Desert Lost (9781615952229) (3 page)

“Rosella, the woman was a polygamist.”

“What makes you think that?” Suddenly she sounded wide awake.

“Her hair. Her clothes. Her resemblance to you.”

Rosella was tall, her big-boned frame harkening back to the immigrant Scandinavians who had joined Brigham Young on his trek across the American prairie to the Great Salt Lake. Her face, with features too blunt for true beauty, was a face so common on the compounds that the women could have been cloned. That kind of similarity happened when people interbred with close relatives for more than a hundred years. Frequently, they also shared the same birth defects. Born with all her fingers and toes, Rosella was one of the lucky ones.

“Lena, you sure about this? I mean, how could one of those women wind up down here?”

“
You're
here, aren't you?”

“That's different. After the last beating, I scooped up the baby and ran like hell. I'd never have made it, except Celeste, one of my sister-wives, helped us get out.”

In polygamy parlance, a sister-wife was one of your husband's other wives—if you counted such “marriages” as legal, which they weren't. “Helped how?”

“It was supposed to be my night to spend with the Prophet, but she, uh…” Rosella fell silent. For all her toughness, Rosella was like most ex-sister-wives; uncomfortable talking about sex. Also like the rest of them, she had never been allowed to call him by his given name, not even during their most intimate moments.

“Celeste convinced him to change his mind?”

After clearing her throat, Rosella answered, “Yeah. She knew I wanted to run, so she made sure she was wearing some dress he especially liked. Blue calico with red flowers. And she kind of, well, wiggled her hips when he came over to…Anyway, she got him thinkin' about her instead of me. That's when I ran.”

It was rare for one sister-wife to help another escape, but not unknown. “Have you heard any rumors lately about Shupe's activities? Other than those armaments caches he's supposedly bunkered near the Utah border?”

I could almost hear Rosella's head shake through the phone. “Nope. The kids I pick up aren't much in the mood for talkin' and I'm too busy drivin' to cross-examine them.”

Chances were the runaways would know little about Shupe's expansion plans, but I still had to ask. “Do you know anything about new satellite compounds he's started? I've heard he's been setting them up all over the place—Texas, Colorado, Missouri, Canada. Think he might try for Scottsdale?”

She laughed. “
Scottsdale
? C'mon, Lena, that's nuts.”

I wasn't so sure. When Rosella ran, she had changed from her long-skirted dress into baggy jeans, the better to navigate the rough desert terrain around Second Zion. Most of the runaways did the same, leaving their cumbersome dresses at the compound. The dead woman had still been wearing hers. The woman was no teenager, either. By their late twenties, most sister-wives had already accepted their fate and were trying to make the best of it. Even if they still wanted to run, they had borne too many children to carry across the desert, and couldn't bring themselves to leave them behind.

When I shared my thoughts with Rosella, the laughter stopped. “Okay, so the dead woman probably wasn't a runner. But as for there bein' some sort of satellite compound in Scottsdale, where would Prophet Shupe hide it? Up at Grayhawk, near the book club ladies? Over at the Boulders, so the golfers could gawk? When he sets up satellite compounds, they're always in the boonies. He may have been getting crazier these past few years, but I'm sure he still understands that he can't get by with his shit in Scottsdale. Too public.”

A vision of razor-wired fencing fronted by thick plantings of eight-foot-tall oleanders flashed across my mind.

Chapter Four

After emailing the woman's picture to Rosella's computer, I called my old friend Sergeant Vic Falcone at Scottsdale PD headquarters. Vic's quick action had kept me from bleeding to death after I was shot in that ill-fated drug raid. Someone had once told me an old American Indian belief held that when you saved a person's life, you became responsible for that person ever after. Vic might have originally hailed from Jersey City, but when it came to me he acted mighty Indian.

“I hear you had a run-in with Dagny Ulrich over a DB last night,” he said. “Better watch yourself, kid.”

