Текст книги "Cold Betrayal"

Автор книги: J. A. Jance

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

16

Back on the maternity floor, things were getting back to normal. The metal shutters on the nursery windows had been raised. The doors were no longer locked. Nurses buzzed around the ward, reassuring both anxious patients and visitors that the crisis had passed. While Sister Anselm, ice pack on hand, hurried off to check on her charges, Ali took a seat in the waiting room and turned to her iPad.

A few moments after putting the words “Colorado City” into her browser, Ali found herself reading about the “Short Creek Raid.” Seeing those words in print, she remembered that was what Evangeline Begay, the Indian woman Ali had talked to earlier on the phone, had called the place—Short Creek.

In the summer of 1953, Howard Pyle, then governor of Arizona, had called out the National Guard and ordered a raid on the polygamous group of fundamentalist Mormons who lived there. In the course of the raid, the entire community had been taken into custody. Of the 400 arrested, 263 were minor children, some of whom were put into foster care and never returned to their biological parents.

The resulting political fallout was disastrous, especially for Governor Pyle. The Short Creek debacle was thought to be, in large measure, responsible for his failure to win his bid for reelection the following year.

With Pyle’s unfortunate history as an example, succeeding governors had simply turned a blind eye on the people who lived in the area and had ignored whatever it was those folks were doing or not doing. Short Creek, now renamed Colorado City, had continued to benefit from this seemingly deliberate lack of governmental oversight.

Once that original group was reconstituted, its members went about formally establishing the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The FLDS church, as it was now called, remained the largest denomination in the area, although a number of groups with similar belief systems had settled nearby as well. Colorado City had again burst on the national scene a few years earlier when one of the FLDS leaders, Warren Jeffs, had been arrested and imprisoned on charges of sexually assaulting underage girls.

And now it’s happening again, Ali thought, because it’s easier for officialdom to ignore the problem than it is for them to fix it.

She remembered that Gordon Tower had said something about an entity he called “The Family” and Edith had mentioned “Outside,” but Ali’s browser located no applicable references. If The Family was a real group of some kind, it was operating under the radar of the people running Wikipedia.

Sister Anselm came down the hallway and beckoned to Ali. “Time for a strategy session,” she said. “Better to do that in private.”

Back in the tiny conference room, Ali noted the still visible handprint on Sister Anselm’s cheek, but the nun’s narrow shoulders were straight and the fire was back in her eye. The confrontation with Gordon Tower had galvanized her out of her earlier lethargy.

“How are they?” Ali asked. Then, remembering Sister Anselm’s vow of silence, she added, “Never mind. Sorry.”

“What’s your take on Edith?” Sister Anselm asked.

“When I first saw her, I thought she was Enid’s mother, but no mother forgets her child’s birth date. And Gordon about had a cow when you asked about Edith’s relationship to Enid.”

“I noticed that, too,” Sister Anselm said. “Colorado City is known for harboring polygamous groups, but admitting it here, in what Edith referred to as the ‘Outside,’ is probably not encouraged.”

“We’re both on the same page on that score,” Ali confirmed. “Edith is an older wife of Gordon Tower, while Enid, formerly known as this Jane Doe, is a younger one?”

“Yes,” Sister Anselm said. “That’s my take, too. What caught my eye was the way Edith wore her hair. Did you notice that crown of braids?”

It was Ali’s turn to nod. “You’re right. That’s the one obvious common denominator for all three of them—Edith, Enid, and the Jane Doe you told me about who was left near the Hualapai Mountains and later died at the Kingman hospital. It’s a distinctive hairstyle, and it suggests that they could all be from the same group. Finding out what we can about Enid’s background may help us untangle the Kingman Jane Doe’s history as well. From there, we might even be able to find her killer.”

“This many years later?” Sister Anselm asked dubiously. “Is that even possible?”

Ali nodded. “Tell me about that case again. When was it exactly?”

“It happened about twelve years ago. The Kingman Jane Doe was found close to death by some passersby who had been hiking in the mountains. She had been stripped naked, savagely beaten, and left to die.”

“That doesn’t sound like an act of random violence.”

“No,” Sister Anselm agreed. “It wasn’t random at all. I went so far as to mention that to one of the detectives at the time—that I wondered if it might possibly be a case of domestic violence. The detective wasn’t having any of it, at least not if the idea came from me. Besides, it made no difference. Since the cops had no idea of who she was or where she came from, the investigation went nowhere. I’m sure they worked the case for a time, but I don’t know how hard or how long.”

