Free Betrayal of Trust by J. A. Jance Page A

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