Still
kid
, after all these years. I pictured Vic's sharp-featured Sicilian face, gentled by soft brown eyes. “What was she doing at the crime scene, anyway?”

“You don't know?”

“That wasn't a rhetorical question.”

“She was there because she's left orders to be alerted whenever you turn up connected to something. Anything. Homicide, parking ticket, whatever. When you called in that body dump, she couldn't get out the door fast enough. Like I said, watch yourself.”

“Thanks for the warning. Now about that DB. Any info yet on the woman's identity?” I already knew
what
she was, but the specific
who
remained in question. Rosella would sleep for another couple of hours, then fire up the computer to look at the photo I'd just emailed her. In the meantime I wanted to know what Scottsdale PD knew.

Vic lowered his voice, which probably meant that Dagny was near. “Nothing so far. The woman had no ID on her, and AFIS doesn't have her prints on file. The buzz around the station is that she might be some kind of actress.”

Ah, because of the woman's nineteenth-century “prairie” dress. Almost fifty small theater groups were sprinkled throughout the Phoenix/Scottsdale metroplex, and the surrounding county boasted a couple of Old West theme parks featuring OK Corral reenactments. There were also a few Scottsdale shop-keepers who, during high tourist season, dressed in Western drag. To believe the dead woman was one of them made more sense than the truth. Besides, Scottsdale PD had zilch experience with polygamists. Lucky them.

“Dagny's going to have her cleaned up so she can post a photo online, right?” I asked.
After she'd had the woman's tell-tale hairdo washed and re-arranged to hide that big dent in her skull
.

“Already done. You know how efficient the lieutenant is.”

We chatted for a few more minutes, then I let him go and checked my watch. Noon. Leaving Jimmy to the culinary joys of his brown bag lunch, I took the stairs up to my apartment.

When I'd moved in several years earlier, everything had been beige, from carpet to paint to furniture. The only spots of color had been a yellow-and-black clown Kachina doll lounging on the window sill and the black satin toss pillow with red embroidered lettering that said, “Welcome to the Philippines.” I'd stolen the pillow from my fourth foster home because they were nice people and I wanted something to remember them by.

Last year, after finally accepting that this was my home, I'd tricked out the place in neo-Cowgirl, adding a saguaro-rib sofa upholstered in a bright Navajo print, a red Lone Ranger and Tonto bedspread, and two turquoise-shaded lamps with bases shaped like horses' heads. The Philippines pillow was still there, though. I don't let go of the past. Which is, my therapist never tires of telling me, part of my problem.

I sidestepped a pyramid of empty packing crates and went into the kitchen to nuke a Styrofoam container of ramen noodles. That done, I slid an old blues album on the turntable. The vinyl was one of my favorites: Fred McDowell, his hair-raising slide guitar work audio-taped in his own living room by musicologist Chris Strachwitz. While the old master growled his way through “You Gotta Move,” I slurped down ramen and thought about polygamy.

Most people didn't know that more than fifty thousand polygamists currently live in the Southwest. Every now and then their self-styled prophets, most of them every bit as crazy as Prophet Hiram Shupe, made the six o'clock news when they got caught performing forced underage marriages, but normally the prophets shunned publicity. Their lifestyles were illegal, of course, as were their common practices of child rape, battering, welfare fraud, and witness intimidation. But, hey, God was on their side, right? The very thought that these Taliban-types might be moving their mess to Scottsdale put me off my ramen.

I was standing in the bedroom, surveying the packing cartons and wondering where to start, when my cell rang.

“Better get over here.” Rosella. Fully awake.

“You know who she is?”

“Not on the phone.” With that, she hung up.

***

Rosella lived in the Garfield Historical District of Phoenix, an in-transition neighborhood where gentrified homes hunkered next to dilapidated cottages too far gone to be anything but tear-downs. After establishing a successful in-home medical transcription business, she'd bought a two-bedroom adobe at a bargain basement price, and after five years, was still renovating. As I exited my Jeep, I noted the house's slow Hyde-into-Jekyll transformation. Old siding, new doors and windows, two sparkling brass carriage lamps flanking a crumbling cement porch.

