Righteous02 - Mighty and Strong (22 page)

Eliza came out of the van. “They took her,” she panted. “They didn’t want me, just her. Oh, no.”

“What?” he asked, still dazed.

“Look.” She pointed to his side.

He reached down and felt the red, sticky mess at his gut, felt light-headed. “Funny,” he said, and he sounded like he was at the bottom of a drum.

His head throbbed, but he felt nothing from the bullet. So this was what it meant to take a fatal shot. You kept going, you didn’t feel a thing. He sank to his seat on the pavement and clutched his side. Would he be conscious when the ambulance arrived?

“It doesn’t hurt, I don’t feel a thing.”

Eliza bent and picked up something from the pavement. “That’s because you weren’t shot.” She held the tattered remains of the paper sack from the coffee shop. “My cherry Danish took a bullet for you, Agent Krantz.”

“Oh, god, he missed.” His head cleared and he felt like an idiot.

It was replaced by the feeling of failure, the horrible memory of Fayer struggling in the back seat of the truck. Every second that passed she’d be farther away and harder to find.

Sirens sounded from both directions. A crowd gathered on either side of the street and a security guard came running from Temple Square. A police car screeched to a stop.

He started to think clearly, in spite of his aching head. He rose to his feet and grabbed for his badge. He had to cut through the bullshit back and forth with shouting and badges and lost time until he convinced the cops he wasn’t a threat.

“FBI!” he shouted as two officers spilled out, grabbing for guns. Another car came around the corner from the opposite side of the block, sirens wailing. “I need your help. They took my partner.”

#

Several fruitless hours passed while they looked for Fayer. Police set up roadblocks, pulled over dozens of trucks on the freeway. The local news had crews on site within ten minutes and ten minutes later Fayer’s picture was on all the stations.

Krantz took calls from Denver and Washington, got his ass chewed. Several variations on, “Krantz, you moron. You’ve got two missing agents?” One from the Deputy Director himself, and it was an ugly call.

The man screamed for ten minutes, threatened to pull him, demote him, fire him. But then offered the HRT, the hostage rescue team that was the most advanced SWAT team in the FBI. “Just get her back, Krantz. And don’t lose any of my guys, you got it?”

Eliza Christianson provided two critical pieces of information. First, a partial license plate number and a model on the truck. They tracked it back, as he’d guessed, to the Zarahemla compound and the Church of the Last Days. The second was a pair of names.

“Fear-Not,” she told Krantz in a temporary office in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building across the street as he debriefed her. “That’s what they called the leader. One of the others—the younger guy beating Agent Fayer—they called Zeal.”

“Code names?” Four hours since he lost Fayer and he was through the rest of today’s cigarettes, tomorrow’s, and the next day’s as well. He’d sent Chambers for a pack of Marlboros.

“I don’t know what it means,” she said, “but it’s not random.”

Eliza had a nasty bruise at her eye where she’d fought off the attackers and a swollen lower lip. She let the paramedics check her out, but refused to go to the hospital.

He wrote the two names in his notebook, underlined ‘Fear-Not’, then tapped his pen on the table, glanced out the window.

A view down at the green roof of the temple. Every few seconds a police cruiser came down South Temple, and he saw a news truck. Only the local news so far, but that would soon change. He needed to keep the polygamist angle quiet. The last thing he needed was the media clogging up Manti and the road leading to the compound.

“Did you see if I hit anyone with my shot?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m surprised he missed you. He aimed right at you.”

“He killed your Danish, so he couldn’t have missed by much. And the truck was moving.”

“If the younger guy had been the shooter, he wouldn’t have missed.” A cloud passed over her face. “I’m going to have nightmares about that one. Did you see his eyes?”

“Yeah. Terrorist eyes. But what about the one who hit me with the bat? This Fear-Not guy, the leader. Did you see him?”

“Brown hair, thinning. Medium build. I didn’t get a good look at his face. All three of them came in, but he went back outside to watch for trouble while the other two were supposed to grab Fayer and bring her out. We fought back, but they caught us by surprise.”

“The third guy must have been around the front of the van when I arrived,” Krantz said, “because I didn’t see him.”

