Cold Betrayal

As soon as Ali smelled the food, she realized she was once again starving. In terms of hours, the box lunch she had eaten as the Sprinter came north from Flagstaff wasn’t that long ago. In terms of life experience, it was epochs away.

“This is fuel for us,” Ali said, unwrapping her burrito and taking a bite while the beans were still hot. “What about gas for the car?”

“Someone in authority convinced the guy who runs the trading post on the south side of Colorado City that it would be a good idea for him to do an unscheduled opening,” Dave answered. “He’s got all his gas pumps up and ru

They headed south a little before four. A few minutes into the drive, when Ali unconsciously reached for her phone to let Leland Brooks know what was happening, she remembered it was gone. So was B.’s phone and both their iPads. B.’s had been in his briefcase. Ali’s iPad had been in her purse, and both purse and briefcase were still in the impounded Sprinter. As for her iPhone? Agent Malovich had commandeered that as evidence documenting the call she had made to Stu. With all their electronic devices under lock and key as part of a crime scene investigation, Ali started to ask to borrow Dave’s phone. But then, noticing the time, she didn’t.

“So how did you get mixed up in all this?” Dave asked Ali as they drove under a moonlit high desert sky. “B. gave me the shorthand version earlier before we left Flag to come here, but I have a feeling there’s a lot I don’t know.”

Between them, Ali and B. told the story, a little at a time. By the time they finished, the sky was begi

Dave was the one who broke the silence. “There you have it,” he said. “In one fell swoop, Sheriff Daniel Alvarado goes from being an unindicted homicide suspect to being a full-fledged hero. So do you still think he murdered the Kingman Jane Doe?”

“I do,” Ali said quietly. “I most certainly do.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m not sure,” Ali said.

The problem of dealing with that had been banging around in her head the whole time she and Dave had been telling the story. “Alvarado may look like a hero right now, but A

“Are you going to go through with the Doe exhumation, then?” Dave asked.

“I’m not sure,” Ali said again.

“What’s the point?” B. asked quietly.

“We’ll determine once and for all if the Kingman Jane Doe is A

“But knowing that won’t tell us who killed her,” B. objected. “With the evidence box missing, we’ll probably never know. The only people who’ll be hurt by all this are Daniel Alvarado’s widow and kids. Right now he’s a hero. Can’t we let him stay a hero?”

“It may come up later,” Dave cautioned. “Other people know that the Kingman Jane Doe most likely came from The Family. The human trafficking investigation will require putting DNA samples of all the victims into the system. There’s no telling what’ll happen when they get a match.”

“That’ll be somebody else’s decision, then,” B. said. “It won’t be ours.”

Given the circumstances, it didn’t surprise Ali that B. was turning out to be one of Sheriff Alvarado’s staunchest defenders.

“All right,” Ali agreed. “I can live with that.”

At six o’clock in the morning, a time when Leland usually showed up to start breakfast, Ali borrowed Dave’s telephone to call home.

“Oh, madame,” he said, “so good to hear your voice. We’ve all been worried sick.”

“All?”

“Well, yes. Athena tried to reach you. Your mother tried to reach you. When neither you nor Mr. Simpson answered your phones, they both called me. I take it something serious has occurred. How can I be of service?”

Ali closed her eyes. She was bone weary. She had a choice to make. If she told the story to Leland on the phone right now, she’d end up having to repeat it at least two more times, once each with Athena and her mother and maybe with Chris and her father, too.

“What day is this?”

“Saturday.”

“Just a sec.” She covered the phone with her hand. “What do you think?” she asked B. “Should we invite everyone to breakfast, tell them the story all at once, and get it over with?”

B. thought for a moment and then nodded. “Have Leland set up a separate table out in the kitchen for Colin and Colleen. This isn’t a story that’s good for little ears.”

Ali took her hand off the speaker. “How about if you invite everyone over to an early brunch,” she suggested to Leland. “B. and I should be home around nine or so. That way we can say it once and be done with it.”

“Of course,” Leland agreed. “I shall do so immediately.”

“Oh, and set a table for the little ones in the kitchen, please.”

“Of course.”

Once off the phone with Leland, Ali dozed off. Two hours later Dave drove them through Flagstaff to DPS headquarters. When he dropped them off, the parking lot wasn’t nearly as full as it had been the night before, but given what all was going on up in Colorado City, the place wasn’t exactly a deserted village. The collection of media vans—many of them with national news outlet logos—told Ali that what had gone on in Colorado City was big news. Doing his best to be unobtrusive, Dave dropped B. and Ali as close as possible to their respective cars. With her purse still in Governor Dunham’s Sprinter, Ali was missing both her driver’s license and her car keys. B. had a spare key for her to use, but no spare license.

Alone in the Caye

Richard Lowell, the man most directly responsible for all that death and destruction, was dead, too. Ali had pulled the trigger that took him down. She felt absolutely no guilt about that—not a whit. As for the others? That was another story.

The operation at The Encampment, an action designed to bring human traffickers to justice, had ended in disaster—not the one Ali or anyone else had anticipated, but a disaster nonetheless. As far as Ali knew, the tour buses Governor Dunham had ordered to transport refugees from The Family were still there waiting, parked just up the road from the bustling taco truck. Who knew how many of The Encampment’s residents, including other Brought Back girls, would choose to leave The Family in the face of this sudden and tragic turn in all their circumstances. The jury was definitely out on that score.

By now, the Department of Corrections bus, no longer needed, had most likely been recalled to its place of origin. The men it had been sent to transport were all dead. Twenty-nine of the thirty men named in the human trafficking warrants would be leaving Colorado City in a convoy of medical examiners’ vans. They would never see the inside of a jail or a courthouse; they would never have their guilt or i

Unlike the raid at Short Creek, none of The Family’s children had been taken into custody, but, with the exception of Amos Sellers’s kids, they had all been left fatherless. Ali had heard Governor Dunham say she would take full responsibility if anything went wrong. In the upcoming news cycle, there would be plenty of comparisons between Governor Dunham’s actions at The Encampment and Governor Howard Pyle’s long-ago actions at Short Creek. The Short Creek raid had been publicized as being all about religious beliefs. With The Family, religion had been nothing but a thin veneer over an ongoing criminal enterprise. Governor Pyle had lost his election after Short Creek. Ali suspected that even with the death toll, Governor Dunham would come out smelling like a rose. The fact that she had been carried away from the incident with life-threatening injuries almost guaranteed that her glowing political legacy would continue to shine.