by Jane Jensen
It was one of the Amish men who finally spoke. Ezra didn’t know him, but he was likely an elder. He had a full, long white beard and a kind face. There was a sparkle in his eye and sympathy in his open nature that made him a good spokesman. He stood in front of the array of barrels, his booming voice carrying easily through the crowd. “Can I have your attention, if you please! Please, come gather round. Come on in. Don’t be shy.”
He motioned with his hands, and everyone moved in. The crowd had grown since Ezra arrived, and now there was a news van too. A man with a huge camera over his shoulder moved in close to get the speech on film.
“So this here is a peaceful demonstration. Those of you who are visitors may have heard that we Amish do not believe in violence. We won’t serve in the military. We won’t go to war. But sometimes, it’s our duty to protest in a peaceful way. And this is one of those times.”
Ezra was nudged forward as people in the back tried to get closer to hear.
“Here’s how we see it: Men have been livin’ on homesteads for thousands of years, raising stock and crops, and bartering with their neighbors with the fruits of their labor and the blessings the good Lord gives us. In the past fifty years, we’ve had to fight to keep our rights to raise food and sell food in the way we believe God means for us to live—simply and with as little intervention in the natural way of things as possible.”
There were appreciative murmurs from the crowd.
“We would never knowingly sell anything to anyone that would do them harm. We want to get to the bottom of what happened as much as anybody. Our hearts go out to the victims, and it is heartbreakin’ what happened to them, to the folks in Philadelphia, to Levi Fisher’s customers, Will Hershberger, and the Kinderman family. But so far, the police haven’t been able to tell us anythin’ that makes sense about this tragedy. They say the sickness was due to a plant the cows ate, but they haven’t found the plant, not in a single place.” He paused while that sank in.
“Now, there were only three farms affected. Two of ’em didn’t sell milk to anyone, but only drank their own cows’ milk. Yet Amish dairymen all over Lancaster County are havin’ their milk turned away by the same dairies they’ve supplied for years. The dairies don’t want our milk, even though there’s nothin’ to say our milk’s been affected. Two men farmin’ land side by side—the English man gets his milk picked up as usual and the Amish man does not. That’s thousands of gallons of good food the Lord gave us that’s goin’ to waste every single day. And families that earn their livin’ from the milk have nowhere to turn. So today we’re here to say this cannot go on without hurtin’ the entire Amish community, and in turn all good people of conscience.”
It was what Ezra had feared when he’d seen that press conference about the raw-milk ban. The dairies were now boycotting all Amish milk. It wasn’t easy to make a living as a farmer anymore. Many Amish youths had to get jobs in construction or tourism or anywhere else they could find them. Dairy was an important chunk of what was left of traditional Amish farming. This would be devastating.
“We want to show people just what is bein’ wasted. We want people to feel the waste—the heartbreak and the sin of it, and to know that the milk is perfectly safe. So we brought our milk here.” He waved to the barrels. “All of this milk was tested. The farmers, their families, and those in our community, all drank some of every single batch of this milk two days ago and never got sick. So if you want to add your voice to the protest, you’re welcome to have some milk from the open barrels we’ll put out. There’s no obligation to do so. Please, only take some if God moves your heart. Now I’d like to offer up a prayer that He will give us wisdom in this matter, that He will open people’s eyes and hearts, and bless this demonstration.”
The elder’s prayer was long. Ezra figured most of the English people present were not religious, but no one made a peep. What happened afterward had the intimate air of communion.
The Amish women started to sing. They chose hymns that would be familiar to everyone, not the German hymns they sang at church. “Amazing Grace” began soft and low and swelled as people joined in. Amish men opened up two large barrels at the front of the crowd. Amish women stood by them with dippers and a stack of plastic Dixie cups. First the Amish went up to the barrels and received cups of milk, which they drank. But soon everyone was lining up. And as the slow lines moved forward, a dozen or so Amish men began to open the rest of the barrels, one by one, and dump rich milk into the running stream.
