Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

order to forestall one of those ugly surprises he had cautioned against, I told him what I knew. “There are several paths leading out of Purity and into the desert, but there’s really only one way to hook up with the road. To smuggle Rebecca out without anybody seeing us, I chose the path into Paiute Canyon. It’s not only the shortest, but it provides the best cover, too. Juniper, mesquite, and brush all over the place. Hell, you could hide a giraffe in there. Anyway, we headed south down the canyon until it hooked northwest, and that’s where we just about fell over the body.”
    He phrased his next question carefully. “When you all drove up there, Ms. Corbett took her own car, right?”
    “A bright green Geo with Arizona plates.” I began shading the male figure’s head, trying hard for a resemblance to Prophet Solomon.
    “Are there any other roads leading to the compound, especially any paved roads?” he asked.
    “Naw. Just the dirt road.” Satisfied with my drawing’s resemblance to the prophet, I added a bullet hole between his eyes, then sketched in a shadow box frame.
    “So if Ms. Corbett drove along that road she would pass you at some point, right?”
    As much as I wanted to answer in the affirmative, I couldn’t. “Not necessarily. You forget that all those nights Jimmy was waiting for me, he’d pulled the truck several yards off the side of the road and hid it in a stand of piñon pine. He told me he heard several cars and trucks going to and coming from Purity that night, but he was more concerned with staying hidden than he was with car-spotting. Technically speaking, if Esther left the motel just after Jimmy, she could have driven all the way to the compound without him seeing her, done the deed, and beat us back. The timing would be tight, but with a little luck she could have managed it.”
    “It was night. And way out in the badlands.” Winfield’s voice sounded distant, like he was deep in thought. “To avoid being seen, all she had to do was turn off her lights.”
    I wiggled the pencil between my fingers and explained. “Cars driving along dirt make a lot of noise, which is why Jimmy was able to hear all the traffic. But here’s my thinking. If Esther had driven within a quarter mile of Purity that night and yet not gone in, someone would certainly have heard her and gone out to investigate. Also, where the dirt road ends at the blacktop? There’s an all-night gas station/café combo sitting right there on the northwest side of the intersection. Lots of traffic and lots of nosey people. They probably pay pretty close attention to any strange car they see going out to the Purity compound, and a green Geo is a pretty strange vehicle for that area because almost everyone else drives pickups. If nobody’s come forward yet to say they saw the Geo, we’re probably all right.”
    When he spoke next, he still sounded worried. “We’ll find out during the discovery process, won’t we?”
    “I guess.” I thought we’d finished the conversation, but then Winfield dropped a bomb.
    “Ah, Lena, I have some other news you need to know about. Abel Corbett, Rebecca’s father, arrived in Scottsdale this morning, custody papers in hand from Utah Family Court.”
    The pencil in my hand broke in half.
    “Mr. Corbett insists on taking his daughter back to Utah with him until this situation is cleared up,” Winfield continued. “We have to comply.”
    “Does he have another dirty old man he wants to sell Rebecca to?”
    “No crime has been committed yet. Rebecca has to be proven to be in danger before we can successfully challenge the Utah custody order now that her mother’s in jail.”
    I tossed the pencil’s remains into the wastebasket. “What does that mean? Do we have to wait until Rebecca’s in some old fart’s bed and
then
go to court? Where’s the sense in that? You know as well as I do that the Utah court system won’t remove a little girl from a polygamy compound. It’s been tried before by worried relatives and they’ve failed every time. The court always rules that the parents, whatever freaks they may be, have custody over the child until she turns sixteen. And by then, it’s too late.”
    “Lena, the law is the law, and as an officer of the court, I have to comply with it. In Utah, parents are God until proven unfit, and that’s pretty tough to do unless they’re serial killers.”
    “Well, I’m not an officer of the court, and as far as I’m