Cold Betrayal (39 page)

“This is fuel for us,” Ali said, unwrapping her burrito and taking a bite while the beans were still hot. “What about gas for the car?”

“Someone in authority convinced the guy who runs the trading post on the south side of Colorado City that it would be a good idea for him to do an unscheduled opening,” Dave answered. “He’s got all his gas pumps up and running. I filled up immediately. If demand ends up outstripping supply, I don’t want to be one of the people left stranded until the next gasoline tanker truck shows up with a delivery.”

They headed south a little before four. A few minutes into the drive, when Ali unconsciously reached for her phone to let Leland Brooks know what was happening, she remembered it was gone. So was B.’s phone and both their iPads. B.’s had been in his briefcase. Ali’s iPad had been in her purse, and both purse and briefcase were still in the impounded Sprinter. As for her iPhone? Agent Malovich had commandeered that as evidence documenting the call she had made to Stu. With all their electronic devices under lock and key as part of a crime scene investigation, Ali started to ask to borrow Dave’s phone. But then, noticing the time, she didn’t.

“So how did you get mixed up in all this?” Dave asked Ali as they drove under a moonlit high desert sky. “B. gave me the shorthand version earlier before we left Flag to come here, but I have a feeling there’s a lot I don’t know.”

Between them, Ali and B. told the story, a little at a time. By the time they finished, the sky was beginning to brighten in the east. For a while, the only sound in the vehicle was the whine of all-weather tires on the pavement.

Dave was the one who broke the silence. “There you have it,” he said. “In one fell swoop, Sheriff Daniel Alvarado goes from being an unindicted homicide suspect to being a full-fledged hero. So do you still think he murdered the Kingman Jane Doe?”

“I do,” Ali said quietly. “I most certainly do.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m not sure,” Ali said.

The problem of dealing with that had been banging around in her head the whole time she and Dave had been telling the story. “Alvarado may look like a hero right now, but Anne Lowell and her baby are still dead.”

“Are you going to go through with the Doe exhumation, then?” Dave asked.

“I’m not sure,” Ali said again.

“What’s the point?” B. asked quietly.

“We’ll determine once and for all if the Kingman Jane Doe is Anne Lowell,” Ali answered. “We’ll also know if Daniel Alvarado was the father of her baby.”

“But knowing that won’t tell us who killed her,” B. objected. “With the evidence box missing, we’ll probably never know. The only people who’ll be hurt by all this are Daniel Alvarado’s widow and kids. Right now he’s a hero. Can’t we let him stay a hero?”

“It may come up later,” Dave cautioned. “Other people know that the Kingman Jane Doe most likely came from The Family. The human trafficking investigation will require putting DNA samples of all the victims into the system. There’s no telling what’ll happen when they get a match.”

“That’ll be somebody else’s decision, then,” B. said. “It won’t be ours.”

Given the circumstances, it didn’t surprise Ali that B. was turning out to be one of Sheriff Alvarado’s staunchest defenders.

“All right,” Ali agreed. “I can live with that.”

At six o’clock in the morning, a time when Leland usually showed up to start breakfast, Ali borrowed Dave’s telephone to call home.

“Oh, madame,” he said, “so good to hear your voice. We’ve all been worried sick.”

“All?”

“Well, yes. Athena tried to reach you. Your mother tried to reach you. When neither you nor Mr. Simpson answered your phones, they both called me. I take it something serious has occurred. How can I be of service?”

Ali closed her eyes. She was bone weary. She had a choice to make. If she told the story to Leland on the phone right now, she’d end up having to repeat it at least two more times, once each with Athena and her mother and maybe with Chris and her father, too.

“What day is this?”

“Saturday.”

“Just a sec.” She covered the phone with her hand. “What do you think?” she asked B. “Should we invite everyone to breakfast, tell them the story all at once, and get it over with?”

B. thought for a moment and then nodded. “Have Leland set up a separate table out in the kitchen for Colin and Colleen. This isn’t a story that’s good for little ears.”

Ali took her hand off the speaker. “How about if you invite everyone over to an early brunch,” she suggested to Leland. “B. and I should be home around nine or so. That way we can say it once and be done with it.”

“Of course,” Leland agreed. “I shall do so immediately.”

