Seeds of Deception: A Kate Burkholder Short Story by Linda Castillo

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?”
    “No one knows if she was there of her own accord or if someone took her there and dumped her,” Betancourt replies.
    “Sheriff Suggs tells us the Amish up there aren’t very forthcoming,” Bates says. “He’s not getting much in terms of cooperation.”
    “How did the ME rule on manner of death?” Tomasetti asks.
    “Undetermined,” Bates replies.
    Betancourt nods. “That didn’t sit well with Jim. Frankly, doesn’t sit well with me, either. I mean, we have a dead fifteen-year-old kid who’d ingested OxyContin. Gotten herself pregnant. Had an abortion. Froze to death in the woods. And no one will tell us shit.”
    “What’s the age of consent in New York?” I ask.
    “Seventeen,” Betancourt says. “There’s a Romeo and Juliet law, but if the guy who got her pregnant is more than four years older than our girl, we got him on statutory rape.”
    “Do the parents know about the abortion?” I ask.
    “Didn’t even know she was pregnant.”
    Tomasetti shrugs. “You check with local clinics? Area doctors?”
    Betancourt and Bates exchange a look. “ME thinks maybe the abortion wasn’t done at a clinic.”
    “Home abortion?” I ask.
    “Probably,” Bates replies. “No sign of infection or anything like that, but—and I’m speaking in layman’s terms here—I guess there was some internal damage. Not life-threatening, but present nonetheless.” Sighing, he motions toward his counterpart. “So we got all of this and then the sheriff gets a visit from a neighbor.”
    All eyes fall on Betancourt. Expression intense, he leans closer. “A few days after the girl was found, a neighbor, who’d heard about the girl’s death, called Jim Walker at home and informed him that a few weeks before her death, Rachel told her there were ‘bad goings-on’ out at that Amish settlement.”
    “What kind