Cold Betrayal

by J. A. Jance

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 fro
m 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.

  18

  After a night of ragged sleep, Ali wasn’t exactly at her best at eleven the next morning when she arrived at Bishop Gillespie’s residence in Phoenix and was ushered by his assistant into a book-lined study. The old-fashioned library table that served as a desk was situated in front of a metal mullioned window that looked out on a spacious lawn of winter-hardy green grass. Except for a wrought-iron gate on the drive, the lawn was completely surrounded by a thick hedge of twenty-foot-tall oleanders and punctuated by towering, fully skirted palm trees. Off in the distance was the distinctive hump-shaped rock formation that gave Camelback Road its name.

  Bishop Gillespie, seated in front of a gas-log fireplace in what Ali assumed to be an original Stickley Morris chair, watched with interest as Ali paused long enough to enjoy the view.

  “The gardener keeps asking for me to let him trim the palm trees,” Bishop Gillespie said, “and I keep saying no. All those dead palm fronds provide a lot of habitat for doves, especially, and they also provide a lot of shade.”

  He gestured toward an oak and leather Morris chair that matched his. The lumpy leather cushions were burnished with long use and cracked with age. Ali guessed that the chairs were probably about the same age as the bishop.

  “Come and sit,” he suggested. “Coffee?” He raised the cup and saucer that had been perched on the broad flat arm of his chair in Ali’s direction.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m completely coffeed at the moment. Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”

  Ali had called earlier that morning, a little after eight, asking for an appointment. She expected it would take a day or two to gain access. When she was told eleven that morning was the only time available, she made tracks to be there.

  “What have you and Sister Anselm got up to now?” Bishop Gillespie asked, beaming at her. “I assume that’s why you’re here.”

  He listened to Ali’s story in silence until she reached the point where Gordon Tower had nearly decked Sister Anselm. At that point the bishop laughed out loud.

  “It sounds like she deliberately provoked him.”

  Ali nodded. “She did, and since the cops were right there, they were only too happy to cuff him, arrest him, and haul him away.”

  “It’s not the first time,” Bishop Gillespie observed. “That’s one of the tools Sister uses when she’s dealing with bullies. That way someone else locks the guy up, and she doesn’t have to mess with him. It only works, though, if she has cops on hand to witness the assault.”

  Ali had known Sister Anselm for years, but Bishop Gillespie’s revelation was news to her.

  The bishop fell silent again and stayed that way until Ali finished telling him the rest of her story. In doing so, she told the bishop about sending DNA samples from Enid and her baby to Banshee Group while neglecting to say exactly how those samples had been obtained—a sin of omission. She ended with the hope that Bishop Gillespie would be able to convince Sheriff Alvarado to reopen the Jane Doe case.

  “You’re thinking that a reexamination of the DNA involved in the Kingman cases will lead back to a perpetrator who’s a member of the group you just mentioned, The Family or whatever—the one Gordon Tower is part of?”

  “Yes, I do,” Ali answered.

  Bishop Gillespie considered for a time before he spoke. “My connection to the Kingman case is tenuous at best, but I know that this case in particular is one that has haunted Sister Anselm through the years. However, your assumptions about the connections between the two cases may well be correct. My asking might provide the necessary impetus to get the case back in the spotlight. I suspect, however, that the added expense of the DNA lab work may turn out to be a sticking point as far as Sheriff Alvarado is concerned.”

  “High Noon will cover that,” Ali declared.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  Ali nodded. “I’m sure.”

  A long silence settled over the room. Bishop Gillespie was the one who broke it. “On the one hand, reopening this case—if it does lead back to The Family—might suggest the authorities are indulging in a certain level of religious persecution. On the other hand, the extreme youth of the two pregnant female victims—Jane Doe and Enid Tower—is indicative of a history of sexual abuse, something of which the Catholic church is hardly blameless.

