Cold Betrayal (20 page)

The resulting political fallout was disastrous, especially for Governor Pyle. The Short Creek debacle was thought to be, in large measure, responsible for his failure to win his bid for reelection the following year.

With Pyle’s unfortunate history as an example, succeeding governors had simply turned a blind eye on the people who lived in the area and had ignored whatever it was those folks were doing or not doing. Short Creek, now renamed Colorado City, had continued to benefit from this seemingly deliberate lack of governmental oversight.

Once that original group was reconstituted, its members went about formally establishing the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The FLDS church, as it was now called, remained the largest denomination in the area, although a number of groups with similar belief systems had settled nearby as well. Colorado City had again burst on the national scene a few years earlier when one of the FLDS leaders, Warren Jeffs, had been arrested and imprisoned on charges of sexually assaulting underage girls.

And now it’s happening again,
Ali thought,
because it’s easier for officialdom to ignore the problem than it is for them to fix it.

She remembered that Gordon Tower had said something about an entity he called “The Family” and Edith had mentioned “Outside,” but Ali’s browser located no applicable references. If The Family was a real group of some kind, it was operating under the radar of the people running Wikipedia.

Sister Anselm came down the hallway and beckoned to Ali. “Time for a strategy session,” she said. “Better to do that in private.”

Back in the tiny conference room, Ali noted the still visible handprint on Sister Anselm’s cheek, but the nun’s narrow shoulders were straight and the fire was back in her eye. The confrontation with Gordon Tower had galvanized her out of her earlier lethargy.

“How are they?” Ali asked. Then, remembering Sister Anselm’s vow of silence, she added, “Never mind. Sorry.”

“What’s your take on Edith?” Sister Anselm asked.

“When I first saw her, I thought she was Enid’s mother, but no mother forgets her child’s birth date. And Gordon about had a cow when you asked about Edith’s relationship to Enid.”

“I noticed that, too,” Sister Anselm said. “Colorado City is known for harboring polygamous groups, but admitting it here, in what Edith referred to as the ‘Outside,’ is probably not encouraged.”

“We’re both on the same page on that score,” Ali confirmed. “Edith is an older wife of Gordon Tower, while Enid, formerly known as this Jane Doe, is a younger one?”

“Yes,” Sister Anselm said. “That’s my take, too. What caught my eye was the way Edith wore her hair. Did you notice that crown of braids?”

It was Ali’s turn to nod. “You’re right. That’s the one obvious common denominator for all three of them—Edith, Enid, and the Jane Doe you told me about who was left near the Hualapai Mountains and later died at the Kingman hospital. It’s a distinctive hairstyle, and it suggests that they could all be from the same group. Finding out what we can about Enid’s background may help us untangle the Kingman Jane Doe’s history as well. From there, we might even be able to find her killer.”

“This many years later?” Sister Anselm asked dubiously. “Is that even possible?”

Ali nodded. “Tell me about that case again. When was it exactly?”

“It happened about twelve years ago. The Kingman Jane Doe was found close to death by some passersby who had been hiking in the mountains. She had been stripped naked, savagely beaten, and left to die.”

“That doesn’t sound like an act of random violence.”

“No,” Sister Anselm agreed. “It wasn’t random at all. I went so far as to mention that to one of the detectives at the time—that I wondered if it might possibly be a case of domestic violence. The detective wasn’t having any of it, at least not if the idea came from me. Besides, it made no difference. Since the cops had no idea of who she was or where she came from, the investigation went nowhere. I’m sure they worked the case for a time, but I don’t know how hard or how long.”

“It turns out we have something the cops back then never had—a clue, those three matching hairdos,” Ali said. “We also know, first from my conversation with Evangeline Begay and now from Gordon Tower himself, that Enid came from somewhere in or around Colorado City. I think the Kingman Jane Doe came from there, too. Is there a chance Enid might have known the other victim?”

Sister Anselm shook her head. “I doubt it. If Enid is almost seventeen now, she would have been only four or five at the time Jane Doe disappeared. Most likely she would have been too young to remember anything about it.”