“It turns out we have something the cops back then never had—a clue, those three matching hairdos,” Ali said. “We also know, first from my conversation with Evangeline Begay and now from Gordon Tower himself, that Enid came from somewhere in or around Colorado City. I think the Kingman Jane Doe came from there, too. Is there a chance Enid might have known the other victim?”

Sister Anselm shook her head. “I doubt it. If Enid is almost seventeen now, she would have been only four or five at the time Jane Doe disappeared. Most likely she would have been too young to remember anything about it.”

“But maybe she’s heard stories about it,” Ali suggested. “Kids remember stories, and having a girl from the group running away or going missing would have been big news. It would help if we could ask her about it. Are we going to be able to?”

Rather than answering Ali’s question directly, Sister Anselm folded her hands and gazed out the window toward the waiting room. “Patients with traumatic brain injuries and with swelling issues may be kept in medically induced comas for a while. Recovery takes time, and how much they’ll be able to remember is questionable.”

On the surface, Sister Anselm appeared to be speaking about TBI patients in general, although Ali understood the truth of the matter. She was really speaking about one patient in particular—Enid Tower.

“Let’s say then,” Ali suggested, “that your first instinct was correct and Kingman Jane Doe’s death was due to an act of domestic violence—that she died at the hands of a husband or a boyfriend. As you said, since the cops had no idea who she was, they had no idea about where to go looking for suspects.

“I think it’s likely that DNA evidence was collected at the time,” Ali continued. “But just because it was collected doesn’t mean that it was ever processed. Processing DNA was very costly back then. Without family members prodding the cops to keep working the case, there’s a good chance that evidence is still lying, unprocessed, in a sheriff’s department’s evidence locker. And even if they did run it at the time, technology available back then might have yielded inconclusive results. With the advances made in DNA technology in the meantime, samples deemed useless back then can now be used to create full DNA profiles.”

“So?” Sister Anselm asked.

“I’m thinking about this group Gordon Tower called ‘The Family.’ It’s likely to be a small, isolated group—one that wouldn’t be welcoming to people from the ‘Outside.’ So if what happened near Kingman was domestic violence, maybe the offender is someone from that same group—a group with a very small gene pool.”

“Are you saying genetic profiles taken from Enid and her baby might lead us back to the Kingman Jane Doe and to her killer as well?”

“Yes, or even to a near relative of her killer. Knowing that might at least enable us to point the investigators in the right direction.”

“And you propose to get these samples how?” Sister Anselm asked.

“From you, of course,” Ali said.

Sister Anselm’s pale face went a shade paler, making Gordon Tower’s lingering handprint that much more obvious. Ali knew she had stepped over an invisible boundary.

“No,” Sister Anselm said at once, shaking her head. “Absolutely not. I couldn’t possibly condone such a thing. Besides, what would you do with the samples once you had them? Pass them along to the nearest crime lab? Run them through that national criminal DNA database that we’re hearing so much about these days?”

“Not a crime lab,” Ali answered. “I have a friend in the UK who was a huge help in sorting out the long-unsolved homicide of Leland Brooks’s father. The friend’s name is Kate Benchley. She runs an outfit called Banshee Group, a nongovernmental organization that specializes in identifying the remains of victims of various cases of genocide, or as politically correct people like to call it these days, ‘ethnic cleansing.’

“Banshee Group’s brief is to return murdered victims to their families for proper burial. If we were to send Kate sample swabs from Enid and her baby, I have no doubt that her people will provide us with their profiles in private. Once Jane Doe’s case is reopened, assuming there is usable DNA, we’ll have DNA profiles ready and waiting for comparison purposes. We’ll have them available to hand over to any Mohave County investigator who might have need of making a genetic match.”

“All that presupposes you’ll be able to get the cold case reopened,” Sister Anselm objected.

“Yes, it does,” Ali agreed. “I have an idea about how to make that happen. It’s an avenue I intend to pursue regardless of your answer on the DNA question.”

“Taking the samples seems like a gross invasion of my patients’ privacy,” Sister Anselm said.

