Jude Devine Mystery Series (23 page)

Naoma’s eyes registered confusion. “I submit as God commands.”

“That would be a yes, then?”

Before the big woman had time to respond, Jude caught her off guard, seizing one arm and twisting it behind her back. Pinning her against the wall of the house in an arm lock, she found her cuffs and said, “Naoma Epperson. You are under arrest for assaulting Darlene Huntsberger.”

As she read Naoma her rights, glass smashed in the doorway. Summer stood with her mouth open, the hand that had held the tumbler still outstretched. Several other women appeared next to her, their expressions equally stunned.

One of them, a plump bottle blonde wearing a blue dirndl dress, complete with frilly white apron and petticoats, stepped out onto the stoop and demanded, “What’s going on?”

“What’s your name?” Jude asked.

“Fawn Dew Rockwell Epperson.” She tilted her head. “I am a daughter of the true prophet.”

“You don’t say.”

Jude had several more sets of restraints in the car. It could be interesting to arrest this self-satisfied Swiss Miss as an accomplice. Would Rockwell intervene on behalf of one of his offspring, assuming he could remember who they all were? Probably not. Ignoring Fawn Dew for the moment, she hustled a vociferously protesting Naoma down the steps toward the car and honked the horn, her prearranged signal for Tulley.

As she locked the door on her captive, she heard a distinctive metallic click and dropped automatically to a crouch, scrambling around the car.

“Let go of her!” Fawn Dew wielded the Remington.

Jude grabbed for her weapon, and yelled, “Drop it, or I’ll shoot.”

To her horror, the younger wife fired several rounds into the air and with that, shouted, “Take your posts. They’ve come to destroy us!”

She backed into the house and ten seconds later a manual siren sounded.

Aghast, Jude pictured twenty crazed elders abandoning the search for the runaways to respond to the alarm. Where in hell was Tulley? She climbed into the front seat of the car and trained her gun on Naoma.

“Call them off,” she said.

“Shoot me,” Naoma invited.

“Do you really want to give your life to protect a man who brought his girlfriends into your home?”

Jude peered past Naoma out the back window, seeking Tulley. The seconds were crawling by. A movement in the front windows of the house captured her attention. They were being boarded up. The Eppersons were preparing to shoot it out.

Disbelieving, she tried to reason with Naoma. “Don’t allow this. People are going to get hurt. You have a house full of women and children. Please. Tell them to sound the all clear.”

Naoma laughed. “You think I care about those whores and their brats?”

A figure ran toward the car. Tulley. Alone. He dived for the ground behind it and, keeping her head down, Jude reached across and swung open the door for him. He scrambled into the passenger seat. Blood ran down one side of his face from an open gash.

“Jesus. What happened?” Jude asked.

“He hit me with a shovel and ran off. I can’t find him.”

“Perfect.” Jude started the motor. “Keep your heads down. We’re out of here.” As she jerked the car into motion, a bullet ricocheted off the bonnet. “I said get down!” she yelled at Naoma.

The head wife laughed and began reciting scripture. A hail of bullets fell short of them as they accelerated away from the house. It wasn’t worth shooting back. There was no one to shoot at and Jude wasn’t about to open fire on a house full of innocent civilians.

She swung hard on the wheel and they made a one-eighty, hit the road beyond the gates of the Gathering for Zion Ranch, and laid rubber turning for Rapture.

“Oh, my Lord,” Sergeant Gossett said after they’d locked Naoma in a holding cell. “This is going to get ugly.”

“Tell me about it.” Jude pulled a can of ginger ale from the fridge and tossed a Coke to Tulley. “We need to turn it over.”

Gossett rolled his eyes. “There’s gotta be some way we can defuse the situation. If we bring in the feds, we’ll have another Waco on our hands.”

Jude groaned. So much for her stellar career and unblemished reputation. She’d go down in the annals of the Bureau as an agent who dragged them into a shitstorm. She’d be hauled in front of the Office of Professional Responsibility and she’d never work in the field again, let alone undercover. They would transfer her to a training post at Quantico, or worse, she would be demoted to mindless wiretapping stakeouts for some two-bit field office.

Angry at herself, she took a slug of soda. How could she have misjudged the situation so badly? She’d seen it coming, yet she’d been so focused on bringing Naoma Epperson in, she’d decided the risks were worth it. Picturing, at worst, a few shots fired, she’d underestimated the escalation potential. The targets of her investigation were not just religious extremists who were armed to the teeth and might shoot if provoked, they were actually hoping for trouble. Cults like the FLDS fostered a siege mentality among their members and stockpiled weapons in readiness for the day of reckoning they thought was just around the corner.

