Desert Wives (9781615952267) Read online

  Rebecca’s safety now guaranteed, Jimmy returned to his computer. Exhausted after flying in the face of so many child custody laws, I tried to relax by watching a herd of sunburned tourists exit a chartered bus and begin strolling along the neighboring art galleries on Main Street. It was something like watching the buffalo roam, except that tourists moved with less purpose. They drifted, sweating, into one gallery and out the other, emerging with bad paintings of Italian-looking “Indians” and plaster statues of howling coyotes.

  I understood why Scottsdale was considered an Eden in the midst of winter, when as the rest of the country shivered in sub-zero temperatures, we barbequed by the pool. But in summer? Why on earth would someone from cool, shady Minnesota visit Arizona, where asphalt had been known to melt as early as May?

  This conundrum cleared my mind wonderfully, and so I began to relax, my eyes following the tourists until they climbed back onto the bus.

  Jimmy began straightening his desk. “I think I’ll head over to Curtis’s house. Anything you want me to tell Rebecca while I’m there?”

  “Tell her not to worry, that her mother will be out of jail in no time.”

  It wasn’t bad enough that I had lied to Esther. Now I was lying to her child.

  After a little more fussing at his desk, Jimmy was out the door, into his souped-up Camaro, rumbling down Main Street toward the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation, where tribal law ruled and the rest of the world could go hang.

  The afternoon shadows lengthened into darkness, and for a moment, I thought about changing into jogging gear and heading out to Papago Park. But since I had already worked out at the gym that morning honing my karate skills I gave it a pass. Besides, I still felt parched from my three days in Paiute Canyon, where I had learned to my surprise that Utah’s daytime temperatures climbed almost as high as Scottsdale’s.

  Instead, I decided to call Dusty, my boyfriend, and invite him over for the evening. He worked forty miles north on a dude ranch at the backside of Carefree, but now that the Pima Freeway was finished, the drive took less than forty minutes, even with traffic. After a bumpy beginning to our relationship, much of it my fault, we’d recently grown closer.

  I picked up the phone again and punched in the number.

  “Happy Trails.” The voice at the other end of the line belonged to Dusty’s boss, Slim Papadopolus, the owner of the ranch.

  “Hi, handsome. It’s Lena.”

  “Ah, the most beautiful blond in the world.” Before buying the dude ranch, Slim had been a jockey on the top racing circuits and his flattering ways had helped him become as popular with women as with the horses’ owners. None of them seemed to mind that he stood no more than 5’3” in his built-up cowboy boots.

  “What can I do for you, sweetheart? You want to come up here and ride tomorrow? You do, I’ll get Lady saddled first thing in the morning. Unless you want to try that new Appaloosa we just got in. I figure you can handle him.”

  The prospect appealed, but I declined. “I’d love to, but I’m in the middle of a case and can’t spare the time. I was just calling to see if Dusty was through for the day and wanted to be treated to a home-cooked meal.”

  Slim usually laughed when I said something like this, because my inability to cook was legendary. This time, though, he just said, “Dusty, he’s, ah, he’s not here.”

  That was odd. Dusty seldom went anywhere. Other than the times he took tourists out on a trail drive, his excursions to the nearby country-western bars or down to Scottsdale to see me tended to be the sum total of his worldly travels.

  I wasn’t Dusty’s baby-sitter. He’d probably taken that old truck of his out for a tune-up. “When he gets back, tell him I called.”

  “Will do.” Slim sounded relieved.

  I hung up the phone and prepared for my nightly ordeal. Hating myself for my weakness, I reached down into my carry-all and took out my .38 revolver. I turned off the office lights, leaving only the neon sign outside to glimmer “Desert Investigations” to an empty street. Since it was not an Art Walk night, the one evening during the week when the art galleries stayed open until nine o’clock, all the businesses had already closed. I was alone.

  But, hey, I’d been alone almost all of my life, so what was the big deal?

  Plenty, a mean little voice inside me hissed. Plenty.