“Oh, and set a table for the little ones in the kitchen, please.”

“Of course.”

Once off the phone with Leland, Ali dozed off. Two hours later Dave drove them through Flagstaff to DPS headquarters. When he dropped them off, the parking lot wasn’t nearly as full as it had been the night before, but given what all was going on up in Colorado City, the place wasn’t exactly a deserted village. The collection of media vans—many of them with national news outlet logos—told Ali that what had gone on in Colorado City was big news. Doing his best to be unobtrusive, Dave dropped B. and Ali as close as possible to their respective cars. With her purse still in Governor Dunham’s Sprinter, Ali was missing both her driver’s license and her car keys. B. had a spare key for her to use, but no spare license.

Alone in the Cayenne, Ali wrestled with the enormity of what had happened. Twenty-nine members of The Family were dead, twenty-eight of them gunned down by one of their own. Governor Dunham’s driver had perished as had Sheriff Alvarado, and Virginia Dunham was gravely injured.

Richard Lowell, the man most directly responsible for all that death and destruction, was dead, too. Ali had pulled the trigger that took him down. She felt absolutely no guilt about that—not a whit. As for the others? That was another story.

The operation at The Encampment, an action designed to bring human traffickers to justice,
had ended in disaster—not the one Ali or anyone else had anticipated, but a disaster nonetheless. As far as Ali knew, the tour buses Governor Dunham had ordered to transport refugees from The Family were still there waiting, parked just up the road from the bustling taco truck. Who knew how many of The Encampment’s residents, including other Brought Back girls, would choose to leave The Family in the face of this sudden and tragic turn in all their circumstances. The jury was definitely out on that score.

By now, the Department of Corrections bus, no longer needed, had most likely been recalled to its place of origin. The men it had been sent to transport were all dead. Twenty-nine of the thirty men named in the human trafficking warrants would be leaving Colorado City in a convoy of medical examiners’ vans. They would never see the inside of a jail or a courthouse; they would never have their guilt or innocence determined by a judge and jury.

Unlike the raid at Short Creek, none of The Family’s children had been taken into custody, but, with the exception of Amos Sellers’s kids, they had all been left fatherless. Ali had heard Governor Dunham say she would take full responsibility if anything went wrong. In the upcoming news cycle, there would be plenty of comparisons between Governor Dunham’s actions at The Encampment and Governor Howard Pyle’s long-ago actions at Short Creek. The Short Creek raid had been publicized as being all about religious beliefs. With The Family, religion had been nothing but a thin veneer over an ongoing criminal enterprise. Governor Pyle had lost his election after Short Creek. Ali suspected that even with the death toll, Governor Dunham would come out smelling like a rose. The fact that she had been carried away from the incident with life-threatening injuries almost guaranteed that her glowing political legacy would continue to shine.

But what about Sister Anselm and me?
Ali wondered as she turned off Manzanita Hills Road and onto her driveway.
What happened may be Governor Dunham’s responsibility, but it’s ours, too.

38

T
he space at the top of the driveway was full of cars—Chris and Athena’s new Ford Flex, Ali’s mother’s blue Buick, and a bright red Ford Fusion Ali thought belonged to Cami Lee from High Noon. Colin and Colleen came racing out of the house, followed hard upon by Bella. The kids were in the lead as they left the porch, but Bella beat them to and through the gate. By the time Ali opened the car door, Bella made an impossible leap, scrambling into the vehicle and up onto Ali’s lap. Laughing through a barrage of doggy kisses, Ali exited the Cayenne and bent down to greet the kids.

“Where were you?” Colleen demanded, greeting Ali with a serious frown. “Mommy was worried about you and so was Daddy.”

B. arrived on the scene and swung Colin up onto his shoulders. “And well they should have been,” he told them. “It’s been a tough night.”

“Daddy said you were chasing bad guys. Did you get them?” Colin wanted to know.

“I think so,” Ali told him. “I hope so.”

By then the adults had made their way out of the house. First came Ali’s parents. Edie Larson pulled her daughter into a tight hug. “You’ve got to quit scaring us this way,” she ordered.

“Sorry, Mom,” Ali said. “Didn’t mean to.”

