Текст книги "Cold Betrayal"

Автор книги: J. A. Jance

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

20

The elevator door had barely closed behind Sister Anselm when Ali’s phone rang.

“Hi, Cami,” she said. “What have you got for me?”

“Angus Lowell,” Cami answered. “I found information about him on the Internet under The Lowell Family rather than The Family. Somewhere along the way they dropped the Lowell part.”

“Who’s Angus?” Ali asked.

“He was the great-grandson of a Scottish industrialist named Angus McCutcheon who made his fortune as an arms dealer. He was one of those money-grubbing guys who had no scruples about selling his wares to both sides in any given conflict. When his underhanded dealings started coming to light, he took himself and his fortune out of the UK, settling first in Morocco and later in the Cayman Islands. That’s where the Lowell Family Trust is located, by the way, the Caymans.

“About the time he ended up there,” Cami continued, “Angus’s great-grandson and namesake, Angus Lowell, was living in the United States. He had flunked out of Stanford and gotten hooked up with some druggie fellow dropouts. After doing his share of LSD, he ended up living in a hippie commune somewhere in the wilds of Northern California. At that point, Angus the elder staged an early version of an intervention and carted the kid off to the Caymans, where he underwent a course of treatment of some kind, had a religious conversion, and became an outspoken back-to-the-earth kind of guy. When the old man died a few years later, he left his fortune to his great-grandson, bypassing both his daughter and granddaughter in the process.”

“The old man was a bit of a chauvinist, maybe?” Ali asked.

Cami laughed. “Do you think?”

“Where did you find all this stuff?”

“Newspaper archives mostly. Angus returned to the U.S. in 1966, purchased the land near Colorado City, and established a church he called The Lowell Family. Then he went to California, where he rounded up a collection of like-minded individuals, probably old pals from his commune days, and brought them to northern Arizona with him. At that point they all seem to have disappeared from public view.”

“Is Angus still in charge?” Ali asked.

“Probably not. The guy who signs the checks and whose name is on the motor vehicle registrations for their fleet of cars, trucks, and SUVs is someone named Richard Lowell.”

“One of Angus McCutcheon’s progeny?”

“That’s my guess.”

“What happened to Angus the younger?”

“No idea. Since someone else has taken over the helm, I have to assume that Angus is no longer with us, but that’s another interesting thing about the group. If they keep any kind of birth and death records, they don’t bother passing that information along to Mohave County.”

“How many families are we talking about?”

“Twenty-nine all told—at least that’s how many we’ve been able to find with addresses on the existing named streets. There may be others, like the Wendell Johnson family, where with two generations, one lives in town and the other doesn’t.”

“Where are we now?” Ali asked.

“Once I finished creating my driver’s license/voter registration list, I handed it over to Stuart,” Cami said. “So far he’s only checked on a couple of the names, but the results are interesting. Apparently, each family receives a small allowance from the church that goes to the head of the household. Members dutifully file an income-tax report on that, but none of them makes enough money to trigger any tax liabilities or to attract the attention of the IRS.”

“Income-tax fraud?” Ali asked.

“Maybe, but it’s doubtful,” Cami said. “Without birth certificates or Social Security numbers, they wouldn’t be able to claim any dependents. As for the houses? They evidently belong to the group rather than to the people who live in them. The property taxes are paid for by the church. Ditto for the fleet of vehicles. They belong to the church, too.”

“So we’re not dealing with some kind of Amish mentality where electricity and combustion engines are off-limits?”

“Definitely not.”

“What kind of stipends are we talking about?”

“Stu’s only checked on a few of the names so far. Two of those were for ten thousand and the other one for twenty.”

Ali did some math in her head. “With thirty families on the rolls that still amounts to a considerable outlay. Where does the money come from?”

“That’s not clear. They evidently raise cattle and hogs. They consume some and sell the rest. They also do a certain amount of subsistence farming.”

“You can’t raise enough livestock on three thousand acres to bring in that much money a year,” Ali said.

A call came in for Cami. She signed off. Ali sat with the still warm phone in her hand, thinking about the money question. Both times she had seen Gordon Tower, he had been dressed in relatively ordinary store-bought clothing—jeans, boots, a western-style shirt, a Stetson. None of it had struck her as particularly expensive. Still, what he wore was a big step up from the threadbare homemade goods Edith was wearing and from the flimsy clothing and worn-out shoes Ali had seen in the box containing Enid’s personal effects. So maybe a small family stipend stretched a lot further if you were buying clothing for only one person while everyone else made do with ragged homemade castoffs.

