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much it had cost to build it, how much it had cost to renovate, and how much it had cost to rehab the place after it had been allowed to deteriorate almost to the point of demolition.
    It was like listening to one of those canned recordings that you can carry around in a museum to give yourself a guided tour. I’m sure the governor had conducted that kind of tour countless times. I had been to a charity auction or two where a guided tour of the mansion had been on the auction block. No doubt this was the first time two homicide investigators had been given the full meal deal tour treatment.
    Clearly the house was more a public edifice than it was a private home. The framed oil paintings on the walls were official portraits of notable folks in Washington State’s history rather than anything that might have come from the governor’s own family. The oriental rugs in the hallways and on the stairs were no doubt expensive, but they were also worn. By the time we reached the top floor—Josh’s floor—they were downright shabby. Apparently the mansion renovation budget didn’t stretch all the way to the top floor. I also noticed that the wooden steps creaked noisily under our weight. That probably explained why Josh had found it necessary to use the emergency rope ladders to go in and out.
    In the third-floor hallway, Marsha stopped in front of a closed door and pushed it open. Before stepping inside, Mel removed the search warrant from her purse. “Don’t you want to take a look at this?”
    Governor Longmire shook her head. “Ross Connors’s office drew it up. I’m sure it’s in order.”
    Her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket, glanced at it, and then put it back.
    “You’re welcome to be here while we do the search.”
    Marsha shook her head. “That was my husband on the phone. He needs some help. You’ll give me receipts for anything you take, including the computer, right?”
    “Right,” Mel answered.
    “Fine,” Marsha said. “No need for me to hang around then. I’d just be in the way.”
    She left in what struck me as a big hurry. Yes, her husband was ill and yes, he maybe needed her, but there was a real urgency in the way Marsha almost sprinted back down the stairs.
    Once she was gone, Mel handed me a pair of latex gloves and then pushed open the bedroom door. She stepped inside and I followed. The hallway outside the room had been totally impersonal. This was the opposite. Every inch of available wall space had been covered with drawings—both in pencil as well as in pen and ink—from a troubled kid who was suffering the agonies of the damned.
    These were not pretty pictures. All of them unframed, they were stuck to the wall by tacks and Scotch tape that would no doubt damage the wall finish.
    Mel and I studied the pictures in silence for some time, moving from one image to the next as though we were walking through an art gallery specializing in the art of the macabre. Several appeared to be devoted to various complicated implements that could have been instruments of torture used in the Spanish Inquisition. The instruments themselves were carefully rendered in every mechanical detail, but the faces of the suffering victims appeared to be chillingly modern. I suspected that if we examined Josh Deeson’s high school yearbook, some of those faces might be readily identifiable.
    In the pictures there were people being savaged by medieval weapons—swords in some cases, or iron maces. Others were being mowed down in hails of bullets. In each of those, the spray of blood, created one dot at a time with pointillist precision, probably would have done a crime scene blood-spatter expert proud. There were gaping wounds. There was suffering. And for some odd reason, those bloody wounds were all the more chilling for having been artistically and painstakingly crafted in pen and ink.
    Mel broke the long silence with a single word. “Whoa!” she said, reaching up to take down one of the