Pray for Silence (40 page)

You’re too late.

“Shut up,” he muttered. “Shut the fuck up!”

A person could bleed to death in a matter of minutes. The thought shook him so completely, he nearly ran off the road. He could feel the fear climbing over him, an ugly lumbering beast that tore him up from the inside out.

Too late. Too late . . .

The Tahoe fishtailed on the wet asphalt as he turned into the gravel lane of the Zook farm. The SUV kicked up stones and bounced over ruts. The farmhouse loomed into view. The place was pitch black. No vehicles. No lights on inside.

Where the hell was her backup?

Tomasetti drove over a sapling tree and through the grass, over the sidewalk. Ten feet from the back door, he hit the brakes hard, and the Tahoe’s tires dug ruts into the soft ground, skidded to a halt.

Throwing open the door, he pulled his weapon and hit the ground running. He knew better than to enter the place alone. He knew he could be walking into a trap. He kicked in the door without knocking. “Police!” he shouted. “Police! Put your fucking hands up now!”

In the dim light slanting through the window, he saw three bodies. A lake-size puddle of blood. The black silhouette of a gun. His heart slammed hard against his ribs when a flicker of lightning revealed Kate. She was lying on her back, stone still. Her eyes were open and for a horrifying moment, he thought she was dead.

Too late. Too late.

The little voice taunted him. He stumbled toward her. Choking sobs squeezed from his throat. A scream of denial rang in his head.

She’s not fucking dead! God wouldn’t do that to me twice in one lifetime.

“Kate!” He dropped to his knees beside her.
“Kate!”

Her eyes shifted to his. “Jesus Christ, Tomasetti, it took you long enough. A girl could bleed to death.”

The relief came with such force that for a moment, he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t stop looking at her. Couldn’t stop touching her. He could hear his breaths rushing in and out. His heart hammering in his ears. Too many emotions knocking at his door. All he could think was that she was alive. He hadn’t been too late.

“I ought to wring your neck,” he growled after a moment.

“Now would be a prime opportunity,” she whispered. “I’m in no condition to stop you.”

“Ambulance is on the way.” There was too much blood. Too much pain in her face. It worried him that she wasn’t moving. “You shot?”

“Twice. Vest protected me, but he got me in the arm.” Wincing, she tried to sit up. “I think they shot Skid. He was in the barn.”

Tomasetti eased her back down. She felt weak. Cool to the touch. Where the hell was the ambulance? “We’ll take care of him. Just be still for now, will you?”

She closed her eyes, and he felt her body relax. “Are they dead?”

He glanced at the other two bodies. The staring eyes and lack of color told him they were DOA. “Nice job, Chief.”

“I’m going to ask for a raise,” she whispered. “Hazard pay.”

“Kate, you’re bleeding. You need to stop talking. Okay?”

“You’re a moody bastard, you know that?”

“That’s what everyone says.” But he smiled.

She smiled back. “Thanks for coming.”

Fighting emotions he didn’t want to feel, John Tomasetti bowed his head and thanked the God he had forsaken for the last two and a half years.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or so I tell myself, anyway. I’m in the Explorer, idling down Main Street the way I have a thousand times before. Light rain patters the windshield, keeping time with a moody Everlast song about saving grace on the radio. To my right, two women in suits and heels stand outside the City Building, huddled against the rain, smoking cigarettes and making small talk. The aromas of warm yeast and cinnamon from the Butterhorn Bakery waft through my open window. I slow down as I pass the Carriage Stop Country Store on the traffic circle. In the display window, a dozen or more colorful Amish quilts hang, and for the hundredth time I find myself thinking of the Plank family.

Four days have passed since the night I shot Scott Barbereaux and Jack Warner at the Zook farmhouse. I want to think a sort of final justice was served that night. I want to believe I gave the sons of bitches what they had coming. But as is usually the case, things aren’t always that cut and dried.

Because both perpetrators were killed at the scene, questions about what happened to the Planks will never be fully answered. What linked Scott Barbereaux, Jack Warner and Todd Long? The only connection I could find was that they went to high school together. I can tie Barbereaux and Warner to the Carriage Stop Country Store. But I’m left wondering: Is that where they met Mary? Did her natural beauty and innocence bring out some dark and primal hunger in them? Did they think her naïveté would make her an easy target? Did her being Amish make her easy to exploit? I’ll probably never have
definitive answers, but we did uncover evidence that helped fill in some of the blanks.

