“Watch for footprints,” I tell him.

His beam illuminates the plank floor, sweeps left and right. As if of its own accord, my beam paints the nearest body with terrible light. Dozens of bruises, contusions and abrasions mar the dead girl’s torso, arms and legs. Small patches of skin are bright red. Other areas are nearly black. At some point, she’d vomited. I can smell the sour stink of it from where I stand.

“I got a footprint,” Skid calls out.

“Mark it.” I don’t take my eyes off the corpse. “Looks like they were tortured.”

“Someone tied them up and just went to fuckin’ town on them,” Skid says after a moment.

He lowers his flashlight and in that instant of light, I notice two small marks on the floor. “Wait,” I say. “What’s that?”

I squat next to the marks. Upon closer inspection, I can see there are actually three of them. They look like scuff marks in a thin layer of dust. If I were to connect them, they’d form a perfect triangle.

“What the fuck?” Skid whispers in a baffled tone.

“Mark them, will you?”

“Sure thing.”

“Keep your eye out for more footprints.”

“You bet.”

I shine my beam around the room. A few feet from where we stand, a propane torch, a small wooden club, a knife smeared with blood, and a foot-long skewer-like instrument sit neatly atop a workbench. Not the kinds of things you’d find in an Amish barn, and I know that whoever did this left them behind. “We might be able to lift some prints off those . . . tools.”

“Yeah.” Skid’s beam joins mine, and he makes a sound of disgust. “How the hell could someone do this? I mean, for chrissake, a couple of Amish girls?”

I have no answers. I have no words at all. For a moment the only sound comes from the stirring of the cows down the aisle and the muted song of the crickets outside.

“You think the father did this?” Skid asks.

I hear doubt in his voice and shake my head because I can’t imagine. “I don’t know.”

He shifts his beam back to the nearest victim. “Were they shot?” he asks. “Stabbed?”

Taking a deep breath, I train my beam on the victim nearest me. I see pale flesh speckled with blood. My beam stops on the black, gaping hole just below her navel.

“What the hell is that?” Skid’s voice comes from behind me.

“Knife wounds?” My voice is steady, but my beam quivers as a tremor of revulsion moves through my body.

“It looks like someone cut her open.”