Cold Betrayal (25 page)

“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.”

22

W
ith all the unexpected messing about with Joe Friday on Wednesday, Betsy had completely forgotten that she had agreed to spend most of Thursday working with the planning committee on the Women’s Retreat due to happen in early April. Had Grace Hunter, her ride for the day, not called to remind her, she would have been caught completely flat-footed. As it was, Betsy barely had time to get herself pulled together before Grace showed up in the driveway.

“I heard you had some trouble the other night and that a deputy dropped by,” Grace commented, once Betsy was belted in. “Hope it wasn’t anything too serious.”

That was the problem with living in a small town.
Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Since the cops hadn’t believed Betsy’s version of events, and since Jimmy and Sandra didn’t believe her, either, Betsy decided that the less said about the gas burner issue, the better.

“Just a little misunderstanding,” she said. “It’s straightened out now.”

“And the workman? I heard someone was here most of the day yesterday. I worried that you might be having plumbing issues. There’s a lot of that going around.”

“Electrical,” Betsy muttered, resenting this whole third-degree interrogation. “And I had the guy install a new computer.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?” Grace said. “You haven’t been online since Athena left. You’ll have to give me your new e-mail address.”

“It’s the old one,” Betsy said. “It turns out that one still works.”

The planning meeting took all morning. Betsy hated being on committees. All the wrangling back and forth drove her nuts, but if someone didn’t volunteer to handle things here and there, nothing got done. The Women’s Retreat had been going on for more than forty years, and Betsy had more experience than anyone else about putting the annual program together. She worried about who would take charge of it once she was gone, but right now, she was still the one running the show.

When the meeting was over, she and Grace stopped by the diner for lunch, so it was mid-afternoon before she got home. Exhausted by three days of seemingly nonstop activity, Betsy let Princess out and then decided a nap was in order. She and Princess went to the bedroom, curled up under her down-filled duvet, and slept for the next three hours. It wasn’t until close to six when she got up, fed the dog, and fixed a sandwich to have for supper. She couldn’t shake the idea that everything she did was visible to someone sitting at a computer monitor somewhere far away. Joe Friday had assured her that her own image wouldn’t be tracked or recorded or set off any alarms, but she wasn’t sure she believed all that.

She had assured Joe that she’d get right after the password thing, but so far she hadn’t. The day had been too busy and time had gotten away from her. Tomorrow, she’d call Marcia to come pick her up early so she could go to the bank before her hair appointment and before the fish fry. That way it would all be handled before Monday when she had her so-called evaluation.

Before she went to bed for the night, Betsy sat down at the table and forced herself to face her computer. It looked like it was on, but it wasn’t until she put her thumbprint on the mouse that she was able to access the hidden computer screen where her files and e-mail account were kept. Once there, she was surprised to find two new e-mails—one from Grace and the other from Athena.

Grace’s said only,

Welcome back to the world of e-mail. I hope you’ll sign up for Facebook, too.

Athena’s said,

Stu has my thumbprint and image. We’ll talk tomorrow.

It was only nine when Betsy shut down the hidden screen, leaving just the original begonia-covered screen saver—the fake one—still visible.
Yes,
she told herself as she crawled back into bed.
Tomorrow will be plenty of time to talk.

23

B
ringing the hospital administrator around to Sister Anselm’s way of thinking wasn’t exactly a slam dunk. While Sister Anselm worked on that, Ali ordered a pizza and then went down to the lobby to wait for it to be delivered.

She had called Leland earlier to say she wouldn’t be home for dinner, but now she called again, told him that she was downstairs waiting for a pizza, and gave him a heads-up about her probably not being home for the remainder of the night.

“I wanted to make sure someone would look after Bella.”

“Of course,” he said. “No problem there at all, but it sounds as though there’s something seriously amiss. Can I be of assistance?”

Ali laughed. She and Leland had been through too much together for her to try lying to him about it. “Yes,” she said. “There
is
something amiss.”

She explained the situation in an abbreviated
Reader’s Digest
fashion.

“I see,” Leland said when she finished. “It sounds to me as though you and Sister Anselm have served notice to some potentially bad people that the young woman they’re after—someone with possibly incriminating evidence—will be moved elsewhere, presumably out of the bad guys’ reach, tomorrow morning. Is that correct?”

“Pretty much.”

“Which means you’ve given them a deadline. If you’ll pardon my saying so, this seems especially foolhardy, even for the two of you. What about the other patients and employees at the hospital? What are the chances your actions might endanger them? And if there’s some kind of criminal activity occurring in that place where the young woman is from, then you need to let the proper authorities know about it and let them handle it.”

