Vanishing Girls (23 page)

Chapter 22

P
hotographs: lots of them. Men, including Steve Campbell and Reed Dekker, aboard some kind of yacht, looking groggy and contented in their baggy short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts. Fishing poles. Beer bottles. Mixed drinks. And lots of children, some very young, some barely pubescent, scantily clad in bathing suits you wouldn’t feel comfortable passing in a Victoria’s Secret storefront. Wearing things that were supposed to be shirts but were more like scraps of cloth dripping off their mostly exposed bodies. Toothless smiles trying to look happy for the camera; dull eyes that revealed the disorientation of a situation that is innately surreal; children who were not children because their eyes said otherwise. Sitting on the men’s laps, legs loose, hints of wandering hands, giddy drunken smiles, little shoulders tensed below stunned-smiling little faces. Children on beds. Naked.

I couldn’t look at any more.

“Oh my God,” Sam mumbled.

Ladasha turned away, hiding a face distorted by anguish, muttering, “What is wrong with this crazy fucking world?”

“Steve Campbell mentioned something about annual boat trips off the coast of Brazil,” I remembered. “His wife called them fishing trips—
the guys’ time off
kind of thing.”

“Gross.” Sam grimaced.

“This is un-fucking-real,” Vargas muttered. “You think you’ve seen it all—think again.”

Even Mac looked stunned, and he had seen a lot. Maybe these past few years, working mostly cases of errant spouses, he had forgotten how sordid it could get. I know I had. But the contents of the locked box reminded me how deep some people’s undersides went, how malevolence could become a way of life.

Billy was last to move away from the box, shaking his head. “Man, that is some crazy shit.” His tone was so soft, so low, you could hardly hear him.

Mac stepped closer to the group at the table now. “Where were those fishing trips again?”

“Isn’t Brazil a hub for the commercial sex trade?” A shadow seemed to fall across Vargas’s face as it dawned on all of us. Suddenly I recalled some of the sordid facts I’d picked up researching trafficking, when I was deciding what to do about Dathi.

“It is,” I said, “along with India, Africa, and Thailand. Those are the biggest markets. Victims are trafficked through from just about everywhere.”

“When I used to work domestic violence,” Sam said, “there were pimped girls who told us some of their friends got trafficked out, never seen again—poof. If the girls surfaced back in New York, we’d just arrest them. No one bothered the pimps or the johns. Nothing changed.”

“Load of
crap
.” Ladasha reset her tone to surly, but she wasn’t fooling anyone.

“What about the hooker on Nevins?” Mac asked. “Did her DNA ever match up with any missing kids?”

“I wish everyone would stop calling them
hookers
,” I blurted. Hookers. Whores. Sluts. The words were so ugly; but how did those women, sometimes just
girls
, earn those judgmental labels? There was a societal transaction, a collusion, that started as early as middle school if not sooner: Girls tarted themselves up for approval, and it went from there. But everyone was born innocent. It wasn’t right.

“Yeah,” Ladasha backed me up. “They’re sex
workers
.”

“Technically speaking,” I said, “they’re commercial sex trade
victims
. Not workers; that isn’t
work
.”

“People
pay
them,” Billy said.

“People pay
pimps
,” Ladasha argued. “And people who do that ain’t
people
. They’re pigs.”

Billy raised a hand to rub his eyes. “I’m just saying that’s the perception, okay? I know you’re right, but we’re not here to change the world.”

“Why not?” But I was roundly ignored.

Billy finally answered a rephrased version of Mac’s question: “No, the
commercial sex trade victim
on Nevins didn’t hit as a missing kid. She doesn’t show up in our system at all.”

“Buddy of mine is a cop in Brazil—Rio,” Vargas said. “I’m giving him a call, get him to look for her over there. And I’ll check Interpol, too.” The International Criminal Police Organization. Suddenly there was an elephant in the room: Why hadn’t anyone thought of running the Working Girl Victims through Interpol before?

“Tell him to check the system for the other ones, too,” Ladasha said.

Vargas flipped open his cell phone, shaking his head. “All those missing kids who found their way home just to get themselves killed by some psycho with a hunting knife.”

