Cold Betrayal (38 page)

“Everybody out,” Ali hissed in an urgent whisper, opening the door to the luggage compartment and beckoning them toward it. “Go out the back door and make a run for it.”

They did it at once. Bill Witherspoon was the last of the four to disappear through the opening. Ali moved forward through the cabin. She had just ducked into the galley alcove next to the doorway into the cab as an earsplitting blast of automatic gunfire filled the air.

For a moment, Ali was rendered completely deaf. Her hearing was starting to return when she heard another shot—a single one this time—followed a moment later by another. Then the air filled with the sound of a woman screaming. “Help me, please,” Governor Dunham cried. “Please help me. I’ve been shot.”

Ali started to step forward to do just that—to go help—but then the Sprinter shifted again. She knew what that meant. Someone had just climbed back inside, and she thought she knew who. Freezing in her hiding place, she pulled herself back into the kitchen alcove. She knew Richard Lowell. She had seen him at the hospital when he had come there trying to lay claim to Enid. But what if B. was the first one to come through the door? Or what if someone else did?

When a man wearing a sheepskin jacket suddenly barreled through the doorway, Ali knew it was Richard Lowell. He appeared to be injured. He held an AK-47 in his left hand while his right hand and arm hung uselessly at his side. Intent on something else, he darted past Ali without a glance in her direction. When he reached the captain’s chairs, he slammed his weapon down on the tabletop.

His back was turned to Ali. She could see a bright red spot leaking through his jacket and blossoming into a fist-sized stain just below his shoulder. Richard Lowell had been shot and was bleeding profusely. Grunting in pain, he struggled to pull something out of his jacket pocket. Only when Ali saw the phone did she realize what he planned to do. Richard Lowell may have been shot, bleeding, and maybe even dying, but he was intent on going out with a bang—by making the phone call and setting Robbie and the airplane hangar on fire.

It took a second or two, but finally Lowell had the phone clenched in his left hand and was clumsily attempting to operate it with his thumb. Only then did Ali step up behind him.

“Drop it!” she ordered. “Drop it now.”

“You wouldn’t shoot me, would you?” he panted.

“Try me,” Ali said.

Richard Lowell was not a tall man. Looking over his bloodied shoulder, Ali could see the face of the phone. His thumb was already poised over the top number on his list of recent calls when Ali did what she had to do. She simply pulled the trigger.

Richard Lowell slumped to the floor. The phone flew out of his hand and disappeared under one of the seats. Without the phone, Ali had no way of knowing if he’d managed to complete the call or not. Looking at the man’s suddenly still body and realizing that she’d shot him full in the middle of the back, Ali didn’t need to check to see if he was dead. She already knew.

“Drop your weapon and get on the ground!” someone ordered.

Ali turned to see a man in full SWAT regalia appear in the rear door opening, the one through which Witherspoon and the others had exited. As he moved toward her, weapon held at the ready, Ali complied. She laid the Glock on the galley’s counter and dropped to the floor.

“You need to check on Governor Dunham,” she urged as the officer fastened her wrists behind her with a pair of cuffs. “She’s outside the cab somewhere. She’s been shot.”

36

W
hat followed was a forty-five-minute period of total chaos. For most of that time, Ali sat in one of the captain’s chairs with her hands cuffed behind her back and with Richard Lowell’s lifeless body on the floor at her feet. Through the window next to her Ali watched as a group of EMTs swarmed toward the Sprinter and then left again on the run, pushing a gurney that they loaded into a medevac helicopter. It had arrived on the scene so promptly that Ali theorized that it had most likely been summoned by Governor Dunham herself and then held in reserve somewhere nearby, awaiting any possible casualties from the upcoming joint operation.

The helicopter had barely taken off when a grim-faced FBI agent who introduced himself as Agent Malovich stepped into the van. The first thing he did was remove Ali’s cuffs. After that, he popped her Glock into an evidence bag. That was a mixed message. Ali couldn’t tell if she was in the clear or not.

“Is the governor going to be all right?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Too soon to tell. There was a struggle over a revolver the guy had tucked in his pants. Governor Dunham went for it, and so did he. Looks like she got him in the shoulder but ended up shooting herself in the leg. We put on a tourniquet before the EMTs even got here, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to save the leg. Now, how about if you tell me what went on here.”

