by Terry Shames
Then there’s Elaine Farquart’s body. Have the officers working the case thought of whether they can get tire tracks from clothing? Even if they do, unless whoever murdered her has unusual tires, you’d be considering hundreds of vehicles.
I feel like I’ve missed something. I go back through the list, paying particular attention to the unexplained items, but whatever it is doesn’t jump out at me.
I check to see whether I’ve had a reply from the man with no photograph, but no luck yet. He might not bite at all. It’s like fishing for some exotic species.
As I’m leaving, I remember my promise to Sanchez to try to talk sense into Ida Ruth about the rodeo.
I reach her at home, and she reluctantly says I can stop by. “I can’t talk long; I’m cooking dinner. I know what you’re calling about.”
It’s not that late, but the clouds have thickened, making it seem later than it is. When I get to Ida Ruth’s, I tell Dusty to stay in the pickup. “I won’t be long. You’ll get your dinner before long.”
Ida Ruth takes me into the kitchen and installs me on a stool at the cabinet. Whatever she’s cooking smells odd, like it has got vinegar in it, so I don’t ask what it is. I don’t want to risk her asking me to stay for dinner. “Ida Ruth, this business with the goat rodeo has gotten out of hand.” She’s chopping celery, and she pauses, like she’s thinking. “Samuel, I know it has. But I don’t know what I can do to fix it.”
“You can lay off Father Sanchez, for one thing.”
She lays her knife down and folds her arms across her chest. “I don’t understand why he has to be so selfish.”
“Let me ask you a question. What do you think Loretta would say if she was here? Do you think she’d have tried to intimidate Father Sanchez?”
She narrows her eyes. “What kind of question is that?”
I wait her out.
“I don’t know what she’d do. But I don’t think it’s fair to bring her into it.” There’s a hitch in her voice, and when she speaks next her voice is small. “Do you think she’s still alive?”
“I have to believe it.”
“But what about that other lady . . .?”
I don’t know whether Hogarth has made it public yet that Elaine Farquart died of natural causes, so I can’t tell Ida Ruth that. But I don’t want to dash her hopes. “We don’t even know for sure that the same person who took Mrs. Farquart has Loretta.”
“You mean maybe Loretta didn’t get kidnapped? Maybe she’s just gone off and doesn’t even know that everybody is upset?”
I hesitate. I don’t want to alarm people. “We’re trying to find Loretta.” She picks her knife back up and attacks the celery as if it has offended her. “Why would somebody kidnap those two women anyway? People say they didn’t even know each other.” Her voice is miserable, and we are both silent with our awful thoughts for several seconds.
“We’re looking into it. But I have to say, Ida Ruth, focusing on Loretta doesn’t leave me time for this nonsense between Becker and Sanchez. And it’s not like you to be petty.” I don’t know if that’s true, but it doesn’t hurt to butter her up a little.
“Reverend Becker came to the Ladies’ Circle last week, and he . . .” She pauses in her chopping but doesn’t look up. “He told us that if we were good Baptists, we ought to be on his side.” She shoots me a quick glance and then chops more vigorously. Why do I have the feeling she had started to say one thing and then changed her mind?
“Do you really think that has anything to do with being right with God?”
“I know it doesn’t. But we have to make allowances for Reverend Becker. He’s new and doesn’t know how things work.”
“You’d think if he didn’t know how things worked he would be a little more careful not to horn in on the way things have been done in the past.”
She sighs and scoops up the celery and throws it into the pot. “I’ll see if I can get a chance to talk to him. But he’s . . . well, he’s persuasive.” Again, that odd feeling that she meant something else. Maybe I need to chat with some of the other women to see if others have a different sense of Reverend Becker.
CHAPTER 26
It’s dusk when I get home. The wind is blowing, and I feel the rain in the air. I want to hurry and get my chores done before the rain sets in, so I leave Dusty in the house while I go down to feed the cows.
When I get back, I feel world-weary and sad. There’s a message on my home phone, and I grab for it, hoping it’s Loretta. But it’s a telemarketer, wanting to sell me a new roof. Which isn’t a bad idea.
“Woof.”
I’m so upset that I’ve forgotten to feed Dusty. I crouch down and rub his ears. “Sorry about that, boy.”
He submits for a few seconds but then pulls back and races into the kitchen. I feed him and throw an enchilada into the microwave.
While I eat, standing at the kitchen counter, I consider whether I should call Wendy, but even the prospect of seeing her doesn’t help me climb out of my mood.
Hoping I’ve gotten a bite on my website profile, I pour myself a beer and sit down at the kitchen table with the computer. To my surprise, I’ve gotten five new emails from men interested in my dummy site. I feel a certain stupid pride in that. The profile I wrote must have been pretty good. But none of the five is the man I’m looking for. That doesn’t mean the kidnapper isn’t among them, but a quick perusal of the emails tells me it’s not likely. One asks if she’s taken Jesus as her savior and invites her to visit his church congregation because, “I wouldn’t consider a woman who was not in my church family.” Another wants to sell her insurance. Two ask for another bunch of photos “to help me know more about you,” and one says he wouldn’t go out with her on a bet. That one makes me laugh. Some people are just odd.