“But maybe she’s heard stories about it,” Ali suggested. “Kids remember stories, and having a girl from the group running away or going missing would have been big news. It would help if we could ask her about it. Are we going to be able to?”

Rather than answering Ali’s question directly, Sister Anselm folded her hands and gazed out the window toward the waiting room. “Patients with traumatic brain injuries and with swelling issues may be kept in medically induced comas for a while. Recovery takes time, and how much they’ll be able to remember is questionable.”

On the surface, Sister Anselm appeared to be speaking about TBI patients in general, although Ali understood the truth of the matter. She was really speaking about one patient in particular—Enid Tower.

“Let’s say then,” Ali suggested, “that your first instinct was correct and Kingman Jane Doe’s death was due to an act of domestic violence—that she died at the hands of a husband or a boyfriend. As you said, since the cops had no idea who she was, they had no idea about where to go looking for suspects.

“I think it’s likely that DNA evidence was collected at the time,” Ali continued. “But just because it was collected doesn’t mean that it was ever processed. Processing DNA was very costly back then. Without family members prodding the cops to keep working the case, there’s a good chance that evidence is still lying, unprocessed, in a sheriff’s department’s evidence locker. And even if they did run it at the time, technology available back then might have yielded inconclusive results. With the advances made in DNA technology in the meantime, samples deemed useless back then can now be used to create full DNA profiles.”

“So?” Sister Anselm asked.

“I’m thinking about this group Gordon Tower called ‘The Family.’ It’s likely to be a small, isolated group—one that wouldn’t be welcoming to people from the ‘Outside.’ So if what happened near Kingman was domestic violence, maybe the offender is someone from that same group—a group with a very small gene pool.”

“Are you saying genetic profiles taken from Enid and her baby might lead us back to the Kingman Jane Doe and to her killer as well?”

“Yes, or even to a near relative of her killer. Knowing that might at least enable us to point the investigators in the right direction.”

“And you propose to get these samples how?” Sister Anselm asked.

“From you, of course,” Ali said.

Sister Anselm’s pale face went a shade paler, making Gordon Tower’s lingering handprint that much more obvious. Ali knew she had stepped over an invisible boundary.

“No,” Sister Anselm said at once, shaking her head. “Absolutely not. I couldn’t possibly condone such a thing. Besides, what would you do with the samples once you had them? Pass them along to the nearest crime lab? Run them through that national criminal DNA database that we’re hearing so much about these days?”

“Not a crime lab,” Ali answered. “I have a friend in the UK who was a huge help in sorting out the long-unsolved homicide of Leland Brooks’s father. The friend’s name is Kate Benchley. She runs an outfit called Banshee Group, a nongovernmental organization that specializes in identifying the remains of victims of various cases of genocide, or as politically correct people like to call it these days, ‘ethnic cleansing.’

“Banshee Group’s brief is to return murdered victims to their families for proper burial. If we were to send Kate sample swabs from Enid and her baby, I have no doubt that her people will provide us with their profiles in private. Once Jane Doe’s case is reopened, assuming there is usable DNA, we’ll have DNA profiles ready and waiting for comparison purposes. We’ll have them available to hand over to any Mohave County investigator who might have need of making a genetic match.”

“All that presupposes you’ll be able to get the cold case reopened,” Sister Anselm objected.

“Yes, it does,” Ali agreed. “I have an idea about how to make that happen. It’s an avenue I intend to pursue regardless of your answer on the DNA question.”

“Taking the samples seems like a gross invasion of my patients’ privacy,” Sister Anselm said.

“Well,” Ali said. “You could bring me that box of Enid’s effects, and I could clip off a tiny piece of the part of her shirt that was soaked in amniotic fluid. That would probably fill the bill.”

Sister Anselm thought about that and then shook her head. “I just can’t see any way to justify doing such a thing, especially without having Enid’s consent. It’s out of the question.”

“Do you remember what you told me this morning, about your being afraid that these two new victims were an answer to your prayers for a solution to the Kingman Jane Doe case? You also mentioned the responsibility you felt that by not pushing to solve that case, you had somehow left these two new victims at risk.”

Sister Anselm nodded.

