BLESSED BE THE WICKED
An Abish Taylor Mystery
D. A. Bartley
In loving memory of Mom and Grandma,
who both enjoyed a good mystery.
All mankind love themselves, and let these principles be known by an individual, and he would be glad to have his blood shed. That would be loving themselves, even unto an eternal exaltation. Will you love your brothers or sisters likewise, when they have committed a sin that cannot be atoned for without the shedding of their blood? Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood? That is what Jesus Christ meant.
—A Discourse by President Brigham Young, Delivered in the Tabernacle, Great Salt Lake City, February 8, 1857
Acknowledgments
I grew up to have faith. I do: in serendipity and kindness. This book wouldn’t exist without both.
Thank you to Matt Martz, Crooked Lane publisher extraordinaire, who took a chance on a rough manuscript forwarded to him by a friend of a friend. Thank you to Derek Hansen, who was one of those friends. Thank you to my amazing agent, Paula Munier, who possesses the special magic of knowing exactly what to do and when to do it. I’m eternally grateful to my fabulous editor, Sarah Poppe, whose fresh eyes and meticulous attention to detail turned an unpolished story into a bona fide murder mystery. Thank you to Jenny Chen and the entire Crooked Lane team, who went above and beyond the call, checking long-forgotten LDS doctrines and little-known hamlets up the canyons of northern Utah.
Thank you to Stephanie Healey, Iván Morales, Antonia Sherman, Heidi Schmid, Marianne Wilson, and Archie Nagraj, whose friendship, support, and concrete advice kept me going. Thank you to my dear friends and author mentors, Melissa Roske and Evie Manieri, without whom I never could have figured out what I needed to know but didn’t.
Thank you to my dad, my sister/cousin Elizabeth Jones-Harris, and my dear friend Charlotte Triefus Zuckerberg. You believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. I’ll never know why you did, but I’m grateful.
There aren’t words to describe how grateful I am to my brother Mark Justin Bartley, who really is the best in the universe. I don’t know how I got so lucky to be his sister.
Thank you to my daughter Kirsten, whose enthusiasm, brilliance, and loyalty inspire me every day, and to my son Tycho, whose intelligence, dry wit, and good-natured patience make our family work.
Thank you most of all to my husband—for everything.
ONE
The dead man in the closet was dressed almost entirely in white: shirt, trousers, shoes and socks, even the sash draped over one shoulder and the stiff, puffy cap on his head. The only exception was a dark-green apron embroidered with fig leaves around his waist. He was sitting upright in a heavy chair; his feet and knees had been bound with a thick white satin ribbon. An identical ribbon was wrapped tightly around the trunk of his body, fixing it in place. Both tied into meticulous bows.
The clothes were sacred, not meant to be worn outside the walls of the temple. This fact was making the Mormon police officers on the scene uncomfortable. Detective Abish Taylor, though, wasn’t at all uncomfortable. The clothes intrigued her, almost as much as the apparent manner of death: there was a thick straight gash running from ear to ear under the dead man’s chin. Blood had drained from that single wound onto his shirt and the ceremonial apron, finally pooling in a dark puddle on the floor.
Abbie knew this crime scene was tough on everyone. The younger officers were skittish because of how the body was dressed. They’d all been taught those all-white ensembles were an outward expression of secret covenants made with the Lord. Seeing this bloody body—dressed for the temple—in the basement of a McMansion was jarring. Abbie suspected this may have been the first time some of the young officers had ever thought about what it looked like to be dressed in those white clothes with a green apron wrapped around their waist. When you did it at the temple, you sort of were on autopilot. Everyone around you was dressed the same, you spoke in the same hushed tones, and you certainly didn’t question anything you did. Abbie was sure most of the officers were struggling to suppress questions as they processed the scene. Hell, that’s what they’d been taught to do since Sunday school—suppress questions—but she saw in the strained expressions on a few officers’ faces that they were dealing with an internal barrage of doubts about a practice they had, until now, done without thinking. Of course, none of them would admit that, certainly not to her.
