Breaking Silence (28 page)

“Chief Burkholder?”

I turn to see a young paramedic standing a few feet away. His partner stands next to him, his eyes going to the body in the truck. “We’re going to have to get in there and check his vitals.”

I blink and step aside quickly. “I think he’s gone.”

“Looks that way, Chief, but we still need to verify.”

“Of course.”

The other paramedic glances at the .38 in my hand. “You okay, Chief Burkholder?”

My collarbone aches, but my own pain seems so minuscule in comparison to what’s happened here, I can’t bring myself to mention it. “I’m fine.”

“Don’t go anywhere. We’re going to need to check you out. Make sure you’re okay.”

Only then to do realize I’ve got tears on my cheeks. I’m gripping the gun so hard, my knuckles ache. When I look down, my hand is shaking as if I suffer from some form of palsy. I know the sheriff’s office will be taking my weapon from me. Cops never like that, but it’s protocol whenever there’s a fatality shooting. The BCI lab will test it, make the official determination that my bullets caused the death of Mose Slabaugh. I’ll be put on administrative leave. Not because I did anything wrong, but because I killed someone. They’ll urge me to seek counseling. I’ll resist. There will be a hearing. But it was a righteous kill.

A righteous kill.
Right.

One of the paramedics goes around to the driver’s side. I didn’t notice the fire truck arriving, but they’re here, because there’s a firefighter in full gear next to him. I know there are things I should be doing. But I’m not capable of much at the moment. My brain is misfiring, like an engine missing most of its spark plugs. I can’t stop shaking. I watch the two men pry the door open. Mose’s body nearly falls out, but the paramedic catches the dead boy by his shoulders. I see blood on blue latex gloves. Gray skin and staring eyes. And then the two men lower the body to the ground. The paramedic checks the carotid for a pulse, then places a stethoscope against the boy’s chest.

Not wanting Salome to see the body, I glance left, where I last saw her. She’s crumpled on the ground, her face and hands in the dirt. Her body quakes with sobs that sound more like screams. She looks small and pale and broken lying there. Her dress and hair are wet. Her fingers are curled in the mud, black under her nails. I want to go to her, comfort her, tell her it’s going to be all right. But I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure I’m capable of saying anything at the moment.

I’m relieved when I see Glock striding toward her, bending, setting his hands on her shoulders. But his eyes are on me. “I’ve got her,” he says, and it’s as if he’s reading my mind. “I’ll take care of her.”

“Kate.”

I turn at the sound of my name. Tomasetti stands a few feet away, looking at me as if I might shatter into a million pieces and he’s not sure he can contain them all. More than anything, I want to go to him. I want him to put his arms around me and make all this pain go away. I want to sink into him and never leave, because right now I know that’s the only safe place in the world.

“He’s dead,” I tell him.

He looks down at the gun in my hand and crosses to me. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t think I am.”

“I don’t think you are, either.” Never taking his eyes from me, he reaches out and eases the .38 from my grasp. “They’ll need your weapon.”

“I know.”

“Rasmussen will want to talk to you.”

I nod. “That’s fine.”

Sighing, he looks past me at Mose’s wrecked truck. Both doors of the vehicle are open, and I know he can see the paramedics preparing to load the corpse onto a gurney. “He try to run you down in the truck?” he asks.

“I should have run. Let him go. I should have taken cover in the—”

“That’s a crock of shit, Kate. He would have killed you if you hadn’t stopped him, and you know it. Don’t tear yourself up over this.”

“God, Tomasetti.” I lower my face into my hands. “God.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

When I don’t look at him, he wraps both hands around my wrists and gently pulls them from my face. When I still don’t make eye contact, he puts his hand beneath my chin and forces my gaze to his. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he repeats. “You got that?”

I look into his eyes. He stares back. He’s so solid and unflinching and kind. It’s a huge comfort knowing that he’s not judging me, that he doesn’t blame me. “It feels like I did,” I say.

“I know it does. It’s not easy taking another person’s life. But that’s part of the job sometimes.”

“I don’t know if I can handle that.”

“You can.”

I feel the burn of tears behind my eyes. The last thing I want to do is cry. Talk about bad form for a female cop. I swipe frantically at my eyes. “How are Ike and Samuel?”

