In the Land of Milk and Honey

by Jane Jensen

  “No, Rob. We won’t shoot an unarmed man. Toss the knife down and let me come over to you. I’ll stand in front of you while you put Sadie down. Then I’ll handcuff you. I swear, no one will shoot you. We’ll put you in a squad car and take you to the station. All right?”

  He glared at me, shifting from foot to foot. His eyes darted to Hernandez and then to Schmidt, both of whom still had their guns trained on him. Keep calm, boys. But keep the pressure on.

  “This is it, Rob,” I urged softly. “You either die right here, or you go to jail.”

  “I’m not done. I wanted a higher body count.”

  I felt a wave of absolute hatred. Body count. All of those dead individuals were nothing to him but notches on his belt. But I couldn’t let it show. “You are done, Rob. There’s no way we’ll let you continue now. It’s done tonight, one way or the other. Die in this barn or surrender now. Your choice.”

  He thought about it a few seconds more. “Okay. But you walk over here first. Without your gun. I’m not tossing my knife until you’re in front of me, blocking their shots.”

  “I can do that.”

  I heard Hernandez hiss my name, but I ignored him. And, yes, with a psychopath like this, it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility that he’d think that adding a female cop to his body count would be a good way to check out. But I had to take that chance.

  “I’m just going to put my gun down and get my cuffs.” Slowly, I bent my knees and placed my gun on the floor, both of my hands visible. Then I raised one hand, and with the other slowly fished a pair of cuffs from my pocket and held them up. “All right?”

  Jerkily, he nodded, still holding Sadie and the knife.

  It felt like I crossed a football field one slow step at a time to get to them, worried that at any moment he’d change his mind and kill Sadie. The knife was so close to her throat. The other cops wouldn’t be able to stop him, not with me in the way.

  Finally, I was close enough to hold up the cuffs. “Okay? Let go of the knife and then Sadie. Turn around and let me cuff you, and you’ll walk out of here, Rob. I promise.”

  I could make out his face now, under the hood. He looked back at me, his light blue eyes darting nervously between me and the cops behind me. Such an ordinary-looking young man.

  If you’re going to go for broke and kill anyone, come after me, I thought.

  But Rob gave a jerky nod. He opened his hand and let the knife fall to the floor, where it landed with a clang. He let Sadie go, pushing her away and turning quickly. He held his hands behind his back, shoving them up, fingers splayed as if to show he was unarmed. He seemed anxious to get cuffed so he wouldn’t be shot. His faith in the police department was almost touching. For a second, the images and smells from the Kinderman home roared through my mind and I wanted to kill him anyway. I could pick up the knife and do it. It would be easy. But the urge lasted only a second before reason caused it to dissipate. I wasn’t the only person he’d hurt, and whatever justice he had coming, it wasn’t mine alone to dispense. Besides, I would never leave Sadie with a memory like that.

  I cuffed him. And if I tightened the steel bands a bit too much, who could blame me?

  Hernandez was there to grab Rob. He looked at me to see if I wanted to do the honors, but I just motioned for him to take Rob out of the barn. I had more important things to do.

  As Hernandez started reading Rob his rights, I picked up Sadie Yoder and held her tight.

  EPILOGUE

  Rob got his wish. He was famous. The story unraveled in the media hour by hour, each source adding some small spot of detail to the horrific picture.

  Rob’s father had been a dairy farmer who’d gone bankrupt. He’d hated the Amish because he said they hurt his business, that customers wanted Amish goods because they thought them “quaint” when really they were “dirty hillbillies.” After he’d lost his farm, Rob’s father had worked in a factory for a short time before abandoning his wife and son for parts unknown.

  Their dairy farm had been in Paradise, not far from the Knepps and the Hershbergers, Rob’s first and second attempts to use white snakeroot.

  Rob was supposedly fascinated with Native American culture and stories of the Wild West and thought Indians had poisoned settlers with white snakeroot. He’d written a paper on it once, the media wrongly claimed. They got most other things right though.

