by Jane Jensen
“I see. And the rest of the milk from Tuesday, the morning and evening milking both, went into your farm store?”
Levi nodded, his mouth in an unhappy line.
“Does the milk get sold or distributed to anyone else? Besides your farm store and to Amber Kruger?” I asked.
“Sometimes, but not for the past few weeks.” He bit his lower lip and looked out the window. “By yesterday mornin’, the cows . . . well, I milked ’em. You can’t just leave ’em. But I set the milk aside. I wasn’t sure. . . . The way they was actin’ . . . I haven’t sold any of the milk from Wednesday or this mornin’.”
Well, that was something, I thought. “Have you heard anything about there being trouble with milk in the Amish community?”
Levi shook his head. “Not till youse showed up this mornin’. We don’t normally go out anywheres during the week.”
“Have you heard about the Kinderman family?” I asked, keeping my voice gentle. It was hard to believe, but we’d discovered the Kindermans only six days ago. It had been big news in the area though, and certainly was among the Amish.
Levi met my eyes for the first time. His mouth dropped open. “The Kinderman family that all died? That was . . . that was like this? Their cows was sick too?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Levi digested that, looking stunned. His eyes flickered to the doorway through which his wife and children had disappeared, as if imagining what could have happened. His face went a peculiar shade of red. One hand clutched the table, and he muttered something in German that sounded like a prayer.
“It’s all right, Mr. Fisher. Try to relax,” Glen urged. He leaned forward to put his hand on Levi’s shoulder.
While Levi got himself under control, facing the horror of what might have been, my mind rooted insistently at the situation. I felt hungry for something, some information I felt was missing, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“Have there been any strangers on the farm, Mr. Fisher?” I asked when Levi’s color faded to a less alarming hue. “Have you noticed anyone hanging around that shouldn’t be here?”
Glen looked at me oddly, but he didn’t interrupt.
Levi focused his gaze on me reluctantly. “Customers come and go from the shop all the time. Haven’t noticed anyone where they oughtn’t be. And our dog, Tangle, he sleeps in the barn at night. He’d bark his fool head off if someone came around after dark.”
“Have any of your farm-store customers reported getting ill, Mr. Fisher?” Glen asked.
Levi shook his head. “No. But . . .” He looked down at the table. “There’s a lady comes by every other day for milk. Stops on her way home from work. She’s got four or five kids at home. She was here Monday but didn’t come last night, Wednesday. I noticed ’cause she always comes.”
“Do you know her name?” I asked.
“Ja. Susan Traynor. Lives somewhere close by.” His voice was rough, and I could well imagine what he was thinking.
“We should be able to locate her.” It was true but not much of a comfort.
He rubbed his eyes and looked first at me, then at Glen. “I didn’t know about the milk being dangerous till this mornin’. I guess they’ll take my license. Will I go to jail? I surely didn’t mean to hurt anyone. God knows I’d never want that. But I suspect that don’t matter. It’s just . . . my family.”
“That’s why we’re here, Mr. Fisher,” I said. “We need to determine how this happened, where your cows got the plant that made them sick and poisoned the milk.” I didn’t add Likely the most you’ll be charged with is manslaughter, because it didn’t seem like Levi Fisher needed to be thinking about that at the moment, and it was too soon to know what we’d find. One thing I absolutely believed though, was that Levi Fisher had done none of this on purpose. He was a sturdy man, and right now he looked like a stiff breeze could knock him over, and maybe he wouldn’t care to get up again.
“Youse will check on all my customers? With the list in my notebook? Make sure they’re all right?” Levi looked at Glen, as if asking man to man.
“We’ll track down anyone who might have had access to your milk,” Glen assured him. “Get them help if they need it. That’s our job.”
“Thank the Lord. Please, God, let no one else die.” Levi put his elbows on the table, folded his hands, and began to pray.
—
By the time we were done interviewing Levi Fisher, the CDC medics were at the door wanting to take blood samples. I left them to it and headed back outside. It wasn’t that I was squeamish at the sight of blood, but crying children were another matter. I was already heartsick enough today. Out near the barn I found the vet packing up his truck.
