underlined in red ink.
“In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”
It tugged at my heart that in the last hours and minutes before taking his own life, Josh Deeson had been reading his Bible-his mother’s Bible.
“Still think this is some kind of homicide instead of a suicide?” Mowat asked. “That looks like a suicide note, too, right there in black and white. Red and white, actually,” he corrected himself.
“I think,” I said truthfully, “suicide or not, there may be more going on here than meets the eye.”
I heard a doorbell, followed instantly by the now-familiar sound of footsteps ascending the creaking stairs. Whoever was coming paused outside the door of the room, no doubt doing the same thing I had done-putting on booties, putting on gloves.
“The CSI guys are here,” I said. “You should probably go wait somewhere else until they finish up.”
Mowat balked. “Go wait somewhere else? Are you kidding? You’re kicking me out of my own crime scene? You can’t do that. This is Thurston County.”
The bedroom door opened. I looked up expecting a group of CSI folks to enter. Instead, Mel Soames, wearing her own booties and latex gloves, slipped quietly into the room, closing the door behind her and leaving a trio of CSI techs stuck on the far side of it.
She looked at Mowat and gave him a thin smile. Not a nice smile, an icy smile. If she had given me that look, it would have shriveled my balls.
“Yes, he can,” she said to him. “You need to go.”
Mowat leered back at her.
“Hey,” he said. “I remember you. I thought you were some kind of detective, but I guess you got kicked back to the gang and now you’re one of the crime scene dolts.”
“Actually, I’m not a crime scene dolt,” she replied, giving the last three words an emphasis I recognized as nothing short of menacing. “I’m still a detective, and I work for S.H.I.T., too, right along with Mr. Beaumont here. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the hell out. There’s a captain with the Washington State Patrol downstairs talking to the governor. Her name is Joan Hoyt. Give her your information. When we’re ready for you to come pick up the remains, we’ll have Captain Hoyt give you a call.”
Had I said the very same words, the results might have been quite different, but since the orders seemed to come from an entirely unexpected quarter, they threw Mowat for a loss. He didn’t know quite how to react. He looked uncertainly from Mel to me and then back at Mel again.
“You can’t talk to me that way,” he complained. “It’s disrespectful.”
“Sorry,” she said with a shrug.
Mel said the word “sorry,” but with her, tone of voice is everything. I understood exactly what she meant, as in, “Too bad. I just did talk to you that way.” She wasn’t sorry in the least.
Mowat stalked across the room and wrenched open the door. The three CSI guys were still waiting in the hall. From the way they were chuckling among themselves, there could be little doubt that they had heard the whole exchange. What’s more, they had evidently loved every word of it.
“Weren’t you a little tough on the poor guy?” I asked Mel in an undertone once Mowat was gone.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “When I was down here in Olympia working on a special project, that guy tried to put the make on me.”
“In that case,” I replied, “you weren’t nearly tough enough.”
The Washington State Patrol crime scene team entered stage left. It was made up of three guys-three experienced guys. They may have come into the room laughing at Dr. Mowat’s expense, but they got over it in a hurry and went to work. Someone higher up the food chain had given them marching orders. This was the governor’s mansion. The dead boy was the governor’s stepgrandson. The team had been told to do what they had to do, process the scene, take their photos, be respectful, and get the hell out.
I noticed they took particular care in untying the end of the necktie rope from the doorknob. One of the CSI techs coiled it as gently as possible and then stowed it in a waiting evidence bag.
People assume that you have to have a hard surface to collect fingerprints, and they did check every hard surface, but that’s yesterday’s technology. I knew from past experience that it might well be possible to collect usable fingerprints from the silk ties, too. More important, however, there was almost certain to be DNA evidence caught on the material. The problem was, in addition to trace evidence from Josh and from whoever might have worn the ties long in the past, there was probably also DNA evidence from the EMT who had cut down the body.
One of the techs was in charge of taking photos. Every time he snapped a picture, Mel used her little digital camera to photograph the same item. She took the photos while I took notes that would explain each of the photos for easy reference. The WSP crime scene photos would be the official ones-the ones that would be part of any legal proceeding. They would be available to us in good time, which is to say eventually or whenever the state patrol got around to giving them to us. Mel’s photos would fill in the gap and give us working copies we could use in the meantime.
As far as I was concerned, the watch was possibly the most important piece of evidence in the room. I was dying to see if it was the supposedly missing graduation Seiko. I didn’t make a fuss about it because I didn’t want to give away our prior involvement. Instead, I waited patiently while the photographer finished with his pictures of the body.
Since someone had cut Josh down, we all understood that the pictures of the body in situ probably weren’t all that important. Still, everybody played along and went through the entire protocol charade all the same.
“Okay,” the photographer said at last. “I’m done. You can call the M.E. back anytime.”
“First I need to see the watch,” I said.
Obligingly one of the techs turned Josh’s wrist over so the face of the watch was visible. My distance vision is fine. It’s up close where I need reading glasses, and I was able to read the logo with no difficulty-Seiko. Just yesterday, Josh Deeson had told us that the watch he’d been given for graduation was lost. Now, inexplicably, it was back.
On pieces of property, especially watches and cameras, sales receipts and serial number information can often be verified if you go to the trouble of digging far enough. If this really was the supposedly missing watch, then where had it been while it had been among the missing, and how had it been returned?
The crime scene photographer leaned in and took a close-up photo of the watch with his camera. As soon as he moved out of the way, Mel did the same thing with hers.
The crime scene guys were packing up to go when the door swung open again. I was amazed to see Gerry Willis standing in the hallway. His face looked gray. He had abandoned his wheelchair on the ground floor. He was panting and leaning heavily on a walker. It had taken tremendous effort on the First Husband’s part to make it all the way up to the third floor. I doubted Governor Longmire had any idea of where he was or what he was doing.
He stood there in the open doorway staring at Josh’s bare feet. That was all that was visible from behind the half-open closet door.
Of all the people in the room, Mel was the one who came to her senses first. She didn’t tell Gerry he shouldn’t have come all the way upstairs. And she didn’t deny him entrance to the room, although, since it was still an active crime scene, she most certainly could have. Instead, she hurried to the door, took Gerry by the arm, and gently escorted him over to the bed.
“You should probably sit down and catch your breath,” she said.
Gerry Willis nodded gratefully, but before he took a seat, he reached out and smoothed the part of Josh’s bedspread that Larry Mowat had left rumpled. Only when the bed was perfectly smooth again, as Josh must certainly have left it, did Gerry turn his walker around and ease himself down onto the mattress.
From that perspective, I knew that Josh’s body was completely exposed. In another minute or so, the CSI guys would have covered the corpse with something, but right at that moment, they hadn’t.
Gerry looked at the body for a moment, then he looked away, shaking his head sadly as tears spilled out of his eyes and dripped off his cheeks.
“Josh was meant to be a good boy,” he said hopelessly. “I failed him, just like I failed his mother.”