“Do I need a lawyer? Are you going to read me my rights?”

“No Miranda warning, and you don’t need a lawyer. We already talked to the people outside—three women and a man. According to them, this guy was armed, dangerous, and badly in need of being put down. They all say you’re a hero.”

“First tell me about my husband,” Ali insisted. “He got out of the van earlier. He’s out there somewhere. With all the gunfire, I’m worried about him. Is he all right?”

“B. Simpson? Let’s just say he’s not hurt, but he’s not all right, either. The other guy’s dead. Your husband says it’s his fault.”

“What other guy?”

“The county sheriff—a guy named Alvarado. He tried to bluff Lowell, pretended the place was surrounded even though his backup was minutes away. Lowell unloaded on him with his AK-47. Cut the poor guy to pieces.”

“B. doesn’t even own a weapon. How can it be his fault?”

“You’ll need to ask him about that, but later. He’s being interviewed now, too. So please, tell me what went on. I’m the first person you’re talking to about all this, and I certainly won’t be the last. Do you mind telling me what happened here?”

“What about the hangar? Did it burn down or not?”

“No, ma’am,” Malovich said. “We located the kid with the dynamite and the cell phone. He was still waiting for orders to set it off.”

Ali closed her eyes in gratitude. She had pulled the trigger in time. Richard Lowell hadn’t managed to complete the call.

It didn’t take long for her to tell the story of how, with Ali in the restroom, Lowell had broken into the Sprinter and taken its passengers hostage. Malovich listened but without taking notes. Knowing she’d be interviewed in far greater detail later when what she said was being recorded, Ali hit the high spots of what had happened, ending with her ordering Lowell to drop the phone and pulling the trigger when he didn’t.

“Okay,” Agent Malovich said at last. “All that jibes with what everyone else is saying. You can go now. You should probably go check on your husband. He’s in the hangar right next door, and he’s pretty shaken up. Oh, and you’ll have to go out the back way and walk around to hangar number one. The space between two and three is an active crime scene.”

It was three o’clock in the morning as Ali made her way to hangar number one. On the far side of number two she could see the generator-powered floodlights that had been set up around the crime scene. She didn’t need to go there. Remembering visiting Sheriff Alvarado and with him totally at ease in his office hours earlier on the previous day, there was nothing she wanted to see.

She found B. sitting just inside the door to the hangar, hunched into a plastic lawn chair, with his face buried in his hands.

“Sorry,” she murmured, walking up to him and laying a comforting hand on his shoulder. “So much for being part of the out-of-harm’s-way ‘rear guard.’ ”

B. nodded without looking up. “I signaled with the headlights as he was taxiing to his tie-down. Three shorts, three longs, three shorts—SOS. Sheriff Alvarado saw the signal and came right over to me, as soon as he got out of his plane.

“I told him what was going on and that the guy was inside, holding hostages and threatening to kill them. By then Alvarado knew the SWAT team was coming, but they were still two minutes out. He told me he wanted to get closer so he’d be able to give his guys a better idea of what was going on inside the Sprinter. That’s when the door opened. Lowell came out, holding Governor Dunham in front of him. Alvarado was caught out in the open. Lowell opened fire and cut him down just like that.”

Ali heard the futility in B.’s voice and her heart ached for him. “It’s not your fault,” she said.

“If I hadn’t signaled him to come over, he wouldn’t be dead.”

“You don’t know that. Neither does anyone else.”

Looking around the hangar, Ali located another chair—an ancient wooden desk model on creaky casters. She pushed that over to B.’s chair and sat down beside him. Then she reached out and took his hand.

“I heard the governor got shot and was airlifted out,” B. muttered after a minute or so. “Is she going to be okay?”

Ali shook her head. “Don’t know,” she answered. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

“I tried to come see you, but they wouldn’t let me back inside the van. Dave Holman told me you shot Richard Lowell.”

“I did,” Ali admitted. “I didn’t have a choice. He was about to make a phone call that would have killed a kid and set fire to a tank full of jet fuel. I shot him in the back, and I’m not sorry about it, either. Did Dave say anything about how the search warrants went?”

