“There’s a quarry on the northwest corner of the property,” the deputy says. “It’s defunct now. There used to be a lot of gravel trucks coming and going through a gate at the back.”
The sheriff indicates a greenbelt that bisects the property. “Creek runs through there, too.”
“A lot of trees,” I murmur.
“So what’s the plan?” Tomasetti asks.
The sheriff looks at his watch. “It’s six A.M. Let’s execute the warrant. Search the house, outbuildings, and the property.” He makes eye contact with me. “I’ve got two more deputies en route. Everyone has been briefed. Once we execute the warrant, my guys will enter the property through that back gate and work their way to the front.” He addresses me and Tomasetti. “Before we do anything, might be a good idea to talk to the couple, feel them out, and then search the house and outbuildings.”
“I think we’re good to go,” Tomasetti says.
“Let’s do it.” The sheriff brings his hands together. “My deputy and I will ride together. You two follow.”
I stride to the TV stand, snatch up my shoulder holster and .38, shrug into it. I grab my jacket out of the closet. I gather the file. My laptop.
Tomasetti reaches for the keys and the four of us go through the door.
CHAPTER 25
One hundred eleven hours missing
It’s still dark with drizzle and fog as Tomasetti and I follow the sheriff’s cruiser to the Detweiler property, which takes twenty minutes. The lane entrance is overgrown, without a mailbox or any indication it’s a residence at all, and we drive by twice before realizing we’ve arrived at our destination.
The brake lights flash as they make the turn. Tomasetti follows, muttering a curse as he wrestles the Explorer over deep ruts and through hip-high grass and weeds. A hundred yards in, he jams the Explorer into four-wheel drive. We pass by a low-slung hog barn that looks abandoned. The ground is muddy and torn up, but there are no hogs in sight. No lights as far as the eye can see. A quarter mile farther in, trees encroach on the driveway. We climb a hill, and a small frame house looms into view. No shutters or landscaping. The downstairs window glows with light. Someone is awake.
Beyond the house, a falling-down bank barn leans precariously. It was once white, but the decades have eaten away most of the paint. A chicken house stands next to the barn. There’s a smaller hog barn with an attached pen where several dozen hogs mill about. Two horses stand inside a loafing shed, munching on a round bale of hay, watching us.
Tomasetti parks next to a black buggy, our headlights revealing the lack of a slow-moving-vehicle sign. There’s no reflective signage of any kind. But it’s the lack of a windshield and the sight of the dual kerosene lanterns that confirm what I already know. The Detweilers are Swartzentruber.
“Interesting that he’s got a driver’s license and a buggy,” I say.
“I guess all those Amish rules are a pain in the ass when you have a kid to abduct and she lives four hours away.” Tomasetti jams the Explorer into park and looks at me. “You got a vest?”
“Didn’t think I’d need it.”
Giving me a dark look, he swings open the door and gets out. “Keep your goddamn eyes open.”
The four of us meet next to the sheriff’s cruiser. I’m keenly aware of the silence. The whisper-hiss of drizzle. The totality of the darkness pressing down. The sense of abandonment that seems to permeate the place.
The sheriff slaps the rolled warrant against his palm, then addresses his deputy. “Stay here, keep an eye on things. Get on the radio, tell those guys in the back to stand by.” He looks at me and Tomasetti. “Let’s go serve this bastard.”
Cold drizzle floats down from a charcoal sky as we take a stone path around the side of the house to the front. We ascend the steps and cross the wooden porch. There’s a single large window that’s covered with a dark pull-down shade. Standing slightly to one side, Sheriff Pallant knocks on the door. Tomasetti and I stand behind him and to his right.
Footsteps sound and the door swings open. An elderly Amish woman blinks owlishly at the sight of us. “Oh my. What’s this?” She’s wearing a gray dress that falls nearly to her ankles. A kapp covered with a black bonnet. Black apron. Practical black shoes. A dish towel in her hands, fingers bent with arthritis.
