Desert Cut

by Betty Webb

  At first it seemed as if the boy would continue ranting, but he thought better of it. Throwing one more growl behind him, he stalked to the door.

  Outside, a few people still milled around, but most of the satellite trucks were gone to wherever satellite trucks go at night. I spotted a few familiar faces: Clive Berklee and his nephew Herschel, both looking like they’d downed too many Molson’s; a few faces from the Geronimo’s Rest Trailer Park, including Foo Fighter Man, father of the foul-mouthed Ladonna. I also saw Lee Casey, CEO of Apache Chemical, speaking quietly to a group of men near the parking lot. When I caught his eye, he moved into the shadows.

  I gave Raymundo a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Let’s get some coffee.”

  Geronimo Espresso, just down the street from the sheriff’s office, was open, so we found ourselves a corner booth underneath yet another photograph of a peaceful-appearing Geronimo. This time the old Apache was chatting with two derby-wearing white men at what appeared to be a county fair. I remembered Selma Mann telling me that during his long captivity, he had appeared at several, an odd ending for a man who had avenged the murders of his children by murdering other children.

  Toward the front of the coffee bar, a grouping of Los Perdidos teenagers sipped their frothy confections while text-messaging. Fairly quiet as teenagers go, their chatter still made the place less private than I would have liked. At least the coffee shop was darker than McDonald’s, but not quite dark enough to hide the pain on Raymundo’s face. His obvious anguish made me forget my own troubles and the fact that someone had just tried to kill me.

  After ordering our drinks—an espresso for me, a Caramel Frappuccino for him—I checked the time. Almost ten. “We brought Nicole and Aziza in last night. Don’t tell me you just found out.”

  That expression of contempt again. “Of course not. But nobody said anything about her being hurt! When I turned on the local news tonight…” The contempt changed to bewilderment. “The newscaster said something I didn’t understand, about something called FGM? What the fu…what the heck’s that?”

  Ah, the media was at it again, cleaning up the grisly facts. Now they’d switched their euphemisms to FGM—female genital mutilation—a vague term to disguise complete amputation. Why bother telling the ugly truth?

  “The story’s been on TV all day, Raymundo,” I told him.

  Teen contempt returned. “I’ve been at work all day, since before nine. And the store stays open late on Saturdays. The tourists eat dinner, start talking about all the pretty pots they saw around town, then decide to buy some for their New York apartments. Half the time they’re hammered when they arrive, so they buy more high-end stuff than normal. After we ran the last guy out at nine, I helped clean up. When I got home and turned on the TV, I heard them talking about this FGM thing. What’s that mean? Did that Hall jerk-off do something to her? If he did, I’ll kill him!”

  One of the teenagers at the other end of the coffee shop glanced our way.

  Not wanting to make a scene, especially one involving death threats, I said, “Calm down, Raymundo. Did you talk to anyone outside the sheriff’s office tonight?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. I just barged straight in. Why?”

  It seemed impossible the boy didn’t yet know what had been done to Nicole, since everyone else in town did, but maybe he was telling the truth. “Raymundo, did Nicole ever say how Reverend Hall punished her for getting pregnant?”

  “Punished? He gave our baby away, that’s what he did! What could be worse than that?”

  “There is something else.”

  He glowered. “Worse than giving away our baby? He beat her, I’ll bet, but she swore he didn’t. He never cared anything for her, on account of he’s not her real father.” At the expression on my face, he nodded. “Yeah, she told me about that. He never let her forget it, always calling her ‘the child of sin.’ She said he was getting worse, too. When she snuck out to the river, I tried to get her to tell me what was going on, but she cringed away every time I came near her. Jesus, she never used to be like that. She loved it when I…”

  He blushed. “Anyway, I never saw any bruises, but I know Hall must have done something terrible to her. Nicole sometimes looked at me with this really sick expression that’s hard to describe, and she told me once that if I didn’t leave her alone, she’d stop hanging with us and stay home. So what could I do? I figured that seeing her, even if she wouldn’t let me touch her, was better than nothing. So I did what she wanted. I shut up.”