“They’re going to be fine. Ambulance took them to the hospital. They’ll probably spend the night.”

When I close my eyes, I see their small bodies floating in the manure pit. “How could Mose do that to his little brothers?”

Tomasetti shakes his head. “That’s probably something we’ll never know.”

“I didn’t see this coming,” I tell him. “Why didn’t I see it coming?”

“Because you’re human.” He sighs. “None of us saw this.”

That’s not what I want to hear, but I let it go. “I want to talk to Salome.”

“Glock is with her.”

“I need to talk to her.” I start to move around him, but he stops me.

“Kate, paramedics are going to check you out, then I need to take you to the sheriff’s office. Rasmussen is obligated to talk to you.” He sighs. “So am I.”

Only then does it dawn on me just how difficult the next hours will be. There will be interviews and forms and a thousand questions. I don’t care about any of it. All I want to do is see the children, Ike and Samuel and Salome. I want to be the one to tell them what happened to their brother. At the very least, I want to be there when they get the news. But I know that won’t be the case. As of five minutes ago, I’m no longer a cop. Not until the shooting is fully investigated and I’m cleared of any wrongdoing.

I barely notice when the young paramedic crosses to where we stand. While Tomasetti looks on, he runs through the standard emergency medical protocol, taking my blood pressure and asking about any pain. My collarbone hurts plenty, but I don’t mention it. There’s no way I’m going to the hospital.

When he finishes, he looks at Tomasetti and proceeds to talk about me as if I’m not there. “She looks fine, but you might want to run by the ER before taking her home.”

“I’ll do that.”

I wait until the paramedic is out of earshot before saying, “I’m not going to the hospital.”

Tomasetti sighs. “Why am I not surprised?”

“I want to see the kids,” I say.

“I know. You can’t. Not right now.”

“I’m fine, damn it.”

“We need to talk to Rasmussen. File a report.”

When I don’t respond, Tomasetti motions toward his Tahoe, which is parked haphazardly twenty yards away. “Come on. I’ll drive you to the sheriff’s office.”

That’s the last place I want to be. Of course, I don’t have a choice. They’re going to take my badge, my weapon. Strip away my title. They’re going to pass my caseload to my subordinates. I know it’s temporary. But it doesn’t feel that way.

“I hate this,” I say.

“I hate it, too,” Tomasetti concurs. “But it’s going to be okay.”

As we walk toward his Tahoe, I glance over at Salome. She looks like a sad little ghost sitting in the passenger seat of Glock’s cruiser, a blanket around her shoulders. Her eyes meet mine, and I see a clutter of terrible emotions in their depths: grief, betrayal, hopelessness. But there are other emotions, too—thoughts and feelings I can’t even fathom—too many for me to sort through at the moment. For a crazy instant, I’m tempted to break free of Tomasetti, run to her, and tell her I didn’t have a choice.

Instead, I get into Tomasetti’s Tahoe, and we start toward the sheriff’s office.

CHAPTER 18

Killing someone changes you in ways most people can never understand. It stains your soul with an ineffaceable darkness. It burdens your psyche with a weight that will crush you if you let it. It adds a disconsolate component to your persona that shadows every facet of your life, like the total eclipse of a good sun by a bad moon, and you’re stuck in that darkness forever. And no matter how much good you do in an effort to make up for that black transgression, you know it will never be enough.

I’m standing alone in that darkness tonight. It’s unforgiving and covers my soul from end to end. That my victim was a child only deepens the black crevasse that’s split my mind right down the middle. The weight of it is slowly smothering me.

The degree of dysfunction a cop experiences after the use of deadly force depends on the cop. Some are capable of distancing themselves completely. Others can’t handle it and turn to alcohol or other vices. More than a few cops’ marriages end up in divorce. Others end up eating a bullet to end their misery. I’m one of the lucky ones; I fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t feel very lucky tonight.

The first night is always the worst, when you’re alone and tired and the images from the day are fresh in your mind. The instant you made the conscious decision to kill runs through your head over and over again, like some bad movie with a skip. That’s when the second-guessing begins, and you ask yourself,
Could I have done something differently?
The
if onlys
usually follow. If only I’d seen it coming. If only I’d waited a few more seconds. If fucking only. I can’t escape it. Mose is still dead, and his blood is still warm on my hands.

