I let out a long breath. It was finished now. I’d done what I could do and maybe I hadn’t done it the best way, but no one else had died and the real murderers were in custody. That seemed something to be proud of.
“I’m not sure what Joanna’s role was,” I said. She had known about the crimes before they happened, but maybe she had just been Edward’s pawn. How guilty could she be, given the way that she had been taught to follow orders all her life and never have a thought of her own? I was still trying to figure out if any part of her spiritual gift had been real, or if it had all just been part of the charade. I wanted to believe that one trapped young woman could see the future, I guess. Maybe I wanted to believe it too much.
“It’s hard to believe she was completely ignorant of what Edward Carter had planned,” Kurt said.
I hadn’t yet told him about the Robert Frost poem quote or her warning to me and Kenneth. “Knowing about it is not the same as being responsible,” I said. And I wondered if Mormon women were the same as the women in FLDS, kept from leadership and thus from responsibility.
“I did more research on the FLDS while you were sleeping,” Kurt said. “It sounds like the young men are taught from birth to evade the law as much as they can, because the government itself is supposedly in the hands of Satan. They call it ‘bleeding the beast’ and they break child labor laws, school laws, food stamp rules, anything they can. Then they give the profit to the one man in charge. I think Edward Carter just decided that it was time for him to use the same attitude for his own cause.”
It sounded like he and his brother had a lot in common. Stephen had been the king of his castle and fiefdom. Edward had made himself prophet and president of his own church, even if that only contained five people: himself and Joanna and the three children.
“Do you think Joanna was planted for two whole years to bring this to pass?” I asked. “Or do you think she really did get away and he found her again?” My encounter with the Perezes made me think the former, but I could be wrong.
“I don’t know. But it might ease your mind to know that a couple of good pro bono lawyers who’ve had experience defending women in polygamous cults are volunteering to defend Joanna,” said Kurt. I couldn’t tell how he felt about this.
I was relieved, though. At least a good defense would be some way to right the balance of the scales, though I didn’t really know what a fair result for Joanna would be in all this.
“Are the police going to arrest anyone for obstruction? Or conspiracy to conceal a crime?” I asked, wondering if I was going to be headed to jail immediately after this, where I would find Kenneth and Rebecca had adjoining cells. I also wondered how difficult it would be to prosecute Edward and Joanna, given how contaminated much of the evidence would now be.
“They’re disinterring the body right now, but Rebecca took the blame for everything. She said that the two young boys, Lehi and Nephi, dug the grave on her orders and that she dragged the body into it herself,” Kurt explained. But I was pretty sure he had a good idea what had really happened there.
I was surprised for a moment that Rebecca would implicate her own children in any of this, then remembered that they were minors and were unlikely to face any charges. If it were otherwise, Kenneth or I would have had to step forward to try to shield them from prosecution.
“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” I said. Rebecca might well end up serving time. And Dr. Benallie couldn’t be shielded, either, after all my threats to keep her from telling Carolyn the truth about her supposedly stillborn child. That was likely to break wide open, too, and there was no more I could do to help Carolyn now.
“A mess is a nice word for it. Why in God’s name you allowed that to happen, I don’t know. Did you really think you’d do a better job of the investigation than the police?”
Well, maybe it looked ridiculous now. At the time, it had seemed to make sense.
“I was so sure it was one of the wives. I thought I just had to figure out which one before I left,” I tried to explain. “I thought they might have had a good reason. Those poor women.” I had been trying to help them. Or had I been trying to help myself? To make myself feel useful and righteous?
“Yes, poor Joanna, who nearly killed everyone in that burning house, including you,” Kurt said, rubbing at his head.
Yes, poor Joanna. “She is hardly more than a child,” I said, my voice hoarse with tears. So many children in that compound, so many victims.
Kurt sighed. “You’re right, I suppose. But the most I can do is pray for her to get the help she needs. And pray you get well enough to never do something crazy like this all over again.”