Vanishing Girls (17 page)

I went into her room to say good night to her at nine-thirty. She was lying on her mattress in the dark, and when I opened the door, a shaft of light from the hall fell on her yawning face.

“Okay if I come in?” I asked.

She nodded.

I knelt on the floor beside her, and tentatively stroked her forehead, as a mother might. She let me, silently at first, and then she said:

“I friended her and she accepted.”

“That girl from school?”

“Yes, her too. But I meant Abby.”

That took me by surprise. I was sure I’d never mentioned Abby’s last name to Dathi. Anyway, she was in the hospital; it wasn’t possible.

“Maybe it was a different Abby. That’s a common name.”

“Abby Dekker. I read about
her
family’s tragedy online. And then I found her on Facebook.”

It didn’t surprise me that Abby had a Facebook page, now that I knew that “everyone” that age had one, but it was unlikely she’d gotten her hands on a computer at the hospital. Still, you never knew. I would ask.

“Well, I guess anything’s possible. What did Abby say to you?”

“Nothing. We didn’t message or chat. She just accepted my friend invitation. She has five hundred and seventeen friends of all kinds. I noticed she hasn’t updated her status recently. When was she hurt?”

“More than three weeks ago.”

“Yes, that’s about right. I only have twenty-six friends, all girls I knew back home, but I am sure I’ll catch up fast. My whole class was on Facebook tonight, I think. Oja was there, too. I introduced her to my new friends.”

“Were Abby’s friends girls and boys?”

“Girls, boys, women, men. Everyone is Abby’s friend. I already like her very much.”

I felt a little dizzy by the time I left her alone to go to sleep. It was all moving so fast. Before going to bed, I went online and created a Facebook account for myself; I hadn’t been tempted by it, or felt any need for it, until now. I found Abby easily and sent her a friend request; but unlike Dathi, I didn’t hear back, and so couldn’t see past her photo and her name into the world she had created before the accident.

The next morning, Dathi appeared ready for school in skinny jeans and a T-shirt featuring a drawing of a bicycle and the legend
Cool Rider
. She had also chosen a pair of feathered earrings in sherbet colors and a cupcake charm necklace, both of which she wore now. She almost looked like all the other tweens at her new school except for one thing: She didn’t have the attitude yet; she was still the eager, friendly girl who had greeted me at the airport. But she was working on it. When I tried to get onto the bus with her, she stopped me.

“Karin, please, I can do this myself.”

My mind reeling, I stepped back onto the curb and watched the bus pull away. Mothering a twelve-year-old girl, mothering
this
girl, was like nothing I had ever experienced. Her fierce independence frightened me, even if I recognized myself in her. She was a child, but she seemed right on the cusp of that moment in childhood when you left it behind. Still, I had brought her here; I needed to keep her safe. The challenge was going to be figuring out how.

Back at home, I checked my Facebook page to find out if Abby had accepted my friend request. She hadn’t. I called Billy and told him about it.

“Abby’s still staring at the ceiling,” he said. “She can’t even talk.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“You think I know?”

“Just ask Sasha Mendelssohn if there’s any way she might have been online. I’m trying to figure out if Dathi made this up.”

“She seems like a sweet kid; I don’t take her for a liar.”

“Neither do I—but we really don’t know her very well.” I didn’t like saying that about Dathi, mixing doubt into the irrational affection I already felt for her. But it was true. “Find out and let me know, okay? I’m really curious.”

Twenty minutes later, just when I’d stepped out of the shower, my cell phone rang. I picked up my jeans, where I’d dropped them on the bathroom floor, and fished in a front pocket for the phone: Billy calling me back.

“Mendelssohn says no way. Abby doesn’t leave her bed unless someone’s with her, and then she pretty much just goes to the bathroom or hobbles down the hall on crutches. And all the computers in the hospital are password protected.”

“So either Dathi made it up, or someone else is controlling her Facebook page.”

“Ask her to show you when she gets home from school.”

“I will.”

“If it’s true, Karin, call me. Sometimes stuff slips past the CCU.”

