As Mel left the room, my phone rang. It was Ross. “I need to take this,” I told Marsha. “It’s the AG.”
She nodded and waved, but I’m not sure she was really paying attention.
“Are you at the mansion?” Ross asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Please give the governor my condolences,” he said.
I held the phone away from my ear. “Mr. Connors says he’s sorry for your loss.”
Marsha nodded, but again she didn’t seem connected to my words.
“Here’s how this is going to go down,” Ross continued. “S.H.I.T. will handle the investigation, but we’ll be using state patrol crime scene investigators. It’ll be a joint case.”
It was also going to be a big case. I understood Ross’s thinking. It was better to spread the responsibility around. If the case turned into a blame game somewhere along the line, that could be spread around as well.
“Where did it happen?” Ross asked.
“Upstairs in his room. It’s on the third floor.”
“Is there anyone there right now?” Ross asked. I relayed the question to Marsha Longmire.
She sighed. “I believe the M.E. got here a few minutes ago.”
“Did you hear that?” I asked Ross.
“Yes, I did,” he replied. “The Thurston County M.E. isn’t one of my favorite people. If that yahoo is on the scene, you’d better get your butt there, too.”
I excused myself to the governor and then, bad knees or not, I ran all the way up the stairs to the top floor, to Josh Deeson’s floor.
M.E.s and cops are supposedly on the same side, but we’re not necessarily on the same page. Medical examiners want to know how someone died. Homicide cops want to know who did it and why. Medical examiners are concerned with bodies. They’re not concerned with preserving crime scene evidence. Cases often turn on the smallest particles of trace evidence. For that reason, crime scenes have to be treated with great reverence and care. The items found under those circumstances need to be handled like fine, fragile antiques.
Some M.E.s are great, but some end up being the proverbial bulls in a china shop.
Unfortunately the Thurston County M.E., Larry Mowat, falls in the latter category. And since Olympia is both the state capital and the Thurston County seat, Ross Connors most likely had had enough dealings with Mowat to know whereof he spoke. I had met Mowat at various conferences, but I knew him primarily by reputation, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
I stopped outside the door long enough to slip on a pair of crime scene booties and a pair of latex gloves. Mel and I keep a ready supply of them in our vehicles so we can slip them into our pockets at a moment’s notice. I found Dr. Mowat sitting on the edge of Josh’s bed-his carefully made bed. The M.E. wore neither booties nor gloves. He was staring down at the dead boy, who lay on the floor between the open closet door and the closet itself.
As Marsha had already explained, a makeshift rope had been manufactured by stringing together a whole set of out-of-date neckties. They had been tied with knots that would have done an Eagle Scout proud. It wasn’t surprising that a kid obsessed with instruments of torture and death would be able to fashion an impressive noose for himself, one that had done the job for which it was intended.
Josh was clearly dead, but his stiffly spiked hair remained perfectly intact. I had a feeling someone-his grandfather, most likely-would come along and flatten out those spikes before Josh Deeson was laid in his final resting place.
I noticed something else, too. He was wearing a wristwatch-a good-quality wristwatch with a stainless-steel band. I would have had to turn Josh’s hand over to see if it was his graduation-present Seiko, but I didn’t. Until the crime scene photos had been taken, I didn’t want to touch anything at all.
I recognized Dr. Larry Mowat. He didn’t recognize me.
“You crime scene?” he asked. “I called for my guys a while ago. I’ve got no idea what’s taking them so long. They should have been here by now.”
I knew exactly what was taking so long. His guys weren’t coming. Ross Connors had sent word down from on high. As a result Thurston County had called off their forensics people because Ross was sending in CSIs from the Washington State Patrol. The fact that no one had bothered to let Dr. Mowat know told me he was almost as popular with his fellow Thurston County employees as he was with the attorney general.
“I’m with Special Homicide,” I told Mowat. “I understand we’ll be handling this case from here on out.”
“Special Homicide? You mean that S.H.I.T. outfit that works for the AG?” Mowat asked derisively. “Somebody needs to tell Ross Connors to get over himself. This is a suicide, not a homicide. I know Ross holds me in pretty low regard, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of brainpower to see that this kid offed himself. He even left us a note.”
“What note?” I asked. This was the first I had heard of any note.
“On the desk over there. It says, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ What a joke. Take what? Like living in the governor’s mansion is some kind of hardship?”
For Dr. Larry Mowat, this qualified as wit.
I went over to the desk and looked down at the note. I didn’t touch it and I hoped Mowat hadn’t touched it either as I read it myself, aloud. It was, as they say, short but brief:
“I can’t take it anymore.” The initials J.D. were scrawled underneath those stark five words.
I noticed right away that there was a grammatical problem with that sentence. It was a case of what my high school English teacher, Mrs. Reeder, would have called “faulty pronoun reference.” In fact, if she’d still been alive and had seen the note, I’m sure those are the very words she would have written on Josh’s suicide note in bright red-colored pencil: FAULTY PRONOUN REFERENCE!!! She always wrote her remarks in capital letters with plenty of exclamation marks after them.
As I remember her long-winded harangues on the subject, pronouns are used in place of nouns, more specifically nouns that precede the pronouns in question-the pronouns’ antecedents. Mrs. Reeder was a holy terror, by the way, and spending a year in her class was tantamount to being brainwashed. After all these years, how else would I even remember the word “antecedent,” to say nothing of what it means?
In the case of Josh’s note, the pronoun “it” had no antecedent, but it told me there had been something terribly wrong in his life. Josh was a kid who had already suffered some pretty hard knocks. As a homicide cop, I leaned toward the idea that Josh’s mysterious “it” referred to his involvement with the girl in the video clip and to the part he had played in her death.
I’ve seen that happen over and over. Josh wouldn’t be the first suspected murderer to choose to exit on his own rather than deal with the legal consequences of his actions. Still, I couldn’t help wishing the kid had spelled “it” out for us in more detail so we’d be able to give his grieving relatives some real answers.
Dr. Mowat had looked at the note and immediately assumed that what was written there had something to do with ordinary teenage angst. I looked at it with the dubious benefit of having information Dr. Mowat wasn’t privy to. (I won’t even mention Mrs. Reeder’s opinion about ending sentences with prepositions!) What I saw in my mind’s eye were those two hands, pulling inexorably on the ends of that blue scarf, choking the life out of our still- unidentified victim.
Out in the world of criminal justice, a fair amount of attention is given to so-called deathbed confessions. This was neither-not a confession and not a denial.
I looked up from the note and found Dr. Mowat was still sitting on the bed, watching me speculatively.
“Maybe he killed himself because his folks wouldn’t let him have a computer,” Mowat said with a nonchalant shrug. “What teenager these days can get along without a computer? Isn’t not letting your kid have a computer considered to be a form of child abuse?”
I happened to know that Josh Deeson did have a computer. At that very moment it was off in Spokane and being analyzed by a branch of the Washington State Patrol crime lab.
Rather than comment on the computer issue, I changed the subject.
“Who cut him down from the door?” I asked.
The M.E. shrugged. “Probably the EMTs,” he said. “It sure as hell wasn’t me,” he added. “I’ve had my ass chewed a couple of times for doing just that. And take a look at this. Just before he killed himself, the kid was reading his Bible. Get a load of the verse he underlined.”
I saw the book then, hidden behind Dr. Mowat’s considerable bulk. He stood up when I walked over to the bed. The Bible lay open on the bedspread that probably hadn’t been rumpled before Mowat sat on it. A red roller- ball pen marked the page. The book was open to the Gospel According to Saint John. John 14, Verse 2, was