“You still think it was
some psycho
, George?” Ladasha’s voice bubbled with frustration as she seemed to realize, along with everyone else on the task force, what I had suspected for a while now: that it wasn’t your garden-variety serial killer they were hunting. The person who had killed those women, and possibly the Dekkers, too, wasn’t the likes of Patrick Scott, trolling for sexual thrills, or Antonio Neng, stalking a banker in vengeance. It was someone with a secret he was desperate to hide.

Someone like Father X. Reed Dekker. Steve Campbell. The other men in the creepy photos.

And the secret had just peeked out at us from inside a little metal box.

Vargas reached his friend on the phone and launched into a conversation in Portuguese that eluded me, but the urgency in his tone was unmistakable.

“What I don’t understand,” I thought aloud, “is what Chali had to do with any of this. I’m sure she was never trafficked—not like that, anyway. She was sold into marriage when she was thirteen, but by the time her husband died, she was a mother, and she came here to work as a babysitter not long after. How does she fit in?”

Sam went over to the box and pulled out the church’s guest book. “I was looking at this before”—she flipped through pages as she walked over to me—“and there’s something I wanted to show you.”

She edged the tip of her short-bitten fingernail beneath a name in the guest book:
Chali Das
. I recognized the painstaking handwriting. It was dated the last day I saw her. Under “Reason for Visit,” she had written:
Confession
.

“I didn’t think Chali ever went to church near our house,” I said. “She used to mention a church in her neighborhood. She loved talking about it; she was pretty religious. I’m sure she would have mentioned it if she went to St. Paul’s or knew Father X.”

Billy stood behind Sam and together they fanned through the rest of the book. “Nothing,” he said. “It looks like that was the only time she went there, or at least the only time she signed in.”

“Chali was a stickler for rules,” I said. “If she signed the guest book once, she would have signed it every time.”

That was the day Billy and I discovered the Dekkers’ bodies. The night Billy received his award. Chali had been with Ben all afternoon and evening . . . had she taken him with her to visit the church? I felt a shiver of cold, imagining that.

“Maybe she didn’t go for confession,” Vargas said. “Maybe she went to talk to Father X. He’d be the one sitting in the confession booth, right?”

“That’s what they told us over at St. Paul’s.” Sam closed the book.

“She told me she needed to talk to me.” I walked around the table to stand in front of the gory montage, scanning it for new clues, fresh understandings. My gaze landed on the photo of Chali, dead in her apartment, and I remembered Dathi, just last night, telling me that Abby had known Chali—insisting on it: “She knew my mother.”

I turned to look at Mac and Billy. “I need to check something at home. And then we need to talk to Dathi—I think Abby might have told her other important things we should know.” I looked at my watch: It was almost noon; Dathi would be home in a few hours.

N
o one was home when we got there but you could see that Mary and Ben had stopped in for lunch: a frying pan that hadn’t been there earlier was drying in the dish drainer; evidently she had cooked him something before heading out to his music class.

“Chali kept a calendar here.” I pulled open the crowded kitchen drawer.

“Why?”

“She’d forget hers at home sometimes.” I found the pocket-sized calendar and started leafing through the pages. “She did odd jobs for people around the neighborhood occasionally, babysitting, cleaning . . . I’m wondering if . . .
Here
.” I showed him the page for July 24. “ ‘Marta Dekker, six
P.M
., 234 Bergen, Abby.’ She
did
know Chali!” I flipped through the rest of the calendar, but there were no other entries for the Dekkers. “It looks like it was just that one time.”

“What did Chali want to tell Father X?” Mac wondered aloud.

“Dathi also said Abby told her that ‘her mother’ was coming back for her. It sounded like a fantasy to me—Abby never spoke. But what if Abby really
was
talking to Dathi? What if she
did
tell her things that were true? What if she told her all about . . .”

