by Jane Jensen
“Nah. I didn’t make them prints and ain’t no reason for my boys to be out there,” Amos told Grady. He said “there” as dah, his German accent as broad as his face. “But lemme ask ’em just to be sure.”
He started to stomp away. I called after him. “Bring the boys out here, please.”
Amos Miller shot me a confused look, like he hadn’t expected me to be giving orders. I arched an eyebrow at him—Well?—and he nodded once. I was used to dealing with men who didn’t take a female cop very seriously. And I wanted to see the boys—wanted to see their faces as they looked at those tracks.
My first impression of Amos Miller? He looked worried. Then again, he was an Amish farmer with two boys in their teens. A beautiful young English girl—the Amish called everyone who was not Amish “English”—was dead and spread-eagled in his barn. I’d be worried too.
He came back with three boys. The youngest was small and still a child. That was probably Jacob, the eleven-year-old who’d found the body. His face was blank, like he was in shock. The next oldest looked to be around thirteen, just starting puberty. He was thin with a rather awkward nose and oversized hands he still hadn’t grown into. His father introduced him as Ham. The oldest, Wayne, had to be the fifteen-year-old that Grady mentioned, the oldest child. All three were decent-looking boys in that wholesome, bowl-cut way of Amish youth. The older two looked excited but not guilty. I suppose it was quite an event, having a dead body found on your farm. I wondered if the older boys had gone into the barn to get a good long look at the girl since their little brother’s discovery. Knowing how large families worked, I couldn’t imagine they hadn’t.
Each of the boys glanced at the tracks in the snow and shook his head. “Nah,” the oldest added for good measure. “Ain’t from me.”
“Any of you recognize that print?” I asked. “Does it look like boots you’ve seen before?”
They all craned forward to look. Amos stroked his beard. “Just look like boots, maybe. You can check all ours if you like. We’ve nothin’ to hide.”
I lifted my chin at Grady. We’d definitely want the crime team to inventory every pair of shoes and boots in the house.
“Would you all mind stepping over here for me, please?” I led them over to the other side of the ice-and-gravel drive, where there was some untouched snow. “Youngest to oldest, one at a time.”
The youngest stepped forward into the snow with both feet, then back. The others mimicked his actions obediently, including Amos Miller.
“Thank you. That’s all for now. We’ll want to speak to you a bit later, so please stay home.”
They went back inside and Grady and I compared the tracks. All three of the boys had smaller feet than the tracks in the snow. Amos’s prints were large enough but didn’t have the same sole pattern. Besides, I was sure Grady wasn’t missing the fact that the prints came and went from the trees, since the prints heading in that direction overlaid the ones approaching the barn.
“I think Ronks Road is over there beyond those woods.” Grady sounded hopeful as he pointed across the field. “Can it be that easy?”
“Don’t!”
Grady cocked an eyebrow at me.
“You’ll jinx it. Never say the word ‘easy.’ That’s inviting Murphy, his six ex-wives, and their lawyers.”
Grady smirked. “Well, if the killer dumped her here, he had to come from somewhere.”
I hummed. I knew what Grady was thinking. I was thinking it too. A car full of rowdy youths, or maybe just a guy and his hot date, out joyriding in the country. A girl ends up dead and someone gets the bright idea to dump her on an Amish farm. They drive out here, park, cross a snowy cornfield, and leave her in a random barn.
It sounded like a stupid teenage prank, only it was murder and possibly an attempt to frame someone else. That was a lot of prison years of serious. A story like that—it would make the press happy and Grady fucking ecstatic, especially if we could nab the guy who wore those boots by tonight.
“Get a photographer and a recorder and let’s go,” I said, feeling only a moment’s silent regret over my good black leather boots. I should have worn my wellies.
—
It wasn’t that easy.
The tracks crossed the field and went into the trees. They continued about ten feet before they ended—at a creek. It hadn’t been visible from the barn, but there was running water here, a good twelve feet across. The land dipped down to it, as if carved out over time. The snow grew muddy and trampled at the creek bank. The boot prints entered the water. They didn’t reemerge on the opposite side.
“Cattle use this creek?” I asked Grady, looking at the mess of mud and snow and hoofprints along the bank.
Grady sighed. “Hell. It’s not legal, but a lot of the farmers do it, especially the Amish. It’s hard to explain to a man whose family has farmed the same land for generations why politicians in Baltimore don’t want his animals to have access to the free and plentiful water on his own land.”
I really didn’t give a toss about the pollution of Chesapeake Bay at the moment. But our possible killer’s footprints, so clean in the snow, had vanished into a churned-up creek bed that had been literally ridden herd over. I walked up and down the bank as carefully as I could, trying not to step anywhere there might be evidence. There was chicken wire strung up across the creek to the north, and a matching wire wall glinted to the south. Presumably, this kept the farm’s animals from escaping the property.
The freaky thing was, there were no signs of tracks on the other side of the creek anywhere between those two makeshift fences. I rubbed my forehead, a sense of frustration starting in my stomach.
“Damn it!” Grady cursed, apparently reaching the same conclusion.
“How far is the road?” I asked.
As if to answer my question, an SUV lumbered past, visible through the trees on the far side. There was a road maybe thirty feet beyond the other side of the creek.
In a righteous world, the boot prints would have climbed out on the opposite bank and led right to that road. In a righteous world, there’d be tire tracks off the side of the road over there, tire tracks we could attempt to trace.
No one had to tell me it wasn’t a righteous world.
I looked at the creek again, then went back to look at the boot prints. The prints with the toes facing the creek definitely overlaid the prints with the toes facing away. Unless the killer had walked backward in both directions—one way carrying a dead body—he hadn’t come from the farm.
Grady stood there shaking his head. I decided, Screw it, and shucked my boots and rolled up my pant legs. At least this suit was a trendy wash-and-wear and didn’t require dry cleaning.
“You don’t have to do that.” Grady sounded uneasy.
I ignored him. If there was one thing I knew for sure about being a woman on the police force, it was that you didn’t turn up your nose at getting physical or messy. You didn’t wait for some guy to do it. If you wanted respect, you had to be willing to jump into the shit headfirst.
But, goddamn, this sucked. I waded into the ice water masquerading as a creek and followed the bank to the chicken-wire obstruction.
“Anything?” Grady called to me as I ran my hand along the chicken wire and stepped deeper into the creek.
When I reached the middle, the frigid water was streaming painfully around my upper thighs.
“Damn,” I muttered as I felt along the fence.
A few inches below the surface of the water the wire ended. To be sure, I sent one leg forward on a foray. It swept through nothing but water. No wonder our Jane Doe had gotten wet. The killer had pushed her under these barriers and then likely followed by ducking under himself.
“Bastard walked through the creek,” I said, my voice shaking with cold and not a little disgust. “He came in and out under one of these fences, but he had to le
ave the water somewhere. We need to search the banks upstream and down from here. We’ll find his tracks.”
I sounded confident. And I did believe what I was saying. We were talking about a man, after all, not a superhuman, not a ghost.
I was wrong.
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