“Well,” Ali said. “You could bring me that box of Enid’s effects, and I could clip off a tiny piece of the part of her shirt that was soaked in amniotic fluid. That would probably fill the bill.”

Sister Anselm thought about that and then shook her head. “I just can’t see any way to justify doing such a thing, especially without having Enid’s consent. It’s out of the question.”

“Do you remember what you told me this morning, about your being afraid that these two new victims were an answer to your prayers for a solution to the Kingman Jane Doe case? You also mentioned the responsibility you felt that by not pushing to solve that case, you had somehow left these two new victims at risk.”

Sister Anselm nodded.

“What if you’re right?” Ali asked. “What if this whole state of affairs is an answer to that prayer—an exact answer? Just because we’ve made the connection between the two cases doesn’t mean we’re absolved from having to do something about them. We need to carry this thing forward. With what we know so far, we can go to the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office and give them a reason to reopen Jane Doe’s case, but I want to do more than that. I don’t want them to simply reopen it. I want them to solve it.”

“And you believe those samples might be the key?”

“I do. Of course, if Enid dies, this whole discussion is moot,” Ali added. “At that point, her DNA would be collected during the course of an autopsy with or without her consent, and the end result may well turn out to be the same. At that juncture the Kingman Jane Doe’s case may be solved without our help, leaving your conscience entirely clear. But please remember, Kingman’s Jane Doe didn’t consent to having her DNA samples taken, either.”

“No,” Sister Anselm agreed regretfully. “She did not.”

“And what about this?” Ali asked. “If we could go into Enid Tower’s room right now and ask her if she’d be willing to allow you to take DNA samples, what do you think she’d say, especially if she knew samples taken from her and her baby might help solve another case, the murder of another runaway girl very much like her?”

“I suppose she’d say yes,” Sister Anselm conceded.

“I suppose she would, too,” Ali agreed.

Sister Anselm stood up. “I’ll have to think this over,” she said with her hand on the doorknob.

“Pray about it maybe?” Ali asked.

Sister Anselm allowed herself a small fleeting smile. “That, too,” she said. “Now I’d best go check on them.”

Refraining from any additional urging, Ali simply nodded. After all, a possible yes was far better than an absolute no.

“One more thing,” Ali said. “Did you attend Kingman Jane Doe’s funeral?”

“Of course, but as I mentioned, Bishop Gillespie handled final arrangements for both Jane Doe and the baby. I was there as part of the bishop’s delegation, but I doubt my presence was noted one way or the other. Why are you asking?”

“Right now I’m mostly thinking out loud,” Ali told her. “How many interactions did you have with the detectives on the Kingman case?”

“Just the one I already mentioned—when I brought up the possibility of domestic violence. By then, though, the mother was dead and I was caring for the baby. She couldn’t tell them anything.”

“With Kate Benchley’s help, she might be able to now.”

“Yes,” Sister Anselm agreed. “You might be right.”

For a few minutes after the nun left the room, Ali stayed where she was, thinking. If Sister Anselm couldn’t square her conscience with taking the DNA samples, Ali realized she’d need to find some other way to accomplish that goal. In the meantime, she set about tackling the next problem.

By then it was ten o’clock on the East Coast. When she called B., he answered immediately. “Hey,” he said. “I just got back from a dinner meeting and was about to call you. I heard from Stuart that the Betsy Peterson matter is under control. The surveillance system is up and running.”

“Great,” she said. “Now I have another problem for you. It’s a cold case or, rather two of them—the deaths of a young mother and her infant daughter twelve years ago near Kingman. They were both Sister Anselm’s patients.”

Ali spent the next several minutes explaining the specifics to her husband.

“Okay,” B. said when she finished. “What does any of this have to do with us?”

“I want to call Bishop Gillespie and ask for his help,” Ali said. “I’m hoping that, based on his connection to the Kingman Jane Doe and her baby, he’ll be able to convince the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office to reopen those two cases.”

“Because he paid their burial expenses?” B. asked. “Is that enough of a connection?”

“Maybe not,” Ali said. “But there’s something else at work there. We didn’t meet the Mohave County sheriff when we were in that mess back in November, but I remember seeing his name—Sheriff Daniel Alvarado. I just googled him. He’s still in his first term, so he wasn’t sheriff back when all this happened. Based on his name, I’m willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that he’s a good Catholic boy.”