B. looked up at her questioningly. “You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what? I’ve spent the better part of two hours locked in the van with Lowell’s body and then being interviewed by an FBI agent. Nobody’s told me anything.”

“I’ve been interviewed, too,” B. said, “but my guy let something slip, and Dave told me the rest. It turns out the men named in the search warrants are all dead.”

Ali was taken aback. “Dead? All of them? What was it, some kind of suicide pact?”

“Not exactly,” B. answered bleakly. “As far as I know, Amos Sellers is the only one still alive. Everywhere the teams went, they were able to lay hands on the Bibles with no problem because none of the men was home. Lowell had evidently summoned all the heads of households to what was supposedly an important meeting at the church.

“There’s a bunker in the basement. He lured all but two of them into the bunker, then sprayed them with the automatic weapons fire, probably from the same AK-47 he used here. It was a bloodbath. The other two, the guys who weren’t in the basement, were found up at the airstrip, parked in the airplane hangar, inside in a pool of aviation fuel. Both of them had been shot execution style. The men in the basement died earlier in the evening. The men in the car probably died a while later.”

“How many dead?” Ali asked as the weight of the death toll sank into her soul.

“Twenty-nine from the family,” B. answered. “Dave says Lowell must have been trying to get rid of everyone who might know any of the details about the human trafficking operation.”

“What about the girls?” Ali asked. “The ones at the hangar?”

“There were only six of them, and they’re fine—frightened but fine. At least that’s what I was told. When Alvarado ran up the flag here, they split the SWAT team into two groups. Some came here and the others stayed behind to look out for the girls. They’ve called in a hazmat unit to clean up the spilled Jet-A before it leaks down into the water table.”

Dave Holman walked into the hangar and came over to where they were sitting. “DPS is sending a helicopter over to Kingman to notify Sheriff Alvarado’s next of kin. They asked me if I wanted to go along. I told them I wanted to check with you first. It’s been a hell of a night; if you need any help getting back home . . .”

“Come to think of it, we do,” Ali said at once. “We rode up in the governor’s Sprinter, and that’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Andrea Rogers and the two Brought Back girls are in the same fix.”

“The governor’s chief of staff assigned a DPS officer to do The Family’s next-of-kin notifications. My understanding is that Andrea, Patricia, and Agnes will be assisting with that.”

“We should probably help with that, too.”

Dave shook his head. “No,” he said. “You two have done enough.”

Ali glanced at B.’s ashen face. “You’re sure it’s no trouble to drive us?” she asked.

“None at all,” he answered. “Between doing a next-of-kin notification and getting my friends back home to Sedona, which one sounds like a better idea to you?”

37

T
he Phoenix-area taco truck that Governor Dunham had summoned to provide refreshments for her teams of officers had now arrived on the scene. It was parked on the shoulder of the road, just outside the entrance to the airport. With cops of all descriptions coming and going, the place was doing land-office business. Once convoys of hastily dispatched media vans started to arrive, it would be even busier.

Dave pulled over and stopped next to the food truck. “It’s a long way back to Flag from here,” he said. “After what you’ve both been through, you’re going to need food, and it’s on me. What do you want?”

“Whatever’s good,” B. said. Because of his need for legroom, he was in the front passenger seat. That put Ali in the back of the patrol car—behind the screen and in a part of the car with no interior door handles—something she found unsettling.

Looking at the mob lined up at the window, Ali’s assessment was more realistic. “Whatever they have left,” she said. “Since a few of the people waiting in line are early-bird reporters, it’s probably best if B. and I stay in the car.”

Dave left to place their orders, returning a few minutes later with three brown bags of food and another filled with cans of soda. “They’re about to run out of everything. All they had left are bean-and-cheese burritos, so that’s what I got. We all have a single burrito and cans of Diet Coke. Hope that’ll work for you.”

As soon as Ali smelled the food, she realized she was once again starving. In terms of hours, the box lunch she had eaten as the Sprinter came north from Flagstaff wasn’t that long ago. In terms of life experience, it was epochs away.