Dirty Game. Jessie Keane

name is Melissa Soames,” she said. “This is my partner, J. P. Beaumont. We’re with the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team. We’re executing a properly issued search warrant of this young man’s room. I don’t believe I caught your name.”

      “Garvin McCarthy,” he growled, snatching the search warrant from Mel’s hands. “Let me see that.”

      The gesture would have been more effective if McCarthy hadn’t had to dig a pair of reading glasses out of the jacket of his designer suit in order to read what was written on the documents. Before he began reading, however, he shot a venomous look in Josh’s direction.

      “Not another word from you, young man. Understand?”

      I half expected Josh to balk at this unmistakable order from someone he didn’t know, but I think our questions had scared the crap out of him. He knew he was in trouble. He knew he needed help even if that help was unappreciated and coming from his “not” grandmother. He nodded and kept quiet.

      While McCarthy read the warrant through, line by line, Mel quietly switched off the recorder and stowed it in her purse. Finished reading, he handed the warrant back to Mel.

      “What’s this all about?” he demanded. “Why Special Homicide?”

      “Ask your client,” she said.

      “Who’s dead?”

      “Ask your client.”

      “What are you, a one-trick pony?”

      Mel smiled at him and handed him a business card. That was her only answer. Then she picked up one of the Bankers Boxes and turned to me.

      “We’re done here,” she said casually. “Let’s go. We can stop by and see Mr. Willis on our way out.”

      That comment got a rise out of Garvin McCarthy and out of Josh Deeson as well.

      “No,” they said, speaking in inadvertent unison.

      The lawyer turned his ire on Josh. “I told you to be quiet and I meant it,” he said, shaking an admonishing finger in the kid’s direction. “Not another word.” He turned to Mel. “Receipts,” he said. “I want receipts for everything in those two boxes.”

      “Talk to my partner,” Mel said sweetly. “He’s the one in charge of paperwork.”

      I gave him a lowly carbon copy of the receipt form. I knew in advance that it wasn’t especially legible. McCarthy looked at the paper, then at me.

      “You expect me to read this?” he demanded.

      “Sorry about that,” I said with a shrug. “Old technology and all that. I can copy the originals and fax them to you later if you like.”

      McCarthy didn’t say yes or no to that. “Is my client under arrest?” he asked.

      “Not so far,” I told him cheerfully. “Right now he’s merely a person of interest. With any kind of luck on our part, however, he’ll be a full-fledged suspect under suspicion and under arrest in no time at all.”

      Scowling, McCarthy gave me a business card with his name and a whole collection of phone numbers embossed on what looked and felt like expensive paper. I dropped the card in my jacket pocket. I offered him my hand. He ignored it. I love it when attorneys can’t bring themselves to be collegial, to say nothing of polite. In my book, that was strike one against Garvin McCarthy.

      I took my box and followed Mel out into the hall. On the second floor I made my way to the balcony and picked up the coil of rope ladder that was still lying in the far corner of the balcony where Josh had left it. Once that was in my Bankers Box, I finally stripped off my latex gloves and dropped them into my pocket.

      Back in the hallway I heard raised voices coming from the landing at the bottom of the stairs. I recognized the governor’s voice. Hers was followed by a man’s voice, an angry man’s voice. The First Husband had evidently emerged unexpectedly from his hospital bed in the maid’s quarters. It sounded as though he wasn’t happy to discover that any number of things had transpired behind his back.

      “What the hell is going on up there?” he demanded. “Who are all these people coming and going?”

      “Some police officers stopped by,” Marsha responded pleadingly. “Please, Gerry. It’s just a little problem with Josh. I’m taking care of it. It’s handled.”

      “It’s not a little problem,” Mel said, stepping briskly into the argument as well as into the lion’s den. “My name is Agent Melissa Soames. I’m with the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, Mr. Willis. My partner, J. P. Beaumont, and I are here executing a search warrant of your grandson’s room.”

      “A search warrant?” Gerry Willis repeated. “What kind of search warrant? Why? What’s going on? Is Josh in some kind of trouble? And what team again?”

      I came down the last flight of stairs in time to answer that one.

      “Special Homicide,” I told him. “We found some troubling images on your grandson’s cell phone.”

      “What do you mean, ‘troubling’?”

      At the bottom of the stairs Mel and Marsha Longmire stood on either side of an angry older gentleman in a wheelchair. Since the man was seated, it was difficult to tell how big he was, but he struck me as a large man, with a fringe of iron-gray hair around a balding pate. Knowing Gerry Willis had recently undergone bypass surgery, I expected him to look wan and sickly. He did not. His coloring was great, and from the fit he was pitching, there was nothing at all the matter with his vital signs or mental faculties.

      “Snuff film,” Mel said in answer to his question.

      “Snuff film,” Gerry repeated. “As in somebody died?”

      Mel nodded. “Apparently,” she said.

      Gerry Willis’s hardened eyes flashed in his wife’s direction. “You knew about all of this and didn’t tell me?”

      “The doctor says you need to take it easy. I didn’t want to worry you.”

      “Screw the doctor! My grandson is under suspicion in a homicide and you didn’t want to worry me?” he demanded. “What’s the matter with you, woman? Are you nuts?”

      In that moment, Governor Marsha Longmire crashed to earth. She was an ordinary human being caught in the everyday turmoil of living in a blended family, loving her husband and wanting to protect him from his progeny’s folly. It was the old blood-and-water routine all over again, only this time Marsha was on the wrong side of the equation, the water side.

      “Ms. Soames and Mr. Beaumont are just leaving,” Marsha said. “Once they’ve gone, I’ll be glad to tell you everything.”

      “No,” the First Husband responded. “If this has something to do with Josh, you’ll tell me everything about it right now, all three of you.”

      Governor Longmire shook her head in frustration. She’d had every intention of smuggling Mel and me into the house and out of it again without raising any alarms as far as her ailing husband was concerned. That was why she had hustled us first into the study across from the front door and why she had then unceremoniously herded us on upstairs. We were unwelcome but necessary visitors, and she had wanted to steer us clear of the first floor as much as possible.

      Unfortunately for her, that plan had just come to grief.

      “As you wish,” she said to her husband.

      She watched as Gerry Willis rolled his wheelchair away from the landing and through an arched doorway into what was evidently the mansion’s formal living room.

      With a resigned sigh, Marsha Longmire turned to us. “After you,” she said.

       CHAPTER 6