Jude Devine Mystery Series (14 page)

“It’s not an internal situation. Darlene was a Colorado girl.”

“I’m talking about their religion.”

“But these polygamist sects aren’t mainstream Mormons. The church disassociated itself from them a long time ago.”

“Yeah, well. They sure don’t like the public looking into that particular relationship, and you can see their point. Those crazies in Colorado City are a big embarrassment.”

“Because they’re a snapshot of what the Mormon church used to be before they reinvented themselves?”

“In a nutshell, yes. I gotta tell you, there’s not a whole lot of separation between church and state in Utah.”

“The Iran of the Southwest, huh?”

“Some parts more than others, but you got the general idea.”

“Point taken. So, I guess that means they won’t just hand Epperson over if we ask nicely, so we’re stuck with having to make this happen our own way.”

Pratt muttered something. Jude guessed he could see the hole he’d dug for himself. She waited for him to come up with some delay tactics. Instead he grumbled, “What are we supposed to tell those idiots camped out in front of the town hall? The last thing we need is a pack of embedded reporters tagging along for the ride.”

“We don’t have to tell them anything.”

Last she’d heard, they were more interested in the rumors about Mercy and the British actress than the hunt for Darlene’s killer. Half of them had left Cortez and were now sniffing around the medical examiner’s office in Grand Junction.

“I want you back here in three days,” Pratt said.

“So, I have your approval to make an arrest if the evidence is there, sir?”

“Let’s not pretend you need my approval for anything you do, Devine.” Pratt lowered his voice to a harried murmur. “Any idea when you’ll be out of here? I mean, in regards to your real…mission?”

“I wish I could discuss that. I truly do.”

“If it’s a nuclear situation, I don’t want to be the last to know. Is that too much to ask?”

Jude guessed he’d tried to make that sound like dry humor, but fell short of the mark. “I promise you, sir. If I ever think there’s a reason to evacuate this area, I’ll tell you. Protocol or not.”

At this reassurance, he went pale. “So you’re saying there
is
something going down?”

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Jude sighed. “Not that I’m aware of at this time.”

“Nothing would surprise me. We got ourselves some real nuts out here.”

“We surely do. And on that subject, what can you tell me about those Utah folks who bought the ranch outside of Mancos?”

“Lot of money and a lot of womenfolk. You know my position—if they don’t ask for trouble, they won’t get any.”

“They weren’t too cooperative when we called around there last week.” They’d interviewed all the Huntsbergers’ neighbors, in fact, most of Mancos, asking if anyone remembered seeing a white minivan hanging around before Darlene disappeared. The new residents hadn’t been living there at the time but had reacted to the routine questions with extreme paranoia.

“Yeah, I heard,” Pratt said. “The boys thought they must have stumbled onto a methamphetamine lab.”

“Is there anything we can hold over them so they’ll quit with the sons of perdition crap and answer some questions?”

Pratt took time out from mangling his cigarette pack. “They’ve applied for a building permit. Paid the urgent processing fee.”

“I wonder if they made all the necessary disclosures.”

“Insufficient information…yeah, that’s a problem.” Pratt ran with the ball. “Can’t get approval if you’re not telling the whole truth. They wouldn’t let the assessor into any of the existing buildings, so what’s the guy supposed to think?”

“You can bet they’re exceeding occupancy levels,” Jude said. “Maybe approval has to be delayed while additional evidence of purpose is gathered.”

“I’m guessing they won’t be holding a parade once they hear the news. Better free up a couple of deputies to accompany the building inspector, just in case.”

“Wise idea. That’s the kind of situation that can get heated.”

“You bet. So, what do you want from them?”

“Everything they can tell us about Nathaniel Epperson and this power struggle that seems to be going on in the FLDS.”

“Which stands for what?”

“Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints. That’s the biggest of the polygamist factions that broke away from the Mormon church.”

“Beats me how they manage,” Pratt marveled. “It’s all I can do to make one wife happy.”

“I seriously doubt any of these men give a crap about their wives’ happiness,” Jude said. “This is just white slavery by another name.”

Pratt seemed lost in thought. “Darned if I know what we can do about that kid you brought in,” he said eventually. “We get them drifting through here, panhandling and sniffing substances. Stealing goddamn cars from the Ute, who, by the way, get called Lammanites by our friends in Utah. Whatever that means. Anyway, half of them don’t have birth certificates or social security numbers. No one knows what to do with them.”

“Well, Zach’s a key witness.”

“Not to the murder.”

“If we get this to trial, he’ll testify to the mutilation.”

“What are you proposing?”

“Protective custody without the paperwork.”

“Keep talking.”

“I don’t want his family to know we have him. Tulley has volunteered to accommodate him for a while, and I’m going to see about getting his education started again.”

“I thought you were taking Deputy Tulley to Utah with you.”

“Agatha will keep an eye on Zach while we’re away.”

“You don’t think he’ll get skittish?”

