by Jane Jensen
Hernandez had interviewed the fruit market’s manager. It was their policy to tow any car that had been left overnight, but they tried to contact the owner first as a courtesy. Jessica’s car had been left unlocked and they had found the registration in the glove box. No one Hernandez questioned recalled seeing Jessica Travis.
There were three buggies and a few dozen cars parked at Henry’s as I drove past. I slowed down to take a good look at the place, and Ezra Beiler came out of the market holding grocery bags. I was almost past the last driveway, so I had to decide fast. I jerked the wheel and swung in, earning an annoyed honk from the car behind me.
Ezra went to one of the buggies. He didn’t see me until I walked up to him.
“Morning, Ezra.”
My heartbeat raced at the sight of him, which was absurd. I was a grown woman, a seasoned cop, not some impressionable schoolgirl. I couldn’t deny that I felt a strong attraction to Ezra Beiler, an Amish man. But I certainly could, and would, ignore it.
“Hullo.” He looked surprised to see me. He put his bags in the buggy and then turned to give me his attention. There was warmth in his eyes and a hint of a smile on his mouth that looked involuntary, like he was pleased to see me too. At least, I flattered myself that’s what it meant.
“Hey,” I said. Duh. “So . . . you shop here at this market?”
“Looks so,” he said drily.
Great. “What I mean is, do you shop here a lot? Sorry. It’s early for me.”
Ezra looked up to study the position of the sun. It was past eight o’clock and he gave me a look, I swear, that called me a lazy ass. In a wry, Ezra Beiler sort of way.
“Ja. I shop here lots of times.”
I bit back a smile. This wasn’t good, I reminded myself sternly. Shopping here made Ezra more of a suspect. Then again, he did have an airtight alibi for the night Jessica was killed.
“Do you happen to know if your neighbors shop here? The Millers, the Fishers, the Lapps, the Kings?”
Ezra started to answer and then stopped to really think about it. He nodded. “Guess I’ve seen most of ’em here one time or another. Other Amish I know too. It’s close by and it’s a good place to shop.”
“I see.”
As if he couldn’t meet my eyes, he looked away toward the road. “Good potato salad. So I hear.”
“Good to know.”
“Not as good as mine, probably.”
“Uh-huh.”
He was deadpan but there was no doubt he was being funny. I scratched a nonexistent itch on my nose, trying to collect myself. I hadn’t had coffee yet, so my judgment was suspect, but I’d swear to God we were flirting. I reminded myself that one girl was dead and another missing. I needed to keep my head where it belonged.
“You didn’t happen to come by here the day before the girl was found in Miller’s barn, did you? You mentioned that you delivered some chairs that morning.”
Ezra frowned and shook his head. “No, didn’t stop for groceries that day.”
“Didn’t happen to drive by and notice anyone you knew was here? Or maybe a dairy truck, the kind that picks up from your neighbors?”
Ezra cocked his head and met my eyes, curious now. A non-Amish person would probably start asking me questions about the case, but he didn’t.
“Guess I must’ve drove by. But I didn’t look to see who was here.”
It sounded like automatic pilot worked in buggies too. “Okay.”
We were standing between his buggy, with one of his mules attached, and another one with a dark brown horse. That buggy started to move and I stepped closer to Ezra to get out of the way. I noticed the driver was a middle-aged Amish woman. She had a couple of young children with her.
“Do most Amish women drive buggies by themselves?” I asked.
“Most do. Some don’t care for it,” Ezra said. “My mother don’t. She’s got lots of sons to take her anyplace she needs to go.”
“Is there a legal age? How old does someone have to be to drive a buggy?”
He shrugged. “Big enough to handle the horse. And that depends on the horse.”
I looked at Route 30. It was the main route between Philadelphia and Lancaster, and was very busy, especially during tourist season. I’d never envied buggy drivers. Route 30 had a buggy lane in places, but still, traffic on the road drove way too fast. Accidents between buggies and cars happened more often than anyone would like, and the buggy never got the good end of it.
“Sixteen?” I prompted, looking into his brown-green eyes.
He shrugged again. “I was takin’ the buggy out alone by thirteen.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” He crossed his arms against his chest and looked away. His upper lip twitched as if he wanted to say something more, but he didn’t.
“I, um, need to go get some coffee,” I said by way of ending the conversation.
He nodded his head at the market. “They got some in the bakery. Probably not as good as—”
“Yours.” I smiled big. “I’m sure it isn’t. Thanks. You have a good day, now.”
“Detective Harris.” Ezra tipped the brim of his hat at me with his strong, tan fingers, that damned appealing sparkle in his eye. Then he started to untie the mule and I ordered my body to turn and walk to the market. It reluctantly obeyed.
They did have a bakery department inside as well as a deli. All the women behind the counter were Amish, in black or white caps. I resisted the whoopie and shoofly pies and picked up a dozen whole-grain bagels for the office—my contribution to the health and well-being of my fellow officers—and a coffee for me. I looked around the place for a few minutes. The ratio of English to Amish shoppers was probably ten-to-one, but that was still a lot of Amish.
