Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

a few minutes alone. They’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
    So Jimmy made a big, slow deal of wrestling the truck into a parking space beside Esther’s Geo, which was so coated with dust that its green paint barely peeked through. I frowned. The trip to the motel from Scottsdale, although long, had been by interstate, then blacktop; we’d never once left asphalt. Surely she hadn’t disregarded my orders and driven out toward the compound.
    But I kept my concern to myself. As Jimmy took his sweet time, I gave him more details on the night’s adventures.
    “Do you have any idea when it could have happened?” he asked, when I finished. “I mean, did you hear the shot?”
    “I’m no coroner, but since he was in full rigor, I’d say he could have been dead anywhere from five to twelve hours. Maybe even more. And yes, I heard a shot. Dozens of shots. Hunters are always in that canyon, and I’m telling you, keeping away from them for three days wasn’t easy.”
    “Is there any chance it could have been a hunting accident? Maybe he dropped his gun and it went off?”
    I snorted. “He had no powder burns on his chest, and the shotgun was too far away from his body for it to have been merely dropped. No, someone grabbed it, shot him, then discarded it. It was murder, all right. We need to report the death, but let’s get Rebecca and her mother further away from Utah first. We’re still too close to Purity for comfort.”
    Jimmy said something under his breath in Pima but when he switched to English, he sounded all agreement. “You’d better use a pay phone on the way, then, because cell phones…”
    “Can be traced,” I finished for him. “Now let’s get moving.”
    We bailed out of the Toyota and hurried over to the motel, where Rebecca still stood wrapped in her mother’s arms. The sight brought a lump to my throat. This was how normal mothers were supposed to behave, not as my own mother had thirty-two years earlier when she’d shot me in the head and left me to die in a Phoenix street. I’d been four years old. I survived only because I had been found by an illegal Mexican immigrant, who without concern for her own precarious position had carried me to a nearby hospital.
    Swallowing hard, I forced away the memory of my mother’s betrayal. I did not know where she was now and I did not care, or so I told myself. I had put my past behind me. After all, most of my foster homes hadn’t been too bad.
    When I thought I could trust my voice, I explained our latest problem to Esther. “Prophet Solomon is dead. We found his body in Paiute Canyon, and I might as well tell you straight out, that it looks like murder.”
    Her face paled but she said nothing, so I continued on. “It’s only a couple of hours to sunrise, and pretty soon now someone’s going to notice that Prophet Solomon and Rebecca are missing. When that happens, they’ll form a search party and it’s my guess they’ll figure out the Rebecca part pretty quick. Then the shit will hit the fan.”
    Esther nodded, her strawberry blond hair slipping out of its barrette. It was easy to see from which parent Rebecca had inherited her beauty. Even with the stresses of the past few days, Esther’s perfect face remained as flawless as a Botticelli angel’s. Her pale blues eyes, though, looked guarded.
    “You’re saying Solomon was shot?”
    I frowned. I had said nothing of the kind.
    Rebecca tore herself away from her mother’s arms and gave me a terrified look. “I already told Mother about the Prophet. About the hole we saw in his…in his…” She hiccupped, then attached herself to her mother again.
    I directed my next words to Esther, careful not to say too much. “Yes, I’m sure you did. But this is no time to be worrying about assisting the police with their inquiries, at least not before we get back to Scottsdale and get your child custody mess cleared up. Then you can help the authorities all you want.”
    “I have no intention of helping the Utah authorities with anything,” Esther said. “They never helped me or Rebecca when we needed them.” She gestured into the room behind her, and I saw several suitcases sitting on the bed. “We’re already packed.”
    “Then let’s get moving.”
    Since we had paid a week’s rent in advance for the room, we simply threw the luggage into our vehicles, and within seconds our two-car caravan peeled out of the parking lot. Fifty miles slid by before I directed Jimmy into a