In the Land of Milk and Honey (16 page)

Deep in my heart I do believe that we shall overcome someday.

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.

—

Wh
en 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 thought 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.

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.

“I will.”

I looked at him for a heartbeat and then took the two steps to where he stood on the kitchen's hardwood floor. I wrapped my arms around him and he held me tightly, his face buried in my hair. Silent apologies passed between us. Death has a way of making arguments feel trivial, and I wasn't even sure what we'd been arguing about. I found his mouth and kissed him deeply for one brief moment. Then I left him in the kitchen and hurried to my car.

I tried to steel myself on the drive, my stomach clenching around sips of coffee. Grady had said “multiple dead” and that it was a family. There'd be children, like at the Kindermans'. That was not a scene I'd ever wanted to see again in my lifetime. But seeing it—seeing
them
, the victims—was my job.

The farm was well off the beaten path, not even on Drytown Road, which was edged by farms for miles, but down a dirt road off that. I passed fields of unused land thick with weeds. Approaching the Troyer farm, there was an overgrown pasture surrounded by an old post-and-barbed-wire fence. The two-story brown barn looked halfway to falling down, but the farmhouse was neat, with rows of tulips around the porch.

God, there were still clothes hanging on the line. Their flat and empty aspect felt sinister as they billowed in a light breeze like fabric ghosts.

The driveway was crowded with an ambulance, three black-and-whites, the coroner's van, and Grady's car. All this, and the sun was barely over the horizon. It didn't look like Glen was here yet, but I'd texted him. He was on his way.

The mood was solemn as I approached the house. I passed several uniformed officers, who looked at my badge and then away again without saying a word. They seemed shaken. At the front door I closed my eyes and blew out a long breath. I took a pair of latex gloves and paper booties from a box on the porch, put them on, and went inside.

The Wayne Troyer family had been dead for over twenty-four hours. They'd died early Tuesday morning, before dawn, and within a few hours of each other. One of them, a teenage girl, had been found in the back field, apparently attempting to reach a neighbor's farm. She must have been going for help. She didn't make it.

The others—mother, father, an older female relative, and seven other children ranging from two to fourteen—were all found in the house. The place was ripe with the smell of decomposing bodies, and I was forced to dab some Vicks under my nose as I went about my work.

I looked over each body, recording my observations into my cell phone. This time there was a hard line inside my chest that kept my feelings distant. It felt almost surreal. I had the idea that if I were truly to feel it, I'd be incapable of doing my job. So I accepted the numbness and did what I had to do.

Glen was beside me at some point, pulling up the eyelids on an Amish boy, maybe eight years old. Something about signs of acidosis. I was barely aware of it when he walked away. I kept recording.

I saw Grady in the house, and the coroner, even Glen again, but no one seemed inclined to talk. It was the quietest crime scene I'd ever attended. There was no doubt about what had killed the Troyers or how. There was only the task of witnessing and recording the lives passed, one by one. When I'd seen all of the dead in the house, I went down to the kitchen. Glen and Elaine from the CDC were there. The refrigerator door was
open, and Elaine was taking samples from a Tupperware bowl that looked like leftover casserole. She acknowledged me with her gaze, but neither of us smiled or said a word.

Glen waved his hand at a large glass gallon jar on the counter. On the bottom was a scant half inch of creamy white.

“We'll sample everything in the kitchen, but my guess is this milk is the culprit. Looks like they had it with one of their last meals, but God knows how long it's been poisoning them.”

“He's getting too good at this,” I said. “The timing of it, and the amount. He's got it down to a science.”

Glen nodded, his brow furrowed and his eyes upset. He wasn't having much luck keeping this strictly professional either. “I was just going to check the barn. Want to come?”

I nodded in answer. There was little room for words in the thick atmosphere of tragedy that hung over the house, and my throat felt too tight to form any sentences that weren't absolutely necessary. Glen seemed to be feeling the same, because we said nothing more as we left the kitchen through the back door and walked to the barn.

We found the cow, a pretty Jersey, in a stall in the barn. The large door to the pasture was closed, and the sour stench of manure and sickness hung in the confined space. The cow lay on her side in a straw-strewn stall. She was panting, and her udder was so huge and distended that it looked like she had a beach ball between her legs. There was dried foam and mucus over her nose and mouth. Her brown eyes, dull and glazed, rolled to look at us, but she didn't try to rise.

I felt sick. “Oh God! Poor thing. She must have gotten a heavy dose of it.”

“Looks like she hasn't been fed or milked since the family died,” Glen said. “We should call the ASPCA.”

“I have the number of that vet who was at the Fisher farm. He's familiar with milk sickness.”

“Even better. Can you call him now?”

