Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

should have been sealed.”
    “Not if your mother knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who taught at the school.”
    I found the information about Noah Heaton more disturbing than that about Earl Graff’s imprisonment for battering. Graff was a thug, to be sure, but he was an obvious thug. But Noah? Even given the dog-shooting incident I’d been told about, I had considered him more whiney than vicious. More fool me. Anyone in law enforcement knew that serial killers began their careers by torturing animals, eventually moving to human prey unless they received intensive psychiatric treatment. Somehow I doubted that the good people of Purity had driven Noah into Zion City on a regular basis to have his head shrunk by an expert. These people were more interested in hiding problems than they were fixing them.
    Struck by the futility of the situation, all I could say was, “What a mess.”
    “You’re telling me. But there’s more, much more. Prophet Solomon, for instance, certainly wasn’t without his sins. He’s not on record for dismembering hamsters or beating women, but he was one of those convicted child molesters I was telling you about. Back in the late Fifties, after he’d left the compound for a while, he did two years in Idaho for indecent acts with a minor. Even worse, I checked it out and apparently the case was pled down from statutory rape. He was twenty-five, the little girl was eight.”
    I felt a sharp pain in my palm. When I looked down, I saw that I’d clenched my fist so hard the nails had dug into it. Four crescent-shaped cuts sprouted tiny drops of blood.
    “He also has a fraud conviction to his credit.”
    “A fraud conviction?” Not in the same league as child rape, but still…
    “Yeah, seems that after he got out of prison he took off for Oregon, where he defrauded a group of Portland businessmen out of something close to six million dollars in a fictitious land development deal. He served four years in a federal country club, paid some of the money back, then vanished for awhile. Next time we hear from him he’s back in Purity as God’s very own prophet. Oh, and by that time, he’d already accrued five wives of record, one at a time, all legal.”
    “You think any of the people in Purity know about his adventures outside the compound?”
    “Hard to tell, and even harder to tell if they’d mind if they did. They don’t play by the same rules the rest of us do.”
    A thought struck me. “Did you get the names of the businessmen he defrauded? He only paid back some of the money, right?”
    “Yes on both counts.” He reeled off several names and I wrote them down. Warming to his theme, he continued, “Royal’s victims recovered about two million and change, but the other four mill never turned up. It’s my guess some of that money wound up in offshore accounts.”
    Who had the money now? Davis Royal? Or somebody else? “A lot of people would kill their grandmothers for four million dollars,” I mused.
    “Grandmothers? Try their mothers. And pet dog.”
    “Jimmy, you’re starting to sound as cynical as me,” I laughed.
    “Maybe that’s because I’m beginning to realize the number of crimes hidden in Purity. I hate to say it, even our client’s own family may have blood on its hands. Jacob Waldman, Esther’s father? My sources tell me it’s rumored that one of his daughters went missing after she refused to marry his buddy Solomon.”
    I didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean, went missing?”
    “Exactly what I said. One day Jacob had a teenage daughter, the next day he didn’t. No one knows what happened to her.”
    “Maybe she just ran off.”
    “Doubtful. She’d just turned thirteen.”
    I remembered Waldman’s venomous display at the community meeting and his insistence on blood atonement. There was no telling how much of his raving was due to the dementia of Alzheimer’s and how much to fact, but I made a mental note to watch the old man more carefully.
    “Another thing, Lena.”
    “Yes?”
    “That guy you’re staying with, Saul Berkhauser? Well, about twenty years ago his business partner Micah Browning was found murdered up in Salt Lake. The case was never solved, but there were some pretty nasty things being said there for a while about Mr. Berkhauser.”
    I groaned. “Why didn’t your mother know about all this?”
    “I thought of that, too, so I called and asked her. Apparently, when it all went down, she was