Kingdom Come (8 page)

“She had no more patience for our prayers and lectures,” Hannah said with a resigned sigh and a shake of her head. She pricked her finger with a needle, like something out of a fairy tale. A red dot blossomed on the white fabric. She stuck her fingertip in her mouth.

Grady and I exchanged a silent message. Maybe that was the way of it when an Amish teen left, to just walk out to the road with the clothes on their back and not say good-bye. But there were other, darker explanations. And Jessica turning up dead lent a dire weight to her written statement, her insistence that Katie
was
missing
. Grady gave a slight nod to me with his chin. I turned back to the Yoders.

“Jessica Travis was found dead last week. She was murdered and her body was placed in the barn of Amos Miller on Grimlace Lane.”

Hannah's face went a putrid color, like that of moldy cheese. She dropped her sewing and put both hands over her mouth. Isaac looked shocked but he wore it better. He put a hand on the back of his wife's chair—whether to comfort her or steady himself wasn't clear.

“We heard about that dead girl that was found. That was Katie's friend Jessica?” he asked with disbelief, looking at Grady for confirmation.

“It was,” Grady said.

Hannah and her husband exchanged a look that was part fear, part confusion.

“May the Lord have mercy on her soul,” Isaac muttered.

“Did Katie have any particular dealings with any of the families on Grimlace Lane?”

“Not particular,” Isaac said.

“She never dated any of the boys? The Millers? Fishers? Kings?” I swallowed and added reluctantly, “Ezra Beiler?”

“No,” Isaac said firmly.

I felt relieved. “Right. Well I guess you can understand why this makes us interested in Katie's whereabouts.”

They said nothing but they looked genuinely worried for the first time since we'd arrived. I didn't understand how parents could let their daughter go without any expectation of her
return or even news on how she was doing. True, I'd seen plenty of families with troubled youths, families that were better off when the black sheep in question—usually a kid badly hooked on meth or alcohol—simply stayed away. But surely Katie, an Amish teenage girl, couldn't have been that much trouble. If liking boys were a crime, I'd have been sentenced to Siberia by age thirteen.

“Do you have any pictures of Katie?” Grady asked. “We'll need to check the hospitals and morgues in the area. Hopefully, we won't find anything, but we have to look.”

Isaac wiped his face as though he were sweating. He looked shaken. “No. We don't hold to such like. No photos.”

“Katie didn't have any photos of her own that she left behind, from when she was in
rumspringa
?” I asked.

“No.”

“I cleaned out her drawers already,” Hannah said with certainty. “Ruth and Waneta are in Katie's old room now. Didn't find no photos.”

“We can call in a sketch artist,” Grady said. “Would you be willing to help us draw a picture of Katie?”

They exchanged a look and Isaac nodded. “I s'pose that would be aright.”

“Did she have any distinguishing marks?” I asked.

Hannah shook her head. “Not that I can say.”

“Here.” Isaac gestured to his left front thigh. “A good-sized mole. Shaped like a butterfly.”

Hannah looked at him in surprise. “That's right. I forgot about that already.”

I stared flatly at Isaac. He grew uncomfortable, his face reddening. “I . . . I remember it from when she was a baby.”

I said nothing.

Grady cleared his throat. “Can you show Detective Harris Katie's old room, please?”

—

Grady called for the sketch artist and to get a search started on any bodies matching Katie's age and gender that had been found since October of last year. Meanwhile, Hannah took me up to Katie's room.

“As I said, her clothes and such like were already handed down. Not much to see,” she said as she opened the door.

Two girls followed us into the room and stood with their hands behind their backs, regarding me with interest.

“Who's this?” I asked, giving the girls a smile.

“Ruth and Waneta.” Hannah pointed them out. Ruth was the older, maybe just on the cusp of puberty. Waneta looked to be seven or eight. They were both quite pretty, petite like their mother, and dark-haired. I wondered if they took after Katie.

“Wanna see some of Katie's clothes?” Ruth volunteered eagerly. She opened the closet and pulled out a typical blue, long-sleeved Amish dress. She held it up to her chest and primped a bit. “This was Katie's. It's mine now, or will be when I grow big enow.”

“It's a beautiful color,” I said, lightly fingering the soft cotton with a smile. Ruth was certainly not shy. I wondered if that too was a family trait.

“The lady is a policeman. I don't think that's of much help to her now,” Hannah said patiently.

“It's all right,” I said as warmly as I dared. “Did Katie have this room to herself when she lived at home?”

“Nah, she shared it with Miriam till she got married, then Ruth,” said Hannah.

“That's me!” Ruth added in case I was absentminded.

“Hush now,” Hannah scolded lightly.

“Actually, if it's all right with you I'd like to ask Ruth some questions, since she roomed with Katie.”

Hannah considered the request. “Can I be with her?”

“Of course! I can do it right here.”

“Ja, it's fine. Go ahead now.”

I turned to Ruth. “Did Katie do or say anything that made you think she was going to leave when she did?”

“She said I'd have the room to myself right soon enow.”

I nodded. “But the
day
she left, did you know she was going to leave that very day?”

Ruth shook her head.

“We already asked the children that,” Hannah said. “Katie didn't say good-bye to any of them.”

“And when Katie was here, did she ever talk to anyone at night, maybe on a phone? She had a phone, didn't she?”

“Vater said she was not to use it in the house.” Ruth sounded very firm about that.

“Well, sometimes girls Katie's age don't always do as they're told. Do they?” I smiled.

Ruth looked at me with big eyes. “Vater said not to, and I woulda told.”

Well. That explained why Katie didn't confide in Ruth.

“Did Katie ever talk to you about her friend Jessica?”

Ruth shook her head.

“What about a boy she liked? Was she seeing anyone special?”