The older officers, though, Abbie felt for. These were men who had been going to the temple for decades, long enough that they had drawn their own thumbs across their neck dozens, maybe hundreds, of times in the macabre reenactments that had been removed from the temple ceremony a few decades ago. Abbie was sure Church leaders had hoped that changing the temple ritual would change history, would erase the Church’s own sanctioning of deadly violence. The problem was, Abbie thought, you couldn’t change history. You could talk about it; you could process it; you could expand your view about it; but you couldn’t change it. Blood atonement was part of the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It always had been and always would be.
The LDS Church had disavowed it in the late 1970s and removed the penalty oaths from the temple ceremony in 1990, but anyone old enough to have been to the temple before then wouldn’t be able to forget it. That’s why the younger officers were merely uneasy while the older officers felt a sense of dread. Early Mormon leaders had taught that certain sins were so egregious that not even the blood of Christ was sufficient to wash away the stain of sin. Such sins required the sinner’s throat to be slit from ear to ear and his blood to spill to the earth. Abbie had never been able to understand how this ritual was Christlike. No Sunday school teacher had ever been able to explain to her how the same divine source who taught complete forgiveness in the story of the prodigal son would centuries later make exceptions to his grace. The Heavenly Father Abbie had come to know as a child had high expectations of his children.
“I’ve got the knife.” Officer Jim Clarke held up a standard bowie knife. It had been on the floor beneath the dead man’s right hand. This was Clarke’s first murder case, and the first time he and Abbie were working together. What Abbie knew about him was fairly innocuous: he was a local, a former high school basketball player, and a returned missionary. He was hardworking, meticulous, and, unlike Abbie, technologically savvy. Abbie wasn’t sure why Chief Russell Henderson had chosen Clarke to be her number two, but she guessed it was because Clarke was the only guy at the Pleasant View City Police Department who didn’t seem to have any trouble dealing with a woman as his superior officer. The rest of the small police force behaved exactly as she had expected them to when she’d taken the job a few months ago: white male with a strong undercurrent of chauvinism.
“Have you gone through those clothes yet?” Abbie asked.
“Nope,” Clarke answered.
Abbie kneeled on the floor and looked through the neatly folded clothing behind the body. On the top of the stack was a cream Brioni shirt, a pair of camel Ralph Lauren Black Label trousers, a navy Armani sport jacket (size 48), and a pair of dark-blue socks with their tops carefully folded inside out. There was also a pair of barely worn, dark-brown Gucci loafers.
“No wallet or ID?” Abbie looked inside the back of the white shirt collar. Some Mormons embroidered their names in white thread on their temple clothes, but here there weren’t any initials or insignia. The man wasn’t wearing any jewelry, but the thick stripe of white skin on his left-hand ring finger indicated he’d probably worn a wedding band. In this part of the world, it would have been strange for a man of his age not to be married.
Clarke said, “No ID, but he looks—”
�
�There’s no ID on the body,” Chief Henderson cut in before Clarke could finish what he was saying. The interruption piqued Abbie’s interest, but everyone in the basement was on edge. Being polite was hardly a priority. This death was not the sort of thing anyone in Pleasant View had ever encountered. Abbie had probably seen more dead bodies in New York in a single year than everyone else here had in their entire lives. Combined.
So far, Abbie’s view of the chief was mildly favorable. He seemed to be honest. Undoubtedly, he would have preferred to have a man in her job, a man who was an active member of the Church, but he’d been decent to her since she’d started. Henderson lived by the rules. Those rules were usually pretty clear. He didn’t miss a day of work. He went to church every Sunday. But Abbie had a queasy feeling in her stomach that something about this case was going to challenge her boss. The religious overtones of this death were going to test which rules mattered more to him: church or state.
“Okay, then, it’s Mr. Doe.” Abbie shrugged.
