Cold Betrayal

Ali closed her eyes in gratitude. She had pulled the trigger in time. Richard Lowell hadn’t managed to complete the call.

It didn’t take long for her to tell the story of how, with Ali in the restroom, Lowell had broken into the Sprinter and taken its passengers hostage. Malovich listened but without taking notes. Knowing she’d be interviewed in far greater detail later when what she said was being recorded, Ali hit the high spots of what had happened, ending with her ordering Lowell to drop the phone and pulling the trigger when he didn’t.

“Okay,” Agent Malovich said at last. “All that jibes with what everyone else is saying. You can go now. You should probably go check on your husband. He’s in the hangar right next door, and he’s pretty shaken up. Oh, and you’ll have to go out the back way and walk around to hangar number one. The space between two and three is an active crime scene.”

It was three o’clock in the morning as Ali made her way to hangar number one. On the far side of number two she could see the generator-powered floodlights that had been set up around the crime scene. She didn’t need to go there. Remembering visiting Sheriff Alvarado and with him totally at ease in his office hours earlier on the previous day, there was nothing she wanted to see.

She found B. sitting just inside the door to the hangar, hunched into a plastic lawn chair, with his face buried in his hands.

“Sorry,” she murmured, walking up to him and laying a comforting hand on his shoulder. “So much for being part of the out-of-harm’s-way ‘rear guard.’ ”

B. nodded without looking up. “I signaled with the headlights as he was taxiing to his tie-down. Three shorts, three longs, three shorts—SOS. Sheriff Alvarado saw the signal and came right over to me, as soon as he got out of his plane.

“I told him what was going on and that the guy was inside, holding hostages and threatening to kill them. By then Alvarado knew the SWAT team was coming, but they were still two minutes out. He told me he wanted to get closer so he’d be able to give his guys a better idea of what was going on inside the Sprinter. That’s when the door opened. Lowell came out, holding Governor Dunham in front of him. Alvarado was caught out in the open. Lowell opened fire and cut him down just like that.”

Ali heard the futility in B.’s voice and her heart ached for him. “It’s not your fault,” she said.

“If I hadn’t signaled him to come over, he wouldn’t be dead.”

“You don’t know that. Neither does anyone else.”

Looking around the hangar, Ali located another chair—an ancient wooden desk model on creaky casters. She pushed that over to B.’s chair and sat down beside him. Then she reached out and took his hand.

“I heard the governor got shot and was airlifted out,” B. muttered after a minute or so. “Is she going to be okay?”

Ali shook her head. “Don’t know,” she answered. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

“I tried to come see you, but they wouldn’t let me back inside the van. Dave Holman told me you shot Richard Lowell.”

“I did,” Ali admitted. “I didn’t have a choice. He was about to make a phone call that would have killed a kid and set fire to a tank full of jet fuel. I shot him in the back, and I’m not sorry about it, either. Did Dave say anything about how the search warrants went?”

B. looked up at her questioningly. “You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what? I’ve spent the better part of two hours locked in the van with Lowell’s body and then being interviewed by an FBI agent. Nobody’s told me anything.”

“I’ve been interviewed, too,” B. said, “but my guy let something slip, and Dave told me the rest. It turns out the men named in the search warrants are all dead.”

Ali was taken aback. “Dead? All of them? What was it, some kind of suicide pact?”

“Not exactly,” B. answered bleakly. “As far as I know, Amos Sellers is the only one still alive. Everywhere the teams went, they were able to lay hands on the Bibles with no problem because none of the men was home. Lowell had evidently summoned all the heads of households to what was supposedly an important meeting at the church.

“There’s a bunker in the basement. He lured all but two of them into the bunker, then sprayed them with the automatic weapons fire, probably from the same AK-47 he used here. It was a bloodbath. The other two, the guys who weren’t in the basement, were found up at the airstrip, parked in the airplane hangar, inside in a pool of aviation fuel. Both of them had been shot execution style. The men in the basement died earlier in the evening. The men in the car probably died a while later.”

“How many dead?” Ali asked as the weight of the death toll sank into her soul.

“Twenty-nine from the family,” B. answered. “Dave says Lowell must have been trying to get rid of everyone who might know any of the details about the human trafficking operation.”

“What about the girls?” Ali asked. “The ones at the hangar?”

“There were only six of them, and they’re fine—frightened but fine. At least that’s what I was told. When Alvarado ran up the flag here, they split the SWAT team into two groups. Some came here and the others stayed behind to look out for the girls. They’ve called in a hazmat unit to clean up the spilled Jet-A before it leaks down into the water table.”

Dave Holman walked into the hangar and came over to where they were sitting. “DPS is sending a helicopter over to Kingman to notify Sheriff Alvarado’s next of kin. They asked me if I wanted to go along. I told them I wanted to check with you first. It’s been a hell of a night; if you need any help getting back home . . .”

“Come to think of it, we do,” Ali said at once. “We rode up in the governor’s Sprinter, and that’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Andrea Rogers and the two Brought Back girls are in the same fix.”

“The governor’s chief of staff assigned a DPS officer to do The Family’s next-of-kin notifications. My understanding is that Andrea, Patricia, and Agnes will be assisting with that.”

“We should probably help with that, too.”

Dave shook his head. “No,” he said. “You two have done enough.”

Ali glanced at B.’s ashen face. “You’re sure it’s no trouble to drive us?” she asked.

“None at all,” he answered. “Between doing a next-of-kin notification and getting my friends back home to Sedona, which one sounds like a better idea to you?”

37

The Phoenix-area taco truck that Governor Dunham had summoned to provide refreshments for her teams of officers had now arrived on the scene. It was parked on the shoulder of the road, just outside the entrance to the airport. With cops of all descriptions coming and going, the place was doing land-office business. Once convoys of hastily dispatched media vans started to arrive, it would be even busier.

Dave pulled over and stopped next to the food truck. “It’s a long way back to Flag from here,” he said. “After what you’ve both been through, you’re going to need food, and it’s on me. What do you want?”

“Whatever’s good,” B. said. Because of his need for legroom, he was in the front passenger seat. That put Ali in the back of the patrol car—behind the screen and in a part of the car with no interior door handles—something she found unsettling.

Looking at the mob lined up at the window, Ali’s assessment was more realistic. “Whatever they have left,” she said. “Since a few of the people waiting in line are early-bird reporters, it’s probably best if B. and I stay in the car.”

Dave left to place their orders, returning a few minutes later with three brown bags of food and another filled with cans of soda. “They’re about to run out of everything. All they had left are bean-and-cheese burritos, so that’s what I got. We all have a single burrito and cans of Diet Coke. Hope that’ll work for you.”