The Dead Priest of Sedona

by Charles Williamson

  CHAPTER 31

  Rose, still looking amused at my bad habit, replaced my broken handset, and I started calling contacts on the Los Angles Police Department. It took six calls to find that the license plate that had originally been on the burned Navigator was now in the evidence room at a station near the airport. The man who managed that precinct, Grady O’Connor, had been a friend for twenty years. He had even seen me on TV describing the murder scene at Pagan Point.

  “Chaplain Mike, the prints on that plate will have the highest possible priority,” Grady said. “You’ve found yourself a real crime in that hick town, and us big city guys will be glad to help.” My nickname had been Chaplain Mike since I was a rookie at the police academy and showed up with ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday. A lot of cops think I was too by-the-book for the Rampart Division, and the name had stayed with me for thirty years. I was glad no one in Sedona used it.

  “There might be a connection to a local family named Wood. When you run the prints, start with their son Walter who lives in LA,” I said.

  Next, I phoned Ian Groves. He was the English Druid who had retired to Scottsdale. Professor Stone had mentioned that Groves was the only professed Druid that he knew in Arizona. Groves answered on the second ring. His nasal aristocratic British voice sounded glad to hear from me. Mr. Groves had seen my press conference and had considered calling me. He was certain that these murders had nothing to do with real Druids. He suggested that his son could drive him to Sedona to meet with me and discuss the Druid movement. We set up a meeting for the following day. I asked Rose to run an FBI check on Mr. Groves. I wanted to know more about him before our meeting.

  Next, I called Father Antonio and asked about the list he was making of people who had contact with Father Sean and might be connected with the case. He had it ready. I sent a uniformed officer to St. Paul’s to pick it up.

  I decided to visit our neighbor Alicia Magnus at her bookstore. She probably knew where to buy natural dyes in the area. I was also guessing that Ms. Magnus was part of the Wicca community that Father Sean had been investigating. I wondered if she had known Father Sean.

  When I entered the Mystic New Age Bookstore, Alicia left her customer and came immediately. “Oh Mike, I’ve been thinking of nothing else but the horror up above the West Fork.”

  The only customer in the shop, a slender blonde lady in her twenties, came up and said, “Lt. Damson, my whole circle is projecting wisdom toward you.” She left the shop to Alicia and me. The creepy black cat rubbed its back against my leg and then moved off to watch me through half-closed, yellow eyes from a nearby chair.

  Alicia smiled and said, “Shadow likes you. My little friend would like to help.”

  I asked Alicia about the dyes and she directed me to a shop in downtown Flagstaff that catered to the weaving hobby and the rug making trade on the reservations. She knew what woad was, but she was not sure that they carried natural indigo made from woad. However, Alicia was certain I would find powdered madder at the store. There were a lot of places that carried beeswax. She used it herself and made her own candles mixing it with carbon black. I asked if she had heard anything in town that might help.

  Alicia shook her head. “I wish I did have some way to help. My friends and I know almost every long-term family in town. We just don’t know anyone who is following the Druid way. I can’t imagine anyone in our community who would kill a priest. Sedona is a very peaceful and laid-back village. The idea of ritual murder is totally alien to our whole belief system. I think the murderers must have been from Flagstaff or Phoenix.”

  I asked her point blank if she knew the Wood family of Oak Creek Canyon.

  “Everyone in town knows that they serve minors at that tavern of theirs,” she said with a smile.

  Her eyes got wide. “Damn, I had never connected the name Apple Tree Tavern. I’ve met them, but they keep pretty much to themselves. Mrs. Wood has been in the store, and Mr. Wood belongs to the Elks Club with my brother. They seem nice enough, but I really don’t know them. Malcolm’s father Angus was a really colorful local fellow, Scottish I think. Mike, I’ll see what I can find out about the family and call you.”

  I asked Alicia if she had known Father Sean. She looked surprised at the direct question. “Yes, I met him once when he came to my bookstore. I did not find him to be good company, and I asked him to leave my shop. He was a judgmental and narrow-minded man.”

