Kingdom Come (20 page)

“Huh. Third time on this metal detector, Detective Harris,” she said with a quirked brow. “This a kink of yours?”

“You know what they say: Third time's the charm.”

“Well if you find RoboCop with that thing, bring him back here. He's hot.”

I smiled. “The original or the remake?”

She snorted like I was out of my mind. “You kiddin'? Peter Weller all the way.”

I gave her a high five and lugged my stuff out the door.

—

By the time I got back to the pullout it was almost two-thirty. I started getting tired on the way back, and I contemplated the wisdom of what I was doing—as opposed to, say, going back home to bed and returning in the morning. But I wanted to at least do a quick pass with the luminol to see if I could find any traces of blood. If I did, that would be a good reason to pull the forensics team out bright and early. So I parked my car at the pullout, took my flashlight and the newly mixed spray bottle of luminol powder and H
₂
O
₂
liquid, and got to work.

Once I was there, with the potential for discovery on every patch of ground, my energy and excitement returned. The rain had eased off to a sprinkle, which made the work slightly more rational. It was quite dark out, so if there was anything to react to, the luminol would glow blue. I sprayed it at various places around the pullout. I got reactions immediately and I was excited
until I remembered that luminol detects iron and also reacts to fecal matter. There was plenty of horse manure in the pullout, both old and new. They showed up as round blue blobs. But near the edge of the clearing I found a patch that was sprayed out in a pool—it was a shape I recognized from plenty of crime scenes. I'd bet anything it was blood, blood that had soaked into the dirt and gravel of the pullout and was probably nothing more than a darkish stain during the day.

I followed the blobs that trailed from that patch into the trees.

—

I searched for an hour, tantalized to keep going by bread crumbs of blue glow on leaves and on the ground in the woods, getting closer and closer to the creek bank. And then I found it. There was a pile of brush with bits of blue glow on it. When I moved some of the brush aside, I found the bower. I could almost picture Jessica lying here—a large patch of deep blue marked where her head had been. Here, the killer hid her after she was dead, roughly covered by brush and blanketed by snow. She'd lain here in the cold for hours until he came back and dragged her into the creek. But I was sure this area had been searched the day we'd found the body and no footprints found. The snow would have hidden his tracks from earlier in the day, when he'd killed Jessica, but not from that night, when he'd moved her. Which means he had to have walked back through the creek to pick up the body.
Smart.
But where had he come from?

I took photos with my phone, even though they really didn't turn out. I felt a burning sense of satisfaction. Luminol is like
God's eye, revealing the invisible blotches of sin. I had a fleeting sense of being an avenger.

Then I went and got the metal detector.

I was still obsessed with the idea of the phone. I searched in a wide swath around the area but found nothing. Of course, this was where
Jessica
had been killed, not Katie. And Katie was the one who'd had the phone. But I couldn't get the damn thing out of my mind. At last I stood at the edge of the creek and looked north.

It was time to stop, I knew that. But I was wide-awake now, adrenaline in my blood and the scent of victory in my nose.
I'll just go upstream far enough to see how far this is from the Millers' farm.

That's what I told myself. I went back to the car and put on the chest-high waders I'd checked out at the station. I stuck the spray bottle of luminol down inside my waistband. Carrying the metal detector across my shoulders, I waded into the creek.

—

Rockvale Creek was running very high—and it was cold. I walked for a good ways. I had to stay thigh deep, because the sides of the bank that were newly flooded were riddled with branches and bushes and debris. The rush of the current around me was like an embrace that wanted to pull me down. Adrenaline or not, exhaustion was threatening to put an end to my midnight adventures. Then I hit the first chicken-wire barrier.

I saw it, stretching from the sides of the creek bank, mere seconds before I ran into it. I stopped. I had to be on the property line of a farm with livestock, though whether or not it was one of the farms on Grimlace Lane remained to be seen.

