NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be

aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold

and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the
publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

love me or else

Copyright © 2012 by Colin McEvoy and Lynn Olanoff.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.

EAN: 978-0-312-54082-1

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / March 2012

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 CHAPTER 1

The door shouldn’t have been unlocked.

Judy Zellner slipped her key into the side door at Trinity
Evangelical Lutheran Church, but the door fell open before
she could turn it. She looked down at the doorknob, surprised
and more than a little annoyed. This door is always supposed
to be locked, everybody in the church knows that. Even out
here in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the door has to be
locked.
Whoever’s in here is going to get a piece of my mind, Judy
thought, slipping the key back into her purse and stepping
into the hallway. She was glad to get out of the cold on this
winter day of January 23, 2008.
The door to the church office was shut, but through the
large interior window Judy could see the light was on. She
hadn’t expected anybody to be there that Wednesday after-
noon, when she came on her twice-weekly routine to clean
the church. She glanced briefly through the window, but
nobody was sitting behind the desk inside the small office.
Perhaps, she thought, Pastor Shreaves is upstairs somewhere.
But first things first. Judy walked straight past the office,
dropped her purse and coat onto the table in the narthex, and
headed for the bathroom.
The sixty-year-old grandmother of six had been faith-
fully attending Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church for the
2 COLIN McEVOY and LYNN OLANOFF

last twenty-six years. Even after she moved from nearby

Wassergass to Allentown, the largest city in the Lehigh Valley
region, she continued to call this church her own, and en-
couraged her three children to regularly attend with her. Judy’s
home in Allentown was twelve miles away, and she had to
pass by several closer churches on her way to this one, but
she never once considered going somewhere else. She loved
her church family here at this small parish. She loved sing-
ing in the choir and being involved with everybody’s lives.
The church sits along Route 212, a winding country road
that serves as a major thoroughfare in Springfield Township.
The town of about five thousand residents rests five miles
southeast of the Allentown and Bethlehem metropolitan area,
and about forty miles north of Philadelphia. Bucks County
grows far more suburban as it borders Philadelphia on its
southern end, but here in the northern end of the county,
Springfield Township remains an example of the area’s rural
heritage.
At over thirty square miles, Springfield Township is the
county’s second largest municipality in terms of land area,
and about half of it remains undeveloped, preserved as agri-
cultural open space or completely vacant land. More than 44
percent of the township consists of heavy woodlands, and
much of the land is characterized by large rocky hills cut by
valley streams and creeks.
And that’s just fine with the residents of Springfield Town-
ship. Most of the township’s residents—98 percent of which
are white—fall between ages forty-five and sixty-four, and
are perfectly content to drive outside the area for goods, ser-
vices, and places of employment if it means maintaining
Springfield’s rural character. In a survey, when asked what
types of stores, businesses and professional ser vices were
needed most in the township, 51 percent responded, “none
needed.”
Judy passed the church office again on her way up to the
pastor’s office, where she found his door was locked. Judy
was surprised. Since he joined the church nearly three years
ago in March 2005, Pastor Gregory Shreaves was almost
 LOVE ME OR ELSE 3

always here. Judy hadn’t yet met the new secretary, Megan,
who was hired a few days ago. Maybe she’s here somewhere,
she thought.
Judy grabbed her cleaning supplies from the closet down
the hall and went back downstairs to the church office. No-
body was behind the desk, so Judy started walking toward
the cubbyhole of file cabinets in the corner of the room.
“Megan?” Judy called, tilting her head to see if anybody
was in the corner. “Megan, are you back there?”
As she passed the corner of the desk, Judy froze as some-
thing caught her eye. Crumpled behind the desk lay the body
of a woman, her legs folded at the knees, her head and upper
body curled forward, pointing toward the ceiling.
There was a great deal of blood. The woman’s head was
soaked in a crimson puddle, strands of her long brown hair
flowing outward in all directions. Judy looked at the wom-
an’s chest and found it motionless. Then her eyes drifted to
the wound on the right side of the woman’s head.
Judy’s thoughts immediately turned to her many hours
spent watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on television.
Don’t touch the body, she thought.
She froze. What if the person who did this was still in the
church? Oh my God, she thought. Somebody could kill me.
Judy grabbed the cordless phone sitting on the desk and
ran outside. Fumbling with it, she dialed 911.
“911, where is the emergency?” an operator said.
Judy screamed into the phone: a primal, fearful sound that
was impossible to decipher. The operator tried to calm her
down and instructed her to stop screaming, calming Judy
long enough to find out the address she was calling from.
“Okay, what’s the problem?” the operator asked.
“There’s a girl murdered in our office!” Judy said, her voice
loud, nearly hysterical.
“There’s a girl what?” the operator asked.
“Murdered!” Judy shouted back, breathing long, panicked
breaths.
“Ma’am, listen, calm down,” the operator said. “What do
you mean? What’s wrong with her?”
4 COLIN McEVOY and LYNN OLANOFF