He leaned back in the chair. It creaked under his weight. He was still pissed that he’d missed the third man. He’d known there were three. God, he could use a cigarette.

“This is what I’ve got,” he said at last. “They came for Fayer. Let’s say they watched until I left and were sure I wouldn’t be back for a few minutes. They probably knew you were in there, but figured you weren’t a threat.”

“I did what I could.”

“I know you did. You held them off long enough. It was my fault, not yours.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

He gave her a wry smile. “Easier said than done. But this is what I’m getting at. Either way, they didn’t want you, otherwise they could have killed you or carried you off, too. And why did they even talk? If they’d shut up, you never would’ve heard code names. ‘Fear-Not,’ ‘Zeal.’”

“They wanted me to hear,” Eliza said. “And they wanted you to know they’re polygamists or they’d have done something about the license plate on the truck.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. But why?”

Eliza chewed at her lip. “I don’t know. None of this makes sense. Fundamentalists usually want to avoid attention, not attract it.”

“So, then?”

“I don’t know, but the key is
to think like they do. You don’t get inside their heads, you’ll never figure out what they’re up to.
”

“You’ve got a career in the FBI when you get off your mission. Think about it.”

“Ha, right.” She smiled, but then her face turned serious. “
Look, is my brother still in Zarahemla?”

“He told you?”

“Sure, I’m his sister. He didn’t tell me what it’s about, just something about helping your investigation. And don’t worry, I can keep my mouth shut.”

“I’m not worried.”

“So is he still in the compound?”

“Yeah, afraid so.”

“He asked me to check on his family if anything happened to him. I should take advantage of this mess and walk up to the house. If you could cover with the mission while I check in on Fernie and the kids, that would be great.”

Yeah, that. What a screw-up.

“Here’s the thing about your brother,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s doing in there or when he’s coming out. I don’t know much of anything at this point.”

“You could send me in, too,” Eliza said.

“No, out of the question.”

“I could do it. Let me talk to my mission president. They’ll have to release me.”

“Not going to happen. The situation is already FUBAR. And here’s the thing about checking up on your sister-in-law.” He grimaced. “Jacob’s wife followed him down. She’s inside, too.”

A grim expression passed over her face. “Really? Oh.”

“Yes, and the kids.” Krantz didn’t tell her that if he’d been doing his job and watching Jacob’s family, Fernie never would have felt so desperate she had to look for her husband in the compound.

“Look, I’m serious,” Eliza said. “They always need more young women. They’ll let me in, I know they will. I could go places, see things, talk to people. I’ll do anything to help. And I do mean anything.”

He gave a vigorous shake of the head. “Absolutely not. Besides, what you’re suggesting is exactly what we tried before. No, the time for that tactic has passed.”

“Does that mean you’re going to raid the compound?”

“I can’t answer that question, you know that.”

She leaned across the table and put her hand on his forearm. “Whatever you do, please, please be careful. I owe my brother everything, you can’t understand what he means to me. And Fernie is more than just my sister-in-law. Those two are the only people I can count on in the world.”

Chapter Twenty-three:

Jacob and Miriam dug the girl’s body out of the sand. First the legs, then they uncovered the torso, the shoulders, and finally the head. No blood, no obvious broken bones. The ground was reluctant to let her go. Miriam dug more around the legs and they tried again. She came free with a wet plop, like a rotten tooth being pulled. Jacob lost his footing, fell, and the body fell across his chest, a hand brushing his face.

He pulled free, scooted backward. The dead body sprawled, the girl’s head lolled back, sand gunked her eyes. They stared toward him. One course of gross anatomy had numbed him to that stomach-churning experience of touching a dead body, but the touch of her hand on his face made his skin crawl.

Miriam dropped to a knee and brushed dirt from the girl’s hair and face. “We need a forensics team.”

“That’s what I told you.” Jacob rose to his knees. “We’re trashing all sorts of evidence.”

“You don’t think I know that? Sheesh. Come on, let’s get this over with. Any luck, we’ll find an innocent explanation.”

“And maybe the Angel Moroni will cook me waffles for breakfast.”

“You’re so sacrilegious.”

“I’m sacrilegious, you’re sanctimonious. So what?”