I wondered if anyone in the parking lot that day had seen Jessica Travis, noticed her talking to someone or getting into another car. It was a long shot, but I’d mention it to Grady. We could make up some flyers for the parking area and store, give a number for info.
Sooner or later, someone had to have seen something.
It didn’t occur to me until I was nearly at the office that I’d forgotten to ask Ezra if he knew Katie Yoder.
—
The previous evening, Grady had sent the sketch of Katie, along with the information on her birthmark, to every morgue and hospital in the area and out as far as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg. He’d also sent word out to several groups who helped ex-Amish relocate, just in case Katie had really left, but we didn’t have a lot of hope there.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the phone. If Katie had borrowed Jessica’s cell phone, and since it wasn’t in her secret stash, where was it? I got the phone number from Jessica’s mother, but calling it went immediately to voice mail, indicating the battery was dead. It didn’t give off a GPS locator trace either. We managed to get the service provider to talk to us, and they confirmed that the phone had not made any calls or texts out since October 10, 2013, the last day Katie’s parents saw her alive.
Had Katie had the phone on her when she vanished? If so, where was it now?
It niggled at me enough that I checked out a metal detector from the precinct and took it over to the Yoder farm. I spent four hours wandering around with the thing—in the barn, around the barn, around the house, down the driveway. It was tedious and ultimately fruitless. I didn’t find the phone. I did find Sadie, though, who followed me around like a shy duckling and even enjoyed taking a turn with the metal detector. She had a difficult time with “Detective Harris,” which is admittedly a mouthful, so I had her calling me “Lizbess” before long. The rest of the Yoders kept a watchful distance.
It took exactly forty-nine hours from the time Grady put out the APB until we got a response. Katie’s body had been found.
—
Grady and I picked up Hannah Yoder, K
atie’s mother, and took her with us in the car. Just her—no one else. For having such a large family, I was surprised she hadn’t brought along support, but perhaps she wanted to spare the others the pain of it. She was very quiet on the drive into Maryland and often had her eyes closed in prayer. Grady and I didn’t disturb her.
The body that matched Katie’s description had been washed up in Maryland on Robert Island, a small bump of land surrounded by the Susquehanna River. She’d been found on October 14, 2013. Naked, and with no match on her prints, the body had been remanded to the Maryland State Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, where she was still on ice pending identification.
We arrived at the ME’s office around eleven in the morning after a long, solemn drive. Hannah said very little as we sat in the waiting room. There were lots of curious looks at her clothes. Downright staring, in fact, as if we were something from a Lifetime movie.
I tried smiling encouragingly at Hannah but she looked back down at her lap, not accepting the comfort of a stranger. I didn’t blame her. We were about to view a dead girl who fit Katie’s description and had a butterfly mole on her thigh. What comfort was possible? And a female police officer was as foreign in her world as she was in that Baltimore waiting room.
Normally, a photo or video feed was used for identification, but Hannah insisted, calmly but firmly, on seeing the body in person. The ME’s office was accommodating, but it took a while. After about an hour, we were led into a clinical room, the sort of place with drains in the floor and lots of stainless steel where they normally did autopsies. There was a body on a rolling table covered by a sheet. The young man in the white coat who led us in there waited for a nod from Grady and then pulled down the sheet that covered the corpse’s face.
The girl had been in cold storage, so there wasn’t a lot of deterioration, but the river had had its way with her first. Her dark hair was wraithlike around her head and her dark lashes stark against white cheeks. She’d been young and pretty once and now had the cold, white, plastic look of long-dead things.
Hannah Yoder nodded and swallowed hard. She reached out to find Katie’s hand and held it over the sheet. She closed her eyes and prayed over her daughter while tears streamed down her cheeks and her chest shuddered silently. I wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, but I didn’t.
Grady collected the autopsy report and I browsed it while he filled out the paperwork to transfer Katie’s body to Lancaster. We gave Hannah some private time with her daughter.
The autopsy paperwork indicated that Katie had been hit with a flat, blunt, heavy object on the back center of her head, hard—hard enough to shatter the skull. She probably would have eventually died from that blow, but her airways had been blocked and she’d died of suffocation. She’d been in the water for four days, very likely floating downriver from Pennsylvania, before washing ashore at Robert Island.
I felt sick as I read it. Then I read it again to be sure. Jessica and Katie had died the exact same way.
—
The drive back to Lancaster was solemn, but there was a measure of relief in it too. Katie had lain unidentified in cold storage for months. If we hadn’t investigated Jessica’s death, if Jessica hadn’t filed that missing persons report, we would never have found Katie and her family would never have had any idea of her fate. It’s hard to explain the sense of rightness of bringing someone home for a loving burial, but it was one of the sparks of light that made being a cop worthwhile. For some reason the idea of being dead and no one knowing, of being an unidentified corpse in storage or in an unmarked grave, felt like the loneliest thing in the world to me, as if the life that came before hadn’t mattered to anyone.