  I walked back to the office to see if Chad had learned anything. He was smiling again. “Mike, I called the minister at the First Presbyterian Church up in Flagstaff. He says that the Wood family is what he calls Christmas Presbyterians. They really only come to church on Christmas day or for weddings and funerals. He did say that Mr. and Mrs. Wood were in church last Sunday. There were several Christmas Presbyterians at church this week because the whole community is upset by the discoveries at Pagan Point. People are seeking guidance,” Chad said.

  I needed some guidance too. “That’s interesting but not evidence,” I said.

  Chad smiled. “I had one of the uniformed officers stop Mrs. Wood to check her auto registration as she went to the store this morning. Her registration is current, and he found that her truck has four brand-new Firestone tires. They still had glue from paper price stickers the tire store used. I have three guys checking every store that carries Firestone tires. Almost everyone turns his or her old tires over to the store for disposal. If we can find them before they go to a tire-recycling yard, we may be able to link the truck to the crime scene. That will get us a warrant,” Chad said.

  “Excellent idea, partner,” I said.

  “I also ran an FBI check on the whole family,” he said. “Neither Helen nor Malcolm Wood has a criminal record, but their son Walter has one arrest and conviction, a suspended sentence for a grand-theft-auto four years ago in Hollywood, California. I was also able to get a copy of his mug shot.”

  Chad showed me the faxed copy of a man in his early twenties. He had very short crew-cut hair that seemed to be bleached white. There were metal studs in his ear lobes and nose. We both knew that Walter Wood could change his looks quite a bit in four years. I decided to distribute the photo to local officers to keep an eye out to see if he returned to town.

  Chad went back to his office to check on the tire search while I called Phoenix to check on the owner of the storage shed where the Navigator had been hidden prior to its use to murder Kevin Riker. My investigation of Dr. Peter Beech produced a small surprise. Dr. Beech had spent the past eleven months in a small village in Afghanistan where he was serving a volunteer assignment.

  I spoke with his former supervisor at a hospital in Scottsdale. He told me that Dr. Beech was a thirty-year-old trauma specialist and emergency care physician. He had inherited the small cabin in Oak Creek Canyon when his father died of a heart attack several years ago. Dr. Beech had visited it often as a child and loved the place, but he seldom had time to visit it as an adult. When I asked how to reach Dr. Beech, I was given an e-mail address, which the doctor checked about once a week. I sent a message explaining the situation with the Navigator stored in his garage at the Oak Creek Canyon property. I asked if he knew who might have used it.

  I spent the next hour calling every firewood supplier listed in the Flagstaff or Sedona phone books. None of them carried large oak logs like those used at Pagan Point. Pine was available free in the Coconino Forest from areas that were being thinned to reduce fire danger. Every supplier that I talked with indicated that there was no demand for expensive large oak firewood logs.

  CHAPTER 32

  After lunch, Chad and I drove to downtown Flagstaff to the dye shop that Alicia Magnus had mentioned. We also thought it might be worthwhile to introduce ourselves to former Sheriff Cook. He might know something that could help us that he had not mentioned to Sheriff Taylor. Also, a retirement home might be a good place to find someone who could remember a circle of trees planted decades ago. Afterwards, we planned to drive to the Sheriff�
�s office for our daily 4:00 investigation meeting.

  I found a parking place on the street a block from the Flagstaff Natural Dye and Yarn Shop. As I got out of the Explorer, I heard someone call my name. It was Moon Lady ambling across the street ignoring the traffic. I had never actually met Moon Lady, and I didn’t know her real name. I’d been on TV several times in the past week so she knew I was Mike.

  She approached through the honking traffic, and said in a cryptic singsong, “I’ve seen the evil ones snatch their prey. I’ve seen white-coated dragoons, their faces fey. They stun their victim with an enchanted touch. The lost souls into their coal-black wagon they clutch. They’re gone in a flash, in the drop of a hat. They speed away to hell, flying like a bat. Dancing and singing in Dutch as they burn ‘em right to ash. Feuer und Tod they sing as they tossed ‘em into the trash.”

