Kingdom Come (16 page)

His eyes were troubled and a bit wild. He was strung with tension, like he was holding some giant weight. I remembered the story I'd heard as a child about Atlas holding up the world. For some reason, Ezra struck me like that. I wanted to take that crushing weight away.

“I'm sorry I made you talk about this.”

“
No
,” Ezra insisted with a firm shake of his head. “I meant to tell ya. Thought you should know.”

We stared at each other. He thought I should know?

It certainly had nothing to do with the case. Together with his visit and the goodie basket, I only knew one way to interpret that. He wanted me to know the worst about his past because he liked me. He thought I had a right to know about his disastrous marriage so I could make an informed choice about being with him.

There was absolutely no doubt in my heart about my answer. I put my hands on his face, went up on my tiptoes, and kissed him.

As incredibly attracted as I'd been to Ezra from the start, and as long as it had been since I'd had sex with someone, I hadn't intended to pounce on the man. I only intended a brief meeting of mouths, a response to his unasked query, an invitation for him
to proceed. So after brushing my lips against his, I rested my forehead on his cheek.

I breathed in his expelled breath. He smelled of the earth, even in the dead of winter, and of horses and wood smoke and soap. I bit back a flood of want, determined not to push this moment.

His hands touched my waist and his head tilted down, his mouth nudging into mine, seeking, trembling, yearning.

Gone.
There was a moment in which my brain shut off and when it came back I was flush against him, his arms were around me, and he was kissing me deeply. Or maybe I was kissing him. Whoever was responsible, the kiss was all heat and friction and glide. At first he seemed unsure of what to do, as if he'd never kissed quite like this before, but he threw himself into it with desperation and a greedy hunger. It was as if this could be pulled away from him at any second, and he had to take it all
now
. He pushed into me as if he was trying to go
through
me, all muscle and will and hardness, and maybe defiance too.

“Ezra,” I soothed, pulling my mouth away to speak.

“Don't. Don't, don't, don't,” he mumbled, his hands pulling me closer.

“Shhh. I'm not going anywhere.”

“You can't want me.”

I laughed. “Now you really are confused.”

I kissed his neck, unable to resist tasting the place below his ear. He made a throaty sound and held me tighter. He was so strong, I swore he was going to crush the life out of me. I heard his heart thumping fast and felt the trembling of want in his hands. I was tempted. It had been a long time for me. But I forced myself to push away.

“I'm not going anywhere,” I said again, to reassure him. But I didn't want to be like Mary. I didn't want to seduce him into bed and then have him regret it later.

He started to reach for me and stopped himself. He swallowed. We stared at each other for a long moment, both wanting more and both making a conscious decision not to take it.

“Sorry if I disrespected you,” he said at last.

I couldn't stop a smile from spreading over my face. “I thought I came on to you.”

A spark of humor lit in his eyes but he answered solemnly. “Pretty sure it was t'other way around.”

“You rebel,” I said. “Driving cars in the snow and kissing loose women.”

“I wasn't the one driving the car,” he said laconically.

I nudged his shoulder for that, teasingly. Then I decided I was in control of myself enough to lean into him again. He put his arms around me lightly this time, the fire banked. “You feel good,” I whispered.

“You feel right to me too.” He sounded a little surprised. He hugged me closer with one arm.

We stood there like that for a bit, him leaning against the kitchen counter and me leaning against him. I was just about to suggest we move into the living room when he said, “I don't have much. When I leave the Amish, I'll be starting from nothing again.”

I pulled back and looked up at him, puzzled.

“I hope to keep my customers. For the mules and the furniture. But I'm not sure where I'll have to move to. Gonna sell the farm. I can't stay where I am.”

“Okay.”

His brow knit in a puzzled frown. “You know I have to find a place to rent where I can keep the mules. I make pretty good money off 'em and I hope to build the business. It won't be anything like this house, probably.”

I shrugged. “As long as it's not so far away that I never see you.”

“You want to see me?”

“Ezra.” I pushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “The last man I cared for was murdered. Compared to that, none of these are big problems. We'll figure it out. If we both want to.”

“I want to,” he said without hesitation. “You're the first person in my life who's ever made sense to me, Elizabeth Harris. I may not know much, but I know that it feels good to be with you. You see me as I am, and you . . . like it. My whole life everyone only saw me as an Amish man and I wasn't very good at being one.”

My chest burned. “You're perfect just the way you are.” How could he not know this?

He said nothing for a moment. Then: “What happened to your husband?”

Well. Ezra had been open with me. I supposed I owed him the same courtesy. But if we were going to get into that, I definitely needed to sit down. I refilled our coffee cups and led him out to the living room couch. This was a difficult story, and, needing some distance to tell it, I sat at the end of the sofa and curled my feet up under me. He sat in the middle and put an arm across the back but made no move to touch me.

