Kingdom Come (10 page)

Ezra stared out the windshield as if he hadn't noticed, but I could tell by the color staining his cheek and his tensed posture that he had.

“Is this going to get you in trouble?” I asked.

He let out a held breath. “No more'n I am already.”

“Want to talk about it?”

He shook his head firmly. “It's nice
not
to talk about it.”

So I was an escape for Ezra too. If that's the way he was treated by his neighbors, he was probably in need of a friend. I could live with that. “Okay.”

Nevertheless, I was a cop, which made me nosy by training, and I was getting to the point where I really wanted to know more about Ezra Beiler. I was working my way around an approach in my head when he saved me the trouble.

“You have family here?”

“Not really. I grew up in Quarryville, but I was an only child. My parents died in a car crash a few years ago.” I didn't mention that the police thought Dad had been drinking. “I have some cousins around, but I haven't seen them in a long time.”

“Oh. Sorry about your parents. Can't imagine.”

Given how large the Amish families were, I thought it probably would be hard for Ezra to imagine not being surrounded by relatives.

“How did you come to work for the police, then?”

It was a fair question, one I got from just about anyone I met for the first time. “I was studying criminal justice in college. I thought about being a lawyer. But then I witnessed an accident. It was in the city. A girl was hit by a car. There was a female police officer who was there, held the girl's hand and kept her calm while they were waiting for an ambulance. She was so”—
strong, calm, warm—“
professional. Helpful, you know? And school was so expensive. I decided to quit and go to the police academy.”
Where I could actually be useful right away and earn money rather than burning it
.

I'd eventually finished up my criminal justice BA taking classes part-time, with financial help from the NYPD. But that felt like boasting, and Ezra didn't need to know that.

Ezra digested the information. Unlike most people, he didn't seem to feel the need to pass judgment on my choices.

“You married?” he asked after several minutes of silence. His tone was neutral and he kept his eyes on the road, though we weren't exactly breaking land-speed records with the mule and buggy.

There was a low tingle in my belly. If he asked that, he was interested, right? Unless, of course, he was simply making conversation. “I was.”

“Divorced?”

“Widowed,” I said, hoping to draw him out about his own past. He looked a little surprised but didn't glance at me and said nothing.

“You?” I prompted, though I knew.

“Same.”

“What happened?”

He appeared to wrestle with what to say. “She was hit by a car.”

“Oh God, Ezra. I'm so sorry.”

“Yeah.” Then: “Sorry about your husband too.”

“So am I.”

I was still more than sorry about Terry, the man who had been my husband.

Ezra Beiler was the polar opposite of Terry Leblanc.

When we'd met, I was a beat cop and Terry was the victim of an armed mugging. He hadn't been hurt, just shaken. We never
did find the perp, but Terry canceled all his credit cards and he got me in the bargain. He always said he was the luckiest mugging victim in the city's history.

Terry was urbane, sophisticated. Compared to him, I always felt like a rube. When we met, he was forty-nine and I was twenty-four. He was a man who always had been, and always would be, very handsome, a silver fox, as my friends called him. He had a strong, noble face and brown hair with a lot of gray that was long enough to hit his shoulders. He was a dapper dresser, the kind of man who still wore vests and ties. He had a beautifully decorated apartment and a reasonably successful career as a literary novelist. And I—I was a girl from small-town Pennsylvania who'd become a New York cop, chugged beer with the guys, and had girls' nights out with other female cops who talked like dockworkers. Despite my bit of higher education, I was from a blue-collar world.

I often felt like Terry's arm candy, particularly around his friends, though Terry pooh-poohed those feelings. There were times when I wondered if Terry's main attraction to me was my looks. Well, honestly, he wasn't shy to admit that he thought I was beautiful, that he was proud to be seen with me. He liked to see me in a dress. Like my mother used to say, I “cleaned up well.” But if Terry was a bit of a seducer at the start, if I was a bit awestruck, we ended up with a genuine love. We were together for two years before we got married, and I had him for four years after that.