“That sounds like some sort of racial profiling. Or religious profiling at least,” B. said. “Do you want me to call Bishop Gillespie and ask?”

Ali knew that if B. asked, the bishop would agree. Ali had something else in mind.

“No,” she said. “I’ll call him myself, but I do need his number.”

17

When Ali left the conference room, Sister Anselm was standing near the nurses’ station talking to someone. She waved for Ali to join them.

“This is the young man I was telling you about, Ali,” Sister Anselm said. “David Upton. And this is my friend Ali Reynolds.”

“Yes,” David said ruefully, holding out his hand. “I’m the bad guy here, the one who hit the poor girl and sent her to the hospital.”

“From everything I’ve heard, what happened was unavoidable,” Ali said with a reassuring smile. “And obviously it was anything but a hit-and-run. I mean, you’re here now, aren’t you?”

David nodded. “I came by because I remembered something else from last night. I don’t know if it’s important, but when I first got to her, she kept mumbling something about her brother and something about pigs. Like don’t take me to the pigs. When I remembered that today, I wondered if she’d had some kind of run-in with the cops.”

“Did you see anyone else out there?” Ali asked. “Anyone at all?”

“I saw at least one car—a light-colored pickup, I think. It went past when we were there on the road and before the guy from the gas station put up the flares. I wondered why the driver didn’t stop to help, but I was so concerned about her right then that I didn’t really pay attention.”

“If she was talking about the pig situation at the time, it probably is important,” Ali suggested. “You should mention it to the officers who investigated the incident.”

David nodded. “All right,” he said. “I will.” He turned to Sister Anselm. “Thank you for letting me know that they’re both still hanging in. When she wakes up, be sure to tell her I stopped by.”

When Upton turned and walked away, Ali sent a questioning look in Sister Anselm’s direction.

“I know, I know,” Sister Anselm said. “But sometimes, rules are made to be broken. Including this one.” With that, she shoved something into the pocket of Ali’s jacket then hurried off down the hall in the direction of Enid Tower’s room. When Ali checked the pocket, she wasn’t surprised to find two Ziploc bags, each of which contained a single cotton swab. On one bag was a taped label with the words “Jane Doe” written in ink in Sister Anselm’s distinctive handwriting. The other one was tagged with the words “Baby Jane Doe.”

•   •   •

With the samples in her pocket, Ali left for Sedona. The road was bare and clear, but she stayed well under the speed limit on I-17. Minutes later, when the Cayenne’s headlights picked out a herd of elk taking a leisurely stroll across the blacktop, she was glad she’d been taking it slow. She had just passed the elk when her phone rang.

“Hi,” Athena said, “I just got home from a basketball game.” Athena was now the high school’s varsity girls’ basketball coach.

“Who won?” Ali asked.

“We did.”

“You don’t sound very happy about it?”

Athena took a deep breath. “There’s good news and bad news,” she said. “For one thing, when I got home tonight, there was an e-mail waiting for me from Gram, which was a huge surprise. I’ve been trying for months to get her back online. How did you do that? So then, when I called to tell her congratulations, she said something weird—a couple of things, really. She told me I need to go see Stu and have him take a copy of my thumbprint. What’s that all about? And while I’m there, she says Stu is supposed to take 3-D photographs of me, too. Why? What’s going on?”

“It’s probably something to do with the security system we installed for her,” Ali said. “But if the e-mail from your grandmother is the good news, what’s the bad?”

“I just got off the phone with my dad. He says he wanted me to know that he and Mom have scheduled what he called an ‘evaluation appointment’ for Gram on Monday.”

“What kind of evaluation, physical?”

“Mental,” Athena answered bleakly. “Dad told me that with everything that’s going on, he and Mom think it’s time to take that ‘next step,’ as he called it. That if Gram’s turning on stove burners and forgetting about doing it or mixing up her meds, she’s no longer capable of living on her own. What astonished me is that Dad says she agreed to go for the evaluation. Why would she do that? If I were in her shoes, I’d tell the people trying to lock me up to go piss up a rope.”

“I get the feeling that your parents aren’t particularly close to your grandmother,” Ali said. “Is that the case?”

“More my mother’s problem than Dad’s. And Mom is most likely the mover and shaker behind all this. That’s just how she operates. She can be a super-manipulator at times, and my father goes along with whatever she wants because that’s what he does. He doesn’t like to make waves as far as Mom is concerned, even when she treats him like crap. Which she always has, by the way, for as long as I can remember.”