  “So, yes, I’ll make that call to Sheriff Alvarado,” he continued. “Since you are far more conversant with the details of the current investigation and how it leads back to the Kingman homicide investigation, I’ll suggest that he contact you directly. In the meantime, I’d like to know more about The Family. I’d like to know if they’re part of that splinter fundamentalist group that still refers to itself as LDS or whether this is something else entirely.”

  “You’re asking me to look into it?” Ali asked.

  “Yes, I am,” Bishop Gillespie answered. “I’m familiar, of course, with what happened there years ago—the Short Creek incident you mentioned earlier. That was a complete travesty. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for bringing that kind of overreaction down on the heads of folks who may be innocent of any wrongdoing. On the other hand, we have two young women, twelve years apart, risking life, limb, and their children’s lives in desperate attempts to escape. That would suggest that something is seriously wrong as far as The Family is concerned. I want to know what’s really going on up there.”

  “All right,” Ali agreed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  That was an easy commitment to make since she was way ahead of Bishop Gillespie in terms of searching out information concerning The Family. On her way down from Sedona, she had called Stu. Since she had struck out in locating any online information on The Family, she asked him to see if he could find any information on Gordon Tower.

  “I’m busy working the Bemidji angle,” Stu had said. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll turn this over to Cami.”

  There was a discreet knock at the door to the library and the bishop’s assistant stepped back inside. “Excuse me, Bishop Gillespie,” he said. “Your next appointment is here.”

  Taking the hint, Ali rose to leave, but Bishop Gillespie wagged an admonishing finger in her direction. “Remember,” he said with a smile, “I expect both you and that bully-baiting friend of yours to stay in touch and out of trouble. I’m sure Mr. Simpson has my cell number, but I’ll ask my assistant to give it to you as well.”

  Ali left the bishop’s residence with his direct number added to her phone’s list of contacts. On the way back to I-17, she stopped off at a FedEx office to drop off the envelope bound for Banshee Group. She was back in the car and headed north when her phone rang with a call from Cami.

  “Making any progress?” Ali asked.

  “Some. I started by searching co
unty and state databases for Gordon Tower. Both his driver’s license and his voter’s registration list him as living on Tower Road in unincorporated Mohave County. Then I got a satellite photo of Tower Road. There’s only one house on it, a massive-­looking place, and several outbuildings—a barn, some Quonset-­hut-looking things, and a few others. I found a driver’s license listing at that address for someone named Edith Tower, but there’s no voter registration listing for her.

  “I figured if Gordon Tower lived on Tower Road, I’d check out some of the other roads as well, and I struck paydirt. When I went looking through voter registrations for a Johnson living on Johnson Road, I found one—a guy named Wendell Johnson Jr. at 114 Johnson Road. A search of the driver’s-license database for that address shows two licenses, one for Wendell Jr. and one for Anita, but no voter’s registration for Anita. There’s another set of Johnsons in the area, a Wendell Sr. and Vera, but their home address is actually in Colorado City.”

  “Let me guess,” Ali interjected. “Vera drives but doesn’t vote.”

  “Right you are. That’s true for the entire enclave—two driver’s licenses per household—one for a man and one for a woman, but there are no voter registration listings for any of the women. At all.”

  “What enclave are you talking about?” Ali asked.

  “That information came from the property records. A little under fifty years ago, a guy named Angus Lowell showed up and purchased three thousand acres of unincorporated land in that part of unincorporated Mohave County. He bought that acreage from the FLDS church. He must have paid cash for the whole shebang because there’s no record of anyone ever carrying a mortgage. The entire property is still deeded over to the Lowell Family Trust.”

  “That’s it,” Ali breathed. “That’s probably why they call it ‘The Family.’ Are you saying that none of the individuals you just named actually own the properties where they live?”

  “Not that I can tell,” Cami said. “They may pay rent to the trust, but if they do, I can’t find any paper trail. My guess is the roads were unnamed until a few years ago when the state required mandatory compliance and all rural roads were assigned names. At that point, the residents must have opted for the simplest solution and named each road for the family that lived there.”