Desert Cut (9 page)

After a short nap that made me feel more groggy than refreshed, I showered, changed into clean clothes, and drove to the sheriff’s office. Except for the dispatcher and a deputy handling the phones, the place appeared deserted. Empty coffee cups sat on the desks and cigarettes butts littered the carpeting, many of them right under the NO SMOKING sign. On the bulletin board, another picture had joined that of Precious Doe: Aziza. Her
hijab
accented dark-lashed brown eyes, a sculpted nose, and a wide smile. At seven, she hovered on the edge of her mother’s beauty.

Seven. The age when so many terrible things might happen to a little girl.

I shook the memory of my own childhood away and headed toward the rear, where I found Avery in his office, slumped over his desk. The place was half-buried in paper, with printouts slopping across the floor and every other available surface.

“What do you want now, Ms. Jones?” he asked, raising his weary head.

The return to formalities worried me. “I’m here to help, Sheriff. If you’ll let me.”

He shook his head slowly. “I’ve done some thinking about that, and the answer’s no. What with Dr. Wahab’s accusation, you’ve become part of the problem. Besides, another girl’s gone missing.”

“
What
?!” Surely I hadn’t heard right.

His eyes were so sunken they looked like a one-hundred-year-old man’s. “The call came in right after you left the Wahab’s house. Her name is Nicole Hall and she’s sixteen. Her family lives just the other side of the Lazy M Ranch. This morning her parents found her bedroom window open—sound familiar?—and she was gone. So was one of the family cars.”

My fear for the girl lessened. “Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Not currently. Her father’s the Reverend Daniel Hall, who runs Freedom Temple. He’s stricter than Dr. Wahab, which is saying a lot.”

A teenager. A strict father. A missing car. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure that one out. But I’m not much on coincidence, and two young girls disappearing at the same time bothered me. “What’s being done?”

“I’ve pulled men in from Benson, Tombstone, Bisbee, even Sierra Vista. Before you say anything else, let’s go outside. I want some fresh air.” He pushed his chair away from his desk

Curious, I followed him out into the “fresh” air, where the exhaust of automobiles headed for the day shift at Apache Chemical overwhelmed the more subtle perfume of the desert. After glancing up and down the street, he said, “Things are getting worse here, and your situation with the Wahabs just adds to the general deterioration. That’s why I’m telling you again, go home.”

Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. Angered, I snapped, “Worried about reelection, are you?”

“That was uncalled for, Ms. Jones. I’ve been busy trying to hold things together while you’ve been running around the county getting people even more riled up. Now, don’t start a fight you’re bound to lose. Get in my way and I’ll lock you up.”

“For
what
?”

“Interfering with a police investigation.” With that, he spun on his heel and went back inside.

I stood there a moment, trying to figure out my next move. Going home was out of the question, but in a way, Avery was right. So far, I’d accomplished nothing other than putting certain people on their guard. Yet with one girl dead and two more missing, I couldn’t bring myself to walk away.

Not and live with myself, I couldn’t.

Chapter Ten

When I returned to the guest ranch, I found Selma Mann in a paddock, working with a recalcitrant Appaloosa colt. She wanted to saddle it, it didn’t want to be saddled. A few ranch hands sat on the fence’s top rail, grinning at the spectacle. She finally got the saddle on, although the colt wasn’t pleased. Leaving him alone to contemplate this new addition to his life, she walked over to the rail.

“Horses. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” She brushed dust off her face, then her shirt. “Say, there’s a FedEx package waiting for you inside the cottage. Sent from a Beverly Hills address. I signed for it and put it on your bed.”

The latest
Desert Eagle
script, no doubt. Oh, joy. I would have to read the thing before leaving for L.A. the next morning. But not now. There was a reason I’d returned to the ranch before heading to Freedom Temple. A fifth-generation Arizonan, Selma knew about everyone local, living or dead.

“What can you tell me about Reverend Hall?” I asked. “Sheriff Avery says he lives nearby.”

