“If people think they can make money without doing work or taking any risks, they’re bound to be fooled,” Kurt said when I asked him about it once. “It’s the greed that’s ultimately behind the schemes. Ignorance is part of it, but if they weren’t so greedy, I think they’d be able to listen. They think they’re special and they deserve something for nothing. Like God wants His special children to be rich.”
Mormons said that God wanted us to be happy, but that wasn’t the same as being rich. I thought again of the ideal Zion society in the Book of Mormon, where there were no rich or poor among them, everyone just sharing what they had. That seemed a far cry from what we were living in now.
“They’re definitely hiding something,” Gwen said, drawing my attention back to the here and now. “They freaked out when I brought up Gabriela as part of the sales force. I assumed that was what she did, and figured mentioning her name might be a special in. But instead, it was like I’d thrown a grenade in there.”
“So she wasn’t in sales?” I asked. We still didn’t know what the monthly deposits had been for, or whether they had to do with her death. We were just guessing they did.
Gwen sighed. “I wish I’d waited longer before saying anything about her. If I’d just gone with the program and signed up for a sample sales kit, I might have gotten the chance to ask the other employees about Gabriela.”
“You have an extra three thousand dollars lying around for that? Wouldn’t Brad get mad if you spent that much without consulting him?” I asked. Kurt certainly wouldn’t have been happy if I’d blown that kind of money on a ruse like this. I couldn’t have hidden it from him, since he had equal access to our accounts.
Gwen arched an eyebrow. “I have my own bank account—I always have. I have my own money saved up, and I can use it on whatever I want without consulting Brad. I don’t understand women who don’t have their own bank accounts. Why would you want to be dependent on someone else for every penny you spend?”
I tried not to feel stung at her judgment. From my perspective, it was strange that she and Brad didn’t share finances. What kind of marriage was it when you didn’t share everything? When you didn’t make your decisions together?
A modern marriage, I supposed. It was hard for me not to think that this was one of the problems at the heart of Gwen and Brad’s marriage. They were too separate. They didn’t need each other like Kurt and I did.
“Now I can’t go back to that same presentation. They’d recognize me. Do you think we could find someone else in the ward who would be willing to do it for us? Maybe if I paid them for it?” Gwen asked.
Anna popped into mind, but there was no way I’d ask her to do this for me. And I doubted she would, even so.
“Maybe I could try a disguise?” Gwen said. “I could cut my hair really short and not put on makeup. Wear casual clothes. Slouch a little.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not going to work, Gwen. And even if it did, it would take weeks for you to be able to start asking questions, and you would probably still end up being kicked out anyway. You’d be out the three thousand dollars for nothing.”
Gwen went silent for a few moments. “I hate this. If I were a police officer, I could demand access to bank records and look into their finances. I could make them tell me what Gabriela’s job was.”
I wondered if Gore had already been here. “Maybe we should talk to Detective Gore again and tell them what we know about Celestial Security’s payments to Gabriela,” I suggested.
Gwen made a raspberry noise at this. “She’s not going to pick up our lead. She doesn’t trust us.”
I stopped short of telling her about Gore’s visit. She’d certainly been interested in Bishop Hope. But she’d stopped short of telling me she was looking into his business, rather than just personally and religiously. Gore always held her cards close to her chest.
“I’m sure she’s already looking into things here. Maybe we should let it go,” I said.
“When she might have been corrupted already? A big business like this, she could have been told to just ignore it by a friend of Hope’s, focus on other leads,” Gwen said.
“If you think the police are so easy to corrupt, why do you want to join them?” I asked.
“To change things from inside,” Gwen said easily.
I shook my head. “Gore is a good detective, Gwen.” She’d proven that more than once.
“You talk to her, then,” Gwen said.
“And what are you going to do?”
“Figure things out myself,” Gwen said bitterly.
That didn’t sound good. “Gwen, don’t be unreasonable. I want you to promise you’ll tell me if you’re planning to do something,” I said.
She pressed her lips together and refused to promise anything. After a few moments, she said, “You’re not my mother, Linda. So you can stop acting like it.”
Well, that hurt, but this was the danger of me having taken Gore’s side. “Fine. I’ll take you home, then,” I said. She was right. She wasn’t my daughter, and I couldn’t force her to do anything even if she were. Being a mother sucked sometimes.
Chapter 21
Kurt texted to say he was coming home early from work, and I started to plan a nice evening together for just the two of us, hoping to repair the damage I’d done by neglecting him for this case too many times already. I made fish tacos for dinner, the first time in ages I’d tested a new recipe. I thought they’d turned out pretty well, judging by their smell and appearance. The bright-purple cabbage stood out against the shredded carrot and the deep-green cilantro, and the fish was nice and flaky—I’d snuck a bite before putting the tacos together.
I jumped a little when the garage door slammed shut, but didn’t have the sense of impending doom I probably should have, given what I’d spent the afternoon doing.