I know immediately this woman isn’t Rosanna Detweiler. If Rosanna Detweiler had a child in 2012—even if she had a child late in life—there’s no way she could be much over fifty. This woman looks to be around seventy.
“Is something wrong?” she asks in an accent that tells me she speaks more Deitsch than English. “Has something happened?”
Pallant has his official ID at the ready. “Are you Rosanna Detweiler?”
“I’m Irene Detweiler.” The woman’s eyes flick from him to Tomasetti to me and back to the sheriff. “What’s this about?”
He identifies himself. “We’re looking for Vernon and Rosanna Detweiler. Are either of them here?”
“No.”
“Do they live here, ma’am?”
“No. This is my home.”
“Are you related to the Detweilers?”
“Vern’s my son. Rosanna is my daughter-in-law.” Rheumy blue eyes skate from Tomasetti to the sheriff to me and for the first time she looks alarmed. “Has something happened to them?”
Tomasetti and the sheriff exchange a look. “When’s the last time you saw them?” Pallant asks.
“I haven’t seen my son or his wife for several years. Not since the bishop put them under the bann. Said they were backsliders,” she tells him, using the Amish term for someone who doesn’t follow the rules set forth by the Ordnung. “I always hoped they’d change their ways, but they didn’t and they never came back.”
“Do you know where your son is living now?” I ask.
“Like I said, I haven’t seen him in years.” Her brows furrow. “Did they do something wrong?”
This isn’t what I expected. “Your husband’s name was Vernon?” I ask.
“Yes.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the property deed might be in her husband’s name, not her son’s. A rookie mistake. I kick myself for not anticipating it, for not checking.
Stepping back from the door, Pallant frowns at us and lowers his voice. “Someone get their information wrong here?”
“She could be covering for them,” Tomasetti says in a hushed tone.
Pallant holds his gaze for a moment, then goes back to the door and passes the warrant to the Amish woman. “I’ve got a warrant to search your house and your farm, ma’am. I suggest you read it carefully.”
“A warrant? But…” She takes the paper, and looks down at it as if it’s covered with some lethal virus. “What on earth are you looking for?”
“Everything you need to know is in the warrant.” Opening the door wider, the sheriff pushes past her.
She steps aside, incredulity flashing in her eyes. “Has my son done something wrong?”
The sheriff ignores her question, his eyes already skimming the darkened room. “Is there anyone else here at the farm this morning, ma’am? Family member? Farmhand?”
“It’s just me.”
I follow the sheriff into the house. Tomasetti comes in behind me.
“Are there any firearms in the house or on the property?” Pallant asks, his voice amicable.
“Just that old muzzle-loader that belonged to my husband.”
The three of us exchange looks.
“Where is it?” I ask.
“The mudroom.” The Amish woman starts toward it.
The sheriff reaches out and touches her arm, stopping her. “I’ll get it, ma’am. Why don’t you just have a seat and relax?” He starts toward the kitchen and the back of the house.
My eyes adjust to the dimly lit interior. We’re standing in a living room with battered hardwood floors. Dark blinds hang at the windows. In the flickering light of a single lantern, I see a quilt wall covering above a ragtag sofa.
A coffee table. An oval braided rug covers the floor. The house smells of kerosene, coffee, and toast.
I see Tomasetti, taking in the details, looking past me into the kitchen. There are stairs to our right. A darkened stairwell that goes to a second level.
Visibly upset, the Amish woman unrolls the warrant and blinks at it as if it’s written in a language she doesn’t understand.
The sheriff returns to the living room. He’s wrapped the long gun in what looks like a dish towel. “We’ll tag it and start a return sheet,” he says to no one in particular.
“You can’t just walk into someone’s home and take things.” Irene Detweiler walks to the center of the room and faces the three of us. “What on earth do you want?”
“Everything you need to know is in that warrant, ma’am,” the sheriff tells her. “Why don’t you take a seat on the sofa over there and read it?”
She holds her ground, hands on her hips, glaring at him.
“That’s not a request, ma’am.”
