Vanishing Girls (24 page)

Chapter 24

T
he first call I made, as soon as Mary and I were in a taxi speeding back to Brooklyn, was to Dathi’s school to find out if she had ever come back after lunch. The school had an open lunch policy, during which kids were let out for an hour. Attendance was taken twice a day, in the morning and after lunch. I waited a few minutes while a school secretary put me on hold, then heard exactly what I expected:

“She was here on time for
A.M.
attendance, but she wasn’t marked in for
P.M.
attendance.”

“Why didn’t anyone call to tell me she never got back to school after lunch?”

There was a pause. A sigh. “We don’t always call. But we keep a record.”

Which apparently the person who answered the phone when I’d called earlier hadn’t bothered to check. What was the point of all that record keeping if you weren’t going to use it?

Next I tried to call Mac, to tell him to look for Dathi at the Dekker house. But he didn’t answer his cell phone and he didn’t answer at home, either.

I thought of calling Billy, but decided against it. But I did call his sister; something had been bothering me and I wanted to find out. I tapped my phone’s Web browser and in moments located her number through the online white pages.

“Hi Janine, I’m Karin,” I introduced myself, “a friend of Billy’s?”

“Oh, sure. He’s told us all about you. Your little boy sounds like a hoot.”

“He is.”

“Little boys that age—yummy.”

“Janine, thanks so much for the hand-me-downs for Dathi. She needs clothes. We really appreciate it.”

“Don’t mention it; sorry it isn’t more. I hope she doesn’t mind Catholic school chic.” She laughed. But I thought it was a strange thing to say.

“Dathi’s trying to be more American,” I said, “though maybe not
that
American.”

“You telling me she’s too uptight for a navy blue skirt with pleats and a matching sweater?”

“Oh—I didn’t see those.”

“The good thing about school uniforms is you don’t have to fuss about shopping, except for a few weekend clothes. The bad thing is, no one wants most of it afterward, except other Catholic schoolgirls. But I figured the skirt and sweater were versatile and Dathi could probably use them.”

“Thank you. By the way, I’m wondering if Billy’s there; I’ve been trying to find him.”

“Billy? No.”

“He’d mentioned helping you bail out from a broken pipe—what a nightmare.”

There was a pause. And then: “We just got back from Jamaica this morning. All our pipes seem fine.”

I fudged my way out of the rest of the conversation, cutting it short. I had what I needed to know: Billy had lied about where he’d been yesterday and last night, why he’d been incommunicado. And that bag of trashy clothes—they hadn’t belonged to his niece, from the sound of it.

I called the Eight-four conference room and asked for Ladasha.

“Oh Jesus, Karin. What do you want now?”

“Dathi might be in trouble.”

“Honey, I got five kids, and I can tell you I never knew a teenager who
wasn’t
in trouble.”

“She’s only twelve.”

“Same difference.”

“Listen to me, Dash. Dathi didn’t go back to school after lunch today. I just talked to Abby and—”

“You
talked
to Abby?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you everything later. But right now, we need to find Dathi.”

I rattled off everything Abby had told us. What worried me now was that other men were involved, besides Reed Dekker and Steve Campbell, who were dead and harmless, or Father X, who was in jail. The question was: Who were the other men in the photos?

“Dash, maybe you already know this—but don’t tell Billy for now, okay?”

She sighed, or snorted, or a combination of both. “Yeah. I got that one figured out.”

“Can you get over to the Dekker house to check?”

“I’m on it.”

“See you in a few minutes—on my way.”

The cab pulled up in front of the quiet brownstone that exuded a forlorn abandonment. The windows were dark. Recent snowfalls had buried the house in untouched swaths of white, thick bands of it edging the roof and the lintels above each window and the front door. A narrow path of packed snow had been trampled by the inevitable stream of passersby. I was surprised that none of the neighbors had shoveled the sidewalk, knowing that the Dekkers were gone and the house was unoccupied now. They must have thought it was still a crime scene, and therefore shouldn’t be touched, though that in fact was not true.

Mary and I got out, and the cab drove away. A few people walked by on either side of the street, but mostly it was quiet and peaceful. Evening was quickly descending, sucking away all the light.

