Among the Wicked: A Kate Burkholder Novel

by Linda Castillo

  Then my chest is on the ice’s surface. I reach out, hands scrabbling, sliding, fingers digging in. A flurry of kicks and I’m facedown on the ice, wet hair in my eyes. Violent shivers rack my body. I don’t have the strength to get up. Even if I could, the risk of falling through a second time is too great. Instead, I do the only thing I can—roll.

  A few feet from shore, I get to my hands and knees and crawl. Frozen cattails scratch my face, but my skin is numb. I don’t stop until I’m on solid ground, where the bank slopes steeply up. I collapse, coughing and choking. I rest my head against the snow. My hands and legs are numb. Oddly, I’m no longer cold. My thoughts slog through a brain filled with cotton.

  I think I hear the engine of a snowmobile. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m physically spent. I know if I close my eyes I’ll tumble into a waiting darkness.

  But the darkness scares me. I don’t want to die here. I want to see Tomasetti again. I want to see my team of officers back in Painters Mill. Glock and Mona and Pickles. I want to sit at the table in my old farmhouse and listen to the rain pound the roof. I want to stand on the dock of the pond and look out over the water with the man I love.

  Rolling onto my side, I push myself upright. I get my knees under me and crawl to the top of the bank. My hands are in the snow, but I don’t feel the cold. Unsteadily, I get to my feet.

  Swaying like a drunk, I put one foot in front of the other. One foot bare. The other sloshing in a boot. I’m so uncoordinated I go to my knees twice before reaching the woods. Once I enter the trees, my mind shuts down. I don’t think about anything except putting one foot in front of the other. I’m a machine. Left foot. Right foot. Stay upright. Keep moving. I hear the snowmobile, but I feel no fear. The only thing that matters is one more step. Reaching the trailer. Survival.

  By the time I emerge from the woods, I’m staggering. My hair and the hem of my dress are frozen. The whine of an engine sounds scant yards away. I see the glint of headlights against the trees. Choking back sobs, I make my way around the end of the trailer, stumble to the stairs, crawl up them using my hands. The snowmobile skids to a stop twenty feet away. The driver cuts the engine. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him dismount and start toward me.

  “I got you now,” he says. “Fucking ran me all over hell and back.”

  Yoder. Getting closer. Feet crunching through snow.

  Somehow I get the key into the lock. Then I’m inside, slam the door behind me. I’m about to throw the lock when the door explodes open. A scream pours from my throat. I lurch across the living room, down the hall, into the bedroom. Footsteps thud against the floor.

  “Come here, you bitch!” But he laughs.

  I reach the bed, go to my knees, jam my hands beneath the mattress. I can barely feel the .38. I clutch it, spin, thrust it at Yoder’s silhouette as he comes down the hall.

  “Police officer. I got a gun.” I try to shout the words, but they come out as puffs of air. “Stop. Stop.”

  He doesn’t stop.

  I fire and miss. Cursing, he ducks sideways, keeps on coming. I have no grip. No aim. Little strength in my hand. I fire four more times. Yoder yelps and goes down three feet from where I’m huddled on the floor against the bed. He’s facedown. Still moving, scrabbling toward me. Hands reaching. I fire the final round. He jolts and goes still.

  Swiveling, I jam my hand beneath the mattress, yank my cell phone from its nest. I’m trying to dial Betancourt when pounding sounds at the front door. If it’s Suggs or Smucker I’m done. I have nothing left.

  Betancourt picks up with a harried, “Where are you?”

  “My trailer,” I pant. “I’m down. Hurry.”

  He says something, but I don’t hear. I drop the cell without disconnecting and pick up the .38 even though the cylinder is empty.

  “New York State Police! Chief Burkholder!” comes a male voice. “Kate Burkholder! New York State Police! Are you there?”

  The trailer rocks as someone comes inside.

  The .38 clatters to the floor. I sag against the bed, put my face in my hands. It’s not until I speak that I realize I’m crying. “I’m here,” I say. “I’m here.”