“What if you’re right?” Ali asked. “What if this whole state of affairs is an answer to that prayer—an exact answer? Just because we’ve made the connection between the two cases doesn’t mean we’re absolved from having to do something about them. We need to carry this thing forward. With what we know so far, we can go to the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office and give them a reason to reopen Jane Doe’s case, but I want to do more than that. I don’t want them to simply reopen it. I want them to solve it.”

“And you believe those samples might be the key?”

“I do. Of course, if Enid dies, this whole discussion is moot,” Ali added. “At that point, her DNA would be collected during the course of an autopsy with or without her consent, and the end result may well turn out to be the same. At that juncture the Kingman Jane Doe’s case may be solved without our help, leaving your conscience entirely clear. But please remember, Kingman’s Jane Doe didn’t consent to having her DNA samples taken, either.”

“No,” Sister Anselm agreed regretfully. “She did not.”

“And what about this?” Ali asked. “If we could go into Enid Tower’s room right now and ask her if she’d be willing to allow you to take DNA samples, what do you think she’d say, especially if she knew samples taken from her and her baby might help solve another case, the murder of another runaway girl very much like her?”

“I suppose she’d say yes,” Sister Anselm conceded.

“I suppose she would, too,” Ali agreed.

Sister Anselm stood up. “I’ll have to think this over,” she said with her hand on the doorknob.

“Pray about it maybe?” Ali asked.

Sister Anselm allowed herself a small fleeting smile. “That, too,” she said. “Now I’d best go check on them.”

Refraining from any additional urging, Ali simply nodded. After all, a possible yes was far better than an absolute no.

“One more thing,” Ali said. “Did you attend Kingman Jane Doe’s funeral?”

“Of course, but as I mentioned, Bishop Gillespie handled final arrangements for both Jane Doe and the baby. I was there as part of the bishop’s delegation, but I doubt my presence was noted one way or the other. Why are you asking?”

“Right now I’m mostly thinking out loud,” Ali told her. “How many interactions did you have with the detectives on the Kingman case?”

“Just the one I already mentioned—when I brought up the possibility of domestic violence. By then, though, the mother was dead and I was caring for the baby. She couldn’t tell them anything.”

“With Kate Benchley’s help, she might be able to now.”

“Yes,” Sister Anselm agreed. “You might be right.”

For a few minutes after the nun left the room, Ali stayed where she was, thinking. If Sister Anselm couldn’t square her conscience with taking the DNA samples, Ali realized she’d need to find some other way to accomplish that goal. In the meantime, she set about tackling the next problem.

By then it was ten o’clock on the East Coast. When she called B., he answered immediately. “Hey,” he said. “I just got back from a dinner meeting and was about to call you. I heard from Stuart that the Betsy Peterson matter is under control. The surveillance system is up and running.”

“Great,” she said. “Now I have another problem for you. It’s a cold case or, rather two of them—the deaths of a young mother and her infant daughter twelve years ago near Kingman. They were both Sister Anselm’s patients.”

Ali spent the next several minutes explaining the specifics to her husband.

“Okay,” B. said when she finished. “What does any of this have to do with us?”

“I want to call Bishop Gillespie and ask for his help,” Ali said. “I’m hoping that, based on his connection to the Kingman Jane Doe and her baby, he’ll be able to convince the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office to reopen those two cases.”

“Because he paid their burial expenses?” B. asked. “Is that enough of a connection?”

“Maybe not,” Ali said. “But there’s something else at work there. We didn’t meet the Mohave County sheriff when we were in that mess back in November, but I remember seeing his name—Sheriff Daniel Alvarado. I just googled him. He’s still in his first term, so he wasn’t sheriff back when all this happened. Based on his name, I’m willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that he’s a good Catholic boy.”

“That sounds like some sort of racial profiling. Or religious profiling at least,” B. said. “Do you want me to call Bishop Gillespie and ask?”

Ali knew that if B. asked, the bishop would agree. Ali had something else in mind.

“No,” she said. “I’ll call him myself, but I do need his number.”

17

W
hen Ali left the conference room, Sister Anselm was standing near the nurses’ station talking to someone. She waved for Ali to join them.