He stares at her until she acquiesces; then he speaks into his lapel mike. “Warrant has been executed.” He gives the go-ahead for the deputies at the back of the property to enter through the rear gate.
Pallant looks at me. “Chief Burkholder?”
I look at the woman, address her in Deitsch. “Mrs. Detweiler, we’re looking for a missing child. A seven-year-old little girl. Is it possible she’s somewhere here on the property?”
“A little girl?” She fingers the collar of her dress. “Lord no. There’s no child here.”
“Is it possible she’s with your son or daughter-in-law?”
“What on earth would they do with a child? Why would they even have a little girl?”
I translate for the sheriff.
“All right.” Pallant looks from me to Tomasetti. “I’ve got a female deputy on the way to look after Mrs. Detweiler while we search the place. If you’d like to go ahead and start, I’ll stay with her.”
“Sure thing.” Tomasetti turns and takes the stairs to the second level.
Doubt whispers in my ear as I start toward the kitchen. Is it possible I’m wrong about this? Not only is the property not owned by the Vernon Detweiler we’re looking for, but Irene Detweiler seems credible and genuinely confused by news of the missing girl. Is she telling the truth about her estrangement from them? Is her son living elsewhere? Are the dates coincidental?
The kitchen is a large room and the heart of the house. What looks like a picnic table is covered with a plain tablecloth. A lantern flickering in the center throws off a dim glow. There’s a sink to my right. Thin predawn light slants in through the window. A cast-iron skillet on the stove. A roll of paper towels. There’s no refrigerator. No pantry. Pulling my mini Maglite from my jacket pocket, I move on to the mudroom.
It’s a narrow, cluttered space. Hooks for coats on the wall. A door that leads outside. Through the window I see our vehicles and the deputy with his flashlight beyond. I run the beam of my flashlight along the hanging coats. A barn coat. A woman’s slicker. Three of the hooks are unused. There’s a pair of dirty, adult-size sneakers on the floor. Rubber muck boots. None are large enough to be a men’s size thirteen. I even check the floor for loose boards that might lead to a crawlspace. But there’s nothing there.
I walk back to the living room to find a female deputy standing next to the sofa where Irene Detweiler sits. She’s a big woman, tall and substantially muscled, with blue eyes, buzz-cut blond hair, and the tail end of a tattoo peeking out of the uniform cuff at her wrist.
I cross to her, introduce myself, and we exchange a quick shake.
“Sheriff went out to help search the barns,” she tells me.
Tomasetti jogs down the stairs, Maglite in hand. “Upstairs is clear,” he says.
“Attic?” I say.
“Nothing there.” He crosses to me. “You want to take a look around?”
Anxious to get outside, I’m already striding toward the door.
* * *
The gray light of dawn hovers atop the tree line to the east as Tomasetti and I make our way to the hog barn. Two more cruisers are parked in the driveway. Rain pours from a low sky and I’m relieved we had the forethought to bring slickers. We find Sheriff Pallant, and two deputies, flashlights in hand, running a dozen or so hogs from the barn. The smell of manure hits me like a sledgehammer when I walk in the door. To my left, one of the deputies wades through muck, arms spread, herding the last of the hogs through the lower half of a Dutch door and into the muddy pen outside. None of the men look too pleased to be here.
Pallant is smoking a cigar and saunters over to me. “You still think this mystery couple has a kidnapped child somewhere on this property?” he asks.
Skepticism rings hard in his voice; I feel that same doubt crowding my own certainty. “I don’t think I’m wrong about this.” I’m aware of Tomasetti standing a few feet away, watching the exchange. Even the deputy has paused. “It’s the best lead we’ve got,” I tell them.
After a moment, the sheriff sighs. “Well, we’re here. We got the warrant. Let’s do our jobs. If there’s a kid here, we’ll find her.”
While the deputies and sheriff continue their search of the hog barn, Tomasetti and I move on to the bank barn. Rain patters against our slickers as we wade through mud and clumps of grass and weeds. Tomasetti slides open the big door. It’s a massive structure. The interior is dark and dusty and jammed full of ancient farming implements—a wooden wagon, a manure spreader, a rusty harrow, and a beat-up galvanized trough.