  “Madam, when did you see this?” I asked, trying to make something of her bad poetry.

  Moon Lady’s eyes looked wild. She was off her medication. She sang, “Three autumn times long past on candy day they were. One was Tony who lived with us. Two was a boy from the youth hostel who spoke Dutch. Three was a drunk who camped in the park and had garbage for lunch. The fiends come every year on candy day, but I only saw them these three times. They’re usually undetectable wind sprites who dance in the deep woods and speak only in rhymes.”

  Chad and I spent a few more minutes asking questions, but the answers got even less coherent. If Moon Lady knew something, we needed to question her after she was back on medication. We walked to the dye store, where we learned that they carried natural indigo, but it was from India, not the kind made from the European woad plant. They did have the red dye made from madder root. We bought a sample for comparison with the dye found in the candle wax up at Pagan Point. I had a strong intuition that we would learn something useful on our visit to the Peaks Extended Care Facility.

  CHAPTER 33

  The facility was out on Highway 180 about a mile southeast of the Museum of Northern Arizona. The building was constructed of local volcanic rock and tan wood. It was a lot newer than any of its inhabitants. The San Francisco Peaks formed a dramatic backdrop above the nursing home. Sitting in its beautiful setting, it looked as nice and well maintained as any of these facilities. The uniformed nurse at the front desk took us to a covered porch where Sheriff Cook was sitting in a wheelchair. Although damaged by age, Cook’s body still showed that he had been a formidable man. His upper body looked strong. His massive arms still had the muscle tone of a young man. His jaw was square, and his thinning hair was gray and longer than the current fashion. A stroke had left him in a wheelchair, but his speech and his mind were still sharp.

  Sheriff Cook seemed genuinely glad that we had stopped by to ask for his help on the case. The former sheriff complimented me on my performance at the press conference. He was willing do anything he could to help our cause. He wanted the murderers caught while he was still around to see it.

  Chad and I spent half an hour hearing about his experience with the abduction cases. In the three years before the sheriff left office, the victims had been from other towns. The Flagstaff authorities didn’t know that the pattern had continued. When Sheriff Cook lost the election in 1976, the last known abduction was already four years old. Sheriff Casey who won in 1976 had lost to another candidate four years later. The newest sheriff had relegated the old abduction cases to the inactive files. Until the Father Sean Murphy case, they’d been forgotten. The former sheriff did not have much to add to the information about those old cases. After his Arizona experience, Cook had spent fifteen years in law enforcement in Montana. The retired lawman moved back to Flagstaff in 1995 to be near his son and grandkids.

  I asked if he had known Angus Wood and his family who lived down in Oak Creek.

  There was a strange look on George Cook’s face. There was a lot going through his mind. “Could it be?” he said. “I did know the Wood family. They had a bar and motel at the south end of Oak Creek Canyon. Angus Wood was a volunteer with the Forest Service. I often saw him in town in his Forest Service uniform. He was a nice old guy with an English accent, but I always had a strange feeling about the family. They kept to themselves so much. They mostly had friends from LA and back east who would come and stay in their cabins for long periods. They were strange guests, even for the hippie days of the late sixties and early seventies. I thought Angus might be involved in pornography, gambling, or something else slightly outside of the law, but there was never a formal complaint about the Wood family. Folks in Coconino County didn’t know them well, even though they had been here for decades.”

  “Sheriff, are there a lot of people here at Peaks who grew up in the county?” I asked.

  The former sheriff smiled. “A town at 7,000 feet with ten feet of snow most winters doesn’t have a lot of retirees who didn’t grow up in this climate. Most folks go down to the valley to Sun City where it’s warm. Almost everyone here is a native or a long-term Flagstaff resident.”