“Is this sickness fatal? For the cows, I mean?” I asked him.
He gave me a quick once-over. “Hi. Are you with the CDC?”
I inwardly chided myself for my impatience. As a cop with the NYPD, we rarely did things like introduce ourselves. But what was normal there was considered rudeness here. “No, sorry. Lancaster Police. I’m Detective Harris.”
“Ah.” The vet’s expression didn’t relax. If anything, he grew tenser. “What was your question again?”
“I was asking if these cows will die—and if tremetol is always fatal for cows or if it depends on how much they consume?”
“Hum.” He stripped off the gloves he was wearing and tossed them in a receptacle in the truck. “I’m not sure. I suspect the two worst-off ones here won’t make it. But I gave them all a strong dose of sodium bicarbonate and vitamins, so the rest may recover.”
The vet was in his early thirties, overweight, and a bit geeky. It was clear he’d never been an attractive man, but he was confident and aloof.
“You’re Doctor . . .” I prompted.
“Dr. Richmond.” He didn’t offer his hand. Then again, that could be because he’d just been tending some very sick animals, latex gloves or no.
“Are you familiar with this problem, Dr. Richmond? Tremetol poisoning caused by cattle eating white snakeroot?”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t say ‘familiar with’ it exactly. I’ve never seen it myself, but we read about it in vet school. In cows it’s called ‘the trembles’ or ‘the slows,’ because the stiff muscles affect the animal’s gait. And it’s not just white snakeroot. Certain species of goldenrod contain tremetol too. It’s more of a problem in the southwest I think.”
“So you’ve never seen it around here?” I pressed.
“Nope,” Richmond said briskly. “Not until today.”
“I guess other animals, like horses or goats, would get sick if they ate the plant too, right?”
“Sure. And before you ask, no, I’ve never seen any animal sick like that around here.”
It suddenly occurred to me that we should be talking to local vets—not just this one, but all of them. They might know of cases the police and the CDC had missed. Plus . . . An idea niggled. Not many people would know about white snakeroot and what it could do. But vets would. I looked at Dr. Richmond more closely.
He must have seen something on my face, because he shifted uneasily and rubbed his jaw with his thumb. “I . . . saw the press conference this morning. About the raw-milk ban.”
“Yes?”
He narrowed his eyes and looked off toward the pasture. “That’s really going to hurt the farmers. Take it from me, the dairy animals in Lancaster County, particularly the ones on Amish farms, are some of the healthiest you’ll find anywhere. Almost all of them have access to fresh air and grass all year round. And they’re not fed cheap feed with fillers or hormones.” His voice shook with intensity. “My wife and I drink raw milk. You do know it’s tested by the state? Farms with raw-milk licenses are tested regularly for bacterial contamination.”
I didn’t know that, actually. I was surprised it hadn’t been mentioned in the CDC debriefing. “Thank
s for the information, Dr. Richmond. I can assure you, the CDC is working hard to determine where this toxin is coming from. No one wants to hurt the farmers, but we have to keep the public safe.”
Dr. Richmond grunted and shut the back of his truck. “Then I hope you find it soon,” he said stiffly. He headed for the driver’s-side door.
“Dr. Richmond?” I pulled a card out of my pocket. Something about Richmond’s attitude didn’t sit well with me, but I gave him a polite smile. “Would you please ask around with other large-animal vets you know, see if they’ve seen any cases, or suspected cases, of tremetol poisoning? If so, we need to know immediately.”
I’d ask Hernandez to call around to all the local vets too, but it couldn’t hurt to get Dr. Richmond trolling for us. He took the card and gave me a glance that was noticeably less hostile. “Of course. I’d like to help in any way I can. I’m sure all the vets in the area feel the same.”
“Thank you.” I turned on my heel and went into the barn.
