Meribeth shook her head. “He’s definitely not one of our clients. I’ve never seen him before. Besides, if he lived at the governor’s mansion, Josh Deeson was a long way from needing our kinds of services.”
“And this is Rachel,” I said. “Rachel Camber from Packwood, Washington. She was found dead, murdered, in a water-retention pond in Centralia early this morning. Her parents just went back home after identifying her body.”
This time Meribeth winced. It was a tiny gesture, but a telling one. Meribeth knew Rachel, and she didn’t try to deny it.
“Her name is Amber, not Rachel,” Meribeth said. “At least that’s the name she went by when she was here.” She sighed and then looked up and down the street. “I suppose you should come inside,” she added reluctantly. “We need to talk.”
She led us into the house-through a foyer, past a reception desk, and into a small office that had been carved out of what must once have been a spacious living room. She sat down behind a cluttered wooden desk and motioned Mel and me into chairs in front of it. We might have gotten off to a rocky start, but the mention of Rachel’s murder had broken down some of the barriers.
“What about the dead boy?” Meribeth asked. “Is he a suspect in her death?”
“Josh probably would have been,” Mel said, “but he died a good twenty-four hours before Rachel Camber was killed. That means he’s dead, but he’s also in the clear. You’re sure you’ve never seen him before?”
“Never!”
Meribeth’s answer was forceful. As far as I could tell, it was also truthful.
“So how does this work?” Mel asked, gesturing at the Janie’s House surroundings. “Kids can come here and stay for free for as long as they like?”
“No,” Meribeth answered. “As I said earlier, we’re not a group home facility. No one sleeps over. The shelter opens at seven in the morning and closes at ten at night. Drop-ins only. Generally boys hang out in the house west of here and girls on the other side. This building is the only one that’s truly coed. We have a library here as well as the computer lab. The other houses have TVs and VCRs, showers, kitchens, and laundry facilities. Here we try to maintain a kind of study hall atmosphere. During the school year we concentrate on academics. There’s some of that during the summer as well. A lot of our kids need remedial help, but during the summer months the emphasis is on having fun.”
“Supervision?” I asked.
“We have volunteer houseparents who manage each building,” she said. “Those are often former clients who’ve gone on to make better lives for themselves. And don’t think what we do here is free. We don’t charge money for our services, but the kids who come here are expected to help out. They do chores-dusting, sweeping, painting, loading dishwashers, yard work-just like kids are supposed to do at home.”
“You make computers and cell phones available to your clients?” Mel asked.
“Of course. Social networking is vital these days. Kids who are too poor to have access to e-mail or texting are marginalized or even ostracized. We do what we can to rectify that. There’s a cell phone in each building that’s for client use, and we have a total of ten computers.”
“Do you keep track of Internet usage?”
“We keep track of who uses the computers, but we certainly don’t monitor what they do on them, and we don’t censor them, either,” Meribeth said.
“What about attendance?” I asked. “Do you keep track of who comes and goes, check photo IDs, anything like that?”
Meribeth shook her head. “No. We’re a support system and we’re privately funded. We don’t have to keep attendance records to justify our existence.”
“What about those chores?” I asked. “Are there sign-up sheets for those?”
“Yes,” she said. “The houseparents handle those. They’re in closer contact with the kids than I am, but this is all done on a first-name basis only. Or at least what they claim to be their first names. And we don’t keep track of those, either. We work on an honor system. I assume you know what that is.”
The first-name-only ploy was just that-a ploy to protect Janie’s House clients from people like Mel and me. I didn’t much like Meribeth’s snide “honor system” dig, either, but I didn’t push back right then because I saw Mel was reaching into her purse and retrieving her phone. That meant she was about to deliver some serious push-back of her own.
“Do you happen to offer any drama classes here?” Mel asked. “Or filmmaking?”
“We don’t offer any official classes as such,” Meribeth said. “We have a staff of volunteer tutors that comes in to help out as needed. That’s not to say that some of our clients aren’t involved in those kinds of classes, however. We actively encourage those pursuits. Through the years we’ve found that creative arts activities can be very therapeutic.”
“I’m sure,” Mel said agreeably. “And I can tell you for sure that some of your clients have a real flair for the dramatic. If you don’t mind, I’d like to show you something.”
“What?”
“It’s a film clip that we believe may have originated here. At least it was sent out as a file first from one of the computers in this building and then from one of your cell phones. You’ll probably find it to be graphic, offensive, and quite shocking. We did, too. You do know what a snuff film is, don’t you?”
“A snuff film?” Meribeth repeated. “You mean one of those movies where someone is actually killed on- screen? If that’s what you’re about to show me, I’m not interested,” she declared. “I will not watch such a thing. I won’t allow you to show it to me. You need to leave now. If you don’t, I’ll call the police.”
“We are the police,” Mel reminded her. “And you don’t need to worry. It turns out that although this film is very convincing, it’s also make-believe. We now know that the young woman who is supposedly being murdered in this video, the girl you said was Amber, was still alive for a period of time after the film was made.”
Without saying anything further, Mel activated the clip. Despite Meribeth’s protestations, there was absolute silence in the room as the clip played. By the time it finished playing, Meribeth Duncan’s face was ashen.
“Are you sure she wasn’t really dead?” Meribeth asked. “It looked so real.”
“Yes, it did look real,” Mel agreed, “but according to the medical examiner, she didn’t die until sometime later.”
“And you think one of my clients is behind this. . this. .”
Unable to find a strong enough word to express her horror, Meribeth left the sentence unfinished.
“The clip was downloaded onto one of your computers here, probably from a thumb drive,” Mel explained. “Next it was uploaded to one of your cell phones. From there it went to Josh Deeson’s phone. That’s where it was found early Monday morning. We believe your cell phones were also used to send Josh any number of ugly text messages.”
“Josh-the boy who committed suicide?”
“Yes,” Mel said. “That happened yesterday morning. Rachel Camber’s body was found early this morning, but the coroner estimates that she was killed only a few hours before she was found.”
“What do you need from me?” Meribeth asked.
“We’re in the process of getting a search warrant so we can access your phone and Internet records. I’m expecting it to show up any minute.”
“You won’t need a warrant,” Meribeth said. “As far as I’m concerned, you have my full cooperation.”
Chapter 19
Meribeth Duncan may have been a raging bleeding heart with a knee-jerk contempt for the police, but once she reached her tipping point, she was all in. It turned out a number of folks in the neighborhood had been waging a land-use war with her for years, trying to shut Janie’s House down completely.
“Once this gets out, that might give them enough ammunition to go to the city council,” she said. “So how do we fix it? And how do we do it without letting the other kids know what’s up? Some of them might not come back at all if they find out the cops have been here.”
My concerns tended to go in the opposite direction. I was afraid the troublemakers would do their best to
