parents didn’t know-Marsha and Sid Longmire had had balls enough to throw their daughter under the bus. When they did that, they threw Ron there as well.
I couldn’t interview Ron, but as long as I was at Olympia PD, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to touch base with whoever was working the Janie’s House arson case.
“They’re not here,” the desk sergeant told me when I showed him my badge and ID and asked my question. “They’re out in the field doing a next-of-kin notification.”
“For the victim from the fire?”
The sergeant hesitated for a moment before he nodded. “His name is Owen Wetmore, age thirty-five. Our investigators don’t know if he’s a victim, a participant, or both. When they recovered the body, his ID was in his back pocket, charred but still legible. His parents are off in Europe on some kind of a three-week cruise. The detectives went to Seattle to talk to the grandmother.”
“At thirty-five, Owen is too old to be one of Janie’s House’s homeless clients,” I said.
The sergeant nodded. “My understanding is that he’s one of the houseparents.”
I gave the sergeant a business card. “Have one of the detectives give me a call as soon as they get back,” I said. “I may have some information for them.”
“It could be late,” he counseled. “It’s a long way up to Seattle and back.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s going to be a long night for everyone concerned.”
I stopped by the local Domino’s franchise and picked up a large pizza and three Cokes before I headed back to the office. It was summer. The night was warm. The fragrance of pizza in the car reminded me of summertime parties I had attended long ago, back when I was Gizzy’s age. It saddened me to think that this was most likely the last bite of freshly baked pizza Giselle Longmire would encounter for a very long time.
Back at headquarters, Ross Connors was standing outside the interview room watching through the glass. I was carrying the pizza in one hand and a cardboard multiple-cup container in the other. I set the load down on a nearby table and handed Ross a slice of pizza on a fistful of napkins.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Mel’s working her pretty good,” Ross said, biting the tip off his piece of pizza. “What the hell were these kids thinking?”
“They weren’t thinking,” I said. Then I tapped on the door to the interview room, opened it, and held the door open with my toe long enough to let myself inside.
“Your pizza has arrived,” I said with a flourish. After depositing the food on the interview table, I took my own drink and pizza and rejoined Ross outside in the hallway. Mel was clearly making progress with Gizzy. My hanging around and horning in on the discussion might have been enough of a distraction to mute her effectiveness.
“She said Ron and a pal of his came up with the idea of hiring Rachel to make videos,” Ross said. “Gizzy was the one who thought it would be funny to send one of them to Josh.”
“Videos-plural?” I asked. “As in more than one?”
Ross nodded. “A money-making venture. According to Gizzy, they did their filming in one of the outbuildings- an old caretaker’s cottage-at Ron’s family home out on North Cooper Point Road.”
“She was in on it from the beginning?”
Ross nodded sadly. “They lured Rachel here over the weekend with the promise of making another four hundred bucks by reprising her phony death scenes.”
“Would Ron Miller’s film partner happen to be a guy named Owen Wetmore, by any chance?” I asked.
Ross shot me a look and nodded. He didn’t ask me how I knew that, and I didn’t tell him.
“Does Owen drive a green pickup truck?” I asked.
Ross nodded. “As a matter of fact, he does-a dark green Chevy Silverado.”
Inside the room, Mel moved the pizza box aside and pushed a blue-lined notepad in front of Gizzy. “Write it all down,” she said, handing her a pen. “When you’re finished, sign it.”
“All of it?” Gizzy asked faintly.
“All of it,” Mel told her.
Mel stood up and stretched. Then she picked up another piece of pizza, came to the door, and knocked on it. We let her out.
Gizzy Longmire wrote her life-and-death essay for the better part of an hour. By the time she finally finished it, signed it, and handed it over to Mel, Joan Hoyt had already obtained a search warrant for the Ronald Miller residence on North Cooper Point Road. After dropping Giselle off at Olympia PD for booking, we went there, too, where officers from the Washington State Patrol, along with the arson detectives from Olympia, were already in the process of executing the search warrant. On the sidelines an outraged Ronald Miller, Senior, and his rudely awakened attorney ranted and raved to no effect. They might be able to run roughshod over any and all comers in a courtroom, but crime scenes are cops’ turf, not theirs.
And that’s what this was. As soon as we stepped into the caretaker’s cottage I knew we had found the place where Rachel Camber had played her fictional role as well as her real one. The soiled mattress on the narrow cot in one corner of the room told the story of her imprisonment and death, as did the very expensive video equipment that still stood in the center of the room.
Ron Miller may have staged more than one phony snuff video, but someone had failed to give him the memo that, in real life, death isn’t a pretty picture. When a body stops working, there are consequences in terms of bodily functions. Nothing in Ron Miller’s life experience had taught him the necessity of cleaning up his own crap, and he hadn’t done so in this case, either.
It took hours to process the scene. The same Washington State Patrol crime scene team that had come to Josh Deeson’s bedroom appeared for a return engagement. They took photos dogged by Mel, who took her own photos while I cataloged each and every shot. By the time we finally left there to return to the Red Lion, the sky was starting to lighten. It was only four-thirty, but morning comes early in the Pacific Northwest at the start of summer.
We went back to our room and stripped off our clothing. Mel removed her makeup, and we both fell into bed. Mel was asleep instantly-the sleep of the just, as we call it. It took two Aleves and the better part of forty-five minutes before I was able to fall asleep, still hearing Ron’s words echoing in my head: “You and who else, old man?”
Chapter 28
Much later it was the sound of Mel’s key in the lock that woke me. She came into the sun-filled room carrying a tray loaded with a coffeepot, two cups, two salad plates with silverware, a pair of napkins, and an enormous bowl of cut-up fresh fruit-several different kinds of melon, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries.
“Ready to sit up and take nourishment?” she asked. She looked great.
“What time is it?”
“Twelve-thirty.”
“I guess we missed checkout time.”
“I guess so,” she agreed. “But we don’t have much time. Ross expects us at Josh Deeson’s funeral, which starts at two. He wants us there for the funeral and for the press conference afterward.”
Ross is our boss, and an order is an order. I took two Aleves. I drank coffee. I ate fruit. Then I crawled out of bed, limped into the bathroom, and took a long hot shower.
Josh’s simple service was accompanied by mountains of floral arrangements and was conducted in the open air on the lawn outside the governor’s mansion. It was pretty much a standard funeral service. When the minister opened the microphone for comments, I was surprised to see Zoe Longmire slip out of her spot next to her mother and make her way to the podium.
Her words were simple and heartfelt. “Josh lived with our family,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t know him better. I’ll miss him.”
It was graceful. It was charming. It set the tone, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised because Zoe,
