Vanishing Girls (10 page)

“Karin,” Mac interrupted, but gently, “I see his point.”

“She was wearing pajamas with
sheep
on them.” I stared, hard, at Mac and Billy, my two favorite men in the universe—did I have to steer even them away from some base male instinct?

Billy pitched forward in his chair now. “And you’re shocked because it was a
white
girl in pajamas with sheep on them, and he thought he could buy her.”

“
No
.”

“Because little black girls, let me tell you, they’re used to it. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen in this city. Black guys pimping little black girls to your white neighbors.”

“
Whoa
.” Mac now rested a hand on both our arms, as if his touch could regulate down to harmless the high voltage of this forbidden conversation. “Both of you, get off the race and gender shit. Patrick Whatshisname is a pig. But he’s a pig because he’s a pig, not because he’s white or builds bookcases for fun or lives in Queens. They come in every size, shape, color, and gender. You both know that. So get off your high horses.”

Billy and I both sat there, grudgingly corrected.

I felt an amorphous rage deflate as shame settled in. Billy was upsetting me, but was this really why? So much had happened this past week to test my idea about who he was; I had always regarded him as reliable, unshakable, and here he was turning out to be fragile as thin glass. I didn’t know if I was disappointed by his troubles, or bewildered by his needs, or afraid of the new reality that his challenges were slippery and frightening. Why
was
I upset with him? Obviously, he wasn’t personally responsible for the narrow-mindedness that gripped our society; we were all in it together.

“I’m sorry, Billy. I didn’t mean to lash out at you. It’s just—men who use prostitutes, even if they’re kids . . . Who are they? How can someone use another human being like that, and not understand that there’s a real person at the other end of the transaction? It just makes me sick.”

“I’m also sorry, Karin,” Billy muttered. “And for whatever it’s worth, I don’t get it, either. I’ve had to think about it so much in the last year, it makes me sick, too. Those kids going missing, then turning up as dead hookers.
Sick
. Abby Dekker lying there on the sidewalk so close to another one—how close did she come to being one of them? And Pat, from Queens, with blood on his car. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that this wormy guy could be responsible for so much damage, going back years. I mean,
human trafficking
?
P-P-Pat
? The guy’s scared of his own wife. He’s scared of himself. Something doesn’t factor, I don’t know what, but it doesn’t feel right.”

“Let’s look at the facts,” Mac said.

Billy nodded. “Okay, here are the facts on Patrick John Ryan Scott, as it stands right now. He was arraigned and held on a class E felony for hit and run. Since it’s tied into a serial murder case
and
the Dekkers’ murders, the judge denied bail—flight risk. If Abby dies, the charge escalates to a class D felony and he goes to jail, and that’s just for the hit and run.”

“Pat’s wife hire him a lawyer?” Mac asked.

“Nope. Looks like she’s cutting him loose, which tells us something right there.”

“How old are his kids?” I asked, thinking of
all
my kids—Ben, and Cece, and Madeleine or Elizabeth or Catharine—and wondering what kind of burden a parent placed on their children when they worse than misbehaved.

“Two are teenagers, the other one’s younger, around eight I think,” Billy said. “Two boys and a girl.”

We took that in with a moment of silence. Boys who would become men, hopefully not like their father. What were the chances of that, once the seeds of his arrest were planted in their imaginations? I shivered at the thought. On the other hand, maybe they’d look at their father and run in the opposite direction. You just never knew.

“What I keep wondering,” I said, “is whether Abby ran before or after her parents were killed, what exactly went on in that house that night.”

“Exactly. We’ve been over the Dekkers’ e-mails and phone records, talked to neighbors, talked to colleagues, trying to put together what was going on in their lives lately. The last call from Reed Dekker’s cell phone was to . . .” Billy pulled out his iPhone, tapped it a couple of times, and read from the screen. “Father Ximens Dandolos.”

“And I thought Seamus was a tongue twister,” Mac said of his own given name.

“I looked it up—Ximens is Spanish for Simon; means the listener. But everyone calls him Father X,” Billy said. “They were good friends. The Dekkers were active in Father X’s church, St. Paul’s up on Court Street. Did a lot of fund-raising—helped finance the methadone clinic at Mary Immaculate, the teen outreach program at the local Y, things like that.”

