Bates motions to Betancourt. “Since Tomasetti and I are pretty much window dressing, I’ll turn it over to Frank.”

Betancourt comes to life. “On January twenty-first, a couple of hunters found the body of fifteen-year-old Rachel Esh in the woods a few miles from where she lived.”

His style differs greatly from Bates’s, who seems more politician than cop, preferring to ease into a conversation with a joke and small talk. Not so with the senior investigator. While Bates is laid-back, Betancourt is intense and jumps into the discussion feetfirst. I get the impression he’s not shy about ruffling feathers, either.

“What was the cause of death?” I ask.

“The autopsy showed she died of hypothermia due to exposure. There was a snowstorm. For some reason she was out in it and froze to death. ME ran a tox, which showed she had traces of OxyContin in her bloodstream at the time of her death.”

“Odd for an Amish girl that age to have drugs in her system,” I say. “Does the sheriff suspect foul play?”

“She got the drugs somewhere.” Betancourt leans closer. “But even more perplexing is the fact that she’d recently been pregnant.”

“Recently pregnant?” I look from man to man. “What do you mean?”

“During the autopsy, the ME found evidence that she’d recently lost a baby. Some fetal material had been left behind.”

“Miscarriage?” I ask.

“ME thinks she had an abortion.”

“Is parental consent required in New York?” I say.

Betancourt shakes his head. “Nope.”

“Is there a boyfriend?” Tomasetti asks. “Anyone talk to him?”

“We talked to a lot of people, including her parents, and no one knows who she’d been seeing. We couldn’t come up with a single name,” Betancourt growls. “No one had ever seen her with a guy. She never talked about him. The family she was living with claimed she didn’t have a boyfriend.”

“So she wasn’t living with her family?” I ask.

Betancourt shakes his head. “Evidently, she had some problems with her parents. She moved in with another family, who are also Amish. Basically, no one seemed to know shit about what might’ve been going on in this girl’s life.”

“Or else they’re not talking.” I think about that for a moment. “Had she been reported missing?”

Betancourt shakes his head. “The family she was living with figured she’d run away, gone back to live with her parents. Apparently, she’d done it before. No one checked.”

“Sometimes the Amish prefer to take care of their own problems,” I tell him. “If they can avoid involving outsiders—including law enforcement—they will, for better or for worse.”

“This time it was for worse,” Bates mutters.

“Interestingly,” Betancourt says, “this girl wasn’t dressed in Amish clothes.”

“That may or may not be relevant.” He gives me a puzzled look so I expand. “At fifteen, she may have been starting Rumspringa, which is a teenage ritual, so to speak, in which Amish youths don’t have to follow the rules in the years leading up to their baptism. The adults pretty much look the other way.” I consider this before continuing. “What was she doing in the woods in that kind of weather?”