Betrayal of Trust by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online

a history of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with a section of shiny pages that contained photographs of some of the equipment we had already seen depicted in Josh’s drawings on the wall. One was a biography of Kurt Cobain. One was a King James version of the Bible with the name “Elizabeth Desiree Willis” printed in gold on the leather-bound front cover.
    I still have the Bible that was given to me in my early teens after I had gone through confirmation classes. It was imprinted with my name in gold leaf the same way this one was. Clearly the Bible had belonged to Josh Deeson’s mother, not that it had done her much good. It made me wonder if anyone had ever cared enough about Josh to point him in the direction of church attendance. If so, I doubted if anything he had learned there had taken root. Judging from the books he kept, Josh was twice as interested in suicide as he was in (a) the Spanish Inquisition or (b) his immortal soul; take your pick.
    The room itself was neat and clean, spookily so. Emphatically so. I looked through all the dresser drawers, top to bottom. There were socks—carefully paired socks—in the sock drawer, folded briefs in another, folded undershirts in a third, and a selection of folded T-shirts in a fourth. I checked the bottoms of each drawer to see if anything was hidden there, but I found nothing.
    For a teenager, Josh’s closet was atypical. All the clothing was carefully hung on hangers, with pants, slacks and even jeans at one end of the closet, while shirts, carefully divided into long sleeves and short sleeves, hung at the other end. There were several pairs of shoes—also neatly arranged—on the floor of the closet. There was a clothes hamper in one corner, half filled with dirty clothes. The only thing stored on the top shelf was an extra blanket.
    As an adult, my son, Scott, gives every appearance of being neat and well organized, but I remember his stepfather, Dave Livingston, telling me how when Scott was fifteen his room was such a mess that Dave and Karen had found mushrooms growing in his closet. That was certainly not the case here. For a kid with very little parental involvement, I had the sense that the compulsive cleanliness of the room was Josh’s doing and nobody else’s.
    It didn’t seem likely to me that a housekeeper working for the governor would have ventured all the way up here to the third floor to spend time in this unwanted child’s room doing cleaning. Any right-thinking housekeeper in the universe would have taken one look at the disturbing subject matter in those pictures and freaked. Most likely she would have gone straight downstairs and ratted out Josh Deeson either to the governor or to the First Husband.
    The old-fashioned en-suite bath was also scrupulously clean. His medicine cabinet contained a carefully arranged collection of toothpaste, men’s cologne, and deodorant; nail clippers, comb, brush, and a bottle of styling gel. The only visible medication there was a nearly empty prescription tube containing what was evidently a topical treatment for acne. But there was no dust on the glass shelves. There was no grime, and no film of dead toothpaste in the sink. No garbage in the trash can. To top it all off, the toilet seat was definitely down. That was the capper on the jug. Even if I’d never seen the pictures on the wall, I would have said from studying the bedroom and its attached bath that Josh Deeson wasn’t normal—not at all.
    When I came back out of the bathroom, Mel was finished with the photos and had started removing the artwork. Where they had once been I could see tracks of tape and tacks. Once Josh moved out of this room it would have to be spackled, sanded, and painted, floor to ceiling.
    â€œAnything?” Mel asked.
    â€œNothing. The whole room is neat as a pin.”
    â€œScary, isn’t it,” Mel said. And I had to agree.
    The rope ladder had been fastened