She took one last glance at the body sitting eerily upright in the large walk-in closet. The entire Pleasant View police force—four full-time officers, three part-time, and Chief Henderson—were all in the basement of this enormous house. The house was in one of the many wealthy new neighborhoods that crawled up the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains from Ogden to Provo. Where the mountains had just been mountains thirty years ago, now there were houses as far as the eye could see. The ones in this neighborhood, Ben Lomond Circle, ranged in size from huge to gigantic. This particular house was definitely in the latter category. Abbie wondered what the officers thought of the obvious display of wealth. This might have been the first time most of the guys had ever been inside a place this big.
“Detective Taylor,” Clarke said, “the couple who found the body are upstairs in the kitchen. Do you want to speak to them?” Jim Clarke had never called Abbie by her first name. She wondered if he ever would. She reciprocated and called him by his last name, too.
“Yeah.” Abbie had seen the husband and wife on her way to the basement. They had moved into the house that morning. The wife had been checking out the basement with her kids when she discovered the body. Abbie didn’t expect to get any helpful information from them. She doubted they had anything to do with the dead man, but the possibility couldn’t be ruled out.
Clarke followed Abbie up the plushly carpeted stairs leading to the main floor. “I heard they only paid six hundred thousand for it,” Clarke whispered. That was definitely a post-real-estate-bubble price, Abbie thought. A few years earlier, this house would certainly have gone for well over a million.
Abbie walked into the kitchen. It looked like something out of a Real Housewives show. Everything was designed to impress. “Understatement” was not a word in the builder’s vocabulary. Like the cameras people invited to follow them around in return for a check and notoriety, the purpose of this house was to hit you over the head with an obvious display of wealth that would appeal to those who couldn’t distinguish between tasteful and expensive. Everything was over-the-top: there were the double-thick granite counter tops in the kitchen, twelve-foot ceilings, two sweeping staircases with custom ironwork in the marble entry hall, crown molding, and gleaming brass (yes, brass) fixtures.
The husband and wife sat in their brand-new, shiny kitchen. They both looked shaken and pale. Boxes were stacked everywhere, full of top-of-the line kitchen appliances, no doubt. On the counter between two boxes sat an orchid, still in its stiff plastic wrap with ribbons and a card attached that read “Welcome to Your New Home!” Abbie looked at the card and thought of the body in the basement. What a housewarming gift.
TWO
Having spent the entire day sifting through the very little evidence in the McMansion’s basement, Abbie finally made it home and showered the day’s crime scene off her body. She pulled her thick auburn hair into a messy bun and slipped on dark-gray sweatpants and a ribbed white tank top. In New York, her body was ideal for Herve Leger and Roland Mouret. There wasn’t much use for body-con cocktail dresses in Pleasant View.
Abbie had once taken credit for her lean physique. She watched what she ate and was disciplined in her almost daily runs, but now that she was in her early thirties, she’d grown out of her youthful arrogance. Whatever she looked like was mostly the result of luck in the family gene department. Her mother had been stunning: beautiful skin, ideal bone structure, and a metabolism that required little effort to maintain a slender figure. Abbie now understood why her sisters teased her for being boyish. They both took after her dad’s side of the family with ample thighs, short thick waists, and large breasts that didn’t bounce back after childbirth and nursing.
Abbie walked into her kitchen. The inside of her cabin had been entirely renovated so that it felt more like an airy apartment in Stockholm than an old summer house on the side of a canyon in northern Utah. She opened the cabinet and took out a bottle of Montepulciano. She poured herself a generous tumbler. She needed it.
Today had been painfully slow because, with the exception of Chief Henderson, none of the officers had ever worked a suspicious death scene before and none of them wanted to ask Abbie how to do anything. Even though Abbie was technically running the investigation, Henderson had kept everyone on a tight leash. Even Clarke, who was supposed to be her partner, answered to Henderson first.
Abbie held her tumbler between both hands the way kids held hot chocolate when they came in from the cold. The act of cradling the wine was comforting. She was beginning to feel the cloud of depression threatening to settle in around her. She had been fighting it ever since Phillip’s death. Sometimes she managed to go for weeks without its shadow, but it was always lurking.