  “Sheriff Cook, I was hoping that you would help us with the investigation. We want to know when and why that circular grove of ponderosa pine was planted on the plateau above the West Fork Creek. There might be someone here who knows how it got there. We are having some professors from NAU verify the age of the trees, but someone planted them at least fifty years ago,” I said.

  Sheriff Cook greeted the request with a broad smile. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I would be honored to help. Half the men here hunted in that area sometime in their youth. There’s a good chance I can learn something. I’ll ask around a little about Angus Wood. Some folks here at Peaks might have known him much better than I.”

  The former sheriff was still smiling as we left. I saw him rolling his wheelchair toward another resident as we left the porch. I was certain everyone in the facility would be questioned in the next few days. We drove across town to Sheriff Taylor’s office for our afternoon conference.

  CHAPTER 34

  The sheriff had dark circles under his eyes as if he had been working all night. He greeted us and updated us on the horror up on Pagan Point. “Guys, they have identified at least fifty-two bodies. There may be more. That puts the start of this crime somewhere in the late 1940’s or earlier if they were doing one a year.”

  “It can’t possible have been a group of traditional serial killers for sixty years. It’s a cult for sure.” I said.

  “I was with the forensic crew most of the night,” the sheriff said. “The specialist will spend years trying to identify these victims. Some of the skeletons may be too old to ever identify. I went back to the circular grove with three professors from NAU’s forestry department. We established that the ponderosa pines in that circle are sixty-seven years old. They were probably grown in another location for five to ten years before they were planted in that circle. All three professors agreed not all of the trees could have survived the first twenty years of life unless they were tended in some way. Someone wanted those trees to survive enough to visit that spot with a water truck several times every summer in their early years.”

  The sheriff asked for an update on our progress. He seemed to understand the problem of further information from the superior general, but he suggested that I keep in contact with him. Maybe he could find a way to help without violating his religious ethics. I mentioned that the doctor who owned the cabin where the Navigator was discovered was out of the country. I had e-mailed him to find out who was looking after the Oak Creek Canyon property for him.

  When we told the story we heard from Moon Lady, the sheriff seemed more interested than I expected. “I’ve know her for years,” he said. “Her real name is Molly Bodean. She’s been of help on several other cases. People think she is so crazy that she can’t report a crime. She’s a little too dizzy to ever make a witness in court; however Molly actually is very observant. She helped us with a bank robbery once. She also described a car thief with such accurate detail that we caught him the same after
noon. Molly is quite smart but also totally crazy. There is a psychologist who works with the Flagstaff police. I’ll ask her to see if she can learn more from Molly.”

  We looked over the list of missing people. There was a Tony Allonso who disappeared from a boarding house in 1987. Molly was listed as the person who reported the abduction. The file was skimpy as if not much time was spent on a drifter reported missing by a crazy lady. There was the German tourist who was missing in 1991. I said that Molly might have mistaken German for Dutch. Chad pointed out that the word for the German language in German is Deutsch. Maybe Molly was saying that he spoke Deutsch.

  One of the most interesting bits of information came from Sheriff Cook. Old Angus Wood had worked as a volunteer with the Forest Service back in Sheriff Cook’s days. It was another bit of data that might connect the family to the Druid grove. Still nothing we had was the sort of tangible information that was useful in court.

  The Flagstaff detectives had not been successful in finding a single store in the county that had sold size seven and a half Salomon boots. There was not much to go on for tracing the all terrain vehicle. A check of records did not indicate that the Wood family owned one. However, if the criminals would steal a sixty thousand dollar SUV and murder fifty people, they would not worry about swiping a little all terrain vehicle for their rituals. The tire track had been too small to identify the brand of the ATV.

  “I hope the LAPD will find a usable print on the license plates that were originally on the Navigator,” I said. “I expect to hear from them by tomorrow.”

  “The Woods are our best lead,” the sheriff said. “I’ll put someone in that campground near their cabins to keep an eye on them until we can get an officer into one of their rental cabins.”

  “I’d hate for them to skip town on us,” I said.