  He looked down at his Frappuccino, his face bereft. “Nicole’s my whole world.”

  His sincerity reminded me that young love can be true love. Sometimes. But how would this healthy young man react when he found out the truth about his beloved’s injuries and just how life-changing they were? And he would find out, of that I had no doubt. The media might still tippy-toe around the issue, using the standard, truth-obscuring euphemisms, but Ramondo had access to the Internet. It was probably just a matter of hours before Raymundo learned what those euphemisms really meant.

  Of course, I could tell him myself and cushion the blow as much as possible, but would that be wise?

  As I was pondering my choices, his hand clamped down on my wrist. “I want to see her! You’ve got to tell me where she is! I can help her!”

  I stared at him until he loosened his grip. “I told you. She’s in a group home and I have no idea where. In Tucson, probably, because CPS will have wanted to get her as far away from her parents as possible. I imagine she’ll call you soon.” If the group home operators allowed her near a phone, that was. Poor Nicole. She was the victim in all this, yet the most punished.

  Trying for threatening, Ramondo narrowed his eyes. “I said, I need to see her! Now! You can find out where she’s at!”

  When his voice rose, one of the teen boys at the other end of the coffee shop stood up and walked toward us. He was even taller than Raymundo. “Everything okay over there, Miss?”

  Great. Now I was about to get involved in a coffee shop brawl, only one step above a bar fight. I smiled at my would-be rescuer. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  To my relief, the boy rejoined his friends.

  Raymundo flushed, realizing how his behavior must appear to others. Placing both hands on the table where they would be visible to my teen protector, he leaned toward me and whispered, “Can’t you see that I’m worried sick over Nicole, Ms. Jones? First her parents adopt out our baby, then she won’t talk to me, and now she’s been taken away! Not knowing what’s going on is driving me crazy!”

  His pleas accomplished what his threats couldn’t. He was right. Not knowing always was the worst thing.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go for a drive, Raymundo. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  When Reverend Hall’s flock arrived at Freedom Temple the next morning, they found him lying near the altar with a bullet in his face.

  In a live feed from in front of the church, a brunette newscaster related the bare facts. “We have few details about the killing yet, but Sheriff Bill Avery has scheduled a news conference for noon. We do know that there have been no arrests, although he is reportedly interviewing several persons of interest.”

  Looking away from the tiny counter-top television set, Selma stared at me across the breakfast table. “Several? Hell, who didn’t want to kill him?”

  Who, indeed?

  The newscaster struggled to keep her face neutral when she recapped the mutilation murder of “a girl identified only as Precious Doe,” the arson death of a convicted child molester, and the mysterious child disappearances in Los Perdidos.

  She almost succeeded. “Two of the missing children turned up safe Friday night and are now in protective custody, but sources in Los Perdidos tell us there have been rumors about unusual unlicenced medical procedures being performed on at least one of them, a teenaged girl. These procedures may be connected, the same sources tell us, to th
e dead minister’s church. In an interesting development, we also hear that Child Protective Services is joining with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department in this investigation, and that the county attorney has cut short her participation in a week-long conference in Washington D.C. to fly back here. As we learn more, we will keep you posted.”

  First circumcision. Then FGM. Now unlicenced medical procedures. Media folks sure have trouble calling a spade a spade, don’t they?

  Mirroring my disgust, Selma rose from the table and turned off the TV. “So much for a quiet morning.”

  No longer hungry, I pushed my plate away. Was Reverend Hall’s death my fault? If so, did I care? Last night, after telling Raymundo about Nicole’s mutilations, I hadn’t left until he calmed down. But perhaps the mood I’d judged to be acceptance was, in fact, determination. He probably had access to a gun; almost everyone in Arizona did. Despite our modern trappings, we remained a frontier state, as proved by the vigilante killing of Floyd Polk.

  “Something wrong with your omelet? Too many chilies?” I looked up to find Selma studying me with a worried expression.

