gave me the address.
“What are you going to do while I’m off on garbage detail?” I asked.
“See if Todd can enhance the images of the arms pulling the scarf.”
I knew what she meant. She wanted to know if the watch in the picture was Josh Deeson’s watch. So did I. I left her to it and set off on my own. With help from the GPS, I pulled into the Goodwill parking lot in a matter of minutes.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I arrived at the thrift store to buy cheapo clothing while driving a very expensive Mercedes. Since I had no idea of how many days of garbage duty I was in for, I went wild and stocked up. I came out of the place fifteen minutes later feeling like I had scored and carrying a plastic bag that contained three pairs of shorts, three T-shirts, and a pair of flip-flops-all for under fifteen bucks. I loaded my bag of purchases into the trunk of the Mercedes and sped off.
The storage unit was a multilevel affair. To my amazement and relief, it was also air-conditioned. Who knew? I found the front desk, asked for Rebekah, and gave her my name.
“Unit D-335,” she said. “Take the elevator to the third floor.”
As she handed me the key, she gave me that singularly disapproving one-raised-eyebrow look all women seem to use on occasion. In the old days I wouldn’t have had a clue about what that look meant, but being married to Mel has made me almost fluent in nonverbal female-centric lingo.
Rebekah thought I was overdressed for the job at hand. So did I.
I held up my bag of thrift-store duds. “I’m planning on changing,” I said.
Without a word Rebekah handed me a second key. This one was on a ring that also contained a large wooden paddle that was too big to slip into a pocket. Written on the paddle was the word RESTROOM.
“Good,” she said. “The restrooms are just beyond the elevators on the right.”
I changed clothes there. Then, carrying my good clothes in the bag, I located unit D-335. Even with the AC going, a pungent odor assailed my nostrils the moment I opened the rolling door. There were two separate and bulging tarps on the floor of the unit. The first one, the recycling bin, was easily disposed of. It consisted primarily of soda cans and clear plastic water bottles. There was also a whole bale of shredded paper, along with an impressive stack of print newspapers. Obviously Governor Longmire preferred to get her news in dead-tree fashion rather than over the Internet.
Keeping the recycling safely contained, I tied that tarp shut and dragged it out into the hallway. The second tarp was a bit more problematic. In last-in-first-out fashion, the garbage heap was topped with yesterday morning’s coffee grounds. It was possible to trace the previous day’s events in chronological order, ending with a pizza box that no doubt dated from last night’s dinner. Somewhere in the middle I found the flurry of paper napkins that had accompanied our unadorned tuna sandwiches-several of which had been tossed into the garbage along with the napkins.
Let me say right now that I was very grateful Washington’s First Family had no pets. That would have made a tough job even tougher. It was clear, however, that these folks were big on fresh fruit. There were apple cores, orange peels, and banana peels in abundance. What happens to dead apple cores and banana peels overnight in the heat of summer isn’t pretty, but it’s nothing compared to witnessing any given autopsy, so I soldiered on, trying to do so with a cheerful heart.
I sifted through the garbage as best I could and found nothing that looked remotely related to what we were doing. I found a newspaper page with a completed Sudoku puzzle that had made it into the garbage instead of the recycling. Nowhere did I find any wadded-up sheets of notebook paper with cryptic phone numbers or coded messages. This was garbage-plain and simple garbage.
I spent forty-five minutes on the thankless task, then I tied up the tarp of garbage and dragged both that and the recycling downstairs. I emptied the tarps, folded them as best I could, and then took them back up to the storage unit so they could be reused. Josh Deeson might be dead, but I had a feeling that Ross Connors’s interest in Governor Longmire’s garbage wasn’t going to end anytime soon.
I locked up and returned the keys to Rebekah. I drove back to the Red Lion feeling conflicted. I felt virtuous because it was a dirty job and I had done it. I felt frustrated because I had found nothing.
Mel wasn’t in the room when I got back. There was a piece of hotel notepaper sitting on top of her closed computer. There was only one word written on it: AUTOPSY.
That surprised me. Mowat had picked up the body a relatively short time ago. Usually there was a little more wait time built into the system, but I chalked it up to Josh’s being related to Governor Longmire. That probably greased the skids and made things happen faster than they would otherwise.
I headed for the shower with the slightest bit of guilt added to the mix. Sorting garbage wasn’t my first choice of afternoon activity, but it beat the hell out of spending the afternoon with Dr. Larry Mowat.
I threw away the first set of Goodwill clothing and wore the second one. Yes, Ross Connors expects his agents to go out in public properly dressed in business attire. For men that means slacks, dress shirts, jackets and ties, even in the dead of summer. As long as I was working in the privacy of my hotel room, there was no reason not to be comfortable.
I turned on my computer and booted it up. There were several new e-mails listed. I cleared those out one at a time. Among them I found three from Todd Hatcher and one from Ross, which meant that one really came from Katie Dunn. There was also a copy of the e-mail Mel had sent to Ross giving him an overview of what had gone on earlier in the day. The next message after that, the one I’d saved as new, was the one from Sally Mathers-the one marked “Beaumont.” I owed her a response, but I wasn’t ready to deal with all of that, at least not yet.
I avoided the issue by hiding out in work and opened Todd’s first message instead. That one contained two attachments-a copy of the snuff video and a copy of the Jane Doe jpeg. The second contained a short note and two jpeg attachments. I read the note first.
I opened the attachments. Each one contained a photo of an individual hand and arm, with the hand knotted into a tight fist around the end of the scarf. I squinted at the watch in the one photo. I wished I had a magnifying glass on me to help make out the details, but I didn’t. In the other photo, the top of the thumb was clearly visible. Todd was online, so I sent him an instant message.
He wrote back almost immediately.
The door opened and Mel came in looking surprisingly grim. More than a little surprised, I glanced at my watch.
“You’re done already?” I asked. “That has to be one of the fastest autopsies in history.”
“As far as I know, the autopsy has yet to start.”
She came over and sank down on the bed. That’s when I noticed she was holding a bag of ice against her right hand.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I punched him,” she said. “Right in the kisser. If I’d made better contact, I would have broken his nose, but he ducked back out of the way. With any kind of luck, though, I loosened his front tooth. I know for sure he’s got a split lip.”
“Who ducked?” I asked. “Whose front tooth?”
“Who do you think?” Mel asked irritably. “Dr. Mowat, that’s who. He listened in on your conversation with Ross earlier and figured out that you’d be tied up doing something else this afternoon. That’s why he claimed he had moved up the Deeson autopsy. He thought getting me alone was a good idea. Turns out it wasn’t.”
“You punched him?”
I admit there should have been a little more husbandly concern in the question and a lot less admiration, but I doubted Mel had been the only target of Larry Mowat’s inappropriate attentions. Most likely the creep had deserved having his lights punched out for a long time. Of course, if he ended up filing an official complaint against Mel, that might have all kinds of long-term repercussions.
Right that minute, however, neither Mel nor I was thinking long-term.
