“Is Angus still in charge?” Ali asked.
“Probably not. The guy who signs the checks and whose name is on the motor vehicle registrations for their fleet of cars, trucks, and SUVs is someone named Richard Lowell.”
“One of Angus McCutcheon’s progeny?”
“That’s my guess.”
“What happened to Angus the younger?”
“No idea. Since someone else has taken over the helm, I have to assume that Angus is no longer with us, but that’s another interesting thing about the group. If they keep any kind of birth and death records, they don’t bother passing that information along to Mohave County.”
“How many families are we talking about?”
“Twenty-nine all told—at least that’s how many we’ve been able to find with addresses on the existing named streets. There may be others, like the Wendell Johnson family, where with two generations, one lives in town and the other doesn’t.”
“Where are we now?” Ali asked.
“Once I finished creating my driver’s license/voter registration list, I handed it over to Stuart,” Cami said. “So far he’s only checked on a couple of the names, but the results are interesting. Apparently, each family receives a small allowance from the church that goes to the head of the household. Members dutifully file an income-tax report on that, but none of them makes enough money to trigger any tax liabilities or to attract the attention of the IRS.”
“Income-tax fraud?” Ali asked.
“Maybe, but it’s doubtful,” Cami said. “Without birth certificates or Social Security numbers, they wouldn’t be able to claim any dependents. As for the houses? They evidently belong to the group rather than to the people who live in them. The property taxes are paid for by the church. Ditto for the fleet of vehicles. They belong to the church, too.”
“So we’re not dealing with some kind of Amish mentality where electricity and combustion engines are off-limits?”
“Definitely not.”
“What kind of stipends are we talking about?”
“Stu’s only checked on a few of the names so far. Two of those were for ten thousand and the other one for twenty.”
Ali did some math in her head. “With thirty families on the rolls that still amounts to a considerable outlay. Where does the money come from?”
“That’s not clear. They evidently raise cattle and hogs. They consume some and sell the rest. They also do a certain amount of subsistence farming.”
“You can’t raise enough livestock on three thousand acres to bring in that much money a year,” Ali said.
A call came in for Cami. She signed off. Ali sat with the still warm phone in her hand, thinking about the money question. Both times she had seen Gordon Tower, he had been dressed in relatively ordinary store-bought clothing—jeans, boots, a western-style shirt, a Stetson. None of it had struck her as particularly expensive. Still, what he wore was a big step up from the threadbare homemade goods Edith was wearing and from the flimsy clothing and worn-out shoes Ali had seen in the box containing Enid’s personal effects. So maybe a small family stipend stretched a lot further if you were buying clothing for only one person while everyone else made do with ragged homemade castoffs.
Closing her eyes, Ali tried to put together the chronology. If Angus Lowell had bought the property in the mid-1960s, that was nearly fifty years ago, but only a dozen or so years after the Short Creek debacle. At the time, the lesson of what had happened to Governor Pyle would have been relatively fresh in everyone’s mind. Wanting to avoid suffering a similar fate, the politicians who had come after Pyle had maintained an unofficial but strictly observed hands-off policy—creating a live-and-let-live atmosphere in that corner of the state. Had their wink-and-nod stance allowed members of The Family to do whatever the hell they liked, up to and including, perhaps, getting away with murder?
Ali thought about that fifty-year interval. If young women in The Family started bearing children at age fifteen or so, that time period allowed for at least three generations of young women to have come of age—women who had been and still were being denied their basic constitutional, civil, and human rights. They weren’t allowed to vote, or drive, or wear store-bought clothes. The problem was they weren’t in some village in the distant mountains of Afghanistan. They were right here, living on three thousand acres, smack in the middle of the good old U.S. of A.
So where did The Family’s money come from? That was the crux of the matter. Three thousand acres wasn’t a large enough spread to feed and support a group of twenty-five to thirty families. Not nearly. And no matter how much money old man Angus McCutcheon had set aside, the trust couldn’t last forever without being replenished. The money for all those stipends was coming from somewhere, but where?
That’s when it hit her, taking Ali’s thoughts straight back to her training days at the Arizona Police Academy. The basic philosophy of community policing dictated that by paying attention to the small things—to graffiti on walls, property thefts, turned-over trash cans, littering, juvenile drinking—police could prevent those kinds of antisocial behaviors from morphing into something more serious—into the big-time crimes of armed robberies, assaults, and homicides.
Was that what was going on here? The authorities had neglected to enforce the little things—like birth and death certificates, for example. By doing so, had those same authorities allowed some other kind of major criminal enterprise to grow and flourish unnoticed in their midst? Two young women had run away from The Family twelve years apart—one now dead and one barely alive. Ali understood that Sister Anselm was right to be concerned for Enid’s safety. What if Enid had a chance to tell what she knew? Maybe the end result would be enough to expose to all the world whatever no-good The Family was up to.
Taking a deep breath, Ali picked up her phone and dialed Cami back. “When you were matching all those road names to people, were there any places where you came up empty—where there was no match between the name of the road and the name of the family?”
“How did you know that?” Cami said. “I did, but only once. There’s one road called Fields that shows no sign of any residence. There are some buildings that look like big sheds of some kind, but they’re clearly not houses. The other residences are all built the same way, with a kind of cookie-cutter design plan and layout. It’s like a company tract housing where all the houses are just alike, including all the various outbuildings and what appear to be large garden plots.”
“Is the satellite map you’re using right now the most detailed one available?” Ali asked.
“Probably not,” Cami admitted. “It’s the first one I found.”
“If you can find one that’s better, please send me the link.”
“Will do, Ms. Reynolds,” Cami said cheerfully. “I’m on it. Oh, and I just sent you what was available on Sheriff Alvarado. It’s not much, but it’s what I could find on short notice.”
21
As soon as Ali’s e-mail alert sounded, she brought out her iPad. The first item from Cami was a brief bio of Sheriff Alvarado, probably lifted from an election pamphlet. It said that he’d been born in California. As a toddler, he had moved back to Kingman with his stepfather and had lived there ever since. He was married and had two teenaged children, a boy and a girl, both attending Kingman area public schools. His list of memberships included a local golf club, Rotary, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the Cessna 150-152 Fly In Foundation.
After scanning that message, Ali turned to the second, one with a link to the satellite photo. Once it opened, Ali took some time to orient her view of the image. Cami had helpfully placed a flag on a spot southeast of Colorado City where Sanctuary Road intersected with the highway.