It wasn't perfect. There were times when Terry could make me feel small. He had a sharp brain and a wicked tongue. But he doted on me, was proud of me, and encouraged me. He exposed
me to so many things I never would have experienced without him. He encouraged me to finish my degree and go for the promotion to detective. If I was still a rube deep down inside, Terry had helped me polish off the rough edges. He helped me be
more
of what I inherently was—a strong and confident woman, a public servant, a righter of wrongs.

But as much as I had stars in my eyes about his suave lifestyle initially, by the end I merely tolerated it. The literary parties bored me out of my skull—a lot of pretentious posturing as far as I was concerned. And his love of beautiful things and expensive food and wine got to me sometimes. He had a fairly modest income as a writer and so did I. I was uncomfortable with his extravagances. I was a simple girl at heart. I could be happy in a cabin in the woods with a single bedroom and a woodstove. Especially with my job being as stressful as it was, I had a craving for the clean and basic and safe; Terry needed more. When we traveled, he wanted fine dining in Paris whereas I would have been happy going hiking in Vermont. We did what Terry wanted, of course, and I always enjoyed it. As I said, I experienced a lot of things with Terry that I never would have done on my own. I mean, what's not to love about Paris? I was grateful.

I loved him. I respected his talent. He was my first and only real love. And I was devastated when he was murdered.

I sat in that buggy watching the rural winter landscape go by, hearing the
clop clop
of the mule's hooves on the asphalt, and I felt that pang of hunger for the simple that had driven me back to Pennsylvania. I'd wanted to escape from the ugliness I'd seen in my ten years on the force—the gang shootings, the domestic violence, the terrorist threats. . . . It had all accumulated into a
pile of shit weighing on my soul that had been bearable on some days, unbearable more and more often, and ultimately was topped off with the big, oozing cherry of Terry's senseless and horrific death. I wanted . . .

“Detective Harris?” Ezra said quietly. It sounded so formal.

“Call me E.” I sat up straighter, coming back to the here and now.

“E?”

“Short for Elizabeth. People call me E when they're not calling me Detective Harris,” I explained with a smile.

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “May I call you Elizabeth?”

No one had ever called me that. It was too feminine and old-fashioned a name for a modern woman, a police officer. I'd been Liz in high school, but my friends in New York had started calling me E, and it was infinitely more hip. But the way Ezra said it—
Elizabeth
—made me feel all warm inside. Maybe I liked feeling feminine and old-fashioned around him. Which was something to contemplate—later. “If you prefer. Hey. See those houses over there?”

We were approaching town. I pointed across a mile or so of empty fields to a distant cluster of prefab houses. If it had been summer, there would have been a million cornstalks blocking the view.

“Ja.”

“I live in the blue one on the far right. If you ever need anything.”

I turned to look at him with a smile, because I needed right then to reach out. He glanced at me and smiled back, and my mood got a little lighter.

“I'll remember.” I thought he sounded pleased. I made up my mind that he was.

“The market's just up here on the right. I'll leave ya and stop back by after I drop the chairs off.”

“An Amish taxi service. This could be a thing.”

Ezra snorted. “I'll text ya when I'm back. That way I don't have to tie Sandy up.”

“Oh,” I said in surprise. Of course, I'd known he had a cell phone. “You need my number?”

He looked away, a slight flush rising on his cheekbones. “You gave me your card once already.”

And you still have it? Maybe even put my number in your phone?
That was interesting.

“So . . . you're going to text me to say you're outside waiting with the horse and buggy?” I teased.

The corner of his mouth tugged up ever so slightly. “Not at all.” He turned his head and looked me in the eye, his face serious. “It's a mule.”

—

I barely made it back to the station house before our noon meeting. It was a Saturday, but we were all working. We'd taken to grabbing a conference room—Grady, me, Smith, and Hernandez—with bagged lunches to go over our progress on the case. As I headed over there, Grady caught up with me.