“Where are they?” I snapped. Ladasha had told me she was “on it.” By the look of it, no one was on it. And I wouldn’t fool myself by thinking anyone had come and gone—the pristine blanket of snow up the front stoop said otherwise.

“Look at that.” Mary pointed at the snow-covered front yard leading to the ground-floor entrance. You could just make out, in the thickening twilight, a steady trail of smallish footprints.

We opened the half gate and entered the yard, where a large flowerpot was mostly buried in snow.

“It looks like someone was digging behind the pot,” Mary said.

When we came closer, you could see that a hand had burrowed all the way to the bottom by the back. On one side, settled lightly across the top of the snow, there were bits of snapped-off twigs from the dead plant in the pot.

“The pot was tilted over,” I said. “Abby must have told her where to find a key.”

The outside lower gate was unlocked; it opened to an easy push. The inner door, however, was locked, but with the kind of flimsy doorknob locks you tended to find inside on hollow doors. A lot of the brownstones still had those, relying for safety on the heavy iron exterior gate. I wished I had Mac’s lock-pick set, but I didn’t.

I fisted my hand in my leather glove and punched through the pane of glass closest to the knob. The glass shattered. After knocking out the jagged teeth of broken glass, I reached in and turned the pinch lock.

“When are people going to learn not to use these cheap doorknobs?” I said to Mary.

“Well,
I
won’t, that’s for sure.”

It was still and quiet inside the house. The lowceilinged ground floor, with its carpeted hall and three doors off a narrow hallway, looked as if it had served as the Dekkers’ utilitarian space: workrooms, guest room, storage.

Dathi’s black sneakers, wet from tracking through the unshoveled snow to the door, sat side by side, neatly, by the wall. It was too quiet. Was someone with her? Had he heard us come in?

“Shh,” I cautioned Mary, whispering: “Check the rooms down here. Abby said ‘under the stairs,’ so keep that in mind. I’ll go up.”

I went upstairs to the parlor floor. Light from a passing car outside shimmered on the high, ornate ceiling. The round glass coffee table had gathered a thick coat of dust as undisturbed as the snowy front stoop. Something I hadn’t noticed last time I was here popped out at me: a cookbook had been left open on the couch, a pair of reading glasses hooked over the topmost page. I wondered what the Dekkers had been doing that Sunday night when Tina appeared at their front door. It struck me how shocked Marta must have been—a doorbell setting in motion the abrupt destruction of her world. But had she really been an innocent bystander? It was hard to understand how, living with such a man, you would fail to notice or even suspect that something was seriously amiss. It seemed beyond reason. But in these cases there were really only two choices: She was either deluded beyond the pale, or his accomplice.

There was no sign of anyone else here. I started to relax; then warned myself not to.

Hidden under the stairs
, Abby had said.

I looked around.

As in all brownstones, a staircase zigzagged up the flights, this one rising in elegant bends of polished banister. I walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up, thinking it was possible that one of the steps opened; but for the kinds of things these men had been up to, such a small hiding place seemed unlikely. Careful to avoid the orange-and-red vase on the pedestal near the foot of the stairs, I slowly walked the length of the wall that sided the staircase on the parlor floor, where oldfashioned carved wood paneling had been restored to a dull luster, a decorative checkerboard landscape of circles within squares within larger squares. It was the kind of pattern you’d imagine a young child taking the time to count the parts of, but you’d have to really concentrate or you’d lose track; there was no way to ascertain the number of circles at a glance. I stood there, staring at the hypnotic repetition. Each circle was ringed by two other circles, and had a convex center.

Stepping closer, I moved my fingertips along the surface of the nearest circle, dipping toward the center. They were like inverted buttons. How many hands, over how many decades, had explored the crevices of the pattern? The longer I looked at it, the more I saw: a dozen circles graced each panel, and each panel was the size of approximately half a door. Between each panel was a hairline separation so thin it was barely visible.

