The Names of Our Tears (4 page)

When they reached the lane, they bagged their nitrile gloves, and Ricky said, “There’s no way to tell where anyone was standing.”

“And no way to tell how many people were here,” Lance added.

Down the gravel lane came the slow rattle of an empty buggy. It was hitched to a horse in high lather, one Amish lad leading the horse by the reins, while the shorter of the two walked beside him. The horse was still somewhat agitated, blowing froth from
its nostrils and lips, and lifting its feet in an awkward, irregular gait.

The boys stopped the horse behind Ricky’s cruiser, and Niell and Lance walked up to them.

The older of the boys said, “She’s hurt. Hind legs are bloody where she’s been kicking at the shafts.”

Niell stepped to the flank of the horse and saw that one of the hickory shafts had been cracked and splintered near the rear. The left edge of the whiffletree was nicked and scratched. Several of the straps comprising the harness had been loosened by the exertions of the horse, and the breeching was stretched out of place at the rump of the horse.

Lance asked, “Will she be OK?” and the younger of the boys said, “We think so.”

The older boy spoke with more assurance. “She needs leg wraps with a poultice, and new shoes. She’ll be fine.”

Niell and Lance stood at the front of the buggy and studied an ugly splatter of red blood that had coalesced and bled down the front of the buggy’s dash. The splatter ran across the back of the buggy’s seat. Despite his training and experience, Niell was appalled by the crimson spray. He said as much to Lance, and she answered grimly, “This is where she was shot.”

Wondering about the Amish boys who had obviously seen the blood, Lance turned around to check on them. Apparently uninterested, they were helping each other bend and lift the left front leg of the horse to inspect the hoof. They paid scant attention to Niell and Lance.

Leaning in beside the buggy’s dash, Niell found a hole punched into the leather seat back, roughly in the center of the blood splatter, and he asked Lance for a pair of long forceps. She went back to her cruiser, took out her kit, opened it on the hood, and brought Niell a long pair with blunted tips. Distracted by the boys, she handed the forceps to Niell and nodded toward the youngsters. With their penknives, they were cleaning mud from the horseshoe. Lance gave Niell a bewildered shake of her head, and Niell shrugged fatalistically. Obviously the lads weren’t disturbed
by what they had seen, and Niell said softly to Lance, “I think they’ll be OK.”

Turning back to the buggy, Niell had Lance take several photographs of the dash and of the damaged buggy seat, then he eased the tips of the forceps into the round hole in the leather. He felt something solid, opened the forceps wider to acquire the object, closed gently, and pulled back on a straight line with the path into the hole. It was a bullet, spread by impact to a wide and ugly star shape in front. It had been black coated originally, but now it was abraded along its flank by the lands and grooves of a gun barrel to reveal striations of shiny copper where its heavy base hadn’t expanded. The star blades fanning out and back at the front of the bullet were blood- and flesh-encrusted, but the sharp tips were bright metal, though jagged, as if they had been cleansed by passage through the leather of the buggy seat.

Niell looked at Lance and groaned, “It’s a Black Talon, Pat. A forty-five-caliber Black Talon.”

“I thought those were illegal. Pulled off the market a long time ago.”

“Yeah,” Niell said. “Since the Clinton administration. Looks like someone kept one.”

Lance said, “It’s a really big wound that I felt at the back of her skull. And it would have to have been a hollow-point that made it.”

Niell dropped the slug into an evidence jar and screwed on the lid. He studied the hole in the seat back and took a position wedged between the dash and the rump of the horse. “If she was shot in the head, and the bullet ended up here, she must have been standing in front of her buggy like this, right here, tight against the rump of this horse.”

“OK, but forty-five autos throw brass,” Lance said. “Where’s the brass?”

Ricky shrugged. “Over there in the mud somewhere?”

“And where’s her finger?” Lance asked.

The boys spoke up, then. One of them had a folding knife open in one hand, and with the other he held up a silvered brass
bullet casing between his fingers. The second boy displayed a handkerchief with mud on it, saying, “We cleaned it up for you,” with a satisfied smile.

The lad with the brass casing said, “We found this wedged under the horseshoe. It’s probably why she wasn’t walking so good.”

Lance took the casing, said, “Thank you, boys,” and showed the shiny brass to Niell, saying, “Won’t be any fingerprints left. But it’s a forty-five, Ricky.”

