Death in the covenant, p.1
Death in the Covenant, page 1
DEATH IN THE COVENANT
An Abish Taylor Mystery
D. A. Bartley
ALSO AVAILABLE BY D. A. BARTLEY
Blessed Be the Wicked
To Tycho
Under this law, I and my brethren are preparing tabernacles for those spirits which have been preserved to enter into bodies of honor, and be taught the pure principles of life and salvation, and those tabernacles will grow up and become mighty in the kingdom of our God.… If marriage be of any benefit in the eternal world, would it not be far more consistent with the law of God that [a virtuous woman] should have the privilege, by her own free, voluntary consent, to marry a good man, though he might have a family, and claim him for her husband, not only through time, but eternity?
Remarks by President Brigham Young,
Delivered in the Bowery, Provo, July 14, 1855
ONE
Damn! Please be a wrong number.
Abbie had drifted to that critical junction between pleasant drowsiness and total unconsciousness when her phone went off. Her body craved sleep—just one night of uninterrupted rest. One night with no nightmares, one night when she didn’t lie awake for hours staring into the darkness. It had been too many months to count, now. John had suggested she “see someone,” his big-brother way of letting her know he was worried. He had broached the topic a couple of times in gentle, oblique ways, which made Abbie feel ungrateful for being irritated.
Her phone buzzed two more times before she could focus enough to read the numbers on the screen. It was Clarke. She swiped to the right to answer the call.
“Taylor, there’s been a car accident on Route 39.” Jim Clarke, Abbie’s partner, sounded chipper. He probably never had trouble sleeping. “The driver’s dead. An old guy. I already called the doctor working as ME tonight. The chief said we should just handle it. I don’t think he wants to get out of bed for a drunk driver.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Abbie forced her body upright, the latest Tana French falling to the ground as she shifted. She picked up the book and placed it on the coffee table next to a nearly full cup of passion flower tea. Granted, reading suspense probably hadn’t been the best choice for inducing sleep, but she’d hoped the herbal tea’s calming qualities would do the trick.
Abbie climbed up the stairs to her bedroom. She pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, then laced up an old pair of hiking boots. As she walked back through the kitchen to the front door, the coffee pot called to her, but there wasn’t time to brew a fresh one. In an act of optimism, she picked it up. It was heavy. Abbie poured day-old coffee into a thermos, grateful for small blessings.
The end of Abbie’s long driveway was Route 39. Like a lot of small canyon roads in Utah, it was treacherous and narrow. Abbie’s cabin wasn’t far from the crash site. It wasn’t long before she saw the glow of flares and police cars on the side of the road. Nearly half of the Pleasant View City Police Department was there: Clarke and the two other full-time officers. The area had been cordoned off and the three men were searching the ground.
Abbie parked her old Range Rover next to a squad car, near cement blocks that had seen better days. It had been decades since politicians in any of the nearby towns had had either the money or political will to spend on infrastructure to prevent exactly what had happened tonight. Clarke looked up when he heard her car door open. He waved.
The narrow shoulder of the road dropped precipitously to the creek below. Streams in the canyons were fast moving with snow melt this time of year, cutting jagged edges into the mountainside. Abbie hiked down the steep embankment to where the car was crumpled. The back of the dark car was in nearly perfect condition even though the automobile had taken a nose dive into the rushing creek. Despite efforts to light the scene, the darkness made it impossible to see much of the front, let alone who or what was inside it.
“What do we know about the driver?”
“Nothing,” Clarke answered. “We can’t touch the body until the ME gets here and does his thing. It looks to me like he drove straight off the road.”
“Anyone see anything?” Beyond the lights the officers had set around the car, there was nothing but blackness. Nobody lived anywhere near this winding stretch of the canyon.
Clarke shrugged.
“Anyone check up there?” Abbie pointed to the other side of the creek. There was an unofficial campsite just past the first ridge where local teenagers liked to hang out, drink beer, and do whatever teenagers did when left to their own devices. It hadn’t been so long ago that she’d spent the occasional weekend evening up a canyon beyond the careful watch of parents and Church leaders. Abbie couldn’t see light from a campfire, but if she was lucky, someone might be up there, someone who could have witnessed the crash.
Clarke kicked the dirt. “No.” Abbie knew he was embarrassed he hadn’t already thought of checking the site, but Clarke probably hadn’t been the kind of teenager who hung out at nonsanctioned campsites. It wouldn’t have occurred to him.
“No worries. You stay here to meet the ME.”
Flashlight in hand, Abbie crossed the stream with dry feet, courtesy of two fairly stable rocks and some luck. From there, it was a steep but not difficult climb up a well-worn dusty path. As she stepped into the cleared area, the breeze shifted so that the pleasant smell of campfire smoke was unmistakable. A few large trunks served as benches around a firepit, deep-red embers still glowing beneath the wet, charred remains of the logs.
Abbie slowly shone her flashlight in a circle around the camping area. All she could see were trees. Aside from the sound of rushing water from the creek below, it was silent. No giggling. No nervous snickering. She hadn’t interrupted a lovesick teenage couple. Abbie repeated her circle of light. This time, as she faced into a breeze, she inhaled a cloud of cannabis along with the campfire smoke.
