Jude Devine Mystery Series (15 page)

Before Ben disappeared, they had talked about going to school together one day, training to be pilots, having their own plane so any time they wanted they could fly away to some glamorous destination. The pyramids. The Amazon. The Australian outback. Jude still had the dress-up pilot uniforms their mother had made for them. She had never worn hers again after the day that changed everything. It was folded away, along with her childhood. From that moment on, her compass had been fixed on a different pole. On each anniversary of his disappearance, she told her mother the same thing—that she would find him if it was the last thing she ever did. Lately, the promise sounded hollow.

Jude hung over the basin in her bathroom and scrubbed her teeth. There had been times when she’d thought she was close to a breakthrough. But nothing had ever panned out. Ben’s trail was stone cold. She knew she should find some way to let go. That was part of the reason she had left the Crimes Against Children unit and moved into intelligence work, part of the reason she had relocated. She was thirty-six. It was time she came to terms with what had happened and moved on with her life like a rational person. Her older sister and brother had done so long ago. Even her parents seemed to have let go now. Selling the house had been a big step for them.

Jude had thought about buying it, if only for the tree house, but her mom had kicked up a fuss and in the end, Jude had accepted they all needed to let the place go. Her parents had held on to it for almost twenty years, frightened to leave in case Ben came home one day and they weren’t there. Jude supposed they’d finally accepted that the day they’d prayed for was never going to happen—that Ben was dead. She should accept it too, and she’d tried, but hope had a complex root system. No matter how determinedly she hacked away at it, it refused to die. Without a grave to visit, she could not say good-bye and believe it.

She showered, dried, and wandered across the oak floorboards, her damp feet making satiny prints on the polished surface. She stared out the bedroom window for a few minutes, numbly seeking consolation in the view. The FBI had found a house for her a few miles out of Montrose. It was originally someone’s rustic mountain retreat, built before the area was infested with trend-hounds buying up accommodation in what realtors loved to call “the Switzerland of America.” Because of its age, it lacked the pretensions of many newer homes in the area. No hot tub, no marble bathrooms, no cobblestone fireplaces or theater room, or multilevel lofts.

Jude enjoyed its woody simplicity and the inescapable views of the Uncompahgre Plateau, and after ten years in an apartment building in Adams Morgan, she loved the privacy. The house was set back from the road on a few acres of sparse forest. Jude still couldn’t get used to living in a place where you checked for bears and mountain lions before working in the yard.

She moved away from the window and took some underwear from the top drawer of her Welsh chest, making a point of ignoring the picture she kept there—an artist’s rendition of how Ben might look as an adult. There was no need to refresh her memory. She automatically compared every male face she saw, searching for a match.

After she’d dressed, she made coffee and stared at her phone. Mercy had finally returned her last call. Jude replayed the message.

“It’s Mercy.” The voice was tight. “Next week is kind of difficult. My father is having a rough time. But dinner some time sounds like a good idea. I’ll call you.”

Discreet? Lukewarm?
I’ll call you.
Did that mean:
don’t call me
? Jude wanted to be a human being and phone back to say she was sorry about her father, and offer help, as people did. Mercy had no one; that’s what she’d said. Yet the tone of her voice seemed discouraging. Jude listened one more time, trying to picture the facial expression that would have accompanied the words. She didn’t know Mercy well enough to guess. The only boxes she could tick with any certainty were: professional, flirtatious, and orgasmic.

Still, only a self-centered jerk would not call a woman she’d slept with whose father was dying. Preparing herself for a frosty reception, she dialed Mercy’s cell phone. To her astonishment, a woman answered in a British accent.

“Hello. Dr Westmoreland’s phone.” The voice was husky from sleep, or who knew what else.

Jude checked her wristwatch and collected her wits. A sexy-sounding foreign stranger was answering Mercy’s phone at 6:30 a.m. It had to be the actress.

She rolled out her serious cop voice. “This is Detective Devine, Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office. Is Dr. Westmoreland available?”

