Desert Lost (9781615952229) (2 page)

Chapter Three

I slept in the next morning, which created no problem because Jimmy Sisiwan, my Pima Indian partner at Desert Investigations, always beat me to the office. But I showered, dressed, and breakfasted quickly just the same, hoping the routine of the day would chase away last night's grim memories.

When I finally did make it downstairs to our two-desk front office, Jimmy looked up from his computer, his curved tribal tattoo gleaming against his dark forehead. Orphaned at an early age, he'd been adopted by a Mormon family and raised in that faith. By the time he'd graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in computer science, however, he'd begun delving into his Pima Indian heritage. Following the genetic call, he moved back to the reservation, learned the old language, and tatted himself up like an eighteenth-century Pima warrior.

His soul may have been Indian, but his computer skills were pure Techno-Wizardry.

“Catch any taggers last night?” White teeth flashed from his handsome, reddish-brown face. A glance at his computer screen showed me he was in the middle of another batch of background checks for Southwest MicroSystems.

“A murder victim got in the way.” I filled him in on the dead woman and my suspicions.

“Polygamists? In Scottsdale? Doesn't sound plausible to me.”

“She had all the signs, Jimmy. Clothing, hair, the whole bit.”

He shook his head, more in sorrow than doubt. “Wonder what she was doing all the way down here.”

When I brought out my digital camera and showed him the pictures, he widened his eyes. “Either I'm imagining things, or she looks an awful lot like Rosella!”

Rosella Borden, one of my closest friends, was a former sister-wife who'd escaped from one of the compounds fifteen years earlier, taking her baby daughter with her. She now used her knowledge to help vulnerable girls escape before they could be forced into becoming the plural wives of elderly men. “Don't worry, that's not Rosella. But she could easily be a relation.”

“No kidding. A half-sister, maybe, or a cousin.”

“The problem is, since so many of these polygamists look alike, the victim might be only distantly related. Maybe she's even from a different compound, one of those satellite things Prophet Hiram Shupe keeps setting up, so it's possible Rosella and the dead woman didn't know each other at all.” Which is what I hoped, since most murder victims were killed by their nearest and dearest, and when threatened—even by her relatives—Rosella could play rough.

“You'd better call her, Lena. She'll want to know.”

And she could help with the I.D. “Right. But yesterday she called and told me she was headed toward Second Zion to pick up a couple of runaways, that if I don't hear from her within twenty-four hours, to alert DPS.”

Rosella wasn't being paranoid. Prophet Shupe didn't appreciate people who helped his cash cows break out of the pasture. The God Squad, his private police force, obeyed his every command, and it was rumored that he wanted my friend dead.

I did some quick math. If Rosella left Scottsdale before six and cheated the speed limit all the way to Second Zion, she could have arrived around midnight. The girls would be waiting for her in some agreed-upon desert canyon. It would take around a half hour to hike them out and get back on the road, six ticket-risking hours for the drive back, then another hour to get them settled in a Phoenix safe house. If the rescue went according to schedule, Rosella could possibly be in her own bed by nine a.m. I checked my watch. Nine-thirty. Waving a hovering Jimmy away, I dialed her home number, but it switched over to voice mail. I left a quick message, then tried her cell. Same thing.

“She's probably sleeping,” Jimmy said. “Try again in a few minutes. Or if you want, I can drive to her house right now and roust her.”

In case the victim was Rosella's sister—she had at least thirty—I wanted my friend to get as much rest as possible before confronting grief. “I'll go over there in a couple of hours.” That said, I began returning phone calls from the lame, the halt, and the heartbroken.

I'd started Desert Investigations right after leaving Scottsdale PD, having learned the hard way that following a superior officer's orders could be dangerous to my health. Running a P. I. business had turned out not to be the safest profession, either, but at least I was my own boss.

