by J. A. Jance
“Why not?” Mel asked. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing’s wrong with her. She’s Indian—like from India. My parents are . . . well . . . let’s just say they’re a little prejudiced.”
“Greg!” Barbara Jane Alexander demanded. “Did you hear me?”
By then Greg’s mother was not only within earshot, she was also within smelling distance. I was pretty sure that she, like her husband, had been smoking dope in the privacy of their moss-covered abode. She looked like one tough broad, and I wouldn’t have been the least surprised if she had reached over the fence, grabbed her son by the scruff of the neck, and dragged him bodily back inside.
“How about if you let us buy you a late lunch or an early dinner?” Mel suggested.
I understood exactly why Mel was inviting him to dinner. Readily verifiable alibis made him less attractive as a suspect, but as a source of information he could prove invaluable. He was a regular Janie’s House client, and his take on the people there would be far different from what we’d learn from someone in an official capacity like Meribeth Duncan, for example, or one of the houseparents.
“Am I under arrest?” Greg asked.
“No, not at all,” Mel assured him. “We’ll buy you lunch, ask you a few questions, verify your alibis, and bring you right back here.”
Making up his mind, Greg turned and waved at his mother. “See you, Mom,” he said. Then he hustled into the backseat of our car before she had a chance to tell him otherwise.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked.
“I’d love a Grand Slam, and there’s a Denny’s not far from here.”
“You’ve got it,” I said.
Chapter 20
My grandmother, Beverly Piedmont Jenssen, always used to quote that old saying about the quickest way to a man’s heart being through his stomach. The same holds true for starving teenagers when you’re looking for answers to thorny questions.
Greg’s Grand Slam came on a man-size platter. While he devoured the food, Mel and I drank coffee, asked questions, and took notes.
It turned out that Greg went to Janie’s House almost every day, usually in the afternoons. That meant he knew most of the people who went there, Amber Wilson included, in a manner not open to someone like Meribeth Duncan. She knew the kids by name and by what they wrote on their needs assessment. Greg knew them up close and personal.
“Tell me about the computer lab in the administrative building,” Mel said. “Do you use it much?”
“Sure,” Greg said, between shoveling forkfuls of hash browns and scrambled eggs into his mouth. “I use the computer lab almost every day. I don’t have a computer at home, and even if I had one, I couldn’t get on the Internet with it because we don’t have landline phone service. My parents can’t afford it.”
“What about a cell phone?” I asked.
Greg shook his head. “We don’t have one of those either. I use the ones from Janie’s House occasionally, and Nadia’s, too, when she isn’t low on minutes.”
His parents can afford weed, I thought, but they can’t afford a telephone.
“Tell us about yesterday,” Mel said.
“What’s there to tell? I worked eleven to seven—a full eight-hour shift. After work, I went to Nadia’s.”
“Nadia?” I asked.
“Nadia Patel,” he said. “My girlfriend. She lives with her kids here in Olympia. She has a computer. She let me log on and check my e-mail last night.”
“What if I told you that your user name, Hammer, was logged on to the Janie’s House computer network for four hours on Sunday evening?” Mel asked. “Some of that time was spent uploading the video that was sent to Josh Deeson. The remainder of the time was spent visiting porn sites.”
“It wasn’t me,” Greg insisted, sounding peeved. “I already told you I wasn’t there Sunday night. I was at work. My manager’s name is Mr. Newton, James Newton, and here’s his number.” Greg reeled off a 360 number. “Go ahead. Call him. Ask Mr. Newton to check my time cards. He’ll be able to tell you exactly what time I came on duty and what time I got off, all week long—Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. I think I used the Janie’s House computers for a while on Monday, but that’s the only time I’ve been on them this week.”
“Should I call him right now?” Mel asked.
“Sure,” Greg said. “Go ahead. Why not? I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Mel made the call, spoke to Mr. Newton, and got an immediate verification of Greg’s work schedule for all three days.
“Now tell us about what you did after work last night,” Mel said.
“I already told you that, too,” Greg said. “I was at Nadia’s. We went there after we both got off work. Her kids are with their dad this week. She made us some curry for dinner.”
“And what time did you leave?”
“Sometime after midnight.” Greg paused and gave Mel a shrewd look. “I suppose you need to check that, too.”
Mel nodded. “Yes, we do.”
With an exasperated sigh Greg gave Mel another phone number. “You won’t be able to call her until after six. That’s when she gets off tonight.”
He was quiet for a minute, then asked, “So this is all because someone was using Janie’s House computers to surf the net and visit porn sites?”
“That’s part of it,” I said, stepping into the fray. “We believe the person doing the surfing is also the person who sent the video you saw to Josh Deeson. We need to know who that person is.”
“Why don’t you ask Josh, then?” Greg asked.
“We can’t,” I said, “because he’s dead, just like Amber Wilson.”
Greg paled and put down his fork. “You mean someone did the same thing to him?”
“Not exactly,” Mel said. “Amber was murdered. Josh committed suicide. We believe the two cases are related, but so far we haven’t found any connection between Josh and Amber.”
