KINGMAN, Ariz. — On a Friday afternoon this month, a jury in this hot, dusty city on the road to the Grand Canyon announced it had reached a verdict in the case of a 39-year-old building contractor accused of the statutory rape of a 16-year-old girl.

It was clear from the reporters, lawyers and curious citizens in the first-floor courtroom that the accused, Kelly Fischer, was no ordinary defendant and the charges against him no ordinary statutory rape case.

Fischer is a polygamist, and the young woman prosecutors call the victim is his third wife and mother of his child. His trial in Mohave County was the first prosecution in Arizona in decades stemming from plural marriage among the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a group that broke with the mainstream Mormon church in 1890 over the practice of polygamy.

Conspicuously absent from the crowd who gathered in the courtroom that evening was the man to whom the verdict likely mattered most.

Gary Engels, the investigator who built the case against Fischer and seven other polygamists to be tried later, was too nervous to sit in the courtroom. Assembling evidence against the members of the insular church required Engels to move hundreds of miles from his family to work in the isolated, high-desert town the FLDS ran as a virtual theocracy.

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For the better part of two years, he had lived and worked in a state of psychological warfare with the members of the church, enduring harassment, office break-ins, soul-killing glares, and comparisons to Satan.

Unsure if he could control his emotions when the verdict was read, Engels sat in an office across the street from the courthouse, waiting alone to learn if the difficult 21 months had been for nothing.

The Prophet

"Dumbasses."

Engels was being tailed, as he always is in Short Creek. He steered his county-issue SUV down a dirt side street and the Lexus behind him nearly collided with a pick-up tracking Engels from the opposite direction. The 54-year-old shook his head.

"That makes six of them. There are six of them following us," he said.

Mohave County investigator Gary Engels has spent more than a year and a half building cases against men who allegedly took teenage brides as plural wives.

Outside, women wearing long, loose braids and prairie dresses, and blond children in homemade clothes, stared from the yards of large houses as Engels drove by, closely pursued by the Lexus. The pick-up was visible on a side street. A sedan rolled toward Engels, and other vehicles seemed to greet him at every side street. All had darkly tinted windows, but behind them, young men in baseball caps and sunglasses were visible.

Some of the women took their children by the hand and turned toward their houses.

"Everyone in town knows who I am. By now, they have to," he said.

The state line separating Utah from Arizona runs through the middle of the FLDS city. The Utah side is officially known as Hildale, the Arizona portion as Colorado City. The town spreads out from the Vermillion Cliffs, red and brown stone formations that share the dramatic beauty of the Grand Canyon, which is directly to the south of town, and Zion National Park, which lies to its west.

The state boundary means little to the approximately 7,000 residents, many of whose families have lived there since before either state existed. They refer to the area by its original name, Short Creek, and in their minds, the law comes not from Salt Lake or Phoenix, but from the mouth of the man they call the Prophet, Warren Jeffs.