Before I could raise my hand to knock, the new oak door opened. “Come in. Quick.”

Stymied by her paranoia, I darted a quick look around but saw only several African-American children playing hopscotch, and a homeless Hispanic pushing his garbage bag-filled cart down the sidewalk. As soon as I was inside, Rosella slammed and double-locked the door behind me.

“What's going on, Rosella?”

She shoved the printout of the dead woman's photo into my hand. “That's Celeste King, my cousin, my former sister-wife. She's the one who helped me escape from Second Zion.”

In that community, it was common for cousins—mothers and daughters, even—to marry the same man, but since the “marriages” were legally nonexistent, they kept their maiden names. “Are you telling me the dead woman is one of Shupe's wives?”

“She was the last time I saw her, but if she's down here, he's probably reassigned her to someone else.” I noticed for the first time the redness of her eyes. She'd known the woman, and loved her. “Oh, Lena. I owe everything to Celeste,
everything
. My freedom. My sanity. Celeste getting killed in Scottsdale means something downright strange is happenin'. Men like Prophet Shupe don't let their women leave the compounds on their own, not ever. And if she ever decided to sneak off, well, I would have been the one to pick her up. I mean, damn, that's what I
do!
”

From somewhere in the back of the house, a girl's voice rose in song: KariAnn, Rosella's sixteen-year-old daughter, home from the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind on spring break. Despite the tension of the moment, I smiled. Her voice was a sweet soprano, but flat. The deaf often have trouble hitting the right notes.

Seeing the direction of my glance, Rosella managed a smile, too.

“That latest poem, she get it published?” I asked.

“In
Highlights Magazine
, no less. Now she's settin' it to music using some kinda mathematical formula she found on that website for people in the beginning stages of Usher's. Who'd a thunk music is math.”

KariAnn suffered from Usher's Syndrome, a common product of generations of incest. Like profound mental retardation, this particular genetic combination of deafness and blindness was endemic on the polygamy compounds. The prophets loved it because the handicap guaranteed the sufferer SSI payments for life, yet the disease left the girls fertile enough to breed more Usher's kids. Cash cows squared.

Rosella closed the door to her daughter's room, then led me into the living room, which was further along in the renovation process than the house's exterior. Pale yellow walls contrasted with polished oak floorboards, and bright patterned throws covered the reupholstered sofa and armchair Jimmy and I had helped her lug home from Goodwill. The lemony scent of furniture polish filled the small room.

As I settled myself on the chair, she said, “One of us has to tell the cops.”

“Right.”

“But, uh, as you know, I try and stay away from them.”

“Right.”

“Because of any kidnap charges that might be pendin'.”

“Right.” One of the problems with helping young women escape was that they were so often minors, therefore still legally under their parents' control. Under Arizona statutes, helping a minor hide from his or her lawful custodial parent was custodial interference at best, kidnapping at worst. Since Rosella had been implicated in dozens of “custodial interference” cases, the county attorney, who boasted polygamists in his own family tree, had set his sights on the more serious charge. For the same reasons, the state attorney general didn't like Rosella, either. My friend was one warrant away from a jail cell. Add to this the numerous death threats that had been leveled against her by Hiram Shupe's God Squad, and Rosella's paranoia wasn't merely understandable, it was smart.

“How about an anonymous phone tip? There's a pay phone over by the Ranch Market.”

“Two blocks from my house? The cops ain't dumb. Look, all they need is Celeste's name, then they can do the rest. There's some phones outside that Circle K on Forty-Fourth Street. Call on your way back to Scottsdale and disguise your voice.”

