Kingdom Come (18 page)

—

Jim Johnson was a hard-assed reporter. He tried to get out of us what had happened to Katie Yoder and why we were involved. But it wasn't the first time I'd dealt with the press, or Grady's either. We ended up telling him it was a murder investigation—and not disputing the fact that it was
Katie's
murder but not confirming it either. We promised him he'd be the first reporter we
talked to when the time came. That opened up Jim Johnson's sealed lips.

Katie Yoder had contacted the tabloid and eventually been forwarded to Jim. She claimed to have a story about sex abuse among the Amish, and sent him photos of herself, probably taken with Jessica's phone. Jim had been interested but wary. He told her he'd need proof. And if she could get something like an incriminating video, get the guy to confess on camera, preferably with a little kissing and groping, he thought he could get her ten to twenty-five thousand dollars.

“A story like hers, with her face and personal testimony along with an authentic video? It would have been worth some money,” Jim claimed. “Amish stories always do well for us. Add in sexual abuse of a young girl and that's the kind of story you can bleed for weeks to sell papers. I have some contacts in reality TV that might have been interested too. I offered to agent her. If, you know, she could really get the goods.”

I just bet he had.

“So, what was the story she told you?” Grady asked. He watched me over the conference table with an unreadable expression.

“She wouldn't give me a name. Said she'd do that once we had a firm deal. She wasn't stupid, Katie Yoder.” Jim sounded sad.

“She must have said something,” I pushed. “Was it a family member? Any indications it was her father or brothers? Her abuser was Amish, right?”

“Yeah, he was Amish. It started when she was only eleven and it went on for years, so he must have been considerably older than her. That's what I know for sure.”

I stroked my chin, my gaze locked with Grady's.

“No names?” Grady asked again, just to be sure. “Not even an initial?”

“Nope. She just called him ‘this man.' She was very wary. She wanted the money, that much was clear, and she was going to make sure no one took the story away from her until she'd gotten her fair share. Like I said, she wasn't stupid.”

“Did she tell you what kind of proof she had or was going to get?”

“When I told her the kind of money we could get if she had video, she said she'd
get
video, just like that. I told you, she wanted as much money as she could get from the story.” He paused. “Do you think this guy killed her?”

We hadn't even verbally told him the victim was Katie yet. I wasn't going to play that game with him.

“As we said, this case is ongoing and we can't discuss anything that might hurt our chances of finding the killer. But Detective Harris here will be in touch when we
can
talk,” Grady said.

“I certainly hope so.” Jim Johnson had an edge to his voice. “I went out on a limb for you guys.”

“And we appreciate that. You're been enormously helpful. We'll be in touch.”

Grady disconnected the call.

I knew Johnson would sniff out something. With some digging he could even find out that Katie Yoder's body had been found in the Susquehanna and had sat in the cooler in Maryland until claimed by her Amish parents. That stuff was public record. But there was nothing we could do about that now.

“Fuck.” Grady rubbed his heavy face. “Great work, Harris, Hernandez.”

I was bubbling over with energy. This was a huge lead. “That's two sources now that say Katie was abused—the psychiatrist and now a reporter who talked to Katie herself. We have to find that guy, Grady. If he got a whiff of what Katie was planning . . . Talk about a motive for murder.”

Grady nodded grimly. “Yeah. I'll ask for an urgent meeting with the elders of the local district. I'll impress upon them the importance of giving this guy up. Someone has to know something.” He stood. He must have seen the frustration on my face, because he added, “Go write up a list of questions you want me to ask them and e-mail it to me.”

I just glared at him.

“This is the way it's gotta be, Harris. Do it,” he barked.

I went to type up my damn list.

—

Grady arranged the meeting with the Amish elders, which wasn't going to happen till after supper. So I was still at the station, waiting anxiously, at nine
P.M.
when he returned. Everyone else had left for the day. Grady nodded at me and I followed him into his office.

“Well?” I asked, before he even sat down.

