Despite our efforts, the case spun out of control. Media crawled all over us, circling the kid’s house and the neighborhood with drones. False leads poured into my office, and we had to investigate all of them. We had no idea if one could be legit.
Then we got a tip. A grocery store manager reported that she saw a guy act strangely, staring at the headlines on the newspapers in the rack, talking about the case to another customer standing nearby. “The guy gave that lady the creeps,” the manager told me. “Something about him was off. He looked excited about the case.”
We had a list of every sex offender in Dallas, and we zeroed in on those who lived or worked near the store. I took driver’s license photos of all of them to the grocery manager and she identified the man. Minutes later, I knocked on the door of a well-kept ranch house.
Just in case this lead was the right one, I had a SWAT team back me up.
The guy answered, looking like any other homeowner, wearing a T-shirt and shorts. At first, he couldn’t have been more cordial, but that changed when I tried to talk my way into the house. Visibly agitated, he’d slammed the door and shouted at me that he had a gun. He ordered me to stand back and threatened to kill the kid.
I worked for hours trying to talk him out, and finally convinced him that he had no other option that brought him out alive.
Hands in the air, he’d strolled through the front door, but I knew the moment I saw the grin on his face that the boy was dead.
As hard as I’d tried, I couldn’t save that boy. I wasn’t going to let that happen to Delilah.
I was hoping to fly out that night, but there was nothing available and a twenty-hour drive from Dallas to Alber wasn’t a reasonable option.
I texted to tell Max I’d arrive on the first flight in the morning and tried to get some sleep. The day had been long, and the one to come promised to be tough. But as I crawled into bed, memories of Delilah kept me from drifting off. I saw her as a baby in her mother’s arms, Sariah beaming at her, so proud. My father and mother, Mother Naomi and Mother Constance stood around them, all welcoming our new baby. I remembered Delilah’s softness on my lap, the sweet smell of her neck as we cuddled on the couch. I remembered her at one, newly walking, tottering with my sister Lily and the other children, singing “Ring Around the Rosie,” giggling when they all fell down.
At 2 a.m., I gave up and turned on my computer. I surfed the web, skimming newspapers and missing person articles, searching for cases of missing children in Utah, any unexplained disappearances of minors, but found nothing recent. After that, I logged on to NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, and searched the files on missing persons. There were dozens, but none anywhere near Alber—I kept looking until I eventually fell asleep.
The plane touched down in Las Vegas at ten, and I rented a black Nissan Pathfinder for the three-hour trek northeast into the mountains. After I entered Utah and passed St. George, the worn asphalt highway cut through great valleys covered with spindly pines and low brush. For the first half of the drive, campers and tourists, tankers and eighteen-wheelers drummed past, but as I swung southeast, the road became nearly deserted. I wound between mountain ridges, past grass-covered fields and through thick pine forests that were crisscrossed by thin streams and dry creek beds.
The drive gave me ample time to consider what waited for me, but I pushed back memories, held them at bay. I’d never intended to return to Alber, never thought that I would even consider it. I’d put my past behind me—the prairie dresses, the cinder block school where I taught kindergarten, all of it.
“I’m a cop, a detective,” I said out loud. “Ten years on the outside. Nine years with Dallas PD. I’m a different person.”
Yet at the same time, I pictured our rambling house, my sisters and brothers running through the yard, our mothers sitting on the porch knitting and watching us play.
As I drove, the towns became smaller. They were spread farther apart, surrounded by wilderness, and I considered the isolation of living in the mountains, especially in the winters, when icy roads became nearly impassable. The town elders liked the solitude, and the separation served as a barrier to protect them.
I crossed a bridge over the Virgin River and, a short distance ahead, a brown and white sign greeted me:
ALBER, UTAH
ELEVATION 5,841 FEET
POPULATION 4,346
Tucked into a notch at the base of a pine-covered mountain ridge, Alber spread across a sloping valley. At the far end, Samuel’s Peak guarded the town, a silent sentry keeping watch. Glowing against the clear blue sky, the afternoon sun glistened off the summit’s stark gray wall of stone. I remembered how in sunset’s dwindling light the mountainsides sometimes shone a burnished gold. When I was a kid, my mom told me the spirits of our founding fathers lived on that peak. She said our dead ancestors protected us from the dreaded outsiders, those who condemned our way of life and our faith.
In Alber, we trusted no one outside our sect. Other Christians, including mainstream Mormons, we labeled Gentiles. They were not of us. Only Elijah’s People were the chosen ones. Those held up as the greatest sinners were people like me—ones who had once been part of the faith but
