with warrants and got in the place.” There was another pause. “Walt, my grandfolks come up in the dirty thirties, hard times when you had to do whatever it took to survive. I’ve looked at the pictures and heard the stories, but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s one thing to read about this stuff in the news, but it’s something else to come up against it face to face. People up there are just living in sheds—women and children. . . . Thirteen-year-old girls married to fifty-year-old men—I mean, they’re not married in the legal sense—that’s how they try and get away with the support checks. They marry these girls off to these men,
seal
’em, they call it, in private ceremonies.” There was another pause, and when he spoke again, there was a catch in his voice. “There was a little girl. . . . She didn’t look right—birth defects. There was this one little girl that comes up to me. . . . Right. We’re busting up these irrigation pipes they’ve got going in the river, and she pulls on my pant leg, wanting to know why it is we’re taking away their water so that they can’t water the cows that they’re gonna milk to make enough money to have something to eat. I kneeled down and took her little hand, and Walt . . . she didn’t have any fingernails.”
“I don’t know what to say, Tim.”
“How’s that boy, the one you found?”
“He says his name is Cord.” Vic reentered and sat in her chair with a massive computer file, her index finger stuffed in the middle. “Normal, or appears to be. I had the school psychologist give him a going-over, and she seems to think that he’s all right.”
“Lucky you.”
I fingered the brim of my hat, spinning it on the crown and thinking how the simple gesture was sometimes indicative of the job as a whole. “I’ll keep you informed as to what’s going on over here—and you’ll do the same for me?”
“Sure will.”
I hung up my phone and looked past the bruises that looked like crow’s wings spread beneath the Terror’s tarnished gold eyes. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
She dropped the book onto my desk and opened it. “Trouble in rabbit-choker land?”
“That polygamy group up in the north of Tim’s county; he doesn’t know what to do about it.”
“It’s a cult; they’re fucking cults. The fact that they’re trying to cover this shit up under the auspices of actual religion only makes it that much worse.”
“I thought you thought all religions were cults.”
“Some are worse than others—I should know, I grew up Catholic.” She heaved the book around, her finger pointing to a number about a third of the way down the page. “Surrey/Short Drop General Mercantile.”
I read the exchange and picked up my phone. “A commercial number?”
“Surrey/Short Drop—they’re in-county, and I don’t even know where either of them are.”
Surrey and Short Drop were tiny towns in the southeast corner of the county. Surrey had been named after a remittance man, born the fourth son of four. In the late eighteenth century, the first son of a British nobleman inherited the family fortune, the second went into the military, the third into the clergy, leaving the fourth to ride into Powder Junction every month for his remittance check so that he could drink himself to death on the high plains. Short Drop, which was a stone’s throw away, was where a member of Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall gang had been caught and lynched—hence the name referring to a short drop on a long rope.
The other point of interest in the area was the infamous Teapot Dome of Teapot Dome scandal fame, named for a tiny rock formation on top of the U.S. Naval oil reserves, which had brought rightful disgrace upon the administration of Warren G. Harding in the twenties. The illegal sale of the Teapot Dome to Sinclair Oil had been the biggest national scandal in the country until a few guys back in the seventies had gotten