—
I watched three CDC agents go over the Fishers’ cow stall taking photographs and samples. They wore paper face masks now, along with white coveralls, gloves, and booties, and they carried sheaths of plastic evidence bags on their hips, clipped onto a loop on their coveralls. The door to the pasture was now open, and most of the animals had disappeared. Only two cows, too sick to make their escape, remained in the stall. The one who’d been down before was still lying on her side, eyes half-closed, insensible to what was going on around her. It made me feel sick to see her. The pain of animals and children is always the hardest to bear.
The encounter with Dr. Richmond worried me. If a vet who’d just treated these very sick cows was against the raw-milk ban, we were in deep trouble on the PR front. And that wasn’t the only problem. Levi Fisher hadn’t heard about the raw-milk warning, and we’d been working to spread that word in the Amish community for several days now. Ezra’s famous “Amish grapevine” wasn’t working nearly fast enough. Which meant there could well be other families out there who were sick or dying.
Elaine, the CDC agent I’d met earlier, started examining the feeding trough inside the stall. The trough was fixed to the other side of the half wall where I was standing. On my side, there were bales of hay and a chute from the upper story. It would be easy for the farmer to load the trough with feed without having to go into the stall. Elaine shined a high-powered flashlight over the old metal surface of the trough and leaned in to peer at it carefully.
I watched her, but my mind was elsewhere. This is the first case the vet has ever seen. Why here? Why now? How are they getting this damn plant?
The DCNR agents were still out in the pasture. Would they have any more luck finding a toxic plant growing here than they’d had at the Hershbergers’ or Kindermans’? I hoped so, but I’d be surprised if they did.
“Detective?” Elaine’s voice was serious.
I was immediately alert. “Did you find something?”
She motioned with her gloved hand for me to come closer. I took the few steps down the half wall and peered over the edge.
“There are bits of a green plant here,” Elaine said. Using the flashlight and a pair of tweezers, she drew my attention to several small green leaves that were stuck to the bottom of the trough. “It doesn’t look like hay.”
No, it didn’t. It looked like the remains of a green, leafy plant. I was familiar with what Ezra fed his mules, and this didn’t look like anything he gave them. A shot of excitement went through me. Sometimes in my work I had moments that were rather like what I’d imagined an archaeologist would feel uncovering that first bit of a valuable artifact. Of course, sometimes it just turned out to be a buried penny.
“Should I go ahead and bag it?” Elaine asked.
I shook my head. “Let’s get some photos before anyone touches it.”
“We can do that.” Elaine called for the CDC agent with the camera around his neck and he came over.
I fidgeted with the cell phone in my pocket as I watched. I was half tempted to call Grady and suggest a crime-scene team, but a few bits of leaves were hardly a smoking gun, and the CDC and DCNR people were already here. This multi-bureau work was so complicated.
More than a dozen photos were taken of the trough, and then Elaine looked at me. “Good?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks. Go ahead and bag it.”
She did, carefully picking up the bits of green with tweezers and placing them in a plastic bag. “I can courier this to the CDC lab for testing. If there’s any tremetol in this plant, we’ll know by tomorrow morning.”
“That’s fantastic. Thanks, Elaine.”
I meant every word. If this was a breakthrough, we’d know soon. Maybe working with the CDC wasn’t a hardship after all.
Glen got a phone call just as he and I were getting into his car. He took it outside while I checked e-mail on my phone.
When he got into the driver’s seat, he looked pleased. “The cows on the other two farms where Amber got milk look healthy, and there’s no sign of sickness in the families. We’ll still confiscate all their milk and test it, and the cows too. But so far it looks like we’re in luck there. Do you have a preference which one we hit first for questioning?”
“Actually, if it doesn’t look like those farms were affected, I’d like to follow up on the Hershbergers. You said you didn’t have much luck questioning Samuel Hershberger?”
“Not really. It’s probably a good idea to go back there with you.”
“The green plant your team just found in the trough—you didn’t find anything like that over at the Hershbergers’?”