Several law enforcement agencies, including the Painters Mill PD, the sheriff’s office, and BCI, conducted a search that produced dozens of disks, drives, computers, a laptop and hundreds of photographs. I’ve seen a lot in the nine years I’ve been a cop, but the outrages inflicted upon Mary Plank top all of it.

Because Glenda Patterson alibied Barbereaux, Glock and Pickles brought her to the station for questioning. Handcuffed and surrounded by cops, she spilled her guts. She claimed no knowledge of Barbereaux’s involvement in the murders, going so far as to suggest he drugged her, left the house, and then sneaked back before she regained consciousness the next morning. We’re still trying to decide whether to put her before a grand jury. She wouldn’t be the first woman to lie to protect her lover.

Mary Plank’s journal continues to haunt me. Throughout all of this, I worried I would never be able to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Barbereaux was the man she wrote about. The man she loved. Just this morning, I learned that the DNA from the sperm found inside Mary’s body was matched to DNA taken from Barbereaux. Evidently, he didn’t know human sperm could live for up to three days.

Since the fetus and placenta were never found, there was no way to extract paternal DNA from the child Mary Plank was carrying, making it impossible to ascertain the identity of the father. But I know in my heart it was Barbereaux’s.

T.J., Pickles and Mona spent two days in the woods surrounding Miller’s Pond before finding the tree where Mary Plank carved her and her lover’s initials.
M.P. loves S.B. forever.
Next to it, she’d carved a heart pierced with an arrow. While it didn’t mean much in terms of evidence, it meant the world to me on a personal level. I had my proof.

I’ve spent the last couple of days piecing together a theory. I believe Scott Barbereaux delivered gourmet coffees to the shop where Mary worked. He also fancied himself an amateur photographer and did a few wedding and family reunion–type shoots at the store. I believe he met her there, charmed her, pursued her and seduced her. Unaccustomed to that kind of attention from an attractive male, Mary was swept off her feet. In the following weeks,
he bought her gifts that seemed lavish to a naïve Amish girl. English clothes. Lingerie. Jewelry. He introduced her to music, sex and drugs. Once her judgment was skewed—either by her feelings for Barbereaux or the drugs—he began drugging her with dangerous barbiturates and sedatives, such as Rohypnol. At that point, he began photographing and videotaping her in pornographic situations, using his friends Todd Long and Jack Warner as actors.

There’s no doubt in my mind that in some way, Mary loved Barbereaux. She wanted to marry him, have his child and lead a normal life. She was malleable; she wanted to please him. Her naïveté brought out something vicious in Barbereaux. He was a classic sociopath. He knew he could push her and he just kept on pushing. The power of that must have been heady. Toward the end—after he’d raped her body, mind and soul—it wasn’t even a problem for him.

But what was the impetus for murdering the entire Plank family? I have a theory on that, too. After Mary confessed her sins to her parents—telling them about her relationship with Barbereaux, the drugs, the porn and the child she was carrying—her parents broke Amish protocol and decided to take the information to the English police. But they never got the chance to follow through. Somehow Barbereaux found out what they were going to do and decided to eliminate the entire family. But he didn’t stop with just murder. They filmed the killings and sold the video on the black market as a sort of snuff film.

Mary Plank was not the first young woman the three men had exploited. Evidence discovered at Barbereaux’s home proved there were others, ranging from fifteen to twenty-two years of age. We also discovered a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Records indicated Barbereaux was raking in a lot of foreign cash. In the last six years, he’d earned over five hundred thousand dollars from the sale of pornographic videos. Mixed in with the sex, were several snuff-like productions. The bulk of the money came from the Philippines, China, Nigeria and Ukraine. Since international borders were crossed, the feds stepped in. For the first time in the course of my career, I was glad to relinquish control of a case.

It wasn’t until I’d arrived at the hospital that I learned Skid was still alive. During the storm, Barbereaux and Warner ambushed him in the barn. Skid’s
no rookie, but he didn’t even have a chance to draw his revolver. They shot him in the back first. As in my case, the Kevlar vest protected him. But when the two men realized he wasn’t dead, they shot him in the head.