She pointed the light toward the breeze and walked around one of the large logs. Her beam lit up a sleeping bag, backpack, and a few empty cans of beer.
“Hello!” she called. “I’m Detective Abbie Taylor of the Pleasant View City Police Department. I’m not here to enforce fire violations or drug laws. I’m interested in the car accident on Route 39.” Abbie hoped her voice sounded friendly enough to persuade the source of the smoke to come forward.
There was rustling on the other side of the sleeping bag. Then a man in his early twenties stepped into the light. His dark hair fell to his shoulders and he had a scruffy beard. His fitted T-shirt revealed highly developed shoulders and arms. He was a climber.
He stepped closer to the firepit and poured water over it from a plastic milk carton. The water hissed as it hit the last of the glowing coals.
“Hi. Is there a problem?” The young man didn’t wait for Abbie to answer his question before launching into his explanation for being where he was at this time of night. “I’m just up here for the night. Climbing first thing in the morning.”
“Actually, there is a problem. There’s been a car accident.” Abbie pointed toward the road. Even in the darkness, you could see the lights at the scene clearly through the trees. “Did you see anything?”
The climber hesitated for a moment, but then must have decided cooperating with the police was his best option. “Yeah, I saw it,” he said. His tone went higher at the end of the sentence instead of deepening into finality. There was more.
“Can you describe what you saw, Mister …?” Abbie asked.
“Strong. Bryce Strong.”
“Mr. Strong, as I said before, I’m only interested in the car accident. Not any other …” She cleared her throat. She didn’t want to spook her eyewitness. “Minor infractions.”
Her words had the desired effect. Bryce Strong exhaled and the tension in his jaw relaxed. “Okay, so the crash was sorta weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah. You know the place in the road where you can’t see around the bend?”
“Yes.” Abbie knew exactly where Bryce Strong was talking about. There were twists up much of the canyon road to Huntsville. Some of the curves were gentle. A few, though, rendered a driver essentially blind. The place where this car had gone off the road was just such a spot. Large cement blocks had been placed along the side of the road as a barrier, but that was a long time ago. They were crumbling now and served more as a warning than an effective means of preventing a car from going off the road.
Bryce Strong continued his description. “Anyway, the car that crashed wasn’t going all that fast, but when it came around the bend, there was this big white car in the wrong lane. That black car swerved right into the creek.”
“A white car?”
“Yeah. Something expensive and new.” Bryce Strong was not a car guy.
“You didn’t happen to get a license plate number, did you?” Abbie had learned it never hurt to ask.
“No,” the climber answered, “but I remember the letters B, L, and S, in that order.” He smiled wryly. “They’re my initials.”
Abbie pulled her purple notebook out of her back pocket and jotted down the letters; then she looked down at the road. From where they stood, both sides of the curve were visible.
“You said the white car was stopped on the wrong side of the road. Did you see the driver?” Abbie asked.
“Yeah, he got out of his car after the other driver went off the road.” Clarke hadn’t mentioned anything about another car. How was this the first she was hearing about another witness to the crash? Had everyone just assumed this was a drunk driver?
“I went down to make sure nobody was hurt. I didn’t really want to call the cops—I mean, I would’ve if I needed to—but, you know, I’m a little …”
“You’d been smoking marijuana.”
Bryce Strong smiled. “Anyway, by the time I got down to the car, the guy driving the fancy white car was already there. When he saw me, he yelled across the creek that he’d called 911.”
“That was it?” Abbie asked.
“Uh.” Bryce Strong placed his palms together, the tips of his fingers touching his lips. He looked vaguely like a yoga instructor. “Now that I think about it, I asked him if the driver was okay.”
“And?”
“He said the driver was fine and everything was under control.”
Abbie thought of the corpse in the mangled black car. Whoever that stranger had been, he’d been lying. Even if the driver hadn’t been dead at the time, he certainly could not have been “fine.”
“Can you describe the man you spoke to?”
“Short hair, you know, missionary cut, maybe shorter, but he was a little old to be a missionary.”
“Anything else? Do you remember what he was wearing?”
“Oh, yeah. That was sort of odd. The car was really nice, but the guy was in old jeans and a flannel shirt. He was wearing boots. Not cowboy boots, but work boots or combat boots, ones with treads.”
“And you didn’t talk to him beyond asking about the driver in the crashed car?”
“Nope. He looked like he knew what to do when the police got here. I didn’t have any interest in sticking around if I wasn’t needed. Don’t get me wrong. If I’d been the only person here, I completely would’ve helped, but I wasn’t.”
“What happened after that?”
“He walked back up to his car. He drove off and I climbed back up here and doused the fire so I wouldn’t get in trouble when the ambulance and cops showed up. I tried to calm down so I could fall asleep. I was still hoping to get an early start. Seeing a car accident isn’t exactly the most soothing thing to happen before going to bed.”
It didn’t sit well with Abbie that the driver had left before Clarke and the other officers arrived. It also didn’t sit well that Clarke hadn’t mentioned that no one was on the scene when he arrived. They had received a 911 call. Usually, the caller stuck around.
