Sister Anselm came down the hallway and beckoned to Ali. “Time for a strategy session,” she said. “Better to do that in private.”
Back in the tiny conference room, Ali noted the still visible handprint on Sister Anselm’s cheek, but the nun’s narrow shoulders were straight and the fire was back in her eye. The confrontation with Gordon Tower had galvanized her out of her earlier lethargy.
“How are they?” Ali asked. Then, remembering Sister Anselm’s vow of silence, she added, “Never mind. Sorry.”
“What’s your take on Edith?” Sister Anselm asked.
“When I first saw her, I thought she was Enid’s mother, but no mother forgets her child’s birth date. And Gordon about had a cow when you asked about Edith’s relationship to Enid.”
“I noticed that, too,” Sister Anselm said. “Colorado City is known for harboring polygamous groups, but admitting it here, in what Edith referred to as the ‘Outside,’ is probably not encouraged.”
“We’re both on the same page on that score,” Ali confirmed. “Edith is an older wife of Gordon Tower, while Enid, formerly known as this Jane Doe, is a younger one?”
“Yes,” Sister Anselm said. “That’s my take, too. What caught my eye was the way Edith wore her hair. Did you notice that crown of braids?”
It was Ali’s turn to nod. “You’re right. That’s the one obvious common denominator for all three of them—Edith, Enid, and the Jane Doe you told me about who was left near the Hualapai Mountains and later died at the Kingman hospital. It’s a distinctive hairstyle, and it suggests that they could all be from the same group. Finding out what we can about Enid’s background may help us untangle the Kingman Jane Doe’s history as well. From there, we might even be able to find her killer.”
“This many years later?” Sister Anselm asked dubiously. “Is that even possible?”
Ali nodded. “Tell me about that case again. When was it exactly?”
“It happened about twelve years ago. The Kingman Jane Doe was found close to death by some passersby who had been hiking in the mountains. She had been stripped naked, savagely beaten, and left to die.”
“That doesn’t sound like an act of random violence.”
“No,” Sister Anselm agreed. “It wasn’t random at all. I went so far as to mention that to one of the detectives at the time—that I wondered if it might possibly be a case of domestic violence. The detective wasn’t having any of it, at least not if the idea came from me. Besides, it made no difference. Since the cops had no idea of who she was or where she came from, the investigation went nowhere. I’m sure they worked the case for a time, but I don’t know how hard or how long.”
“It turns out we have something the cops back then never had—a clue, those three matching hairdos,” Ali said. “We also know, first from my conversation with Evangeline Begay and now from Gordon Tower himself, that Enid came from somewhere in or around Colorado City. I think the Kingman Jane Doe came from there, too. Is there a chance Enid might have known the other victim?”
Sister Anselm shook her head. “I doubt it. If Enid is almost seventeen now, she would have been only four or five at the time Jane Doe disappeared. Most likely she would have been too young to remember anything about it.”
“But maybe she’s heard stories about it,” Ali suggested. “Kids remember stories, and having a girl from the group running away or going missing would have been big news. It would help if we could ask her about it. Are we going to be able to?”
Rather than answering Ali’s question directly, Sister Anselm folded her hands and gazed out the window toward the waiting room. “Patients with traumatic brain injuries and with swelling issues may be kept in medically induced comas for a while. Recovery takes time, and how much they’ll be able to remember is questionable.”
On the surface, Sister Anselm appeared to be speaking about TBI patients in general, although Ali understood the truth of the matter. She was really speaking about one patient in particular—Enid Tower.
“Let’s say then,” Ali suggested, “that your first instinct was correct and Kingman Jane Doe’s death was due to an act of domestic violence—that she died at the hands of a husband or a boyfriend. As you said, since the cops had no idea who she was, they had no idea about where to go looking for suspects.
“I think it’s likely that DNA evidence was collected at the time,” Ali continued. “But just because it was collected doesn’t mean that it was ever processed. Processing DNA was very costly back then. Without family members prodding the cops to keep working the case, there’s a good chance that evidence is still lying, unprocessed, in a sheriff’s department’s evidence locker. And even if they did run it at the time, technology available back then might have yielded inconclusive results. With the advances made in DNA technology in the meantime, samples deemed useless back then can now be used to create full DNA profiles.”
“So?” Sister Anselm asked.
“I’m thinking about this group Gordon Tower called ‘The Family.’ It’s likely to be a small, isolated group—one that wouldn’t be welcoming to people from the ‘Outside.’ So if what happened near Kingman was domestic violence, maybe the offender is someone from that same group—a group with a very small gene pool.”
“Are you saying genetic profiles taken from Enid and her baby might lead us back to the Kingman Jane Doe and to her killer as well?”
“Yes, or even to a near relative of her killer. Knowing that might at least enable us to point the investigators in the right direction.”
“And you propose to get these samples how?” Sister Anselm asked.
“From you, of course,” Ali said.
Sister Anselm’s pale face went a shade paler, making Gordon Tower’s lingering handprint that much more obvious. Ali knew she had stepped over an invisible boundary.
“No,” Sister Anselm said at once, shaking her head. “Absolutely not. I couldn’t possibly condone such a thing. Besides, what would you do with the samples once you had them? Pass them along to the nearest crime lab? Run them through that national criminal DNA database that we’re hearing so much about these days?”
“Not a crime lab,” Ali answered. “I have a friend in the UK who was a huge help in sorting out the long-unsolved homicide of Leland Brooks’s father. The friend’s name is Kate Benchley. She runs an outfit called Banshee Group, a nongovernmental organization that specializes in identifying the remains of victims of various cases of genocide, or as politically correct people like to call it these days, ‘ethnic cleansing.’
“Banshee Group’s brief is to return murdered victims to their families for proper burial. If we were to send Kate sample swabs from Enid and her baby, I have no doubt that her people will provide us with their profiles in private. Once Jane Doe’s case is reopened, assuming there is usable DNA, we’ll have DNA profiles ready and waiting for comparison purposes. We’ll have them available to hand over to any Mohave County investigator who might have need of making a genetic match.”
“All that presupposes you’ll be able to get the cold case reopened,” Sister Anselm objected.
“Yes, it does,” Ali agreed. “I have an idea about how to make that happen. It’s an avenue I intend to pursue regardless of your answer on the DNA question.”
“Taking the samples seems like a gross invasion of my patients’ privacy,” Sister Anselm said.
“Well,” Ali said. “You could bring me that box of Enid’s effects, and I could clip off a tiny piece of the part of her shirt that was soaked in amniotic fluid. That would probably fill the bill.”
Sister Anselm thought about that and then shook her head. “I just can’t see any way to justify doing such a thing, especially without having Enid’s consent. It’s out of the question.”