It was hard to voice what we’d seen in those photographs of Reed Dekker and Steve Campbell. But having seen them, beginning to realize now the stark probability that Abby’s father was not an innocent victim in his own murder, it was impossible not to wonder if, and how, she might have been victimized. It made me sick to think it. But the way she reacted around adults, the recognizable signs and symptoms of having been traumatized . . . it was all right there on her face, and in her silence. Had Chali stumbled onto something the night she babysat, something that clicked for her later, after the Dekkers were killed? She had been agitated the last time I saw her; she had needed to tell me something. Had she tried to talk to Father X about it? A priest—she would have trusted him without question. Had that turned out to be a fatal mistake?

“And to think that Abby was supposed to go live with the Campbells tomorrow.” A shudder ran through me. “Steve Campbell—Mr. Nice, a
teacher
. I’m glad he’s dead.”

Mac went to the cupboard to get a clean glass and filled it with water at the sink. “I can’t get over it—I
knew
Reed Dekker. Well, I sort of knew him. But one thing he did not strike you as was a pervert. He was a stand-up guy. Remember I came home from the gym that time, saying we should invite them over for dinner?”

“I remember. What else did everyone who knew those people not see?”

“What time does Dathi get home from school?” Mac asked me.

“Three-thirty, three thirty-five, depending on the bus. Maybe we should pull her out early.”

“What for? We’re solving a crime, not stopping one.”

“How do we know that?”

“The damage is done, Karin. Dathi’s boat’s been rocked enough. This can wait a couple more hours.”

I hoped he was right.

Mary came home with Ben just after two-thirty. We filled her in, and we all waited together. And waited.

Three-thirty came and went. Four o’clock. Four-thirty. At four thirty-two, I called the school, only to be told without a moment’s hesitation, by whoever answered the office phone, that all the kids had left the building together at three o’clock today just as always.

I hung up the phone and looked at Mary and Mac, whose expectant faces watched me, waiting to hear that all was well.

“Something’s wrong,” I said. “I feel it. Mac, why haven’t we gotten her a cell phone yet?”

“It doesn’t help to think that now.” But I could tell by the tension rippling across his forehead that he wasn’t as calm as he sounded.

“We could have called her, at least. We could have tracked her via satellite—”

“I think we should go together to see Abby,” Mary said suddenly. “No police. Just you and me, Karin. No men.”

Mac nodded soberly; Mary had a point: Abby switched to mute every time a man came near her. It was worth a try, especially if her silence had anything to do with a fear of Steve Campbell or Father X, who were no longer a threat. I wondered if she knew that.

“Leave a note for Dathi here,” I told Mac. “Give Ben his scooter and go out on foot, retrace her bus route, see if you find her anywhere along the way. Maybe the bus broke down. Maybe she got off. Maybe she’s lost.”

Ten minutes later, Mary and I were in a taxi racing up the FDR, paying the driver extra to go as fast as he could.

Chapter 23

W
e pushed through the revolving doors at the hospital’s main entrance so fast it kept turning after we’d rushed into the lobby. Waiting for the elevator to arrive felt like a small eternity. But finally . . . finally . . . we were at Abby’s bedside.

She cracked a tiny smile when she saw me. At the sight of Mary, a stranger, she stiffened.

Mary moved back until she was standing almost against the wall.

“Abby, honey,” I said. “Did anyone tell you yet that you won’t be going to the Campbells?”

Abby shook her head. I could have sworn she brightened at the news, just a bit, but enough to embolden me to continue—gently.

“Steve died.”

She didn’t appear upset; on the contrary. I plunged forward.

“And Father X was arrested.”

A simple nod.

“We’re starting to figure it out.”

She closed her eyes.

“Are you ready to talk, sweetheart?”

I couldn’t tell if she was retreating into her hard, lonely silence, if she really
couldn’t
talk, or if she was thinking it over. I turned to look at Mary, deciding on a different tack, and beckoned her forward.

“Abby.” I spoke softly, carefully. “This is my friend Mary. She’s a mom, too.”

Abby opened her eyes. Mary smiled warmly, making sure not to come too close. Her hands floated open in a gesture of friendship, and I was taken off guard by the dime-sized tattoos in both her palms: a flower in her right palm, a smiley face in her left. I hadn’t noticed them before. It occurred to me that she was offering them to Abby, showing them, so she would have to ask.