The water was so high the chicken-wire fencing disappeared in the middle of the creek, its top underwater. It was like an invitation.
There's no barrier here, keep going.
I waded to the middle and pushed the fencing down farther with my hand and allowed the water to push me over it, the rubber of the waders catching only a little on the wire. I kept going.

After the third chicken-wire fence I crossed I started to recognize the area. I waded out and climbed up the creek bank. In front of me was a pasture, the grass low but already greening up in the March rain. Beyond that was Aaron Lapp's big red barn and new, ranch-style farmhouse. The night was silent except for the sound of the running creek and the increased beat of the rain, coming down hard now.

I'd used the metal detector at the Millers' and at Ezra's place, but not here. I swung it off my shoulders and gave silent thanks when I turned it on and it was still working. I started to search.

I found nothing along the creek bank, so I followed the animal trail across the pasture toward the barn, swinging the metal detector along the way. I'd been banned from Grimlace Lane, so I wouldn't be able to come back and search in the day. But now? No one was here to see me. I was interacting with no one.

I reached the barn having found nothing but three large nails and an old metal buckle. I turned the metal detector off and stood there.

The Lapp house was silent and dark. The barn loomed like a living presence. Aaron Lapp would be incensed to find me here. Which was why I'd likely never have this opportunity again.

I thought of the laws governing police searches of outbuildings. It was iffy territory. But the Lapp barn was at least a
hundred feet from the house and not marked in any way, either by fencing or signage, as private. In the normal course of my job, I would not hesitate to check it out if I had good reason to do so. Even so, I knew Grady wouldn't like it.

But I thought of Jessica, her body left unclaimed in that barn, and of Katie, who was lost in the river. And I thought, more selfishly, of Ezra.
This needs to end
. I went inside.

The Lapps had four horses in one large free stall at the end of the barn, and two cows in a stall on the other side of the aisle. They were rough shapes in the dark, unalarmed by my presence. There was a light switch just inside the door.
Dare I risk it?
The part of the barn I was in faced away from the house. Still, I decided to stick with the flashlight.

The aisle was apparently used for feeding, with long food troughs on either side that opened onto the stalls and large plastic bins of grain. I ran my flashlight over everything and ran the metal detector briefly around the food bins—nothing.

The aisle opened onto a larger room with a cement floor, steel plates lay over what appeared to be channels for manure, and several rusty chutes disappeared into the upper story. I figured the metal detector was going to be useless in a place like this, but I did run it in the shadows along the wall, under a wooden cabinet that sat up off the floor, around a large bin of firewood. The readout spiked. I ran it around the wood bin again—the metal detector was reacting to the back of it.

It was probably a large metal hinge or even nails. I told myself that, but my stomach twisted with anxiety. I put the metal detector down and shone the flashlight inside the bin. It was a large container, around five feet long and four feet high. It was
made of rough boards, well aged, and filled with chopped wood and twigs sized to burn in a wood stove. The back of the bin was taller than the front and some of it showed over the logs. It looked normal—unusually clean even. I debated turning on the light so I could get a better look. Then I remembered the spray bottle of luminol I'd tucked into the waders. I pulled it out and sprayed the top of the woodpile and the back of the bin and turned off the flashlight.

The back of the bin had an apple-sized smear of blue glow—blood.

A body would fit in that bin. In fact it would be a good place to hide it until it could be disposed of. Was that blood Katie's? Jessica, I was fairly certain, had been killed at that pullout, hidden in the woods there until the killer could return and drag her body downstream to the Millers' barn. But Katie? Had Katie been killed here?

I propped my flashlight up on a nearby ledge so it shone over the wood bin, and I started removing logs.

Drowning

I found the phone with the hot pink cover in the woodpile, where it had slipped down through the top layer of logs some time ago, probably the previous October. I stood there holding the phone in my hand. I hit the power button, but of course the battery was long dead. I knew as soon as I picked it up that I shouldn't have touched it. I had to put it back, call Grady, and get the forensics team in here. I could stand watch outside, make sure no one got a chance to move it before—

The light in the barn went on.