Headshots are almost always fatal. In Skid’s case, however, the bullet struck his forehead at an angle that caused the .25 caliber bullet to ricochet off his skull without penetrating the cranium. The impact knocked him unconscious. He sustained a concussion. The wound required seven stitches to repair. He’s not complaining. Adhering to their usual bad cop humor, the guys are already giving him a hard time about the thickness of his skull. I’ve laughed about that a few times myself.

After three days in the hospital, I checked out against the advice of my doctor. Tomasetti was there to drive me home. On the way, I asked him to swing by Barbereaux’s house. He balked, of course, but I guilted him into letting me have my way. By that time, Barbereaux’s home had already been thoroughly searched by my team as well as BCI and the feds. I didn’t care. It took me two hours, a double dose of Vicodin, and a physical confrontation with Tomasetti, but I tore the place apart. If it hadn’t been for Tomasetti, I would have continued my mindless tirade until I collapsed. Despite my name-calling and cursing, he took me home.

Our relationship is complicated, but I’m thankful to have Tomasetti in my life. I’m thankful for this town. For the people I’ve surrounded myself with. I’m thankful for my job. It gives me purpose. It reminds me why God put me on this earth.

I’m not supposed to report back to work for a few more days. I’m not even supposed to be driving. I have four broken ribs and a broken ulna that required surgery and the insertion of a titanium pin to repair. But I’ve never been very good at following orders. I pull into my usual spot and kill the engine. I see Glock’s cruiser parked curbside. Mona’s Escort. As usual, Lois is early. Rain beads on her red Cadillac, and I know her husband spent half the weekend waxing it. Farther down, I see Pickles’s old Corvette and T.J.’s brand-new Mustang. Taking a moment to gather myself, I head inside.

Lois and Mona stand at the dispatch station, bent over the switchboard,
solving some new problem that’s cropped up with our antiquated phone system. They look up when I walk inside. “Chief!” Mona’s eyes widen as she takes in my cast and sling. My face still bears scabs from the pellets I took.

“It looks worse than it is,” I begin.

Lois comes around the dispatch station. “I didn’t think you were coming in for a couple more days.”

“I’m not.” I walk toward them. “Officially, anyway. I just wanted to check messages and make sure you guys aren’t having too much fun.”

Mona snorts. “Only fun thing around here is all the jokes about Skid’s head.”

“Emergency room doctor shaved the whole front,” Lois adds. “Poor guy won’t take off his cap.” She looks at my cast and sobers. “How are you feeling?”

“Cast is a pain in the ass.”

“Some graffiti might help that,” comes a male voice from somewhere behind me.

I glance over to see Glock, T.J., Pickles and Skid emerge from their cubicles, staring at me as if I’m some mental patient that’s escaped the psycho ward and wandered into the police station. Skid wears his Painters Mill PD cap. I see the edge of a bandage sticking out at his right temple. A black eye. Residual bruising on his right cheekbone. I withhold a smile . . . barely.

“You look pretty good for a guy who got shot in the noggin.” My grin spreads despite my efforts. “How’s the head?”

He grins back. “Pretty hard, evidently.”

“All them rocks rolling around inside,” Pickles growls.

“Fragmented the bullet so badly, BCI techs couldn’t find all the pieces,” Glock puts in. “That’s a hard fuckin’ head.”

Everyone laughs, but I feel their collective attention on me. I wonder if I look as strung out as I feel. I wonder if they know Barbereaux was alive and defenseless when I took that last shot. I wonder if they know I flew into a rage at Barbereaux’s house and that Tomasetti had to physically subdue me before he could drag me out. I wonder if it’s obvious I’ve been hitting the painkillers just a little too hard.

“How’s the arm?” Glock asks.

“Hurts like a son of a bitch.”

Skid sends me a silly grin and moves his eyebrows up and down. “How ’bout those Kevlar vests, Chief?”

That makes me laugh, which is almost as bad as coughing because my ribs protest loudly. “Don’t make me laugh,” I say, touching my side gingerly.

Silence trickles over us, reminding me why I’m really here. “I just wanted to thank all of you for going above and beyond on the Plank case. It was a tough one.” I sigh, surprised when my breath shudders. “You did a good job. We got them.”