“I’m sorry, she can’t take your call right now. Would you care to leave a message?”

Jude vacillated, wondering if she should make up some work related bullshit, or say something more meaningful. “I work with the doctor and I heard about her father,” she said, hoping to hit a note of polite but impersonal sympathy. “I was calling to let her know she’s in all of our thoughts at this difficult time.”

Mercy was smart enough to interpret that.

“Thank you, Detective. Let me make a note of your name. Devine, was it?”

Jude refrained from replying:
Elspeth Harwood, was it?
Coolly, she replied, “Yes, that’s right.”

“Thank you for calling. I know Mercy will appreciate it.”

Jude wasn’t so sure about that. She said good-bye and hung up. Ex-flings didn’t fly into town from England when your father was dying. Mercy wouldn’t risk her cover being blown by the tenacious media if this woman was not important to her. Whatever was going on between Mercy and the Brit, it was not past history. She sipped her coffee and tried to figure out if she was angry, disappointed, or jealous. Mercy wasn’t the first woman to lie about being single so she could score, if lying was what she had done. Maybe she and Elspeth had an open relationship, or one of those on-again-off-again situations.

Jude decided it was none of her business. It wasn’t like Mercy had suggested their encounter would be repeated, quite the opposite. Neither did Jude nurture any romantic illusions about the two of them. Far from it. Sure, she’d have sex with Mercy again in a minute. But that’s all it was. Sex. These days, that’s all it ever was, and probably a good thing too. She wasn’t looking for love. Who needed the drama?

Aggravated with herself for letting the phone call get under her skin, she focused her mind on work. In a few hours’ time, she and Tulley would fly into Las Vegas, then drive up to Colorado City and Hildale, the twin border towns otherwise known as Polygamy Central, USA. A few miles east lay Rapture, a satellite town where some of the FLDS elite had ranches, Nathaniel Epperson and his tongue-slasher wife among them.

Jude threw some clothes into an overnight case and phoned Tulley. “You ready?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How’s Zach?”

“Pigging out.”

Jude could swear the kid had put on ten pounds in the days since he’d arrived. “Is he okay about the arrangements?”

“I told him he has to mind Smoke’m. He’s keen. He had a dog back home that died.”

“Yes.” Jude hadn’t mentioned the dog massacre to Tulley. They didn’t have time for him to get on the phone to his ma right now.

“I was thinking, he should stay at my place,” Tulley said. “He reckons he’ll be okay by himself, and Agatha says she don’t mind picking him up on the way to work and bringing him home later.”

“Fine by me. He’ll probably feel safer up there too.”

“Yeah, he’s petrified these Sons of Whatever are going to come after him. The same ones that beat on him and ran him out of town. He says they’ve killed kids before.”

“He’s witnessed actual killings?”

“Not exactly. It’s just stuff he’s heard.”

“Go on.”

“He says it’s mostly kids like him that aren’t welcome in the town after they get excommunicated. If they keep hanging around, they end up dead. He says they make it look like an accident and say the kid got run over by a car. Or sometimes they just take kids out into the desert and shoot them and bury them out there.

“Ask him for names. We can see if the sheriff knows anything about it, once we get out there. It’s weird,” she mused. “They’re so sexist, you’d think they’d value boys more than girls.”

“Here’s what I think.” Tulley’s voice had a rare gravelly intensity, like this was something that kept him awake in the small hours. “The old guys who run this outfit want a whole bunch of wives, but there’s only so many women to go round. So they get rid of the extra males out of their church and make them leave town. It’s like the cuckoo bird. You know…throwing the others out of its nest.”

“Eliminating younger, better-looking competition,” Jude completed the train of thought. “Yes, that makes sense.”

She called to mind Warren Jeffs’ yokel face. Fiftysomething with prominent front teeth and a bug-eyed stare, he sure looked like he’d washed up at the shallow end of the gene pool. Out in the real world, he’d be lucky to get a date, let alone convince seventy women to join his personal harem.