Abby’s gaze fixed on the tattoos, shifting between them like a metronome.

“This one,” Mary said, “the lotus, symbolizes detachment from your surroundings. Plus I think it’s really pretty.” Her whole face smiled, melting a layer of Abby’s wariness; Abby leaned closer to see the other hand. “The smiley is a reminder not to worry too much.”

Suddenly Abby laughed: a chain of tinkling bells that skipped out of her with surprising ease. One hand, the blue polish now chipped mostly off, flew up to cover her mouth.

But we’d heard it—the beautiful, miraculous sound of her voice.

“Abby,” I said, “Dathi told me yesterday that you’ve been talking to her. We can’t find her anywhere. Can you help?”

Abby’s gaze flickered across my face.

“
Please
talk to me. Tell me anything you told her that might help us know where to look.”

She took a deep breath, and locked her eyes to my face with resolve. You could feel the tendrils of a conversation about to start. I came in closer.

“My mother has a nose ring.” Her voice was small at first, tender, hesitant. “An itty bitty diamond or something.” She reached up to touch the outside of her right nostril.

But I’d seen pictures of Marta and didn’t remember a nose ring; it would have stood out on a banker’s wife.

“She came that night. She wanted to know where Daddy kept his things, so she could get the ones that were hers. She wanted them back. And she wanted
me
.”

“But you lived with your mother,” I said. “What do you mean?”

Abby stared at me, appearing to realize the breadth of what we didn’t know, what she’d have to explain. “Marta wasn’t my real mom. They said she was, but she wasn’t.”

“I’m confused, Abby.”

“Marta was Daddy’s wife.”

“Your mother—who is she?”

“Daddy had lots of kids, but we didn’t always know each other. But my mom remembered me, and she came back to get me, and also to get her stuff, ’cause she wanted it back. I knew where it was. I found it a long time ago, but no one knew I knew. I pretended I didn’t know. I was scared.”

I felt as if we were going in circles; but Abby was trying, finally, to tell us something. And I had to listen patiently and carefully until I understood.

“Who’s your mom?”

“Tina.” She said it carefully, like turning a candy in her mouth. “I never met her before that. She’s so pretty.”

“Do you know where she is now?” But suddenly I knew the answer, even if Abby didn’t: the dead woman on Nevins Street; I could still see the tiny sparkle of her nose ring in the dark. If I were Abby, if I had had a long-lost mother who came back for me out of the blue, I would run barefoot at midnight on a winter night to follow her, too. But if I was right, if the murdered woman I’d seen that night was Tina, why did Abby think there was a chance she’d come back? The car must have hit her before Tina was attacked, in which case she wouldn’t know that
both
her mothers were dead.

“What happened that night when Tina came to get you?”

Abby’s voice started small and thin, gaining confidence the more she spoke, as if issuing the memories robbed them of their power to terrify her. “They had an argument. Tina accused Daddy of tricking her. She said he stole me from her. She said Mommy, Marta, needed to know where I really came from. Mommy got
so mad
when she heard what Tina told her.” Abby’s eyes slammed shut, but she kept talking. “She called him lots of names. I hated him, too, so I didn’t care.” Her chest began to quiver and then shake, and then sobs rose up in waves. I leaned over to hold her, and she let me. “Tina got scared and left. I ran after to tell her I knew where her things were. I could show them to her. She could have them back. But it was dark and I got lost and I had to find her.”

After a few minutes, when Abby had calmed down, she said, “I asked Dathi to get Tina’s things for me, from the place where Daddy kept them under the stairs. So when she comes back for me, I’ll have them for her. Dathi told me she’d do it; she’d go at lunchtime, it would just be a quick errand, and then she’d go right back to school.”

“Honey.” I spoke softly, knowing that sometimes the most obvious questions were the hardest to answer. “Why didn’t you tell us all that?”

“I was afraid if I told”—her voice was so small—“I’d be like the girls in the pictures, when Uncle Steve got me home. Daddy never hurt me because I kept quiet. At least I think that’s why. I never really knew.”