The Eppersons would see the arrest of their head wife as the beginning of the end. It was tailor made for their paranoid fantasies. They were expecting the government to attack them at any moment, and not only that, their leader had proclaimed dates for the end of the world on more than one occasion in the past year or so. The true believers had duly maxed out their credit cards and spent money like there was no tomorrow, because that’s what they expected. They had arrived at the place where their prophet said they would be lifted up, only to find themselves up to their ears in debt the next day and told Armageddon had been postponed because they were not faithful enough. They had to be chomping at the bit to get things rolling. She should have taken that into account.

“I blame home schooling,” she said.

This ill-timed levity earned a funny look from Gossett and a worried stare from Tulley, who suggested, “Maybe we should just wait it out. They can’t stay holed up in there forever.”

“I should have taken early retirement,” Gossett said.

“Is there anyone we could ask to go talk some sense into them?” Jude asked. “A local bigwig—the mayor maybe?”

“He’d only encourage them.”

“You’re telling me these people want a bloodbath?”

Gossett pondered this briefly, and confirmed, “Yes.”

“We’ll have to go back for Epperson eventually,” Jude said. “And there’s the missing kids to think about. We need a plan.”

“We need a friggin’ army.”

Jude chewed over their options. There really was only one. Notify the FBI. By now Sheriff Pratt would also be looking for an update. She decided to phone him later, once they’d settled on the plan. Maybe she would have better news then. Maybe she would have a confession.

She signaled Tulley. “I think it’s time we had a chat with Mrs. Epperson. Then we’ll work up a strategy.”

Gossett set about cleaning his guns. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”

*

“When did you first meet Darlene Huntsberger?” Jude asked.

Naoma Epperson didn’t bother to look up. “Never heard of her.”

“We both know Darlene went by the name Diantha and that she was one of your husband’s spare wives, so let’s not play games. He seems to like them very young. Has it always been that way?”

No response.

“Some women would feel pretty uncomfortable having their husband sleeping with girls younger than their own children,” Jude said.

The gray head finally lifted and Naoma smoothed the tidal wave of hair that loomed several inches above her forehead. Jude wondered if this elaborate coiffure was mandatory for polygamist women, or if they’d adopted it because they thought it was captivating. Naoma was staring at her like she would love to practice her tongue excision technique, right here, right now.

Jude referred to her notes for a moment or two so her subject could enjoy the fantasy, then asked, “Is it true that one of your husband’s wives is also his daughter by another wife?”

From all accounts, polygamist family trees were like a bad soap opera, girls marrying uncles who were also their stepfathers, half brothers and sisters marrying, then their progeny marrying the grandfather. The Eppersons were no exception.

Naoma sipped the water she was holding. Her face was stubbornly set, her attitude one of martyred disgust. “The Lord’s elect have a duty to keep our bloodline pure of contamination. Anyone who mingles their seed with the seed of Cain loses all right to priesthood blessings.”

“You’re telling me people of other ethnicities are inferior and God thinks incest is a good idea?”

“I would not expect you to understand the higher goal that we must aspire to as the chosen people.”

Jude realized she was going to get nowhere fast trying to make this woman feel ashamed. Naoma Epperson firmly believed her lifestyle was mandated by God and that she was being victimized by the servants of Satan. Changing direction, Jude took several photographs of the Gathering for Zion montage from her file and laid them out on the table.

“This is an amazing piece of work. Wonderful detail.”

Naoma’s pudding face registered an expression Jude couldn’t quite read. It lay somewhere between embarrassment and gratification.

Hoping she was interpreting this correctly, Jude summoned a trace of awe and asked, “Did you paint it yourself, Mrs. Epperson?”

“Yes.”

Jude’s mind raced. Naoma was proud of her painting. She had an ego. Amazing, given the life she must have led. Wondering how she could best capitalize on this chink in the head wife’s armor, she said, “I’m impressed. You have a real talent.”

“I apply my gift to the glory of God.”

Jude pointed to the white-haired zealot in the center of the image. “Your husband, right?”

It seemed Naoma couldn’t help herself. She followed the progress of Jude’s finger with a faint nod.

“And here’s you when you were younger, holding the hand of a little girl. Is that your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She’s really beautiful. I suppose she’s married now with kids of her own.”

Jude wondered if she imagined a very slight tremble in Naoma’s hand. The head wife poured some more water into her glass from the plastic pitcher at the end of the table. “She’s far away.”

Shipped off to Bountiful, Jude deduced. According to the material she’d been reading, numerous American girls were dispatched by their families to the large polygamist settlement in British Columbia. The traffic in youthful brides went both ways, with Bountiful girls shipped across the border to marry Utah men. It was one way to freshen up the gene pool, she supposed.

“How many children do you have, Mrs. Epperson?”

“Three.”

Intrigued by this modest number, Jude said, “That’s interesting. You know, most people on the outside have this idea that women in plural-marriage situations usually have many more.”

“God chooses when to bless us with children.”

“You never took birth control?”

Naoma gave her an odd look, doubtless trying to second-guess where this line of questioning was headed. “It’s a sin to interfere in God’s business.”

“So all the members of your church simply trust that God will make the right decision about when babies should be conceived?”