He isn’t the first person I’ve killed. When I was fourteen years old, an Amish man by the name of Daniel Lapp came into our farmhouse and raped me. I grabbed my
datt
’s rifle and shot him in the chest. It was a clear case of self-defense. Of course, when you’re fourteen and traumatized beyond anything you’ve ever imagined, it doesn’t matter. I had committed the consummate sin, and I would pay for my offense against God the rest of my life.

My
datt
covered up the crime, swore all of us to silence, and the entire incident was swept under the rug. I’ve learned to live with my demons, but it’s not a comfortable cohabitation. To this day, I can’t drive past the old grain elevator where Lapp’s bones are slowly turning to powder without remembering what he did. Without remembering what I did. What all of us did.

After the shooting this morning, Tomasetti drove me to the sheriff’s office in Millersburg. Rasmussen, Tomasetti, a representative from the Ohio State Highway Patrol, and I spent four hours in an interview room, where they took my statement. Though the men did their best to reassure me that I hadn’t done anything wrong, I felt as tainted and guilty as a criminal. I had, after all, taken the life of a seventeen-year-old boy. The irony that he was Amish doesn’t elude me.

For four hours, I answered the same questions a hundred different ways, a hundred times over. I ranted and cursed and slammed my fist down on the tabletop. I did everything cops do in situations like this. Everything but cry, anyway. That’s the one thing I haven’t been able to do.

They stripped me of my gun and relegated me to administrative duty. With pay, of course. After the debriefing, Tomasetti drove me home. Wise to the ways of guilt, he did his best to keep me talking. I didn’t cooperate and fell into a black silence that echoed inside me like a scream. He wanted to stay with me.
I
wanted him to stay, too. More than I could admit, more than he could know. But the case had just busted wide open; we both knew he had to work.

The Slabaugh case now takes precedence over the hate crimes, though Tomasetti will work both with equal fervor. The cops will want to know if Mose killed his adoptive parents and uncle. They’ll want to know if Salome was involved. If she was, they’ll want to know to what extent. Good luck with all that, Tomasetti.

It killed me to stay behind. More than anything, I
needed
to see this through. This is my case. My town. It was my goddamn bullet that killed Mose. I wanted to finish this. Too bad, Kate.

Of course, none of that matters, because when a cop is on leave, he’s basically no longer a cop. He’s a civilian and is treated as such. The only thing Tomasetti asked of me before he left was that I lay off the booze. I figured we both knew he should have taken the bottle with him. Thank God he didn’t, because the demons came knocking the instant he closed the door.

It’s almost 10:00
P.M.
now. The pain in my shoulder is back, so I took three aspirin from a bottle that expired two months ago. So far, it’s not helping, but then maybe I deserve to hurt tonight. I’ve showered and put on a ratty pair of sweats and a T-shirt from my academy days. I turned on the TV, turned it back off. Did the same with the radio. I wish I could do it with my mind. Turn it off, crank down the volume, unplug the damn thing. I’m wired, but exhausted. I can’t sit. Can’t stand. Can’t eat. Can’t sleep. It’s like my skin is too tight. My mind is wound like a top and at any moment it’s going to spiral out of control.

For the first time in a long time, I wish I could cry. It’s as if the tears are stuck in my throat and they’re slowly choking me. At the same time, the fist lodged in my chest is twisting my heart and lungs into knots, until I can’t draw a breath. Even though the temperature hovers around freezing outside, I throw open the kitchen window and stand by the sink, sucking in great mouthfuls of air. I need Tomasetti, but I won’t call him. I swore long ago the one thing I would never be is the clinging-vine female.

On a brighter note, in the last couple of hours every member of my small police force has called at least once: Glock, Mona, Lois, Pickles, T. J., even Skid, who doesn’t have a compassionate bone in his body. We ended up talking about the weather. They’re my officers, but they’re also my friends. My family. They believe me when I tell them I’m all right. I say it so often, I almost believe it myself. Then that fist inside me tightens and I realize I’m about as okay as a dog that’s just been run over by a bus.