  “It’s delicious. I just had a late night.” Not wanting to worry her, I hadn’t told her about my experience at the river.

  She gave me a small smile. “Hangover?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Maybe you should. If a horse turned up looking like you this morning, I’d shoot it.”

  Come to think of it, how many guns did Selma have? I had counted six in the living room alone. Granted, most were museum pieces, but I’d seen some relatively new ones, too.

  Dismayed by my suspicions, I stood up. “I’m going into town.”

  “Good luck if it’s to see the sheriff. He’s probably hip deep in interview requests.”

  She turned out to be right. When I arrived at the sheriff’s office, satellite trucks were lined up all the way down the street, fronted by a gaggle of talking heads yapping into microphones. After pushing my way through the crowd and into the office itself, I found myself blocked as effectively as Raymundo had been blocked the night before, and by the same huge deputy.

  “I need to talk to the sheriff,” I said, uncomfortably aware that I echoed the boy’s words.

  “Take a number,” Deputy Mountain grumped. He glanced at the clock. “Sheriff Avery should be able to get to you, oh, some time in December.”

  “We’re working on the same case, for Pete’s sake! So what’s the…”

  He didn’t let me finish. “Ms. Jones, would you please go away? We have enough on our plates without having to deal with you, too.”

  “Tell me one thing. Has the sheriff…” I stopped myself just in time. I had been about to ask, Has the sheriff interviewed Raymundo Mendoza yet?

  Deputy Mountain raised his eyebrows. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I muttered, and left.

  The minute I emerged from the sheriff’s office, the newscaster I had seen on the morning news ran over and stuck a microphone under my nose. “Ma’am, are you with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department?”

  “No.” I tried to duck away, but she followed me.

  “Child Protective Services?”

  “No.”

  “But you live in Los Perdidos, right?”

  “No.”

  Her expression grew strained, but she didn’t pull the mike away. “Do you have anything to say about the murder?”

  “No.”

  “My sources tell me there was another shooting last night, but that no one was hurt. Have you heard anything about that?”

  “Another shooting? News to me.” Hey, if you can’t lie to the media, who can you lie to?

  She wouldn’t give up. As I hurried to my Jeep, she trotted right along, the satellite truck rolling along with her. “Those rumors of medical procedures being carried out by unlicenced medical practitioners. What have you heard about them?”

  I almost repeated my “no comment” comment, but then had a better idea. I stopped, leaned into her mike and said, “Why don’t you go talk to Kalil and Quibilah Wahab? They might be able to tell you a great deal about those so-called unlicenced medical procedures. Which, by the way, are complete genital amputations carried out on living little girls, without anesthesia.”

  Then I climbed into my Jeep and left for Freedom Temple.

  A satellite truck was just exiting the church’s driveway when I pulled in. Passing several more, I drove around to the back and parked by the parsonage. Instead of knocking, I walked right in.

  Olivia Hall was seated on one of the sofas, surrounded by a dozen women wearing white robes. The Women For Freedom. Olivia alone was dry-eyed, but that meant nothing. I’d known people who remained stoic when confronted with the news of the death of a loved one, but committed suicide as soon as the funeral was over.

  When Olivia raised her head and met my eyes, I feared for her, too. There was a vast emptiness in her expression, as if only her body sat in the room. Her soul, if she’d ever had one, was gone.

  Sitting down in the chair directly across from her, I spoke gently. “Mrs. Hall? I’m very sorry about your loss, but there are a few things I’d like to ask.”

  She spread her hands in an “I don’t care” gesture.

  “Do you have to?” snapped a harsh-faced woman of around fifty. “She’s in mourning.”

  I ignored the woman. “Olivia, what time did you last see your husband alive?” Knowing the estimated time of death would help my own investigation.

  She looked at the photograph display on the wall. Her attention seemed riveted on the picture taken in Africa. Was that where it all began?

  “He left the parsonage around midnight,” she finally said. “I figured he was going over to the church to finish up some work.”

