He recites the names with the correct spelling and contact information, and I jot everything down. “Do you know Bonnie Fisher?”

Karns’s brows knit. “I don’t think so.”

“What about Noah Mast?” Tomasetti asks.

Karns shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

He doesn’t ask who they are and we don’t offer the information.

Ten minutes later, Tomasetti and I climb into the Tahoe and head down the gravel lane toward the highway.

“Slick guy,” Tomasetti says.

“Except we’re too jaded to buy into his bullshit.”

He slants me a look. “You think he’s lying about something?”

“I hate to see a guy like Karns rewarded for repugnant behavior.”

He pulls onto the highway. “Maybe he made contact with her, photographed her without her parents’ knowledge, and things went too far.”

“Or he initiated sexual contact and didn’t want her talking about it,” I put in.

“I don’t know, Kate. I think Annie’s murder is related to the other disappearances,” he says, surmising.

“Maybe there’s more to Karns than meets the eye.”

That’s one of the reasons Tomasetti and I work so well together. He’s never taken in by appearances and believes everyone is capable of deeds far removed from what they are. When he disagrees with me, he holds his ground.

After a moment, he sighs. “I think he’s a sack of shit, but I don’t like him for this.”

I’m not ready to let Karns off the hook. “The common denominator is that the missing are young and Amish and behaving outside the norm.”

“Karns’s photos depict the Amish within normal parameters.”

“That doesn’t rule him out.”

“We can’t make the pattern fit if it doesn’t.”

I don’t respond.

CHAPTER 13

An hour later, Tomasetti and I are back in the interview room of the Trumbull County sheriff’s department. He’s slumped in a chair, looking grouchy and bored, pecking on the keyboard of his laptop. I’m standing at the rear of the room with my cell phone stuck to my ear, listening to Auggie Brock lament the injustice of his son’s ongoing legal saga. I make all the appropriately sympathetic noises, but I know what he wants and there’s no way I’m going to compromise my ethics because his seventeen-year-old son has the common sense of a snail.