Staking out the Pillar of Fire headquarters, Alice’s lack of a police uniform helped her. “The less you are known the better chance you have to operate successfully,” she explained to reporters about her approach. “I will have many costumes to be used on different occasions.” For this assignment, she chose a demure outfit.

Alice navigated through the mass of shrubbery to the front porch, and knocked on the door.

In the preceding months, reporters had prodded her about details of the life of a policewoman. She was asked about carrying a gun or Billy club. “Oh now, please don’t,” she had replied. When all else failed, she could rely on her voice when in danger. “The weapon nature gave a woman was a scream and in civilized communities it is invincible.”

Entering the eerie sanctum of Alma White, Alice may have second-guessed being unarmed. There was the cult’s track record of involvement in strange cases, and the even stranger rumors. It was not so long ago that the community still frantically searched for Annie Vitagliano, the teenager who followed her mother’s footsteps into religious seclusion. On January 5, 1905, her father reported to the police that his daughter was kidnapped, and at 11 o’clock that night Patrolman Bert Parker arrived at the Burning Bush missionary house to investigate. Forcing his way inside, Patrolman Parker found young Vitagliano in a trancelike, comatose state. Brother Shepard, then in charge of the Los Angeles branch of Alma White’s cult, fought against releasing the young woman.

Alice did not shy away from danger when performing her duties. Once, a woman had asked Alice for help with her abusive husband, who would yell at her in fits of rage and throw dishes around the house. Alice tracked him down and found a formidable subject. “He was quite large enough,” she later recalled, “to have picked me up and thrown me in the street.” She confronted him anyway. After Alice was finished with one man who “used to break up the furniture,” she’d persuaded him to accompany his wife to suffrage meetings.

When the door to the cult opened, Alice could hear women chanting above the sound of dull pounding. A sharp-featured woman stepped into view.

“What do you want?” she barked.

She told the woman she was in search of “the truth,” that she wanted to join the Pillar of Fire and needed to learn more about it.

The woman studied Alice with piercing blue eyes. Several moments passed before she pressed a button on the wall by the door. The strange noises inside ceased. Alice was invited in.

Entering the eerie sanctum of Alma White, Alice may have second-guessed being unarmed.

Inside, the curtains were drawn and the room shrouded in darkness, except for one corner where the sunlight snuck in. The woman, taking a seat in the darkened part of the room, motioned for Alice to sit in the light.

Soon the other residents of the house emerged; as many as ten men and women shared this old farmhouse. They started into their hymns, most of which were written by Alma White herself: compositions such as “Soon I Shall Be Bloodwashed” and “The Cry of the Soul.” Alice found the hymns, whose lyrics often evoked fountains of blood, “outlandish,” but she sang along anyway.

Some thro’ the waters, some thro’ the flood, Some thro’ the fire, but all thro’ the Blood.

Singing eventually gave way to conversation. In the exchanges of the true believers, echoes of Alma White’s exhortations reverberated. “It is unreasonable and utterly impossible,” White wrote, “to support [the world’s] institutions, walk in her streets, peer in her windows, and drink of the wine cup of her fornications without being contaminated.” Holy Jumpers on every side of Alice had left their jobs and turned over all their money, real estate, and worldly possessions to the cult. The separation was meant to be absolute, which was why recruits like Lily Maud Allen were urged to sever ties with family members who refused to convert — parents, spouses, even young children.

On some level Alice had every reason to relate to the separate world Alma White had created. She understood the pain of feeling left behind by one’s community and culture, of having one’s accomplishments unappreciated, talents unutilized — generally, living a life that was overlooked, especially for married women. But White’s attempt at gender equality was a mirage. The manipulation of women’s dreams was as much a sin as the neglect of their abilities. Alice could think back to her formative time at Chicago’s World’s Fair, a hypnotic landscape of a future utopia drawing in romantics, all while women were being murdered in the shadows. Beneath the Pillar’s manufactured feelings of unity and belonging festered darkness, a dangerous sense of superiority and conflict. It would not be too much longer before White began delivering speeches praising the Ku Klux Klan, turning the Pillar of Fire into the only major religious group to publicly align itself with the hooded white supremacists.

Angels guard our pathway as we march along, Pointing to the city and its blood-washed throng.

Even though she had gone into the heart of Pillar headquarters unarmed, Alice was always prepared for a fight. She practiced martial arts. “The use of a few well chosen Jiu Jitsu tricks,” she once advised women, “will help women when sneak thieves arrive or burglars invade the home.” Despite what she told reporters, she also had at least one hidden weapon: the hatpin atop her head. “Don’t forget the trusty hat pin,” she advised, “the best weapon and most to be depended on.”

Yet Alice stood firm in her mission to avoid violent confrontation. She succeeded in persuading the followers that she was ready to join. In order to undermine Alma White, Alice embraced the part of disciple. But there was no sign of Lily Maud Allen among the chanting followers, nor in any of the chambers Alice entered.