She grimaced. “Yeah, a quarter mile down the road. The parsonage’s in the rear. Why? Is he implicated in Aziza Wahab’s disappearance? It’s been all over the news this morning. Hall’s a major asshole, but I never heard he had issues with kids, if you know what I mean.”

I did. After the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, ministers of all denominations had come under increasing scrutiny, some with good reason. Power corrupts, and spiritual power was no exception. I remained shocked, however, at hearing Selma refer to a man of the cloth as “a major asshole.” Harsh words, even in these disrespectful times. Maybe she just had a thing about religion. Lots of people did.

“Nothing like that,” I assured her. “His daughter’s disappeared, too. The sheriff’s hoping she just ran away.”

Shock replaced the grimace. “Nicole? Disappeared? It’s happened before, but I’m concerned about the timing. There was that Iraqi girl a few years ago, then Precious Doe, then Aziza Wahab, and now Nicole. It’s terrible!”

There’s terrible, and then there’s terrible. At sixteen, Nicole Hall was almost ten years older than Tujin, Aziza, and Precious Doe. Yes, most pedophiles did specialize in one particular age group, but not always. The timing of the teenager’s disappearance worried me, too. Less than a four-hour drive away, in the border town of Juarez, Mexico, hundreds of young women had disappeared over the past decade. A few mutilated bodies had been found in the desert, but most victims remained lost, the perps unknown. Had Juarez’s serial killer, growing bored with grown women, moved to Los Perdidos? Had he begun preying upon children, killing an older girl every now and then as a refresher course?

Then I remembered that one of the Hall’s cars was missing, which made it almost certain Nicole was a runaway, but it wouldn’t hurt to make sure.

“Maybe I should pay the Reverend a visit,” I told Selma, curious to see her reaction.

She snorted, sounding just like the Appaloosa. “Good luck.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.” Shaking her head, she went back into the paddock and tried to horse-whisper a colt that wanted nothing to do with it.

***

Freedom Temple was an unprepossessing cinder block building, its whitewashed walls unrelieved by decorations of any kind, not even a cross. The signboard in front announced services at nine a.m. and six p.m. every Sunday; seven p.m. every Wednesday. The Women For Freedom study group met at eleven Monday and Thursday. Today. A political group? I’d always believed religion and politics made a dangerous mix. Checking my watch, I found it was already ten-thirty, which meant that I’d have to conduct this interview in record time.

The driveway wound around the church and ended at a gravel parking lot separating it from the parsonage. The small house was no more attractive than the church, just a plain wooden structure with a deep eave jutting over a slightly raised cement pad that passed for a porch. There were no shutters, no flower boxes, none of those friendly, human touches normally seen at rectories. Except for the lacy tracings of cottonwoods against the sky at the rear of the house, the entire property was composed of sharp, stern angles.

The Jeep crunched across the gravel until I braked next to a ten-year-old Taurus that was a candidate for the wrecking yard. After climbing out, I approached the house, but before I reached the porch, the door opened and a tall man peered out. White teeth flashed.

“May I help you?” His voice was as melodious as a good Shakespearean actor’s, and as mannered as a bad one’s. He started to add something, then halted, an expression of shock crossing his face. But it disappeared quickly and the phony smile returned.

“Excuse me for staring, dear. That scar on your forehead. A car accident?”

I phonied a smile back. “An old bullet wound, and no accident.” While he digested this, I studied his too-perfectly chiseled features. He would have been handsome except for the coldness of his blue eyes.

“Did you receive counseling, dear? If not, perhaps I can help. Freedom Temple is happy to offer those services, for a sliding fee, of course.” He didn’t invite me in, just stepped onto the porch, closing the door behind him.

“No counseling necessary, Reverend. I’m here to ask a few questions about your daughter.”

His smile faded when he noticed my Jeep. In the bright morning light, the Pima Indian signs that decorated it from bumper to bumper fairly glowed. “That’s not one of Sheriff Avery’s vehicles.”