In the last two days, Ali had learned more about what made her daughter-in-law tick than ever before, and she suspected those insights had been offered more because Ali had turned off her asking mode in favor of simply listening.

“Growing up in that kind of family dynamic must have been tough,” Ali offered.

Even over the phone she heard the catch in Athena’s throat. “Yes,” she agreed softly. “It was.”

“Okay,” Ali said. “You asked for High Noon’s help, and you need to let us do just that. Your responsibility in all this is to do exactly what your grandmother asked—get the photographs and thumbprint taken as soon as you can, tomorrow if possible.”

“You don’t think it can wait until the weekend?”

“Sooner is better than later.”

“All right,” Athena agreed. “I’ll see if my assistant can handle practice tomorrow. Maybe I can run up there after school.”

“Do that,” Ali said. “In the meantime, what’s the doctor’s name again—the evaluation doc?”

“Munson,” Athena answered. “Dr. Elmer Munson.”

“Okay,” Ali said. “Let me follow up on this. Don’t worry. Your grandmother has some good people in her corner. She’s not in this on her own, and neither are you.”

By the time Ali turned off I-17, there was a small strip of snow on either side of the pavement, but that was only the remnant of what had been plowed off the night before. The rest of the snow had melted into the desert. After years spent living in Chicago, that was one of the things Ali really appreciated about living in Sedona. It was a place where snow was relatively rare and usually stayed on the ground no more than a day.

Out of freeway traffic, Ali dialed Stu’s number and wasn’t surprised to hear that he was still up and working.

“Tell me about needing Athena’s thumbprint and the photo,” she said. “I’m assuming it’s got something to do with the surveillance system.”

“The photo does,” Stu answered. “If Athena shows up at her grandmother’s house, her image will be one of the ones that doesn’t trigger an alarm. The thumbprint is something else. Mrs. Peterson had all her personal passwords, including her banking passwords, in a notebook in her bedroom. Joe Friday pitched a fit about that. He’s established a secure cloud account for her to use for storing passwords. Betsy wants Athena to be the only other person with access to all her passwords.”

“She’s probably not wrong about that,” Ali said, “especially considering what Athena told me just now. I want you to find out everything there is to know about Athena’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. James Peterson of Bemidji, Minnesota. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that one or the other of them is up to no good.”

“Why?”

“They seem to have launched a concerted effort to have Betsy declared incompetent. She told me yesterday that Athena is the only beneficiary named in her will. That means if she dies, Jim and Sandra Peterson get nothing, but if they can make a competency hearing work in their favor, they may be able to gain control of her funds right now.”

“How deep do you want me to go?” Stu asked.

“Deep,” Ali answered. “And while you’re at it, take a look at someone else—a Dr. Elmer Munson, also of Bemidji.”

“Who’s he?”

“The doctor doing the evaluation,” Ali answered. “Call me a conspiracy nut if you want, but I have a feeling there’s something rotten in Bemidji.”

Minutes after ending the call to Stu, Ali was home. Bella had evidently heard the garage door. She was stationed just inside the kitchen door and scampered around Ali in ecstatic short-legged circles. Straightening up from greeting the dog, Ali spotted a note from Leland on the kitchen counter. She had tried calling him earlier in the afternoon to let him know she’d be coming home late. When he didn’t pick up, she had left a message. His note said: “Couldn’t tell from your voice mail if you’d eaten or not. Just in case, there’s a pasty waiting in the warming drawer.”

That was welcome news. The pasty Ali had eaten at lunchtime was now far too many hours in the past. She took the warm one out of the oven, poured herself a glass of milk, and sat down at the table to eat, sharing only a few morsels of pie crust with the dog.

Half an hour later, after taking Bella out for one last walk, Ali and the dog headed for the bedroom. Ali didn’t bother pretending to pick up Pride and Prejudice. She was beyond Jane Austen’s reach tonight. And she didn’t try to boot Bella off the bed, either.

She went to sleep as soon as she turned out the light, but she didn’t stay asleep. In one dream after another, her friend Irene Bernard was there, surrounded by a group of pregnant girls, all of them wearing crowns of braids on the tops of their heads. In the dreams, Ali was the only one who knew the girls were dead. Reenie had no idea.