The Jumpers served Alma White through fear, but they came to engage Alice with a different feeling: trust. By the end of that night inside the cult’s hive, Alice convinced a member to divulge Allen’s whereabouts at an 81-acre Pillar of Fire compound near Bound Brook, New Jersey. There, on a strip of land along the Delaware and Raritan Canal, some 125 members sequestered themselves from the sinful world in gloomy buildings with small windows. Allen was washing dishes and scrubbing floors, simultaneously unhappy and content with her new life. “They give the impression,” the New York Times said of the communal houses, “of being places to discipline people in.” On this campus in the coming years, White would permit burning crosses, host a Klan meeting, and set off a riot.

Alice said her goodbyes and rushed to notify the chief, who passed along word to Allen’s desperate father and the New Jersey police.

Alice’s breakthrough detective work won respect from a group that had treated her as an object of curiosity: the press. The Los Angeles Herald celebrated its policewoman locating someone “for whom sleuths of two continents searched.” The Daily Oklahoman’s headline touted a “Clever Ruse to Find Lost Girl,” and newspapers in Boston, Baltimore, Colorado Springs, and Detroit added endorsements.

As for Lily Maud Allen, in spite of Alice’s triumph, the Englishwoman ultimately remained with the Holy Jumpers. It turned out White’s camp had a secret at their disposal. Allen was not seventeen, as her father claimed. He had lied about her being a minor to spread alarm. She was actually twenty-six, and could not be removed against her will. She resurfaced some two years later in Washington, DC, as a Pillar of Fire missionary, supporting Alma White’s announcement of the Second Coming of Christ. Alice may have triumphed in the battle to track down young Allen, but White’s war was far from over.

Alice, too, had just begun, a long road of breakthroughs and challenges awaiting her. The Pillar case cemented confidence in Alice from her newest booster, Chief Sebastian. The thirty-seven-year old had cut his teeth in farming and as a streetcar conductor before entering police work, and he had no trouble embracing practical, outside-the-box thinking. That November, he paid the ultimate compliment to Alice. He made his first formal request for additional policewomen. The police commission granted it — as well as several subsequent requests. By the end of 1912, the Los Angeles Police Department passed a remarkable milestone by boasting four women officers: Alice, Aletha Gilbert, Rachel Shatto, and Nellie Tarbell.

Sebastian began calling upon departments across the country to hire women. “The natural protective instinct of woman makes her advent in the field but natural,” he explained to the San Francisco Chronicle. “We believe that women can be a valuable and harmonious addition to the police department. Mrs. Wells is our pioneer policewoman and has done satisfactory work.”

In 1913, the police chief traveled to Washington, DC, to make a forceful case to his most skeptical audience: his peers. “I can say nothing but good of women’s work in my department,” he told the Los Angeles Herald before leaving for the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “I shall do all in my power to convince the other chiefs of their value.” At the convention, he declared that the experiment Alice had launched three years prior had succeeded. “[Policewomen’s] worth has passed the experimental stage, and I would not, if I could, dispense with their services.” Crime abated citywide. Policewomen, per capita, were making more arrests than policemen.

Sebastian added a baritone voice to a chorus that had, until then, been mostly soprano. But he also understood that the idea of women police had no more effective advocate than the one woman who persisted beyond all odds to secure herself a badge. From September 1912 to March 1913, with the chief’s encouragement, Alice barnstormed North America as an evangelist for the policewoman movement, delivering 136 lectures to 73 cities across the continent. In the wake of her speeches, city after city would amend its laws and add a woman to the police force. She was soon able to rattle off an impressive list of cities with women officers:

Seattle, 5; Baltimore, 5; Fargo, 1; Grand Forks, 1; Rochester, 1; Syracuse, 1; Kansas City, 1; Chicago, 20; Topeka, 2; Superior, 1; Racine, 1; Aurora, 1; Denver, 1; Colorado Springs, 1; San Antonio, 1; Billingham, 1; San Francisco, 3; Salem, 1; Ottawa, 1; Toronto, 2; Birmingham, 2; South Bend, 1; Portland, 2; Tacoma, 1; Oakland, 2.

Within a few more years, Los Angeles made pay for policemen and policewoman uniform, sending Alice home every month with the same $120 as her male peers.

Now, as she boarded an Arizona-bound train for the first leg of her tour, she was trying out a new look. In her two years on the force, Alice had never worn a uniform. Representing Los Angeles across the country, she needed an outfit that reflected the dignity of her office. There was no standard-issue police uniform for women, of course, so she and Chief Sebastian designed one themselves. The result, made from a heavy English diagonal serge, roughly approximated the patrolman’s summer uniform with its golden khaki tone. The letters “L.A.P.” were embroidered on her collar, and on her head she wore a standard Stetson campaign hat. Her coat was military-trim; her skirt long and pleated.

In New Orleans, a brawny, 6’2” man who worked in the city clerk’s office approached Alice. He pleaded for a favor.

“I want to be arrested by a lady.”