Bob Larson hugged his daughter, too. He said nothing, but his silent reprimand made Ali feel far more guilty than her mother’s straightforward chiding.

To Ali’s surprise next up were Stuart Ramey and Cami Lee. Somehow Ali managed to keep from mentioning how surprised she was to see Stu out of his natural habitat in front of a computer terminal.

“How come you guys went dark on us?” Stuart grumbled. “Aren’t we supposed to be on the same team? I know everything went to hell in a handbasket up there, but as yet no details are being made public. Once your call to me ended, we’ve been shut out of the information loop along with everyone else.”

Stuart liked to sit at his computer terminal and feel like he was in tune with everything that was going on. Being out of the know didn’t work for him.

“I’m afraid that’s all Governor Dunham’s doing,” Ali said. “When we headed north to Colorado City, she made us all shut down our devices so they couldn’t be traced, and I’m sure the information embargo is part of her game plan, too.”

“Right,” Stuart said. “Everything was fine when they needed information from our drone. Now, though, it’s all hush-hush. That’s not fair.”

Ali turned next to her daughter-in-law and was surprised to see Athena’s eyes suddenly fill with tears.

“What’s wrong, Athena?”

“I started trying to call you about eight o’clock, right after I got off the phone with Gram. When it kept going to voice mail and I couldn’t reach B., either, I called Stuart. Gram told me some of it. Stuart told me the rest—that my mother’s been stealing money out of Gram’s accounts. Mom also has a boyfriend who happens to be the doctor who’s supposed to do the competency evaluation on Monday. When I learned all that, I was ready to get on a plane last night and go home to punch Mom’s lights out. Chris made me promise that I wouldn’t go until after I talked to you and B.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Chris said, stepping up for his turn. “I told her she needed cooler heads to weigh in on all this. Yours and B.’s are the coolest heads I know.”

Considering what had just happened in Colorado City, Ali almost objected to Chris’s kind words. Instead she turned back to Athena.

“We’ll talk this over,” Ali said. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. All of it.”

Leland Brooks appeared on the porch. “Come on in,” he said. “Breakfast is served.”

Colin and Colleen stayed in the kitchen eating their chocolate chip Mickey Mouse–shaped pancakes under Leland’s occasional supervision while everyone else tucked into coddled eggs and croissants at the dining room table.

“There’s a breaking news alert on TV about what happened last night,” Leland announced when he went around the dining room replenishing coffee cups. “I turned it off in the kitchen, but if you want to see it somewhere else . . .”

“Any word on the governor?” Ali asked.

“Hospitalized,” Leland said. “Guarded condition.”

No one leaped up to go see what the talking heads had to say. It would most likely play out as “another act of random gun violence, with thirty-one dead, including the shooter.” That’s how the media usually portrayed such things. News commentators would make a big deal of the governor’s involvement, debating whether or not this was a case of governmental overreach. By the time the DNA details were sorted out and the human trafficking issues at the background of the case came to light, the media would have lost interest and moved on to something else. After all, who cared what went on in some remote corner of northern Arizona?

“What’s going to happen to all those people, the women and children who have been left behind?” Athena wanted to know. “Where will they go? How will they live?”

“I have no idea,” Ali said. “Whether they stay where they are or move into town somewhere, they’re going to need huge amounts of assistance. The governor said she’d do everything in her power to help them.”

“If she lives,” Bob Larson cautioned. “But what makes you think she’s a straight shooter?”

“The gun that was tucked inside Richard Lowell’s pants was evidently one Governor Dunham took out of her purse when he demanded his hostages turn over their cell phones and weapons. While he was busy killing Sheriff Alvarado, she tried to take him down with that.”

“Okay then,” Bob said heartily. “Any woman brave enough to try to take down a guy armed with an AK-47 is a woman who gets my vote.”

“Mine, too,” Ali said. “But she’ll have to run for something in order for that to happen.”

39

A
fter that, the conversation veered back to the situation with Betsy Peterson. In the end, the breakfast table discussion convinced Athena that it would be a good idea to have at least one cooling-off day before she went rushing off to Bemidji to kick butts and knock heads. They arranged for a further council of war on the following day, one where they would have access to any additional information Cami and Stuart might have dredged up in the meantime.