When I was a child, Jon and I would spend hours exploring our grandparents’ big old Victorian house in Montclair. When we eventually moved in, we discovered on our own that there were secret compartments built into the house in seemingly random places; Grandma and Grandpa always denied it, but with a sly wink. By the time we outgrew our curiosity about secret places, we had mapped every one of those compartments in our minds. Some had slender handles that would lift up leverlike out of the edge of a panel, while others popped open on tension springs if you pushed them just right.

I pressed all along the edges of the closest panel. Nothing moved. Stepping right, I kept trying until one sprang open to my touch.

Chapter 25

I
nside was a musty compartment piled with bike helmets, tennis rackets, a bucket, a coil of hose still in its packaging—the kind of random stuff a family accumulated over time. The stink of decay was terrible; it was the same smell I recalled from my first apartment in Brooklyn where mice had died in the walls. It was too dark to see across the entire space, but I thought it was worth a look, so I went to the kitchen and rooted around until I found a flashlight in a drawer along with other household tools: a ball of twine, packing tape, a stapler.

Illuminated, I now saw everything, and realized that this was where the family stored a lot of its shoes: white sneakers in various sizes; high-heeled black leather boots; Crocs in different sizes and colors; purple rain boots; large brown suede Desert boots, edged with mud. I couldn’t resist knocking one over with the flashlight to see inside: My heart jittered when I saw a whitish
10
imprinted on the leather interior. I swung the flashlight to the pile of sneakers and was sure I spotted at least one pair of men’s New Balance. I didn’t remember the exact model of sneaker Ladasha had mentioned matched the footprint at many of the crime scenes, but I remembered they were a size 10 and sometimes, instead of sneakers, the killer had worn Desert boots.

I was about to back out of the space and call Ladasha when I thought I heard something knocking around inside. I swept the flashlight back and forth, but saw nothing new. A live mouse must have been trapped behind a wall. With no one living here anymore, the place must have become infested.

But then I heard something that with certainty was
not
a mouse.

“Hello? Is someone there?” The voice was small and muted; but I recognized it.

“Dathi?”

“Karin—in here!”

“Where?”

“Push the inside wall, the one with the sticker.”

Three quarters of the way up the back wall of the crawl space, along the far left edge, was a decal from a bank. It looked innocuous enough, as if stuck there accidentally by a mischievous child; but when I pressed it, I could feel that it was in fact covering some kind of hardware.

The inner wall sprang open in my direction, just an inch, but enough for me to get my fingers through. I pulled it open and shone the flashlight into the darkness: and there was Dathi, cross-legged, the top of her head touching the low slanted ceiling. You could see from her puffy face that she had been crying.

“I shut the door behind me so no one would see me, and I couldn’t open it again. Abby didn’t warn me.”

“Who was going to see you in here?”

“I don’t know. She told me to be careful. Look.”

I swept the light across the space beyond her and saw how far back it went, diminishing to a sharp angle at its deepest point. Shoeboxes were stacked against the wall, along with some larger boxes that looked worn with age. Nothing was labeled, and Dathi had opened a few of them, assumedly to find what she had been sent for.

Her hands shook as she held up a flimsy book of photographs, the kind drugstores used to give you for free when you had your prints developed there. “These are Abby’s baby pictures with her mother—her real mother. They are so much like my own baby pictures: our mothers were both girls.”

Then, from the floor beside her, Dathi picked up a cloth doll, the color so faded it looked almost white, the fabric of its face so thin there were no features, just a blank webbing through which you could see clumps of stuffing. “I think this is the doll Abby meant. She said it was her mother’s, and then hers. I had to find it in the pictures first. The
other
pictures, Karin . . . in the other boxes.” Her expression froze in a denial of whatever it was she had seen in the photographs.

Behind her, photos lay scattered across the floor where she had emptied shoeboxes, searching. It looked like more of the same kind of filth that was in the metal lockbox from the church. But this time I caught a glimpse of two things that made my insides quiver: In at least two photos, there were black-robed men, like priests, wearing the kind of white Halloween mask Joey Esposito had described; in another photo, you could see the arched back of a young girl with long brown fingers curved around her middle like a cage.

She whispered, “Thank you so very much for saving me, for bringing me from India, so I wouldn’t have to . . . Well, I am worried about Oja.”

“Oja’s family will protect her.”

“Why didn’t my family protect me?”

