by Rose Beecham
“We’d need at least one of those underage wives to testify against him. If you can find one, the state attorney would be all over it.”
Jude could imagine how difficult it would be to persuade a brainwashed, terrified, uneducated girl to testify in court. “Well, this runaway bride is underage. So, at least we can detain Epperson on suspicion of attempted child molestation.”
“He’ll claim he wasn’t going to marry her until she turned sixteen, and you won’t get a statement from anyone disputing that.”
“Not even the girl’s sister?”
Gossett’s shrug said it all. If they wanted Epperson, they would have to persuade his wife to implicate him.
“What’s the situation out there?” Jude asked. “Do you know the place?”
“Big compound. Fifty acres. The menfolk will be out searching for her when you show up.”
“Excellent. I take it they’re all armed.”
Gossett laughed. “Oh, yeah. The plygs have been shipping weaponry and ammo into this place by the truckload for the past twenty years.”
Jude unholstered her Glock .22 and inspected it. “Can you let us have a few extra rounds?”
“You got it.” Gossett unlocked his firearms cabinet and took out a box full of .40 S&W magazines. “That all you’re carrying?”
From the tone of the question, Jude surmised they were probably crazy to be going to the Gathering for Zion Ranch short of a SWAT team. On the other hand, they had the element of surprise in their favor.
She said, “I have a backup snubbie and a Model 19 in the vehicle.”
The Smith & Wesson was an old favorite her father had passed on to her when she’d graduated from the Academy. Even now, she seldom went anywhere without it; she preferred it to her Glock, the peace officers’ duty weapon of choice in Montezuma County. The Model 19 handled like a dream and always seemed to lock effortlessly on target. Jude loved the lethal elegance of the six-gun with its four-inch barrel, classic nickel plating, and smooth wood grip. She loved the serrated trigger and the very slight stack at the end of the pull-through, just enough so you could measure each shot. The 19’s action was like buttered silk, and the earsplitting reports would scare most criminals shitless.
Beau Gossett must have caught her small sigh. “Now that’s a real handgun. None of your polymer and titanium crapola.”
They shared a moment’s silence, aficionados contemplating the passing of an era. Was there anything finer than seeing the sky shimmer across your barrel and hearing that magical kiss as the case heads went flush with the cylinder?
Tulley said, “I’m in the market for a Sig P220.”
Gossett considered this. “I could see you with a 1911, a Les Baer maybe.”
“Nice, but they cost,” Jude said. “I looked at a Kimber Tactical a while back. Pretty good and half the price.”
Tulley frowned. “Isn’t the 1911 kind of…old fashioned?”
“If you mean it comes from the days when they designed sidearms to win fights, not avoid product liability lawsuits, sure it’s old fashioned,” Jude responded.
Gossett said, “No kidding. We’re out there with popguns and they lift the ban on assault rifles. Put those morons on Capitol Hill in a peace officer’s uniform for a week in Washington Heights and see if they can keep their pants dry.”
Jude was a little surprised to hear this good ol’ boy criticizing the government. On the other hand, he was surrounded by wackos who carried shotguns in the main street.
“Maybe I’ll try a 1911 on the shooting range before I make my decision,” Tulley said.
“Good plan.” Jude returned her Glock to its holster. “I mean, how often do you buy a sidearm? Might as well be the right one.”
“Are we going to go look for those kids?” Tulley asked.
“Kind of hard to do that officially when they haven’t been reported missing,” Gossett replied. “How about I swear you both in and you go take care of Mrs. Epperson? Then we’ll see about the search.”
“I knew we should have brought Smoke’m along,” Tulley said.
“He’s a K-9 handler,” Jude told Gossett.
“No kidding? What kind of dog you working with?”
Tulley whipped out a photo of Smoke’m. “He’s not top of his class in agility, but he’s one heck of a sniffer hound, sir.”
“I’ll bet he is. Man, those are some jowls.” Gossett examined the picture with the air of a man who knew the real McCoy when he saw it. “We run a few K-9 units ourselves. German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois.”