“Amazing Grace” turned into “We Shall Overcome.” And Ezra was enveloped with a thick, sacred sense of community. It had been a long time since he’d felt that, felt the invisible webbing that bound him to other people with its sticky threads. That binding could chafe. He knew that better than anyone. But it could also be a wonderful feeling, to be part of something so much bigger than yourself—a way, a people, a place, and a time.
For a moment, he glimpsed it again and was grateful.
With a faint smile, Jacob squeezed Ezra’s shoulder and moved away to get into the milk line, his hand clasping Leah’s. Before anyone else in their group could move, Ezra stepped forward and followed.
Deep in my heart I do believe that we shall overcome someday.
PART III
Poison
CHAPTER 13
Despite it being a Sunday morning, I drove in to work. Downtown Lancaster was quiet. Most businesses were closed on Sundays, a consequence of living in an area with strong religious roots. I detoured to pass through Penn Square. It was devoid of protesters for once, but the ghost of the protest lingered on every corner. There was a “Stop Big Brother Bullies” sign poking out of a too-small trashcan. Litter attested to the throngs that had stood around the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. And on that classic brick-front real estate building a new message was scrawled in graffiti—Pritchard.
I shook my head and drove the few blocks to the parking garage for the police station.
I wondered if even the liberal ACLU types took the Lord’s day seriously, or if protesting in Penn Square could no longer hold a candle to the Amish-led protest that had been going on at Lancaster County Central Park the past few days—the one that drove me bat-shit bonkers. Thousands of gallons of raw milk were being dumped into the local waterways, and there was nothing the police could do about it. Or, at least, there was nothing they would do about it.
“The elders say they’re testing all the milk before they dump it, drinking samples two days before. So there’s little chance there’s any tremetol in it. And even if there were, it would get diluted in the water. Besides, the press is all over it, Harris. There are a dozen news vans out there now. Do you really want us to be on national news handcuffing a bunch of Amish? The governor doesn’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole!”
At home, Ezra had been quiet on the subject of the Amish protest, but I sensed he was in favor of it. Not that I’d seen much of him lately. Glen felt almost as strongly against the protest as I did, and he was trying to get an injunction to stop the dumping of milk on purely environmental grounds, but that was going to take time. Which meant there was just more pressure on us—on me—to find the goddamned source of the tremetol and stop it so all of this could end.
—
When I got to the station, the usual hodgepodge of drunks and desperate people were in the lobby. Back in the Violent Crimes room, I was the first one in. I sat down at my desk, but I wasn’t quite ready to face it all yet so I hesitated to start up my computer. I got myself a cup of coffee and sat quietly for a minute, willing my brain to stop churning like a washer on “agitate.”
By the time I finished my first cup, I’d achieved some level of mental quietude—except for one thing. There was something niggling at me, lurking just out of reach. It was something I’d seen or heard recently. What was it?
I stared at the desk with a frown, thinking over the morning. I’d thoug
ht about the case in the shower, of course. There’d been rumors that some anti–raw milk group, or maybe even the state, had deliberately poisoned the milk in order to ban raw-milk sales. Was that conspiratorial nonsense? Or was there something to it? Could someone like Mitch Franklin feel so passionately about government regulation that he would engineer a crisis like this? But it didn’t feel right, didn’t quite fit.
My thoughts moved on to a quick good-bye to Ezra out at the barn. There’d been a brief kiss on the cheek, something distant in Ezra’s eyes. He was always extra quiet on Sunday mornings, as if he felt guilty about not being in church. Then my drive in . . .
The graffiti: Pritchard.
It’s human nature to dismiss the expected, the mundane. There’s so much data in the world, and we can only process so much of it. But this . . . it was ringing a distant bell.
I started my computer and googled it.
