The other one was from Ralph Ames. “I understand you’re in Olympia at the Red Lion for the next couple of days. I happen to be coming down there tomorrow. Hoping to have breakfast. I’ll be there right around eight. Let me know if you can’t make it.”
From my door-to-door salesman days, I recognized that as an assumed close. When one asked for an appointment, the standard question was always: “Which would be better for you, mornings or afternoons?” The question is designed to leave the dreaded words “Not ever” out of the list of possible answers, with the underlying assumption being that of course you want to see me.
The idea of Ralph just “happening” to be in Olympia at that ungodly hour-a good ninety miles from Seattle- was also bogus. Ralph isn’t a spontaneous kind of guy. He doesn’t ever just “happen” to go someplace. He has appointments-deliberate appointments-and like it or not, Mel and I would be having breakfast with him in the morning. Evidently the governor’s garbage, piling up in the storage unit, couldn’t wait until then.
Mel was still on her phone and on hold. Here’s an idea. Why don’t cell phone companies discount the minutes people spend online without talking to anyone?
“Breakfast with Ralph tomorrow morning at the hotel at eight A.M.,” I told her, putting the car in gear. “But right now we’re on our way to Ross’s storage unit. You dodged garbage detail yesterday, but not today.”
“Dressed like this?” she asked.
“We’ll be careful.”
Moments later Mel was taking notes, holding the phone to her mouth with her shoulder and typing them into her laptop.
“Okay,” she said when she ended the call “Here’s the scoop on Ron Miller-Ronald Darrington Miller lives on North Cooper Point Road.”
“Darrington is his middle name?” I asked. “Like the town along Highway 2? It sounds a little pretentious.”
“Oh, right,” Mel said with a laugh. “Look who’s talking. Is being named after a town in Texas pretentious?”
She certainly had me there.
“Middle name notwithstanding, Ron is seventeen years old and already has two traffic stops to his credit-a Minor in Possession and a speeding ticket, reduced from reckless driving. The MIP charge was dropped for no apparent reason.”
“No wonder Monica doesn’t like him much. And how did the MIP get dropped? Political pull of some kind?”
“Maybe. Probably.”
“What make and model car?”
“A brand-new Camaro with temporary plates. Probably a high school graduation present.”
“I guess it was too much to hope that he would be driving a green pickup truck.”
“I guess,” Mel agreed.
With a detour by an all-night drugstore for a bottle of Febreze, we drove straight to Tumwater Self-Storage. As soon as we stepped into the hallway I understood why Rebekah had been so insistent. Foul garbage odors permeated the entire floor. We let ourselves into the storage unit and went to work. I took pity on Mel and gave her the recycling while I tackled the coffee-grounds-leaking garbage. She finished hers in a hurry and then she helped me with mine.
Later on someone told us that finding what we found that night was just “blind luck.” I beg to differ. It wasn’t luck; it was work. And it wasn’t because we were slapdash about it either. Mel and I worked our way through the garbage slowly and methodically and-because of our clothing-carefully as well. There was nowhere to sit. We did it crouching or, in my case, bending over, because the tarp with the garbage on it was on the floor and my knees don’t do “crouch” anymore. I was about to give it up when something shiny caught the light from the bottom of a pile of used coffee grounds.
I brushed away the grounds and there it was-a watch with a stainless steel watchband. “Hey,” I said, “what do you know! Look what I found!”
I picked it up carefully in my gloved fingers and held it up to the light. I would have had to get out my reading glasses to read the front of the watch. Mel didn’t.
“It says ‘Seiko,’ ” she reported. “I could be wrong, but it looks exactly like the one we found on Josh Deeson’s body. Which means we have two watches-two interchangeable watches. What does that mean?”
I blew off the remaining coffee grounds and slipped the watch into an evidence bag. Meanwhile, Mel came over and looked through the trash in the same general area where I had been searching. It stood to reason that if anything else of interest had been thrown away, it would be found in close proximity to the watch. We spent another half hour picking through the trash, but we found nothing more than broken eggshells, soggy mounds of dead melon balls, and rotting strawberries. When we had finished, we dragged the tarps to the Dumpster, where we emptied and folded them. After returning them to the storage unit, we left the key at the office and headed back to the car.
It was almost ten by then but not yet fully dark. We were on our way to the hotel. I was dead tired, but Mel had caught her second wind.
“Let’s go take a look at Ron Miller’s place before we call it a night,” Mel suggested.
She fed the Millers’ address into the GPS and off we went. By the time we reached North Cooper Point Road, it was full dark. Even so, it was possible to see that Ron Miller’s family lived in a home that made Sid Longmire’s place look like a slum and the governor’s mansion look modest. This wasn’t a gated community so much as a gated estate or a gated compound with several buildings looming into view. We drove past the driveway entrance slowly but without stopping.
Mel gave a whistle. “These people have moolah,” she observed. “So maybe showing up unannounced in the middle of the night to talk to their fair-haired boy isn’t such a good idea.”
I had visions of a Garvin McCarthy look-alike riding to the rescue before Mel and I had a chance to open our mouths.
“How about this?” I asked. “It’s been a long day. Let’s call it a job for tonight. Ron Miller may be tied in pretty tight with Janie’s House, but the place was closed all day today. If his conscience is bothering him, I’m willing to bet that he’ll show up there bright and early tomorrow, trying to get the lay of the land and figure out if the closure had anything to do with him. If he’s our guy, he’ll want to make sure his tracks are properly covered. I think Meribeth Duncan is far more likely to give us a crack at talking to Ron Miller than his parents will.”
“Agreed,” Mel said. “Time to head for the barn.”
Back at the hotel we stopped off at the coffee shop for a late supper. I had soup; Mel had salad. Once up in our room, I booted up my computer while Mel got first dibs on the bathroom. Hidden among all those penis enlargement spam messages was an e-mail from Todd Hatcher.
I sent Todd a thank-you note and said that we’d be in touch tomorrow, which, it turned out, was very close to being today. There was an e-mail from my daughter, Kelly, with a photo of Kayla, my granddaughter, missing her right front tooth. That one rocked me because it didn’t seem possible that Kayla was already old enough to be losing her baby teeth.
Then, there at the bottom of the new-mail list lurked the one from Sally Mathers. I still didn’t know how to answer it, but I didn’t want her to think I was ignoring it, either.
All of which was the truth, with only the smallest possible amount of varnish.
Mel emerged from the bathroom with nothing on and slipped into bed. I told her about the message from Todd.
“That squares with what the M.E. told us, too,” she said.