Tulley slid the picture back into his breast pocket. “Smoke’m could find those kids, no problem.”
Jude said, “Guess you’ll be bringing your own dogs in once the search is official, Sergeant.”
“If we get that far. The plygs used to report their runaway wives to the marshall, and he’d go find them and bring them right on back to the compound. Nowadays they’re supposed to report missing person cases to me. Fat chance.”
Jude gathered up the spare ammo, suddenly impatient with the talking. “We need to be moving along.”
After they were sworn in, the sergeant walked them to their car. “Any trouble, you know where to find me.”
Chapter Ten
“There’s a house full of bored-shitless women out here who’ve never seen a movie and are married to an ugly old fart,” Jude declared as she and Tulley bounced along the narrow, potholed road to the Epperson ranch. “All we need is to entice one of them to agree, and we can take a look around.”
Tulley listened earnestly, but wasn’t getting it.
Jude clarified, “That’s your job, Mr. Smooth Talker.”
A rosy glow illuminated his ears and he hastily moved the discussion along. “You want me looking for the crime scene. Right?”
“Right. I doubt she was murdered this far from the body dump site, but anything’s possible. We’re looking for blood, a hammer, more of those tree spikes, a knife, and the owner of the attractive teeth, of course. We also need to check all vehicles and collect trace.”
“I packed extra latex gloves.”
“Good.” Jude was starting to wish she’d packed an assault rifle.
Gossett’s flip remarks about plygs and their weaponry had come as no surprise. She was already uneasy about the whole scenario. Two officers alone on the property of a group of paranoid lawbreakers who think they are God’s chosen and have the weapons to defend themselves—definitely not a walk in the park. She could see the sense in making a low-key approach, and she could see why Gossett thought they might be better off going in without him. But this was a volatile situation. No question.
They had two big advantages and she didn’t want to squander them. The first was surprise, the second was the search for the missing teenager, which hopefully meant only women and children would be present on the ranch. They would only catch the Epperson clan off guard once, and they needed to capitalize on that. Her primary objective was simple—Naoma Epperson in custody. A thorough search for evidence could happen later if became unwise to proceed this morning.
“I wouldn’t want to be those kids.” Tulley had his window down a notch and a hand out, testing the breeze or lack thereof. “It’s gotta be a hundred out there.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll join the search as soon as we have Mrs. Epperson in a holding cell. They can’t have gotten far on foot. They’re probably sheltering somewhere to stay out of the sun.”
“We could get one of the other deputies to fly down with Smoke’m.”
“Rapture’s maybe not the best place for dogs,” Jude said. “Sounds like they shoot first and ask questions later.”
Tulley blanched. “I’d kill anyone that hurt a hair on my dog’s head.”
“An incident with Utah—Sheriff Pratt would be thrilled.”
Tulley huffed.
“Any more thoughts on that number they found in her stomach?” she asked.
They’d tried phoning it. There was no such number. What else had ten digits?
She’d worked her way through all the usual suspects. Bank deposit box—when would Darlene have been able to get to a bank, living out here in the middle of nowhere? Floor safe—most did not have ten-digit codes. Computer password—did these people have computers? The Universal Product Code and Standard Book Numbers had ten digits. Ciphering—if the numbers related to letters of the alphabet, they spelled out: BCBIAEIIAI. Jude had gotten nowhere treating this as an anagram and had so far resisted the urge to phone her boss and hand it over to the cryptologists. She figured she’d take that liberty only if she didn’t get a break on the case by arresting the Eppersons.
Tulley consulted a slip of paper he kept in his pocket. With the measured deliberation of a monk reciting a Gregorian chant, he read, “2329159919.”
They reflected in silence.
“Amazing she could remember that whole string,” Jude said.
“It must have meant something to her.”
“No kidding.” It was bound to end up being something blindingly obvious. In the meantime, they could waste hours gnashing their teeth on a fruitless quest for the esoteric. “We need to put ourselves in her shoes if we’re going to decode this. It has to be linked somehow to her environment.”
