Chapter 23
The next morning, Jojo got up, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt instead of her security guard uniform, and quietly left the house with Trident.
Her uncle Jonas was already at work somewhere on the farm, and she had no idea where Uncle Levi might be, but she managed to slip out without encountering either one of them.
Her first stop was the bank. It was too early for the bank to be open for customers, banker’s hours and all that, but the tellers, bank officers, and Mr. Riddle would be inside.
They all parked behind the building, leaving the meager number of parking spaces in front of it for customers, and came in a side door.
She found Marcus Riddle seated behind his desk, which was piled high with papers. He looked up when he heard her enter and was surprised—that she was there, and that she was there not dressed in her guard uniform.
“I need to speak to you, please, Mr. Riddle.”
“Why, sure, Jojo, come in, have a seat. Is something wrong?”
“No, sir, but I need to take some time off.” He looked at her, again surprised, and she rushed to continue.
“Unpaid time off, of course. I certainly will understand if that’s not possible.
I haven’t worked here long enough to have earned vacation time.
But without the time off, I’m sorry, but I will have to resign my position, effective today. ”
He put his pen down on the desk in front of him, took his glasses off, and looked at her. “Jojo, what’s going on?”
She’d been arguing with herself over what she would say to her boss to get the time off to fulfill the promise that she’d made to Martha Miller. She still had not made up her mind when he posed the question, and she opened her mouth and found words falling out anyway.
“I’m sorry, sir, the reason is personal. But it’s very important to me.”
“Well, I don’t want you to quit. I don’t want to lose you. We’ve never had a security guard as qualified as you and Trident, too.”
She hated springing it on him like this, but she’d had no choice.
“I just don’t understand …” He let the words trail off.
“I’m sorry I can’t explain it to you. There’s something I have to do.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, too …”
He wasn’t going to give her the time off. She’d have to quit. Oh, she’d find something else, but dreaded trying to make her uncles understand.
This time it was Mr. Riddle who surprised her.
“… but I don’t have to understand it. If my choices are to lose you as an employee or give you some time off, then take the time off, take as much as you need.”
“That’s … very kind of you, Mr. Riddle. I can’t give you a date when I’ll be back …”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. We went a year and a half without a security guard at all. And before that it was a college kid who spent all day on his phone. We’ll survive. It’s not like we’ve ever had a robbery.” He reached over and rapped his knuckles on the oak of his desk.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
She left the bank with Trident at her side and strode down the street three blocks to the state police headquarters in the courthouse.
The Somerset Barracks of the Pennsylvania State Police Post took up the whole first floor of the Somerset County Courthouse.
It was a huge, ornate, historic building that had been kept pristine over the years and added to the charm of a little town that always put its best foot forward for the tourists.
All of the spaces in front of the courthouse were filled, and it sat on a corner with the huge city public parking lot across the street, and that lot was filled with cars, too.
She and Trident went up the wide front steps of the courthouse to the porch between big white columns and pushed through the ornate metal doors that opened on another set of wide steps leading up to an open area in the center of the building where the Pennsylvania State Seal covered the floor.
County offices opened off that open area—the Somerset County Clerk’s office, the Assessment Office, and the Pennsylvania State Police.
The open area was full of people. There were state police troopers, sheriff’s deputies and men in suits and ties—who could have been FBI or ATF officers or forensic technicians, along with black-jacketed officers with bold “FBI” or “ATF” lettering on their backs.
All those were in addition to the people who worked in or had business in the courthouse—attorneys, citizens with court dates, and magisterial district judges.
It was a beehive of activity. She bumped into a woman she knew who worked in the clerk’s office.
The woman gave her a wry smile and rolled her eyes at the congestion.
“You should see the third floor,” the woman said. “They’ve set up a big war room there—people and equipment … commandeered the whole courtroom, the whole thing.”
Jojo made her way through the crowd of people to the large, windowed office with the state police headquarters sign above it and that room was jammed.
Gratefully, most people just seemed to make way for a person with a Service Animal dog and others unconsciously backed up from the “dangerous looking” animal. Jojo would take that, and she approached the main desk and spoke to a clerk.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
“I need to talk to Lieutenant McCaffrey.”
“He’s … he’s kind of busy right now.”
“Oh, I’m sure he is. Ask if he will see Jojo Kaufmann, tell him I won’t be more than five minutes.”
The clerk nodded and turned, made her way through the mash of people to an office door that was open, and Jojo could see people gathered there.
She waited, and a minute or so later, the people in the office came out, and the clerk she’d spoken to headed her way, caught her eye, and just made a come-on motion.
McCaffrey was at his desk on the phone and looked up when she came to the door, motioned for her to come in and continued the conversation.
“No, sir, I don’t. Yes, sir, we have set up a task force, we’ll work the investigation from here.
They’re running phone lines there now.” He paused, listening.
“Forensics are still going over the spot on the roof where we believe the sniper fired from. There are not that many places that have clear sight lines on those ski lifts, and we cleared all of them last night.”
