by Betty Webb
Which is why I wound up in the McDonald’s hilltop parking lot again with a cup of high-octane coffee. Here I was literally above it all.
Below, I saw the herd of satellite trucks mooing around the sheriff’s office. A block away, customers filed into the Nile Restaurant for an early dinner. On another hill sat Los Perdidos General Hospital, where Precious Doe’s body cooled in a locker. South, along SR80, sprawled Apache Chemical. A more attractive sight was Mendoza’s Mexican Pottery, with its crowded parking lot. Business boomed, even when hearts were broken.
Farther along the highway gleamed the tin roof of Freedom Temple, its own parking lot deserted except for the Halls’ ancient Taurus. The sheriff had impounded the Buick Nicole took when she fled with Aziza. Had none of the white-robed ladies stayed to comfort the grieving widow? From here it appeared they’d left her alone with her ugly memories.
Plenty of those to go around.
I shifted in my seat and looked toward the Dragoon Mountains. With the sun slipping toward the Western horizon, they blazed in red and gold. Beautiful, certainly, but how many more little girls lay buried in their canyons?
I closed my eyes, only to confront the face of Precious Doe.
Her lips moved, but I heard no sound.
“What are you trying to tell me?” I whispered.
“Her hands,” she whispered back.
Can the dead speak? Or do we, out of our own sorrow, speak for them?
When Precious Doe’s image faded, I opened my eyes and looked back down the hill to see several satellite trucks following a cruiser away from the sheriff’s office. As I watched, the cruiser turned down a street near the Safeway and drew up in front of a small house, the satellite trucks close behind. The cruiser’s door opened and two people emerged. Intrigued, I took my binoculars from my glove box and trained them on the scene. Even before I found the correct focus I identified the couple: the Cutter and her husband.
That could mean only one thing. The deputies who searched their house had turned up no evidence, so Sheriff Avery couldn’t hold them.
The man dashed into the house with the Cutter trailing behind. The cruiser left, but the satellite trucks remained, spilling out a clutch of reporters and cameramen. They ran to the door and pounded, but it never opened. Instead of returning to their trucks, the reporters positioned themselves dramatically in front of the house and began yapping into mikes.
I wanted to ask a few questions, too, but knew that attempting to talk to the Cutter now was useless. Better to wait until the press got bored and left.
Plan formed, I put on my headset, switched on my iPod, and listened to Hank Williams sing about cheating hearts.
***
Two hours later, when the last reporter left, I cruised down the hill to the Cutter’s house, hoping that none of the Gulleets had seen me previously on a news broadcast. Knowing better than to try the front door, I slipped around to the rear. I knocked quietly, the way a family friend would. The door opened and the Cutter’s husband peered out.
He frowned, as if he’d been expecting someone else. “Who are you?”
Good. He hadn’t recognized me.
“I’m a friend of Reverend Hall’s,” I lied. “And I need to talk to Dekah. It’s about the trouble your family is having. Maybe I can help.”
His own whisper proved he bought my story. “Are you a lawyer?”
“I’m in a law-related profession, and I really need to see Dekah or I can’t help.”
His face relaxed. “Ah, law help. Well, she is not here. Someone telephoned, then she left.”
Frowning, I asked, “Do you know who called?”
“She answered the telephone. I was watching soccer on ESPN. To calm down, you understand. The police, they were not good to us.”
As if I cared. “Do you know where she went?”
“Maybe on business, who knows what that stupid woman does?” He wasn’t interested in her problems, just his. “She is lazy, that one. Good for nothing.” He started to close the door.
Risking a bad bruise, I shoved my foot between the door and the jamb. “Did she take the car?” Missing from the driveway was the white minivan I’d seen them drive away from the park earlier.
“I told her not to leave but she defied me and left. So now what do we do about supper?” He seemed to expect me to come in and cook it.
Since I might need to talk to him again, I kept the fury out of my voice when I said, “McDonald’s has great fries, and it’s a short walk up the hill.”
I left him standing in the doorway with a puzzled expression on his face.