I was getting tired of standing at the bottom of the steps, and wanted to hurry this along, but I dutifully handed up my card.

He gave it a quick glance. “You drove all the way down here from Scottsdale to investigate Nicole’s disappearance? Oh, I don’t think so.”

Stretching the truth until it howled, I said, “I’m helping the sheriff with another missing girl case. Aziza Wahab.”

Raised eyebrows. “What does she have to do with Nicole?”

“Probably nothing. Look, my questions will only take a minute and after that, you can get on with your day. Otherwise, Sheriff Avery might have to question you himself.”

He didn’t like that. “Get it over with, then.” Still no invitation to enter the parsonage. Maybe his wife was lying on the floor, drunk.

“Is it true Nicole’s run away before?”

“Many times.” His frosty calmness stood in direct contrast to the grief experienced by the Wahabs the night before.

“How is Mrs. Hall holding up?”

He seemed taken aback by my question. “Olivia? She accepts all her trials, of course.”

All her trials.
What an odd phrasing. I decided that I needed to see Olivia Hall, too, but for that I had to get inside the parsonage. “May I come in, Reverend? I hate standing around in parking lots.”

“The Women For Freedom will be here soon.”

“Yes, I know. They’re meeting in a half hour.” To force the issue, I placed my foot on the bottom step. Now he would either have to allow me access or the two of us would share a three-foot-wide section of concrete.

Gracelessly, he gave in. “Really, Ms. Jones, the parlor is rather untidy.”

I gave him what I hoped was a non-threatening smile. “If it’s good enough for the Women For Freedom, it’s good enough for me.”

To my admittedly non-discerning eye, the parlor didn’t appear untidy, just naked. It boasted no rugs, no flowers, no lovingly crocheted doilies, and still no crosses in sight. Cheap linoleum covered the floor, and a long table testified to the room’s sometimes use as a banquet hall. A half-dozen worn upholstered chairs and two equally worn sofas hugged the walls, which were decorated with photographs of various churches. Curious, I approached for a closer look.

In a photograph so old it had faded to sepia, a teenage version of Reverend Hall stood in front of an ornate church door, next to a grim older man wearing a cassock. His father? Probably, since the resemblance between the two was strong. In another faded picture, this one color, a slightly older Hall stood among a group of ethnically-diverse people near a white bus, with chaparral-sprinkled mountains rising in the background. Other photographs showed him posed in front of a series of churches, chief among them an elegant seaside edifice with a hint of ocean twinkling through Monterey pines.

Most were humbler postings. A wood-planked church nearly eclipsed by oaks draped in Spanish moss; a bare bones church in the middle of a rocky field, and a mud-and-wattle hut in a village surrounded by goats and dark children in African dress. Unlike the bleak cinder block the reverend now served, each managed to present a stoic dignity.

“You have five minutes,” Hall said, closing the parlor door behind me. Once we both settled into sagging chairs, he made a great show of checking his watch.

No time for guard-lowering pleasantries, then. “Okay, Reverend. I’ll be brief. Did anything unusual happen last night?”

“No.”

“Did your daughter act unhappy lately?”

“Nicole was always unhappy.” For all his emotion, he might have been talking about the scuffed linoleum.

I had run across cold men like him before but their frigidity hadn’t annoyed me nearly as much. Some other element seemed to be at work here. “What was bothering her?”

“She was sixteen. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

Having a father like you probably doesn’t help, either
, I wanted to say, but with only four minutes remaining, I didn’t want to spend them trading insults. “Was she active in your church?”

His eyes weren’t just cold, they were mean. “Of course.”

On the other side of a door at the far end of the room, someone began to make coffee. Mrs. Hall? The aroma seeped into the room and due to my near-sleepless night, I could barely restrain myself from falling on my knees and begging for a cup.

The reverend stood up. “If that’s all, I’ll see you to the door.”