Whoever was on the other end of the line spoke again.
“Yes, sir, I will, thank you, sir.” McCaffrey hung up the phone and leaned back in the chair. She got a good look at his face then and could tell he hadn’t gone to bed since the shootings.
“You want a cup of coffee?”
It was a disarming remark.
“No … thank you, I’m fine.”
“Have a seat.” He looked at Trident and smiled. “Come here, boy.”
Trident ignored him.
Jojo looked down and said, “Okay,” and Trident relaxed and went to be petted.
“Probably aren’t a lot of people who ask to pet your dog. It’s not like he’s some cute little golden doodle.”
Jojo was taken aback by his demeanor. She would have thought he would be frantic and busy, and yet he sat here, wanting to pet her dog.
It was like he read her mind.
“And why, you ask, is the state police lieutenant not on his horse riding madly off in all directions?” He let out a weary sigh.
“I’ve been on that horse for … ever since you called 911.
Just spoke to the captain, who is going to be here in,” he looked at his watch, “twenty minutes or so depending on Pittsburgh traffic … and then I will mount the horse and keep riding.”
“I promised I wouldn’t take but five minutes of your time, and I won’t.”
“It’s a welcome break,” he said with a disarming smile, and she realized she’d never seen him with his hat off and it was amazing how fiery red his hair was when you could see it, not under the cap.
“I’ll make this short and sweet. I’d like to offer my services in this investigation, anything I can do to help.”
“Thank you. You’re not the first person who has come forward with that offer, and I do appreciate it.”
“I don’t know who the other people are, but I bring some marbles to the game most people don’t.”
He was surprised by that and cocked his head. “And what marbles might those be?”
“Well, I have a history?—”
He held his hand up. “If you’re about to tell me that you were a military police officer and a deputy sheriff, I already know that part.”
She cocked her head. “How do you know?—?”
“Sergeant Michael Donnelly told me about you.”
“Mike Donnelly … right. I remember him.”
She remembered him all right. He had been a jock.
The jock of all jocks. He was the captain of the football team or the quarterback, probably both—which placed him at the pinnacle of high school society.
He expected … nay, he was entitled to have his pick of all the females in a twenty-five-mile radius.
When Jojo made it clear she was not interested, he took it as a personal challenge—spent two years flirting outrageously with her, asking her out, volunteering to be her lab partner in chemistry class, her art project “buddy.” Manufactured every possible excuse to be alone with her …
though she had to admit, he’d been a perfect gentleman, hadn’t “tried” anything. She’d give him that.
“I’m certainly offering those skills, of course. I’m still a sworn deputy sheriff. But the unique marble I bring to the game is that I’m Amish,” she said.
“Well, yes … I know you were raised Amish …” He didn’t get it.
“I told you five minutes. I only have a couple left. The Amish are a closed society. Three of the victims were Amish, and to investigate those deaths, and all the rest of them in this county, you will deal with the Amish. You don’t understand their language.
I speak it, both literally and figuratively. ”
“I’ll think it over.” He sat back.
His response felt like a polite “don’t call us, we’ll call you.” She had to convince him she could really help, that he needed her.
“The Amish are … like fire hydrants.” That analogy appeared to pique his interest.
“You walk past a fire hydrant every day, and after a while, you don’t see it anymore. People don’t see the Amish, they fade into the background—of customers in a store, of people at a gathering, in every circumstance, and the English kind of forget they’re there.”
“Why do the Amish call everybody besides themselves ‘the English’?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with England. They call the outside world ‘the English’ because they have to speak English to those people. We speak Deitsch among ourselves … or under stress—like Amos Yoder after that accident.”
Jojo saw a look she couldn’t read cross the lieutenant’s face. What came to his mind when he thought about being called to a wreck and finding a woman brandishing a pistol? She had no idea how he might have processed that.
“You can’t imagine all the things people say and do in front of the Amish—like we’re deaf and blind, cigar store Indians.
When you start questioning witnesses and suspects in Somerset County, I can just about guarantee that there’s somebody Amish in their lives—and perhaps that Amish person saw something, heard something, knows something that the person you’re questioning doesn’t know they know.
I can talk to the Amish. They’ll open up to me. ”
She could see the cogs turning in his head, could tell he was actually considering what she had to say.
“That’s certainly a … marble I can’t get anywhere else.”
“And I need to make it clear that whether or not you need or ask for my help in this investigation, I’ll be looking into it anyway.”
He lifted an eyebrow but said nothing.
“I made a promise to the mother of a dead child that I would do everything I could to find the monster who … ripped out her little girl’s heart.”
It looked like her words had struck him in the face.
“And I’ll do that. I’ll help you or I’ll do it on my own. I have no illusions that I’m gonna go out there and singlehandedly solve the case, but I promised I’d try, and I keep my promises.”
He got to his feet and held out his hand. “Maybe we’ll be partners.”
She reached out and gave him a firm handshake. “Maybe we will.”