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removed a one-dollar bill, and slid it across that laminate table. Ross put his finger on it and slid it back. Transaction complete. I was on the job.

CHAPTER 3
    â€œUncle Warren?”
    That initial meeting with Ross and Lori Chatwin left me trying to sort out a host of questions, with only a minimum of information. I had the nagging feeling, common among private detectives, that the case needed to be made stronger. After a lot of consideration, I made myself a promise: If I found one single thing screwy with Ross’s story, I was gone.
    One thing that bothered me was that I had known some FLDS people for years, and they in no way resembled those who were perpetrating this outrage against the Chatwins down in Short Creek. I could not imagine them wanting to rip a family apart and throw them out of their home in the middle of winter.
    In my construction days, out there building houses on scalding hot concrete pads, I had become friends with a number of FLDS men. Although, at times, their social skills left room for improvement, they excelled in construction. Most were hard-working, decent guys. They were polite and wore clean jeans, with their women in modest prairie dresses and the small kids scrubbed squeaky clean. They kept to themselves, worked hard, did not bother others, and lived far away. Under those tame circumstances, their practice of polygamy was generally viewed as a minor annoyance; I assumed that grown women were making a conscious decision to marry a man who had other adult wives, all living according to the precepts of their shared faith. Weird, but not really a big deal. Some religions play with rattlesnakes. The FLDS had been around the area for so long that they were accepted as just another part of the scenery. Those people—my friends—didn’t seem to be a bunch of religious lunatics.
    Still, facts were facts. The FLDS church leaders indeed were heartlessly trying to dump the Chatwins out into the cold. My personal scale of justice had tipped in favor of Ross and Lori because of the evidence and their frankness, but perhaps that was just because the other dish on the scale was empty. After years in the area, I realized I didn’t know much at all about this religion and its practices. I wanted to know more. Who was Warren Jeffs, what was the FLDS, and why were they doing this?
    Figuring out who was who in that zoo would have to wait; I had the more immediate concern of trying to keep the Chatwins in their home down in Short Creek. I put Ross in touch with the Mohave County Attorney’s Office in Arizona, which steered him to a legal clinic in Kingman that provides assistance to those who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer. The hardship eviction case was then assigned by the Arizona Community Legal Services to a lawyer named Joan Dudley. I couldn’t have planned it better if I had tried.
    Joan embodied many things that the FLDS despised about the outside world. It was well known that in FLDS schools, teachers trimmed pictures of people of color out of the textbooks. Joan was African American. In the FLDS, women are always subservient. Joan was in-your-face aggressive. Women were not to be highly educated. Joan was smart as a whip. I knew she was unafraid of any legal nonsense by the United Effort Plan attorneys or the FLDS and would not back down an inch in the coming fight. She actually seemed to be looking forward to it.
    While she took charge of the legal side, I went back to Short Creek because Ross was telling me that he and Lori were afraid to set foot outside their house. Apparently, the church was just waiting to pounce and move his brother, Steven, into the unfinished upstairs portion. In my world, that made no sense. Although the church’s UEP Trust had issued an eviction order, the unsettled civil case was in dispute and headed for court. Joan Dudley, active as an officer of the court, wrote a “to-whom-it-may-concern” letter that spelled out that the