I turned. Aaron Lapp stood in the doorway blinking at me. He looked like he'd hastily dressed in his black pants, suspenders, and a worn blue shirt. His hair was wild around his head from having been asleep. His eyes narrowed in anger as he registered who I was and what I was doing—standing in his barn and going through his woodpile.

“Get. Off. My. Property,” he said, through gritted teeth.

I felt a hot wave of fear. I had no backup. No one knew I was
here, on private property in the most secret part of night. I hadn't worn my gun, had no reason to think I'd need it. And I was pretty sure I was looking at the man who had killed Katie Yoder and Jessica Travis. How much further would he go to hide his crimes? And then I realized—I was a police officer, an ex-member of the NYPD, and I had years of self-defense training on Aaron Lapp. I was not a girl he could bash on the back of the head. I wasn't going to be afraid of him.

In fact, I was pissed.

Instead of dropping the phone back where I'd found it, I held it up. “Did you know this was here? I'm betting you didn't, or you would have gotten rid of it. You know what's on it though, don't you?”

He looked at the phone with a frown. “You . . . That does not belong to me. I don't know what you're talking about.”

“It's Katie Yoder's phone. The batteries are dead, or we could take a little look at what's on here together. But you know, don't you? That's why you killed her. Last fall, she took a video of the two of you messing around and she was going to sell it to the papers.”

Aaron wiped his face and left his hand clasped over his mouth as if to hold in words or the contents of his stomach. I could see panic and calculation in his eyes as his gaze moved from my face to the phone in my hand and back again.

“You didn't mean to kill Katie, did you?” I said, unable to resist pushing him. “Did you catch her making the video? You hit her on the back of the head in a rage and then you had to finish it, didn't you? You hid her body in the woodpile until you could get rid of it, and the phone fell out. Bad luck. Where did she tape the
two of you?” I looked around. “Not here, surely. It's a bit too open. You'd take her someplace more private.”

Aaron still said nothing, but I saw his eyes move to a door at the back of the room.

“Back there?” I asked. The phone still in my hand, I went to the door and pushed it open. Behind it was a little workshop, maybe eight feet by ten, with no windows and a concrete floor. An array of tools was organized neatly on a pegboard, and a worktable and chair was against the wall. It smelled of oil, Pennsylvania dirt, and age. It smelled just like my grandfather's workshop, the scent stirring memories long forgotten. I walked in and looked around, found a light switch and pulled it, lighting a dim yellow overhead bulb. It flashed with the generator, casting flickering shadows.

Aaron stood in the doorway. “You have no right to be here,” he said, but his voice had lost all of its hubris. It was almost a whisper. He looked afraid for the first time since I'd met him.

I knew I was grandstanding. I knew I should just leave and call Grady. I shouldn't question Lapp, not without the Miranda and witnesses and a lot of other hoops having been jumped through. But I just wanted him to admit it, goddamn it. I wanted him to admit that he'd sexually abused Katie Yoder, probably from the time she was eleven years old. After all his judging of Ezra—
of me
—I wanted him to goddamn well acknowledge that he himself was a pedophile. I wanted to at least see it on his face.

“I bet she put it here,” I said, noticing a rough wooden shelf opposite the worktable. I went over and put the phone on the middle shelf, on its side, facing out. “She came in before you, didn't she? She set up the phone and she called you in here.”

Aaron's knees started to go out. His face was utterly white like he might faint. He leaned heavily on the door frame, then staggered over to the worktable and fell into the chair. “God help me,” he muttered.

“Did you see the phone while you were touching her? Did you get suspicious when she tried to get you to talk about it? Or maybe afterward she gloated about it, showed you the evidence?”

I took the phone and put it in my pocket for safekeeping. I walked to the doorway and stood there looking at him. Aaron's utter despondency was starting to sink in through my anger. He was slumped in the chair like a rag doll, his face drained of color, his eyes shut, his breathing labored. Maybe that was all the acknowledgment I was going to get. Maybe it was enough. I studied him. It made me sick to think about what he'd done to Katie in this room.

