The room itself was neat and clean, spookily so. Emphatically so. I looked through all the dresser drawers, top to bottom. There were socks-carefully paired socks-in the sock drawer, folded briefs in another, folded undershirts in a third, and a selection of folded T-shirts in a fourth. I checked the bottoms of each drawer to see if anything was hidden there, but I found nothing.
For a teenager, Josh’s closet was atypical. All the clothing was carefully hung on hangers, with pants, slacks and even jeans at one end of the closet, while shirts, carefully divided into long sleeves and short sleeves, hung at the other end. There were several pairs of shoes-also neatly arranged-on the floor of the closet. There was a clothes hamper in one corner, half filled with dirty clothes. The only thing stored on the top shelf was an extra blanket.
As an adult, my son, Scott, gives every appearance of being neat and well organized, but I remember his stepfather, Dave Livingston, telling me how when Scott was fifteen his room was such a mess that Dave and Karen had found mushrooms growing in his closet. That was certainly not the case here. For a kid with very little parental involvement, I had the sense that the compulsive cleanliness of the room was Josh’s doing and nobody else’s.
It didn’t seem likely to me that a housekeeper working for the governor would have ventured all the way up here to the third floor to spend time in this unwanted child’s room doing cleaning. Any right-thinking housekeeper in the universe would have taken one look at the disturbing subject matter in those pictures and freaked. Most likely she would have gone straight downstairs and ratted out Josh Deeson either to the governor or to the First Husband.
The old-fashioned en-suite bath was also scrupulously clean. His medicine cabinet contained a carefully arranged collection of toothpaste, men’s cologne, and deodorant; nail clippers, comb, brush, and a bottle of styling gel. The only visible medication there was a nearly empty prescription tube containing what was evidently a topical treatment for acne. But there was no dust on the glass shelves. There was no grime, and no film of dead toothpaste in the sink. No garbage in the trash can. To top it all off, the toilet seat was definitely down. That was the capper on the jug. Even if I’d never seen the pictures on the wall, I would have said from studying the bedroom and its attached bath that Josh Deeson wasn’t normal-not at all.
When I came back out of the bathroom, Mel was finished with the photos and had started removing the artwork. Where they had once been I could see tracks of tape and tacks. Once Josh moved out of this room it would have to be spackled, sanded, and painted, floor to ceiling.
“Anything?” Mel asked.
“Nothing. The whole room is neat as a pin.”
“Scary, isn’t it,” Mel said. And I had to agree.
The rope ladder had been fastened to the bed frame and headboard, and the bed had then been pushed up against the window. I disconnected the rope ladder from the bed and dropped it into my evidence box. If we ever had an actual crime scene, distinctive fibers from that ladder or the one on the second-floor balcony might very well be important.
I put the rope in the Bankers Box I had brought up from the car to use in gathering evidence. Then I looked at the bed. It wasn’t made, but I guessed that was an unusual occurrence. What appeared to be a bedspread was neatly folded on the floor. I wanted to look under the bed, so I picked up the mattress and box spring and peered down at the floor through the bed frame. Nothing. Not even a respectable collection of dust bunnies on the hardwood floor underneath.
Then, as I was putting the mattress and box spring back in place, I happened to think to look between them. What I saw hidden there was enough to make me feel sick at heart. It was a scarf, a blue silk scarf I was pretty sure I had seen before-wrapped around the throat of an unidentified dying girl in an iPhone video.
“Uh-oh,” I said, leaving the mattress crooked enough that the scarf still showed. “Bad news. You’d better bring that camera over here.”
Mel turned away from the wall. “What?” she asked.
“Come take a look.”
Mel retrieved her camera and came over to where I was standing. As soon as she saw the scarf she raised the camera and began photographing the bed.
“Give me your keys,” I said.
“Why?”
“By the time we pack up the computer and the artwork, we’re going to need that spare evidence box you’ve been carrying around in the back of the Cayman.”
I managed to limp down the two flights of stairs, but on my way back up, my knees were screaming at me. When I finally reached the top floor, I had broken out in a cold sweat. I paused in the hallway outside Josh’s bedroom door long enough to wipe the moisture off my forehead with the sleeve of my jacket. I had told Dr. Bliss about how bad my knees were, but somehow I hadn’t mentioned it to Mel.
Back in the room I discovered that Mel had finished taking pictures of the scarf and had returned to collecting the drawings. I began dismantling Josh’s computer system-a PC laptop and a tiny printer-into the Bankers Box I had dragged up from the car. Each time I added an item to the box I noted it on the evidence inventory form waiting there. Once I tore the two-page form apart, I’d have an original as well as a copy.
One at a time, I went through every drawer-every exceptionally neat drawer-in the desk. I expected to find some kind of camera or video equipment there, but I didn’t.
We were almost finished when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Mel and I both turned to the door, expecting to have our first glimpse of Josh Deeson. Instead, Marsha Longmire stood in the doorway. She looked at the scarred and empty walls and shook her head.
“I wanted to let you know that class is getting out. He’ll be here soon,” she said.
I walked over to where she was standing. “Until this morning, you had no idea, did you?”
She shook her head. “None at all.”
I took her arm and led her over to the desk where the Bankers Box was still sitting open. “You need to prepare yourself,” I warned. “This is bad.”
I reached into the box and pulled out the clear bag in which we had placed the now-folded scarf. Worried about preserving trace evidence, we had handled it as little as possible. Through the plastic it was apparent that the bag contained a swatch of material of some kind-light blue material. Marsha knew what it was without a moment’s hesitation.
She gasped and sank almost to the floor and knelt there with her face buried in her hands. “It’s the scarf,” she murmured. “It’s the damned scarf!”
I reached out to help her up, but she waved aside my hand and rose from her kneeling position without any help from me. Preoccupied with Marsha, neither of us heard the sound of other feet on the stairs or on the worn rug in the hallway.
“Who are you and what are you doing in my room?” Josh Deeson demanded from the doorway. “And what have you done with my artwork? Those pictures are mine. Give them back.”
He was a tall, scrawny, blond blue-eyed kid with spiked hair and a terminal case of acne. He looked more like a geek than a Goth. No black clothing. No visible piercings. His pants-ordinary jeans-were belted around his waist, not worn gangbanger style, riding down somewhere near the bottom of the butt. He wasn’t wearing an oversize hoodie or sweatshirt as some kids do regardless of the weather. He wore a light blue short-sleeved buttoned shirt; ready-made and most likely from somewhere like Nordy’s. It was exactly the kind of shirt I had always lusted after back when my mother was making mine.
He wore no jewelry of any kind, including that Seiko his grandfather had given him.
With his hands outstretched, he lunged toward Mel, probably intent on grabbing the artwork out of her hand. I leaped forward and cut him off.
“We’re police officers,” I told him. “We have a search warrant.”
Bristling with anger, he stopped a foot or so away from me and gave me a cold stare. He was tall enough that he nearly looked me in the eye. For a moment he glanced around the room, looking first at the bed with its displaced mattress and then at the desk.
“Where’s my computer?” he wanted to know. “Where’s my printer?”
“They’re in an evidence box,” I explained. “You’ll have a receipt for everything we take with us. As I said, we have a search warrant as well as your grandmother’s permission. That document applies to your room here as well as to both your computer and your cell phone.”