“Maybe it’s birthdays,” Tulley suggested. “Important dates.”
Jude hit the brakes. Directly ahead, a huge sign proclaimed Gathering for Zion Ranch in lime green lettering. This was emblazoned above a montage in sunrise hues, which depicted what Jude took to be the faithful assembled for the lift-off to heaven. Puzzled by some odd black blotches on the canvas, she got out of the vehicle for a closer look. Seven of the radiant, upturned faces had been painted out. It also seemed new figures had been added periodically; some looked fresher and brighter than the others.
“Check it out,” she said. “I have a feeling this is meant to be the Epperson family.”
Tulley joined her, camera in his hand, and took several photographs of the painting. “That’s a big family.”
They both counted.
“Looks like fourteen wives and forty-seven kids and that’s not counting the blacked out ones.” Jude was troubled by the faceless few standing among the awestruck throng. “I wonder what’s up with that.”
“Dead people maybe? Or excommunicated like Zach.”
Crossed off the list for the celestial kingdom? “Good theory,” she said. “The question is, how many of them ended up like Darlene?”
“Three of them are women.” Tulley moved closer. “This could be Darlene.”
He pointed to a woman whose hair was silvery blond. Most of the others had hair the same shade of reddish gold Jude had noticed on the woman back in Colorado City. Bummer that the faces were concealed. She studied the other two female figures, trying to discern a likeness to Poppy Dolores in either. It was impossible to say.
“I guess we’ll be wanting to ask Mrs. Epperson who they are,” Tulley said while Jude was taking photographs.
“Indeed.”
“Some of the males are just kids.” Tulley noted darkly. “Wonder how many of them got hit by cars.”
Jude shifted her focus to a man who still had a face, if you could call it that. The mouth was horribly twisted. And that wasn’t his only problem. She asked Tulley, “Does this guy look like a hunchback to you?”
“Sure does. And what’s up with his face? You think maybe he had a stroke?”
“Seems a bit young for that.” Jude called to mind Sergeant Gossett’s comments about birth defects. She had a feeling they were looking at a case of spina bifida and who knew what else. The guy certainly looked like a poster child for dental issues.
Tulley read her mind. “You’re thinking Mr. Snaggletooth?”
“Could be. And if he’s still got his face, maybe that means he’s still around.” She pointed at a white-haired patriarch at the epicenter of the painting. He was taller than everyone else and bathed in a golden glow, arms raised above his head. “Wild guess—Nathaniel Epperson?”
Tulley grinned. “I see how come you made detective.”
“Yeah, well, let’s find out if I’m any damn good.” Jude unfastened the Eppersons’ wide steel gate. “We’ll leave this open. I don’t see any livestock around, and we might want to expedite our departure.”
Tulley looked sideways at her. “You think they’ll do something crazy?”
“The deal in this type of situation is to take precautions, just in case.”
The approach to the Epperson’s house was a long, red dirt road. On either side, a few sad junipers eked out an existence amidst the pigweed and silvery scrub that clung to the hillside. An assortment of barns and outbuildings cluttered the front of the property. Beyond these lay a sprawling, whitewashed stucco structure with various additions that lacked windows. L-shaped, it extended back into what looked like several different dwellings interconnected by walkways.
“Well, it’s not Tara,” she remarked, earning a quick, puzzled glance from her colleague. “That’s the plantation from the movie Gone With the Wind. Just thought I’d flaunt my age.”
“I keep meaning to rent that,” Tulley said in a tone of polite deference. “I’d like to know more about the Civil War.”
“Uh-huh. Where are those binoculars?”
He reached into the backseat. “Got ’em.”
“Okay, take a look around and see if you can spot the search party. We could do without them showing up in the middle of the proceedings.” She halted behind a barn that screened them from the house, and turned off the motor. They got out of the car.
Tulley pointed north and handed the binoculars to her. “That’s gotta be them over there on that hill.”