  Rob was a straight-A student at his vo-tech school, where he studied computer repair. He became Amber Kruger’s intern looking for easy targets, and her work with the Amish promised the opportunity to find them. He was a regular poster on three websites that glorified serial killers. Two books and a film on Columbine were found in his room along with videotapes he’d made recounting his kills. He kept his body count list in a spiral notebook with a black cover he’d doodled on, graffiti-like, with metallic pens.

  Rob still lived at home. He’d grown white snakeroot from seeds under grow lights in the basement of his mother’s house and planted it in her backyard. She’d approved of his interest in gardening.

  She continued to believe he was innocent.

  After a while, I tuned it all out. I’d understood the media attention on the case when it was open, but it had always made me feel pressured and anxious. Now, knowing this was just what Rob had wanted, it made me deeply uneasy and slightly ill. How could we stop future copycats in this age of selfies and reality-show stars if we gave these bastards so much attention?

  I had no control over it, so I focused on wrapping up the case paperwork. I received an almost-hug from a grateful Margaret Foderman, aide to the governor, and a meaty handshake and a “Good work!” from Mitch Franklin. I said my good-byes to Dr. Glen Turner for what I assumed would be the last time ever, barring any future E. coli outbreaks in Lancaster County.

  I wished Glen good luck in the parking garage at the police station, turned away, and went inside. I didn’t look back.

  —

  I stood under the hot rush of water in the shower for countless minutes, letting it stream over my face. When the hot water ran out, I toweled off and wrapped myself up in my terrycloth robe with nothing underneath. I padded out to the kitchen in my bare feet to find Ezra waiting for me. He was leaning back with his feet crossed, hands braced on the counter. The smell of something tantalizing like beef gravy hung in the air. My stomach gurgled in delight.

  I lingered in the kitchen doorway, looking at the pots on the stove and the plates on the table and, lastly, at my man. Ezra’s expression was soft and warm and full of things that I wasn’t sure I knew how to deserve—love and pride and forever. My eyes stung. It was exhaustion, I told myself. But, damn, I was grateful to be here. To have this.

  “You always take care of me,” I said, forcing a wobbly smile.

  He held out his arms, and I went to him and let him wrap me up tight. He felt so strong and solid and as warm as a sunny day.

  “Somebody has to. ’Cause you’re too busy taking care of everyone else. Besides, it makes me feel useful.”

  I went up on my tiptoes and put my arms around his neck so I could get even closer. I was tall for a woman, but Ezra was taller.

  “You are more than useful. But it’s my turn to take care of you. Grady says I can have a week off.”

  “Yeah?” He sounded happy. He rubbed my back.

  “Yup. I owe you some quality time.” I turned my head so I could snuggle into his neck, smell the clean, earthy scent of him.

  “What on earth will you do with a whole week off?” he teased. “You’ll be arresting squirrels for putting acorns in the gutter pipes and ticketing groundhogs. Not that they don’t deserve it.”

  I laughed, the sound vibrating against his throat. “I’m not interested in groundhogs or squirrels, but I might have to put you under house arrest for a day or two. Or bedroom arrest,” I added in a sultry tone.

  He squeezed me
tight, but he didn’t laugh. In fact, he grew a little tense in my arms. I felt him swallow. “I hear you can get married pretty quick. Think a week would be long enough for that?”

  Shocked into silence, I drew back to look at his face.

  He studied me warily. “Or . . . maybe you’d prefer to take your time with somethin’ like that. If ya wanna do it at all.”

  I blinked, feeling joy and fear and—damn, life was amazing and sad and tragic and so beautiful too that my chest hurt.

  “I love you, Ezra Beiler. And I will marry you—next week or the week after, it doesn’t matter. Just . . . yes.”

  He smiled, his eyes a little damp. He said nothing more but took my face gently in both hands and kissed me.

  Keep reading for an excerpt of Jane Jensen’s first book in the Elizabeth Harris Novels . . .

  KINGDOM COME

  Available from Berkley Prime Crime!

  The Dead Girl

  “It’s . . . sensitive,” Grady had said on the phone, his voice tight.