Closing her eyes, Ali tried to put together the chronology. If Angus Lowell had bought the property in the mid-1960s, that was nearly fifty years ago, but only a dozen or so years after the Short Creek debacle. At the time, the lesson of what had happened to Governor Pyle would have been relatively fresh in everyone’s mind. Wanting to avoid suffering a similar fate, the politicians who had come after Pyle had maintained an unofficial but strictly observed hands-off policy—creating a live-and-let-live atmosphere in that corner of the state. Had their wink-and-nod stance allowed members of The Family to do whatever the hell they liked, up to and including, perhaps, getting away with murder?

Ali thought about that fifty-year interval. If young women in The Family started bearing children at age fifteen or so, that time period allowed for at least three generations of young women to have come of age—women who had been and still were being denied their basic constitutional, civil, and human rights. They weren’t allowed to vote, or drive, or wear store-bought clothes. The problem was they weren’t in some village in the distant mountains of Afghanistan. They were right here, living on three thousand acres, smack in the middle of the good old U.S. of A.

So where did The Family’s money come from? That was the crux of the matter. Three thousand acres wasn’t a large enough spread to feed and support a group of twenty-five to thirty families. Not nearly. And no matter how much money old man Angus McCutcheon had set aside, the trust couldn’t last forever without being replenished. The money for all those stipends was coming from somewhere, but where?

That’s when it hit her, taking Ali’s thoughts straight back to her training days at the Arizona Police Academy. The basic philosophy of community policing dictated that by paying attention to the small things—to graffiti on walls, property thefts, turned-over trash cans, littering, juvenile drinking—police could prevent those kinds of antisocial behaviors from morphing into something more serious—into the big-time crimes of armed robberies, assaults, and homicides.

Was that what was going on here? The authorities had neglected to enforce the little things—like birth and death certificates, for example. By doing so, had those same authorities allowed some other kind of major criminal enterprise to grow and flourish unnoticed in their midst? Two young women had run away from The Family twelve years apart—one now dead and one barely alive. Ali understood that Sister Anselm was right to be concerned for Enid’s safety. What if Enid had a chance to tell what she knew? Maybe the end result would be enough to expose to all the world whatever no-good The Family was up to.

Taking a deep breath, Ali picked up her phone and dialed Cami back. “When you were matching all those road names to people, were there any places where you came up empty—where there was no match between the name of the road and the name of the family?”

“How did you know that?” Cami said. “I did, but only once. There’s one road called Fields that shows no sign of any residence. There are some buildings that look like big sheds of some kind, but they’re clearly not houses. The other residences are all built the same way, with a kind of cookie-cutter design plan and layout. It’s like a company tract housing where all the houses are just alike, including all the various outbuildings and what appear to be large garden plots.”

“Is the satellite map you’re using right now the most detailed one available?” Ali asked.

“Probably not,” Cami admitted. “It’s the first one I found.”

“If you can find one that’s better, please send me the link.”

“Will do, Ms. Reynolds,” Cami said cheerfully. “I’m on it. Oh, and I just sent you what was available on Sheriff Alvarado. It’s not much, but it’s what I could find on short notice.”

21

As soon as Ali’s e-mail alert sounded, she brought out her iPad. The first item from Cami was a brief bio of Sheriff Alvarado, probably lifted from an election pamphlet. It said that he’d been born in California. As a toddler, he had moved back to Kingman with his stepfather and had lived there ever since. He was married and had two teenaged children, a boy and a girl, both attending Kingman area public schools. His list of memberships included a local golf club, Rotary, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the Cessna 150-152 Fly In Foundation.

After scanning that message, Ali turned to the second, one with a link to the satellite photo. Once it opened, Ali took some time to orient her view of the image. Cami had helpfully placed a flag on a spot southeast of Colorado City where Sanctuary Road intersected with the highway.

Zooming in on that part of the map, Ali saw the network of roads leading off that one. The legend next to the map indicated that these were mostly primitive roads—graded dirt tracks that would probably be washboarded and potholed this time of year. Angus Road, leading off Sanctuary, appeared to be the only one of the bunch that might be paved. Ali followed the stretch of road to the compound Cami had told her was occupied by Richard Lowell. Comparing it to the home next door made it clear that, by virtue of square footage alone, Richard Lowell was most likely the group’s current leader. The satellite view didn’t allow for sorting out the exact purpose of nearby buildings, but Ali found it easy to go along with Cami’s assessment that the several larger ones were probably gathering places of one kind or another.

