Dirty Game. Jessie Keane

a fund-raiser at the rodeo, people are able to show their support by purchasing pink balloons that are released all at once in a moving ceremony at the end of the evening’s performance. When it came time to let go of his balloon, Todd Hatcher found himself standing next to Julie Dodge, and the rest is history.

      It turned out to be a match made in heaven. Julie had inherited her father’s horse farm, where her divorced father had raised her along with plenty of prizewinning quarter horses. She had grown up helping him run the farm. After his death, she ran it solo, hiring help only as needed. It was also after her father’s death that she managed to reconnect with her mother. Julie’s mom had bailed when she discovered she wasn’t cut out for ranch life or motherhood. She died of breast cancer only a few months after being reconciled with her daughter.

      I think standing there side by side, holding those stupid pink balloons, caught Todd and Julie with their customary defenses down. Todd had been through a lot with his own parents’ stormy relationship. He and Julie let go of their pink balloons, went to the nearest Denny’s, and spent the rest of the night, well into the wee hours, talking. They got married a few short weeks later—saying their vows before a justice of the peace in Gray’s Harbor County with the two of them dressed in boots, jeans, and matching pink cowboy shirts. At the ceremony, Ross Connors stood up for Todd. Julie’s best friend from high school stood up for her. Mel and I were invited along to serve as witnesses.

      So now Ross’s consultant-in-chief lives on his wife’s horse farm out in the boonies, where he has a top-of-the-line Internet connection and plenty of real manure to shovel whenever he gets tired of shoveling the politically motivated, man-made, virtual variety. From the looks of it, he and Julie are partners in every sense of the word.

      It was five-thirty in the afternoon when we pulled up in front of a picturesque farmhouse set back several hundred feet from the banks of the Black River. The house, boasting a relatively recent coat of white paint, looked as though it had been plucked off a farm in Iowa or else from a movie set and dropped unscathed in the wilds of western Washington. The barn, gleaming with an equally new coat of bright red paint, could have come from the same source.

      Todd emerged through the screen door on the front porch and then bounded down the steps to meet us. He was in his favorite duds—worn jeans, worn boots, worn shirt. He waved and greeted us with a lopsided welcoming grin.

      “Come on in,” he said, grabbing Mel’s hand and half dragging her out of the driver’s seat of the Cayman. “Julie’s inside making supper. She’s dying to see you.”

      Supper, I noted, not dinner.

      “It’s a pork roast, homemade applesauce, and early corn fresh from the garden, picked just this afternoon. We’ve got plenty. She said to tell you she’s already put extra plates on the table and you are not allowed to say no.”

      I got the feeling from being around Julie Hatcher that she didn’t believe in anyone telling her no, which probably also explained why she and Todd were married. Besides, my single half of one of Governor Longmire’s tuna sandwiches was long gone. I have to admit that the idea of eating a real home-cooked meal had a lot of appeal.

      “Sounds good to me,” I said.

      “What have you got?” he asked.

      Mel stepped out of the car, opened the door, and showed him the evidence box with the computer in it. “Here it is,” she said. “Help yourself.”

      He picked up the box, hefted it, rattling, onto his shoulder, and led the way into the house.

      I have been in farmhouses occasionally in my life, and some of those occasions have been during summer months—hot summer months. So make that miserably hot farmhouses. As I walked across the front porch, I was happy to note that on a concrete pad beside the porch sat a huge Trane AC unit quietly humming away. Julie and Todd’s house was not going to be miserable. In fact, once we got inside, compared to the summer heat outside, it was practically chilly.

      Todd led us through both the living room and dining room and into a spacious country kitchen, where a round oak table held four place settings. Julie, smiling in greeting, was carrying a platter full of corn on the cob to the table. The pork roast was already there.

      “Everything you see here is homegrown,” Todd said proudly. “The corn is from our garden. Even the peaches in the cobbler for dessert come from our own fruit trees—last year’s crop. Not the pork, though. That comes from a guy who raises pigs down in Lewis County.”

      “A friend of my dad’s,” Julie explained. “And we buy sides of beef from a guy in Toledo.”

      I know enough about Washington geography to understand she didn’t mean Toledo, Ohio. Mel was smart enough not to ask.

      The pitcher of iced tea on the table was fruit-flavored and pre-sweetened, which was fine with me. Mel drank hers without complaint, and we both dug into the food, which was utterly delicious. All during dinner we chatted about this and that, making sure we made no reference to the purpose of our visit in front of Julie. If Todd saw fit to confide in her after we left, that was his business, but Mel and I didn’t mention it.

      Finally, when Julie got up to clear away plates and serve the peach cobbler, she looked at Todd and said, “Well, are you going to tell them or am I?”

      “We’re expecting,” Todd announced with a proud but sheepish grin. “We confirmed it just this week. She’s almost two months along.”

      Mel and I both offered enthusiastic congratulations, although mine were tempered by thinking about Gerard Willis’s rocky venture into fatherhood, not to mention my own. That’s the thing with having kids. You can never tell what’s going to happen or how they’ll turn out.

      The peach cobbler arrived still warm from the oven and topped with a generous dollop of store-bought vanilla ice cream. I did my best not to clean my dessert plate, but I didn’t succeed. Once dessert was over, Julie shooed all of us out of the kitchen so we could work while she cleaned up.

      “Okay,” Todd said. “What have we got?”

      He led us to a room that, in another era, had probably once been the farmhouse’s master bedroom. Now it was a fully functional office space, complete with multiple computers, copiers, printers, and scanners. On the way to the office I picked up the Bankers Box containing Josh Deeson’s electronics equipment. Once in the office, I set the box down on Todd’s desk. Without a word of consultation, we donned latex gloves. We all knew that the less the computer and phone were handled, the better. We also understood that we needed to access the information from the devices as soon as possible. I was worried that Garvin McCarthy would make some effort to erase the contents of both the phone and the computer remotely before anyone else had a chance to see what was there.

      Todd directed Mel and me to chairs. Then, whistling under his breath, he set about examining everything we had brought along. “Great,” he said. “I’ve got a power supply for this right here.” Moments later he busied himself copying the laptop’s hard drive as well as the information on Josh Deeson’s phone.

      “Once I have the information off the computer, I’ll be able to analyze it,” Todd said as he waited for the hard drive to finish copying. “Before I can do that, though, I need to know what I’m looking for and what you’re hoping I’ll be able to find.”

      “One of the last files sent to this phone is the video of what appears to be a snuff film, the murder of a juvenile female,” Mel told him. “Are you okay with that?”

      Todd gave her a bemused look, but then he nodded. “I guess,” he said. “I’ve never seen a snuff film, but I’ve butchered cattle, if that’s what you mean.”

      “All right then,” Mel said. “We need to know who sent that video and when. We also need to try to isolate the girl’s face in a benign enough manner that we can use the image in an attempt to locate her next of kin. We may also be able to match the photo with an unsolved missing persons case.”

      “Of course,” Todd