“We don’t have enough manpower to search a farm this size,” I say as I step inside.
“We’ve got our warrant and a sheriff who’s bent over backwards to accommodate us.” Tomasetti shoves open the sliding door as far as it will go, trying to usher in more light. “Let’s give it our best shot.”
Sighing, I raise my Maglite. There’s a row of horse stalls to my right, the boards covered with cobwebs and dust. Ahead, there’s a raised wood floor where a dozen bales of hay have been left to rot. To my right are the stairs to the loft. Beneath the stairs, burlap bags containing some kind of grain have been torn open by rodents.
“I’ll take the horse stalls,” I say.
“I got the loft.”
I go to the stalls, checking the trough as I walk past. I stop at the first door, slide it open. It’s a typical twelve-by-twelve horse stall with a wood hayrack. Any manure or straw left on the floor has composted to dirt. At some point a groundhog has dug a hole in the corner. I check all four stalls, even the floor for trapdoors, but it’s obvious no one has used this place for years.
A few minutes later, I meet Tomasetti in the aisle. He doesn’t say anything as we make our way toward the door, but I can tell by his expression he’s thinking the same thing I am: The missing girl isn’t here.
“Tomasetti, I don’t think that old woman abducted Elsie Helmuth.”
“She’s not your typical child abductor. Then again, she could be lying about her son.”
“What if I’m wrong about this?” I say as we go through the door and into the pouring rain.
“We don’t always get it right, Kate. We do our best. That’s all we can do.” He slants me a look. “It doesn’t mean we should pack it up and go home. Let’s finish this. Walk out of here with the certainty that we’ve done our jobs to the best of our ability and the girl isn’t here.”
Not an easy task when you have a hundred and fifty rugged acres to cover and a handful of people with which to do it. To make matters worse, the temperature is hovering somewhere around forty degrees and the rain shows no sign of abating.
It’s eight A.M. by the time Tomasetti and I reach the back of the property. A Scioto County cruiser is parked on the other side of the gate, but the deputies are nowhere in sight. More than likely they followed the fence line due west to the property line and then turned south toward the house and outbuildings.
Tomasetti stands there a moment, shaking water from h
is slicker, and looks around. “If you were going to stash a kid outside, where would you put her?”
As if on cue the tempo of the rain increases, pounding the canopies and ground. Shit, I think, but neither of us complains.
“A cave. A defunct mine.” I think about that a moment. “Storm shelter. Root cellar.”
“Didn’t someone tell us there was an old quarry on the property?”
I nod. “I saw it on the aerial view. It’s to the west, past the creek.”
“Let’s head that way and then cut south toward the house.”
We slog through high weeds and grass and mud for twenty minutes. We’re standing on a relative high point of the property. Despite the bad weather, the views are pretty. A few yards ahead, the ground drops away steeply. At the base of the hill a muddy creek the color of creamed coffee churns south toward the river. Even though we’re fifty yards away, I can hear the rush of water. Beyond are the house and barns. I can see the lights of the sheriff’s department cruisers. Disappointment presses into me when I realize we’ve covered the entire property.
“I hate to point out the obvious,” Tomasetti says.
“She’s not here,” I mutter.
We stand in the rain, soaked and cold, and take in the scene for a moment. “We did our best,” he says. “We followed through.”
“A seven-year-old little girl is still missing. Tomasetti, after what that son of a bitch did to Mary Yoder … she may not even be alive. The statistics are not in her favor.”
“Fuck the statistics,” he growls. “Let’s talk to the old lady again, see if she has anything to add.”
Heart heavy, the sense of defeat, of failure, a physical weight on my shoulders, I start down the hill and head toward the house.
CHAPTER 26
One hundred and fourteen hours missing
I find Sheriff Pallant and two deputies standing in the rain next to their cruisers, the engines running, headlights on, emergency lights off. Waiting for us. One of the deputies has already left.
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