Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

needed to ride along. I jumped at the chance to return to West Wind Ranch to make some phone calls. I hadn’t talked to Jimmy in over a week, and I was eager to find out what he’d learned about the list of names I’d given him.
    When we arrived at West Wind, the ranch was full up with Swedish tourists, but as Virginia chatted with a man who looked like a professional skier, she motioned me to the office. First I phoned the ranch where Dusty worked, but after much hemming and hawing, Slim Papadopolous told me Dusty had phoned from Las Vegas and asked for another week off.
    “He’s not alone, is he?” I asked Slim, already knowing the answer.
    “I’m sorry, Lena.”
    Well, this wouldn’t be the first time Dusty had disappointed me. Not that either of us had taken any vows of faithfulness or anything old-fashioned like that, but a girl can still hope, can’t she?
    I forced a laugh. “It’s no big deal, Slim. Dusty and I have an understanding not to have an understanding.”
    “If you say so.”
    “I do say so.”
    I replaced the receiver as gently as possible, surprised at the steadiness of my hand. But my old cop attitude stood me in good stead. When you weren’t certain you’d return from your shift alive, a flamed-out relationship was no big deal. That was the theory, anyway. Besides, I didn’t really love Dusty. Never had, never would. Repeating that like a mantra, I called Desert Investigations.
    Jimmy’s first words shocked me. “Lena, I want you out of Purity right now.” The fiber optic line allowed me to hear the quaver in his voice.
    “I can’t leave until I’ve found Prophet Solomon’s killer, Jimmy. Tell me what you found out.”
    As he related the result of his Internet searches, his anxiety to pull me out of the compound began to make sense.
    “Some of those guys are convicted felons, Lena. They moved away from Purity when they hit eighteen and tried to make it elsewhere, but most never fit in. I uncovered several child molestation and lewd acts with minors convictions on a number of them, but right now I’m a little more concerned with one guy who might turn into a physical threat to you personally.”
    “Who?”
    “Earl Graff, one of the witnesses against Rebecca. He left Purity and came down to Phoenix when he was twenty and wound up doing one to five in Perryville Prison for almost killing his first wife when she tried to leave him. When the next wife dumped him, too, he repeated his pattern and went to visit the Perryville boys again. That’s when he saw the light and went back to Purity, where the women have to put up with that kind of stuff. He’s dangerous, Lena. Really dangerous.”
    I waved it away. Graff’s violent past didn’t surprise me in the least. “What else do you have?”
    “Oh, I’m just getting started. Have you run into some guy named Noah Heaton yet? His name came up in connection with Graff a couple of times, so I checked him out, too.”
    “I’ve met him. I can’t say that he impressed me much.”
    “Prepare to be impressed. Up until five years ago, the compound’s kids used to be bussed to the public schools in Zion City, which is why I was able to get the info on him that I did. It turns out that Heaton had a bad reputation in school. A very bad reputation.”
    “So did I, Jimmy. My teachers didn’t know what to do with me. They called me uncontrollable and tried to get several of my foster parents to give me Ritalin.”
    “You’ve told me. But were you ever caught in the science lab dismembering frogs?
Before
they were dead?”
    I winced. “Jesus, nothing like that.” As a child, the only creature I’d ever hurt was myself.
    He continued. “Heaton came to the attention of school officials several times, actually. He was always getting into fights and for a while wasn’t allowed to even sit on the same side of the room with the girls. He was eventually expelled when the class’s pet hamster turned up dismembered and one of its feet was discovered in his desk. After that, Heaton’s mother had to homeschool him because no other school up there would take him on. About a year later, the compound withdrew all its kids from the public school system—afraid they’d get tainted by modern ideas, I guess—and Noah never came to the attention of the authorities again. I doubt if his animal-torturing career ended there.”
    I digested this. “How did you find out? Noah was a minor then, and even if he was in public school, his records