A pointless caution in the day of voice recognition systems, not to mention the fact that my retrofitted 1946 Jeep, painted front bumper to back with Pima Indian symbols, was memorable. Still, I could see little harm in calling in the tip. Celeste King's life had been cruel enough without letting her lie unidentified in the cool room down at the county morgue.

“Give me a dollar, Rosella.”

She grabbed her purse and pulled one out. “This means I'm your client?”

“For what it's worth.”

Down the hall, her daughter's tuneless singing continued. Something about aspens trembling in the wind.

***

After making the call from the Circle K, I drove back to the office on surface streets, along the Hispanic neighborhood on eastern McDowell with its used furniture stores and payday loan rip-offs, past the National Guard Armory at the western edge of Papago Park, then cruised through the big sandstone buttes into Scottsdale proper.

Here's the thing about Scottsdale: it really is beautiful, an oasis in the middle of a harsh land. But being surrounded daily by beauty can scald your eyes blind. Our City Council's aesthetic shortcomings prove this.

Lined with lofty palms and blooming flowers, Scottsdale city center is called Old Town, a determinedly Old West neighborhood which has sung its siren song to Minnesota and Canadian tourists for decades. Jammed up against the art galleries and Indian jewelry boutiques were a full assortment of upscale bars and restaurants. Walking Old Town's streets—where Desert Investigations happens to be located—can be a joy because this oddball conglomeration of the old and the new somehow works. However, just before you turn north off McDowell and head into Old Town, you have to confront SkySong, the City Council's current financial darling. A one-point-two million-square-foot cathedral dedicated to the combined religions of modern technology and gimmee-gimmee retail, this architectural sour note looked more like two huge caskets fronted by four equally-huge, upside-down toilet plungers.

This is what can happen when you let beauty-blind politicians make artistic decisions.

I winced my way past SkySong and headed toward Desert Investigations. There I found Jimmy still working his way through background checks for Southwest MicroSystems. He switched gears the moment I asked him to look up Prophet Hiram Shupe. Having once loved a polygamy runaway and experienced firsthand the damage that had been done to her, he hated the prophets as much as I did.

Less than a half hour later, he slapped a thick printout of articles on my desk.

It made for grim reading.

According to some compound escapees, Prophet Shupe had recently stepped up blood atonement enforcement for anyone sinning against him personally or against compound rules. Those rules encompassed everything from diet (meat no more than once a week, except for Shupe and his God Squad); sexual behavior (missionary position only, husband on top of wives); to financial misdeeds (men attempting to hang onto their salaries, women to their welfare checks). Blood atonement meant death, but since Second Zion was surrounded by vast, empty desert, no bodies had ever been found.

As I read on, I grew more and more alarmed.

Not content with ruling over the intimidated citizens of Second Zion, Shupe had stepped up the establishment of new compounds, and was even rumored to be in the planning stages of yet another in central Arizona. Supposedly, a senior member of his God Squad had been dispatched to help. This flurry of expansion was necessary, one newspaper article claimed, because given Second Zion's high birth rate, it was bursting at the seams.

“Jimmy? Did you read this stuff before you printed it?”

“That last line's the kicker, isn't it? A satellite compound in Central Arizona could mean anywhere from Wickenburg to Casa Grande. Or any place in between.”

“Like Scottsdale.”

I couldn't let that happen.

***

I was still studying Jimmy's printout when the door opened and Warren walked in carrying a clipboard. As always, he looked good. Honey-colored hair, sky-blue eyes, and a fit, nervy build. Even on close inspection he appeared closer to thirty than the forty-one he admitted to.

“Ready, Lena?”

“Ready for what?”

His perfect mouth twisted into a wry smile as he tapped the clipboard. “It's three o'clock. Time for our appointment with the realtor to take measurements at the house. Don't tell me you forgot.”

It's possible that
forgot
wasn't the right word. Somehow I just couldn't seem to wrap my mind around the fact that I was moving in with him. “Can we do this tomorrow, instead?”