I’m ready to shut off the computer when another email comes in. I open it.
“I don’t usually send my photo so quickly,” Rob Barnes says, “but you were persuasive. If you are interested, we can meet somewhere discreet.”
Eagerly I open the attached photo, and for a few seconds I wonder whether I’ve made a mistake. I recognize the man, and I’m completely stunned. It’s a photo of Arlen Becker. The Reverend Arlen Becker. This has got to be a joke. My thoughts veer wildly, trying to imagine who might be playing this kind of trick. A member of his congregation? A Catholic who’s angry that Becker is trying to horn in on the goat rodeo?
I force myself to settle down and be rational. What makes me think it’s a trick? Just because Becker is a minister doesn’t mean he’s not capable of playing around. I sit back and take a sip of beer, contemplating what this means. The reason I was interested in the man to begin with was that he used two different names, and I was sure from the profiles that it was the same man. Beckman and Barnes. It makes sense that Becker would vary his name only slightly. No doubt he did it to avoid anyone making the connection with him as the Baptist minister.
But is there more to it than that? Could Becker be the man who lured Elaine Farquart and Loretta? Why would he do it? He certainly would have recognized Loretta’s photo. No, it makes no sense for him to have preyed on Loretta. Maybe on Elaine Farquart but not Loretta. She’s a member of his congregation. He’d stay far away from her.
Becker said he was an engineer before he became a minister. He said he was “called” to be a minister. Now I’m suspicious. What did this “call” consist of?
I Google his name and “engineer.” There he is. He was employed by a Houston firm as a mechanical and structural engineer, working on bridge projects. But then I see that he had another engineering job with another firm. And then another. He bounced from job to job. Why? The engineering jobs stop five years ago.
I enter his name and “minister.” The next entry for him is at a church in Waco. A larger church in a big city. What happened that he moved quickly from job to job when he was an engineer and then as a minister got taken from a mid-sized church in Waco to this tiny town? I have a hunch it’s a problem t
hat involves women. Harassment?
Becker’s wife must have suspicions that something bad happened for her husband to be sent on his way again and again. And I would be surprised if she weren’t fully aware of the nature of his transgressions. Why would she be loyal to a man like that?
And of course, the big question is, is Arlen Becker a killer? Is he the man who lured Elaine Farquart to her death? Was he responsible for Loretta’s disappearance? At the risk of feeling disloyal, I wonder why those two women? It isn’t as if they are glamorous babes. Or wealthy.
Finally, I mull over what I remember of the man I caught in Loretta’s house. He was built like Becker. Did Becker break in because he sent his photo to Loretta by mistake? Or is it more sinister? Did he kidnap her and know she had a photo that could lead to him?
My heart is tripping double-time. I can’t sit still, so I stand up and begin pacing. This is a long way from what I thought I would be dealing with. I remind myself not to jump to conclusions, although it’s hard for me to come up with an innocent explanation for why Becker is attempting to meet online with the woman he thinks my profile represents.
The question is how to approach this. Let’s say the worst scenario is that he has kidnapped Loretta and is holding her for whatever reason. If he finds out I’m onto him, would that lead him to get rid of her? I have to proceed very carefully to investigate him.
First, I want to find out why he left one company after another when he was an engineer. That’s a safer start. If I start snooping into why he left Waco, he’s likely to find that out. I’m not even sure why I think that’s the case. I just suspect that the Baptist ministry is a close-knit group, and even if one of their preachers is troublesome, it’s possible they stick together if threatened from the outside. They wouldn’t be the first religion to circle the wagons when one of their members is accused of wrongdoing.
I can think of one “innocent” reason that Becker might be conversing with these women. Maybe in his zeal to save people from sin, he thinks women are “loose” if they go on dates with men they don’t know. But even as the thought runs through my head, I reject it. There are other ways to preach to people without being nefarious.
I hesitate to bring Maria in on this until I have a clear plan. It could be that Becker is guilty of nothing more than being a sleazy man. I sit back down at the computer and read carefully the snippets of information covering Becker’s stints at various companies. He seems to have been able to get one job after another, which means two things are probably true. He was good at his job, and whatever got him fired was covered up. Tomorrow, I’ll call human resources in each of the companies to see whether I can get a handle on what he did. I hope I don’t have to go to Houston and confront his ex-bosses in person. That would take time I don’t want to waste. I’m painfully aware that each passing minute puts Loretta more at risk.
I suddenly notice that Dusty is pacing with me. When I stop, he sits down with a sigh. I crouch down, and he flops over to show me his belly. I scratch it. “You don’t have to worry with me,” I say. He turns his head to look at me, and I swear he’s thinking that I’m wrong. It’s his job.
It’s ten o’clock, so I tell him it’s time for bed. The phone rings and I grab for it, hoping it’s Loretta to say she’s back home.
“Hey, are you mad at me?” Wendy’s voice is half-joking.
I groan. “No, I haven’t called because I’m not fit company. But that’s no excuse for not calling you. It’s this case that has me off-kilter.”
