“Twice. Vest protected me, but he got me in the arm.” Wincing, she tried to sit up. “I think they shot Skid. He was in the barn.”

Tomasetti eased her back down. She felt weak. Cool to the touch. Where the hell was the ambulance? “We’ll take care of him. Just be still for now, will you?”

She closed her eyes, and he felt her body relax. “Are they dead?”

He glanced at the other two bodies. The staring eyes and lack of color told him they were DOA. “Nice job, Chief.”

“I’m going to ask for a raise,” she whispered. “Hazard pay.”

“Kate, you’re bleeding. You need to stop talking. Okay?”

“You’re a moody bastard, you know that?”

“That’s what everyone says.” But he smiled.

She smiled back. “Thanks for coming.”

Fighting emotions he didn’t want to feel, John Tomasetti bowed his head and thanked the God he had forsaken for the last two and a half years.

CHAPTER 29

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or so I tell myself, anyway. I’m in the Explorer, idling down Main Street the way I have a thousand times before. Light rain patters the windshield, keeping time with a moody Everlast song about saving grace on the radio. To my right, two women in suits and heels stand outside the City Building, huddled against the rain, smoking cigarettes and making small talk. The aromas of warm yeast and cinnamon from the Butterhorn Bakery waft through my open window. I slow down as I pass the Carriage Stop Country Store on the traffic circle. In the display window, a dozen or more colorful Amish quilts hang, and for the hundredth time I find myself thinking of the Plank family.

Four days have passed since the night I shot Scott Barbereaux and Jack Warner at the Zook farmhouse. I want to think a sort of final justice was served that night. I want to believe I gave the sons of bitches what they had coming. But as is usually the case, things aren’t always that cut and dried.

Because both perpetrators were killed at the scene, questions about what happened to the Planks will never be fully answered. What linked Scott Barbereaux, Jack Warner and Todd Long? The only connection I could find was that they went to high school together. I can tie Barbereaux and Warner to the Carriage Stop Country Store. But I’m left wondering: Is that where they met Mary? Did her natural beauty and innocence bring out some dark and primal hunger in them? Did they think her naïveté would make her an easy target? Did her being Amish make her easy to exploit? I’ll probably never have definitive answers, but we did uncover evidence that helped fill in some of the blanks.