Dirty Game. Jessie Keane

forever.

      Gerry paused for a moment and then went on.

      “Since you’re cops, I suppose you’ve seen meth labs?”

      Mel and I both nodded.

      “By the time Marsha and I married, I had completely lost track of my daughter,” Gerry continued. “It was just too painful to see what she was doing to herself. I didn’t even know Josh existed until he was nine. That was six years ago, right after Marsha and I got married. When I found out about the squalor he was living in, I tried to get him out of it. Marsha was willing to adopt him, and for a time Desiree was willing, but then, when the father refused to sign away his parental rights, she backed out, too.

      “A year later, when Josh ended up in foster care, I tried suing for custody. Desiree found herself a lawyer who managed to make it sound like her Big Bad Powerbroker Daddy and his wife, the Governor, were trying to run all over poor little her. I’ll say that much for Desiree. She was a very capable liar. The social workers at CPS seem to have or at least had a real bias toward keeping families intact.”

      “They gave him back to her,” Mel said.

      Gerry nodded. “We finally got custody three years later when Desiree died, but I’m afraid it was too late. Josh was twelve by then, and the damage was done. He came straight from foster care. He had the clothes on his back. Everything else was in a single grocery bag.”

      I’ve seen kids come out of homes where the parents abuse drugs—crack, cocaine, meth, it doesn’t matter which one. The parents care far more about their next high than they do about their offspring. The kids are lucky to have clothes to wear or food to eat. As for going to school? That doesn’t happen, and once they get into “the system,” that often makes bad situations worse. A lot of foster parents do good work, but there are also some bad apples out there pretending to be do-gooders when they’re not.

      The story Gerry Willis related was sad and all too familiar. I found myself feeling sorry for the First Husband and for Josh Deeson, too. I was also feeling a tiny bit sorry for Governor Longmire. Yes, she was beyond exasperation with the kid now, but once upon a time she had been willing to adopt him. When you try to do a good deed, it’s not nice when it comes back years later and bites you in the butt.

      Gerry continued. “Josh can read. He taught himself. Used it as a mental escape hatch when he was living in terrible circumstances, but when it came to academics? Forget it. Giselle and Zoe were both in Olympia Prep when he came to live with us. Josh was so far behind his grade level, there was no way he could cut that, so we sent him to a public school. That’s why he’s taking classes this summer—trying to catch up. At least he was supposed to be catching up.”

      So Zoe and Giselle went to a private school while Josh was relegated to public. I love it when politicians put their kids in private schools. A little bit of the feeling-sorry stuff for Governor Longmire went away.

      “We tried to make him feel like a member of the family,” Gerry went on. “We offered him a room on the second floor just like everybody else. At the time he came to live with us, the girls—Zoe and Giselle—were willing to share a bedroom so he could have one of his own, but Josh wasn’t having any of that. He’s the one who decided he wanted to live up in the damned attic.”

      Okay, so now I learned that Josh’s supposed Prisoner of Zenda plight was entirely self-imposed. Two points for Zoe and Giselle. Take one away from Josh. This was like an emotional tennis match, and I was having a hard time keeping score.

      “But Josh didn’t want to have a family,” Gerry said. He paused and then asked, “Do you ever read Dean Koontz?”

      As far as I was concerned, this was a question from way out in left field. I shook my head. “Doesn’t he write horror stuff, sort of like Stephen King?”

      In high school, my son, Scott, was a huge Stephen King fan. Me, not so much. I was a homicide cop. I didn’t need to read about horror. I saw too much of it every day.

      “Similar but different,” Gerry said. “One of Koontz’s books is called Watchers. It’s about a DNA experiment gone horribly awry. Two things come out of the experiment and they are the exact opposite. One is this incredibly intelligent golden retriever named Einstein. The other is a terrible monster. They turn out to be Good and Evil personified. And the scene that got to me in that book—”

      “I know,” Mel interrupted. “The scene in the cave—the monster’s carefully made bed and his treasured Disney toys.”

      “That’s it exactly,” Gerry Willis said.

      Then he buried his face in his hands and sobbed. It took some time for him to get himself back under control and dry his eyes. In the meantime I was left thinking about how much more than a purse Mel Soames had brought with us to this interview.

      “We noticed the book on the Spanish Inquisition,” I said when Gerry finally had regained his equanimity enough that he could once again answer questions. “Where did that come from?”

      “I ordered it for him from Powell’s down in Portland,” Gerry said.

      In terms of bookstores, Powell’s is a Pacific Northwest institution. They sell new books, of course, but they also have a huge reputation and a well-oiled system for tracking down old books, some of which are quite valuable.

      “It’s an old college textbook,” Gerry continued. “As far as I know, it’s considered to be one of the definitive books on the Spanish Inquisition, and it’s been out of print for years. Josh was doing a history report and ended up being fascinated by the subject. That’s why I bought it for him.”

      “You’ve seen his drawings, then?” I asked.

      Gerry gave me a hollow look and nodded. “Until today I honestly thought they were just drawings,” he said.

      “The girl in the video,” Mel said. “Did you recognize her?”

      “No.”

      “Is there a chance that she’s a friend of your grandson’s?”

      “I doubt it,” Gerry said. “As far as Marsha and I can tell, Josh doesn’t have many friends, at least none who ever come here to visit.”

      I surmised that the rope-ladder routine meant Josh did have friends somewhere, just ones he couldn’t or didn’t want to bring back to the house.

      The governor chose that moment to return from what must have been a fairly distant kitchen. When Marsha walked into the living room she was carrying a tray stacked with sandwiches. A slim blond girl wearing short shorts and an even shorter tank top followed her. The girl carried a second tray loaded with glasses, spoons, various sweeteners, and a pitcher of iced tea. The hair, the skin, the vivid blue eyes indelibly marked this sweet young thing as her mother’s daughter.

      “Zoe, this is Mr. Beaumont and Ms. Soames,” Marsha said. “These are the people I was telling you about. This is Zoe, my younger daughter. Would you please go get Gerry’s prescription bottle off the counter in his bathroom? It’s the one he’s supposed to take every four hours.”

      Zoe gave us a quick smile, then dashed off to do as bidden while Marsha handed out paper napkins. Mel took the tray of sandwiches and passed it around while Marsha poured the iced tea. Then she settled on a straight-backed chair and pulled it close to Gerry’s.

      “I suppose you’ve told them the whole sordid mess?”

      Gerry nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I have.”

      Zoe returned to the room with a pill bottle. She handed that to her stepfather, grabbed two sandwiches from the stack, and then raced off in the direction of the stairs.

      “Zoe,” Marsha commanded. “Remember your manners.”

      Zoe slid to a stop on the hardwood floor on the landing. “Nice meeting you,” she said over her shoulder. “Bye.” Then she disappeared up the stairs.

      The truth is, Governor Longmire