“I didn’t mean to bother you. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
For a wild moment, I entertain the thought of jumping into my truck and high-tailing it over to see her. “You’re not bothering me a bit. Hearing your voice is the best thing that’s happened to me today.” I tell her I don’t want to go into the details of what’s going on, but that I need to put my personal life on hold until I find Loretta.
“I understand. But listen, even if you don’t have time to come over, call me anytime.”
We make small talk for a while. She’s going to meet an old friend for lunch tomorrow, and the next day she’s going over to her daughter’s house for dinner. “She sounded excited, like something’s up,” she says, “but I don’t want to jump to conclusions.” Wendy has told me she’d love to be a grandmother, but that her daughter who lives in Bobtail hasn’t shown any interest in having children. I know she’s hoping the “something’s up” is a grandchild.
“Don’t get your hopes up. She might have invited you over to introduce you to a new puppy.”
She laughs. She has such an easy laugh. It eases my mind. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep for worry about Loretta, but morning comes before I know it.
CHAPTER 27
Carrie Olivier, the woman I finally get to talk to in the human resources department at Holcomb Construction, tells me that there’s nothing untoward in Arlen Becker’s file. “It says he parted with the company by mutual agreement,” she says.
“What does that mean, ‘mutual agreement’?”
She clears her throat. “I can’t say exactly. I wasn’t here back then, so I don’t have any special knowledge of it.”
I ask the name of Becker’s immediate boss, and she gives it to me, but she says he has retired and she has no contact information for him.
The next company has gone out of business. They say the third time is the charm, and although it’s not exactly a charm, it’s a step forward. This time the human resources person is a man, Stanley Cash. “Look, I can’t be specific, but since you’re in law enforcement, I feel like I ought to cooperate. I can only say that Mr. Becker was terminated without notice.”
“That sounds serious.”
“Mmm. Yes, problems. I’m afraid if you want to find out more than that, you’ll have to get a court order for the records.”
I have a feeling that if I ask the right question, he might be inclined to say yes or no. “Problems with female staff?”
He hesitates. “I didn’t say that.”
“The kind of thing that gets companies in trouble with lawsuits these days?”
This time the wait is longer, but finally he says quietly, “Let’s just say that no company wants that kind of trouble. Are we clear?”
I’m making these calls at home, and I’m not surprised when I get a call from Maria at 10:30. “Boss, where are you?” She’s annoyed.
“I’ve been making some calls. Hang on and I’ll be in. Anything I should know at your end?”
“Only that Loretta is still missing. Nothing important.” She couldn’t be any more sarcastic.
“I’ll fill you in when I get there.” I hang up before she can demand to know what I’m doing.
Normally, if I had to tackle the powers-that-be in the Baptist Church, I’d ask for Loretta’s advice. Because I can’t do that, the next best person to ask is Ida Ruth. She didn’t come clean with me last night about Becker, and she owes me.
I call and tell her I’m coming over. “I need help.”
“Samuel, I’m . . .”
I hang up before she can protest. She won’t leave, knowing I’m on my way.
She opens the door and marches into her kitchen without a word. I follow her. I’ve left Dusty at home, much to his dismay. I left him howling, so my mood is worse than it might have been.
“I’ll get you a cup of coffee.” She pours a cup for both of us, and I have a feeling we’re squaring off as friendly adversaries. She doesn’t offer to take me into the living room, and I’m fine standing in her kitchen.
“I need to talk to you in the strictest confidence,” I say.
She nods. She knows that I have complete assurance that she will keep quiet. I’ve known her to keep a secret for forty years.
“I need to know how the Baptist Church hierarchy works. Like who decides that a particular minister will go to a certain church.”
She straightens and blinks. I figure this is the last thing she expected of me. “Well, th
ere’s an oversight committee that places ministers. When a minister retires or a church congregation isn’t satisfied with their pastor and decides they want a new one, the church applies to the committee, who makes the decision.”
“Suppose the minister has had problems at another church? Will they tell the new church that?”
“Let’s go in the living room and sit down.”
We sit in the same chairs we sat in last time I was here, but it feels more formal. She looks tense. I remind her of my question.
“It depends. When a church wants to make a change, most of the time it’s because the preacher didn’t get along with somebody in the congregation—like the Ladies’ Circle, or a deacon who’s too big for his britches. Congregations are different. Some like a strict preacher, others like one who is a little more lenient.”
“Suppose the problem is more serious?”
She strokes her throat, as if she were wearing a necklace. “You mean like he’s embezzling, or . . .”
“Or the preacher is having an affair with a member of the congregation.”
“Samuel!”
“Come on, Ida Ruth, don’t tell me it doesn’t happen.”
“Well, people are human. It’s not like the Catholic Church, where those poor priests can’t take a wife.” She sniffs.
“Suppose a preacher pursued a woman in the congregation against her wishes. Would the committee send him to another congregation without telling them?”
I have to wait for my answer while she sips her coffee. “I don’t know exactly what they would do. I’d like to think they would dismiss the man from the ministry, but they may think he deserves another chance. After all, I know you’ve heard the old saying, ‘Church is a workplace for sinners, not a museum for saints.’”
“Would they tell anyone in the new church that he had had problems?”
“Samuel, I don’t know.”
“If they did, who would it be?”