While driving the streets for the next hour, I spotted several white minivans, none driven by the Cutter. Although I searched as far beyond the town limits as Mendoza’s Mexican Pottery and Freedom Temple, I had no luck. Giving up, I drove back to the Cutter’s house.
In my business, stakeouts are the name of the game, so I parked across the street and zipped the Jeep’s top closed against the night chill. After switching on my police scanner for entertainment, I settled down to wait.
***
When the sun rose the next morning, I was still waiting. The Cutter never returned.
I soon found out why.
As I watched the Cutter’s house, considering the wisdom of leaving to pick up some coffee, the police scanner informed me that two teens on their way to school had found a woman’s body in a white minivan.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Since I was only two blocks away, I beat the cops to the scene.
The minivan was parked in an alley, drawing a crowd. At the front of the pack, two girls spoke excitedly into their cell phones.
“I was, like, really grossed,” the blonde yapped. “Her one eye was all bugged out and everything. It was so eew!”
The redhead, with a more spiritual turn of mind, sniffled into her cell, “Maybe I should pray for her. But what if she’s not, like, into Jesus?”
Careful not to touch anything, I bent down and looked in the van. The Cutter slumped over the steering wheel, blood leaking from the hole in her forehead, a .38 dangling from her left hand. The odds were strong it was the same weapon that had killed Reverend Hall. She didn’t look like the handmaiden of evil, just a pathetic old woman.
Behind me, the first cruiser pulled up. Sheriff Avery climbed out, royally pissed.
“What the hell are you doing here, Ms. Jones?”
“The usual,” I replied.
“Which is?”
“Investigating.” I stepped aside so he could take my place. For a full five seconds he studied the mess in the van.
“Suicide,” he pronounced, straightening up.
“If that’s a suicide, I’ll eat my Jeep.”
He snorted. “Get the Tabasco ready.”
“Look again, Sheriff. The gun’s in her left hand, but the wound’s above her right eye. A clumsy way to shoot yourself, don’t you think?”
“Perfectly possible.”
Was he being obtuse on purpose? Or was he trying to fool me into going away? “But not probable.”
Before we could continue our argument, three more cruisers rolled up, and close behind them, a caravan of satellite trucks. Deputies emerged and pushed the crowd back, while others police-taped the alley.
The sheriff asked how I had wound up at the scene of the crime, and fortunately, the two teens stopped yakking into their cell phones long enough to vouch for my story. Listening to them reminded me of another teenager.
“Is Nicole Hall still in that CPS group home, Sheriff?”
He blinked. “As far as I know, yes.”
Which meant he didn’t know for certain. I decided not to ask him the whereabouts of Raymundo Mendoza. The boy would either be headed for the border with Nicole, or opening up the family store. I hoped it was the latter.
“Nicole knows Reverend Hall is dead, right?”
“One of the social workers told her.”
I thought about that. “Did she take it okay?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t hear otherwise.”
Not much on follow-up, was he? “Unless you need me here, I’m leaving.”
“Town, I hope.”
“Not without my .38.”
He grimaced. “All right, I’ll call over and have it released. You can pick it up on your way to Scottsdale.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I have to take care of something else before I leave town.”
Prevent another death.
***
An hour later, the weather turned ugly. The sky, which had appeared so harmless when the sun rose, darkened as black clouds blew over the horizon. The wind rose, driving the temperature down to the high forties, pneumonia weather for we thin-blooded southern Scottsdale folks. My Phoenix Suns windbreaker provided little comfort against the chill, so by the time I arrived at Freedom Temple, I longed for the sunny streets of home.
Freedom Temple looked deserted, but Olivia Hall’s old Taurus was parked in front of the parsonage. I smelled coffee brewing and something baking, oddly normal activities for a woman who had just lost her husband and seen her only child seized by CPS. When I tried the door, I found it locked. She had learned a few things from her earlier run-ins with the press.
I knocked.
Nothing.
I knocked again, called, “Olivia?”
Approaching footsteps, the sound of a deadbolt clicking back. The door finally opened. “Oh. It’s you.”