These days, a detective could hardly get through a case without calling the Computer Crimes Unit for help. It was a no-brainer that the CCU would have been monitoring the Dekker family’s online profile, but Billy was right: They might have missed something.

“I’ll call you either way.”

Chapter 15

W
e crossed Bergen Street with the
Don’t Walk
sign flashing. Ben reached the corner first and scootered ahead, nearly colliding with the Three Musketeers.

“Whoa!” The short guy with dagger sideburns and yellow and red sneakers threw up his hands. Jutting his jaw forward, he attempted a semitoothless smile. “Fast little bugger.”

His friends gurgled laughter, and together, in their usual chattering clump, they turned up Bergen in the direction of Court Street. I paused to watch them. Where did they go every day, back and forth along the same path, at the same time, like clockwork?

Looming at the far intersection of Bergen and Court was St. Paul’s, the big Roman Catholic church I’d passed dozens of times. Father X’s church. The church where the Dekkers had been members. I wanted to follow the Musketeers all the way, to see if that was where they were going, but Ben was already at the next corner and I had to hurry to catch up with him.

As I rushed forward it struck me that these three men, these derelicts in their clean little-boy clothes, could be the very men (or kind of men) Father X recommended out for odd jobs. Reed Dekker’s last call before he was killed had been for just such a reference. The idea of one of these men entering the Dekker home to repair a broken radiator made my skin crawl. I imagined him spotting Abby—and then what? That was exactly how Elizabeth Smart’s abductor had found her, focusing on her as his target before abducting her for nine months as his “wife”: Elizabeth’s parents had given the down-and-out man, a homeless Bible-toting pedophile, work fixing their roof.

Maybe I’d come too close to some seriously bad guys in my years in law enforcement, but the rehabilitation of broken people struck me as a deluded pursuit. Protect your family first and keep troubled strangers at a safe distance, that was my philosophy, having learned the hard way that surface assumptions about people were often wrong. Kindness and forgiveness were
not
always what it took to restore a person’s dignity, because some people just didn’t have any.

“Ben!” I called. He turned around, far at the opposite corner, and saw me waving him back in my direction. “Come here!”

He zoomed to catch up with me as I turned in the opposite direction, quickly shortening the distance between us. When he got close, I broke into a jog. He easily kept up.

We crossed Court Street at the light. I managed to catch a glimpse of the last Musketeer going through a gate on Congress Street before vanishing from view. Ben and I followed until we were at an iron gate leading into a small yard with a concrete statue of a girl at prayer: the entrance to a chapel. A plaque outside the gate read
Burial Site of Cornelius Heeney, Founder of Brooklyn Benevolent Society and Benefactor of St. Paul’s Parish 1836
. We went around to the main entrance, on Court Street, where a sign announced the
Roman Catholic Church of St. Paul and St. Agnes
.

So the Three Musketeers
were
projects of Father X’s.
Had
they known the Dekkers?

“Let’s go home, Ben.” As I started walking, I pulled out my cell phone.

“Can we get ice cream?” He stood on his scooter and pointed now in the direction of Blue Marble.

“Later. First we have to eat lunch.”

Reluctantly he turned around and zipped past me. Billy answered his phone as I was picking up speed in an effort to catch up with my very fast son.

“Just what I like,” Billy answered, “a call from a heavy breather.”

“Listen, Billy, there are these three creepy guys I see all the time, and they just went into Father X’s church.”

“So?”

“Didn’t you tell me the Dekkers supported the church’s work with the needy?”

“Yeah, so?”

“You told me that Reed Dekker’s last call was to the father about getting someone over to fix a radiator.”

“Paint a radiator.”

“Whatever.”

“Details matter, Karin.”

“If any one of those men was inside my house, I’d worry. I’m just saying that if I were you, I’d check it out.”

There was a pause. A sigh. “Sure. Why not? I’ll just put it on my list, right under Dathi’s phantom Facebook activity.”

That floored me. “Phantom?”

“You caught me at a bad time. I’m busy. We’ll talk later.”

That was three lame zingers in a row, and each one stung.