She carried it over to her evidence kit at the front of her cruiser and dropped it into a jar. Niell followed with the forceps and the bullet.

As he reached Lance’s cruiser, Ricky’s phone sounded the captain’s tone, and he answered the call, handing his evidence jar and forceps to Lance.

Captain Newell asked over the phone, “Making any progress, Detective Niell?”

Ricky mouthed “More photos,” to Lance, and said to the captain, “We’ve finished with the preliminaries. She’s ready for Missy.”

“Our ME’s not there yet?” Newell asked.

“Not yet,” Ricky said, walking back to the front of his cruiser with Lance.

Newell humphed into the phone. “I got a call from Stan. I told him I’d call you.”

“He was supposed to call me,” Ricky said.

“I think he would have, Detective,” Newell said. “But he was standing out on the front porch of that B and B, getting ready to call you, when he heard an explosion from down the road.”

“What kind of explosion?”

“A big one. Smoke and dirt thrown into the air behind a house. It was down at the Zooks’.”

“What’d he learn about their daughter?” Ricky asked, nervous about the explosion.

“She just got back from Florida. Came home on the bus over the weekend.”

“Has she showed up for work?”

“No.”

“Does anyone over there know where she is?”

“No, Detective. But Stan’s waiting for you at the Zooks’. And they’re asking if we know where she is.”

“Are you going to meet us out there?” Niell asked.

“Oh, no,” the captain said. “This is a job for the sheriff.”

Niell felt a tug on his sleeve, and when he looked down, one of the Amish boys was pulling a small red leather wallet out of the side pocket of his denim trousers, saying, “We found this under the seat.”

Niell thanked the lad and said to Newell, “Wait a minute.” He handed the phone to Lance. From the wallet, he pulled a folded check stub from the Maple Valley B and B, with Ruth Zook’s name on it. It was dated nearly two months earlier.

Niell took the phone back from Lance and said to Newell, “We’ve got a wallet here, Captain. There’s a check stub in it, from the B and B, written to a Ruth Zook, address on 557.”

“OK, Niell, meet the sheriff at the Zooks’. You can call Stan, too. And bring your camera. We’ll have them look at her picture.”

“OK, but if she’s their daughter, they won’t like seeing her this way.”

“Is there a way to get a picture that isn’t so hard to look at?”

“Not without disturbing evidence.”

“Then we can’t do anything about it.”

“OK,” Niell said again. “But what was that explosion?”

Newell laughed. “Old Man Zook, the grandfather, used
about a ton
of dynamite, from what Stan tells me, to breach the dam on his farm pond. Stan says that there’s mud, water, and dead fish spread for about a quarter mile downstream from there, and it wasn’t the explosion that killed the fish.”

“What do you mean?”

“All the fish in the Zook pond were killed sometime last night, Ricky, before the explosion this morning.”

*   *   *

Before he left, Ricky gathered the boys on the far side of his black-and-white cruiser. Except for their difference in height, they could have been twins. Certainly they were dressed like twins. Shiny blue denim pants, with large slit pockets in the sides. Brown work boots, somewhat new. Long-sleeved blue shirts under black wool vests that were fastened in front by hook-and-eye closures. On each of their heads sat a new straw hat, butter yellow in color, with a thin black hatband. The crowns were shaped like fedoras, but the brims were built wide to ward off the sun, more practical than fashionable.

Ricky leaned over to them and said, “You’ve been a big help. Thanks.”

Each lad gave a mature and sober nod of his head.

Ricky wanted to smile, but he knew it would be misinterpreted. Instead, he said, “You’ve seen a lot here. You’re very brave.”

The older of the two said, “We’ve seen blood before.”

The younger added, “And we’ve seen dead bodies.”

Niell acknowledged that. “You’ve handled yourselves well.”

The lads straightened a bit, seeming to Niell to be curiously martial in their postures. “Maybe you should head for home,” he said. “Someone needs to check on your grandfather.”

“He’s seen dead bodies, too,” the older said.

“I’m sure he has,” Ricky said. “But I think he’s going to be sad. Maybe you could check on him.”

The younger lad looked up to the older, and the older said, “We can do that.”

Ricky said, “Why don’t you tell me your names, so I can ask for you when I visit your grandfather.”

“John.”

“Mahlon.”