  I locked the office and, revolver pointed before me, started up the narrow staircase at the side of the building to my apartment. Even though I had taken every security precaution possible, every time I entered my apartment all my childhood fears returned. Not too surprising since at the age of nine, I’d inadvertently locked myself in my own bedroom with my foster father, who then celebrated the occasion by raping me. The near-misses I’d endured during my last murder case hadn’t helped my nerves, either.

  The metal door with which I had replaced the wooden one looked solid enough to withstand an elephant stampede, but I examined the locks and the hinges carefully. As on other nights, my paranoia remained unfounded. I saw no gouges around the door’s frame; the locks and hinges remained intact. Still, I pressed my ear against the door and listened. Silence.

  Taking a deep breath, I unlocked the upper and lower deadbolts, shoved the door open with my foot, and entered the apartment gun-first, leaving the door ajar behind me in case I needed a fast exit.

  As usual, I had left the lights on before coming downstairs to work that morning, but I still checked every corner for telltale shadows. My mainly beige living room, the only spot of color being the huge George Haozous painting, proved free of lurking assassins. So did the hall closet, kitchen and bath.

  But the bedroom had always scared me the most, and as I approached it down the short hallway, my breath hitched as if I had run a four-minute mile. With a kick, I slammed the door back, hoping to injure anyone who might be lurking behind it. No one was. Then I walked over to the bed, jerked the spread away and knelt down, revolver thrust forward. All that greeted me there were a few harmless dust bunnies.

  But now came the worst part: the long, dark closet. My foster father had hidden in a closet.

  Gun still before me, I rolled back the sliding door and jumped away, ready to blast anything that moved.

  Nothing did.

  I sighed in relief, and after double-checking to make sure no one had crept into the apartment behind me, I returned to the front door and double-locked it.

  Now I was safe, or at least as safe as my .38 and my fortress of an apartment could keep me. I wandered over to the stereo, inserted a John Lee Hooker CD, then went back to the kitchen. As John Lee sang about empty beds and lonely nights, I put my gun down within easy reach on the kitchen counter, took a Michelina’s Lasagna with Marinara Sauce out of the freezer and nuked it. I ate my dinner standing up, my back to the sink all the while, keeping a steady eye on the front door.

  A girl can never be too careful.

  Later that night I lay awake until the wee hours, watching the light show on my ceiling made by the headlights of passing cars. I knew that as long as I could see them I was safe. But at some point I drifted away, lulled by the noise of tires on pavement and the sweet whisper of the air conditioner.

  I awoke to find myself on a bus filled with singing people. A woman who looked like me held me in her lap, her fingers tightened into claws. Something cold pressed against my forehead.

  “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her!” the woman screamed, pressing the gun closer to my head. “You just see, I’m going to kill her right now!”

  A sound of thunder, a gunshot. Pain.

  Then I was thrown away into the night, only to awaken in my Scottsdale apartment.

  I sat up and kicked the sweat-dampened sheets away.

  “Damn you, Mother,” I whispered.

  Chapter 4

  “We’ll fight extradition as long as we can, but in the end, Ms. Corbett will have to return to Utah to face murder charges,” Ray Winfield warned, as we spo
ke over the phone the next morning. “We can get a Utah attorney as an assist once she gets up there.”

  “How long can you stall for?” I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Jimmy paid close attention to my side of the conversation.

  A pause. Then some throat-clearing. “A couple of weeks if we’re lucky. You know, Ms. Jones, the Utah officials appear pretty confident about their case, which gives me some concern. Just how much do you know about Ms. Corbett’s movements that night?”

  Damned little, I realized. I thought back to that night at the motel and Esther’s oddly prescient question, “Solomon was shot?” True, this was the twenty-first century and many unanticipated deaths arrived by gunshot, but still, there had been absolutely no surprise in Esther’s eyes at the news of Prophet Solomon’s death. Even Rebecca, in all her panic, noticed it. How could a woman so transparent ever hope to outwit the Utah court system?

  “Ms. Jones? Ms. Jones?” The attorney’s words startled me out of my reverie.

