Dirty Game. Jessie Keane

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      “Mr. Connors would like to see you both,” she said. “He’s in a meeting right now and has another one early this evening. He was wondering if you’d mind stopping by his house later this evening, sometime around eight.”

      “We’ll be there,” I said. “Meantime, we need the physical address for Todd Hatcher. I know where he used to live, but I understand he’s moved.”

      Katie gave me the necessary information, a rural address outside Oakville, half an hour away. I relayed the message and the information to Mel. While she set off in what constitutes rush-hour traffic in Olympia to get us there, I sat back to enjoy the ride. When Mel is making like a Formula One driver behind the wheel, I often find it helpful to think about other things. In this case, I thought about Todd Hatcher.

      Call me a hopeless romantic. I love happy endings, or, rather, happy beginnings.

      Todd Hatcher is a very smart guy with a Ph.D. in economics, a couple of books to his credit, and a natural flair for computers. In the olden days, he might have been a prospector out wandering in the wilderness during the California gold rush. These days he’s a geek who specializes in data mining. As I understand it, that’s what his latest book is all about—data mining for fun and profit.

      But Todd is a most unlikely-looking geek, not at all the buttoned-down type. He wears cowboy boots and cowboy hats—not the rhinestone-cowboy variety, but the scuzzy down-at-the-heels boots that have seen years of wear in all kinds of terrain and all kinds of weather. He’s tall, skinny, and bowlegged from too many hours in the saddle. That’s how he supported himself through college—working as a ranch hand in southeastern Arizona.

      When I first met Todd several years ago, it took some time for me to realize that Ross Connors had stumbled on a diamond in the rough. Back then, Todd was barely making ends meet. He lived in a studio apartment, got where he needed to go by using a bus pass, and existed on a diet that consisted mostly of Top Ramen noodles. He was a kid from a small town in the desert stranded in the big-city wet of western Washington where it really does rain, even though tourists who come through the state in the summer are convinced that it never does.

      The work Todd did and still does for Ross Connors helped put him on a more stable financial footing. Getting his doctorate and having his first book published didn’t hurt. Both of those professional accomplishments led to his doing consulting work for other states. Within a matter of months his life had turned around: he was still living in western Washington and it was still raining, but instead of using a bus pass to get around, he was driving a new dual-cab Ford pickup truck. To ward off a bad case of homesickness he started following the local rodeo circuit, sometimes participating, sometimes as a spectator.

      That was what had taken him to the Kitsap County Fairgrounds out on the Kitsap Peninsula the previous summer. Each year during the Kitsap County Fair and Rodeo, one of the rodeo’s evening performances benefits the breast cancer foundation Susan G. Komen for the Cure. At that performance, everyone is supposed to wear pink, and a local organization donates money to the foundation for everyone who wears pink and wins one of that night’s events.

      As Todd told me shortly afterward, “It takes balls for a cowboy to wear pink.”

      On the evening in question, he had screwed his courage to the sticking place, dressed himself in a brand-new pink Western shirt, and showed up. Sometimes the fates are with you and that’s all you have to do—just show up. Sometime during the rodeo he was introduced to Julie Dodge, who was the winner of the evening’s barrel-racing contest and who was also wearing pink.

      As a fund-raiser at the rodeo, people are able to show their support by purchasing pink balloons that are released all at once in a moving ceremony at the end of the evening’s performance. When it came time to let go of his balloon, Todd Hatcher found himself standing next to Julie Dodge, and the rest is history.

      It turned out to be a match made in heaven. Julie had inherited her father’s horse farm, where her divorced father had raised her along with plenty of prizewinning quarter horses. She had grown up helping him run the farm. After his death, she ran it solo, hiring help only as needed. It was also after her father’s death that she managed to reconnect with her mother. Julie’s mom had bailed when she discovered she wasn’t cut out for ranch life or motherhood. She died of breast cancer only a few months after being reconciled with her daughter.

      I think standing there side by side, holding those stupid pink balloons, caught Todd and Julie with their customary defenses down. Todd had been through a lot with his own parents’ stormy relationship. He and Julie let go of their pink balloons, went to the nearest Denny’s, and spent the rest of the night, well into the wee hours, talking. They got married a few short weeks later—saying their vows before a justice of the peace in Gray’s Harbor County with the two of them dressed in boots, jeans, and matching pink cowboy shirts. At the ceremony, Ross Connors stood up for Todd. Julie’s best friend from high school stood up for her. Mel and I were invited along to serve as witnesses.

      So now Ross’s consultant-in-chief lives on his wife’s horse farm out in the boonies, where he has a top-of-the-line Internet connection and plenty of real manure to shovel whenever he gets tired of shoveling the politically motivated, man-made, virtual variety. From the looks of it, he and Julie are partners in every sense of the word.

      It was five-thirty in the afternoon when we pulled up in front of a picturesque farmhouse set back several hundred feet from the banks of the Black River. The house, boasting a relatively recent coat of white paint, looked as though it had been plucked off a farm in Iowa or else from a movie set and dropped unscathed in the wilds of western Washington. The barn, gleaming with an equally new coat of bright red paint, could have come from the same source.

      Todd emerged through the screen door on the front porch and then bounded down the steps to meet us. He was in his favorite duds—worn jeans, worn boots, worn shirt. He waved and greeted us with a lopsided welcoming grin.

      “Come on in,” he said, grabbing Mel’s hand and half dragging her out of the driver’s seat of the Cayman. “Julie’s inside making supper. She’s dying to see you.”

      Supper, I noted, not dinner.

      “It’s a pork roast, homemade applesauce, and early corn fresh from the garden, picked just this afternoon. We’ve got plenty. She said to tell you she’s already put extra plates on the table and you are not allowed to say no.”

      I got the feeling from being around Julie Hatcher that she didn’t believe in anyone telling her no, which probably also explained why she and Todd were married. Besides, my single half of one of Governor Longmire’s tuna sandwiches was long gone. I have to admit that the idea of eating a real home-cooked meal had a lot of appeal.

      “Sounds good to me,” I said.

      “What have you got?” he asked.

      Mel stepped out of the car, opened the door, and showed him the evidence box with the computer in it. “Here it is,” she said. “Help yourself.”

      He picked up the box, hefted it, rattling, onto his shoulder, and led the way into the house.

      I have been in farmhouses occasionally in my life, and some of those occasions have been during summer months—hot summer months. So make that miserably hot farmhouses. As I walked across the front porch, I was happy to note that on a concrete pad beside the porch sat a huge Trane AC unit quietly humming away. Julie and Todd’s house was not going to be miserable. In fact, once we got inside, compared to the summer heat outside, it was practically chilly.

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