“John and Mahlon, OK. Now, before you go, can you tell me if you’ve seen this girl before?”

The boys’ eyes turned in the direction of the glade, but Ricky had positioned them on the far side of his cruiser. The body wasn’t visible to them.

The little fellow, Mahlon, looked back at Niell, considered the question with eyes that seemed to be searching his memory, and said, “I don’t think so.”

John said, “We talked about that when we were bringing the horse back. We don’t think we know her.”

“Maybe you don’t know who she is, but you remember seeing her once or twice,” Ricky led.

The lads shook their heads in unison.

“OK,” Ricky said, standing up straight. “Please check on your grandfather. If I get a chance today, I’ll come by your house and check with you, to see how he is doing.”

The lads nodded sternly, turned, and walked down the lane. As they passed the glade, their eyes turned compulsively toward the body of the girl.

WHEN RICKY Niell got to the Zook residence on 557, there were seven buggies parked on the gravel drive. They were clustered beside a sprawling, yellow-sided, two-and-a-half-story farmhouse, with a gabled roofline and a wraparound front porch. Nearly two dozen Amish folk—men, women, and children—had gathered on the porch of the home, and they watched Niell intently as he got out with his camera and walked up to Armbruster and Robertson on the driveway. On the lawn off to the side stood an Amish man in black denim, about fifty years old, with a white-haired grandfather in uniformly similar dress standing next to him. Each man wore a wide-brimmed, round-crowned black felt hat, and as Niell approached, he read apprehension in their expressions. Word had passed, it seemed. The family had gathered itself to hear bad news.

Ricky pulled Robertson aside and whispered, “Are you sure about this, Sheriff? None of these photos is easy to look at.”

Sheriff Bruce Robertson was dressed in a gray business suit, white shirt, and blue tie. He had managed to lose a few pounds over the winter, thanks to a diet and exercise program that Melissa Taggert, his wife, had devised for him, but the sheriff was still as broad through the shoulders as he ever was, and still
somewhat round at the belly. He turned to study the two Amish men on the front lawn, then turned back to Niell, saying, “They already suspect it’s her, Ricky. They’ve been getting news about this for nearly half an hour, and when I pulled in, they asked about the dead girl over on TR 165. They’ve got a description of her from someone, and they’re expecting the worst.”

Niell looked up to the porch and saw that many of the people there had faces lined with tears. The children shifted nervously beside their parents, aware that something was dreadfully wrong, if not completely certain yet what it was. As if to honor hope while it was still possible, few words were spoken among the people. What needed to be said was most plainly visible in the grim countenance of a middle-aged woman standing in plain Amish blues and blacks at the front edge of the porch, watching Ricky advance with his camera, as if to accuse him personally for a loss she couldn’t possibly bear.

Niell turned back to Robertson, and the sheriff said, “I called Cal Troyer to come out.”

Feeling an awkward hesitation about what Robertson wanted him to do, Ricky asked, “Then, don’t you think we should wait for Cal? Before I show them any pictures?”

Robertson shook his head. “We need to do this, Ricky. The father and the grandfather are the only ones who need to look.”

Ricky nodded solemnly. He switched on his camera, selected a photograph that plainly showed the girl’s face, and walked over to the two Amish men. When he showed the LCD display on the back of his camera to the men, the father cried out and jerked his head away reflexively as a shudder of anguish washed through him. The grandfather calmly took the camera, studied the face of his granddaughter, and nodded wordlessly. Then he turned to walk up the porch steps, to give the news to the family. The father stayed with the lawmen, head hanging down, tears coursing his cheeks and wetting his chin whiskers.

Zook lifted his hat slowly off his head and brushed the tears away. Robertson and Armbruster flanked the man, intending to steady him if he buckled at the knees or lost his balance.

Drawn by the sorrow he saw on Amish faces, Niell stepped compassionately toward the porch and helplessly watched the people file back into the house. They ushered their children along in front of them, trying in whispers to explain to the youngest what had happened.

After all the others had gone inside, one young girl, maybe ten years old, stood on the porch in her plain lilac dress and white head covering, studying Niell as he looked up to the porch. His eyes turned to hers, and he saw that she was struggling not to cry. Bravely, or maybe angrily, he thought, she stood rock still, with her fingers curled up into little fists, seeming to deny herself the release of tears that would force her to confront her sorrow.