“Do you think this Josh guy killed her?” Greg asked.
Mel didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. She let her shoulders rise and fall and left Greg to draw his own conclusions.
“Is Josh from here?” Greg asked. “From Olympia?”
“Yes,” Mel said.
“What school?”
“Olympia High,” Mel answered.
Greg shook his head. “I thought maybe he might be one of the tutors, but I don’t recognize that name.”
We had already asked Meribeth Duncan if Josh had been involved in Janie’s House. According to her, there was no record of Josh Deeson visiting Janie’s House for any reason, not years earlier as a client when he was living in the care of his troubled mother and not as a volunteer since moving in with the First Family in the governor’s mansion.
“Tell us about the tutors,” I said.
Greg shrugged. “They come from several different schools. Olympia Prep requires that every student perform so many hours of community service. They also have an official ‘mentoring’ connection with Janie’s house. Sort of like that city in Japan—I forget the name—that’s Olympia’s sister city.”
“You’re saying that a lot of the kids from OP serve as tutors?”
Greg nodded. “Lots of them. They even have a school bus, a van really, that drops them off at Janie’s House.”
Now I was starting to see what had happened. Somewhere out in the adult PC world, a brainiac had decided that, in the name of diversity, it would be a great idea to mix things up between the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful—the kids at Olympia Prep—and the offspring of the local poverty-stricken church mice—the denizens of Janie’s House.
Talk about a culture clash. Maybe it sounded good on paper, but the road to hell really is paved with good intentions. Two kids were dead, one demonstrably rich and the other poor. If that supposedly good idea had somehow gone tragically awry, what were the chances that the death toll would continue to rise?
“So are the tutors okay?” Mel asked.
Greg
shrugged. “Some of them are great; some of them are jerks. You know, since they’re ‘volunteering . . .’ ” He used his hands to draw quotation marks around the word. “A few of them are really stuck on themselves and seem to think we’re supposed to kiss their asses or something. Others are nice. Like Zoe, for example. She’s just this really neat girl. She’s not stuck up; she’s not mean. You’d never know from talking to her that she’s the governor’s daughter.”
Greg’s offhand mention of Zoe Longmire’s name was the first hint of a connection between the governor’s mansion and the other people involved. The realization arced between Mel and me like an electrical spark. I’m surprised Greg didn’t notice. Or maybe he did.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling us that Zoe Longmire volunteers at Janie’s House?”
“Sure,” Greg answered. “So did her older sister, Giselle.”
Mel went on asking questions about the other kids at Janie’s House—kids on both sides of the poverty line, while I went wandering off on a tangent of my own. I tried to square what Greg had said about that good-as-gold Zoe Longmire with what I knew about Zoe’s mother.
In Ballard High School, Marsha Gray had been an unmitigated snob. Her parents had money. The Grays were part of the top strata of Seattle society. Marsha had loved rubbing it in and lording it over all the less fortunate, all those negligible “little people,” of which yours truly was definitely one.
The bullying text messages that had been sent to Josh had been not only mean-spirited but entirely personal—like mother, like daughter, maybe?
When I focused on Greg once more, he was definitely slowing down in terms of eating. The only things left on his plate were the half-eaten remains of two pancakes. I suspected he was a kid who had actually suffered from being hungry due to parental neglect. That made him too poor not to clean his plate. That could be part of why he wanted to go into the service, the prospect of having three squares a day for the duration.
When I came back to the conversation, Mel was trying to determine if Greg had given his user name to anyone else.
“I don’t ever remember doing that,” Greg said. “But I suppose it’s possible.”
I changed the subject. “Did Zoe Longmire ever complain to you about quarreling with anyone in her family?” I asked.
“Not to me,” Greg said. “But I didn’t work with her that much. She tutors things like American history and English. I need help in stuff like physics, chemistry, and AP math.”
“Is there a volunteer who looks after the computer lab?” Mel asked.
Greg nodded. “Mr. Saxton. He’s a retired software designer. He’s not there all the time, but if the computers crash or something, he comes right over and gets them restarted.”
I wondered if Mr. Saxton was the reason the Janie House computers had that complicated user log. He was someone we’d most likely need to talk to, right along with Zoe Longmire.
Right that minute, Mel was focused on equipment more than on people.
“Tell me about the Janie House cell phones,” she said. “How do those work?”
“There’s one in each building,” Greg said. “It’s in a little room like one of those old phone booths with a place where you can sit to use it and close the door for privacy. The phone is attached to the wall by one of those little security gizmos like they use on equipment at Best Buy so people don’t just steal them.”
That meant that whoever had called Josh Deeson’s phone to send the file had done so from inside Janie’s House. I wondered if there was a security camera somewhere on the premises that would tell us what we needed to know.
“So there are three phones altogether?” I asked casually.
“One of the cell phone companies donates the equipment and the minutes,” Greg replied. “I don’t know how many phones are on the system altogether. There are just those three that are available for kids to use.”
“Is there any kind of a sign-up or sign-on process for those?”
Greg shook his head. “You just like take turns.”