I stayed put. “When did you notice Nicole was missing, Reverend?”

He sat back down with ill-concealed impatience. “Not until this morning. When my wife went to wake her, she found her gone, along with her clothes and our new car. I called the sheriff and gave him the license plate number. Do you want that?”

“It would help.”

He checked his watch again. “Buick LeSabre, dark green, Arizona plate MFK 762. Freedom Temple bumper sticker.”

I wrote it down. “Description, please.”

“I already gave it to you. Dark green Buick LeSabre.”

“No, I meant a description of Nicole. Tall? Short? Thin? Plump? Hair color? Any identifying birthmarks, scars, tattoos or piercings?” I added the last to shake him out of his cold calm.

His eyes became slits. “Certainly not!”

I softened my approach to throw him even further off-balance. “Probably due to your good influence. By the way, Reverend, may I see some photographs of her?” He had so many of himself plastered all over the walls, surely dozens of his daughter were stashed somewhere in the parsonage’s private quarters.

Wrong.

“My faith isn’t into self-glorification,” he said, apparently forgetting his own pictures. “I gave Sheriff Avery the only photograph we have, taken at Los Perdidos Elementary when Nicole was twelve. She’s taller now but looks pretty much the same. Long brown hair, brown eyes, pale complexion, about your height. Bigger-boned, though.”

I wrote that down on my notepad. “Braces?”

“As I said before, our faith concentrates on the inner self, not the exterior.”

This from a man whom I suspected had undergone considerable cosmetic surgery. Those pearly whites were capped, too. “What faith is that?” I asked, while writing, NO BRACES.

“Non-denominational.”

“Protestant,” I muttered, writing it down.

He shook his head. “Non-denominational.”

Raising my eyebrows, I gestured with my pen toward the photographs. Crosses were clearly visible on all the church buildings, including the African hut. He had once been a missionary, and not for the First Church of Satan.

“I’ve moved on.”

To what? Some religion he’d invented all by himself? Arizona was filled with nutso cults, but with only two more minutes left on the clock, I didn’t have time to explore his beliefs, and I doubted I’d be thrilled with them, anyway. “Do you have any idea where Nicole might have gone? The names of friends who might be hiding her?”

“None of our friends would be so foolish.”

Remembering that gathering place near the river, I said, “Most teens have friends their parents don’t know.”

“Not Nicole. We’ve been home-schooling her for the past two years.”

I was about to point out that home-schooling needn’t isolate a child, but just then a side door opened and a tall wraith of a woman stepped hesitantly toward us. She might have been pretty once, but her hair had faded to an unattractive gray almost the same color as her eyes, and her height was diminished by rounded shoulders. The dress she wore, a dowdy print that had seen too many washings, sagged on her as if she had recently lost weight. Dots of flour sprinkled her frayed apron.

“Daniel? I heard voices,” she said, almost inaudibly. Her eyes were as pale as her husband’s, but unlike his, they were rimmed in red. At least someone in this household mourned Nicole’s disappearance.

Irritation flickered across Hall’s face. “Didn’t I tell you to stay in the kitchen?”

“But I wanted to…”

“Don’t argue with me, Olivia.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“I’m sorry, Daniel.” She exited, closing the door softly behind her.

Her departure made up my mind. I saw no kidnapping here, only a rebellious teen desperate to escape her bully of a father.

The bully rose to his feet. “Your five minutes are up.”

Realizing there was nothing to be gained by arguing, I rose too. Hall marched me to the door. Before he opened it, he took my hand.

“You need counseling, Miss Jones. That scar harkens back to a troubled past. While we were talking, I noticed that you are somewhere in your thirties—am I right?—yet you wear no wedding ring. Perhaps I can help with whatever is keeping you from maturing into a true woman. Counseling women is my specialty.”

I wouldn’t let him counsel me for a stubbed toe. Not caring if he noticed, I pulled my hand away and wiped it on my jeans.