Pritchard Industries, Pritchard Lab, a law firm, scientists, people on Facebook . . . I drummed my fingers on the keyboard, dug into my memory. What else had been written on that same brick wall? I remembered something that should have been “bastard” but wasn’t. Besnard. Right.
I typed it into Google: “Pritchard Besnard.” Still, nothing relevant came up, at least not in the first three pages of the search results, and there were thousands of those.
I got myself another cup of coffee. My brain didn’t want to let it go. It wouldn’t be the first dead end I’d chased, but I didn’t want to give up too soon. When was the first time I’d noticed that particular color and style of graffiti? Single words that seemed random, painted in big block letters with neon yellow paint. Cotton. It’d been written outside Amber Kruger’s apartment on the street, a strange place for graffiti of any kind. I typed it in.
Pritchard Besnard Cotton.
This time, when the search returned, the first result made goose bumps break out all over my body. It was an article on famous poisoners. Dr. Pritchard was an Englishman who had poisoned his wife and mother-in-law with antimony. It had been a famous Victorian case.
Marie and Léon Besnard had killed multiple family members with arsenic in France in the early 1900s. Finally Marie had done away with Léon the same way, with rat poison in his food.
Mary Ann Cotton had poisoned four husbands and twice as many children with arsenic in the mid–1800s.
The website that told me all this, World’s Most Lethal, had a black background and colorful graphics. With grisly glee it celebrated the notoriety of serial killers. The very tone of the website mocked me: I am death and you can’t catch me. Your kind never catches me until I’ve had my way again and again.
I stood abruptly, causing my roller chair to spring away with a clang.
This is why the Amish. This is why so many bodies, so many children. He was taking trophies, the more horrifying the better. He wanted to be famous, a famous poisoner. And he’d written it on the streets of Lancaster cryptically, and he was probably smug about the fact that no one would make the connection until it was too late.
—
The little dark-haired Amish boy marched with exaggerated motions toward his family’s barn. The watcher smiled, though there was no one to see it, hidden as he was behind the trees across the road. He wondered what the little boy was thinking, marching like that. Maybe in his head he was a soldier. True, he was Amish, who were dumb-shit pacifists. But maybe soldiering came naturally to males, even little boys like this one, who’d never heard of war, or even Doom or Halo.
Yeah. That sounded about right. The watcher loved violence, yearned to tear everything down, kick the carefully constructed sand castle in the fucking teeth. Oh, yes. Maybe this little boy did too. He wasn’t yet old enough to have it all tamed and whitewashed and beaten out of him.
The Amish boy went to the barn and pulled the heavy door open with all of his slight weight. This family was a large one, popping out babies like there was a shortage of spit-up and dirty diapers and bad bowl haircuts in the world. His dad used to bitch about that: I’d make a profit too, if I had all that free labor. But my wife ain’t no brood mare.
They all looked so much alike, these kids. The watcher pictured them standing stiffly, all those Amish boys and girls, standing in a field like stalks of corn, waiting for the scythe to cut them off. He, he, was a big fucking scythe. They were so ripe for adding to his body count. Would anyone miss another ten, twenty, fifty identical Amish kids? There were more where they came from. And children—children made it so much worse. And thus, so. Much. Better.
The watcher didn’t know this family but he knew their name from the mailbox—Troyer. Wayne Troyer and his free labor had a farm on a rural road south of Lancaster toward Holtwood. These people were like ducks in a barrel, really. All you had to do was drive around and pick a farm. Wayne Troyer lived just far south enough that maybe the cops hadn’t been around here yet with their raw-milk message. And even if they had, this didn’t look like a family that would throw out good food. They had just the one cow and a calf. The calf was kept separate in a white pen, probably destined to be veal piccata. And when the boy left the barn with the evening’s milk, it was in just one, heavy-looking covered bucket. A gallon, probably, maybe a gallon and a half. A family this size would have that all drunk up by morning. The family dog, a mottled and hairy mutt, followed the boy into the house.
