Betrayal of Trust (19 page)

“That's him?” Meribeth asked. “That's Josh?”

I nodded.

Meribeth shook her head. “He's definitely not one of our clients. I've never seen him before. Besides, if he lived at the governor's mansion, Josh Deeson was a long way from needing our kinds of services.”

“And this is Rachel,” I said. “Rachel Camber from Packwood, Washington. She was found dead, murdered, in a water-retention pond in Centralia early this morning. Her parents just went back home after identifying her body.”

This time Meribeth winced. It was a tiny gesture, but a telling one. Meribeth knew Rachel, and she didn't try to deny it.

“Her name is Amber, not Rachel,” Meribeth said. “At least that's the name she went by when she was here.” She sighed and then looked up and down the street. “I suppose you should come inside,” she added reluctantly. “We need to talk.”

She led us into the house—through a foyer, past a reception desk, and into a small office that had been carved out of what must once have been a spacious living room. She sat down behind a cluttered wooden desk and motioned Mel and me into chairs in front of it. We might have gotten off to a rocky start, but the mention of Rachel's murder had broken down some of the barriers.

“What about the dead boy?” Meribeth asked. “Is he a suspect in her death?”

“Josh probably would have been,” Mel said, “but he died a good twenty-four hours before Rachel Camber was killed. That means he's dead, but he's also in the clear. You're sure you've never seen him before?”

“Never!”

Meribeth's answer was forceful. As far as I could tell, it was also truthful.

“So how does this work?” Mel asked, gesturing at the Janie's House surroundings. “Kids can come here and stay for free for as long as they like?”

“No,” Meribeth answered. “As I said earlier, we're not a group home facility. No one sleeps over. The shelter opens at seven in the morning and closes at ten at night. Drop-ins only. Generally boys hang out in the house west of here and girls on the other side. This building is the only one that's truly coed. We have a library here as well as the computer lab. The other houses have TVs and VCRs, showers, kitchens, and laundry facilities. Here we try to maintain a kind of study hall atmosphere. During the school year we concentrate on academics. There's some of that during the summer as well. A lot of our kids need remedial help, but during the summer months the emphasis is on having fun.”

“Supervision?” I asked.

“We have volunteer houseparents who manage each building,” she said. “Those are often former clients who've gone on to make better lives for themselves. And don't think what we do here is free. We don't charge money for our services, but the kids who come here are expected to help out. They do chores—dusting, sweeping, painting, loading dishwashers, yard work—just like kids are supposed to do at home.”

“You make computers and cell phones available to your clients?” Mel asked.

“Of course. Social networking is vital these days. Kids who are too poor to have access to e-mail or texting are marginalized or even ostracized. We do what we can to rectify that. There's a cell phone in each building that's for client use, and we have a total of ten computers.”

“Do you keep track of Internet usage?”

“We keep track of who uses the computers, but we certainly don't monitor what they do on them, and we don't censor them, either,” Meribeth said.

“What about attendance?” I asked. “Do you keep track of who comes and goes, check photo IDs, anything like that?”

Meribeth shook her head. “No. We're a support system and we're privately funded. We don't have to keep attendance records to justify our existence.”

“What about those chores?” I asked. “Are there sign-up sheets for those?”

“Yes,” she said. “The houseparents handle those. They're in closer contact with the kids than I am, but this is all done on a first-name basis only. Or at least what they claim to be their first names. And we don't keep track of those, either. We work on an honor system. I assume you know what that is.”

The first-name-only ploy was just that—a ploy to protect Janie's House clients from people like Mel and me. I didn't much like Meribeth's snide “honor system” dig, either, but I didn't push back right then because I saw Mel was reaching into her purse and retrieving her phone. That meant she was about to deliver some serious push-back of her own.

“Do you happen to offer any drama classes here?” Mel asked. “Or filmmaking?”

“We don't offer any official classes as such,” Meribeth said. “We have a staff of volunteer tutors that comes in to help out as needed. That's not to say that some of our clients aren't involved in those kinds of classes, however. We actively encourage those pursuits. Through the years we've found that creative arts activities can be very therapeutic.”

“I'm sure,” Mel said agreeably. “And I can tell you for sure that some of your clients have a real flair for the dramatic. If you don't mind, I'd like to show you something.”

“What?”

“It's a film clip that we believe may have originated here. At least it was sent out as a file first from one of the computers in this building and then from one of your cell phones. You'll probably find it to be graphic, offensive, and quite shocking. We did, too. You do know what a snuff film is, don't you?”

