Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

my eyes again. Now I was going to get the truth. “I hid my car in a stand of creosote bushes about a mile away from the compound and hiked down into the canyon. I thought I might even run into you, but I guess you were over in the other direction.”
    I nodded. I’d camped far enough back into the twenty-mile-long canyon to make discovery difficult. But Esther had placed herself right at the murder scene. Could her situation have been any worse?
    She must have seen the consternation on my face. “All I wanted was just a glimpse of Rebecca, Lena. You’d told me how dangerous it would be if I tried to grab her myself.”
    “You ran into Solomon, didn’t you?”
    The tears came back. “Yes,” she whispered.
    Only the pain in her eyes kept me from screaming at her in frustration. “Tell me what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”
    “We…we argued.”
    “I’ll bet you did. Give me the gory details.”
    Her voice trembled but she managed to maintain control. “He was out hunting with two other men, and when I saw him walking along like that, looking so self-satisfied and arrogant, knowing that he wanted my daughter, what he was going to do to her, I…I just lost it.”
    “How badly did you lose it?” I had visions of Esther wresting the shotgun away from old Solomon and giving him both barrels in the chest. It was probably what I’d do if Rebecca had been my daughter.
    “I started screaming at him, calling him all sorts of names. I told him he’d marry Rebecca over my dead body. It became ugly enough that he told the other men to leave us alone. I think he was afraid of what I might say. About him. About Purity.”
    I thought about this for a minute. “And did they leave you two alone?”
    She nodded. “They went further up the canyon, in the direction of Zion City. But not so far that I couldn’t hear them stomping around in the brush.”
    I pulled my pen and notebook out of my carry-all. “Give me the men’s names. They’ll probably be called as witnesses, so we need to be prepared.” I waited expectantly.
    Nothing.
    “Esther?”
    Her lower lip quivered. “Earl Graff was one of them. We never got along.”
    I jotted the name down. “And the other man?”
    “My father.”
    I sat up straight. “Your father? That’s good, then. He won’t want to testify against you.”
    She shook her head miserably. “Before my father left me with the prophet, he called me the Whore of Babylon.”
    Not so good. “Your father called you the Whore of Babylon and then he and that other guy, Earl Graff, left you and Solomon alone. What happened next?”
    She didn’t say anything for a second, then finally took a deep breath. “I called him a pedophile. He slapped me. I started crying and ran back to my car.”
    I frowned. “Do you think the other men heard him hit you?”
    She shrugged. “What if they did? Women get slapped around all the time up there. It’s how the men keep them in line.”
    I frowned. The story sounded reasonable, more or less. I would have liked to learn the real reason Solomon had sent the two men away, but the hard edge in Esther’s voice told me the interview was over. Still, for all the holes in her story, I doubted if Esther had killed Solomon. If she had, Graff and her father would have heard the shotgun blast and nabbed her on the spot. Then they might have indulged themselves in a little Wild West justice. The kind with a rope.
    I put my notebook away and prepared to make my exit. Forcing a smile, I patted her hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you have a damned good attorney before Abel gets down here. We’ll have your ex-husband so tied up in red tape on this custody and extradition business that he’ll look like Houdini.”
    Hope leapt into her eyes. “Do you really believe you can prevent Rebecca from being forced back to Utah?”
    “I know I can.”
    I’m such a liar.
    Jimmy had left for the semiconductor plant again when I arrived back at Desert Investigations, so I rushed straight to my desk and began making phone calls. I soon discovered that I’d forgotten that Scottsdale’s rich and famous tended to flee our hideous heat every summer to hole up in cooler places, such as London or Copenhagen. But after an hour of punching in numbers, I finally hit pay dirt.
    Serena Hyath-Allesandro, one of the Valley’s richest women, remained in town. She had just been released from rehab with her doctor’s warning not to dance the European tango with the fast