“What time did they talk Sunday night?” Mac asked.

“Eight fifty-three. So whatever happened went down after.”

“What did they talk about?” I asked.

“The Dekkers needed someone to paint a radiator in their house. Father X likes to throw odd jobs to some of the guys in the rehab program, and the Dekkers liked to support that.”

Mac and I looked at each other and cringed. Billy shook his head. We had all heard about too many inside jobs by cons on do-gooders like the Dekkers to feel comfortable granting access to our homes by this particular class of strangers.

“Who’d he recommend for the job?” Mac asked.

“Said he’d call them back in the morning with a name.”

“Did he make that call?”

Mac and Billy looked at me when I asked that.

“Maybe he left a message before he found out they were dead.”

“He left them a lot of messages that day,” Billy said, “but not to recommend a handyman. He was trying to reach them because of Abby. The whole family was close. Father X has been spending a lot of time with her at the hospital, sitting by her side.”

“Our family priest would have done the same thing. He and my mom were like this.” Mac twined his fingers. “My dad used to joke that she was going to leave him for ‘the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but mostly the father.’ ” Mac chuckled at the memory of his late parents.

“Kind of creepy,” I commented.

“Not really.” Mac’s tone stiffened. “What’s going on with the church these days is only part of the story.”

“It’s been going on a long time, from what they tell us,” I said.

“Karin the social evangelist.” Billy glanced at Mac, who quickly suppressed a little smile. “Really, it’s the same shit as we were talking about before.”

“It’s true, Karin,” Mac said. “You shouldn’t cast aspersions on all because of the bad deeds of some.”

“Are you quoting your family’s priest now?”

He shot me a look. But he was right: Righteousness in any form was out of line.

“All right.” I straightened in my chair. “The facts. We clear our heads of all the noxious fumes. How is Abby doing?” Thinking of Abby made me remember Dathi, and anxiety tightened in my chest. My BlackBerry lay on the table and I glanced at it for the umpteenth time to see if she’d e-mailed back. But still nothing. It had been two days now since I’d spoken with Uncle Ishat and I was starting to really worry.

“I’m heading up there after this to see for myself.”

My pulse spiked. I looked at Billy suddenly, and he sighed.

“Yeah, sure, why not. You can come,” he said, before I even asked.

I turned to Mac. “Do you mind hanging out with Ben on your own this afternoon? He could always stay with Mom, but you shouldn’t go to the hospital yet until you’re twenty-four hours past your fever.”

“Wouldn’t want to spread the joy,” Mac said. “You go. Fill me in when you get home.”

T
he priest was standing outside Abby’s hospital door when we got there. Before we were close enough to really see his face, I noticed that everyone who passed in the hall smiled at him. He acknowledged every greeting with a small nod, but kept his attention focused on the middle-aged couple with whom he was speaking: a trim man with blond-gray hair, wearing pressed chinos and a plaid flannel shirt; and a woman who was slightly taller than him, in jeans and a fluffy white sweater. A pale blue headband pushed her shoulder-length (obviously dyed) blond hair off her face. Billy caught the priest’s eye just before we reached Abby’s door.

“You must be Father Dandolos.” Billy extended his hand with a smile. “I’m Detective Billy Staples, Eighty-fourth Precinct.”

“Yes, of course. Good to meet you in person; I always like to match a face with a voice. And please, call me Father X; everyone else does.” Father X took Billy’s hand but instead of shaking it, clasped it between his own smooth, liver-spotted hands. He had a thick head of white hair and small eyes that appeared to sink into a doughy face. When he smiled, his cheeks tightened and flushed pink; otherwise his skin was slack, hanging in jowls off his jaw.

“This is Karin Schaeffer,” Billy introduced me, “a private investigator consulting on the case.”

Father X clasped my hand; his skin was cool and damp.

“Let me introduce Steve and Linda Campbell,” he said. “They were close friends of Reed and Marta.”

Steve’s lips pressed together, igniting deep lines astride a mouth that was unusually wide; I recognized him from somewhere, but couldn’t place him. “We still can’t quite get over the shock of what happened to them.”