  Now I understood why. My car crawled down a rural road thick with new snow. It was still dark and way too damn early on a Wednesday morning. The address he’d given me was on Grimlace Lane. Turned out the place was an Amish farm in the middle of a whole lot of other Amish farms in the borough of Paradise, Pennsylvania.

  Sensitive like a broken tooth. Murders didn’t happen here, not here. The last dregs of sleep and yet another nightmare in which I’d been holding my husband’s cold, dead hand in the rain evaporated under a surge of adrenaline. Oh yes, I was wide-awake now.

  I spotted cars—Grady’s and two black-and-whites—in the driveway of a farm and pulled in. The CSI team and the coroner had not yet arrived. I didn’t live far from the murder site and I was glad for the head start and the quiet.

  Even before I parked, my mind started generating theories and scenarios. Dead girl, Grady had said. If it’d been natural causes or an accident, like falling down the stairs, he wouldn’t have called me in. It had to be murder or at least a suspicious death. A father disciplining his daughter a little too hard? Doddering Grandma dipping into the rat poison rather than the flour?

  I got out and stood quietly in the frigid air to get a sense of place. The interior of the barn glowed in the dark of a winter morning. I took in the classic white shape of a two-story bank barn, the snowy fields behind, and the glow of lanterns coming from the huge, barely open barn door. . . . It looked like one of those quaint paintings you see hanging in the local tourist shops, something with a title like Winter Dawn. I’d only moved back to Pennsylvania eight months ago after spending ten years in Manhattan. I still felt a pang at the quiet beauty of it.

  Until I opened the door and stepped inside.

  It wasn’t what I expected. It was like some bizarre and horrific game of mixed-up pictures. The warmth of the rough barn wood was lit by a half dozen oil lanterns. Add in the scattered straw, two Jersey cows, and twice as many horses, all watching the proceedings with bland interest from various stalls, and it felt like a cozy step back in time. That vibe did not compute with the dead girl on the floor. She was most definitely not Amish, which was the first surprise. She was young and beautiful, like something out of a ’50s pulp magazine. She had long, honey-blonde hair and a face that still had the blush of life thanks to the heavy makeup she wore. She had on a candy-pink sweater that molded over taut breasts and a short gray wool skirt that was pushed up to her hips. She still wore pink underwear, though it looked roughly twisted. Her nails were the same shade as her sweater. Her bare feet, thighs, and hands were blue-white with death, and her neck too, at the line below her jaw where the makeup stopped.

  The whole scene felt unreal, like some pretentious performance art, the kind in those Soho galleries Terry had dragged me to. But then, death always looked unreal.

  “Coat? Shoes?” I asked, already taking inventory. Maybe knee-high boots, I thought, reconstructing it in my mind. And thick tights to go with that wool skirt. I’d been a teenage girl living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I knew what it meant to care more about looks than the weather. But even at the height of my girlish vanity, I wouldn’t have gone bare-legged in January.

  “They’re not here. We looked.” Grady’s voice was tense. I finally spared him a glance. His face was drawn in a way I’d never seen before, like he was digesting a meal of ground glass.

  In that instant, I saw the media attention this could get, the politics of it. I remembered that Amish school shooting a few years back. I hadn’t lived here then, but I’d seen the press. Who hadn’t?

  “You sure you want me on this?” I asked him quietly.

  “You’re the most experienced homicide detective I’ve got,” Grady said. “I need you, Harris. And I need this wrapped up quickly.”

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t agreeing that it could be. My gut said this wasn’t going to be an open-and-shut case, but I agreed it would be nice. “Who found her? Do we know who she is?”

  “Jacob Miller, eleven years old. He’s the son of the Amish farmer who lives here. Poor kid. Came out to milk the cows this morning and found her just like that. The family says they’ve got no idea who she is or how she got here.”

  “How many people live on the property?”

  “Amos Miller, his wife, and their six children. The oldest, a boy, is fifteen. The youngest is three.”

  More vehicles pulled up outside. The forensics team, no doubt. I was gratified that Grady had called me in first. It was good to see the scene before it turned into a lab.

