Betrayal of Trust

“What about personal effects?” I asked.

“Nothing much. The M.E. found only one item on the body-a gold chain with some kind of skeleton key on it. The crime scene team inventoried a Seiko watch. That’s already been sent along to the lab.”

I knew about the watch. The key was a surprise.

“A key?” I asked. “What’s it to?”

“Beats me. His room, maybe?” Joan replied. “It seems to me that the rooms on that top floor of the governor’s mansion all have old-fashioned keyhole door locks, but as far as I know the door wasn’t locked.”

“You’re right,” I said definitively. “And since the door wasn’t locked, that means the key is to something other than the door to his room.”

“How do you know that?”

“Think about it. Josh was about to commit suicide. That’s a hell of a lot worse than, say, thumbing through back issues of Playboy or Penthouse. If he’d had a key to the door of his room, he would have used it.”

“Yes,” Captain Hoyt said. “I see what you mean. I’ll have my people do some checking and see if we can figure out where the key is from.”

My chicken showed up. It smelled wonderful, but I could tell from the steam that it was still too hot to eat.

“All right then,” I said, poking a hole in the crispy skin to allow some of the heat to dissipate. “I’ll let you go.”

“One more thing,” she said. “I spent some time with Gerard Willis. You can’t help but feel sorry for the man. He’s really broken up about Josh.”

“I know.”

“So even though it’s not my case, I have to ask. Yes, I know Josh killed himself. I saw the room. There was no one else in there with him who could have been responsible, but do you really think he killed that girl, too?”

“No,” I told her, “he didn’t, but the two cases are connected somehow, and I’m going to do my damnedest to figure out whatever that connection might be.”

Chapter 18

I had ended the call with Captain Hoyt and taken one very hot taste of chicken when the phone rang again.

“Hey,” Ross Connors said. “Where are you?”

“Centralia,” I said. “On my way back to Olympia.” I didn’t mention that I had stopped off for lunch. That was on a need-to-know basis only.

“I just got a call from the crime lab in Spokane. It took a while for them to figure out Josh’s computer password so they could access his files. I passed that along to Todd.”

I would have been surprised if Todd Hatcher hadn’t already found his own access to the data he had lifted from Josh’s hard drive, but I let that pass without comment.

“The kid played chess,” Ross continued. “He had a half-dozen Internet chess games going at any one time, but what’s more interesting is that this really is a case of bullying-cyber bullying. Josh kept a file called My Life on his computer that contained copies of all his text messages, even after he deleted them from his cell phone. Spokane sent a copy of the file to Todd and one to me. Katie just printed it out. Some of the messages call Josh MM for Meth Mouth. Let’s see, here’s a brief sample: ‘You’re too stupid to live.’ ‘Go back to where you came from.’ ‘How does it feel to be brain damaged?’ ‘Protect the gene pool-always wear a condom,’ along with the usual teenage crap saying he’s a queer. All told, there must be hundreds of derogatory comments.”

It was clear that the text messages mirrored the kind of taunting that had provoked the fights Josh had been cited for at school.

Call waiting buzzed. A glance at caller ID told me that Todd Hatcher was on the line. “Gotta go,” I told Ross Connors. “It’s Todd.”

Ross hung up before I had a chance to do so first.

“Hey, Todd,” I said. “What have you got?”

“Some information on the source of that video. It was sent to Josh Deeson from a computer located in Olympia. I’ve got a physical address for you,” he added. “Ready?”

I’m not one of those people who can talk on the cell phone and get it to take messages at the same time. The waitress had dropped off my check, so I grabbed that and wrote on the back of it.

“Shoot,” I said.

He read off an address on Seventeenth Avenue Southeast in Olympia. “It seems to be a kind of rec center or a shelter or something, sort of like a boys’ and girls’ club, only different.”

“It wouldn’t happen to be called Janie’s House, would it?” I asked.

“Just a minute.”

I heard him typing and then waiting. “Yup,” he said at last. “You got it. That’s what it’s called-Janie’s House. How did you know that?”

“I’m a detective, remember? What about the text messages sent to Josh Deeson?” I asked.

“Ross sent me a copy of those a little while ago. I didn’t tell him that I was already working on them. They’re certainly ugly enough. They all come from phones on the same cell phone account, one that leads back to Janie’s House. I ran a preliminary analysis on the texts. Based on language-usage profiles I’d say they were written by several different people-four or five at least-all of them ganging up on the same kid.”

“Do we have any record of him responding?”

“Josh saved copies of the texts that were sent to him. If he made responses, he didn’t save those. However, we may be able to get those from the receiving cell phone accounts. That’ll require another set of search warrants.”

“Let Ross know, so he can go to work on getting what we need.”

“What are you doing in the meantime?” Todd asked.

“I believe I’m going to pay a visit to Janie’s House. Before I go, I need two things.”

“What?”

“Send a copy of the video from Josh’s phone to my cell. Mel has a copy of it on her cell phone, but I need one, too. The other thing I need is a photo of Josh Deeson, preferably a jpeg. I know there was one on the Olympia Daily News Web site today, but I want to have one available that doesn’t show any connection to the news story. When I show up at Janie’s House, I want to be prepared with my own version of shock and awe.”

“It might take a while,” Todd cautioned.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to sit right here and do my homework on Janie’s House.”

I Googled Janie’s House and ended up reading the same information Mel had recounted to me earlier when I wasn’t paying attention. Now I was.

Felina Jane Goodson was fifteen years old when she went to war with her parents, who refused to let her apply for a learner’s permit until her grades improved. Janie Goodson had responded by running away from home. Two weeks later, while staying in a homeless camp near Tenino, she had been raped and bludgeoned to death in a crime that remained unsolved until 2007, when a Washington State Patrol cold-case squad got around to retesting old DNA evidence found at the scene, evidence that in 1985 had meant nothing. The new test linked the resulting DNA profile to a fifty-seven-year-old man serving life without parole in Walla Walla after being convicted in three other cases in which victims had been raped and killed.

The identification and subsequent conviction of Jane Goodson’s killer came twenty years too late for Deborah Magruder, Janie’s maternal grandmother. Deborah came from an old Washington family, one that had made a fortune in the timber industry. Deborah had spent the last years of her life and a good portion of her remaining wealth trying to help “troubled youth.” Her goal had been to create a “safe haven” where distressed young people could access a smorgasbord of needed services-counseling, food, and clothing, as well as educational help and