Glen gave me a worried frown. “No. But we did our investigation several weeks after the family first got ill. If there was something like that there, it might have been long gone.”
“Right. Well . . . yeah. It’s worth going back there. If you need to be elsewhere, you can drop me at the station and I can take my own car.”
“Nope, I’m in,” Glen said firmly. “As you say, it doesn’t look like the other two farms where Amber got her milk were affected. My team can follow up with them.” He gave me a smile that was a degree too warm. I gave a weak one in return and looked out the window.
I was distracted by thoughts of those few green leaves. There hadn’t been enough left of the plant for the DCNR people to be able to identify it. And Levi hadn’t recognized it as anything he fed the cows. His best guess was it was a weed the cows had picked up in the pasture that had gotten dislodged from a cow’s mouth as it ate at the trough. His explanation made perfect sense, but I couldn’t help feeling it was significant. Until the test results proved otherwise, I was suspicious of those green leaves.
As if reading my mind, Glen spoke up as he drove. “We should have the lab results soon.”
“Good.”
—
Leah Hershberger was working in the garden with two of her young daughters when we pulled into their driveway. She eyed me warily as I got out of the car. I took the bull by the horns and walked right up to her. I held out my hand. “Are you Leah? I’m Detective Elizabeth Harris. We have a friend in common—Hannah Yoder.”
Leah’s face relaxed from worry to welcome. “Ja, Hannah told me about you, Elizabeth. You were the one to find out what happened to Hannah’s Katie, and her English friend too.”
I was pleased. “That’s right.”
Leah glanced at her own two girls, around seven to ten in age. “Such a terrible business. I know what was done to you too, and we were all so sorry about that.”
For a moment, I had a visceral memory of that night over a year ago. I’d come so close to death I’d felt its chill in my bones along with the numbing cold of the water I’d nearly drowned in. I almost took a step back from Leah, but I caught myself in time. I pasted on a smile. “Thank you for saying so. I was hoping I could speak with you about y
our family’s illness. I’m sorry I haven’t been out earlier.”
“Your friend the doctor was here. Spoke to my husband.” Leah nodded at Glen, who was standing by the car trying to look like he wasn’t watching us.
“I know. That’s Dr. Turner. He’s with the Centers for Disease Control. They investigate unusual illnesses in order to prevent widespread outbreaks. We’re still trying to understand what’s going on here in Lancaster County.”
“That Dr. Turner told my husband it was the cows eatin’ somethin’ and poisonin’ the milk.” Leah looked doubtful. “But we ain’t had any trouble since we all . . .” Her voice caught, and I knew she was thinking of her son who had died, William. “Since my husband and Aaron got out the hospital. No trouble since then. The cows are actin’ normal, and no one’s been sick again, thank the Lord.”
“You’ve been drinking the milk?”
“Sure.”
She admitted that in such a straightforward fashion, I had to hold in a visible cringe. “Oh. Well . . . I really wouldn’t recommend that, Leah. We don’t understand exactly where the plant’s coming from, and next time, you might not be as lucky. It’s possible your cows wouldn’t show any obvious symptoms until after the milk was already poisoned. Do you understand?”
Leah looked at me for a moment, as if taking my measure one more time. Then she sighed in resignation and handed her hoe to one of her daughters. She wiped her hands on her apron. “I didn’t think on it like so. Thank you for tellin’ me. I will talk to Samuel about it. Now what can I do for youse?”
—
Glen walked me through the Hershbergers’ barn showing me everything the CDC had checked and sampled. He was clearly hoping I might think of something they’d missed, but they’d been extremely thorough.
The Hershbergers were crop farmers, and they didn’t have many animals. There was a lone Jersey cow they milked for the family and four horses used for farmwork and pulling the family buggy. They also had a few goats and a dozen or more chickens. Samuel Hershberger brought their cow, Ginny, in from the pasture on a rope lead and tied her to a beam in the barn. She was incredibly tame, chewing contentedly on some hay Samuel put into the feeding trough for her. She watched us with a placid expression.