“We lived in New York City. I was a detective by then and I was working late, as usual. Terry went out to the drugstore down
the block from our apartment to pick up a few things. While he was there, two armed robbers came in. They ended up killing three customers and two people who worked there.”

Ezra was perfectly still, but his eyes reflected a pain I knew wasn't all for me.

“The stupid thing was, Terry didn't even try to fight the robbers. He wouldn't have played hero. He just stood there in his trench coat in the aspirin aisle, hands up, and they shot him.”

I'd seen the security footage from the store. It was the absolute cold senselessness of it that got to me. No one was trying to stop those two young ex-cons from taking the cash in the store's register, or anything else they wanted, and their faces had been covered in ski masks so no one could have identified them. Yet still they'd gunned down my husband and the others for no reason.

I realized I was shaking. Ezra put one large hand on my calf. “There's so much I don't know about the world out there. It scares me sometimes. The elders say there's so much wickedness and murder.”

“It's not all like that. There are a lot of good people out there. No place is all good or all bad.” I sighed. “Not even Grimlace Lane.”

“True enough. Even heaven can be hell when you don't belong there.”

I thought about that. “God, that's profound.”

“Ancient Amish wisdom,” Ezra said solemnly. I knew he was trying to lighten the mood.

I snorted. “It is not.”

He growled and pulled my legs onto his lap, pinning me down. “Are you callin' me a liar?”

“I think you spin more yarn than a knitting factory, Ezra Beiler.”

“Take that back!”

He tickled me so I tickled him. We wrestled and kissed and wrestled some more. It made my heart
hurt
, in a good way, to see him playful. It was a moment of joy for him, like something had been set free inside him for the first time in his life, and I had given him that.

As we wrestled, the kissing began to outpace the horseplay. By a lot.

Now that the floodgates had opened and Ezra was here with me, it was impossible to turn off wanting him in every way. I'd never expected to feel this way after Terry. And I did feel a little guilty about that. But finding Ezra was such a miracle, and I knew he needed me too.

It wasn't going to be easy. We were from different worlds. And, as happy as he was right now, I knew his process of separating from the Amish was far from over and would be painful. And then there was me. What would Grady say? Ezra wasn't really a suspect, but it still was dicey territory, especially after that visit from the Amish delegation.

But I had a hard time assimilating anything like logic where Ezra was concerned. My heart was like,
Screw that. Just gimme.
Maybe that was the definition of the word “faith.” Maybe faith isn't something you choose to believe. Maybe it's something your heart believes in for you.

In Custody

The following Tuesday, our slow work with the IP addresses finally struck the jugular. We traced one to an address that was all too familiar. Grady called a quick war council in his office with Smith, Hernandez, and me.

“I've been in touch with Klein's. Larry is due back from his pickup route at three. We're going to arrest him at the dairy. I'd rather not have a four-thousand-gallon milk truck in the middle of this.”

“Where do you want us?” I asked, buzzing with adrenaline.

“Harris, you'll be with me at the dairy. Smith and Hernandez, you'll tail Larry in an unmarked and report on his whereabouts until he ends his route. Make sure he doesn't get a whiff of this and take off. And he
won't see you
. Got it?”

Hernandez grinned. He kissed the tips of his fingers and blew them out in a “vanish” gesture. “Like ghosts.”

The guy had been watching too much
Godfather
, but he was enthusiastic. I had to give him that. They took off.

“You're going to actually arrest him? Not just bring him in for questioning?” I asked Grady.

“He lied, Harris,” Grady said angrily. “He denied that he knew Jessica from her crime-scene photo, and he denied it again when I went back there with her high school picture. Yet he obviously knew her. He responded to her Craigslist ad. His IP is on the list!”

“Right,” I agreed firmly. “So let's haul his ass in and question him. But we don't even know that he actually hooked up with them. Jessica might not have responded.”

“You're the one who started this line of investigation,” Grady huffed. “‘The killer has to know the area,' you said. Well, Larry Wannemaker knows the area. He doesn't have an alibi, he was in the park on his lunch break at the time Jessica was killed, and he'd been in contact with her through the Craigslist ad.”

It did add up to a shitload of trouble for our friendly neighborhood milkman.

“When did he contact her?”

“Last September!” Grady said, his eyes glowing. “He must have hooked up with them last fall. He's not a bad-looking guy, right? So maybe Jessica sets it up. Then he meets Katie separately—hell, maybe he just happened to see her biking to the Lapps' while he was picking up from the Millers'. He tries to get her to give him a freebie and she won't, so he hits her and accidentally kills her. In January, he hooks up with Jessica again, arranging to meet her at the park. Now he's got a taste for it, so he does her too.”

