The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(80)

“Damn,” said the detective as he opened the bag and held up each piece in the light streaming in from the front window.

“Can you still test the blood on the dress?” I asked. “Or whatever is on the hammer? Could it be the murder weapon?”

“It could be. The problem is the chain of custody. You took the hammer from the garden and to your garage, where it has been for months now. And as for the dress, we don’t know anything about how the blood got to be on it. If you’d called us immediately, we might have been able to question Tobias about it while he was still alive.” Detective Dun was staring at me accusingly.

“But there was no body at the time,” I said. “You would have thought I was crazy, thinking a dying old man had killed his first wife some thirty-odd years ago.”

“I wouldn’t have,” he said.

I rolled my eyes at him.

He let out a breath and seemed to sink into himself a bit. “I’ll tell you a story about why I would have listened to you, all right?”

“Okay,” I said. I looked at Anna and she nodded.

“My sister was killed by her husband. Three years ago. She called me the day it happened, asking me for help. I thought I could wait to get to her. I thought she was exaggerating.”

I bristled at that.

“That evening, when I finally got to her house, she was dead. So I take women more seriously now. I listen, and try to step in when I can still save a life.”

He was breathing heavily, and it looked like he felt a little ill. I knew what that was like, giving away too much of yourself when you hadn’t expected to and then waiting to see how it was received.

“I find myself telling that story more and more often now. I wish it wasn’t applicable in so many of the cases I investigate, but it is.”

“Even here in Utah?” said Anna.

“Maybe especially here in Utah,” said Detective Dun.

It humanized the detective for me, seeing why he felt called to his profession. I’d never faced a tragedy like that in my own life—before this. “But it’s not as if Tobias could be prosecuted now,” I said. “I don’t see what the point is in making a fuss over all of this.”

Detective Dun straightened his shoulders, back in his authority role, his head rising above the line of the chair. “The point is that people like you think they have seen enough detective shows on TV to do things on their own. But they shouldn’t. If there were a possibility of a real case here, you would have jeopardized it to the point of making the D.A. wonder if he should even try to go to trial. Any defense lawyer would have a field day with the possibilities of what might have happened to the dress and hammer in the time it was in your garage.”

He was right, of course. After the fact, I could see that I had taken too much on myself. It stung to hear him treat me like a child who had stepped into the street without looking both ways.

“Promise me you won’t ever do something like this again. Call the police if you find something. Immediately,” said Detective Dun. There was just a hint of pleading in his voice now, underneath the demand. He stood up, putting everything back in the bag. “I will tell you what I am most afraid of, Mrs. Torstensen,” he said, towering above her now, since she was still on the couch.

“What’s that?” asked Anna, her hands shaking until she put them flat on her knees.

“If your husband was able to fool you and all your neighbors, and keep this body buried right under your noses, it makes us concerned that we may yet find other bodies,” said the detective. “It could be years before we figure out the extent of what he did.”

This struck me as both far-fetched and insensitive to Anna’s emotional state. Surely the police didn’t assume that there were serial killers behind every body found buried in a garden. Although, I suppose a body having gone undiscovered for so long was a sign of careful planning. Sociopathic serial killers are good at covering up their crimes, because their strategy is never compromised by remorse.

Not that I was any expert on serial killers. As Detective Dun had said, I was relying on what I’d seen on TV and what I’d read about Ted Bundy and Arthur Gary Bishop, both Mormons, in the days when I’d been an atheist and looking for reasons to stop believing in the church.

I stood up and tried to meet the detective’s eyes. “What makes you think that there are any other bodies?” Had they found something in the garden that we hadn’t heard about yet? Were there unclaimed murder victims in Draper from the last thirty years they think could be linked to Tobias?

“We don’t know if there are, but a man who has killed once and gotten away with it is more likely to try again,” said Detective Dun.

“Now aren’t you the one who is making assumptions?” How pompous that sounded. He was the detective here. I was just a stay-at-home mother and a bishop’s wife. That was my life. It just so happened that this one murder had impinged on my world. Well, two murders, I suppose.

The detective reopened his notebook and wrote a few scrawled words. I imagined they were warnings about not talking to me again.

“He wasn’t a dangerous man,” said Anna. “If you’d known him, you’d have seen how carefully he controlled his temper.”

“Then he had a temper? You saw that?” asked Detective Dun.