  “Lena.” I picked up a pencil and began drawing a hangman’s noose on a scratch pad.

  “What’s that?”

  “Call me Lena, Ray. I’m not into formality.”

  “I asked how much you know about Ms. Corbett’s movements that night. You’re certain to be subpoenaed when this case goes to trial, and it’s better to tell me now so there won’t be any ugly surprises later.”

  I gave him my rehearsed answer. “As far as I’m concerned, there won’t be any ugly surprises. Esther was waiting for us when we got back to the motel.”

  “This is just a supposition, but is there any way she could have been at Purity that night and made it back to the motel before you did?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Instead, I drew a man’s head in the noose.

  “Let me rephrase that, Ms. Jo…uh, Lena. How well do you know the area up there?”

  “This is privileged information, right? Nothing I tell you can be used in court?”

  “Right.”

  In order to forestall one of those ugly surprises he had cautioned against, I told him what I knew. “There are several paths leading out of Purity and into the desert, but there’s really only one way to hook up with the road. To smuggle Rebecca out without anybody seeing us, I chose the path into Paiute Canyon. It’s not only the shortest, but it provides the best cover, too. Juniper, mesquite, and brush all over the place. Hell, you could hide a giraffe in there. Anyway, we headed south down the canyon until it hooked northwest, and that’s where we just about fell over the body.”

  He phrased his next question carefully. “When you all drove up there, Ms. Corbett took her own car, right?”

  “A bright green Geo with Arizona plates.” I began shading the male figure’s head, trying hard for a resemblance to Prophet Solomon.

  “Are there any other roads leading to the compound, especially any paved roads?” he asked.

  “Naw. Just the dirt road.” Satisfied with my drawing’s resemblance to the prophet, I added a bullet hole between his eyes, then sketched in a shadow box frame.

  “So if Ms. Corbett drove along that road she would pass you at some point, right?”

  As much as I wanted to answer in the affirmative, I couldn’t. “Not necessarily. You forget that all those nights Jimmy was waiting for me, he’d pulled the truck several yards off the side of the road and hid it in a stand of piñon pine. He told me he heard several cars and trucks going to and coming from Purity that night, but he was more concerned with staying hidden than he was with car-spotting. Technically speaking, if Esther left the motel just after Jimmy, she could have driven all the way to the compound without him seeing her, done the deed, and beat us back. The timing would be tight, but with a little luck she could have managed it.”

  “It was night. And way out in the badlands.” Winfield’s voice sounded distant, like he was deep in thought. “To avoid being seen, all she had to do was turn off her lights.”

  I wiggled the pencil between my fingers and explained. “Cars driving along dirt make a lot of noise, which is why Jimmy was able to hear all the traffic. But here’s my thinking. If Esther had driven within a quarter mile of Purity that night and yet not gone in, someone would certainly have heard her and gone out to investigate. Also, where the dirt road ends at the blacktop? There’s an all-night gas station/café combo sitting right there on the northwest side of the intersection. Lots of traffic and lots of nosey people. They probably pay pretty close attention to any strange car they see going out to the Purity compound, and a green Geo is a pretty strange vehicle for that area because almost everyone else drives pickups. If nobody’s come forward yet to say they saw the Geo, we’re probably all right.”

  When he spoke next, he still sounded worried. “We’ll find out during the discovery process, won’t we?”

  “I guess.” I thought we’d finished the conversation, but then Winfield dropped a bomb.

  “Ah, Lena, I have some other news you need to know about. Abel Corbett, Rebecca’s father, arrived in Scottsdale this morning, custody papers in hand from Utah Family Court.”

  The pencil in my hand broke in half.

  “Mr. Corbett insists on taking his daughter back to Utah with him until this situation is cleared up,” Winfield continued. “We have to comply.”

  “Does he have another dirty old man he wants to sell Rebecca to?”

  “No crime has been committed yet. Rebecca has to be proven to be in danger before we can successfully challenge the Utah custody order now that her mother’s in jail.”

