Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

Chapter 1
    What do you call a dead, sixty-eight-year-old polygamist?
    In the case of my thirteen-year-old client, you call him your fiancé.
    “Oh, Lena! Prophet Solomon’s been hurt!” Rebecca Corbett gasped as I pulled her away from his body. “Shouldn’t we stop and help him?” She was such a nice girl.
    But I’m not a nice girl. Few private detectives are. We see too much of the dark side of human nature, such as fathers who would trade their beautiful thirteen-year-old daughters in exchange for two not quite as beautiful sixteen-year-old girls. Kind of like baseball cards, I guess.
    Besides, “nice” was a luxury I couldn’t afford. The cool September night had clouded over and the full moon all too infrequently illuminated the inky sky. Impenetrable darkness carpeted the floor of Paiute Canyon, where loose shale, sliding gravel, and humped boulders conspired to break our legs at any moment. Yet Rebecca and I still had more than a mile to travel before we reached the piñon pine thicket where my partner waited.
    We had no choice. The dirt road above, which paralleled the canyon for almost twenty miles, would soon swarm with the men from the polygamy compound at Purity, all eager to take back what they saw as their property: a breeding-age girl.
    “Lena? Didn’t you hear me?”
    I shook my head. Maybe a nice person would have sat down with Prophet Solomon Royal and waited for help, but when I aimed my flashlight beam, the condition of his chest informed me that the old man was a lost cause. His stiff arms crooked upward, as if embracing the moon. The flashlight showed me something else: a double-barreled shotgun lying among rocks at least twenty feet away from the body.
    This was murder.
    “He’s dead, Rebecca,” I told her, not taking time to cushion my words. “Once we get on the Arizona side of the state line I’ll call the Utah State Police so the coyotes won’t…”
    I stopped myself. Thirteen-year-old girls didn’t need to hear what coyotes would do to a dead body. I had seen that once and it still gave me nightmares. I started again. “I’ll call so Prophet Solomon won’t have to lie here alone all night. But for now we’ve got to keep moving.”
    “Can’t we at least say a prayer over him?”
    “We don’t have time.” I gently pushed her ahead.
    Twenty minutes ago, Rebecca had slipped out of bed to meet me in the canyon. She had sworn no one in the compound had seen her, but I was in no mood to take chances. If Prophet Solomon’s henchmen caught up with us, they certainly wouldn’t take the time to pray. They all claimed to be religious men, but what kind of religion forces polygamous “marriages” on girls still playing with Barbie dolls?
    I heard the call of a nightbird, then the rustle of wings. Something shrieked in the darkness. The Arizona Strip, a one-hundred-mile stretch of badlands between Utah and Arizona, was no place to be caught out alone at night. I had already learned its dangers during the three days and nights I camped out in the canyon, waiting for a chance to signal Rebecca as she walked from her father’s house to the compound’s schoolhouse. One night a black and white king snake had slithered across my foot, but since it was nonpoisonous, its presence did not bother me. I had been less enchanted with the seven-inch-long centipede crawling up my leg.
    “Hurry, Rebecca!” This time I did not bother to lower my voice.
    Rebecca did her best, but in the darkness she ran straight into a straggly mesquite jutting out from the canyon wall. Bless her gallant heart, she didn’t make a sound. As she disentangled her bleeding face and hands from its grasping limbs, she took a final backward glance toward the body.
    “Oh, Prophet Solomon, I’m so sorry!”
    “You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” I said, wiping her blood away with the hem of my T-shirt. “You didn’t kill him, did you?” I tried to turn it into a joke but she didn’t laugh.
    Come to think of it, neither did I.
    It took us almost an hour to make it to the stair-stepped boulder cascade leading out of the canyon and onto the desert floor, but we found Jimmy waiting exactly where he’d promised to be, where he’d waited for us every night since I had gone down in the canyon to rescue Rebecca. His Toyota truck was parked, lights off, in a piñon pine grove several yards back from the road. A cloud picked that moment to slip away from the moon and as we approached; its silvery glow