“It's not what you think.” He opened his eyes to look at me. “She was . . . so beautiful. So young. And she liked it. Liked the attention, wanted to be held and petted. I always . . . she enjoyed it too. She was greedy for it. When she got older, she wanted me to leave my wife—demanded it! I would never, never do that. So Katie, she put an end to it. I repented of this sin years ago already.” His eyes were distant. “It was a pair of earrings, that first time. Some cheap, gaudy things some Englishwoman had given her in town, like you hand a biscuit to a dog. Katie had them on, cleaning up, here in the barn. When I saw them I was angry but I felt this . . . lust. The world out there. It just won't leave us alone.”

I closed my eyes. I tried to filter through what he was saying.

Aaron had taken her young, far too young. But later on it must have been mutual enough, in Katie's mind, that she had expectations. She'd wanted Aaron to leave his wife, given him an
ultimatum? Cut off their affair? Maybe when Katie was out meeting up with men from Craigslist, she'd already been over Aaron Lapp. If so, she must have come back one last time, one last time to get her twenty-five-thousand-dollar video, and maybe her revenge too. And that had been a fatal mistake.

“I don't think the law is going to care that you repented of it, Lapp. It was pedophilia while it was going on, and then, in October, it was murder.”

“No.” There were tears in Aaron's eyes. “We . . . She did come to me. Last year. Tempted me to do it again. And I gave in, God help me. But I never . . . I didn't—”

His words cut off abruptly. I saw his eyes widen in shock, looking at something behind me. But I saw it a moment too late. There was no time to turn or even raise my arm. There was no time for anything before something smashed, with force, into the back of my head.

The pain was the worst thing I'd ever felt—like burning fire wrapping around my skull and shooting down my neck. It was vicious and deep, a dangerous blow, maybe fatal. I knew this on some level, knew I needed help, medical help, but mostly there was just the pain. It was so bad it stole my breath and every scrap of energy. My stomach rebelled in a wave of nausea and my vision went as soft as black cotton.

I was on the concrete floor. There was another whiff of that smell, the smell of my grandfather's workshop, and I wondered if that would be the last thing I would ever smell. Then I knew nothing more.

—

“She told me she was leavin'. She told me that day,” Miriam Lapp was saying matter-of-factly.

I sat on the chair in her kitchen writing it down, writing and writing. The page in my notebook was white as snow and it was getting longer and longer. It was surely getting in the way on the kitchen floor.

“She told me to say good-bye to her family,” Miriam said as she flipped bloody pancakes in a heavy iron skillet on her stove. They looked . . . bony. Like pieces of a skull. I didn't want to look at them.

“And then what happened?” I asked, wanting to make sure I wrote it all down. I had to get everything just right. I could hear an argument in the next room and I wished they'd shut up so I could concentrate.

—

The notebook page was dragging behind me. I worried that it would get wet in the snow and that all my hard work, everything I'd written down, would be ruined and become unreadable. If that happened, I'd never be able to solve the case. It would never end and Ezra would walk away from me. He'd tell me it was over if I couldn't give him what he wanted.

“Stop,” I tried to say. “Let me pick up the paper. Just stop for one second.”

—

She was taking off my clothes. It was cold, so cold, and my head hurt so bad I wanted to die. My chattering teeth woke me up and my body convulsed with shivers.

“Don't,” I muttered, looking up at her hard face.
Take me to a hospital. I'm sick, so sick. Just let me sleep, please.

—

Someone rolled me onto my side in bed. Why was the bed so cold? It was wet too, slick and clammy. Disgusting. I wanted to protect my face from the cold, but my arms were stuck behind me. And then I rolled off the side of the bed into water, deep water. And I was drowning.

