Pray for Silence

something behind. However small or seemingly inconsequential, it’s my job to find it. I owe that to the Plank family. I owe it to this town and the people I’ve sworn to serve and protect. Most of all, I owe it to myself.

Seventeen years ago, I didn’t get justice for a crime committed against me. But I’m a cop now. It’s within my power to see this through, and get justice for another young Amish girl who can’t do it herself.

The sun isn’t quite above the horizon when I pull into my parking space at the station the next morning. Beside me, Mona’s Ford Escort is covered with a diamond layer of frost. T.J.’s cruiser is parked farther down, and I know he’s come in early to finish up his Internet assignment before he goes on patrol.

Mona sits at the switchboard-dispatch station with her feet on the desk, a lollipop in her mouth and a college text open in front of her. Her feet slide off the desk the instant she sees me walk in. “Hey, Chief.”

“You look busy.”

She grins. “It’s been kinda quiet.”

“That’s the way we like it.”

T.J. peeks at me over the top of his cubicle. “You got a sec?”

I enter his cube to see he has both his desktop and a laptop computer running. A printer I’ve never seen before hums from atop a two-drawer file cabinet, and I realize he brought it from home. “Find anything interesting?”

Looking uncomfortable, T.J. slides behind his computer. “I hit a few uh . . . porn sites last night and this morning. I’ll tell you, there’s some weird shit out there.”

“Like murder weird or sex weird?”

“Both.” He face reddens. “We’re talking fetishes.”

“Violence?”

“Foot fetishes, mostly.”

“That is weird.”

He taps a couple of keys on the desktop keyboard. “We have man on man. Woman on woman. Animal on woman.” He looks at me. “You ever seen the size of a—”

“Just case stuff, T.J.,” I cut in before he can finish.

“Oh. Right.” Rolling his chair to the laptop, he types in a login and password. “I searched for anything Amish, and I was blown away by the number of porn Web sites into that sort of thing.”

“To each their own,” I mutter.

“I guess.” He hands me a sheet of paper. “Here’s a list of Web sites with IP addresses. I bought photo paper and printed some of the . . . uh . . . images. A lot of the female . . . uh . . . perpetrators don’t match Mary Plank’s description, but I went ahead and printed the ones that were even close. A lot of the . . . actors wear wigs and try to conceal their identity.”

“Let’s take a look.”

“I found about a dozen.” He hands me a manila folder with several eight-by-ten photos inside. “They’re kind of shocking, Chief.”

I take the folder and open it. He’s right. The photos are not only shocking, but disturbing. Outrage rises inside me at the sight of a young woman clad in traditional Amish garb. Plain dress. Gauzy kapp. No makeup. She’s Caucasian. Brown hair peeks out from beneath the kapp. The photo is relatively good quality, but her face is turned so that I can’t make out her facial features. She may or may not be Amish; there’s no way to tell, but it feels like sacrilege.

The woman and two men are on an antique-looking steel bed. I see rumpled white sheets. A windowless, white-walled room. Shadows raining down, giving the photo the stark ambience of an old film. The woman straddles a white male, who’s lying on his back. He’s in his late twenties or early thirties. Dark brown hair. Goatee. His head is angled so that I can’t see his face. A second white male is grasping her hips and pumping into the woman from behind. Again, his face is turned. He’s larger with a heavily muscled body. A weight lifter, probably. More body hair. Sideburns. No beard. No visible birthmarks.

I’m no prude, but this staggers me. I stare at the young woman’s profile. Her head is thrown back as if in ecstasy. Her dress is open in the front and her tiny breasts are bared. I can’t tell if it’s Mary Plank. She has pretty skin and a girlish figure. She looks very young. So skinny I can see her ribs. But she still has the chubby hands of a child.

I try to take in the details with the unaffected eye of a cop, but I can feel the pound of outrage in my ears. The burn of embarrassment on my cheeks. A depth of sadness in my heart that surprises me.

“Is it her?” T.J.’s words snap me from my momentary fugue.

“Hard to tell.”

“They kept their faces angled away from the camera the duration of the video.”

“I can see why they don’t want people recognizing them. This is pretty raw stuff.” I glance at the folder in my hand. I don’t want to look at the other photos, but I don’t have a choice. “Get the domains and IP addresses to Tomasetti. Get BCI to run down the owners of the sites.”

“Sure.”

“In the interim, why don’t you cruise out to whoisit.com and see if you can come up with contact information or names.”

“Probably a long shot.”

“We might get lucky.”

I take the folder to my office so I can look at them in privacy. I’m midway there when the bell on the door jangles. I look over my shoulder to see Tomasetti enter, a cardboard tray filled with six biggie coffees in his hands. Glock brings up the rear holding a white paper bag. Despite my resolve to maintain an even keel, a small thrill that has absolutely nothing to do with coffee or doughnuts runs the length of me.

“Brain food,” Glock comments.

Skid enters behind Glock. “Gotta have a brain for that, dude.”

“Can’t you guys ever bring anything even remotely healthy?” Mona usurps the bag from Glock and carries it to the coffee station. “Does an apple fritter count as a fruit serving?”

“We’re cops,” Skid says. “We eat doughnuts.”

I feel Tomasetti’s eyes on me as I head toward my office. I know dodging him is a stupid reaction. We’re working together; more than likely, I’ll be dealing with him every day until the case is closed. But just the sight of him shakes me up a little.

Sliding behind my desk, I open the folder and start flipping through the photos. All depict young women in various stages of undress and engaging in some form of sex. Oral. Anal. Threesomes. All wear Amish clothing. Kapps. Plain dresses. Practical shoes. But all semblance of plain or practical ends there. The photos are triple X and difficult as hell to look at.

I arrange the photos into two piles. T.J. did a good job, but none of the women’s faces is fully visible. Of the twelve images, ten of them could be Mary Plank. All I can do at this point is give them to John and see if the BCI lab can magnify them and find some identifiable mark. A birthmark or scar I can connect to Mary Plank. There’s a chance his technology people will be able to identify the owners of the Web sites. From there, they may be able to locate the person who submitted the image.

My brain is still working that over when I look up to see Tomasetti standing in the doorway to my office. “T.J. said you had some photos.”

My eyes skitter away from his, but I force them back. “He got them off the Internet. Amish fetish stuff. A few could pass for Mary Plank.” I shrug. “Can you have someone at BCI take a look at the domains and IP addresses? Maybe we can find the owner of the site or at the very least find out who posted the pics.”

“We can try. The problem is that a lot of porn sites are based overseas where we have little or no control. Might take a while.”

Sighing, I look down at the two piles of photos. “These are the most promising.”

Taking the visitor chair across from me, Tomasetti reaches for the photos and begins flipping through them. I see his face darken. His brows knit. Frown lines appear on either side of his mouth. “Shit. Girls look young.”

“They do.” I reach for the case file, pull out one of the autopsy photos of Mary Plank and set it on the desktop between us for reference. “Can your lab enhance the photos? Maybe do some kind of comparison with the autopsy