Nicole’s mother wore another of her shapeless dresses, but instead of her usual bun, her brown-and-gray hair tumbled down around her shoulders. With the lines on her face softened, she appeared almost pretty, perhaps because her husband was no longer around to convince her that she wasn’t.
“You were expecting someone else, Olivia?”
She frowned. “The Women For Freedom are coming over to help plan Daniel’s funeral. It’s tomorrow.”
So business would continue as usual at Freedom Temple, just under new management. I had suspected for some time there might be the remnants of a backbone hidden underneath Olivia’s cloak of servility. I turned to go, thinking it might be best to leave and return later, when I would have more time with her alone.
Then I changed my mind. Better two minutes now than none. “Five minutes, no more. Then I’ll go.”
She shook her head. “After the Women leave, I need to pick up some buffet items from Safeway. As I’m certain even you noticed, Daniel was very popular. There’ll be a big crowd after the funeral and I don’t want anyone to go hungry.”
I had attended enough après-funeral functions to know that women always arrived bearing casseroles, so this was just an excuse to get rid of me. Arranging my face into an expression that I hoped passed for sympathy, I said, “A couple of questions, that’s all.”
Indecision flickered in her pale eyes. Then, deciding that the quickest way to get rid of me was to cooperate, she said, “Oh, come on in, but you have to leave the second the Women arrive.”
After I followed her into the parlor, she continued into the kitchen with the explanation that she needed to take some rolls out of the oven, so I just stood there staring around. Something had changed since my last visit. While most photographs of the Halls’ earlier church postings remained on the walls, several were gone, among them the one showing Reverend Hall on the steps of Freedom Temple. For some reason, the missing pictures made me uneasy.
As I puzzled at the wall, she called from the kitchen, “You wouldn’t like a sticky bun, would you?” Ever the preacher’s wife, her hospitality was knee-jerk, if not sincere.
Eager for the chance to extend my visit, I answered, “Sounds wonderful!”
A displeased grunt. She already regretted her offer.
I kept studying the photographs until she returned with an elegant silver coffee server, the kind with a candle underneath to keep the coffee hot. “My mother’s,” she said, noticing my gaze. “It’s the only thing my parents left me. Stu got everything else.”
“Stu?”
“My brother.” After she lit the candle, she returned to the kitchen and re-emerged with a platter of home-made sticky buns. “You might as well sit down,” she said, gracelessly.
As soon as I eased myself onto a faded sofa, I saw the missing photographs laid out on the coffee table, arranged in what appeared to be chronological order.
“For the memorial service,” Olivia explained. “A record of Daniel’s life and accomplishments.”
More like a record of his barbarity. “Nice.” I bit into a sticky bun. It was delicious, and so was the steaming coffee, but I didn’t take time to savor them. “Mrs. Hall, did your husband have enemies?”
She poured coffee for herself. “Any man who preaches Truth has enemies.”
“But which one do you think killed him?” I wondered how long it would take her to accuse her daughter.
She didn’t keep me waiting long. “Nicole hated him the most. He wasn’t her real father, you understand. Not biologically, anyway.”
What a woman, throwing her own daughter to the wolves. “So you think Nicole did it?”
“The girl is a sinner, and it’s easy to fall from one sin to another.” Licking her lips, she helped herself to another sticky bun.
“But Nicole is in CPS custody, nowhere near Los Perdidos. She couldn’t have killed him.”
“Then maybe that boyfriend of hers did it, Ray something.” She didn’t sound all that interested.
I decided to shake things up a bit. “Dekah was found dead this morning.”
Her face didn’t change. “Dekah who?”
“You know exactly who I mean, Olivia.”
She smiled. “Oh. You must mean the Cutter. How unfortunate.”
Unfortunate? “Don’t you want to know how she died?”
She nibbled at her sticky bun. “Death comes to us all in the end. It makes no difference how we meet it.”
Was she really that cold, or was she simply parroting her dead husband’s beliefs? “You met the Cutter when Reverend Hall was posted to the Somalia-Kenya border, didn’t you? That was how long ago, fourteen years? Fifteen?”