It was plausible but it didn't quite fit inside my head. The way Katie was killed was opportunistic. If Larry then called up Jessica months later—if he
intended
to kill her—why was it the same MO with the blow to the head and then suffocation? Was he trying to relive what had been a thrilling experience? But if he met up with Jessica intending to kill her, why do it on his lunch break when he knew he wouldn't have time to deal with a body? Why go back and discard her hours later? And why
there
? That was the sticking point that just wouldn't budge in my mind. What was the point of dragging her through the creek and putting her in an Amish barn on Grimlace Lane? Yes, Larry knew the area from his milk pickup route. But that didn't explain why he would go to all that trouble. Surely he didn't think he could pin it on Amos Miller or his boys.

“Harris,” Grady said sharply, drawing my attention. His stare said it all—
Are you with me or not?

“Hell, yeah! Let's go get the son of a bitch,” I responded enthusiastically.

I pushed my doubts down for now. It was showtime.

—

Larry's dairy truck rumbled into the parking lot at the Klein's dairy processing facility. Grady, myself, and two uniformed policemen were waiting inside the lobby where he couldn't see us. Grady spoke into his walkie-talkie, and as Larry hopped out of the truck, two black-and-whites pulled around from the back, caging in the truck so it couldn't move.

“Let's go!” Grady said. We went flying out the door.

Larry looked at the police cars in befuddlement, then he
looked straight at me as we strode quickly toward him across the parking lot. The look in his eyes was pure “oh shit” along with a heavy dose of terror.

“Larry Wannemaker, put your hands in the air!” Grady said loudly as we approached. He put his hand on his holster so that Larry could see it.

Larry did the least intelligent thing he could possibly do—he turned and ran. He dodged around a black-and-white and headed for the road. I knew he was going to bolt a second before he did by the tensing on his face, and I was after him at a dead run before any of the others. He could have been armed, but I was betting he wasn't, not while working his job. He was lean and fast though, and I cursed him inside my head as I gave chase, hoping this wouldn't end with Larry being dead and our questions left unanswered.

Dumb shit. Did he really think he could get away from us on foot? Maybe he was guilty. Either that or he had a real problem with impulse control.

He reached the road, a two-lane blacktop that was not heavily traveled. The recent snow was piled on the shoulder, but the blacktop was clear. He turned right and ran hell-bent for leather. I chased after him. I wasn't catching up but I wasn't falling behind either, and when an unmarked sedan pulled up in front of him and cut him off and Smith and Hernandez emerged, screaming orders and holding their guns, Larry stopped and put his hands on his knees, wheezing and out of breath.

Thank God for pot.

“Larry Wannemaker,” I huffed, as I got up to him, “you are under arrest for suspicion of murder. You have the right to
remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand?” I slipped the cuffs over his hands and listened to them click. It was a satisfying sound.

“I didn't do it. I didn't kill anyone,” he pleaded, looking up at me through his long and not entirely clean curtain of hair.

I said nothing.

—

We spent hours with Larry in the interrogation room back at the station. He'd declined an attorney, said he had nothing to hide. And then he said the same things over and over and over.

Questioning a suspect for hours is a way to shake them down, wear away their defenses so you can spot the lies underneath, catch them in inconsistencies. But as exhausting as it is for the suspect, it's not a hell of a lot of fun for the detectives either. I am not a brute by nature, and my whole being was in a sort of euphoria over my new relationship with Ezra. I had to focus on my memories of Jessica's and Katie's dead bodies and how young they'd been, how undeserved their brutal ends, in order to be the hard-ass I needed to be.

“I told you and told you, I did see the Craigslist ad and I did e-mail her! I met up with 'em once, back in the fall. Haven't seen 'em since. I'm tellin' the truth.”

“When in ‘the fall' did you meet up with them?” Grady asked coldly.

“Like I said, I think it was early October. I don't remember exactly, but I know it took about three weeks from the time I saw
the ad to when we got together. I dunno, she wanted to e-mail back and forth, asking a lot of dumb questions. She wanted pictures. Then it took some time to work out everyone's schedule, you know?”

I knew it was important to establish the timeline. I gave Grady a nod with my chin. “I'll be right back.”

I went to the coffee station. I'd noticed before that the previous year's calendar was underneath the current one, either due to laziness or, in this case, amazing forethought. I grabbed it, spoke to Hernandez briefly, and took it back to the interrogation room.

I plopped it on the table. “Here.” I pointed to a circle over September 23. “This is the day you first contacted Jessica via Craigslist. So tell us when you met up with her and Katie.”

He looked over the calendar carefully, paging between September and October.

“It was a Tuesday night. I think it was this one,” he pointed to October 8. “But it coulda been a week later.”

Katie had disappeared October 10.