Tulley was on the same page. “That Jeffs dude—if he wasn’t running that cult, he’d be flipping burgers and taking shit from waitresses.”

“Instead he gets to hole up in the religious version of the Playboy mansion,” Jude added. All that and tax-free status because his little empire was a “church.” Clearly, she was in the wrong business.

“Are we going after him?” her sidekick asked.

Jeffs was on the radar but not as part of the initial plan. Yet Jude could almost feel her trigger finger itching. The thought made her smile. Being out West had rubbed off. She could hear Tulley breathing and sense his hopeful anticipation.

“Much as I’d like to nail his scrawny ass to the wall, Epperson is our priority,” she answered. “If we can get him, I have a feeling we’ll get all of them.”

*

Adeline spat cotton fibers from her mouth and worked a hole in the arm edge of her bra until she could push the underwire through. For once, she was thankful that Aunt Chastity had insisted on buying her old-fashioned bras with cups instead of the sports type she saw at the department store. She hadn’t complained, she was so grateful not to have to wear scratchy full length undergarments anymore.

Of course, her parents had put an end to that devil’s work as soon as they’d gotten her home. Out came the stupid ugly chemise and knee-length underpants, and all they could talk about was how she would no longer feel the burning in her bosom if she didn’t wear modest attire and how she had to remember every man was a snake and she must not allow one near her. Like that would be a problem.

She pulled the underwire from the bra and bent the sturdy half moon of metal to form a hook. Then she removed the long ribbon threaded through her hair and tied it to the hook.

“You have to watch and tell me if I’m close to the hole in that bolt,” she called to Daniel.

Weakly, he lifted his head and pushed some matted brown hair out of his eyes. “Okay, go.” He shuffled around in his cage to get the best view.

Adeline slid her arm out of the cage, stretched as far as she could and probed around with the tip of her wire hook. “We’re getting out of here,” she said loudly and positively, trying to bolster Daniel’s confidence, and her own.

“I don’t think I can walk,” he said.

“You can too. We’re going to Salt Lake City. My Aunt Chastity is a real good woman. She’ll take care of us.”

“Up just a bit more and thataways.” Daniel pointed.

Grunting and sweating, Adeline pushed up until she felt the hook connect with something solid.

“Down some.” Daniel was excited suddenly, both hands gesticulating.

Adeline lowered her arm a fraction and felt the tip of the wire slide into a hole. She strained to feed the hook in, grazing her arm against the cage.

“It’s through!” Daniel’s voice shook.

Adeline fed her ribbon up, praying it wouldn’t catch on anything, jiggling a little so the weight of the hook would carry it down. When the pink painted tip came into view below the tin strip she almost screamed. Fingers trembling, she grabbed it and tied the other end of the ribbon to it, making a pull cord.

“Please God, don’t let this break,” she begged and dragged down with both hands.

The bolt put up surprisingly little resistance. Adeline thought her heart was going to burst from her chest as she gave a final tug and the cage door swung ajar. Telling herself not to do anything dumb, she called to mind the plan she’d spent all last night thinking about. Leave the pull cord, so that bitch Naoma can see Summer didn’t let them out. Get water. Wait until the Sunday morning gong sounds and when everyone is in prayer and scripture reading, get out and walk fast. They planned to take a route no one would expect, away from the road and northeast into the desert.

Daniel’s hiding place was about six miles away on the slopes of Seeds of Cain Mountain. They could stay there until the searchers gave up, then they could walk in the mornings and at nights until they made it to a road. If they could get far enough away from Rapture and the twin towns, they would see cars with people wearing normal clothes. They could flag one down and hitch a ride to Salt Lake City.

Adeline was so excited she could hardly breathe. Shivering, she used the wire to etch an inscription into the earth in front of her cage. It was a saying Aunt Chastity had on the wall of her parlor.
Ubi dibium ibi libertas
.