She hadn’t mentioned to Leland that Deputy Sellers, the man she had just spoken to and who had blatantly lied to her, was someone who should have been considered a “proper authority.” Not in this case. And there was no way to begin explaining to Leland what happened at Short Creek, now known as Colorado City, all those years earlier.

“We’ll be careful, especially when it comes to other patients,” she said. “Sister Anselm is in the process of emptying the floor, even as we speak. Chances are no one will show up. If they do, they won’t be expecting to find two women who can rightly be considered armed and dangerous.”

“No,” Leland agreed. “I suppose not.”

After ending the call, Ali sat for a time in silent contemplation. What if she was right? What if there was some kind of criminal activity going on within The Family? If she and Sister Anselm did somehow bring it to light, would anyone be willing to do something about it? And what about all those women and children? She remembered how Edith Tower had ducked out of the way of Gordon Tower’s fist. Edith might have some control over what went on inside the home, but Gordon would always be the final arbiter of what happened and what didn’t.

In the world of The Family, women apparently didn’t count for much. But if the guys in charge went to jail for something illegal, what happened to the families once they were gone? If the women had literally been kept down on the farm in something close to involuntary servitude, what would become of them and their children if they were turned loose in the world? As single mothers, would they have any marketable skills? Would they even be able to read and write?

Cami had said The Family was made up of twenty-five to thirty separate households. If every husband had more than one wife and only the first one of those was a licensed driver, that meant there might be around a hundred women with young kids who wouldn’t have cars or be able to drive. They’d be turned out of the only homes they had ever known and driven out into a world about which they knew next to nothing. If most of the men or even some of them were held accountable for some wrongdoing and went to prison, the cult might be dismantled. What happened to the women and children then? For the first time, Ali understood the magnitude of the problem and the real reason officialdom had turned a blind eye. Taking The Family down would mean turning the women and children who lived there into refugees—or perhaps into something worse.

Short Creek had been bad enough—an instance of law enforcement overreach where everyone, children included, had been taken into custody and families torn apart forever. Ali remembered seeing more recent coverage of unaccompanied migrant children being warehoused in inadequate facilities where they, too, were treated like little more than prisoners.

Even worse, Ali had distant but still vivid memories of what might prove to be a hauntingly similar situation—Waco. She had been sitting on the news-anchor desk in L.A. when the siege at Waco came to its horrific end. She had watched the awful videos as flames had engulfed the place. The fire, allegedly started by some nut job who refused to surrender, had burned the compound to the ground, killing seventy-six people in the process.

Up to now, the fact that The Family held women and children in what amounted to bondage hadn’t seemed to register with law enforcement agencies or merited any official response, but what if all that changed? What if Ali’s involvement unearthed evidence of criminal wrongdoing? What if the menfolk who appeared to be running the show were held to account and put in jail? In that case, Ali might be responsible for divesting those same women of everything familiar and driving them homeless into the world. What would become of them then? Who would help them?

Suddenly Ali Reynolds found herself in the same spot Governor Pyle had been in all those years earlier, dealing with a situation no one else had been willing to tackle ever since.
Did she keep poking her nose into the problem or did she let it go? Do something about it or turn away? And was she prepared to deal with the consequences of both taking action and not taking action?

She picked up her phone and scrolled through her contacts list until she found the numbers belonging to Andrea Rogers, the executive director of Irene’s Place. It was late enough in the day that Ali didn’t bother with the work number. She called Andrea’s cell instead.

“Sorry to bother you at home,” Ali said.

“What makes you think I’m at home? You should know that running a shelter has never been a nine-to-five job. What’s up?”

“Have you ever heard of The Family from up near Colorado City?”

There was a long pause. “It sounds vaguely familiar,” Andrea said at last. “Wait, yes. Now I remember. Irene mentioned it, but obviously that was years ago.”

“Were there clients who came from there?”

“There may have been. At least that’s the context in which it was mentioned. I don’t remember any names or details, though. It’s too long ago.”

“Do you have records going back that far?”

“I’m not sure. Now everything is computerized,” Andrea said. “We haven’t had the time or money to go back and digitize those earlier records—the ones from when Irene was in charge. They’re downstairs in the archives.”

“Can you see if you can find anything?” Ali asked.

“I’ll try,” Andrea said, “but those old files are a mess, so don’t expect miracles. Anything else?”