“Fifteen.”
“And you gave birth to Nicole soon after you returned to the U.S., right?”
She frowned. “In Idaho, yes. What about it? I sinned, I atoned, I sin no more.”
Considering what she’d allowed to be done to her daughter, that statement called for debate, but I let it slide. “Who was Nicole’s biological father? Another missionary?”
She gathered up the plates. “It doesn’t matter. You promised just a couple of questions, and now you’ve asked them, so leave. The Women will be here any minute, and we have important decisions to make about Freedom Temple’s future.”
I wasn’t finished shaking things up. “Oh, but it does matter. What if Nicole’s biological father tracked you here and found out what happened to his daughter? The pregnancy. The adoption. The cutting. Good men have been driven over the edge by less.”
She set the plates back down with such force that one of them broke. “Now look what you made me do!”
I heard a car crunch along the gravel outside. Then another. The white-robed nut jobs were only seconds from the door. “Olivia, you didn’t answer my question. Who was Nicole’s father?”
Her eyes darted back and forth, toward the door, to the picture wall. “Oh, all right. But you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter. He was with that group, Doctors Without Borders, inoculating refugees against malaria. At the time I believed he was a good man, but he turned out to be just another sinner. After he got what he wanted, he went home and left me in Africa with the mud and the flies. Satisfied now?”
Not yet. “Was it just a coincidence that Dekah and her family wound up in Los Perdidos?”
She smiled. “Of course not. Daniel and I sponsored her, helped set her and her husband up. And that other woman, too.” The smile faded. Apparently she didn’t approve of Second Wife.
One final question, the wo
rst. “Reverend Hall paid Dekah to cut you, right?”
The door opened and several white-robed figures entered. After uttering one word, Olivia rose to greet them.
That word was “Yes.”
***
I drove down the road for about a quarter of a mile, then eased the Jeep into the trees just off the highway. For the next hour and a half, I sat there thinking about what Olivia Hall had told me. Nothing came as a surprise, because with the discovery of the Cutter’s body I knew the truth. But I had no proof to give Sheriff Avery, and there was no way he would conduct another search without proof—the lawman’s Catch-22.
My wait was made more difficult by a rising wind that rocked the Jeep as if it were no more than a toy. Above, fat clouds raced across the sky, highlighted by the streaks of lightning stabbing through them. Cottonwoods, bent almost double under the onslaught, whipped their leaves, flinging birds off their perches. It hadn’t yet begun to rain, but during the increasingly brief silences between thunderclaps, I heard the San Pedro River roaring its swollen way to Mexico. God help any undocumented alien making his way north today.
When enough time passed, I checked my watch. Almost eleven. Surely the meeting wouldn’t last much longer.
But it did. A full hour later, as the wind tried to tear off the Jeep’s flimsy roof, a small caravan of white-robed women passed me. After a few more minutes, I saw what I had hoped to see, the Hall’s Taurus, with Olivia at the wheel, headed down the highway toward Los Perdidos. She hadn’t been lying about needing to shop. Satisfied, I turned on the Jeep’s ignition and headed to the parsonage.
Since my lock-pick set didn’t work on deadbolts, I bypassed the front door and trotted around to the rear. The kitchen door was a snap, with its open-me-with-a-credit-card lock, so within seconds, I stepped inside.
I hurried through the parlor, noting that Olivia had neglected to blow out the candle heating the coffee server. Dangerous. Too rushed to do anything about it, I continued through the house while the wind screamed at the windows as if it wanted in.
The first bedroom I entered turned out to be Reverend Hall’s room. Spacious and elegant, it looked like a set from Out of Africa. No crosses were anywhere in evidence, but the walls boasted a plethora of tribal spears, shields, and masks that made Selma’s little collection appear skimpy. The bed and reading chair were both covered in African fabrics, as were the shades on the matching lamps flanking the bed. Lying across the wooden floor was what appeared to be a cheetah-skin rug. The good reverend was no conservationist. The thought that cheetahs were endangered had probably never crossed his mind. Or it had, and he didn’t care.