—

Black water. Freezing cold. My feet struck the bottom—toes scraping against stone. I was moving fast in the current. My knee struck a rock, and there was pain, but the pain was distant, like it was happening to someone else.

That scared me. The cold water stung my head where I felt a dull, frighteningly deep, and brutal ache. I had a bad head wound. If I was no longer fully feeling pain in my lower body, that was not good.
Head trauma
. My body was shutting down. But in a moment, I stopped worrying about my head wound because the only thing that mattered, the only thing in the whole world, was my need for—

Air. Air, air, air, air
—

My feet found the bottom again and pushed up of their own accord, from some deep survival instinct. My head broke the surface of the water.

I gasped, choking, my lungs surging with blessed oxygen. I tried to bring up my hands to stabilize myself in the water so I could keep my head up, but they didn't move. For a moment,
I feared they were paralyzed and then I felt the rope.
Tied. My hands are tied behind me
. My head was dragged under again by the rush of water. And my body slammed into something that yielded slightly and scraped my skin.

Chicken-wire fencing. It was submerged because of the flooding. Air was once again the only thing I cared about. Maybe I could use the fencing. I had no clothes to catch on it—my body was nude. But I used my feet to get purchase in the little sections of wire and pushed myself up. My head broke the surface again.

I gasped, drinking in air. My mind and body filled with one clear imperative: I didn't want to die. There'd been days when, weighted down by grief and discouragement, I would have accepted death without a struggle. But not now. I wanted desperately to live. I didn't realize how much I'd healed from Terry's death until that instant, when suddenly there was so much to live for. Death would be a cruel and unwelcome thief.

I tugged at my bonds. I was weak, incredibly weak, and growing weaker in the freezing water. I couldn't undo the ropes around my wrists or even hang on to the chicken wire with my feet. The current pushed me relentlessly and the wire bent under my body. The barbs on top scraped deep into the skin of my stomach as the water dragged me over the top.

No.

I fought for some purchase on the fencing, but it was gone, well gone. Then it was just me under the water again, my searching legs finding no bottom, my damaged head leading the way under the current's surge with no ability to stop or even bring up my arms to protect it. I'd hit another rock. Even the thought of anything touching my head filled me with panic. I was going to drown.

The sides of the creek. The creek isn't that wide.

The thought gave me hope. With the last burst of energy I had, I fought the current and tried to swim to my left, twisting my body and kicking with my legs, all the while trying to keep my head up. It was hard. I was moving forward more than I was moving left. But I fought on, kicking my legs, ignoring the numbness and broken feel to my knee. I went under. My lungs burned, needing air, but I resisted the urge to try to fight my way to the surface and kept pushing left. If I stopped now, any progress I'd made toward the bank would be lost in an instant.

And then I felt the touch of pebbles under my toes. One more hard push and my feet found the bottom. I again resisted the terrible need to push up and find air, refusing to let my feet leave the earth, sure I'd never find it again if I did. I dug in my frozen toes and forced my legs to walk. A moment later my head broke the surface, my feet still on the rocky creek bed.

It was a victory as sweet as any I'd ever had, that moment of feeling that I'd accomplished something, that I'd fought for, and won, both ground and air. I was saved.

And then the current pulled my feet off the slippery stones, and my head under the water.

I fought again for the shore, but my body was so weak, it barely obeyed my commands. Who would believe a mere creek could rush so fast? Be so dangerous?

It isn't. The creek isn't that wide. You can make it the shore. Just do it. Do it!

I thought of Ezra working on his rockers, steady and strong, the way he looked driving his buggy, petting Horse. I remembered the sight of him naked in my bed, his long blond hair like
silk on the pillow. I saw the line of his jaw; the tiny, ironic lift at the corner of his mouth; his kind, sweet eyes.

I drifted, losing thought, losing myself. I might never have returned except that my shoulder slammed, hard, into something. The pain brought me back to my senses. It was a fallen tree, partially submerged. And my head had popped out of the water. I gasped in lungfuls of air and when I exhaled I was screaming.