Based on the network of surrounding roads, Ali realized that the larger compound, the one on Angus Road, was central to all the others. That made it the logical spot to locate a church or school. But did the children from The Family actually go to school?

It took time to locate the track called Fields Road. It was near the top end of the property line. Beyond that was a wide swath of public land with the initials BLM (Bureau of Land Management) emblazoned on it.

This was the dead of winter. If there were actual fields at the end of Fields Road, they weren’t readily visible. What was visible were eight long rectangular buildings, lined up one after another. Hauling out her reading glasses, Ali determined that they were most likely greenhouses—the kinds of plastic-covered structures someone might use for raising starter tomatoes or other vegetables that could be moved outside once the weather warmed up.

The greenhouses were closest to the property line. There were several other unidentifiable smaller structures as well as a much larger one that appeared to have a small loading dock on one side. That would indicate a warehouse of some kind. So maybe this was how The Family stretched their food budget—by growing vegetables even during the winter months. Next to that was a large rectangular building with a long straight stretch of pavement leading away from it. It wasn’t hard to determine that had to be a landing strip of some kind and a long one at that. So perhaps the largest of the unidentified buildings was an airplane hangar.

“You certainly look engrossed,” Sister Anselm observed, arriving silently at Ali’s side. “Anything interesting?”

The nun looked somewhat refreshed after her short break, but she hadn’t stayed away long enough to take a nap.

“This is where Enid is from,” Ali said, shrinking the image a little, passing the iPad to the nun, and then pointing to the property owned by The Family. “Gordon Tower’s place is the one there in the lower left-hand corner of that network of roads. His is the only house on Tower Road.”

Sister Anselm studied the map and then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “What about it?”

“Cami estimates that there are between twenty-five and thirty houses just like Gordon’s on a three-thousand-acre property belonging to a group that calls itself ‘The Family.’ The road name in question generally coincides with the name of at least one of the families living on it.”

“Twenty-five to thirty or so families as well?”

“Yes,” Ali answered, “but here’s something interesting. Cami has learned that each of the households has two licensed drivers. In Gordon Tower’s case, he’s one driver and Edith is the other. But each household has only one registered voter.”

“I assume that, in the Towers’ case, the registered voter would be Gordon?” Sister Anselm asked.

Ali nodded. “That’s right.”

“What is this,” Sister Anselm demanded, “a stateside version of the Taliban?”

It was gratifying to Ali that Sister Anselm had come to the same conclusion she had. “That’s how it looks to me,” Ali replied. “According to Cami, each of these families receives some kind of stipend from the church. So my question is, where does the money come from? Is it possible there’s some kind of criminal activity going on that keeps them afloat financially?”

Sister Anselm thought for a moment before nodding. “That could be it, and they’re desperately afraid Enid might spill the beans. Think about it; by simply walking away, she caused enough concern that they sent out at least one searcher and maybe more to bring her back. And that was before she had us for allies.”

“In other words,” Ali said, “now that Enid has us, she may be even more at risk than when she was out on that road alone in the middle of the night.”

“And that makes her our responsibility,” Sister Anselm declared. “The only way they’re going to get her back is over my dead body. Now, according to my monitor, Baby Ann is crying. I need to go tend to her.”

Once Sister Anselm was gone, Ali resumed studying her iPad. If The Family was engaged in something illegal and doing their best to keep it away from outside scrutiny, it stood to reason that they’d be conducting that business, whatever it was, at a spot as far away from prying eyes as possible. That meant the structures closest to the BLM wasteland might be a good place to start looking, especially since that’s where the airstrip was located. Time passed while Ali stared at the screen, searching for answers to the puzzle, but the static satellite image told her nothing.

“Ms. Reynolds?”

Ali looked up and was surprised to find David Upton standing there.

“Any word on how she’s doing?” he asked.

Unwilling to give out unauthorized information, Ali shook her head. “Not so far,” she said.

She glanced into the nursery where Sister Anselm was just returning Baby Ann to her bassinet.

“Sister Anselm will be out in a minute. Why don’t we ask her?”

The nun emerged from the nursery, caught sight of David, and greeted him with a handshake and a warm smile. “You’ll be relieved to know that the little one is doing very well, Mr. Upton. And Enid—that’s her name by the way, Enid Tower—is improving. She hasn’t fully come around yet, and she’s sleeping right now, but she’s had a few periods of wakefulness. Would you care to sit with her for a while? You’re welcome to do so if you’d like.”

Ali was stunned. Whatever happened to HIPAA? she wondered. David Upton, too, seemed shocked.