“We’ll discuss that later.” Instead of launching into vitriol about Uncle Ishat, I reached in to pull her out. Her hand was tacky-wet, as if it had touched something syrupy.

Before she had moved more than a few inches, we were startled by the clacking of footsteps.

“That’s just Mary,” I whispered.

But something felt wrong. Mary was wearing crepesoled boots; her steps would be spongy, not the hard clomps of what resonated across the wood floor of the foyer, coming closer.

“Karin?” Mary’s voice sounded distant—she was calling up from the bottom of the ground-floor staircase. She must have heard the footsteps, too.

The walking stopped.

“I’m scared,” Dathi began to say.

I pressed my hand over her mouth. Shut off the flashlight. Pulled the inner door closed; it locked with a click, trapping us both inside. We listened as someone rooted around the exterior crawl space.

“Oh shit.”

It was Billy.

I pressed harder against Dathi’s mouth:
Not a sound
.

“Mother
fucker
.” He sounded bitterly angry.

“Billy?” You could hear Mary’s voice in the near distance, beyond the wall.

There was some jostling in the crawl space as Billy backed away. You could hear him exit the space, his unbalanced footing as he came to standing.

“Mary! What’re you doing here?”

“I came with—” She stopped talking so abruptly I thought my heart would explode.

There were a few loud clomps of Billy’s hard footsteps. The sound of something heavy falling.

“Oh man, what were you thinking?” you could just hear Billy mumble. “That is definitely not good.”

If he had hurt Mary . . .
if he had hurt her . . .
Furious, I looked at Dathi and mimed a fast zipping across my lips:
Keep quiet
. Then I released her, grabbed the flashlight, leaned as far back as I could—and kicked open the inner door. The wood shattered. I kicked twice more to push away the shards and create a big enough opening to crawl through. Then I hunched forward and sprang out of the crawl space.

Billy and Mary both stood there gaping at me. On the floor between them lay jagged pieces of orange and red glass, remnants of what had been, until moments ago, a slender vase.

“Karin!” Billy said. “What the hell?”

“Ditto.”

“I came to look for Dathi—and for you.”

“Why?”

“Because I was
worried
. What, do you think you have a monopoly on caring about your friends?”

“How did you know to come here?”

“Did you think . . . oh, fucking Dash. What a piece of work. What did she say to you?”

“How did you know to come here?” I asked again.

“Sasha Mendelssohn up at the hospital’s been talking to Abby. She called me.”

“Billy,” I spit it out, “I called your sister and—”

“Yeah, she told me.” He sighed. “Okay, I lied to you about her pipes breaking. I had something to think about and I needed to get away, all on my own; I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. I went out to Greenport on the North Fork. Got drunk. Took some long walks. Shook some cobwebs out of my head.”

“You’re sure that one’s true?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Those sleazy women’s clothes in your apartment.”

Disbelief crossed his face like a shadow. “Oh
no
. Is that what you were thinking? Karin, seriously, you thought
that
? About
me
?”

“Dash and George Vargas, they’ve been investigating you. The way you’ve been falling apart at crime scenes, well, they thought maybe it was more than PTSD.”

“Yeah, I know. I found out about it this morning after you left. I had it out with her. It was bullshit, what they were doing. I could probably sue them for harassment, you know? But I won’t. I just want out.”

If he was saying he’d had enough of police work, good for him; but this wasn’t the time to have that conversation.

“Billy, what are those clothes?”

“I am not the killer, Karin.”

The look on his face: I wanted to believe him. And yet I knew that if he were a true sociopath, proficient with the kind of manipulation and deception he’d have to be capable of to pull that off, then he’d still be doing now what he’d mostly always done in the past: convincing me he was a good person, my true friend.

“What about those clothes, Billy?” Gently, this time.

“I’m telling you: Janine gave me a bag of stuff for Dathi. It was last week, before they went on vacation. I brought it home. Put it in my place. Went to work.” His eyes rolled up, as if remembering something, and he dug his cell phone out of his jeans pocket. He pressed a speed dial and waited for an answer. “Eartha? It’s Uncle Billy. That bag of hand-me-downs sitting in the hall by the front door, last time I was visiting—did you put some other stuff in there before I took off?” He listened, his face lighting with humor. “Uh-huh, yeah, thanks honey.”