  I tossed the pencil’s remains into the wastebasket. “What does that mean? Do we have to wait until Rebecca’s in some old fart’s bed and then go to court? Where’s the sense in that? You know as well as I do that the Utah court system won’t remove a little girl from a polygamy compound. It’s been tried before by worried relatives and they’ve failed every time. The court always rules that the parents, whatever freaks they may be, have custody over the child until she turns sixteen. And by then, it’s too late.”

  “Lena, the law is the law, and as an officer of the court, I have to comply with it. In Utah, parents are God until proven unfit, and that’s pretty tough to do unless they’re serial killers.”

  “Well, I’m not an officer of the court, and as far as I’m concerned, you can put the law where the sun don’t shine.”

  “Nice sentiment, coming from a former police officer.”

  I brought myself back under control. There was no point in alienating him. “Sorry about that, Ray. For now, just tell Abel Corbett that his daughter’s in a safe place, a place arranged by her mother. And remind him that according to Arizona law, her mother is still the custodial parent, jailed or not. Those legal tricks he pulled in Utah are just so much bullshit.”

  “Child Protective Services might not see it that way.”

  My laugh was ugly. “Oh, yeah, Child Protective Services. Sometime when we have a couple of hours or, even better, a couple of days, remind me to tell you about my own experiences with CPS.” The seedy foster homes I’d endured reared up in my memory. “I wouldn’t turn a snake over to CPS.”

  “While I’m certain there have been abuses…”

  “The answer is no, a flat-out no. Rebecca stays where she’s put until her mother either changes her mind or gets out of jail. If you do your job properly, that’ll be sooner rather than later.”

  Although unhappy, Winfield let it go. Uttering dire warnings about custodial interference and the Uniform Child Custody Agreement, he hung up.

  I replaced the receiver and stared at my hand. It was shaking.

  “I didn’t like the sound of that conversation,” Jimmy said from across the room. I’d forgotten he was there.

  “Neither did I. What do you think the chances are that Utah has a witness who saw Esther near Purity? It’s too bad one of us wasn’t able to stay with her at the motel.”

  “Yeah, it is. But I couldn’t be two places at on
ce, could I?”

  He’d had to wait for me near the compound every night, until I finally showed up with Rebecca. I’d thought I could trust Esther to do what she’d promised when I allowed her to tag along with us to Utah. Still, moping over my own culpability in Esther’s current situation accomplished nothing. The woman stood accused of murder, a murder I was pretty certain she hadn’t committed. If Esther had wanted to kill Solomon Royal, she’d have gone into the compound in daylight, gun blazing, shouting to God and all his angels that the Prophet was getting what was coming to him. There would have been none of this sneaking along dirt roads at night, leaving her beloved daughter to discover a very messy dead body.

  Which reminded me. “Jimmy, have you seen Rebecca yet today?”

  He smiled. “I stopped by on my way in. Curtis is teaching her ‘The Corn Song.’”

  I smiled back. Jimmy had taught me the old Pima harvest chant when we had first started working together. Those words from another time had never ceased to calm me. Maybe I needed that now: a good run, a few bars from “The Corn Song.” Esther’s and Rebecca’s woes had knocked me off my usual schedule, and now my nerves were paying the price. My workouts at the gym made a pretty poor substitute. Besides, my sore hand complained that it didn’t care much for karate.

  I looked up at the clock and discovered to my surprise that it was still early afternoon.

  Jimmy broke into my thoughts. “Lena, we’ve got to help Rebecca. That little girl…”

  “I know, Jimmy. I know.”

  With a grunt, he turned back to his computer and tapped away on the keys, escaping into one of his cases. I tried the same, but it didn’t work. All I could think about was Rebecca and what awaited her if she returned to Utah. With her mother in jail, getting her out of Purity again and keeping her out would be impossible. Because of religion.

  Yet after my last case I could no longer call myself a blatant atheist. Too many odd things had happened as I lay near death on the desert, not all of them attributable to hallucinations.