Gone Missing (Kate Burkholder 4)

phone there.” She chokes out the words, as if her throat is too tight. “Eli doesn’t know.”
    “It’s okay,” I tell her. “What is it?”
    “I didn’t tell you something today that I should have. I think it might be important.”
    “About Bonnie?”
    “ Ja. ” Only then do I realize she’s crying. “Bonnie loves babies. She loves children. She’s so excited about teaching at the school in the fall.”
    I wait, knowing there’s more.
    “Chief Burkholder, she was confused about the baby.”
    “What do you mean?” But even as I voice the question, realization dawns. “She didn’t want the child?”
    “We would have loved the child.”
    “Mrs. Fisher, did Bonnie talk about terminating the pregnancy?”
    “It goes against our belief system.” She begins to cry in earnest. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she was so ashamed. So determined to do this thing. It was the last time I saw her.”
    The words shock me. Most Amish believe abortion is murder. During my lifetime, I’ve known two Amish women who terminated pregnancies. One of them, though she confessed her sin before the congregation, felt so condemned by her peers, she ended up leaving the Amish way. The other committed suicide.
    “Mrs. Fisher, I know it wasn’t easy for you to come forward with this,” I tell her. “Thank you. I think this could be important.”
    “Please find her for us, Chief Burkholder. We don’t care about her mistakes. We just want her back.”
    “I’ll do my best,” I tell her. “I promise.”
    The line goes dead. I take my time clipping my phone to my belt, then turn my attention to Tomasetti and recap the conversation. “She never told her husband.”
    “It sounds like these two girls—Bonnie Fisher and Annie King—were behaving way outside of Amish norms,” Tomasetti says after a moment.
    I nod in agreement, thinking of the third girl, whose family was killed in the buggy accident. “It would have been helpful to talk to Leah Stuckey’s parents to see if she was somehow acting out, too.”
    “Might have helped us figure out if their behavior somehow ties in to their disappearances.”
    “We both know certain kinds of behavior can put people at risk.” I shrug. “But does it connect the cases?”
    “We’ve got too many threads, and none of them ties to anything.”
    We pause when the waitress sets our burgers in front of us. We both look down at our plates. The food looks good and smells even better. We dig in with gusto.
    “Let’s put everything on the table,” he says.
    I go first. “Maybe there’s a religious angle.”
    “The Twelve Passages Church,” he says. “According to Goddard, they don’t like the Amish.”
    “That could tie in. Annie King had an English boyfriend. Bonnie Fisher was pregnant, had multiple partners, and was considering an abortion.”
    “That’s enough to piss off any self-respecting religious fanatic.” Tomasetti’s tone is bone-dry.
    “So we keep everyone with ties to The Twelve Passages Church on our list of suspects.”
    We concentrate on our food for a couple of minutes. Tomasetti finishes the last of his Killian’s. I look down at my plate, drag a fry through catsup, running everything we know about the case so far through my head.
    “Do you think Noah Mast’s disappearance is related?” Tomasetti asks after a moment.
    “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “According to Stoltzfus, he talked about leaving.” I think of the place setting for him in the Mast kitchen. “You’re checking into other missing-person cases? Cold cases?”
    He nods. “If there’s something else out there, VICAP will kick it out.”
    “If it’s been reported.”
    He gives me a sharp look. “Do you think Amish parents might not file a missing-person report if one of their kids went missing?”
    “Most would,” I tell him. “Initially, they might try to handle it themselves. But I think eventually, when they got scared and the reality of the situation sank in, they’d turn to the police.” I think about that for a moment. “That said, there’s a large faction of Amish who believe God will take care of them. If you combine that with a general mistrust of the English, particularly the English police, then I could see a family not making an official report.”
    “Something to keep in mind.”
    I nod, move on to other possible scenarios. “What about the photographer Goddard mentioned?”
    “Stacy Karns.”
    “That conviction and the fact that his