“Really?” he asked.

“Of course,” Sister Anselm said. “I’ll let you into her room. Be sure to use the hand sanitizer before you step inside.”

“What was that all about?” Ali demanded when Sister Anselm returned to the waiting room. “I thought visitors were supposed to be approved family members only. He’s a complete stranger.”

“I put him on the approved list,” Sister Anselm said. “The Good Samaritan was the real deal, and David Upton is, too. Besides, just because something’s the law of the land doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea. Mr. Upton’s is the last face Enid saw before her world went black. He’s also, for whatever reason, the only person to whom she confided her wish to never go home. I’m hoping the jolt of seeing him might help jump-start her return to consciousness. We need to hear her story, but I suspect there’s someone else who could supply that information, too.”

“Who?”

“The person who was sent to bring her back.”

“Yes, of course,” Ali said. “But how do you propose to find him, and once you do, how do you expect to get him to talk?”

Sister Anselm glanced around the waiting room before she answered. The place was surprisingly empty. “He was sent to retrieve her, possibly to keep her from spilling the beans about a group totally dedicated to keeping their secrets secret. Having failed to deliver, it’s safe to assume that he’s fallen out of favor with whoever set him that task. To get back in The Family’s good graces, there’s a good chance he’ll take a second crack at her.”

“Here?” Ali asked. “In the hospital?”

“Where else?” Sister Anselm asked. “They need to act promptly, before she regains consciousness and before she can tell anyone what she knows.”

“Which might turn this maternity ward into a war zone.”

“Believe me,” Sister Anselm replied, “if either Baby Ann or Enid were ready to be transferred to some other facility, I would have done so already. I’m afraid we don’t have any choice but to wait for someone to show up. When he does, I trust that, between the two of us, we’ll give him more than he bargained for.”

“Then why not draw them out on our terms?” Ali asked.

“How?”

For an answer, Ali picked up her phone and called Cami. “Is there a Colorado City listing for the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office?”

“Just a sec,” Cami said. “Let me look.” Ali heard Cami’s computer keys clicking in the background. “Okay, I’ve got it.”

“Message me the number,” Ali said.

“Will do.”

“You’re calling a cop?” Sister Anselm asked. “Why?”

“I’m going to bring a little disinformation into play. This particular cop happens to be a member in good standing of The Family,” Ali explained. “That means he’ll want to keep Enid quiet, too.”

When the message came through, Ali located the number and pressed it. After four rings, there was a click as though the call was being forwarded, then someone picked up. “Deputy Sellers.”

“My name’s Lisa Goodson,” Ali said, plucking a name out of thin air and shifting the phone to speaker. “I’m a reporter for the Flagstaff Record. I’ve just come from a briefing with the Coconino County Sheriff’s Department. They’re investigating a motor vehicle accident that involves someone from up around your way. A young woman was injured. Since she’s a juvenile, they’re not releasing her name. They did say that an unidentified light-colored pickup was seen leaving the scene. I’m wondering if they’ve requested any assistance from your department in this matter?”

“Not that I know of,” Deputy Sellers said. “Someone might have called the office in Kingman, but this is the first I’ve heard about it.”

Ali’s truth meter registered a little ping. Of course Amos Sellers would have known about it. One of The Family’s inmates had gone AWOL. The resident cop would have been the first person Gordon Tower would have called, maybe not on an official basis, but certainly on an unofficial one. Deputy Sellers would have known everything about it.

“I tried going by the hospital,” Ali continued breathlessly, not giving him a chance to respond. “I was able to learn that the accident victim is being cared for on the maternity ward, so there must be a baby involved in all this. The problem is there’s this impossibly bossy nun running the show, Sister Anselm. She sent me packing. Fortunately for me, I have a friend who works at the hospital. Thanks to her, I managed pick up a tidbit or two. They’re expecting to transfer both mother and baby to a new hospital early tomorrow morning, to ‘an undisclosed location,’ like this was some kind of Secret Service mission or something. But no one’s told you anything about it?”

“Not one thing,” Deputy Sellers replied.

“Oh, well then,” Ali said. “Sorry to be a bother. Thanks for your time.”

When she ended the call, Sister Anselm was grinning at her. “Since you just lit the fuse on what may turn into a keg of dynamite, perhaps I’d better speak to the hospital administrator and see if there’s a way to transfer the maternity patients to some other floor.”

“You’ll be able to do that?” Ali asked.

“I believe so,” Sister Anselm said. “This is a Catholic hospital after all. When I drop Bishop Gillespie’s name, people tend to listen.”