“I got the whole thing on audio, so you can crawl over it at your leisure but, bottom line, they still claim they don't know.”

“Goddamn it!” I paced. “They have to know!”

“Closed doors, Harris. I dunno. I don't think they'd outright lie to me. Maybe they really had no idea Katie was being abused.”

I growled.

“I did impress upon them the importance of finding out. They promised me they'd do their own inquiry. Maybe they'll turn something up. They have a better shot of getting their own people to talk than we do.”

I wanted to say:
Bullshit! They're the very people who aren't talking
. But I kept it to myself.

“There's . . . something else, Harris. Have a seat.”

The tone of Grady's voice was worrying. The dark look on his face was downright stomach-dropping. I sat down in his guest chair.

“Okay.”

He leaned forward, putting his forearms on his desk and folding his hands neatly. He pinned me with a stare and suddenly I felt like I was sitting across the interrogation table from him. That was not a place I wanted to be.

“Tell me the truth—are you seeing Ezra Beiler? Because Aaron Lapp says you are.”

Shit. Did the guy have eyes in the back of his head or what? I licked my lips, my heart racing. I considered lying. I didn't.

“Yes, I am seeing Ezra Beiler.”

Grady let out a groan and fell back in his chair, hand over his eyes.

“It's not the department's business who I date after hours. The man is not a suspect.”

“Everyone involved in this case is a suspect!” Grady shouted angrily. He lowered his hand and glared at me.

“Calm down. It's not that bad.”

“Of course it's that bad! One of my homicide detectives
is having sex with an Amish man, a murder suspect! What could be worse than that?”

I couldn't resist. “I could be the killer,” I deadpanned.

“Damn it, this is not funny!” Grady slammed his hands down on his desk. I winced internally, but managed to keep from showing it on the outside.

“You're right. The situation is . . . somewhat labyrinthine.”

“Labyrinthine? Maybe while you were getting that hundred-thousand-dollar education, you should have learned some fancy words for ‘no' and ‘hell no.'”

I knew a few fancy words for those, but I figured he wasn't literally asking me.

“Listen, Grady, it's not what you think.”

I fought to stay calm, even though I was getting a sick, horrible feeling I was about to be fired. After the meeting with the Amish delegation, I already felt like I was on shaky ground. I should have followed orders and laid off. And I did—to a point.

I spoke low. “First of all, Ezra Beiler is one of the only people in this entire thing who has an ironclad alibi for when Jessica was moved that night. You know that. He is
not
a murder suspect.”

Grady's nostrils flared with his heavy breathing as he glared at me. “He
is
a person of interest, though. That puts him off limits. Jesus, I shouldn't have to tell you that!”

“Okay,” I agreed. “He's a person of interest. But he's only tangential to the case. He's also an Amish man who's struggling to find his way to a new life. Did you know he was married to a suicidally depressed girl, and that when she lost their baby and then stepped out in front of a car and killed herself, the Amish made Ezra feel like it was his fault?”

Grady gave a very annoyed, very grumpy huff, as if he didn't want me to stir his sympathy.

“You heard him yourself. He's trying to get up the resources to leave, and he's
alone
, Grady. I befriended him, and I'm not ashamed of that.”

“And then?” Grady's hard look said,
Don't tell me that's all there is to it
.

“And then . . . well . . . stuff happened. It does sometimes between little boys and little girls. See, there's this stork. . . .”

Grady made an exasperated noise and got to his feet, too angry to sit.

“No, I need to hear it all, Harris, whether I want to or not. Who started what? And when? Did you—”

“Seduce him? Come on! Don't treat me like a predator.”

Grady's eyes swept up and down me in annoyance. His look seemed to acknowledge the fact that a lot of effort probably wouldn't have been required on my part.

He sighed and tapped the desk with his pen. “Jesus. Wait till Sharon hears about this. So you ‘befriended' Ezra, and you ended up sleeping together?”