We’d reached our block. I slowed down, watching Ben glide toward our house. I didn’t like Billy’s dismissive attitude, but I understood it: when you were working an impossible case, or in his situation three impossible cases that had rubbed up against each other, everyone was an armchair detective; everyone had the next great lead for you to follow so you could catch your guy. I knew all about how hard it was to politely listen before getting back to the leads you were working on before the interruption. But it was
me
, not some random busybody. Billy knew I was a good investigator even if I wasn’t official anymore. So why had he blown me off like that? I wondered if he was too distracted by his PTSD and the looming shadow of its discovery by his colleagues to focus fully on work. Maybe, I thought, unlocking the downstairs door and pushing it open so Ben could get inside, just maybe next time I had a good idea I would call Ladasha, instead. She would love that; it would feed her distrust of him. But I couldn’t do that to Billy. And I wasn’t going to let go because at this point I
wouldn’t
.

More and more, I believed that Chali’s murder was part of a larger picture that had burst into view on Nevins Street that December night. More and more, the shadows overlapped, implicating each other: dead prostitutes who had vanished as girls; Abby, just eleven, found half dead so close to a crime scene, on the night her parents were killed; Chali, once a child bride in a country infamous for human trafficking, murdered; and now Dathi, the imperative of whose rescue burst into my consciousness as all these pieces clicked together in a new, brutal logic. Girls were vanishing and then, somehow, returning, transformed by whatever had happened to them. It was something you expected in the third world. But here? On the sophisticated East Coast of America? In one of the wealthiest pockets of New York City? It was a ridiculous thought bordering on paranoia.

And yet . . . the shadows thrown by the neighbors, friends, creeps, priests—all the people whose lives swirled around the dead—shifted restlessly. There was something to see hiding in the shadows. Someday Dathi would crave answers, and I wanted to know what to tell her. Especially now that she was a very real part of my family and my life, I felt a powerful urgency to find out who had killed her mother. To give her answers. And to stop whoever was destroying all those innocent girls.

D
athi barely got her jacket hung up in the hall and her sneakers off before I asked her if she could log into her Facebook account.

“Of course!” she said, a little too perkily, I thought. Something told me she was more depleted than she was letting on. Another trying day at her new school? My heart sank for her; I wanted this to be easier than it was or probably could be.

She sat at the kitchen table with my laptop. After a moment, she called me over.

Abby’s profile photo showed her face in close-up, with her blue fingernails pulling her cheeks like lumps of clay. Her eyes were bright and her hair looked blonder than in real life.

“That’s a funny picture,” I commented.

“She probably took it herself with her webcam.”

I looked at the array of thumbnail photos showing her various friends who were currently online. Most of the kids’ pictures were goofy, improvised, like Abby’s, whereas the adults tended to be more studied even if they were relaxed.

“You’re right: She
does
know a lot of different kinds of people.” I was especially surprised to see how many of them were adults, and wondered if that was normal for a kid in the world of online networking. My gut told me it wasn’t. Some may have been teachers at her school and parents of friends. But then it struck me: Too many were men.

“You see, her last status was on the day of the accident.” When Dathi’s slender fingertip touched the screen, I saw a drop of purple fingernail polish that hadn’t been there in the morning, dead center in the middle of her nail. She must have noticed my attention because suddenly she held up all her fingers for me to see: Each nail had been targeted with a purple dot. She smiled tentatively. “Tiffany did it at lunch.”

“It’s nice,” I lied. It wasn’t either nice or not-nice. It was silly. I could only imagine the kind of social pressure she was under and how bewildered she must have felt.

She clicked to her own page; her profile photo showed her as a little girl, back in India, wearing matching orange saris with a young and smiling Chali. My stomach tumbled at the sight of them together. Then she clicked on a little earth symbol in the toolbar and a list of notifications popped up.

“See here? She accepted my friend request last night.”

I nodded. “Okay.” But it was another disingenuous response: It
wasn’t
okay. I didn’t believe that it was Abby who confirmed the friend request. It couldn’t have been, unless she had a laptop hidden somewhere in her room, or someone visiting her had brought in a computer or allowed her to use their smartphone. But all those possibilities seemed doubtful to me. Abby did not seem tuned-in enough to social network at the moment, even if given an opportunity.

