Her Last Breath: A Kate Burkholder Novel

Mill?” Bob asks.
    “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “But I think it warrants looking into.”
    “You got any other paper on this guy?” Rasmussen asks.
    “No sir.” Billy shakes his head. “That’s it.”
    Rasmussen reaches into his jacket and pulls out an evidence bag containing the sheared pin. “This look familiar to either of you?”
    Both men shake their heads.
    Bob squints at the bag. “Looks like a three-quarter-inch L pin.”
    “Any idea what that kind of pin is used for?” I ask.
    “Hard to say,” Billy says. “One that size … could be from a tractor.”
    “I seen ’em on farm implements,” Bob adds. “Could be off a pivot bracket on a rototiller or mower. Honestly, since we don’t know the length, could be for just about anything.”
    Frowning, Rasmussen drops the bag back into his pocket. “How exactly did you guys attach the steel plate?”
    “We removed the bumper and welded it to the frame,” Billy explains.
    “Did you use any type of pin or bolt?” I ask.
    “No ma’am.” Bob shakes his head. “We welded it. Solid as a rock, too.”
    Pinching the invoice between two fingers at its corner, the sheriff picks it up and slips it into the folder. “We’re going to need a description of the customer.”
    “Do you guys have security cameras?” I ask.
    Bob Voss nods. “In the yard out back where we park the vehicles we’re working on. We’ve had thieves come over the fence at night a couple times. Took some rims once and a fuel pump a few months back, so we had cameras installed.”
    “Did this customer go into the yard?” I ask.
    “Wish we could help you there,” Billy says, “but he was only here in the office and the shop.”
    It takes another ten minutes to wrangle a description from the two brothers. They disagree on the color of the guy’s hair and the type of shirt he was wearing. But we walk away with height, eye color, and the general impression that he was a “nice looking young fella” and “dressed like a yuppie.”
    As Rasmussen and I clamber into the Explorer, he turns to me and sighs. “Not to throw a wrench into such a straightforward case, but I’m pretty sure there is no Fourth Street in Killbuck.”
    Nothing about the address had struck me as odd, but now that he mentioned it, I realize he’s right. “He gave a bogus address, too.”
    “People who give false information usually have something to hide,” he says. “And he didn’t just have body work done. He had the front end of a big-ass truck with a big-ass engine reinforced with a big-ass slab of steel.”
    I pull onto the highway and glance at Rasmussen. “He’s our guy.”
    “It would explain the lack of debris.”
    “He had the work done two weeks ago. That shows premeditation.”
    “Premeditated what ?”
    We look at each other for a moment, then he says, “I can’t see someone murdering an Amish man and two kids. I mean, the way this was done—with a vehicle—a lot of things could have gone wrong. He risked a witness seeing him. He risked the victims surviving to identify him. The impact could have disabled his truck and stranded him, gotten him caught. Hell, he could have killed himself.”
    “Maybe what we’re dealing with was more of a road rage situation,” I say.
    Rasmussen nods. “There’s no shortage of meanness out there. We’ve seen it focused on the Amish before.”
    I’m still turning over the road rage angle. “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with this particular family. Maybe it was more about opportunity. It was dusk. They were alone on a little-used back road. Their paths crossed.” I’m tossing out ideas, trying to make sense of something that makes absolutely no sense.
    “We did have that rash of hate crimes last year,” he says.
    I think about the kids and shake my head, unable to wrap my brain around that kind of hatred. “This takes hate to a whole new level of ugly.”
    “I’ll get that invoice to the lab, see what comes back.” He sighs. “In the interim, I’d say we probably ought to keep our options open.”
    I nod, but in the back of my mind I know we’re no longer dealing with a simple DUI or hit-and-run or even a case of vehicular homicide.
    We’re now investigating three counts of premeditated murder.

 
    CHAPTER 8
    I’m sitting in the conference room, working on my second cup of coffee, and going through my sparse collection of notes on the Borntrager case, as the rest of my team files in for an impromptu