I stepped out of the barn to call Dr. Richmond. Anything was better than looking at that suffering animal. Nevertheless, after getting the vet's assurance he was coming straightaway, I made myself go back into the barn. I found Glen kneeling by the cow. He stroked her head with one hand and checked her mouth with the other.

“We need to check everywhere, especially in the stall and around the food trough. There has to be some trace of white snakeroot,” I said. “If not in here, then by the fence line. He could have fed her over the fence. If we're lucky, we can find some trace of our killer too. Footprints. Fibers. As soon as the crime scene team is done inside, I'll get them out here.”

“I don't see any traces of plant matter in her mouth,” Glen said quietly. He put his hand assessingly on the cow's trembling flank.

I began to examine the feeding trough in the stall. The lighting was dim, so I pulled a small flashlight from a pocket and studied the smooth metal surface carefully.

“It's just so hard to believe,” Glen said, “that someone would deliberately do this. I mean, if they wanted to poison a family,
why not just put arsenic in the milk? Or in the well for that matter. Aren't all these farms on wells?”

“Now you're thinking like a homicide detective,” I said, my gaze intently focused on my search. “And for that, I am truly sorry.”

I glanced at him, and he gave me a sad smile. “A week ago I would have said I had no naïveté left.”

“There are always things, people, that can shock you. Seems like there are always people who find a way to be worse than you can possibly imagine.” At this moment, that weighed more heavily on me than it had in a long time. It felt like I had a ship's anchor tied to my soul.

The last time I'd felt like this, I'd considered giving up being a detective, finding some profession where I could hide from the darkest side of life. Flower arranging maybe. Trail guide. Bubble-bath salesman. Instead, I'd moved here to a rural paradise. But there was evil here in Lancaster County. It just hid better.

—

Dr
. Richmond showed up and began, with the grimly unpleasant demeanor he'd shown before, to treat the Troyers' cow. Between him and the crime-scene crew, the barn was overcrowded. There was nothing more I could do now but wait for the results. I walked to a slight rise in the pasture and looked out over the farm. From here I could see the farmhouse, the barn, the driveway, and the dirt road. Across the road was a parcel of native growth with tall pine trees mixed with deciduous ones. The bright green leaves of
spring danced in a slight breeze as if the trees were vain about them.

Why here?

The Knepps, the Hershbergers, the Kindermans, the Fishers, now the Troyers. I'd been looking for something that connected them all to Henry Stoltzfus or some other suspect, or even to Amber Kruger. But if the killer truly was a serial killer, a poisoner, the connection might not be there. It was even harder to imagine the Troyer family, living well away from the heart of Lancaster County, was connected to any of the others.

So why here? How does he choose them?

The Troyers were the most remote family yet. And the white snakeroot was given to their cow only a few days ago, after the press conference, after the protest had started, after the deaths had become major headlines.

Was the killer going farther afield to look for a family who wouldn't have heard the news, who would still be drinking their cow's milk? Unfortunately, I had the feeling that, despite our best efforts , there were hundreds of Amish families like that in Lancaster County. But how had the killer found this one? The Hershbergers' cow had been fed the poison plant at the fence line near a road. That could have been opportunistic. The killer could have seen the cow while out driving around and just decided it was an easy target.

And here, at the Troyers'? Had he just been driving around looking for . . . what?

They were all Amish families.
Large
Amish families. Lots of children. Was that why he'd targeted them?

I let my instinct guide me.
He's not Amish himself, or ex-Amish. He sees them as “other,” expendable.
That felt right, though maybe it didn't go far enough.
He hates the Amish
. Hmmm. I supposed he had to hate them to kill them so ruthlessly. But was the poisoner a sociopath who hated everyone, or the Amish specifically? If so, why? Had he had bad dealings with the Amish? Did he resent them on religious grounds?

And why the children? Did he have an issue with how many children the Amish had? Did he have sadistic pedophilic tendencies? Did the idea of innocent children suffering satisfy him in some way?

It didn't quite fit. If he was a sadist or pedophile, wouldn't he want to see the children suffer in person? My eyes shifted to the house, contemplating the possibility that he had watched from the windows as the family died or even entered the house to see up close.

But we had nothing that indicated that was the case. Other than Mark Hershberger seeing the man at the road, none of the survivors had seen any strangers lurking about. And I'd seen no evidence of an intruder at the Kindermans' or here, no indications that the bodies had been disturbed after they'd died. There was something else, something I wasn't seeing.

My eyes wandered to the woods across the road. If he'd watched the Troyers, studied them to determine if they were a
good target, that would be the ideal place from which to do it. I could almost picture him there, looking back at me from the cover of the trees. I pictured him the way Mark Hershberger had described, wearing a black sweatshirt, hood up, face obscured.

We needed to search those woods.

“We're on to you, asshole,” I muttered under my breath. “I
will
find you.”