She took a last breath of sunbaked air and stepped in. Now the air was cooler, but it hardly smelled like a barn. In her mind she should be inhaling the scents of manure and cow piss, hay and grain and milk. But these were only traces beneath the dull artificial smells of metals and plastics. As her eyes adjusted, she saw a cord hanging from an overhead light fixture… as if daring her to tug it.

“I’m here to help. Is anybody back there?”

She hesitated to touch the cord. Then she pulled it. The bulb winked on and a grinding sound began. She found its source: a sawed-off pump-action shotgun fixed to some kind of geared armature, mechanically coming level with her right hip and racking itself to shoot. An instant before the weapon exploded, she dived back through the doorway, hearing shot strafe the barn wall.

She lay still for a few moments. The blast echoed in her ear membranes. A red-tailed hawk screamed in the sky. What was wrong here? She rose unsteadily, her feet feeling a long way down. Her eyes found the electrical source. There on posts in the high grass behind the sawmill was a solar collector, homemade-looking, silently gathering power from the sky. The sawmill roof sheltered what had to be the inverter, faintly snapping as it fed a rack of heavy gray batteries.

The hawk screamed again as the sheriff stepped back out beneath the ruthless engine of the sun. Through weeds beyond the sawmill she saw a square-bladed shovel stuck up in freshly dug earth and first thought, Shallow grave, his lungs filled with dirt. But the fresh earth was only fill dirt above a narrow trench, leading away through pastureland thick with bull thistle to a wellhead. OK, the trench was bringing power to a pump. Running water? Once more she felt confused about the Ordnung. Were they truly Amish, whoever lived here?

Now, light-headed and panting as she rounded the barn, she could see the outhouse deep in honeysuckle shade. Through its moon-sliver window, she saw light. Closer, she saw a glowing bulb. She drew her service pistol and stepped into the shade, feeling a shiver as she stopped ten feet from the outhouse.

“Hallo?”

Her dizziness, the starkly contracting light and shade—maybe she was seeing things. She stared at the moon-shaped cutout in the door. Yes, there was a light bulb burning inside.

“This is the Bad Axe County sheriff. Open the door and let me see your hands.”

No movement. Silence except for buzzing flies. She closed the distance with unsteady steps and opened the door herself.

The sight stopped her breath. On the toilet hole slumped a man in Amish dress, his trousers past his knees and folded over the tops of his rubber boots, his gray beard so long that it feathered and re-joined blood-stuck around the forged steel shaft of the gimlet jammed into the center of his chest.