In the beginning, Jimmy had brought in the bulk of Desert Investigation's income via his pre-employment background checks for various corporations. But due to my involvement in a murder investigation that took place on an Arizona film set, I'd been hired as a consultant for a television series.
Desert Eagle
, so-named for the big handgun its Cherokee private detective carried, was partially filmed here, necessitating that I attend only one Los Angeles production meeting a week. While I disliked the travel, the retainer was so exorbitant that my contributions to Desert Investigations' coffers now topped Jimmy's. Ordinarily, I would fly to Los Angeles every Friday morning for a production meeting, but due to the current writers' strike, the series was on hiatus. In the meantime, I busied myself with the standard P.I. cases.

My first client call of the morning was to Emily Glendenning, a wealthy, fiftyish widow who wanted to believe she'd met the man of her dreams on the tennis court at one of the local resorts. After doing a basic background check and then following her European heartthrob around town for a few days, I needed to deliver some bad news. Werner Emil Hoffman, supposedly born in East Berlin, where as a teenager he had heroically braved Soviet guns while leading an escape party over the Berlin Wall, was a phony. Actually born in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, his real name was Antonio Nezniacu, and he made a living by fleecing women like Emily. He did, however, have an ear for languages, and during his various scams, had picked up enough German to fool non-German speakers.

Emily's reaction was straightforward, if sad. “I'll give him his walking papers tonight.”

I felt a spike of alarm. “Maybe I'd better be there when you do.” Although Nezniacu's background revealed no propensity for violence, in this crazy world a woman could never be too careful.

“No need. Baby Brian's coming over.”

Having met her son, the youngest of five, I had to smile. Her twenty-seven-year-old “baby” was six-foot-four with the build of a Hollywood action hero, and one look at him would scare the much-shorter Nezniacu into submission. “Just make sure Baby Brian plays nice.”

A laugh, welcome under the circumstances. “I'll try, but you know how kids are these days. Can't tell 'em a damned thing.”

The rest of the morning passed in much the same way, delivering a mixture of bad news and good. Henny was disappointed that I hadn't caught the taggers who'd been plaguing The RV Corral, but sensible as always, she understood that a murder victim trumped messed-up RVs. When she asked if I planned to resume my vigil that night, I told her the taggers probably wouldn't come back.

“Now that the area has become a higher-profile crime scene, the kids will move on to safer territory.”

“You really think so?” Her voice sounded jagged from living too many years spent smoking too many cartons of unfiltered Camels.

I reaffirmed there was an eighty to eight-five percent chance they were gone for good, and with that, we parted on friendly terms. Before I could place my next call, the phone rang in my hand: Warren, calling from the real estate office.

“The lease is signed, and Beth says we can move into the house tomorrow, if we wish. You finished packing yet?”

I'd met Warren when he was filming
Escape Across the Desert
, a documentary about the Phoenix prisoner of war camp for German U-Boat crewmen during World War II. With his blond, surfer-boy looks, he was handsome enough to be an actor, but after a few minor roles, he'd found he preferred the other side of the camera. And, eventually, fact to fiction. The latter decision had worked well for him. One of his documentaries,
Native Peoples, Foreign Chains
, about the near-extermination of American Indians, had won an Oscar. The son and grandson of movie directors, he was as Hollywood as they come, yet we were moving in together. Because he disliked being separated from his eight-year-old twin daughters who lived in Beverly Hills with his actress ex-wife, he'd kept his home there so he could be within shouting distance of them for at least one week every month. Except, of course, when he was filming in some exotic location: Saudi Arabia, Mozambique, New York.

Just hearing his voice made my heart smile, but I tried to disguise it. Unabashed adoration isn't good for anyone, especially handsome men. “Packing? I'm getting there.”

Actually, I hadn't packed so much as one carton. Now in my mid-thirties, I had not lived with anyone since turning eighteen. A childhood spent in foster homes was probably responsible for that, but to be honest, I knew other ex-fosters who had no trouble forming permanent relationships. Most, though, hadn't been raped repeatedly by a foster father at the age of nine.

“Exactly how many boxes have you packed?” Warren was clearly suspicious.

“I can't remember.”

“You do intend to move in with me, don't you?”

I took a deep breath. “Of course I do. I'm halfway packed.”

“Tell me the truth, Lena.”

Counting to ten, I exhaled slowly. “It's just that I haven't done anything like this before.”
And it's scaring the hell out of me.