She looked around her Scandinavian kitchen. It suited her. She had fallen in love with the place the moment she saw it. She loved how isolated and quiet it was. But right at that moment, she wondered if that isolation was such a good thing. She didn’t have any close friends nearby. The job she’d thought would be an easy way to pass the time between hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter had just turned into something real.
What the hell had she been she thinking? Maybe her friends had been right. She was still grieving. She never should have made the rash decision to move back. She could have just stayed in New York, taken time off work, waited until she felt better. Phillip had left her plenty of money; she could’ve stopped working altogether. She could have moved anywhere if she really needed to leave New York. Utah had been her own crazy idea. At the time it had all made sense: she’d buy this quiet cabin in the mountains, find a job that kept her occupied—but wasn’t too demanding—and then she would rebuild her relationship with her father, maybe even her brothers and sisters. That had seemed so important just a few months ago: to be part of a family. Damn it! Now she had a case that was certainly going to be demanding, and it was exactly the kind of case to destroy whatever chances she had of finding some kind of common ground between her—the black sheep of the family who’d left the Church—and her two sisters and three brothers who were all living as they’d been brought up to. Well, almost. Her oldest brother, John, had been open about his own doubts. He and Abbie had always shared a special bond. Now that she was back, he was the only person she really trusted. He was trying to smooth things over with the others, but so far he hadn’t made much progress. Talking about acceptance and love was one thing; actually practicing it was another.
If this case became public, it would make everything harder. There was nothing like LDS history to stir the pot for the Taylors. Her father had spent his entire professional life being an LDS apologist. One could be forgiven for considering the term apologist an insult, but it wasn’t for Mormons. It was used in the classic neutral sense to describe a person who spoke or wrote in defense of someone or something. That was Abbie’s dad: one who spoke and wrote in defense of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
She took another long swallow of wine. She didn’t want to m
ake this call, but she knew it was the smartest thing she could do. If anyone in the world was an expert on blood atonement, it was her father, the respected Head of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. Most Mormons called BYU by its nickname, “the Y.” Abbie tried not to call it that anymore because it was an insider term. Calling it the Y implied she was part of a community she had left, but every now and then LDS jargon would slip out of her mouth like a hiccup. She couldn’t completely control it.
Abbie’s father had a way of making everyone around him feel diminished. Abbie always felt worse about herself after they talked. He didn’t say anything outright—anything she could point to—but somehow she ended up feeling like she wasn’t smart enough, hardworking enough, virtuous enough, just plain good enough for her father. That was probably one of the reasons she’d been so eager to go out of state for college. All of her siblings had dutifully gone to the Y, even though her oldest brother had had the grades and scores to do better. BYU was more than just a university, though; it was a place where you met your spouse and transitioned from being an LDS child to an active LDS adult. For the Taylor children, BYU was also a place where they circled in the orbit of their illustrious father.
Professor Taylor was exacting. When Abbie was little, her mom had kept the house so spotless no one would have guessed six kids lived there. Even the refrigerator was devoid of kindergarten art projects or English tests marked with smiley faces that would be plastered on fridges in normal houses. The standards for Taylor family recognition required far more than a perfect score on a math test. And even then, such recognition would never show up on the refrigerator.
Her mom, in stark contrast to her father, had been fun and funny. Everyone who knew her loved her. She baked gooey brownies for breakfast when their father was away at academic conferences. (“So long as you drink your milk, it’s the same as having pancakes.”) In the summer, she’d run through the sprinkler with the kids and get just as soaked. In the winter, she could be counted on for a good snowball fight. And she laughed. Abbie’s mom had the best laugh. It was a hearty chuckle from her belly. It was entirely unselfconscious and completely contagious. You couldn’t hear Abbie’s mom laugh and not smile. And her mom laughed a lot. There was very little that she thought was too serious or frustrating not to greet with laughter. When something went wrong, like the first time her brother tried to make borscht and the blender spewed hot, deep red beet juice everywhere, the first thing everyone in the house heard was her mom laughing.
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