When we pulled up at the Yoder farm, Isaac came out of the house alone. He and his wife exchanged a silent communication and then he took her hand. Just that—no big hug or weeping, just their clasped hands—was filled with as much meaning as anything I’d ever seen. I felt a moment of envy. Their relationship was without question and without end. Whatever came, they faced it together. I suddenly ached for Terry, but in a way that felt remote, as if something inside me knew that we’d never had that solidity. Maybe it didn’t exist in the modern world.
“Thank you for finding our Katie,” Isaac said to Grady, sounding as stoic as always, “and for arranging to bring her home. We’ll pray for her soul and for your safety as you continue your work.”
“Thank you,” Grady said. “We’re so sorry for your loss.”
“Very sorry,” I added. Then I remembered that the Yoders had been willing to let Katie vanish from their lives forever because she didn’t follow their beliefs. In a way, she’d been dead to them for a long time.
“Suppose you’ll want to find the person who did this to Katie now?” Isaac asked.
“Of course,” said Grady.
Isaac nodded, as if he assumed as much. “Know that, to us, what’s done is done. It’s in God’s hands to punish, not ours.”
“If we don’t find out who did this, they may hurt someone else,” I pointed out firmly.
Isaac nodded, finally meeting my eyes. “That too is in God’s hands.”
—
On the way back to the station, Grady said, “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That it was the same killer? I’m sure of it.”
“So Katie and Jessica met when they were both working at the Paradise Farmers’ Market last summer. They became best friends. Katie was planning to leave the Amish, and Jessica dreamed of moving to New York City. Jessica said in her missing persons report that Katie wouldn’t have left without her. They were planning to go together.”
“I agree. Maybe they were going to wait until Jessica graduated from high school this year. And they were saving up money—Katie’s stash.”
“Right.”
“But how did she get that kind of money? There was over three thousand dollars in that pouch. That’s a lot to save from working minimum wage.”
“She lived at home and had no expenses. We can go back and interview her folks about what jobs she held.”
“Good idea. But what if Charlie Bender was right? What if Jessica was having sex for money? Her mom said she was meeting guys online. What if Katie was part of that?”
“She was Amish,” Grady said with a frown.
“Yeah, but you heard what her parents said. They called her a Jezebel, basically. So Katie and Jessica want to run away together, go live in New York, but they need money. Jessica starts meeting men online and soliciting them. Charlie said he saw Jessica riding around town in cars with various men, and sometimes there was another couple in the backseat. That could have been Katie.”
“And maybe they met the wrong guy, is that what you’re saying? But why are their deaths so far apart? If they’d gotten picked up by a psycho, why didn’t he kill both of them at the same time? Jessica lived for months after Katie disappeared. She didn’t say anything in the missing persons report about a guy they’d picked up. If she was serious about finding Katie, and she suspected someone specific, she would have said.”
“Maybe he met them together, but ended up arranging to see Katie alone. He kills her, and that satisfies him for a while. Then he gets the urge to kill again and reconnects with Jessica. She might have seen him again if she had no idea he killed Katie.”
Even as I said it, it didn’t feel quite right. Would Katie have agreed to see a man she hardly knew alone and not have told Jessica about it? And would a killer really wait that long before going after Jessica too?
And none of that explained where Jessica had been dumped—Grimlace Lane. Why there?
“Katie was Amish, and Jessica was dumped in an Amish barn. There’s got to be a tie-in,” I said.
Grady was silent for a moment. “Maybe the guy they met online deals with the Amish. He could be a driver or a service provider, like our pal Larry the dairy guy.
Maybe he met up with Katie and Jessica with a friend of his, they had sex, then later on he happens to see Katie when she’s in her Amish dress and recognizes her. He threatens to tell if she doesn’t sneak off with him for a quickie. That’s why Jessica didn’t know about it. Katie never had a chance to tell her.”
“And then he decides to kill Katie?”
“Maybe she was going to tell on him. Or maybe she refused, like you said before, and he was just trying to knock her out to have his way with her and then panicked. Maybe by the time he got to Jessica he had a taste for it, for killing, and reenacted the crime with her.”
The whole theory was like a jar of sweet-and-sour vegetables, the kind where you like maybe one veggie in the jar and you have to fish around the stuff you don’t want in order to find the one you do.
I kept that opinion to myself.
—
Our daily meeting with the investigation team was more productive in handing out assignments than reeling in information. Smith and Hernandez’s interviews at Manheim Central High hadn’t yielded anything especially new. The last boy Jessica had dated from there had been involved with her the previous spring and he’d moved on with someone else—and had an alibi. Everyone said Jessica was “wild” but it seemed she’d kept more to herself since her senior year started. She told everyone she was moving to New York as soon as they graduated in May. In truth, it seemed like she was already gone, mentally.
She got average grades, had a 3.2 GPA, and liked art.
The computer was still being processed. Grady lit a bonfire under everyone’s asses about that. New assignments were handed out. We now had Smith and Hernandez doing legwork for us full-time. I took on the task of researching Katie’s work, and I had a few other tasks for myself that I didn’t mention in the meeting.
