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property was in dispute and no action could take place involving the Chatwins’ home until the matter was ruled on by a judge.
    Steven had no claim whatsoever on the property, which made the threat to move him into the house seem absurd; still, Ross had grown up in Short Creek and knew the way things worked there. I was willing to take his word for it, and in part to help them feel a little safer, I went back down with construction tools to help him finish off the basement living quarters, install new locks, cut an access to the upstairs area, and build a stairway that would finally connect the two parts and make the place a single, livable house.
    I began to understand why the Chatwins were scared. No longer was the mean, sharp edge of the FLDS hidden to me. I had lived for years right up the road, only an hour away, and was in the law enforcement business not only as a private investigator, but as a bail bondsman and bounty hunter. But like most residents of Utah and Arizona, I had paid little attention to goings-on in obscure little Short Creek. The FLDS and its members might as well have been a community of invisible ghosts. Now the town was turning ugly right before my eyes.
    As I had started paying attention to them, they had also figured out who I was. When I rolled into town this time, a convoy of overgrown pickup trucks with menacing, dark-tinted windows roared into my rear-view mirror. Then they were right on my tail, gnawing at my bumper, apparently trying to force me off the road. They cut around, boxed me in, slowed down, then sped up and sprayed gravel from their big tires. The tiny rocks peppered my car like bits of shrapnel. It was like being the main character in a Twilight Zone episode, the unaware stranger who has just driven off the map into a strange parallel dimension known as “Short Creek.”
    Being alone in a situation that had turned unexpectedly threatening did not really bother me. I had encountered much riskier moments as a bounty hunter. The drivers of these trucks were just bullies. I kept going and eventually, they peeled away. Still, I was annoyed enough to tell the Chatwins what had happened, and they explained that it was not really all that unusual; this was a standard greeting committee of souped-up trucks called “plyg-rigs.” The dark-tinted windows made it impossible to identify the occupants, which helped strangers clearly understand they were unwanted by scaring the heck out of them.
    There is nothing like personal experience to help an investigator form a conclusion, and the scales tipped farther. There was no way to ignore this latest episode, because it had not happened to someone else; I had been the target. There was nothing subtle about it at all. I had to start thinking about the FLDS in an entirely different light.
    The empire struck back a few weeks later. I was still in bed early on a Saturday morning when Ross called to let me know that church-assigned work crews were gathering outside his house. They intended to move his brother Steven and Steven’s family into the upstairs portion of the home. Steven was blindly loyal to the church and was assigned the task of harassing Ross into wanting to move. I grabbed a copy of Joan’s letter and made it to Ross and Lori’s place by 7:30 A.M.
    The scene looked like a convention of contractors. About fifty men were already on site, readying their tools and unloading building material from their pickup trucks. I parked and got out, determined to get them to back off. The problem was that these Short Creek workers were unfamiliar with concepts like due process of law, constitutional rights, liberty, independence, and being master of your own fate. These men simply did whatever the prophet commanded them to do—end of story. Consequently, the letter that I showed them, which would have been taken very seriously at any other job site in America, only served to puzzle these people. They paused to await