  A man wearing a navy parka with the iconic flat-brimmed trooper hat stops at the end of the hall. I catch a glimpse of his sidearm in hand an instant before he blinds me with his flashlight.

  “You Burkholder?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  Lowering his head slightly, he speaks into his shoulder mike. “I’m ten seventy-five Burkholder.” He lets dispatch know he’s made contact with me as he approaches. “Ten fifty-two,” he adds, requesting an ambulance. “I got an officer down. I repeat, officer down.”

  CHAPTER 24

  One of my most vivid memories of the police academy was the day the instructor brought in a retired vice detective who proceeded to tell us it’s usually the easy cases that kill you. That case you swagger into with a shit-eating grin on your face because you think it’s going to be a cakewalk. Those are the cases, he told us, where in the end you’ll probably end up getting your ass handed to you.

  We got a good laugh out of that. Some old dude with an eye patch and a limp. What did a dinosaur like him know about law enforcement today? Turned out he knew plenty because in addition to the eye patch and limp, he also had a dead partner. He’d worked undercover narcotics for seven years. He’d infiltrated a dangerous cartel and become one of them—until the day he was found out. The cartel had tortured him nearly to death with a cattle prod and roofing nails. He wasn’t quite so cocky the day they airlifted him to the hospital with the assignment left unfinished.

  I spent the night in the ER at Alice Hyde Medical Center in Malone, where I was treated for hypothermia and frostbite. When I arrived, my core body temperature was 94.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Over a period of six hours, it was raised back to normal by heated blankets, warm fluids, and an IV. An X-ray revealed I had sustained two cracked ribs. A CT scan showed no evidence of a concussion, but I had a headache and didn’t argue when they gave me painkillers. By dawn, I’d had enough and asked to be checked out. They wanted to keep me for observation, but I’m no fan of hospitals. By the time Betancourt arrived with my street clothes, I was showered and ready to go.

  I’d called Tomasetti from the ambulance. He took the news of the end of the assignment in stride and without a single I-told-you-so. The news of my impending trip to the hospital not so well. He didn’t rant or overreact, which he’s been known to do on occasion, at least when it comes to me. It was the quiet, creeping fear I discerned in his voice that scared me. That hurt me. I hated doing that to him.

  “You don’t have to drive all the way up here,” I told him.

  “I’ve always wanted to see Plattsburgh in January,” he returned.

  I laughed a little too hard.

  Tomasetti must have heard something in my voice, because he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Aside from the hypothermia, a couple cracked ribs, and superficial frostbite, I’m fine.” We both know that’s not what he meant, but he lets it pass. Ground that can be covered later.

  I was really thinking that I was fortunate to be alive and we were both lucky he wasn’t driving up here to claim my body.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” he told me. “I’ll be there in a few hours.”

  * * *

  It’s one P.M. and I’m occupying a visitor chair in Frank Betancourt’s office at the state police Troop B station in Plattsburgh, an hour’s drive from Roaring Springs. Earlier, he sat with me in one of the interview rooms with a laptop and pumped me full of hot coffee while I completed a seven-page report relaying the events that transpired overnight in the woods and on Schrock’s compound. It was a slow process, made worse by the bandage wrapped around my pinky and ring fingers to protect my frostbite-damaged skin. If Betancourt noticed my shaking hands, he didn’t show it. But he hasn’t let me out of his sight for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Last night, the ER folks kept m
e pretty busy at the hospital. Hypothermia and frostbite are common in upstate New York this time of year. Hunters and other outdoor enthusiasts mostly. The male nurse who took care of me had a wicked sense of humor, which I appreciated. This afternoon, I’m mostly recovered physically. The painkillers make me loopy, but they help with the cracked ribs and lingering headache, so I keep them handy. I’m doing well psychologically. It’s only when I’m alone that my mind drags me back to my wild run through the woods, the whine of the snowmobile engines, and the time I spent in the water, fighting for my life.

  Betancourt pops back into his office a little too often, each time looking at me with shoddily concealed concern in his expression and some lame excuse for needing to talk to me.

