The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(101)

I didn’t look back. I simply moved forward. By the time the SWAT team saw me, I was already knocking on the glass door and Judy Weston was opening it.

She didn’t look particularly glad to see me, but she was trembling and I think she was glad to see anyone who wasn’t her husband.

“What are you doing?” said Aaron loudly, as he came into the vast living room. He was carrying a butcher knife casually, and he was holding a phone to his ear. As soon as he saw me, he smiled at me and pointed at me with the butcher knife.

I hadn’t imagined I would get him to turn himself in without facing him like this. But somehow when the moment came, it was more terrifying than I had anticipated.

Aaron Weston spoke into the phone: “I have a second hostage now. Her name is Linda Wallheim.” He hung up the phone, and motioned for Judy to close the sliding doors.

My stomach seemed to drop to my knees.

I hadn’t said a word of prayer, the whole time I’d been on my way here. Not out loud and not in my heart, either. Maybe I should have, but somehow I had thought in this case God was counting on me instead of the reverse.

Why had I wanted to come in here again? What in the world had I thought I could do that a SWAT team couldn’t? I had had no training in this, no matter how much I told myself it was what I was “meant” to do. I felt a sudden cold sweat of fear at the realization that I had just placed myself into the power of a man who had killed his own daughter. I was now in the same situation Carrie Helm had been in for so long. Was I going to be able to effect an escape any better than she had?

“You,” said Aaron. “You whore.”

The fact that he used the same word as Alex Helm had to make me slap him was strange. I didn’t feel the same anger at all. Possibly because Aaron Weston was speaking so calmly, wearing a fine suit like he had the first time I met him.

My failure to react physically seemed to enrage him, because he lunged at me with the knife. Then I shrieked involuntarily and he pulled back.

“This is the fault of people like you,” he spat out. “My daughters would never—”

“You can stop trying to tell me your excuses. How they seduced you or lied to you or anything else. I’m not interested.”

He stared at me. “I’ll kill you, too. Don’t think I won’t. I’ve gone this far. I killed Carrie, and I’m glad that I did. She needed to die. She didn’t know how to be a mother anymore, or a wife. Her husband will thank me, too, in time.”

At last, I had the impression that I was seeing the real Aaron Weston. There is a legend among Mormons that if you meet a spirit, you should ask to shake hands. An evil spirit will agree to shake, and you will feel no substance. A good spirit will refuse to shake your hand. I wished I had had such a simple test for evil men and good men when I had met Aaron.

“What about Carrie’s daughter?” I asked. “Will Kelly thank you for killing her mother?”

Aaron Weston shrugged. “She is a girl. She belongs to her father, not to me.”

This wasn’t Mormonism, I thought. This had nothing to do with my Mormonism. Only with Aaron Weston’s, and his was wrong.

The phone rang again, but Aaron ignored it. He looked up at me smugly. He nodded out the glass doors to the SWAT team in the driveway and on the street. “They think they are building a relationship with me. They think that they are doing something other than delaying the inevitable.”

But he hadn’t killed himself or Judy yet. Or me. That meant something, didn’t it? “You don’t want to die,” I said. That was, I hoped, where his goal and mine coincided.

“Don’t I? My life is over. Everything I’ve built, my reputation, my family,” he said, his expression dark.

Good. If he saw that clearly, then maybe he could see the rest. “And when you die, what do you think will happen? Aaron, what kind of a God do you believe in?” I asked him.

This was the biggest gamble I had taken in my life. I assumed that after all of his years in the Mormon church, he actually believed some part of it, that it wasn’t all part of a pretense to abuse power. I felt my fear fading and a strange calm envelop me. Maybe I had gone beyond fear, or maybe it was the Holy Spirit. I don’t know.

He stared down at the knife as if talking to his face in a mirror. “God will justify me,” he said. “I have done a lot of good. If I have made mistakes, well, so have others.”

“Aaron,” I said, to make him look at me. He wasn’t alone in this house. He wasn’t in some dreamworld of his own making. “It’s not just a mistake to kill your daughter. You planned it.”

He waved a hand. “Look at Joseph Smith. He had affairs with women long before he instituted the so-called doctrine of polygamy. He was a man with certain lusts, and he found a way to make them palatable to others. He declared a new doctrine.”

“You are not Joseph Smith,” I said. I wasn’t here to defend the founder of Mormonism and the polygamy that had long since been repudiated. Joseph Smith had not been a perfect man, but I believed in the church he had built, and in the Book of Mormon he had translated.

“That is how people outside the church see him. As a lecher. A despoiler of young girls,” said Aaron Weston. “But he was a holy man even so.”

So was that his excuse? That another man had done what he had done and still been praised for his life? “Joseph Smith did not abuse his own daughters,” I pointed out.