“That’s not possible,” Amos insisted. “The Not Chosens go to other families, other homes.”
“Who says?”
“Bishop Lowell.”
“And you believe him?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Then you’re a lot dumber than I thought,” Ali said. She glanced at her watch. The minutes were ticking by.
“A team from the FBI is due here any minute to discuss that with you. Right now, though, I’d like you to tell me about Anne Lowell.”
Hearing the name caused a subtle change in Amos Sellers’s features. His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. “What about her?”
“You tell me.”
He shrugged. “She was married to Bishop Lowell at one time, but she ran off. It happened a long time ago. Nobody ever heard from her again.”
“That long time happens to be twelve years,” Ali corrected. “My understanding is that you were sent out to get her. That’s your job, isn’t it—to bring The Family’s runaways back home?”
“I never found Anne Lowell,” he answered. “Like I said, she ran off and never came back.”
“She never came back because she’s dead.”
Amos reacted to that bit of news with a visible tremor, as though a jolt of electricity had passed through his body.
“How? When?”
“About the time she left home presumably,” Ali said. “She was found badly beaten but still alive in the desert outside of Kingman. She was hospitalized but didn’t survive. Neither did her baby. They were buried together in a common, unmarked grave and have only just now been identified.”
“I never knew she was dead,” Amos said, shaking his head.
“Didn’t you?” Ali countered. “I’m wondering if it’s possible that you were the father of that baby. Anne ran away. You went after her, found her, and decided to kill her rather than bring her back home.”
“I didn’t,” Amos insisted. “I wasn’t the father of her baby, and I didn’t kill her, either.”
Ali shrugged. “Maybe you know who did, then. I’ve heard rumors that Anne had a boyfriend on the Outside. That wouldn’t have gone over well with a cuckolded husband who was about to move up into a leadership role in The Family’s hierarchy. Maybe you caught Anne, handed her over to her irate spouse, and let him do the job himself.”
“I’m telling you, Richard Lowell didn’t kill Annie, and neither did I. I had no idea she was dead until just now when you told me.”
“You called her Annie a moment ago,” Ali observed. “Annie, not Anne. Were the two of you friends?”
There was a long pause before Amos answered. “Yes,” he said finally, “we were. When I was a little kid, I came down with pneumonia and was really sick. Annie was the one who took care of me instead of my mother. After that the two of us became friends. We stayed friends when we were older, even though we weren’t supposed to be. That’s why I helped her.”
“Helped her how?”
“To get away. As far as The Family is concerned, adultery is a serious offense. If Bishop Lowell had found out that the baby wasn’t his, he would have been the one to cast the first stone.”
Ali felt a chill down her spine. “Literally?”
Amos nodded. “I didn’t want Annie to die. I knew that, as soon as she went missing, I’d be the one sent to retrieve her. When I drove away to go look for her, nobody had any idea that she was hidden in the trunk of my car.”
“Where did you take her?”
“To Kingman,” Amos said. “To meet up with her boyfriend. The last thing she said to me when she got out of my car and into his was that he loved her and was going to take good care of her. She believed it, and I didn’t have any reason not to believe it, either.”
“You saw the boyfriend?”
Amos nodded.
“He was someone you knew?”
Amos nodded again.
“So maybe the boyfriend’s the one who killed her.”
“I asked him about her once, years later. He said she’d had the baby—a little girl—and that they had moved to someplace in California—San Diego, maybe. He said they were both fine.”
“But they weren’t,” Ali added.
Another nod, this one with a resigned inevitability about it.
“Tell me about the boyfriend,” Ali said.
“He was just a deputy back then, stuck in Colorado City for a couple weeks at a time. I don’t know exactly how they met, but they did.”
“Was the boyfriend married?” Ali asked.
“Yes.”
During the lengthening silence, Amos Sellers visibly struggled to come to grips with the idea that Annie had been both betrayed and murdered. Meanwhile, Ali began to connect the dots. She knew by Sheriff Alvarado’s own admission that he had once done patrol duty in Colorado City. He was already married back then. For a man with ambitions of rising in the department, having a pregnant girlfriend show up in town would have blown his world apart. No wonder that critical evidence box about the Kingman Jane Doe homicide had disappeared. With it gone, Sheriff Daniel Alvarado must have figured he was in the clear.
Noticing that Amos Sellers had so far avoided mentioning the boyfriend by name, Ali did so herself. “Is that how you ended up being a deputy—because you had something on Sheriff Alvarado?”
It was pure bluff, but it worked.
“I didn’t blackmail him, if that’s what you mean,” Amos declared, clenching his fists and laying them on the tabletop. “A year or two later, he put in a good word for me is all, but I never knew he killed her. I never knew she was dead. Like I told you, she was kind to me. That’s the thing about Annie—she was kind to everybody, not just me.”
Ali watched in amazement as two tears leaked out of Amos’s eyes and coursed down his cheeks. She was even more surprised to find herself placing a comforting hand on one of his knotted fists. “You thought you were saving her,” she said quietly. “You had no way of knowing that you were handing her over to a killer.”
Amos bit his lip. “No,” he agreed. “I didn’t.”
“We’re just talking here,” Ali said. “There’s nothing official about this conversation, one way or the other, but let me ask you this. If you were called upon to do so, would you agree to testify to what you just told me?”
Amos Sellers nodded. “Yes, I would,” he said softly. “Anne Lowell was my friend. He told me she was fine.”
As Ali stood up to leave, Amos Sellers buried his head in both his hands and wept. She touched his shoulder with her hand as she went past.
“Sorry,” she murmured, before buzzing to be let out. “Sorry for all concerned.”
35
That was a bombshell,” B. said as Ali exited the interview room. He followed her back out to the evidence locker, where she retrieved her Glock. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing for right now,” she told him. “Let’s deal with one crisis at a time.”
Nodding, B. glanced at his watch. “Catching up with Governor Dunham’s Sprinter is going to be tight. I was planning on driving up on my own, but when I spoke to Andrea, she told me that I’ve now been officially invited to join the governor’s ‘rearguard’ action. Governor Dunham is of the opinion that having a couple of males from the Outside along for the ride might be a good idea. Bill Witherspoon, her chief of staff, will be there, and so will I.”
As they exited the building, two men in suits were entering. Everything about the new arrivals said FBI, but there was no time to stop and chat. By the time Ali and B. drove back to the DPS parking lot, Virginia Dunham’s Sprinter along with the two chartered buses were the only vehicles left behind. Ali paused long enough to grab her Kevlar vest from the back of the Cayenne before climbing aboard the Sprinter. Although Ali took the vest with her, with a four-hour drive between then and the scheduled engagement, she didn’t bother putting it on immediately.