His voice softened. “Why don't we handle it like this, then? Go ahead and keep your apartment. If at any point you feel our situation isn't working, your place will still be there for you.”

“Maybe I'll do that.” No point in revealing that from the start, I'd planned to keep my apartment upstairs from my office. Changing lifestyles was one thing, burning bridges was another.

“Now remember, I'm picking you up at the office at three o'clock so we can take some measurements at the house. Beth will meet us there.”

“You don't have to keep reminding me.”

“Could have fooled me.”

We talked for a little while longer, but when I hung up, Jimmy was giving me the Evil Eye.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

“I'm smarter than that,” he muttered, turning back to his keyboard.

Jimmy didn't think Warren was right for me. Even worse, he thought I was wrong for Warren.
Oil and water
, he'd once said.
Cactus and neon
. On my good days, I believed Jimmy was just being petty; on bad days, I agreed with him. But this wasn't the time to start worrying about relationship complications, so I dialed Rosella again. To my relief, she picked up.

In a voice fogged with exhaustion, she said, “Jesus, woman. You coulda let me sleep. I didn't get to bed ‘til after eight this morning.”

“Have you seen the newspaper?”

“Brought it in, didn't look at it. Reading the comics isn't on my to do list. Last night I delivered those Second Zion runaways to that safe house on the west side. Prophet Shupe was goin' to give them to his four-hundred-pound uncle, and the kids were so grossed out they'd made a suicide pact. Hell, they already had the gun! I took it away from them, so now I've got another firearm for my collection. Now let me get back to sleep, okay? I had myself a pretty good dream goin' there. Prophet Shupe dead, with a stake through his heart.”

A good dream by any sane person's standards. Since inheriting leadership of Second Zion from his father, Hiram Shupe—who just happened to be Rosella's ex-husband—had issued increasingly bizarre prophecies, most of them concerning the End of Days. Six times he'd led his followers out into the desert after convincing them he knew the exact day and minute God would “rapture” them up to Heaven. Each time God let him down, and Shupe herded his dehydrated flock back to Second Zion. Following God's continued no-shows, Shupe arrived at the conclusion that the inhabitants of Second Zion were too sinful for rapture. After several months of pondering the problem, he discovered a novel way to cleanse his followers' souls. Their chief sin, he'd decided, was idolatry. His followers cared too much for each other and not enough for him. After all, wasn't he, Prophet Hiram Shupe, The Living Presence of God on Earth, the only rightful object of anyone's affection?

So several years ago, Shupe, The Living Presence of God on Earth, began breaking up families. He moved the women and children into dormitories, and the men into smaller bachelors' quarters. Breeding rights changed, too. Brother James now had sex with Brother Silas' harem, and Brother Silas took on Brother Peter's women, so on and so on, until every family unit in the compound had been dissolved. There had been some grumbling, but on the whole, Shupe's brainwashed followers obeyed. Those that didn't were never seen again.

When God still didn't rapture Second Zion up to Heaven, Shupe discovered yet another solution. He ordered the compound's pets—puppies, kittens, hamsters, goldfish, whatever—killed. God had told him, he claimed, that the children used their pets as false idols, giving them the devotion that was rightfully due The Living Presence of God on Earth. After the roar of guns stopped, my informants told me, the only sounds you could hear were children sobbing.

But I didn't see how Prophet Shupe, crazy as he might be, could have anything to do with the dead woman, Second Zion being three hundred-plus miles north of Scottsdale.

Rosella might have heard something, though. Out of sheer self-defense, she kept an eye on her ex-husband's whereabouts.

“The newspaper, Rosella. Read the story on page three, bottom of the fold. They managed to get it in just before deadline.”

After a few mumbled curses, I heard paper rustling, a brief silence, then, “All I see's some blurb about a woman's body bein' dumped in south Scottsdale. Is that what you mean? Since you woke me up, you gotta think there's a connection between me and the, what do you call it, the DB, the dead body? Hell, Lena, if I ever kill anyone, it'll be Prophet Shupe, the bastard.”