Miriam pulled back the girl’s hair and he felt a flash of recognition. “Oh, no. Not that.”

“What is it? You know her?”

Yes, he knew her. Just a girl, just a child. Denied a normal childhood, with normal experiences, friends. The trivial concerns of a teenager: clothes, escapist novels, homework, hanging out at the mall, meeting a boy at the movies, passing notes. Instead, dragged to a polygamist compound in the desert, brain-washed into thinking she should get married at fifteen, to a man twice her age and already married.

“It’s Emma Green.”

“I know Emma. Just a child.” She turned to face him. “You know her, too?”

He rubbed his temples, sat back on his heels. “Yes, sadly. She came into the hospital last week with a false pregnancy and got it in her head that I was supposed to be her husband.”

“Did you give her any ideas?”

Jacob fixed her with a hard stare. “Of course not. What kind of a man do you think I am?”

“Then why—”

“Who knows. Maybe it was the authority thing, maybe she was looking for an escape from a crappy family life. She was letting hormones get the better of her, combined with an excess of imagination. A teenager, in other words.

“I told her no several times,” he continued, “but she kept pushing, so I put her off with something about waiting a couple of years.”

“What about this false pregnancy?” Miriam asked. “Who was the supposed father? Could he have found out and got jealous?”

“Slow down,” Jacob said. “Let’s find out how she died, first.”

He turned back to the body. He probed her scalp and back of the skull. No obvious head wound. He unbuttoned her dress and pulled it around her shoulders. He meant to check for chest wounds or broken ribs, but stopped when he saw the bruising around her throat. He probed gingerly with his fingers.

Miriam looked over his shoulder. “Strangled?”

“Damage to the larynx, hyoid bone and thyroid cartilege. I’d need to drain the great vessels of the thorax and dissect to be sure, but look at this.” He pried open her mouth, to show the swollen tongue. “Congestion of the tongue. Yes, strangulation. No doubt.”

“Ligature or manual?”

“Manual. There’s no mark of a cord or chain, and we’d see more gross congestion in the face.” He rolled Emma onto her side. “Look at these marks here, on the throat.”

“Like round disks. What causes that?”

“Finger tip pressure. Matching marks on both sides. Whoever did it grabbed her once and held on until it was done. If he’d let go or changed his grip in any way, these bruises would be flattened over a wider area.”

“This girl was small,” Miriam said, “but whoever did this must have been strong.”

“Yes, and fortified by the Holy Ghost.”

“What does that mean?” she asked sharply.

“It means murders within the church are couched in religious terms. You catch your wife with another man—never mind she’s your oldest, ugliest wife and you’ve neglected her for years—you catch her cheating, and you’re filled with righteous anger. The Lord wants you to purge the sinner.”

“But it’s not the actual Holy Ghost. That’s Satan’s work.”

“Whoever did this was plenty evil on his own without bringing the devil into it. I think we can also rule out the supposed father of Emma’s baby.”

“Why?”

“First, she never actually had sex with him or anyone, for that matter. She was somewhat unclear about how a baby is conceived. Something about sleeping too close to sheets soiled with seminal fluid.”

“Oh, brother. And this girl thought she was ready to get married?”

“Exactly.”

He filled in the details. He’d rather not have exposed Ammon’s masturbation issue. None of Miriam’s business, but he felt it important to reveal the depth of Emma’s naivete. Miriam shrugged at the bit about the underwear catalog.

“Oh, I see. Yeah, I’ve met Ammon Green. Awkward, skinny, pimple-faced kid. No way he grabbed Emma once and choked her to death without letting go.”

“I don’t think so either. No, it was a bigger man, a strong guy. Any ideas? Anyone with a motive you can think of?”

Miriam turned to him and all the certainty and sanctimony had been swept away, replaced by uncertainty and anguish. “Can I ask you something, Jacob?”

“Sure.”

“I was so happy here. I finally belonged. Everybody pulling in one direction and me a part of it. How many people have that in their lives? Not to mention that I’m married to the prophet. If you could see what I see—well, Timothy says you will, soon—then you’d know what a privilege that is. Only now all I can think about is how terrible this is for
me
. But I should be thinking about this poor girl, and her family. Do you think I’m, you know…?”