“Not to me,” Greg said. “But I didn’t work with her that much. She tutors things like American history and English. I need help in stuff like physics, chemistry, and AP math.”
“Is there a volunteer who looks after the computer lab?” Mel asked.
Greg nodded. “Mr. Saxton. He’s a retired software designer. He’s not there all the time, but if the computers crash or something, he comes right over and gets them restarted.”
I wondered if Mr. Saxton was the reason the Janie House computers had that complicated user log. He was someone we’d most likely need to talk to, right along with Zoe Longmire.
Right that minute, Mel was focused on equipment more than on people.
“Tell me about the Janie House cell phones,” she said. “How do those work?”
“There’s one in each building,” Greg said. “It’s in a little room like one of those old phone booths with a place where you can sit to use it and close the door for privacy. The phone is attached to the wall by one of those little security gizmos like they use on equipment at Best Buy so people don’t just steal them.”
That meant that whoever had called Josh Deeson’s phone to send the file had done so from inside Janie’s House. I wondered if there was a security camera somewhere on the premises that would tell us what we needed to know.
“So there are three phones altogether?” I asked casually.
“One of the cell phone companies donates the equipment and the minutes,” Greg replied. “I don’t know how many phones are on the system altogether. There are just those three that are available for kids to use.”
“Is there any kind of a sign-up or sign-on process for those?”
Greg shook his head. “You just like take turns.”
Saying that, he pushed his empty plate away, looked down at his watch, and then squirmed uneasily. It was almost six.
“Is something wrong?” Mel asked.
“Nadia’s about to get off work,” Greg said apologetically. “Would you mind dropping me off at the store? That way you can meet her and ask her whatever you want about last night.”
Greg’s real motives were so transparent as to be almost laughable. His parents were off in a marijuana- induced never-never land. If he went home, there was a good possibility that Mr. and Mrs. Demetri Alexander would be so paranoid about his having gone off with us that they wouldn’t let Greg out of their sight for the remainder of the night.
“Sure thing,” I said easily. “We’ll be glad to drop you off.”
I signaled the waitress to bring me the check. When I got out my wallet, I handed him a business card with my collection of contact numbers listed on it.
“If you think of anything else Agent Soames and I might be interested in knowing, give us a call.”
Greg nodded and slipped the card into his pocket. “I hope you catch whoever did it.”
“We do, too.”
I thought about telling him that the snuff film was a fake-that Amber hadn’t actually died in the filmed sequence he had seen-but I decided not to. I was sure Greg was going to go out and talk to everyone about what had happened-about what he had seen and what he’d been asked.
From Mel’s and my points of view, it was good to leave a little misinformation out there. If Rachel’s killers thought they were off the hook because we were focused on Josh Deeson as the doer, then we had a better chance of their making a mistake of some kind. An overly confident crook is a stupid crook. An overly confident teenage crook is even more so.
I paid the bill. We got in the car and drove to Safeway, where Greg managed to bound out of the Mercedes and intercept a pretty dark-haired young woman as she headed for the parking lot. He called her over to our car and introduced us.
“Tell them about last night,” he said.
“Why?” she wanted to know.
“Just tell them.”
Nadia shrugged. “What’s to tell? We got off work, he came to the house, we had dinner, and he went home.”
“What did you have for dinner?” Mel asked.
“Curry.”
“What time did he leave?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It was pretty late.”
From the time we started talking to Greg until we started talking to Nadia, he’d had no chance to warn her about us or our questions. So either their stories were straight because they had set that up well in advance or else they were straight because they were both telling the truth.
They left the parking lot together, with Nadia behind the wheel of a battered Ford Focus.
“She’s got to be thirty if she’s a day,” Mel said. There was a certain hint of disapproving umbrage in her voice.
“Oh,” I said. “Sort of like the difference in age between you and me?”
You could say that was the end of
“What now?” I asked, changing the subject again.
Josh Deeson’s only extracurricular activity had been the chess club, so we made it our business to track down the chess club sponsor’s address. Samuel Dysart lived in an old-fashioned but neat little bungalow in Olympia proper only a few blocks away from Janie’s House. He wasn’t home. The curtains were drawn and the blinds were closed. It looked like he might be on vacation. Considering the fact that school was out, he could very well be.
“Okay,” Mel said as we left Samuel Dysart’s front porch and walked back to the car, “what next?”
“Josh’s bullying messages came from Janie’s House, which is also the source for the phony snuff film. At the moment Zoe Longmire is the only person we know of with a foot in both worlds-in the governor’s mansion and in Janie’s House. Let’s go talk to her.”
“And now that we know those are stationary cell phones,” Mel said, “while you drive us there, I’ll get on the phone with Todd or Meribeth Duncan and find out if Janie’s House has any working security cameras. Given Meribeth’s horror at the idea of spying on the kids’ Internet usage, I’m not very hopeful about that.”
It was a little over a mile from Sam Dysart’s house back to the governor’s mansion. Stopping the car, I was struck by the stark contrast between the carefully manicured lawns surrounding the governor’s digs and the Alexanders’ run-down moss-ridden campers.
Somewhere in between those two extremes stood Janie’s House, an experiment in cultural diversity-a fragile beaker in which elements from both ends of the social spectrum had been thrown together in what should have been a win-win situation. Except it hadn’t been win-win for Rachel Camber or for Josh Deeson.
When we got there, Mel was on hold waiting to talk to Meribeth.
“Look at this place,” I said to Mel, waving at our surroundings. “How does a kid with Josh’s neglected upbringing figure out where he fits in when he lands in a place like this? It seems to me that he would have had a lot more in common with the charity-case clients at Janie’s House than with his new family.”
“Are you implying that maybe Cinderella really didn’t live happily ever after?” Mel asked.
“Probably not.”
As I started out of the car, Todd came on the line. While Mel talked to him, I walked on up to the front door. It seemed odd that I could walk up to the front door of the governor’s mansion and ring the bell. I know there are crazies out there, and I was relieved when once again a youthful but uniformed Washington State Patrol officer emerged from the shadows. They may not have paid enough attention when Josh was going in and out and up and down ladders, but they were paying attention now.
“Governor Longmire and Mr. Willis aren’t here at the moment,” he told me when I showed him my credentials.
“What about the daughters?”
“Zoe is here,” he said. He was young; she was a tempting dish. Of course he knew she was there.
Thanking him, I rang the doorbell. To my way of thinking, a uniformed maid would have answered the door. Instead, Zoe Longmire herself threw it open.
“Oh, hi,” she said, recognizing me. “Mom and Gerry went to the mortuary. You know, to make the arrangements.”