Saying that, he pushed his empty plate away, looked down at his watch, and then squirmed uneasily. It was almost six.
“Is something wrong?” Mel asked.
“Nadia’s about to get off work,” Greg said apologetically. “Would you mind dropping me off at the store? That way you can meet her and ask her whatever you want about last night.”
Greg’s real motives were so transparent as to be almost laughable. His parents were off in a marijuana-induced never-never land. If he went home, there was a good possibility that Mr. and Mrs. Demetri Alexander would be so paranoid about his having gone off with us that they wouldn’t let Greg out of their sight for the remainder of the night.
“Sure thing,” I said easily. “We’ll be glad to drop you off.”
I signaled the waitress to bring me the check. When I got out my wallet, I handed him a business card with my collection of contact numbers listed on it.
“If you think of anything else Agent Soames and I might be interested in knowing, give us a call.”
Greg nodded and slipped the card into his pocket. “I hope you catch whoever did it.”
“We do, too.”
I thought about telling him that the snuff film was a fake—that Amber hadn’t actually died in the filmed sequence he had seen—but I decided not to. I was sure Greg was going to go out and talk to everyone about what had happened—about what he had seen and what he’d been asked.
From Mel’s and my points of view, it was good to leave a little misinformation out there. If Rachel’s killers thought they were off the hook because we were focused on Josh Deeson as the doer, then we had a better chance of their making a mistake of some kind. An overly confident crook is a stupid crook. An overly confident teenage crook is even more so.
I paid the bill. We got in the car and drove to Safeway, where Greg managed to bound out of the Mercedes and intercept a pretty dark-haired young woman as she headed for the parking lot. He called her over to our car and introduced us.
“Tell them about last night,” he said.
“Why?” she wanted to know.
“Just tell them.”
Nadia shrugged. “What’s to tell? We got off work, he came to the house, we had dinner, and he went home.”
“What did you have for dinner?” Mel asked.
“Curry.”
“What time did he leave?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It was pretty late.”
From the time we started talking to Greg until we started talking to Nadia, he’d had no chance to warn her about us or our questions. So either their stories were straight because they had set that up well in advance or else they were straight because they were both telling the truth.
They left the parking lot together, with Nadia behind the wheel of a battered Ford Focus.
“She’s got to be thirty if she’s a day,” Mel said. There was a certain hint of disapproving umbrage in her voice.
“Oh,” I said. “Sort of like the difference in age between you and me?”
You could say that was the end of that sauce-for-the-goose discussion.
“What now?” I asked, changing the subject again.
Josh Deeson’s only extracurricular activity had been the chess club, so we made it our business to track down the chess club sponsor’s address. Samuel Dysart lived in an old-fashioned but neat little bungalow in Olympia proper only a few blocks away from Janie’s House. He wasn’t home. The curtains were drawn and the blinds were closed. It looked like he might be on vacation. Considering the fact that school was out, he could very well be.
“Okay,” Mel said as we left Samuel Dysart’s front porch and walked back to the car, “what next?”
“Josh’s bullying messages came from Janie’s House, which is also the source for the phony snuff film. At the moment Zoe Longmire is the only person we know of with a foot in both worlds—in the governor’s mansion and in Janie’
s House. Let’s go talk to her.”
“And now that we know those are stationary cell phones,” Mel said, “while you drive us there, I’ll get on the phone with Todd or Meribeth Duncan and find out if Janie’s House has any working security cameras. Given Meribeth’s horror at the idea of spying on the kids’ Internet usage, I’m not very hopeful about that.”
It was a little over a mile from Sam Dysart’s house back to the governor’s mansion. Stopping the car, I was struck by the stark contrast between the carefully manicured lawns surrounding the governor’s digs and the Alexanders’ run-down moss-ridden campers.
Somewhere in between those two extremes stood Janie’s House, an experiment in cultural diversity—a fragile beaker in which elements from both ends of the social spectrum had been thrown together in what should have been a win-win situation. Except it hadn’t been win-win for Rachel Camber or for Josh Deeson.
When we got there, Mel was on hold waiting to talk to Meribeth.
“Look at this place,” I said to Mel, waving at our surroundings. “How does a kid with Josh’s neglected upbringing figure out where he fits in when he lands in a place like this? It seems to me that he would have had a lot more in common with the charity-case clients at Janie’s House than with his new family.”
“Are you implying that maybe Cinderella really didn’t live happily ever after?” Mel asked.
“Probably not.”
As I started out of the car, Todd came on the line. While Mel talked to him, I walked on up to the front door. It seemed odd that I could walk up to the front door of the governor’s mansion and ring the bell. I know there are crazies out there, and I was relieved when once again a youthful but uniformed Washington State Patrol officer emerged from the shadows. They may not have paid enough attention when Josh was going in and out and up and down ladders, but they were paying attention now.
“Governor Longmire and Mr. Willis aren’t here at the moment,” he told me when I showed him my credentials.
“What about the daughters?”
“Zoe is here,” he said. He was young; she was a tempting dish. Of course he knew she was there.