“A snuff film?” Meribeth repeated. “You mean one of those movies where someone is actually killed on-screen? If that's what you're about to show me, I'm not interested,” she declared. “I will not watch such a thing. I won't allow you to show it to me. You need to leave now. If you don't, I'll call the police.”

“We are the police,” Mel reminded her. “And you don't need to worry. It turns out that although this film is very convincing, it's also make-believe. We now know that the young woman who is supposedly being murdered in this video, the girl you said was Amber, was still alive for a period of time after the film was made.”

Without saying anything further, Mel activated the clip. Despite Meribeth's protestations, there was absolute silence in the room as the clip played. By the time it finished playing, Meribeth Duncan's face was ashen.

“Are you sure she wasn't really dead?” Meribeth asked. “It looked so real.”

“Yes, it did look real,” Mel agreed, “but according to the medical examiner, she didn't die until sometime later.”

“And you think one of my clients is behind this . . . this . . .”

Unable to find a strong enough word to express her horror, Meribeth left the sentence unfinished.

“The clip was downloaded onto one of your computers here, probably from a thumb drive,” Mel explained. “Next it was uploaded to one of your cell phones. From there it went to Josh Deeson's phone. That's where it was found early Monday morning. We believe your cell phones were also used to send Josh any number of ugly text messages.”

“Josh—the boy who committed suicide?”

“Yes,” Mel said. “That happened yesterday morning. Rachel Camber's body was found early this morning, but the coroner estimates that she was killed only a few hours before she was found.”

“What do you need from me?” Meribeth asked.

“We're in the process of getting a search warrant so we can access your phone and Internet records. I'm expecting it to show up any minute.”

“You won't need a warrant,” Meribeth said. “As far as I'm concerned, you have my full cooperation.”

Chapter 19

M
eribeth Duncan may have been a raging bleeding heart with a knee-jerk contempt for the police, but once she reached her tipping point, she was all in. It turned out a number of folks in the neighborhood had been waging a land-use war with her for years, trying to shut Janie's House down completely.

“Once this gets out, that might give them enough ammunition to go to the city council,” she said. “So how do we fix it? And how do we do it without letting the other kids know what's up? Some of them might not come back at all if they find out the cops have been here.”

My concerns tended to go in the opposite direction. I was afraid the troublemakers would do their best to delete any offending files from the computer system as well as from the phones. I had a good deal of faith in Todd Hatcher's ability to recover any missing data, but still the idea of avoiding an obvious police presence at Janie's House seemed like a good one. And certainly my Mercedes, parked on the street in front of the office, gave no hint of being a cop car.

Finally, at my suggestion and citing a bogus plumbing emergency, Meribeth went from building to building, dismissing the houseparents who were on duty and shooing out any kids who had settled in for the day. Once they were gone, she posted a notice on each of the front and back doors saying that Janie's House would reopen at 7:00
A.M.
on Thursday.

When Todd Hatcher arrived, properly drawn search warrant in hand, he came to the party in a mud-spattered pickup truck that didn't look any more like a copmobile than my S-550. Nothing about our vehicles gave any kind of hint that Janie's House, currently off-limits to its teenage clients, was dealing with anything other than a plumbing problem, or that the place was currently being scrutinized by members of Ross Connors's Special Homicide Investigation Team.

One whole wall of the director's office was lined with four-drawer file cabinets. It turned out that Meribeth knew a lot more about the clients Janie's House served than she had let on initially. She may not have kept official “attendance records,” but each client had a file, a paper file, with both first and last names attached, kept under lock and key in that collection of file cabinets.

During three separate visits to Janie's House, Rachel Camber had operated under the alias of Amber Wilson. Meribeth plucked the file with Amber's name on it out of a drawer, opened it, and perused the papers she saw there for the better part of a minute. Then she closed the file and handed it to me.

“When clients come here, they fill out that first page. If they want to give us an alias, we respect that. This is our needs assessment page. It's designed to tell us something about where the kids are, especially if there's any area of study that's giving them trouble. We also want to find out what it is they're hoping to accomplish. One of our jobs is to do what we can to help them meet their goals, no matter how mundane or how lofty. If you look at Amber's goals statement, you'll see she wanted to attend a cheerleading camp.”

“I know,” I said, studying the information on the page. “Her stepfather told us about that. He said they couldn't afford it.”