She aimed the binoculars northwest. Sure enough, twenty or more tiny figures were fanned out across the hills a few miles away. Hopefully Nathaniel Epperson was among them, running his unwilling child bride to ground. With any luck it would be a while before the posse returned to the house. She gazed up at the sky. A delicate cloud cover diffused the sun’s harsh rays, a small blessing for the missing kids. Rain looked unlikely, and she wondered if the runaways had access to water. In this heat, they would not last more than two days if they didn’t.
They were about to get back into the car when a young, heavily pregnant woman emerged from the barn, pushing a wheelbarrow. She stopped and lowered her barrow at the sight of them, staring with startled deer eyes. Like most teenage girls in this neck of the woods, she wore a homemade dress down to her ankles and long braids bound into a bun at her nape. A wisp of snowy hair fluttered from these confines and tangled across her eyes. She tucked it discreetly away and dropped her gaze to a spot somewhere in front of Jude’s feet.
Tulley spared her the immodesty of speaking first to a man she’d never met. “Morning, ma’am. I’m Deputy Sheriff Virgil Tulley, out of Montezuma County, Colorado, and this here is Detective Jude Devine. Would this be the Epperson ranch?”
The girl snuck a disconcerted look at Tulley’s face. A handsome man was almost as much of a novelty in these parts as a woman in pants. And tall, dark, lean Tulley would make any straight woman look twice. Which is exactly what the girl did before blushing wildly. Jude dug her colleague in the ribs. An impressionable young female who mistook him for a Greek god was exactly what they needed.
Tulley caught his cue and flashed a movie-star smile when the girl glanced up again a millisecond later.
“Outsiders are not allowed here,” she asserted, but her tone lacked conviction, and this time she did not lower her eyes, instead gazing transfixed.
Tulley cocked his head slightly and managed a look of such unadulterated country-boy charm that Jude wondered if he practiced it in his bathroom mirror. This certainly worked on the girl, who babbled a breathless justification of her previous pronouncement.
“The gentiles mean us harm, so we are not permitted to talk to anyone that does not share our beliefs.”
“We’re not here to harm you, ma’am,” Tulley said softly. “We need to speak with your father
.”
“My father doesn’t live here.”
“Do you know a Nathaniel Epperson?”
“That’s my husband.” Her voice held an odd mixture of pride and defensiveness.
Tulley shot a look at Jude, who refrained from saying: Congratulations on being some dirty old man’s sex slave. Instead she said, “Would you please inform him we’re here to speak with him.”
Silence.
“If he’s busy right now, we’ll wait.” Tulley hit her again with the matinee session smile.
The girl shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “He sleeps in the afternoon.”
“This is important,” Tulley persisted winningly. “We’d sure appreciate it if you’d let him know we’re here.”
“Before you do, could you take a look at this photo for us?” Jude moved a little closer, took Darlene’s picture from her shirt pocket, and held out it.
Without touching the photograph, the girl darted a quick look at it and made a tiny, fractured sound like a suppressed whimper.
“Do you recognize her?” Jude kept her breathing shallow in the face of the wheelbarrow piled high with horse manure.
The girl shrugged and slid a hand over her big, round belly. Jude guessed that by staying silent, she was avoiding an outright lie.
Tulley took another step forward and murmured like he was coaxing a timid cat from a hiding place. “It’s okay. We know you can’t tell us. But, there’s something I want to ask you.”
The girl dared a look at him from beneath her blond lashes.
“Did Diantha ever do anything to hurt you?”
Before she could stop herself, the girl began to shake her head. Flustered, she immediately suppressed the giveaway movement.
“She was a friend to you, wasn’t she?”
After a long moment, the girl nodded very faintly and Jude realized that by enabling her to remain silent, they could get some answers. On a hunch, she asked, “Is it your sister they’re out looking for?”
Another small nod.
“She’s what—fourteen?”
Again, an affirmative. This time her brow creased in worry and she looked close to tears. She rubbed the small of her back and Jude was abruptly conscious that they were keeping a very pregnant teenager outdoors in fierce heat. Shrouded in that all-encompassing pink dress, she had to be miserable.