I thought about giving another smart answer, but I knew Grady deserved my full honesty. Plus, I really hoped not to lose my job. “I went to see him a few times, asking him questions about the Amish. He was the only person who would talk to me! And the only one I believed for sure wasn't a suspect. We enjoyed spending time together, but that was all. Then he . . . he came to my house a week or so after I'd been banned from Grimlace Lane.”

Grady stared at me.

“He brought me blueberry jam!”

He rolled his eyes. “You must have
indicated
that you were interested.”

“I knew there was an attraction there, yes. But I thought I could manage it, at least until the case was over. I thought that right up until the moment when I couldn't. He told me about his wife and I . . . He needed me, Grady. And I didn't have it in me to reject him.”

“You're saying he came on to you?” Grady pushed, looking doubtful.

I ruffled my hair in frustration. “I'm saying I opened the door, but he walked through it on his own two feet. It was mutual. Mutual-of-Omaha mutual. All right? I'm not trying to justify myself, only—”

“What's going to happen if Ezra turns out to be more than
tangentially
linked to this case, huh? We don't have all the facts yet. We don't
know
what happened out there on Grimlace Lane. And even if he's got nothing to do with it, how do you think it's going to look when this story breaks? And it will, Harris. Via Jim Johnson or someone else, this story is going to break, and if the killer turns out to be Amish, it's going to be ugly.”

I had no response.

“We found the body of a gorgeous young girl in an Amish barn,” he reminded me. “Then a beautiful young Amish girl who'd been sexually abused turned up naked in the Susquehanna. I send in my female detective to investigate, and she starts having an affair with the hunky widowed Amish guy who lives next door. What do you think the
National Tattler
would do with that story?”

For a moment, I had a mental image of Ezra's face plastered on the
National Tattler
with a stark headline: “Detective's Hot Amish Lover.” No, we didn't want to go there. I couldn't do that to Ezra, and not to Grady either. Crap. Lancaster County was so small and remote. I'd forgotten that nothing was really secret in this world anymore. Viruses could spread from a province in China to the backwoods of Canada in just a few days, and news moved even faster.

“I'm sorry,” I said, and with the horror of what could be crawling inside me, I damn well meant it. “I had no intention of bringing harm to this department. I didn't think of it like that.”

“You thought with your . . . your . . .”

I raised my eyebrow at him.

“
Lady bits
, is what you did,” Grady sighed.

I laughed, but I thought that analysis was a bit unfair. Well, maybe not entirely unfair.

Grady ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus, Harris. Sharon likes you. I like you. A lot of people here like you. But you don't make it easy for me to support you.”

That made me feel just great.

“Ezra was already planning to leave the Amish,” I pointed out glumly.

“Do you think the media will care?”

I really didn't.

“Does anyone besides Lapp know?” I asked, hoping it was contained.

“Not that I know of. Not sure even Lapp knows for sure. He's suspicious. He pulled me aside to speak to me about it. Worried for Ezra's soul, of course.”

“Naturally. So tell me what you want me to do.”

Grady glared at me as if to say,
Now I'm supposed to fix this
? “Well, first of all, I'm gonna have to talk to Ezra. See if he backs up your version of things. Make sure it was
mutual
in absolutely every fucking sense of the word.”

I held my tongue and nodded. I would have done the same in his position. A police officer had authority. That could be dicey when it came to matters of consent.

“Assuming that's the case, then I might be able to refrain from telling the chief about this. Poor guy doesn't deserve the ulcer. But you are not to see Ezra again, not till this case is well closed. With any luck, we can keep this thing under wraps, but no more taking the risk. Is that clear?”

I sat back and closed my eyes, feeling sick. “Come on. That's not fair. What if we—”

“You guys lay off until you solve the case, period. Once the dust settles, if he's not involved, we'll help him get out of there if that's what he wants, and then I really don't care what you two do. But I don't want one of my detectives seeing an Amish man while he's still Amish. And definitely not someone linked to an open case. This is nonnegotiable. Unless you want to turn in your badge right now.”