wouldn’t have been much more damaging than ‘Your mother wears G.I. boots.’ The messages sent to Josh were far more destructive than that, and far more personal.”
“But. .” she began.
I dodged around her and started down the stairs.
“How did you find out about these supposed messages?” Marsha asked.
“They’re not supposed messages or alleged messages or any other kind of weasel words. We know about them because Josh saved them,” I said. “He downloaded them from his phone to a file on his computer.”
“What does any of that have to do with Josh’s dirty clothes?” Marsha demanded. “Besides, this is our home. Even if his room is still designated as a crime scene, you can’t just come waltzing in here without a warrant.”
“Your husband gave me permission,” I said.
As I clambered down the long flights of stairs, I ached enough that I could barely walk and talk at the same time. As I neared the ground floor, I heard the sound of assembled voices coming from the living room and could see a collection of suitcases that had been hastily deposited in the entryway.
Gerry must have heard Marsha and me arguing as we descended. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m the one who gave Mr. Beaumont permission to collect Josh’s clothes,” Gerry said. “If you have a problem with that, Marsha, you need to discuss it with me.” After telling his wife to back off, Gerry turned to me. “If you’ll forgive me, Mr. Beaumont, I’m going to have to renege on that offer of coffee. We have people here now-out-of- town guests.”
I nodded. “Of course,” I said.
Zoe came past, headed for the stairs. Gerry stopped her. “Please go tell Ms. Soames that Mr. Beaumont is just leaving.”
Nodding, Zoe went to do his bidding while Gerry walked me out to the car. When Mel emerged from the house, Marsha was still standing at the foot of the stairs.
“Do you think Josh was involved with another boy?” Gerry asked in an undertone as I put the clothing-laden pillowcase in the trunk and pushed the button to close it. “With someone his own age?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Willis,” I said. “I really have no idea. It could be another kid. It could be an adult.”
“Why don’t you go see Mr. Dysart?” Gerry suggested quietly, speaking in what was almost a whisper.
“The guy who ran the chess club?”
Gerry nodded. “That’s the one. I met him last May at the end-of-year dinner for the chess club. Josh thought the world of him, but I tell you true-the man gave me the willies.”
“Gives him the willies?” Mel repeated as we drove away. “That’s an expression I haven’t heard in a long time.”
Mel is younger than I am. There are times when we run head-on into a generation gap. It happens with jokes and music, and occasionally, as in this case, with vocabulary.
“Maybe not,” I said, “but if he bothered Gerry that much, it’s reason enough to stop by once more to see him. We should also have a chat with some of the other kids in the chess club. But before we talk to anyone, I want to go see Joan Hoyt. We’ll give her what we have so she can get it to the crime lab.”
Headquarters for the Washington State Patrol is on Linderson in Olympia. Once there, Mel went to have a chat with Records while I tracked down Captain Hoyt.
“How did it go at the governor’s mansion?” Joan asked when I handed her the pillowcase filled with Josh Deeson’s dirty clothes.
“About how you’d expect,” I told her. “I don’t think they’ll be putting us on their Christmas card list.”
I gave her the two business cards that I had briefly handed over to Gizzy Longmire and Ron Miller.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I’m hoping the crime lab will be able to lift prints and/or DNA off the cards.”
“Related to Rachel Camber’s murder?”
I nodded. Then I handed over Mel’s and my garbage-sifting prize-Josh Deeson’s extra Seiko watch.
“What’s this?”
“Something Mel and I dug out of the governor’s garbage. The watch looks a whole lot like a duplicate of the one Josh Deeson was wearing when he died, the one your crime scene team already took into evidence. Here’s the number for the Seiko distributor. We need to find out when both watches were purchased, and, if we’re lucky, find some trail to the individual purchasers.”
Joan nodded. “I’ll put someone on this right away.”
By the time I was finished documenting the transfer of evidence, Mel was waiting for me in the car. Since she had her own key, she had been able to turn on the GPS.
“Take a look at this,” she said. “I loaded in Sam Dysart’s address. I wasn’t paying that much attention to the relative distances last night when we stopped by there, but it’s only a little over a mile from there back to the governor’s mansion. That’s well within walking distance for someone letting himself in and out of his third-floor bedroom with a pair of strategically placed rope ladders. And if you remember, when we asked Josh about who he had been with that night, he claimed he had been alone.”
“It’s all starting to make sense,” I said. “If Josh was being sexually exploited by a coach-type adult from school, that would certainly explain his reluctance to discuss it.”
“It might also explain where he went on that afternoon jog Gerry Willis thought was so unusual,” Mel said. “But listen to this. Here’s something interesting. Samuel D. Dysart, age fifty-seven, has no traffic citations, but he’s been cited twice for loitering in Fort Defiance Park in Tacoma, late on two different Saturday nights. One occurrence happened two years ago and the other the year before that.”
I allowed myself the luxury of an
Loitering is a misdemeanor. Most civilians seem to place loitering citations on the same level of seriousness as littering violations. What loitering really means in the PC world of cop speak is that some unfortunate gay guy got caught wandering around in a public place in search of a casual sex hookup. Looking for love in all the wrong places constitutes risky behavior. In terms of potential danger, it’s several steps down from Internet dating services. When two men end up “loitering” together and what goes on is between consenting adults, it’s regarded as a relatively harmless, victimless crime. Giving someone a citation for loitering is the civilian cop’s version of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and it’s a charge that doesn’t land the loiterer on the list of registered sex offenders.
In this case, however, maybe it should have. Now there was a victim involved-a juvenile victim, since Josh Deeson had died several years shy of the age of consent.
“Dysart sounds like a hell of a nice guy,” I muttered. “Just exactly the kind of person I’d want in charge of my son’s high school chess club.”
By that time, of course, Mel was already on the phone with the high school principal’s office, speaking to a secretary, and asking for the names of the kids who had signed up for the chess club to be e-mailed to her. After a question about how Samuel Dysart, a nonteacher, came to be in charge of the chess club, Mel listened for some time, typing on her computer the whole while.
“So here’s the deal,” Mel said once she was off the phone. “Twenty-some years ago, when Dysart was in his thirties, he was a nationally recognized championship chess player. Now he’s a retired software engineer. Two years ago, when the school couldn’t afford to pay one of its regular faculty members to be in charge of the chess club, they were delighted when Dysart showed up and volunteered his services.”
“Sounds a lot like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” I commented.
“Exactly,” Mel agreed. “From then on, just like magic, there are no more loitering charges lodged against him. He doesn’t have to go wandering around in parks in the middle of the night looking for connections, because the school is happy to send him a never-ending supply of potential victims.”
The whole idea was anathema to me. By the time we stopped in front of Sam Dysart’s house, I was half sick to my stomach. Child predators revolt me. That was one core value Anne Corley and I had had in common. Ditto for Mel Soames. Antipathy toward child abusers is evidently part of my first sort in picking potential mates.
When we drove up to Sam Dysart’s house, everything looked pretty normal except for the fact that the curtains and blinds were still closed. The house was neat and clean like all the other houses on the block. A gardener’s truck was parked at the curb, and a guy with a lawn mower was industriously mowing Dysart’s small front yard.
Mel and I got out of the car and started up the sidewalk. When the gardener saw us, he turned off his
