Thirty-one years later
September 2016
Desoto, Texas
T. Larinda Jordan stepped inside Shiloh Southwood Tabernacle United, a white stucco one-story church that pastor Darlington Beckner had led for the last thirty years. The locals called the church “Shoebox Methodist” because of its low, rectangular stature, with no steeple, only a small cross nailed to the wall above the front door. Larinda wasn’t local and wasn’t Methodist. She’d been raised an Oklahoma Catholic. One time not too long ago she’d been a cloistered nun. She entered the morning church service late, and she intended to leave early.
Larinda slipped into the last row of folding chairs, joining two other patrons. She was going for invisible in a high-necked white blouse and an eggshell white skirt of respectable length with embroidered white flowers. A short, unbuttoned denim jacket hid her toned, athletic upper torso. Flats lessened her height, makeup lessened her freckles, transitions lenses suggested dull gray eyes, and a blonde ponytail sold her as a college undergrad, reducing her age by ten years. The only thing difficult to hide was her bandaged left palm; the scabbing itched. A light fingertip massage provided relief until she was able to will the discomfort away.
She mouthed the words of the hymn in progress because she knew them, but she didn’t sing. She scanned the congregation. It was mostly Native American parishioners, many elderly, a few children, all dressed in light jackets, sweaters or pullovers, geared to ward off the autumn chill. But she cared little about the parishioners; her focus was the church’s pastor, now at the podium. A white male in his seventies, thin and vulture-like with a hunched back and a black comb-over, his eyes were a radiant light blue, their sparkle noticeable even at this distance. His hands rested flat on the lectern as he delivered a reading from the New Testament.
He matched the picture they’d given her.
A boy two rows ahead, a fidgeting pre-teen, scanned the congregation. Larinda lowered her head and tucked her face into a hymnal to blend in. After a moment she risked a peek to find him staring at her, his look judgmental, effeminate, with batting eyelashes. His mother whispered to him until he faced forward. The mother left behind a self-conscious smile for Larinda as an apology.
This was the kind of kid who saw more than he let on. The mother or the son or both could be a problem, but she wouldn’t worry about that now.
Larinda waited in the church parking lot in a forest green, older model Ford Explorer, her binoculars raised. The midafternoon sun heated the car, forcing her to remove her jacket. Visible through the church’s barred windows, Pastor Darlington Beckner flipped through hymnals in a sparsely furnished sunlit anteroom behind the altar, smoothing out the rabbit-eared pages, straightening the piles. This was taking longer than she’d expected. Regardless, she would not sully the sanctity of a church.
Pastor Beckner hobbled to the door on aged legs. He exited the anteroom, her binoculars following his progress down the center aisle on his way to the back of the church now empty of parishioners. Window to window, pew to pew, she had an unobstructed view of the small church’s interior because there was no stained glass. He reached the vestibule at the church’s entrance.
The Bible passage he’d read at the morning service had stayed with her, as had his grandfatherly demeanor while he delivered it. Matthew 19:14: “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me.’” The passage was a sign that this was right and just.
A dirt parking lot separated the church’s entrance from her SUV. Shoebox Methodist was a repurposed municipal building, the stucco exterior whitewashed but not adequately, some fluorescent colored graffiti showing through. Rust stains dripped from the corners of its ancient iron window frames. One other car was in the lot, a late model Dodge sedan. The pastor exited the church, pulled the heavy front metal door closed behind him, making sure it latched. He paused, lifted his face skyward, breathed in the sunlit September air.
Old age and the recent passing of his wife had softened Pastor Beckner’s conservative leanings, The Faithful had explained to her. He was now on the wrong path. His recent actions said he’d lost his own gospel, and this made him dangerous. The timing wasn’t a coincidence. A new Texas law now forced women to view an ultrasound of their fetuses before they were allowed to have legal abortions. Planned Parenthood appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. In two weeks, on the first Monday in October, the new Supreme Court term would begin, and the Texas case Babineau v Turbin would be argued. If The Faithful had anything to say about it, the Court would validate the original Texas decision, and this validation would eventually be used to leverage overturning the 1973 Roe v Wade decision in its entirety. The Court’s opinion was in the process of being reshaped, considering the recent confirmation of a new Supreme Court associate justice.
For the past thirty years The Faithful had followed Darlington Beckner’s every move. He’d never tried to contact anyone of political, municipal or jurisprudence consequence in all that time. Not the liberal politicians, not the police, not the media. His marriage was dead back then. Over time it resurrected itself to become rock solid. And if he’d felt the urge to confess to his wife his one and only extramarital transgression, The Faithful was fairly sure he hadn’t done so. He’d been a good Christian, and they’d seen nothing that merited his elimination. Until now.
His wife’s passing had been sudden. With it, apparently, came a need for him to divulge his miscarriage of duty when he was county adoption agency director. His sin.
His first misstep had been to contact the FBI. The Faithful had the reach and the resources to know these things. His second misstep was booking tomorrow’s flight to D.C., where they expected him to fess up to his dereliction, his betrayal of the peoples’ trust: he’d provided stolen information, from records sealed by law, about a certain closed adoption.
The Faithful had explained this to Larinda without volunteering other specifics about their agenda, to provide the context she needed to understand that if his confession reached the wrong people, it would be a bad thing. Pastor Beckner was now a new threat to the war on the unborn, a war that was close to being won. Eliminating him would neutralize this threat. Exactly how and where he fit into this equation, Larinda didn’t need to know, and the good Christian that she was, she hadn’t pressed them on it.