The watcher hummed with pleasure. Oh, this one would work. It would be just like the Kindermans. And hadn’t that been fucking perfect? Another four or five like that, plus the Philadelphia horror, and he’d be famous all over the world. He would tear down the biggest fucking sand castle he could before he was caught. Once he decided it was time to be caught.
It would be a while. He had a legacy to build. Besides, it was fun.
The little boy disappeared into the house. The sun was almost down. They’d be having supper next. The watcher considered. He could wait until it was full dark and they were all asleep in their little beds. But maybe the dog would be out then. And he had no fucking patience.
He watched for another five minutes, and when he saw no one else, he decided they must really all be at the dinner table. He took advantage of a tree with a branch that hung over the fence to get himself into the pasture without being visible from the house, then he slipped into the barn.
The brown cow stood in a stall chewing hay from her trough. She chewed and she stared at him. She didn’t seem alarmed.
“I have something for you much tastier than that,” the watcher said, slipping his black backpack off his black hoodie sweatshirt. Under the raised hood he had his hair stuffed under a crappy paper cap he’d had to wear when he’d worked at McDonald’s. On his hands he wore the thinnest rubber gloves he could find at Kmart. He wasn’t an idiot. He watched CSI. He opened his backpack and pulled out a plastic grocery bag stuffed full of green leaves and stems.
It had taken him a few tries to figure out the lethal dosage and also how to get the damn cows to eat the stuff. It wasn’t their favorite food, but if he doctored it with a spray he’d concocted of powdered alfalfa and molasses, the cows ate it eagerly. And wasn’t Google grand?
He was nervous as he held out the first handful and the cow smelled it, tasted it with her thick tongue, then began to eat, not remotely shyly. As she munched away he grew more and more worried that someone was going to come in. He didn’t want to be caught. Not yet.
Where’s your fucking backbone? Be a man.
He felt the urge to dump the bag in her trough and run for it. She’d probably eat it all, probably before anyone came back into the barn. But he wasn’t going to reach his goals by being a fucking coward. He was pretty sure the police didn’t yet know that he even existed. He’d like to get the body count to at least one hundred before they figured it out. And that meant he couldn’t risk his “product” being found in the barn. He had to make sure she consumed it all or take away what she didn’
t.
“Eat up, shithead,” he told the cow in a sweet voice. He eased his mind by going to the door and opening it a bit, peeking out where he could watch the house and see if anyone was coming. “Eat up,” he said again under his breath.
He reminded himself: He was fucking invincible.
CHAPTER 14
The call came in early on Wednesday morning, April 29, twenty-three days after the Kinderman family had been found dead, fourteen days after the deaths in Philadelphia. At five thirty A.M., Ezra and I were asleep, and the buzzing of my cellphone on the nightstand woke us up. Blinking awake, Ezra handed me the phone. It was Grady.
“There’s been another large Amish family hit. Multiple dead. I’m on my way there now.”
“Text me the address.” I was already out of bed and reaching for a dresser drawer.
“Yup. Can you call Dr. Turner and let him know?”
“I will.”
By the time I’d run through the shower and dressed, Ezra was in the kitchen with a sandwich wrapped in a paper towel and coffee ready for me in a thermos mug.
“More deaths?” he asked, looking worried.
I nodded, upset. “Grady says it’s a big Amish family, but I don’t have the details.”
“Do you know the name?” Ezra’s words shook a little. The victims could be people he knew.
I checked the text on my cellphone. “Wayne Troyer, off Drytown Road near Holtwood.”
Ezra shook his head. He didn’t know them.
“You can’t say anything to anyone, all right? Not until the news goes public.”
“I won’t,” Ezra said solemnly. “Be careful, Elizabeth. And let me know when you’re . . .”
Done with the bodies? Recovered? Out of the path of a serial killer?
“. . . back in the office,” Ezra finished awkwardly.