“She’s lying behind the desk, full of blood!” Judy said,

her voice growing higher, her breaths getting so heavy she
started to gasp between phrases. “I’m the cleaning lady at
the church . . . and I just got here. . . .”
“Is she awake and able to talk to you?”
“No, it looks like she’s dead!” Judy said. “There’s blood
all over her head and around her head! Oh my God!”
“Okay. And ma’am, you don’t want to go near her?” the
operator asked.
“I don’t know if somebody else is in there! It’s a big church!”
After asking for Judy’s name, the operator continued,
“All right Judy. Just breathe for a sec, okay? Don’t touch
anything, okay?”
“I didn’t, I didn’t,” Judy said, sobbing. She was starting
to find it difficult to say anything at all. “I . . . I . . . ah . . .”
“Okay, where do you see the blood on her?” the operator
asked.
“It’s all over her!”
“All over her?”
“Yes, it’s all over the floor!” Judy said, crying even harder.
“She must be dead!”
“All right Judy, just try to calm down. I know it’s not
something pleasant to see. Does she look like she’s breathing
at all? Does she look pale? Does she look blue?”
“She looks blue,” Judy responded. She explained that a new
secretary was recently hired, but that Judy didn’t know what
she looks like, and didn’t know if the woman inside the
church is her or not.
“Okay, all right Judy, listen. We have someone on the way,
okay?”

Matthew Compton and Michael Maguire were just finishing

a late breakfast around 1 o’clock at the local diner, Vera’s
Country Cafe, when they received a call on their pager. “Pos-
sible expiration,” the page read. An unresponsive female had
been found in a puddle of blood.
The two paramedics with Upper Bucks Regional Emer-
 LOVE ME OR ELSE 5

gency Medical Services rushed out to their ambulance, Ma-

guire taking the wheel. Fortunately the church was just a
tenth of a mile up the road.
Probably an elderly woman who took a spill and hit her
head, Maguire thought. If this were the nearby city of Beth-
lehem, where he also worked as a paramedic, he might have
been expecting something more serious, but little ever hap-
pens in Springfield Township. In his fourteen years as a
paramedic, most of his calls from Upper Bucks have been
limited to medical situations or traffic accidents from mo-
torists unaccustomed to the winding country roads.
Back in the late 1980s, when Interstate 78 was expanded
into the area, it was thought Springfield Township’s vast open
space would become subject to extensive growth and turn
into a bedroom community of sorts for residents who traveled
to New York City or Harrisburg. This prediction proved false.
While neighboring towns like Richland, Milford, Williams,
and Lower Saucon Townships all experienced significant
growth, Springfield Township generally saw a few new
single-family homes on a couple acres of land. In fact, it was
the only municipality among its neighbors to actually see a
decrease in its population.
So as its neighbors saw the rise of brand-new large-lot
residential subdivisions, Springfield Township continued to
maintain the character of an earlier time, with numerous
farms, inns, historic villages, and even a covered bridge still
intact. Perhaps the township’s biggest claim to fame is the
old home of Eric Knight, author of the 1940 book Lassie
Come-Home. Knight wrote the book right there in Spring-
field, and his family dog, Toots, on whom the famous fictional
collie was based, is buried on the property in what was the
dog’s favorite hill.
The ambulance pulled into the church parking lot, and
Compton and Maguire stepped out and rushed toward the
church. A gray-haired man wearing a blue sweater, alerted by
the sirens, greeted them as they approached the door.
“Can I help you?” the man asked confusedly.
6 COLIN McEVOY and LYNN OLANOFF

“Somebody called for an ambulance?” Maguire asked.

“No,” the man shook his head. “I’m the only one here.
Nobody called.”
Maguire pulled out his pager and read off the call with
the church address: “Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church at
2170 Route 212.”
“That’s the other church,” the man responded, pointing
to a sign that read “Trinity United Church of Christ,” at 1990
Route 212. “Happens all the time.”
The other church was a half mile up the road, and Magu-
ire and Compton pulled in just a few minutes later. As they
arrived, Judy Zellner stood waving at the bottom of a small
stairway leading up to the side door. “She’s inside!”
The paramedics stepped inside with Judy in tow. She
pointed toward the office and Maguire peered inside, but
didn’t see anything out of sorts. “Where?” he asked.
“She’s behind the desk,” Judy replied. “She has a lot of
blood on her. I think she’s dead. I don’t know what happened.”
As Maguire stepped further into the office, he saw the
woman on the floor, and he could immediately hear that she
was still breathing. The high-pitched gurgling reminded
him of the sound of a brewing pot of coffee.
“She’s still alive,” Maguire said to Judy. “Stay in the hall.”
It was immediately clear the woman had been shot. Most
of the blood appeared to have come from the right side of
her head, and Maguire spotted what appeared to be a bullet
wound just above her ear. Compton felt for a pulse and found
one, but the woman was otherwise nonresponsive. Maguire
grabbed his radio and contacted Bucks County dispatch,
calling for a state trooper to respond to the scene.
As Maguire finished the call, Compton pointed toward a
shiny piece of metal on the floor that appeared to be a bullet
fragment. A quick scan of the room turned up no weapons.
Compton took off his ball cap and placed it over the bullet
so police could quickly find it later.
When Compton went outside for a backboard, Maguire
grabbed a black Magic Marker from atop the desk. He knew
he had to move the woman, but he also wanted to leave the
 LOVE ME OR ELSE 7

crime scene as intact as possible for police. After outlining

the body on the floor, he and Compton lifted the woman and
placed her onto the backboard.
As the two men lifted the board, the woman’s head tilted
to the side, facing Judy as she watched from the other side of
the office window. Judy gasped at the blood-streaked face of
a woman she had seen so many times before.
“Oh my God,” Judy said. “That’s my friend Rhonda!”