“And he was wearing it when he came down to dinner?”
Gerry nodded. “Yes,” he declared, “he was.”
“Did Josh have any visitors last night, either before dinner or after?”
“Not that we know of,” Gerry said. “I mean, no one came to the front door and rang the bell, if that’s what you mean, but how would we know for sure? We didn’t know he was getting out overnight, which he had probably been doing for months before Marsha finally caught him at it. If he’s been going in and out without our knowing it, then there’s a good chance other people have been coming in without our knowledge, too.
“But in view of what happened the previous night, he shouldn’t have been able to sneak someone in. Marsha asked the security detail to make sure that the guards that patrol the capitol campus would stop by here overnight as well. I don’t know how often they came by, but no one reported seeing any rope ladders going up or down the side of the building. If they had been there, I think someone would have noticed.”
“How did Josh get along with the governor’s girls?” Mel asked.
“With Gizzy and Zoe?” Gerry asked.
I nodded.
“Okay, I guess,” Gerry said. “I’d say it wasn’t like a real blended family-more like a blended family once removed. Even though Josh and the two girls are fairly close in age, he was my grandson, not my son. When he first got here, there was some jockeying for position and so forth, but that’s just kids. I think we made the right decision when we sent him to public school rather than Olympia Prep. With the other girls ahead of him in school, there would have been undue expectations from some of the faculty members. Josh had holes in his academic background that meant he never would have measured up. Regular high school was tough enough. Olympia Prep would have been impossible.”
“Someone mentioned that he’d been getting in fights,” I said.
“I’m not sure how it happened, but some of the kids evidently learned about what happened to his mother. They teased him about it. He was a good-looking kid, but not as good-looking as he could have been. He should have had braces to straighten his teeth, but his mother never had the money or the inclination to do that. By the time I offered to take him to an orthodontist, he didn’t want to go. He said he was too old for braces. As I understand it, the fights came out of teasing at school. One boy asked him if his teeth were crooked because he had meth mouth like his mother.”
“Kids can be such mean bastards,” Mel said.
Gerry looked at her, smiled, and nodded sadly. “That’s the only instance I know about for sure,” he said. “There were probably plenty of others. I should have protected him from all that, but I didn’t.”
Gerry Willis was back to blaming himself, not for the first time and doubtless not for the last. As far as I was concerned, he was right to do so. Josh had lived in the Willis/Longmire household for more than three years. Somebody should have stood up for him.
“You couldn’t protect him,” Mel said kindly. “No matter how much parents want to, they can’t save their kids from all the little creeps in the world. Kids have to go out there and sink or swim on their own.”
Gerry swallowed hard. “And Josh sank,” he said bleakly.
I had barely touched the food on my plate, but I no longer wanted it. Ross Connors had decreed that our cover story had to do with Mel and me investigating a phony case of school bullying. Now, with the meth-mouth comment, it seemed our cover story had turned all too real and at least two kids were dead.
“Can you give us the names of any of Josh’s friends?” Mel asked after a pause.
“Not really.”
“Outside interests? Extracurricular activities?”
“He wasn’t an athlete, if that’s what you mean. That was why the jogging surprised me. He was interested in chess, though. There’s a chess club at the high school. I met the adviser, a Mr. Dysart, briefly at an end-of-school pizza party, but I didn’t know any of the other kids. I know it sounds strange that we can’t tell you more about him, but he was a pretty self-contained kid.”
“Given his background, maybe he had to be,” I said.
“Thank you for saying that,” Gerry said.
Just then the doorbell rang. A group of people came into the house. They stopped briefly in the entryway. The door to the governor’s study opened. The people who had been closeted in there with Marsha Longmire filed out and milled around with the newcomers, talking and shaking hands. When they all started toward the living room, Mel and I decided it was time to take our leave.
“It would probably be better if we weren’t here when your guests arrive,” I said. “Is there a way we could leave without causing a disruption of some kind?”
“Sure,” he said, pointing. “You could go out through the kitchen.”
And that’s exactly what we did. The cook may have been a little surprised when we came through and asked to be let out the back way, but she was evidently used to off-the-wall requests. When we came around from the back of the building we were relieved to see that most of the media presence was gone. Captain Hoyt had done an admirable job of getting rid of them.
There were new cars scattered around the driveway, but Mel was able to squeeze the Cayman out between a bright blue Jaguar and a red Volvo station wagon without denting any of them.
We didn’t speak until we were back on the street and headed for the hotel. “So what’s the truth about Josh Deeson?” Mel demanded. “Is he a killer or a victim?”
“Maybe a little of both,” I suggested.
“Maybe the girl was one of his tormentors,” Mel said after a pause. “Maybe the killing was all about revenge, and he just couldn’t deal with the consequences.”
That seemed plausible enough. We drove the rest of the way back to the hotel in silence while I considered what Mel had just said. Unfortunately, it was all too true. When Josh Deeson came to live at the governor’s mansion, he had been dirt poor and years behind his peers in terms of academic achievement. Those separate ingredients had combined into a fateful mix that had made him ripe to become a target for mindless bullies. As a friendless loner he had most likely been the butt of countless ugly jokes. Now he was also dead.
All of that left me wondering about just one thing: Whatever happened to Josh Deeson’s civil rights and the civil rights of the unidentified girl who had been strangled with the blue scarf?
I knew that both Governor Longmire and Gerard Willis cared about what had happened to the poor kid, but Mel Soames and I were the ones who were actually charged with finding out the whys and wherefores behind Josh Deeson’s death, and the unknown girl’s death, too.
I was determined that we would do just that, come hell or high water.
Chapter 12
Once back at the Red Lion, we stopped by the front desk long enough to pick up the envelope of photos of the video clip’s dead Jane Doe. Riding up in the elevator, we pulled one out of the envelope. Todd Hatcher had done an excellent job of extracting a usable head-shot photo from the video. His enhanced image showed an average- looking brown-haired girl with a tentative smile-the smile Marsha Longmire had said would haunt her for the rest of her life.
“You know what?” I said. “From that photo, I’d say she was a willing participant, at least initially.”
“Yes,” Mel muttered, sliding the offending photo back into the envelope. “The old ‘choking game.’ Some game!”
Up in our room, while Mel sat down at the desk and booted up her computer, I studied the clothing I had brought along in my suitcase.
“What’s wrong?” Mel asked.
“I seem to have brought along nothing but work clothes. When I packed I had no idea that garbage was going to be part of the work agenda.”
“Try Goodwill,” Mel said. “You should be able to buy stuff you can throw away after you use it.”
“Good thinking,” I said. “Where’s the nearest Goodwill?”
I was fully capable of looking it up on my own, but Mel already had her computer open and at the ready. She