  “I’m still okay,” I mutter, hoping I manage the frown I was going for.

  “I didn’t ask.” He grins unconvincingly. “Just FYI, I’ve been instructed to stay with you.”

  I roll my eyes. “I should have figured he’d call you.”

  “So you two are…” He lets the sentence dangle.

  “Yep.”

  He clears his throat. “We’ll just pretend we didn’t have this conversation.”

  I grin. “What conversation?”

  He sobers as he slides into the chair at his desk. “I thought you should know, Chief. I just got word from the hospital. Dan Suggs is dead.”

  It’s the first bit of new information I’ve received about the case since I’ve been here; Betancourt has kept me sequestered in his office since I arrived, obviously wanting to keep me focused on my statement. The news is a shock and I’m not exactly sure how to process it. “How?”

  “I guess he knew how things were going to go down. Drove out to his favorite fishing lake. Put his thirty-eight in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  “I never suspected him.” I don’t mention the fact that I’d enjoyed working with him. I’d trusted him. I’d actually liked him.

  “No one did. Dan had been a cop for going on thirty years. He was highly respected. Not a mark on his record. Happily married. Who would’ve thought he was involved in something like that?”

  I recall our strange last moments together. The way Suggs had looked at me when he told me they were going to kill me. I’d seen regret in his eyes. But whatever regret he’d been feeling wasn’t powerful enough to stop it. It hadn’t been enough for him to spare my life. Dan Suggs might’ve been sucked into the operation for reasons understood fully only by him. But he was still a dirty cop.

  “What about Schrock?” I ask.

  “Taken into custody without incident.”

  “Yoder? Smucker?”

  “Yoder’s in the hospital. Critical, but he’s going to make it.” He grimaces. “We didn’t get Smucker. We think he took the snow machine and crossed into Canada. We’ve alerted the border patrol and the local authorities up there. Chances are he’ll seek medical attention for that gunshot wound. We’ll get him.”

  I agree. Even a flesh wound is serious. Smucker’s no criminal mastermind. With no one to tell him what to do, he won’t last. That’s not to say he isn’t an extremely dangerous individual, an animal caught up in the flight or fight instinct. I know when law enforcement catches up with him, he’ll go down hard.

  “What about the other people out at the compound?” I’m not sure when we began referring to Schrock’s farm as “the compound” but that’s what it is now.

  “We got the warrant shortly after you were brought in. State police and St. Lawrence deputies are out there now, searching the place. Chances are there will be more arrests; Schrock and Yoder and Smucker didn’t do this by themselves.” He sighs. “They found three females locked in that old barn. We’ve run into some language issues. We think some of the women are Ukrainian. We’ve got a translator on the way.”

  “They were smuggling people into the U.S. from Canada?”

  “Smuggling and possibly trafficking. Some of these women were promised husbands. Evidently, Schrock and his pals made contact with men via the Internet. The men basically paid cash for these women, either to marry or prostitute them. We confiscated four laptops. Going to take a while to sift through all of it, but preliminarily, it looks like Schrock took in illegals and other vulnerable individuals, people down on their luck or homeless, and kept them at the compound. An unknown individual in Canada was sending people down to Schrock. Smucker and Yoder would smuggle them into the country using snowmobiles at night. Most were women, but we believe there may have been children involved, too.”

  “Somehow, it always makes it worse when kids are involved,” I say.

  “Whatever the case, multiple individuals were being held against their will. Most were subjected to physical abuse and sexual assault while they were here.”

  “What about the Amish kids living at the compound?” I ask.

  “We’ve got social workers out there. I’m assuming most of them will be placed with foster parents until we can figure out what else was going on out there. Interviews are happening today and will probably continue the next couple of weeks.”

  I nod, wondering what they’ll find. If the kids will talk. How much they know. If the parents will cooperate.

  Betancourt studies me a moment. “What’s your take on the Amish connection to all of this, Chief?”