  “He never came back?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t notice that he didn’t come to bed?” She might have been a deep sleeper, although considering the hell she’d allowed her husband to inflict on her daughter, I didn’t understand how she could sleep at all.

  Staring at the photograph, she answered, “Daniel and I haven’t shared a bedroom in many years.”

  The room became so quiet I heard the deputy coughing on the other side of the church, traffic passing on the highway. “Was it usual for him to leave the parsonage at night?”

  “To go to the church, yes.”

  “If you didn’t share the same bedroom, how do you know he always went to the church? Perhaps some of those times, he went elsewhere.”

  Hearing a quick intake of breath, I looked over at the young woman whose cowled, white robe couldn’t hide her flame-haired attractiveness. Seeing her guilty expression, I knew that the good reverend wasn’t as pure as his beaten-down wife believed.

  I directed my next question to the redhead. “Were you having an affair with Reverend Hall?”

  The redhead gasped again, then stood up and shouted, “You dirty-minded bitch! Someone should cut you!” With that, she fled out the door.

  Olivia watched her go. “Elaine used to embrace sin, but now she is pure. She made that sacrifice for him.”

  Several white-veiled heads nodded. With that chorus of gestures, a terrible suspicion formed in my mind.

  The temperature in the room was pleasant enough, but I shivered anyway. “Just what kind of sacrifice are you talking about?”

  Olivia’s voice became a mere whisper. “The foregoing of pleasure.”

  I had to be wrong. No one would willingly let themselves be butchered like that. But I had to ask the question. “Have you all been cut?”

  Several women smiled with empty-headed pride. Others looked away. But no one denied it.

  The harsh-faced woman broke the silence. “We are all pure here. Except for you.”

  I realized, then, that I was surrounded by female eunuchs.

  ***

  McDonald’s go-cup in hand, I sat in the park near the library listening to my police scann
er, watching Mass-goers leave the Los Perdidos Catholic Church down the hill. It was a pretty day, with a sky dimmed only by a few scuttling clouds, so the church’s congregants wore summery clothes topped by the lightest of jackets. They appeared happy, as well they should. Their priest had absolved their sins with no cutting involved.

  Self-mutilation is legal in the U.S. As long as you are of legal age and can pass a sanity test, you can do any crazy thing you want to your own body. Still, most people stopped short of amputating body parts.

  There are exceptions.

  When the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide in 1997, the autopsies found that six of the males had been castrated. Some of them had even performed the procedure on themselves to ensure that they were pure enough to be taken on board the spaceship that trailed Comet Hale-Bopp.

  Religion was an odd thing. Believers represented both the best and the worst of the human condition. Religious leaders used their particular faith’s message to soothe grief, to cause grief; to council peace, to incite terrorism.

  And in some cases, to make their flocks feel ashamed for just being normal.

  Snippets of John Lennon’s Imagine drifted through my troubled mind, especially the line where he suggested that without religion, there would be no war, no terror. I’d never bought into that philosophy, having noticed that religion-free regimes—such as those headed by Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Chairman Mao—had no trouble waging war or committing atrocities. Then again, those leaders had made gods of themselves, hadn’t they?

  Just like Marshall Applewhite, the addled-brained prophet of Heaven’s Gate.

  Just like Reverend Daniel Hall.

  Hall had not acted alone. And unlike Marshall Applewhite, he had not confined his barbarous beliefs to willing adult believers. After Nicole’s pregnancy proved she was no longer ‘pure,’ Hall ordered her cut. Nicole told me that the Cutter, the woman who actually carried out the procedures, spoke with an African accent. An old African acquaintance of the Reverend’s who’d immigrated to Los Perdidos?

  Before leaving the parsonage, I had attempted to make the white-robed women of Freedom Temple tell me the Cutter’s name, but they maintained their silence. Overwhelmed by a mixture of pity and disgust, I’d given up and left, but now that I examined the ramifications of the situation, I knew I had to speak to Sheriff Avery right away.