Betrayal of Trust Read Online Free PDF Page A

occasionally, I haven’t seen her since, either.”
    â€œSo you didn’t like date or anything?” Mel asked.
    â€œNo,” I said gruffly. “Not at all!”
    Some people recall their high school experiences through an idyllic haze that makes them seem like heaven itself. Not me. Grade school and high school were hell. My mother certainly wasn’t the only single mother in the world back then. In the aftermath of World War II, there were plenty of war widows raising kids alone. The problem was, my mother wasn’t a widow since she and my father never married in the first place. He was a sailor stationed at Bremerton. They had just gotten engaged when he died in a motorcycle accident on his way back to the base. My mother was pregnant. Her parents were horrified. Her father kicked her out and wouldn’t have anything to do with us.
    I never knew my father’s real name. My mother told me that my last name came from my father’s hometown, Beaumont, Texas. I have no idea if she ever made any attempt to contact my father’s people. Maybe she did, and maybe given the time and the circumstances, they didn’t want to have anything to do with us, either.
    I had told Mel that story, and she had asked me why, after my mother’s death, I had made no effort to contact them on my own. Mutual disinterest, I suppose. Besides, I couldn’t shake the feeling that any attempt on my part to contact them would have been disloyal to my mother’s memory. She had fed us and sheltered us with money she earned working as a seamstress. But her sewing was also part of what made my childhood and adolescence difficult. She made most of my shirts, and that embarrassed the hell out of me. I wanted to look like the other kids—the cool kids—the ones with shirts from JCPenney’s or Sears or even Frederick & Nelson.
    Whenever I think about my mother, I can’t help but be ashamed by how I felt back then. And that’s the other reason I’ve never gone looking for my father’s relatives. My father wasn’t there for me. My father’s family wasn’t there for me, either. My mother was. I figure I owe her that much loyalty and respect.
    I didn’t give Mel the benefit of any of that background information, at least not right then.
    I said, “When we were in high school, as far as Marsha and her pals were concerned, I was a joke—a laughingstock.”
    â€œSo why did she ask for you now?”
    â€œNo idea,” I said. “None. In fact, if you get a chance, why don’t you ask her?”
    While we spoke, Mel had booted up her computer. She sent a copy of the video clip to her iPhone and a second copy of the file to her laptop.
    â€œReady to watch it again?” she asked.
    â€œYes,” I said. “We’d better.”
    It’s one thing to go to a crime scene after the fact. You view the body. You examine the surroundings. You look for clues. Although this wasn’t the first snuff film I had ever seen, this was certainly the youngest victim.
    I’m not sure who first coined the expression “choking game” to apply to this monstrosity. Probably the same kind of language experts who invented the words “suicide by cop.” Right. That cleans it up. Makes what happens a little more presentable. But, as I said before, this was no game—a game would have ended before the girl was dead. This was straight-up strangulation and cold-blooded murder. The fact that the victim seemed to be a willing participant to begin with made it that much worse. And the fact that the killers had come prepared to film the event made it despicable.
    But Mel and I needed to watch it, and we did so, several times, before leaving for the governor’s mansion forty-five minutes later. We watched the girl’s tentative last smile. We watched for anything about her clothing that might be distinctive. She seemed to be wearing a red