Ruth shook her head again. I felt a pang of disappointment. Katie must have kept things very close to the chest.

“Was there anything that she was very fond of? Maybe a book or a picture from a magazine, anything you would have thought she'd take with her when she left?”

Ruth shrugged. “I dunno. She liked cats.”

“Katie had a small collection of cats. People gave 'em to her for birthdays and whatnot,” Hannah clarified.

Ruth ran over to a little wooden hutch on the wall. It was rough, like a birdhouse, with a latched door on the front. She opened it. Inside were four shelves and ten little ceramic cats in different colors and designs. They were the cheap kind you can buy at a roadside stand for a few dollars.

I looked them over, feeling unaccountably hollow. This was the sole treasure of an eighteen-year-old girl?

—

Hannah led the way down the narrow stairs. I started to follow when I felt a tug on the back of my coat. I turned to see an adorable creature—a little girl around five years old. Her fuzzy brown hair burst out from under her cap and her round face still looked a bit tan from the long-lost summer sun. She was a beaut.

“Hey there,” I said, bending down a little.

“Shhh,” she whispered. “That's not where Katie kept it.”

I blinked at her. “Kept what?”

“Her bestest things.”

I felt a spark of interest, but I kept my smile calm. “What's your name?”

“Sadie.”

“Were you special friends with Katie, Sadie?”

The little girl nodded solemnly.

“Will you show me where she kept her bestest things?”

Sadie shook her head just as seriously. “'Tis secret.” Then turned and ran up the stairs.

—

It took a conversation with Grady, another with Hannah and Isaac Yoder, and then a frontal assault on little Sadie's code of honor—which was considerable for a five-year-old, and put her sister Ruth to shame—but eventually Sadie broke. She led us all into the barn, her lip trembling.

“I promise, we're trying to help Katie,” I reassured her.

Sadie wasn't buying it and didn't seem much comforted as she reluctantly led us to the back of the old bank barn. There, a small hidden door that looked like part of the wall pushed inward into a crawl space, maybe four by ten. It appeared long abandoned, maybe part of an original barn that had been built onto over the years.

I stepped into the space while Grady held the door open and Hannah and Isaac stood and watched. The area was dusty, surrounded on three sides by old stone walls and on the fourth by the wooden barn wall. The dirt floor had been wet and re-dried so many times over the decades it had taken on a cracked pattern
like a ceramic glaze. The bones of a large bird lay on the ground next to the head of what might have been a rat.

Up against the inside wall was a black plastic garbage bag. The bag was dusty and twist-tied shut. I pulled it up and handed it over the wall to Grady.

“What is it?” Isaac asked as I climbed back over to join them.

“Would you open it, please?” Grady asked Isaac. He sat the bag on a cement ledge.

Isaac undid the twist tie and pulled it open. Grady carefully lifted each item out and placed it on the ledge in turn so that we could all see.

There were neatly stacked clothes—gauzy tank tops, a light sweater, and two short skirts in bright pink and turquoise. There was a chunky silver-colored necklace and clip-on earrings, and a pair of tan high-heeled pumps, cheap and slightly scuffed. Next came a small bag of makeup. Grady unzipped it. Inside was lipstick, mascara, blush, eye shadow, and two foil packets of condoms. At the bottom of the plastic bag was a leather zip wallet. The wallet contained what looked like a few thousand dollars in twenties and fifties and a folded-up piece of newsprint. Grady unfolded the newspaper and we looked at both sides. One side held the small print of staff credits and copyrights and the other side an ad for diet pills. I hadn't gotten the impression that Katie had been overweight, but teenage girls were never happy with their bodies. There was no cell phone in the bag.

Grady met my eyes. The foreboding look on his face matched my own sickening response. Maybe Katie wouldn't have taken her ceramic cats or her Amish clothes, but all this money . . . She never would have left without this.

Grady nodded and I took out my cell phone and started photographing Katie's abandoned belongings.

“Mr. and Mrs. Yoder, is it all right with you if we remove these items to the station to examine them more carefully?” Grady asked. “You'll get everything back. We can count the money together before we take it.”

Hannah apparently reached the same conclusion we had, because she let out a sob and turned her back to us, turning into her husband for support though not quite touching him. His eyes too were red and he trembled ever so slightly. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Take it,” he said in a gruff voice. “And may God's will be done.”

The Girl in the River

I was driving down Route 30 the next morning toward the police station when I passed Henry's Fruit Market. The name was misleading. It actually carried a full range of groceries as well as locally grown fruit. It was an old-fashioned place of the type Lancaster County excelled in, with a huge '50s retro vintage sign out front complete with painted fruit and lettering.

And Jessica's car had been abandoned here the day she died.

I'd seen the fruit market before, but I'd never shopped there. I did my grocery shopping at odd hours, and frequented the twenty-four-hour, one-stop-shopping gigantic chain stores. Hernandez had done the legwork on the market. He said it had a history running back over a hundred years. It'd been a wooden Amish fruit stand back then. It still employed a lot of Amish workers.

Forensics was examining the car, but our first look confirmed what LeeAnn Travis had said—there was no blood and no signs
of a struggle. It was just a teenage girl's fairly filthy car. It was a 1986 Toyota Corolla that had over two hundred thousand miles and looked like a fender bender would cause the whole thing to fall apart, like in some slapstick cartoon. Whatever had happened to Jessica, it hadn't happened in her car. But
where
it had been left—that was extremely interesting. Henry's Fruit Market was in the heart of the town of Paradise, which meant it wasn't far from Grimlace Lane or any number of other Amish homes. Manheim, where Jessica had lived and gone to school, was twenty miles away, and she hadn't been working at the farmers' market over the winter. So what was she doing in Paradise that day?

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, Katie'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.”