“Do you remember if the man in the flannel shirt drove up or down the canyon?”
“He drove up. Back the way he came.”
“Thanks. Anything else happen?”
“Not that I can think of.”
Abbie handed Bryce Strong her card and took down his contact information. “Please call me if you think of anything else.”
“Will do,” Bryce Strong said, then muttered to himself, “So much for falling asleep.”
He probably wasn’t going to drift off to a restful slumber anytime soon, and neither was she.
By the time Abbie climbed back down to the crash site, the ME had arrived and was almost done, which meant Abbie would be able to take a look at the body. While the ME finished up, Abbie pulled Clarke away from the other officers.
“Was there a 911 call on this?” Abbie asked Clarke.
“Yes.”
“Was the caller here when you arrived?”
“No,” Clarke said.
“That didn’t strike you as strange?”
“You know, some people don’t like to get involved.”
Abbie raised her eyebrow. Clarke liked to give people the benefit of the doubt. Being neighborly and law abiding was highly valued in Utah, so it was particularly unusual for someone to call 911 and not wait for the proper authorities to arrive. Abbie had yet to see it happen since she’d moved back to her home state.
“You were up there for a while. Did you find anything out?” Clarke asked.
Abbie gave him a quick rundown of her conversation with Bryce Strong, including a description of the fancy white car and the man in the flannel shirt.
“I’ll get IT to trace the 911 call first thing in the morning,” Clarke said. “This is a rough curve, though. A lot of cars crash here. Usually it’s just minor injuries, but this guy is old.”
“We have an ID?” Abbie asked.
“No. We didn’t find a wallet, but the ME found his phone.”
Abbie and Clarke headed back toward their fellow officers, who seemed to have given up on the promise of finding anything interesting. Without Bryce Strong’s story about the white car, the accident looked routine: either a drunk driver had missed a turn or a reckless driver had taken the curve too quickly. Either way, there was no sense in wasting energy looking for clues that weren’t there.
The ME, a new guy from Oregon, finished and gave his okay for Abbie to examine the body. Normally, Clarke would have wanted to come alone, but because he and the others thought this was just a random drunk, everyone was focused on just doing what needed to be done. Abbie walked down the embankment. Something about this crash was off. As far as she could fathom, there was no reason for Bryce Strong to make up a story about the fancy white car and the man in the flannel shirt checking on the driver and calling 911. If anything, Bryce Strong’s life would have been easier if he’d said he hadn’t seen anything at all. Now he was involved in a police investigation.
Abbie stepped onto a rock in the creek and opened the driver’s side door of the crushed car. The car was damaged, but it wasn’t in such bad shape that you’d assume it had been a fatal crash. She’d seen people emerge unscathed from much worse. Abbie lifted the head of a white-haired man slumped over the steering wheel. Her heart tightened into a knot in the center of her chest. Of all the things she’d been prepared for, knowing the dead driver wasn’t one of them. She’d known him for as long as she could remember. Heber Bentsen was family, or just about.
When Abbie was little, the Taylors and the Bentsens had spent Days of ’47 picnics together, the occasional Thanksgiving, and countless summer nights. The adults would sit outside talking, and the kids would play until well after the first stars started blinking in the sky. Heber had been called to be an Apostle just before Abbie left for college, and when she’d left the Church, he had been the one to broker a cease-fire between Abbie and her dad.
She placed Heber’s head back on the steering wheel with the gentleness of a mother putting a sleeping child in a crib. She didn’t want to leave him there, all alone, so she stood near the open door, her hand still touching his shoulder, and raised her voice so it would carry over the rushing water. “You know this is President Heber Bentsen?”
Even in the darkness lit by flares and flashlights, Abbie could see Clarke and the two other officers on the scene lose all the color in their faces.
Clarke sprinted from the road to the car. He stepped right into the cold water next to Abbie. She lifted Heber’s head again, tenderly. Clarke saw what he clearly didn’t want to see. Every member of the Church knew the First Presidency, as the President of the Church and his two counselors were called. Heber Bentsen had been the First Counselor to the Prophet for years now. Not all Counselors were beloved. Heber was.
“It’s not drunk driving then,” Clarke said, to himself as much as to Abbie.
Abbie didn’t need to respond. The routine car accident had become anything but routine.
“Should we contact someone in the Quorum of the Twelve or the Prophet?” Clarke asked.
“No,” Abbie said. The fact that the driver was one of the most important men in the leadership of the Church was clouding his judgment about protocol. Not that Abbie could blame him. “The first person who needs to be told is his wife.”
“I know, you’re right. It’s just, you know, I mean, this changes everything.”
Clarke was right about that.
Abbie scrolled through the contacts on her phone. The Bentsen addresses were still there: the house in Provo, the condo in St. George, and the cabin in Huntsville. If Heber had been heading to Huntsville, it was a pretty safe bet that his wife, Eliza, was there waiting for him.
“Will you call Henderson and let him know what’s going on? I’m going to talk to Sister Bentsen.”
“You know her?” Clarke asked.
“Yes. And if this news has to come from anyone, it should come from me.”
