Three down. Four to go.
Screams echo throughout the house. The killer wants the girls now. Two more shots and the boys are gone. The girls scream and cry. They know what’s next, only they don’t. Why did he take them to the barn? He didn’t. The girls break free. Run for their lives. Hands bound and barefooted, they can’t outrun him. The screaming scares the killer. If someone hears them . . .
The killer follows them to the barn. Where are his tools? In his vehicle. The tools are evidence of premeditation. He came here not only to kill, but to rape and torture. Live out his darkest fantasies.
He catches them in the barn. Bound and terrified, the girls are easy to overpower. He chooses the tack room because there are no windows. No one will hear them scream.
The images running through my head offend me. Sweat breaks out on the back of my neck. It’s a cop-out, but I can’t think about the rest, and I climb out of that fetid place, back into my own mind.
I’m still shaking when I traverse the kitchen and enter the living room. Crepuscular light slants in from the two windows. I can make out the silhouette of a wooden bench. A low table where a solitary lantern sits cold and dark. I sweep my beam around the room. Three pools of blood mar the floor like dull black mats. My heart skips a beat when I sense movement to my left. I jerk my beam toward it, but it’s only the curtains billowing in the wind. One of the technicians probably opened a window for fresh air.
I close and lock the window, then turn to face the room. I train my light on the pools of blood. I think of the dead children, and I know this house had once been full of light and chaos and life. Most Amish homes are welcoming, warm and loving; the family is a tightly knit unit. Of course, I didn’t know the Planks. I don’t know if their lives were happy or sad or someplace in between. The one thing I do know is that they didn’t deserve to die.
Rain taps on the windows like impatient fingers as I take the stairs to the second level. I find myself thinking of Mary Plank as I walk down the narrow hall. So young and pretty. I think of her pregnancy. The fact that she had recently engaged in sexual relations. I wonder who she was seeing. I wonder if that relationship or her pregnancy had anything to do with the murder of her family. It wouldn’t be the first time a reluctant father-to-be killed his pregnant girlfriend. The legal age of consent in Ohio is sixteen years old. Mary was fifteen. If her lover was an adult male, he could be charged with statutory rape. But is that motive enough to wipe out an entire family? No matter how hard I try, I can’t get my mind around that.
And what about the torture aspect of the crime? In that moment, the realization that there’s more to this than I’m seeing strikes a blow. A statutory rape charge isn’t motive enough to wipe out an entire family. It doesn’t explain the slaughter of two young women. I’m missing something. Something truly, stunningly evil. But what? It’s like having a word you’ve been trying to remember all day on the tip of your tongue.
My mind rewinds, takes me back to the crime scene in the barn. I’m moving through the murk and into the tack room. I see the girls strung up like ghastly puppets. I see the tools the killer left behind. My mind’s eye stops on the scuff marks left on the dusty floor. Everything inside me stops, focuses on those three small marks, and I know they are somehow meaningful. But how?
The possibilities niggle my brain as I take the hall to Mary’s bedroom. It’s a small space containing a single chest of drawers, a night table, and two narrow beds draped with intricate quilts. A plain dress and two kapps hang on wooden dowels mounted on the wall between the beds.
The chance of my finding anything useful tonight is slim. It’s dark and the house has already been thoroughly searched. On the other hand, the parents’ bedroom, kitchen and living room were the main focus of our earlier searches. No one had known about Mary Plank’s pregnancy. I can’t help but wonder: How thoroughly was her room searched?