“I would very much like to meet her,” Dathi said, again.

I looked at her: loneliness came off her like a vapor. I wanted her to have a friend, a real friend, so badly. But why Abby? And
how
Abby?

“We’ll see. Do you have homework?”

She pulled a stack of heavy textbooks out of her backpack, and set to work.

A few minutes later, when I followed Ben downstairs to make sure he wasn’t getting into anything, I ducked into my bedroom and called Billy.

“The Facebook page is there,” I told him. “I saw it. Someone definitely confirmed Dathi’s friend request last night.”

“Karin, about before. I’m sorry. I was just, you know—”

“It’s okay.” Though it wasn’t, really. “Listen: Do you think maybe whoever broke into the Dekker house the night of the murders somehow got Abby’s login and password?”

“I’ll get the CCU on it. This is enough of a red flag to subpoena the account. Shit—they should have seen this themselves.”

“They weren’t looking.”

“I’ll say.”

“Listen, Billy, before you go—I also want to say that I’m sorry, too.”

“What for?”

“Pushing you so hard, in different directions.”

“I don’t really know what you mean.”

But I knew that he did: pushing him to feel better, pushing him to do better; pushing him to delve into the murky waters of his deepest self and catch a serial killer at the same time.

“Go back to work, Billy.”

“Stop telling me what to do.”

We laughed. And hung up.

T
he next day, Dathi took herself off to school in a morning routine that had already fallen into place. We all ate breakfast together; at eight-ten Dathi left for the bus; at eight-fifty I left with Ben to drop him off at school; sometime while I was gone, Mac took himself to his new office. By the time I got home at a quarter past nine, I would be alone in the house.

Only today I didn’t get there. On my way back home, my attention or obsession or paranoia or whatever you wanted to call it was snagged, once again, by the Three Musketeers making their way along Smith Street. For some reason, their regularity infuriated me this morning. They clearly had sucked from the bottom of life’s shoes, so how was it that their days cycled forward so reliably? There appeared to be a peacefulness to their routine that I felt, intuitively, they didn’t deserve.

Every day at around nine
A.M.
they walked up Smith Street in one direction. Every day at around noon they walked down Smith Street in the opposite direction and went to St. Paul’s.

Where did they go in between?

What exactly was their involvement with Father X, his church, the Dekkers?

Today, as I was about to turn onto my block and they passed me in their prattling nicotine cloud, I hesitated. Watched them move down the block toward the next corner. And without exactly deciding to—followed them.

I just had a feeling about this. A strong feeling that it was crucial to peel back every shadow. Not just to solve the murder cases, but for Billy’s sake: It wasn’t enough for the POI list to shrink with the omission of his name; it also had to grow and grow until his name’s place on it was all but forgotten.

They crossed Pacific Street and kept walking, all three nodding to the orange-vested crossing guard as they passed her.

“Yo, boys,” I heard her say.

At the corner of Atlantic Avenue, they turned east. I held my pace and continued to follow. As I turned the corner onto Atlantic, I realized that this was the same path Dathi followed every morning to her bus, the B63. The Musketeers gathered around the bus stop, waiting. Did these men ride the B63 every morning? What if one day, for some reason, Dathi was late for school—and rode with them? A chill zippered through me: I didn’t like this; I had to know.

I casually stopped near the bus stop and pretended to wait as if that had always been my intention. Their juvenile chattering never ceased. When I managed to overhear them, their conversation was remarkably insipid: at one point, they fervidly discussed shoelaces and double knots; next, the topic was ketchup and how many times you should knock the bottle to get it moving. I started to find them almost charming, an impulse that dissolved when the tallest Musketeer stepped out of the group and moseyed to the recessed doorway of a copy shop that had not yet opened for the day. He wore pressed blue jeans, bright white sneakers, and a black jacket with a white sweatshirt hood dangling down his back. His back to sidewalk traffic, he unzipped his fly and that was when I turned away. After he returned to the bus stop, I glanced over to where he had stood and saw a stream of urine meandering along the ice-mottled sidewalk. Any possibility of charm vanished.