“Right,” Meribeth agreed. “Those can be prohibitively expensive. One of my people was working on locating scholarship money that would have enabled her to attend a cheerleading camp later this summer. We expected to hear back on that any day now. That, of course, she would have attended under her real name.”

“So you have both.”

Meribeth nodded. “Usually,” she said.

I took another look at Meribeth Duncan. With her orange-and-purple hair and her iconoclastic manner of dress—army fatigues and scuzzy boots—I doubted she had ever had any yearnings to be a cheerleader. A lot of folks in her position might have tried to steer her charges into things more to their own liking. The fact that she had supported Amber/Rachel's ambition rather than denigrated it made me revise some of my initial thinking about Meribeth.

“So did she come here this week?” I asked.

Meribeth shook her head. “Not that I know of, but it's possible she was here without my seeing her. We can check with the houseparents who have been on duty this week.”

I made a note to do just that while Meribeth turned to another file cabinet. “I'll give you a list of names and phone numbers,” she said. “These four drawers contain information on all of our volunteers. Some of them do nothing but fund-raising. Some specialize in finding sources of appropriate scholarships. You'll find files on all our houseparents, past and present, in here, as well as all our tutors. Some of those are retired teachers and businesspeople, although most of our tutors come from nearby high schools and colleges.”

“Kids teaching kids?” I asked. “How does that work?”

“You'd be surprised,” Meribeth said. “With kids who have a natural aversion to authority figures, peer-to-peer tutoring works surprisingly well.”

By then Todd, working in a carrel-lined study, had located the offending computer—the one that had been used to upload the film clip to one of the shelter's cell phones.

In a matter of minutes he hit pay dirt. “Hey,” Todd said. “Come take a look at this.”

I have a bad reaction to standing beside someone's chair and trying to look at a computer screen. I guess it reminds me too much of standing next to a teacher's desk to have a paper corrected.

“Just tell us,” I said.

Todd looked at Meribeth. “Let me guess. This whole computer system was donated, right?”

She nodded.

“Whoever did that was interested in helping you, but they must also have had some concerns that their donated system might be put to some kind of nefarious use,” Todd explained. “There's a hidden file in this computer that functions as a virtual logbook—an invisible virtual logbook. The same program is probably on the other computers as well. Before new users can access the system, they have to create profiles that include their names—or at least whatever aliases they employ here—as well as their user names. After that, the logbook maintains a record of each time that user logs in or out as well as which computer was used.”

This all sounded good as far as Mel and I were concerned. Meribeth Duncan was outraged. “You mean we've been spying on the kids' computer usage all this time?”

Todd laughed. “You could have been, if you had known the file was there. But here's our guy. We know the film clip was sent to Josh's phone at one twenty-three Monday morning. And it was sent to the Janie's House cell phone from this computer at nine thirty-five on Sunday night.”

“But how could that happen?” Meribeth asked. “The cell phone, I mean. We're not even open at one twenty-three in the morning.”

“Janie's House may not have been open,” Todd said, “but the Janie's House cell phones were alive and well somewhere.”

“Can you find out where it was and who was using it?”

“Eventually,” Todd said. “Right now the logbook tells us that a guy named Hammer was online on this computer at the time the file was sent to the cell phone.”

“Who's Hammer?” Meribeth asked.

Todd did a cross-check with the user profiles. “Hammer,” he said, “aka Greg Alexander.”

“No!” Meribeth exclaimed, shaking her head in dismay the moment she heard the name. “That can't be. It's not possible for him to be mixed up in something like this.”

“Why not?” Mel asked.

“Because Greg is one of our best kids—the last person I would have expected to go off the rails like this.”

That reminded me of something my mother used to say, about finding things in the very last place she looked. No doubt the answers we needed were also lurking somewhere in that wall of file cabinets, although we had no clue about the first place to look, to say nothing of the last.

“Sorry,” Todd said. “According to this, Greg is the one who was online on this computer at the time the film clip file was uploaded.”

Resigned, Meribeth nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I'll go pull his file.”

Once she left the room, I turned back to Todd. “Is the original file there, too?” I asked.

“No, they probably used a thumb drive to load it onto this computer and then deleted it as soon as it was uploaded to the phone. But these are kids. They think that once they punch the delete button, everything goes away completely, but they're wrong. The data may be de-indexed, but the deleted file sits there on the hard drive for a period of time, waiting to be overwritten. The file was sent out Sunday night. There hasn't been that much activity on this computer since then.”

“You think it's still in there?” Mel asked.

“Yes,” Todd said, “and you can bet money I'll be able to find it.”