“Where were you all morning, Harris?”

“I got up early and took a metal detector over to Grimlace Lane. I checked along the creek for that missing cell phone of Jessica's.”

Grady looked dubious. “The cell phone we think Katie had on her when she died?”

“That's the one.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Then I went over and talked to the guy who runs the stall where Katie worked at the Paradise Farmers' Market.”

“Good!” Grady clapped his hand on my back in a rather paternal way as we went into the conference room. “I've got some things to fill you in on too.”

I brought the team up to speed on what I'd learned from Katie's old boss, which wasn't all that much. Mr. Dearling was a man in his sixties, and he and his wife ran the stall. They sold organic salads—pasta salads and the like—which his wife made. Having a “true Amish” in the stall was good for business, Mr. Dearling said. Katie was a good worker, had a pleasant disposition, and the customers liked her. She'd made minimum wage and, as far as he'd seen, never spent a dime of it at the market.

As for Jessica, she'd worked in the baked-goods shop next door and she and Katie had become friends quickly. They went off together every day at the end of their shift. Mr. Dearling admitted that he'd been worried about what Katie's parents would say about Katie spending so much time with Jessica, but he'd not interfered. Jessica had quit her job when school started after Labor Day and Katie had worked through September. They always laid off the summer help after the last weekend in September because the tourists dried up and they didn't need the help.

Mr. Dearling and his wife were not suspects as far as I was concerned. They were truly surprised and saddened at the news
of Katie's death, and neither of them had the physical strength to carry Jessica's body. Mr. Dearling said both of the girls got plenty of attention from the boys who wandered by, but there was no one in particular who stalked or harassed them that he could recall.

As I recounted this to Grady and the others, I skipped the part about my riding to and from the market in Ezra Beiler's buggy and about Deacon Lapp's thunderous look. The blueberry jam did not come up.

Any more interest in what might or might not have gone on at the farmers' market was quickly put aside by Grady's news. The computer people had given Grady a report on the contents of Jessica's computer.

“Jessica had an e-mail account, [email protected]. She used it for soliciting on Craigslist.” He passed out a sheet of paper with a screenshot of a Craigslist page. There was an ad circled.

2 young girls looking for sugar daddies to love. Beautiful and willing. Only serious gentlemen please. Pic available on request.

“That gets right to the point,” I said.

“‘Young' and ‘willing' probably would have done it,” Smith grumbled.

“And there was a folder of photos too. These were probably used for setting up appointments with their johns.”

He showed them to us on his own laptop. There were a half dozen of the selfie variety, Jessica and Katie made-up and blowing kisses or smiling at the camera. I moved closer to get a good
look. I'd seen Katie's corpse but never a picture of the living girl. God, they looked young. And very pretty, both of them. Katie was in makeup and in her English clothes—I recognized them from her hidden stash. But there was something different about her all the same, sweet and a bit unworldly yet with eyes full of invitation. Jessica was a pretty blonde, but she was a girl who existed a dozen times over in every small town in America. She couldn't hold a candle to Katie.

The idea that these two put themselves out there for anyone who could log on to a computer sent a chill of horror down my spine. They must have been so, so desperate to get out of here.

“Do we know for sure they took money for sex?” I asked.

“Apparently ‘sugar daddy' is understood to mean there would be money involved,” Grady said. “We didn't find her e-mails on the laptop. It looks like she only accessed them in a browser, and tmailer has a rep for being difficult and slow. But we may have luck with Craigslist. All the responses to Jessica's ad had to go through them and there's precedent that they'll open their records, particularly in a murder case. They don't want to become known as a place to get victimized.”

“That's fantastic!” I was already laying it out in my mind. “If we can find someone who contacted Jessica around last October—”

“Yeah,” Grady said, smiling broadly. “That tmailer account was set up August twenty-eighth, so the killer had to contact them sometime between then and October tenth, when Katie Yoder was murdered.”