“I don’t think we ever will. They were our very best friends.” Linda smiled sadly and nodded for what seemed a long time. Her skin made her appear older than she had from a distance: nearly sixty, I guessed. Steve looked younger, but appearances could deceive. “And all the good works they did, well, it’s going to be hard to step into their shoes.”

“Did you know them from the church?” Billy asked.

“Just about all our friends are from the church.”

“That’s right,” Steve agreed.

“And to think,” Linda said, “if Marta and Reed had gone to the party with us Sunday night, they might still be alive. Marta said she wasn’t feeling well. If anyone had imagined this could have happened, we would have
insisted
they join us.” She shook her head and dissolved in tears.

“It’s past, Lindy,” Steve told her, patting her shoulder; the back of his hand was blanketed with pale hair. Her tears escalated, and he wrapped his arm around her. “It’s been a tough day. We were at Reed’s lawyer’s this morning to hear the will. They named us as Abby’s guardians.” There was no word for the emotion that consumed his face when he said that: sadness, joy, regret, gratitude, panic. I couldn’t read him. All I knew was that I felt sorry for the Campbells, who struck me as ill equipped to take on any of this: first their best friends’ murders, and now their child.

A nurse rattled a cart along the hall and then veered into Abby’s room. With her was the small red-haired woman, the care coordinator Sasha Mendelssohn, whom we’d met on my other visit.

“Bath time for Abby,” Sasha cheerfully announced. Though obviously it wouldn’t be too cheerful a bath, given that the nurse would be sponge-bathing a battered, comatose child. “Good to see you again, Detective. And hello to you, too . . .”

“Karin.”

“Right.”

“Any improvement?” Billy asked.

“Still waiting for the brain swelling to go down more than it has. I can tell you it isn’t worse, if that’s any consolation.”

“Last time you mentioned the possibility of taking her out of the coma temporarily so we could—”

“I realize how eager you are to talk to Abby about what happened. Believe me, the hospital’s been fending off pressure from every direction all week. Reporters hound us every time we step out the front door. But the message doesn’t change: We won’t consider bringing her out at least until the swelling’s gone down, and it hasn’t gone down enough yet. I’m sorry.”

It was true: You couldn’t walk down the street or turn on the television without an update on Abby Dekker’s status. Everyone in the city wanted to know what she knew, if anything, about the Working Girl Killer. Was the media frenzy right: was Patrick Scott guilty of all the murders, or was someone else lurking? Everyone was afraid she or a loved one would be next. And everyone wanted it to stop. Something about it being so close to Christmas seemed to accentuate the communal anguish and hope for a miracle in the form of a resurrected child.

“I understand.” But Billy’s tone betrayed impatience.

“If you want to see her before her bath, now’s your chance,” Sasha said.

“It’s been a long day,” Steve said, “and tomorrow’s a school day for me—I’m a middle school teacher, we start bright and early. Think we’ll be heading home now.”

“Mind if I take your phone number?” Billy asked. “Love to talk to you tomorrow.”

Steve dug his free hand into his pocket for his wallet and managed to slip out a business card with one shaking hand, while Linda continued to sob at his side. “Call anytime.”

Father X patted Linda on the back as Steve led her away. “It has been a very long day.”

“I think I saw
you
here pretty early this morning,” Sasha said to Father X as we all headed into Abby’s room. A big, cheerful hand-drawn collage crowded with goofy class photos and kids’ signatures now hung on the wall facing her bed. Half a dozen Mylar balloons were clustered in a far corner of the ceiling. She lay there silently, oblivious to it all.

“Oh yes. I was here before nine. I’ve been reading aloud to her.”

Sasha glanced at a book spread open, facedown, on the guest chair. “
A Wrinkle in Time.
That was one of my favorites when I was a kid.”

“It’s as good today as it ever was,” Father X agreed. “They say people in comas can hear. I thought reading to her might help, somehow.”

“Well, it can’t hurt.” Sasha smiled.

Billy and I stood a few feet from Abby’s bed, looking at her. Her wounds had healed somewhat, and the bright violet of her bruises had faded to a greenish yellow. She was thinner now, and paler, with her hands lax at her sides and her blue nail polish as fresh as a week ago from disuse. I wondered how she would feel when she learned that the Campbells were going to be her new parents. And I wondered how long it would take for her to stop thinking of herself as an orphan, if she ever would.