Meribeth returned carrying another file. Unlike Amber's, this one had more than one sheet of paper in it. I was mildly interested in the fact that, despite all the computer power sitting around, Meribeth Duncan put her faith in paper files stacked in metal cabinets.

“Greg works part-time in the produce department at the Safeway store in Tumwater. He's due to graduate from high school next spring. Greg's family is a mess. Both his parents and his older brother have been in trouble with the law. They buy junk from garage sales and private parties and try to resell it to metal recyclers. That's the business they claim to be in. Their trash heap is on the far side of Tumwater.

“Greg lives in a moldy, wrecked motor home that doesn't even have running water. He comes here to shower and wash his clothes. When he filled out his needs assessment he said that his long-term goal is to graduate from high school and join the military. I was hoping we could help him rise above his family's bad karma. I even helped set up a meeting for him with an Air Force recruiter.” Meribeth shook her head sadly. “He was all excited about it, but if he's mixed up in this mess, his getting into the service probably isn't going to happen.”

“Do you have a street address on their place?” Mel asked.

Meribeth nodded and read it off. “I don't recommend going there, though,” she said. “I'd try finding him at the grocery store first. I took him home one night when his car broke down. Their place isn't officially a junkyard, but it comes complete with a full assortment of junkyard dogs. They were pretty scary.”

Meribeth sounded disheartened, and I didn't blame her. She had invested years of her life, her time, and her effort on behalf of a ragtag bunch of kids nobody else seemed to give a damn about. Now one of those investments had most likely betrayed everything the poor woman stood for or hoped to accomplish.

It was clear to me that Greg “Hammer” Alexander and his pals were using the safe haven offered by Janie's House for a lot more than just “hanging out” and doing their laundry. It was also clear that if word got out that the shelter was under any kind of law enforcement scrutiny, the kids involved in what had happened to Josh Deeson and Rachel Camber would disappear like puffs of smoke.

“You said Greg has a vehicle of some kind?” Mel asked.

“An old Toyota, I think,” Meribeth said. “Don't quote me on that.”

When Mel and I left a few minutes later, Meribeth was watching as Todd copied data from the computers' hard drives so he could analyze them at his leisure. Once we were in the car, I took over the driving while Mel found the only Tumwater, Washington, Safeway store and had the GPS guide us there—to no avail. This happened to be Greg's day off.

“That's all right,” Mel said. “I love going to scary places that have guard dogs.”

She put the Alexanders' home address into the GPS and we headed there next. On the way to and through Tumwater, Mel checked with Records for rap sheet details on Greg's family. His father, Demetri; his mother, Barbara Jane; and their older son, Matthew, weren't exactly what you could call stellar. Matthew was a twenty-one-year-old guy currently out on bail on a weapons charge. Demetri had an extensive criminal background that included drug dealing and grand theft auto. Barbara had two DUI arrests and had spent six months in Purdy on possession of stolen goods.

All that information was enough to make me glad both Mel and I were armed and wearing vests. We weren't really expecting to be shot at, but people who end up having repeated run-ins with the law aren't the kind of folks who make sensible decisions. Their first response to having a cop show up on their doorstep might well be a hail of gunfire.

When we arrived at the address, we could see that what might have been a legitimate auto junkyard at one time had devolved into little more than a privately owned dump. I was surprised the county hadn't shut it down. Maybe the planning and zoning folks weren't any fonder of guard dogs than Mel and I were.

A closed chain-link front gate, complete with a hand-painted
BEWARE OF DOG
sign, barred our way. As if to prove the sign was telling the truth, a chorus of dogs let us have it from the far side of the gate, barking, snapping, and snarling. A smaller sign with an arrow said
RING BELL
. Taking the dogs into consideration, we rang the bell—several times.

Eventually a man emerged from a collection of moss-covered motor homes that stood to one side of a tangle of rusted-out vehicles. They were circled end to end, like a wagon train, and they must have leaked like sieves because they were all draped with tarps aimed at helping keep the no-doubt moldy interiors partially dry. Living in one of those during Washington's cold, wet winters couldn't be fun.

The man, presumably Greg's father, Demetri, was broad-shouldered and heavyset. Everything about him was gray—his hair, his skin, his clothing. In all that monochromatic grime it wasn't easy to determine his exact age. He could have been fifty; he could have been seventy. As Demetri moved toward us, he brought with him the unmistakable odor of unwashed flesh. I remembered what Meribeth had told us about Greg's place of residence having no running water.