Mary and I glanced at each other: truth or dare? How could we be sure he was really talking to his niece? It would be easy enough to find out later, if necessary . . . and he knew it. Which pretty much convinced me. Billy was complicated these days, but he wasn’t stupid.

“Costumes from her school play. She thought the bag was going to Goodwill; she didn’t know her mom was passing the stuff on to anyone to actually wear.”

“What was the play?”

His smile broadened. “
Rent
. Satisfied?”

“You really didn’t notice what was in the bag, Billy?” It was hard to believe, given how flashy the clothes were. “It didn’t strike you as the kind of stuff Eartha doesn’t usually wear?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Honestly, Karin, I didn’t notice. I didn’t even look; I just grabbed the bag and left. I haven’t been in the greatest state of mind lately. I’ve been missing a lot of details.”

I knew it was true; and just like that, whatever doubts I may have grudgingly nursed about him evaporated.

“I’m sorry, Billy, I—”

“Karin, forget it. Let’s just get past this, please. Let’s find Dathi.”

“I am here!” She must have been hovering in the crawl space, waiting for the right moment to come out. She emerged, crawling, with a shaky smile on her round face. I wished she didn’t think she had to be so brave all the time. She had just spent hours locked in a putrid space filled with child pornography. She had every right to protest in any way she felt like; but Dathi, being Dathi, wouldn’t.

She came to my side. I put my arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

“Abby.”

“She told me not to tell anyone; she was very afraid of Mr. Campbell.”

“He can’t hurt her anymore.” I noticed Dathi’s hands, which had been sticky when they touched me before in the dark: Some of her fingers and part of her right hand looked blackish red. “Dathi, are you bleeding?”

She shook her head. “There’s a box, inside is a plastic bag, but it wasn’t tied very well. There are some items of clothing inside the bag, some a little bit damp. I smelled mildew.”

I stared at her a moment, horrified—what had she stuck her hand into? My mind flew to the photographs on the task force wall: all those young women, brutally murdered, partially dressed, each missing an item of clothing. I pulled Dathi close.

“Karin,” Billy said, “let me have that flashlight.”

Mary stayed in the hall with Dathi while I followed him to the crawl space. I could hear them chatting, Mary trying to distract her from the bitter truth she would eventually know by heart: that it wasn’t just her, but girls everywhere who were in danger. She and Abby had more in common than she had imagined. I only hoped this wouldn’t sour Dathi on her hopes for her new life in America; things
would
be better for her here, despite all this. She would learn to absorb and navigate the complications, some of them paradoxical, over time.

Billy got to his knees and crawled in. I crawled in behind him.

There was barely enough room for both of us to squeeze together through the second, smaller door. He jostled the flashlight in and forward, switched it on, and swung it back and forth in the small space.

And then we saw the box.

The partially faded stamp on the side of the old cardboard read
Stark Bowie #23 (MS–63)
.

He held the light on those words: There it was.

He had finally found his killer—a man who had been dead for three weeks.

Which meant that someone else had killed Chali, thus the copycat knife. Trying to make it look as if the Working Girl killer had finally run out of his signature weapon? Someone who had been determined to carry on the legacy? What had Chali seen or heard or thought or discovered that night she’d spent with Abby in this house? Why hadn’t she mentioned something sooner?

“I wonder if there are any knives left in there,” I said.

Billy scooted forward on his knees, his head hunched to accommodate the sloping ceiling. Fingers shaking, he pried apart the four folded flaps.

“Billy, you’re getting your prints over everything.”

“Fuck it,” he said. That was when I knew for sure that he had given up on being a cop.

I pressed in beside him as he maneuvered the flashlight so we could see inside the box.

At least a dozen small, narrow boxes were nestled neatly together at the bottom, each imprinted with a Stark logo in a fattened italic that had been modern in the 1960s and was retro now. Billy reached in with his free hand.

“I don’t think you should,” I warned. If he touched anything else, put his fingerprints on one of the boxes housing an individual knife, it would be even worse for him.