The Faithful. Her confidants and spiritual guides for most of her life in Texas, composed of ministers, town elders, captains of industry, televangelists, congressmen, and a senator. They were also her clandestine employers, on a contract-by-contract basis. Their text message to her that morning: “C.H.: Your new penance is to fix this. The Lord be with you.”
C.H. “Church Hammer.” Larinda’s handle. She was a soldier, a righter of other people’s wrongs, in the name of Jesus Christ.
The pastor unlocked his car. She waited until he climbed inside. The mess would stay contained that way.
“Pastor Beckner,” she called, approaching his car on foot, her dimples accenting her warm smile. “Hello! A moment of your time, please.” Her smile widened as she speed-walked her way closer.
He powered his car window down, her smile contagious. “Of course, miss. What can I help you with?”
At ten paces from the car she raised her arm, ready to shake his hand. Traffic coasted by on the street next to the lot. He made eye contact, was still smiling. He reached his hand through the window to clasp hers. At three paces the small ballistic knife strapped to her wrist inside her denim jacket sleeve ejected from its compressed air sheath with a quiet thokkk, the short blade entering his neck above his Adam’s apple like an arrow, severing his vocal chords. He gripped his throat, a gurgling crimson leak springing from his neck and gushing through his fingers onto the steering wheel and windshield, asphyxiating him in his own blood. She clapped his shoulder like an old friend and scanned the empty parking lot for inquiring eyes, satisfied there were no witnesses. She removed the knife from his neck and wiped the blade on his shirt.
“That was a wonderful reading today, Pastor. Thank you, and may you rest in peace.”
Before turning away, she reached into his front shirt pocket for the jeweled pen she noticed during his sermon. A trophy, or it would be, as soon as she wiped off the blood.
The police found her six days later.
Teresa Larinda Jordan, in jeans, track shoes and a loose pullover sweater, sat in a holding cell waiting for someone to post her bail. The charge for now was possession of prescription drugs in other people’s names. She no longer considered herself a Teresa, answered instead to Larinda, not a saint’s name, because she was no longer worthy of a saint’s protection. She made the change when she was twenty-one, not long after agreeing to the decision that could send her soul to hell: to abort a child, an abominable wrong. There had been intense pressure from her grad student boyfriend, but this was no excuse. For her, the impact of terminating the pregnancy had been overwhelming. The impact to her boyfriend: nothing whatsoever, far as she’d been able to tell, that is until she killed him for being so cavalier, and fed his body to her parents’ hogs. Her first execution.
It stank in the jail cell, pungent as urine-soaked rotting meat. Most of the questions they’d asked her were about Pastor Beckner’s murder, her arrest prompted by statements from the boy in the Shoebox Methodist congregation who’d taken an interest in her. That Indian kid. In an interrogation room, her court-appointed attorney read her the boy’s statement.
“He said to the detective, and I quote, ‘You don’t wear white after Labor Day.’ He busted in on his mother and the detective interviewing her at home, did the whole finger wag, no way girlfriend urban thing for emphasis. Then he added, ‘I don’t care what Emily Post says is acceptable now. Wearing white after Labor Day is abhorrent. If you take notes on anything, Detective, take a note on that.’ The kid’s a little different.”
A twelve-year-old Indian kid who sounded like a queer socialite from Manhattan. Where did these kids learn this behavior? From the atheist liberals, of course.
No evidence could place her at the pastor’s car, and no murder weapon had been found yet. They knew what it was, the police told her attorney. A knife or some other sharp projectile, based on the puncture wound to the neck. The cops did have an interest in the back of her hand and her palm, which showed scabbing in both places. They took a blood sample.
“From a nail gun,” she’d told them. “I’m a journeyman carpenter.” Closer to the truth than they needed to know.
All interesting stuff, her attorney had commented to her accusers, but how did any of it attach his client to the pastor’s murder?
The connection: she was a non-church member who picked that Sunday to check out the church’s service as a potential new parishioner. A coincidence, and detectives didn’t like coincidences. That, plus the odd kid who identified her also knew where the white-on-white embroidered skirt could be purchased on summer clearance, the kid had emphasized, which led the cops to a certain women’s clothing store, which produced a corroborating physical description from a sales clerk. Store video footage gave them their “person of interest,” and local news stations blasted the airwaves with it. Anonymous tips brought the police to her doorstep.
Fingered by a crossdressing Indian kid who knew his women’s clothing stores. She couldn’t have planned for this.
The search of her apartment produced no incriminating evidence regarding the homicide. What they did find were fourteen filled prescription bottles of OxyContin, all current, only one with her name on it, some open gauze packages plus, oddly enough, a novice nun’s habit, complete with a white wimple. The murder case remained open but there wasn’t enough evidence to hold her. The charge for illegal possession of a controlled substance was the only charge that stuck. But this would allow them to keep an eye on her. The judge assigned bail and scheduled her hearing for tomorrow, Monday.
As a transplanted Tulsa, Oklahoma Catholic schoolteacher turned cloistered nun turned itinerant Dallas carpenter, she’d never been arrested before, this despite three executions she’d committed in the eighteen months since she’d pledged her devotion to the cause.
“Your bail’s been posted, Larinda,” her attorney told her, his Texas drawl thick. A turn-on if she were still into sex, but only if he were a Christian; he looked like a Jew. No different than the moneychangers Jesus cast out of the temple.
She had few friends in Texas; friends were distractions. She had The Faithful, and they had arranged her bail. Regardless, whenever and wherever her hearing would be, she decided she wouldn’t be there.
“Thank you for the information, counselor.”
She’d now find the mouthy little faggot Indian kid and his mother and kill them both.