“So you contact Jessica and she sent you photos. Then you sent her a photo,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Therefore, you knew when we came to your house that very first time that we were talking about Jessica Travis, the girl you had sex with.”

He shut his eyes tight. “I had sex with
Katie
. Already told you that! My buddy John, he was with Jessica. It was a double date, like. And I didn't tell you because I knew there'd be bullshit like this!”

“Did you know Katie was Amish, despite how she was dressed?”

He pressed his lips tight. “I really want a cigarette.”

“Maybe when you've actually answered our questions,” Grady said.

Larry sighed. “This is so bogus. Yes, I knew Katie was Amish. Jessica said so in her e-mails. And I had first dibs, right? Because I answered the ads. So I got Katie. The Amish thing . . . you know how it is.”

I stared at him blankly. He shifted uncomfortably.

“It was just . . . hot. Forbidden, you know? I didn't believe she was Amish at first, the way she looked. Thought it was a scam. Didn't care, because she was real pretty anyway. But when she talked I could tell she was Amish all right.”

“How could you tell?” I asked.

He shrugged. “She had that accent. And you could tell she wasn't educated or anything.”

“Where'd you pick them up?”

He spoke in that impatient tone guys have when they've said something fifty times already. “We picked Jessica up in downtown Manheim. It was about eleven at night. She directed us to drive out in the country, where we picked up Katie. She was just walkin' down the road.”

“And then?”

“And then Jessica told us how to get to a little dirt road that ran in the woods. It was only like five minutes away. We parked there and had sex.”

“How much did they charge?”

He swallowed. “Seventy-five each, just like I told you.”

“Were you aware they were underage?”

Larry shook his head, looking defeated. “I didn't ask, okay? I really didn't think about it. I mean, they put themselves on Craigslist. It's not like I picked her up at the playground.”

“Describe exactly what you did with Katie Yoder,” I said.

He rubbed his eyes. “We were in the backseat. We kissed a couple times. I felt her up. Then she wanted to put a condom on me. I had my own and I used that one instead. I put it on. She laid down and pulled her skirt up and that was it, we were fucking. That's all.”

Grady and I just looked at him.

“Look, you want to know the truth?” Larry exclaimed. “It wasn't that good. I mean, she obviously wasn't into it. She just laid there. John, he liked Jessica, but he really didn't want to pay for sex. Me, I just didn't feel right about the whole thing. So I never contacted them again. I mean, I can get women, you know? Maybe not that young and maybe not that pretty, but I'd rather have a chick who's into it. You get what I'm sayin'?”

He gave Grady a come-on-man-you-know-how-it-is look. I tapped my pen on the table, face blank.

“Anyway, it sounded like they weren't going to keep doing it.” He shrugged.

That was the first time he'd said that. My antenna pinged. “What do you mean?”

He scratched his head. “I was just remembering. So after we, you know . . . Jessica and John were still busy for a while, so I talked to Katie.” He fiddled with his jacket zipper.

“Go on.”

He looked torn about whether or not he should.

I leaned forward and spoke sympathetically. “If you didn't kill them, Larry, the best thing you can do is come clean about everything. If you withhold anything, it's going to make you look guilty. Just be honest.”

Larry rubbed his nose, looking very uncomfortable. “Fine. So I asked Katie if she was really Amish, even though I'd already figured she was. She said yes. Then I asked her why she was doing what she was doing. You know, meeting up with strange men. She laughed at me. I told her, you know, that she shouldn't be doing it. That it wasn't safe. I mean, I felt kind of bad for her, you know? She said she wasn't gonna be doing it much longer, that she had a way to make some real money. Big money. She was bragging about it.” He looked at me nervously. “I don't know what she was talking about, honest, I don't. I said something like ‘Okay, good.' And that was it. We dropped Katie off where we picked her up and then took Jessica back to Manheim. I didn't see them again. I didn't hurt either one of them, I swear! John wouldn't have either. He's a good guy.”

I sat contemplating Larry. If what he said was true, that was an interesting conversation. Had Larry really just remembered it? Or did he think Katie talking about “big money” would make him an even more likely suspect, that we'd think he killed her for it?

“She say where she was getting this big money?” Grady asked, sounding like he didn't believe Larry for a minute.

“No. She never said and I never saw her again. Jesus, how many times do I have to repeat myself?”

“It'll be interesting to see what John has to say about all this when he gets in, don't you think, Harris?” Grady asked me.

“Sure will,” I said flatly.

We'd already gotten John's details from Larry and were tracking him down. According to Larry, John was married. His wife was unlikely to be pleased to hear what he'd been up to, but I had a hard time dredging up any sympathy for him.

Grady sighed. “Start from the beginning. You saw the ad on Craigslist when?”