Read Betrayal of Trust for Free Online Page B

drawings. “No wonder Marsha’s next call was to Ross Connors.”
    I nodded in agreement and then added, “What do you want to bet that it’s been a long time since either the governor or the First Husband have set foot in this room?”
    “Absolutely,” Mel agreed. “If they had, they might have blown the whistle on this budding Columbine kid a long time earlier than just today. First I’ll photograph and number these, then I’ll collect them,” she added. “You look at everything else.”
    Mel carries a tiny digital camera in her purse for just this kind of occasion. She dredged it out of her purse, turned it on, and put it to use photographing all of Josh Deeson’s pictures in situ.
    She had told me to handle everything else. At first glance, there didn’t appear to be a whole lot of “everything else.” There was a small flat-screen TV set on the dresser. When I switched it on, it came up on the Playboy Channel. That was pretty predictable. I switched it back off.
    Lots of boys have mountains of sports stuff scattered around their rooms. Not this one. If Josh Deeson was interested in any wholesome sports, there was nothing here to prove it. A freestanding bookshelf stood next to the desk. It was mostly bare. There were no photos of any kind and no knickknacks, either. The second shelf down held only four books. One was a combination biography and collected works of Sylvia Plath. One was 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