  “Can you hold them outside for five minutes?” I asked Grady.

  He nodded and went out.

  I pulled on some latex gloves, then looked at the body, bending down to get as close to it as I could without touching it. The left side of her head, toward the back, was matted with blood and had the look of a compromised skull. The death blow? I tried to imagine what had happened. The killer—he or she—had probably come up behind the victim, struck her with something heavy. The autopsy would tell us more. I didn’t think it had happened here. There were no signs of a disturbance or the blood you’d expect from a head wound. I carefully pulled up her leg a bit and looked at the underside of her thigh. Very minor lividity. She hadn’t been in this position long. And I noticed something else—her clothes were wet. I rubbed a bit of her wool skirt and sweater between my fingers to be sure—and came away with dampness on the latex. She wasn’t soaked now, and her skin was dry, so she’d been here long enough to dry out, but she’d been very wet at some point. I could see now that her hair wasn’t just styled in a casual damp-dry curl, it had been recently wet, probably postmortem along with her clothes.

  I straightened, frowning. It was odd. We’d had two inches of snow the previous afternoon, but it was too cold for rain. If the body had been left outside in the snow, would it have gotten this wet? Maybe the ME could tell me.

  Since I was sure she hadn’t been killed in the barn, I checked the floor for drag marks. The floor was of wooden planks kept so clean that there was no straw or dirt in which drag marks would show, but there were traces of wet prints. Then again, the boy who’d found the body had been in the barn and so had Grady and the uniforms, and me too. I carefully examined the girl’s bare feet. There was no broken skin, no sign her feet had been dragged through the snow or across rough boards.

  The killer was strong, then. He’d carried her in here and laid her down. Which meant he’d arranged her like this—pulled up her skirt, splayed her thighs. He’d wanted it to look sexual. Why?

  The doors opened. Grady and the forensics team stood in the doorway.

  “Blacklight this whole area,” I requested. “And this floor—see if you can get any prints or traffic patterns off it. Don’t let anyone in until that’s done. I’m going to check outside.” I looked at Grady. “The coroner?”

  “Should be here any minute.”

&nb
sp; “Good. Make sure she’s tested for any signs of penetration, consensual or otherwise.”

  “Right.”

  Grady barked orders. The crime-scene technicians pulled on blue coveralls and booties just outside the door. This was only the sixth homicide needing real investigation I’d been on since moving back to Lancaster. I was still impressed that the department had decent tools and protocol, even though I knew that was just big-city arrogance talking.

  I left them to it and went out to find my killer’s tracks in the snow.

  —

  This winter had been harsh. In fact, it was shaping up to be the worst in decades. We’d had a white Christmas and then it never really left. The fresh two inches we’d gotten the day before had covered up an older foot or two of dirty snow and ice. Thanks to a low in the twenties, the fresh snow had a dry, powdery surface that showed no signs of melting. It still wasn’t fun to walk on, due to the underlying grunge. It said a lot about the killer if he’d carried her body over any distance.

  There was a neatly shoveled path from the house to the barn. The snow in the central open area in the driveway had been stomped down. But it didn’t take me long to spot a deep set of prints heading off across an open field that was otherwise pristine. The line of prints came and went. They showed a sole like that of a work boot and they were large. They came from, and returned to, a distant copse of trees. I bent over to examine one of the prints close to the barn. It had definitely been made since the last snowfall.

  A few minutes later, I got my first look at Amos Miller, the Amish farmer who owned the property. Grady called him out and showed him the tracks. Miller looked to be in his mid-forties with dark brown hair and a long, unkempt beard. His face was round and solemn. I said nothing for now, just observed.

  They say the first forty-eight hours are critical on a homicide case, and that’s true, but, frankly, a lot of murders can be solved in the first eight. Sometimes it’s obvious—the boyfriend standing there with a guilty look and blood under his nails rambling about a “masked robber.” Sometimes the neighbors can tell you they heard a knock-down, drag-out fight. And sometimes . . . there are tracks in the snow.