Finding her alone was a gift. Asking her questions while she was alone was probably going to cause a lot of trouble. Governor Longmire would not be amused, but it seemed likely that talking to her alone would be a lot more effective than talking to her with some watchdog like Garvin McCarthy hanging on our every word. Marsha had summoned him when she thought Josh was in some kind of legal jeopardy. She would certainly do the same if her own daughter was being questioned.
“They probably won’t be gone much longer,” Zoe told me. “Would you like to come in and wait for them?”
“If you wouldn’t mind. My partner’s on the phone right now. When she finishes, maybe we could ask you a few questions.”
“About Josh, right?” she asked. “That’s all anyone can talk about-Josh. I mean, I’m sorry he’s dead. And Gerry’s really sorry he’s dead, but it isn’t like Josh was a regular part of our family. He was part of Gerry’s family, but he wasn’t-” She stopped talking suddenly and blushed. “You think I’m terrible, don’t you.”
“There’s an old saying about how you can choose your friends but not your relatives,” I said. “Maybe you could tell us a little about Josh. It would help if we knew something about his interests and his friends. Who better to ask than you?”
“You mean like asking his stupid little not-sister?”
Then, in a surprising move, Zoe suddenly glued herself to my shoulder and burst into tears. That’s how things stood when Mel came in through the front door. I was holding Zoe Longmire close to my chest while the poor kid cried her heart out, with me realizing for the first time that Zoe had been younger than Josh. More sophisticated, perhaps, and certainly more polished, but younger.
Mel reached into her miracle purse and produced a packet of tissues. With each of us taking one of Zoe’s arms, we walked her into the living room and sat her down between us on the couch.
“I’ll never forget what he looked like, just hanging there. I never saw anyone dead before. It was awful. And why did he do it?” Zoe wailed through her sobs. “I mean, weren’t we good enough? Why couldn’t he just be happy living here with us? Are we so horrible that being dead was better than being with us?”
Those are always the essential questions after a suicide, when the survivors are left to deal with a lifetime of self-doubt. What’s wrong with me? Why wasn’t I good enough? For the people left behind, suicide is the ultimate rejection and an irrecoverable loss.
“You loved him, didn’t you,” Mel said.
Zoe nodded wordlessly, emphatically.
She was in the throes of so much pain that I couldn’t help but be a little pissed at Marsha Longmire and Gerry Willis. How was it they could be so caught up in their own processes and in “making arrangements” that they had gone off and left Zoe alone to deal with her part of this family tragedy?
“Tell us about Josh,” Mel urged. “Please.”
Zoe drew a long ragged breath and blinked back tears. “Gerry told us about Josh when he and Mom first tried to get custody. That was before Josh’s mother died. You know about that?”
Mel and I nodded in unison.
“When we found out he was going to come live with us, I was so excited. I mean, I’ve always had a big sister-I’ve always had Giselle-but I always wanted a brother, too. And that’s what I thought Josh would be-a big brother. Even though Gizzy treats me like a pest sometimes, we were willing to share a room so Josh could have a room on the second floor along with everyone else, but he wanted to live upstairs, like a hermit or something. And he told me he didn’t need a sister-any sister, but especially not a ‘little sister.’ Especially not me.”
Mel took Zoe’s hand and held it. “It’s tough when you offer to be someone’s friend and they just walk away.”
Zoe nodded her head and then blew her nose into one of the tissues Mel had given her.
“I think it’s possible that there were a lot of things going on with Josh that no one knew about,” Mel continued. “For instance, did he ever complain to you about people sending him text messages?”
Zoe shook her head. “He didn’t talk to me about anything. He treated me like I was invisible or something.”
“What about his friends?” Mel asked.
“What friends?” Zoe asked.
“He must have had friends of some kind,” I said. “After all, when he was sneaking in and out of the house overnight, he must have been going somewhere or visiting someone.”
“That’s another thing,” Zoe said. “That’s my fault, too. I’m the one who told Josh about the rope ladders and how to time it so the patrols wouldn’t catch you. Gizzy told me and I told him. And that’s what started this whole mess, when Mom caught him sneaking back into the house.”
That wasn’t exactly true. Regardless of who taught Josh to let himself in and out of the house at will, it had been the film clip found on Josh’s phone that had sent everything into a tailspin. There had already been enough wrong in Josh’s unfortunate life that, when Marsha Longmire found the offending video, it had been the capper on the jug or the straw that broke the camel’s back or any other cliche you care to use that means one thing too many. Josh had committed suicide because he couldn’t take the possibility of any more abuse. Rachel Camber was dead because she had been a participant-an initially willing participant-in an ugly game called “let’s all torment Josh Deeson.”
I suspected that might be the real reason Rachel was dead. She had known who was targeting Josh Deeson because she had been part of it. What I didn’t understand was
“Tell us about Janie’s House,” Mel said.
“It’s a cool place,” Zoe said. “It’s a way of helping the less fortunate. Most of the kids who go there are, like, really poor, and we get to help them with schoolwork and stuff.”
“Did Josh ever go there?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Did he know any of the people there?”
“Besides Gizzy and me? He could have, I suppose,” Zoe said. “I mean, some of the kids that go there, as volunteers and as clients, come from the other high schools around town, his included. So I guess he might know some of them from school. But most of the tutors come from OPHS because Olympia Prep has more advanced placement classes than any other school in town. The smarter kids tend to go there, if their parents can afford it.”
Zoe’s parents certainly could afford it, and they could have sent Josh there, too, if everyone around him hadn’t deemed him too stupid. When Zoe made that comment, she was just offering what was probably the Olympia Prep party line-that the school was the home of the superachieving/superintelligent future leaders of America.
God save the world from superintelligent assholes! I’ve seen the kinds of trouble wrought by that breed of arrogant jerks. Plenty of them hang out in the upper echelons of Seattle PD, but my concern about the kids at Olympia Prep was far more immediate. Somewhere among the superstraight kids who were “giving back” by doing their required “volunteer” work at Janie’s House lurked a ruthless bastard-a smart and arrogant little weasel-whose sole mission in life was to destroy anything or anyone who dared to step too far away from the norm.
Josh Deeson had been different. Yes, he had taken his own life, but there were people in the background who had driven him to that level of desperation, and I wanted them held responsible. There were enough connections between the two cases that I felt certain that once we nailed Rachel Camber’s killer, we’d be bringing down Josh’s killer as well.
Up to that point I had been chasing for answers about Josh Deeson’s death because it was part of my job. Right then, though, it became personal-a quest more than a job. Why? Because I had been very much like Josh Deeson once-the poor kid; the outsider. Later on, I was like that at Seattle PD, too. I was the guy who kept his head down and did his job while the “smart” guys, especially the two-faced smart guys, made their way up through the ranks and into management.
I went to work as a cop because I was young and idealistic and thought I could save the world. When I made it to Homicide, I felt like I had come home. I knew by then that I couldn’t save the whole world, but closing cases- one case at a time-was my personal contribution. Even after losing my family and while I was still drinking, closing cases consumed me, and far too often the victims turned out to be people who didn’t quite conform to the