“Linda, what in God’s name did you think you were doing at Celestial Security today?” Kurt roared.
I put down the plate of tacos and wished I’d nibbled more than a single piece of fish, because the conversation was one that clearly wouldn’t end any time soon. Most likely, by the time I got back to these, they’d be soggy, and it was always a shame when good food was wasted because of an argument.
“I went to apply for a sales consultant position,” I said, answering the question directly, even if I knew it wasn’t what Kurt wanted.
“I know you don’t actually want a job there, Linda, so don’t try that garbage with me,” Kurt said angrily.
“You don’t know that. I’ve been thinking about getting a job since Samuel graduated,” I said. It was mostly true.
“I know that if you were going to get a job, you certainly wouldn’t get one at Celestial Security, which you only heard about because of Gabriela Suarez’s death. You have no interest in home security systems, and you hate those kinds of sales schemes. You’d rather do just about anything than ask people to buy stuff.”
This was all true. Even though he was shouting at me, it was comforting that Kurt knew me so well. “Gwen and I went to find out what we could about the company Gabriela was working for. We wanted to know what she did for them,” I said as calmly as I could manage.
“Gwen Ferris went with you?” Kurt demanded.
“You didn’t hear that part? Kurt, who did you get your information about this from?” I asked. Had someone reported me? If they had, how had they known I was Kurt’s wife?
Kurt looked down at his hands, and I could see him trying to rein in his emotions. He hated being angry, especially with me. “Bishop Hope called me an hour ago,” he admitted.
So that’s why he’d come home early. “He was angry about me being there?” Only me and not Gwen? Had he recognized my name when he’d checked over things for the day? Did he keep that careful track of the daily workings of the business?
“He couldn’t understand why I had sent
my wife over to poke into his business concerns when, as a fellow bishop, I could have just asked him for any information I wanted,” Kurt said. “Linda, it was supremely embarrassing.”
Typical Mormonism. Instead of speaking directly to the woman involved, call up her husband to complain to him about her “embarrassing” behavior.
I pushed away my questions about Greg Hope calling Kurt about me and focused on what was more important. “Kurt, there’s something sketchy going on over there.” I should have called him when I’d first gotten back to tell him about the creepy temple vibe. But now Greg Hope had been able to tell his version of the story first, and anything I said now would be brushed off. I wished that my husband would assume the best of me, but maybe I hadn’t given him reason for that in the last two years of poking my nose into murder cases.
“Linda, if there is something weird happening there, it’s not your place to dig into it. You’re not a detective. You have no training. You don’t just . . .” Kurt sighed. “I’m just afraid for you. I love you and I—I want you to be safe.” His anger had drained away, and now he was leaning against the other side of the counter as if he’d deflated. He looked like he might sink into the ground without support.
This was moving at a faster pace than I’d first thought, which was good news for the tacos. “I want that, too,” I said, remembering that this was what he’d been saying since last year, and that I’d agreed to do better.
I patted the stool next to me and Kurt came over. To set an example for him, I lifted one of the tacos up and took a big bite. The sauce dripped out onto my hands and then down onto the plate. Its flavor was delicious, and I had to admit, the messiness seemed apropos of the current state of our relationship.
Kurt watched me eat the entire taco before reaching for his own.
We didn’t talk again until he was done eating. He looked like a new man by then, and I wondered if he’d forgotten to eat the lunch I’d made for him that morning. He was always grouchy when he was hungry, even if he refused to admit it.
“Making me good food isn’t going to end this argument,” Kurt said softly when he was finished. “You keep putting yourself in danger even after promising me you’d stop. You’re so focused on getting information you forget about your own welfare.”
That might have been true other times, but at Celestial Security? “Surely you don’t think I was in danger at Greg Hope’s company,” I said. “Not unless you’re worried about me blowing our Christmas budget on an overpriced security system.” I was trying to inject humor into the situation, but Kurt was not amused.
“Linda, that’s not what I mean. What if—well—someone had felt threatened?” Kurt was acting strangely now, and I didn’t know why. Was this just about Celestial Security, or did it have to do with the fire that had almost killed me a few months ago?
“By me?” I said, waving at my squat figure. They might have been annoyed by me, but threatened?
“Linda, I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything like that again. Stay away from Celestial Security, all right?” I noticed an involuntary twitch in his right eye, which seemed like a bad sign. I’d never seen that before.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sound suitably repentant. And I was sorry I was causing him such stress, which I’d never meant to do. “But Gabriela Suarez deserves not to be forgotten.”
“That’s why we have police investigating her murder,” Kurt said.
I knew that. I’d defended Detective Gore to Gwen myself, but now even I had my doubts as to whether the murderer would be found. The news hadn’t mentioned Gabriela since the night she’d been called an unidentified corpse behind a gas station dumpster.
“I’m serious. I want your promise about dropping this. It isn’t your place.” His tone was urgent and his face flushed.