“I think he’ll stay where the food is.” Jude took a few sheets of paper from her satchel and slid them across the desk to Pratt. “This is his medical report. Not for the faint-hearted.”

Pratt skimmed the top couple of pages then slid his chair back to peer through the Venetian blinds to the outer office, where Zach was devouring a pizza. “God damn. Is this for real?”

“Which part? The tapeworm? The old fractures…the starvation…the scars on his back? The semi-castration…”

He faced her again and this time the pained resignation was gone and a grim anger had replaced it. “These people are vermin and we’re going to put some of them behind bars. I don’t know how the heck we’re going to get them extradited, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Jude shared his pessimism. While Zach was sleeping that morning, she’d done some homework and learned that, with a few high-profile exceptions like Tom Green, polygamists were seldom brought to trial in Utah. The state seemed to be run by a small number of genealogically connected men who publicly distanced themselves from the fundamentalists but allowed them to operate unchallenged. In recent times, the new attorney general had signaled an end to Utah’s indifference and had frozen the assets of the FLDS sect. But there hadn’t been the flood of arrests antipolygamy activists were hoping for. If justice was to be done, Epperson and his wife would have to be convicted in Colorado.

“All we need to prove is that they kidnapped Darlene and took her across state lines. Then we can involve the feds,” she said.

“Any idea where she was murdered?”

“We don’t have a crime scene, as yet. If we can get the Eppersons in for questioning based on Zach’s statement about the assault, maybe one of them will make a slipup.”

Pratt made a sound halfway between a laugh and an asthma attack. “You think the Rapture sheriff is going to let you run that interview in his office?”

“I guess I’ll just have to persuade him. They want to keep the polygamy stuff out of the newspapers. That’s a lever we can use.”

“Good luck with that.” Pratt glanced down at the medical report again. “Utah’s not going to like this. Not one little bit.”

“I’m up for it. Are you?”

Pratt sighed. “We already let that family down once. We’re not doing it a second time.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “When I look Clem Huntsberger in the eye I want to be able to tell him we did everything we could.”

Jude got to her feet, mildly surprised by his determination. She hadn’t been sure if Pratt would have the balls to ride shotgun on this case. He’d been distinctly uneasy when she first briefed him on Zach a few days earlier, insisting that they didn’t have a smoking gun and just because it sounded like Diantha was Darlene, they had no proof. Jude had half expected she would have to sidestep him and take what she had straight to the FBI field office in Denver. It was good to discover he had a spine, after all.

“I’ll keep you posted,” she said. “Thank you, sir.”

He shot her warning look. “Be careful. People like them think they’re above the laws of man. They think they’ve got God on hold. That’s according to my wife.”

“Well, God isn’t going to help them this time.”

If some bunch of child-abusing, dog-massacring wackjobs thought they could hide behind religion to justify their crimes, Jude had news for them.

The morning began with a dream, the kind that hovers just out of memory’s reach. The moment Jude awoke, she knew it was about Ben, and almost as soon as she’d acknowledged that, the shutters of her mind closed, leaving her straining to recall what she had glimpsed.

Sometimes, in the days after these dreams, tiny fragments would flutter across her thoughts. She was always quick to trap these in the net of her consciousness, adding them to the disjointed mosaic that never quite became a clear picture. In her idle moments, she would arrange and rearrange every piece of the puzzle, searching for a secret code that would unlock their meaning. She had done the same with the facts of the case a thousand times over.

Ben had vanished three weeks after he turned twelve. Her memories of him were filed as neatly as entries in a Webster’s dictionary, a consequence of her frequent recourse to them. Their reliable sequence comforted her. The memory of wheeling him in his stroller when she could not reach the handles, of climbing into his cot with him. They had been natural allies, separated from their older siblings by five years—an eternity, it seemed back then.

Ben was born in 1970, the year Nixon sent troops into Vietnam and National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of protestors at Kent State. According to the Fifth Dimension it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Jude’s dad always said they were “crazy times” and talked about “damn hippies.” Her mom sounded wistful when she mentioned those days, which was seldom. She couldn’t talk about Ben for more than a minute or two before taking refuge in chatter about something she just saw on the television .

Jude remembered his hair, fine white fluff that smelled of baby soap. She remembered being told off for biting his toes. She remembered taking him to school on his first day, teaching him to ride a bike, going to his Boy Scout events. Together, they had built the tree house they escaped to when their parents were fighting. They had not had time to become enemies. She had never had to put up with a pain-in-the-butt younger brother who humiliated her in front of cool friends. Ben always seemed a little younger than his age, as boys often did before the testosterone kicked in. He was gone before his Adam’s apple appeared.

Jude got out of bed, telling herself not to go there. What was the point in shuffling the same hand of cards over and over? She could change nothing. The facts were the facts. He had vanished. The case was still open. Her single-minded quest to solve it had led her to law enforcement, a degree in criminology, the FBI. She often wondered if she would have made those choices had things been different.