Page 37 of Rage

“We don’t know yet.” I recite from memory everything I learned from Doc Coblentz. “He’s going to do the autopsy early tomorrow. There may be fragments at the nursery location, so I’m going to get a metal detector out to the scene first thing in the morning.”

“Probably won’t get enough to be helpful.”

“Gotta try.”

I pull out a chair and he joins me at the table. For a moment, we sit there, staring at each other, our thoughts churning and troubled. His eyes are bloodshot. I see exhaustion on his face, in the slight sag of his shoulders, the hollows of his cheeks. I feel that same exhaustion and intensity weighing me down.

Welcome to homicide.

“His best friend is missing,” I say. “Aaron Shetler. He’s Amish. Same age.”

“I saw the BOLO.”

“Tomasetti, this homicide … it has an odd vibe to it,” I say. “Don’t ask me to qualify that statement.”

“Definitely not typical, especially for this area.”

I reach for details, hating it that I’m tired, that my brain is operating at about sixty percent. “You mentioned earlier today that it felt more like a big-city type of crime. The more I learn, the more strongly I agree.”

“Let’s run with it.”

“This was not a crime of passion or jealousy.” I think about that a moment. “With that sort of crime, there’s usually a high level of emotion. Anger or jealousy or fear. There’s a certain level of panic. Mistakes are made. I don’t think that was the case here.”

He takes it from there. “Dismembering a body takes resolve. A certain kind of mindset. It also takes privacy. Time. A relative certainty that you won’t be interrupted.”

“To a degree, this feels planned,” I say. “The decision to murder Yutzy wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment impulse.”

“Whoever came into that nursery went in to kill him.”

In my mind’s eye, I see the way the body looked lying on the gurney. Eleven pieces of what had been a twenty-one-year-old Amish man. “They shot him in the abdomen first,” I say. “The head shot was the fatal wound.”

“Maybe that second shot came after he was down.”

I nod. “And even though it was not a crime of passion, the killer or killers still made a number of mistakes.”

“The body parts were buried too shallowly. The killer didn’t anticipate scavengers.”

“Coyotes are common to this area,” I say. “A local would have known.”

“Maybe.” Tomasetti takes his glass to the counter, refills it, and returns to the table. “It’s concerning that the best friend is missing.”

I nod. “Is Shetler on the run because he did the murder? Or did something happen to him, too?”

“Did you get anything from either of the families?” he asks.

“The most interesting development is the woman Yutzy was seeing.”

“The woman in the photo from the briefing?”

I nod. “According to Yutzy’s parents, she had visible tattoos. Dyed black hair. She wore inappropriate clothes. Smoked cigarettes. One of the dancers at The Cheetah Lounge claims her name is Cassidy. No last name.”

Tomasetti offers a wry smile. “I’m doing some loose profiling here, but she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman a young Amish man would take home to his parents.”

I smile back at him. “You know love is blind, though, right?”

Not for the first time I’m amazed that even as we mine the depths of such a dreadful topic, he reminds me that life—and people—are good.

“With regard to Aaron Shetler,” I say, “his parents barred him from their farm. They believed he was a bad influence on the younger children.”