“Kurt, you don’t get to give me orders. I’m doing the best I can, and there’s no reason to think I’m in actual danger.” Greg Hope wasn’t Stephen Carter. It felt like Kurt was just being controlling now, not protective.
“Linda, I’m doing this for your own good. You need to listen to me this time.”
“And if I don’t?” I asked stubbornly. I regretted it as soon as I said it. What I should have done here was give him the chance to de-escalate.
“If you don’t, well . . .” There was only a moment’s hesitation before he said, “I’m going to have to call both you and Gwen in for a disciplinary council.”
It wasn’t at all what I’d expected, and it made me wonder what was going on in his head. I wished I could be more sympathetic to him, but he was using his position to bully me, and I wasn’t about to put up with that.
A disciplinary council was usually a first step to excommunication, though it didn’t always lead there. Sometimes you got off entirely innocent. Sometimes you were only disfellowshipped. But excommunication was a drastic measure. It meant removing your name from the records of the church, canceling your temple blessings, your marriage sealings, and every promise for the next life that Mormonism offered. It would sunder me from Kurt, and from my children. Not to mention make it impossible for me to take the Sacrament in church meetings, and disqualify me from holding any calling or even speaking in church.
“You’re going to make me and Gwen stand in front of a church court because we’re trying to get justice for a dead woman?” I echoed, sure he would take it back once he heard how it sounded.
But he was as stubborn as I was and I saw him swallow and clench his jaw. “Linda, you need to listen to me. I know more about this situation than you think. I’m trying to do what’s best for everyone here.”
Because he’d spent ten minutes on the phone with Greg Hope, he thought he knew more than Gwen and I did? It had to be more than that, but why wouldn’t he just tell me?
“I’m pretty sure I know better than you do what’s going on at Celestial Security, and if you think the right thing to do is to try to intimidate me, I wonder if you’ve ever met me,” I said, and walked right out of the kitchen and up to our bedroom. But there were reminders of Kurt’s possession of this place everywhere and I didn’t want that.
So I stomped down to Samuel’s room, then realized the bed was unmade, and I stomped back to the linen closet to get sheets and a quilt, as well as a pillow case. I threw all the bedding onto the bed and then stared at it. It was hours too early for bed.
I waited for Kurt to come in later that night to try to reopen the conversation, but he didn’t. And that was odd. He wasn’t an arrogant man; he never had been. Something was going on—something that was making Kurt act differently, and I didn’t like that I had no idea what it was.
Chapter 22
The next day, I remained in Samuel’s bed until I heard Kurt leave the house. It was the first time in our married life that I could remember not making him a lunch for work, but I had nothing to say to him that wasn’t more of the same from last night.
My cell phone rang just as I headed down for breakfast.
It was Gwen. “Luis Suarez is in Salt Lake City,” she said.
It took me a moment to realize she meant Gabriela’s husband. But Gabriela had told us he’d been deported. Had she lied to us, or had Luis somehow found his way back into the country? Then I thought about the recent letters I’d seen from him with the Salt Lake City postmark. I’d thought they must have been posted by someone else, but apparently I’d been wrong. I wondered how he’d gotten back into the country after his deportation.
“How did you find him?” I asked.
“I copied all the numbers from Gabriela’s phone before we turned it in to the police. This morning, I called the number she had for him and he answered,” Gwen said breathlessly.
Gore would be furious about this, but it probably wasn’t technically illegal in and of itself.
“I asked him if he had heard about Gabriela’s death, and he said that someone f
rom the church had already contacted him,” Gwen went on.
That had to have been President Frost’s work. Did he know that Luis was in Salt Lake or had he just assumed that he had kept his old cell phone number?
“How long has Luis been back?” I asked, trying and failing to remember the date from the letter. Kurt had wanted me to keep out of this, but his threat was going to have the opposite effect of the one he wanted.
“I didn’t ask him that,” Gwen said impatiently.
“I think we should let the police deal with this,” I said, aware that I sounded all too much like Kurt had last night.
Gwen made another of her raspberry sounds, which seemed to summarize how she felt about most of my advice lately.
“I’m going down to talk to him and thought you might want to come. You said you’d come with me, no matter what.” There was a long pause that made it obvious she was withholding something.
“What’s going on?” I asked when the silence continued.
“Well, I may have exaggerated our role a bit to him,” Gwen said.
“Exaggerated?” I echoed.
Gwen took a breath. “I told him I was with the police and this was part of the official murder investigation, following up on their initial interview with him.”
“Gwen!” The shout was involuntary, though I tried to tone it down. “That’s more than an exaggeration.” Now she really had moved into illegal territory. She said she wanted to go to the Police Academy, but she kept doing things that could get her kicked out of it. Did she really think no one would find out? If Detective Gore caught her, there was no reason to think she wouldn’t report her and ruin Gwen’s plans for her future. What would she do then? She’d already quit her job at Zions.
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