  “I think all this began with Schrock,” I tell him. “He’s a predator and a sociopath. His views are extreme. I’m guessing, but he was probably ousted from his former community because the leaders there realized what he is. He came to New York. Designated himself bishop. He used his charisma to bring people in. Amish who were disgruntled with their own church districts. He took in those who’d been excommunicated. The lost and unwanted. People looking for something. He controlled them through intimidation and violence.” I shrug. “In essence he was running a cult. When someone displeased him, he punished them. Or did away with them.”

  “Suggs knew about the Esh girl?,” Betancourt says with a good bit of anger.

  “Interestingly, when I asked Suggs about her, all he would tell me is that she’d become a threat. I don’t know how or why. He said she tried to run away.” I shake my head, remembering Suggs’s bizarre reaction. “I suspect they caught her and let her die in the cold.”

  “Any idea who?”

  I shake my head. “Maybe Schrock will be able to shed some light.”

  “So far the son of a bitch isn’t talking,” he growls. “We’re probably not going to get a handle on the scope of this thing for a while, Chief.” Leaning back in his chair, he contemplates me. I can tell by his expression there’s more and it’s not good. “Call came in from Franklin County twenty minutes ago. They found some graves on that hill by the barn.”

  Something inside me sinks. “How many?”

  He shrugs. “They’re trying to get a forensic anthropologist out there now. I guess one of the deputies uncovered some bones. He started looking around and sure enough, he found more. He’s pretty sure they’re human. We’ll get a better picture of things in the hours to come.”

  I think about Rebecca’s family. Her missing son and daughter-in-law. Her missing grandchildren. Schrock is a murderous son of a bitch. So much pain. So many lives destroyed, and for what?

  * * *

  Tomasetti arrives forty-five minutes later. Betancourt rises to greet him and the two men shake hands. “Chief Burkholder and I were just finishing up the debriefing.”

  “Good timing on my part,” Tomasetti says. He’s trying to play it cool, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off me since he entered the room. “I hear you guys broke the case wide open.”

  “It was bigger than any of us imagined.” Betancourt grimaces. “Dan Suggs was involved. Shot and killed himself sometime last night.”

  “Sad for his family.”

  “Chief Burkholder had a few dicey moments. I was just thanking her for sticking with it and making the sacrifices she did. We appreciate it.”

  A brief silence ensues. Betancourt makes a big deal
of looking at his watch. “I’ve got a meeting to get to.” He raises his hand. “Take care, Agent Tomasetti.”

  We watch Betancourt go through the door and close it behind him. I’m still sitting in the visitor chair. Tomasetti is standing next to the desk. He looks at me and says, “Ten to one there’s no meeting.”

  “He sort of figured things out. I mean, about us.”

  “Probably didn’t help that I called him six times,” he admits. “Asked him to keep an eye on you.”

  Then I’m out of the chair. Tomasetti steps toward me, raw emotion flashing on his face before he can tuck it away. I fall against him. His arms wrap around me and pull me close. I take in his scent and the feel of his body against mine, and I’m overwhelmed with the knowledge of how things could have turned out. I’m about to thank him for coming, let him know how happy I am to see him, but his mouth comes down on mine. The words leave my head and I forget about everything except kissing him back.

  After a full minute, he eases me to arm’s length and looks me over. “You’re in pain.”

  It’s not a question, so I nod and tell him about my cracked ribs.

  He sighs. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You never do.”

  He’s looking at me closely, running his hands up and down my arms as if making sure I’m really there. That I’m not going to slip away. “You look shaken up.”

  “I guess I am.”

  “That’s honest.”

  “My new policy, remember?”

  “Betancourt told me what happened. Kate, for God’s sake, you were nearly killed.”

  “‘Nearly’ being the key word in that statement.”

  Growling low in his throat, he faces me more squarely, takes both of my hands in his and squeezes gently. “I don’t want to be the guy getting a phone call in the middle of the night, telling me the person I love was killed in the line of duty.”

  “No one knew what was happening out at that compound. No one could have foreseen things turning out the way they did.”