Vanishing Girls (4 page)

“Want me to check yours, too?” We had placed an ad on Craigslist yesterday morning, before the flu hit him, for a part-time office assistant to take over some of the paperwork that MacLeary Investigations, his flourishing business, was generating and that had swamped both of us lately. His e-mail address was the contact, and I was pretty sure he hadn’t checked it at all.

He nodded.

I ran his e-mail—and opened a floodgate.

“Look at all these résumés!” I turned the laptop so he could see it. “They just keep streaming in.”

His ad had gotten one hundred and seventeen responses . . . make that one hundred and nineteen, as two more arrived before our eyes. And then another, and another. One hundred and twenty-one people interested in a paltry part-time job. We had advertised office help, twelve hours a week, can pay up to fifteen dollars an hour.

I opened one at random. “Okay, this one is a woman who has over twenty years experience managing a Broadway theater.”

“Overqualified.”

I opened another. “Here’s someone who has a degree in landscape architecture from Harvard, and helped design city playgrounds for three years.”

“Overqualified.”

“Here’s an actor who had a leading role on
Law & Order
. And here’s a woman with a PhD in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania.” I looked at Mac, who was staring at me in shock. “This is nuts. Why would these people be interested in our little job?”

“ ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ ”

Right. The economy was in disaster mode; all these résumés from vastly overqualified people only reinforced what the news reported every day.

“Maybe your friend Reed Dekker can sprinkle a few extra millions on some of us commoners. Did you know they reported last week that Goldman Sachs is making a huge profit, and salaries and bonuses are back to prerecession amounts?”

“I read that, yup.”

I closed Mac’s e-mail account as another résumé came in. “This is going to be a project. I’ll start going through the résumés a little later, make a short list. It could be more time consuming than we thought.”

“We need an assistant to find an assistant.” Mac tried to laugh at his own joke but ended up coughing. I kissed his burning forehead, gave him another ibuprofen, and got into the shower.

T
wenty minutes later I was upstairs in the sun-drenched living room, lying on the floor. Ben’s tummy was balanced on my feet and I held his hands wide in a flying angel. He loved it when I swerved my legs and dipped sideways, nearly toppling him, and then saved him at the last minute.

At the sound of the doorbell ringing, Ben tumbled down onto my stomach, giggling.

“I’ve got it!” Chali called from the kitchen, where she was checking her e-mail. She didn’t have a computer at home and sometimes borrowed mine so she could keep in touch with her daughter.

“No problem. I’m right here.” I jumped up and went to the door.

On my way, I heard Chali intercept Ben as he headed to the top of the stairs: “Hold it now, little Hadji, let’s put your blocks away together first. Unless you want to build another fortress with me?”

I looked through the peephole and there, to my surprise, was Billy.

“Morning.” He leaned through the open door to kiss my cheek; he smelled spicy clean.

“On your way someplace special?”

“Feeling like a fool about last night. Wanted to stop by and apologize.”

“No apologies necessary, Billy. You should know that. Want to come in?”

Behind him, on the sidewalk, our mail carrier stopped and reached into her cart. She came up the stoop and handed me our bundle of mail, glancing fleetingly at Billy, whose eye patch often drew attention. He ignored her.

“Thanks, Terry,” I said.

“Have a nice day.”

“You too.”

I watched her jog down the stoop and roll the cart forward. When I turned back to Billy, he was staring at the house across the street. It was a typical four-story brownstone, more or less the same as all the others on the block, except for one thing. It was on the rooftop of that very house, in a shootout with his lover, that he lost his eye. I had noticed before that when he came over he seemed to avoid even glancing across the street. This was the first time I’d seen him take such a long look, and it saddened me. I wished I could stop his hurt, all of it, give him back the sight in his right eye and undo Jasmine from having entered his life in the first place. Mac and I had even discussed moving to spare him the distress of revisiting that fateful day every time he came over to see us; but with real estate badly devalued, there was no way we could sell our co-op duplex and afford to move somewhere comparable in the neighborhood, so we’d stayed put.

“Come inside, Billy. It’s cold out there.”

I hung his jacket on a peg in the hall while Ben ran to him. Chali seemed to hesitate when she saw Billy; her face blanched just a little—reacting, I assumed, to another distraction stopping Ben from cleaning up the blocks, unless it was something else bothering her. Whatever it was, the flash of agitation was quickly replaced with her usual smile.

“Pirate Bill!”

“Ahoy, matey!” Billy fell to one knee and caught Ben in a hug. “Where’s your hat? You’re out of uniform. Do you want to walk the plank?”

Ben hurried downstairs and returned moments later wearing his black pirate’s hat with a white skull and crossbones on the front. It had been a gift from Billy last Christmas, and it put an end to our efforts to get Ben to stop pointing out Billy’s eye patch every single time he came over. Now it was a game they played without fail.

“What are my orders, Pirate Bill?”

Billy stood tall and stroked his chin in a melodramatic thinking pose. “Tie up the princess!”

“Aye aye, Bill!”

“Not
again
.” Chali laughed and went to the kitchen to get the ball of twine we used for recycling newspapers. She sat on a chair in the middle of the living room, and Ben got to work.

I led Billy into the kitchen and poured us both a cup of coffee, adding a splash of milk to his. I drank mine black.

“How’s Mac doing?”

I shook my head. “I hope it’s a quick flu.”

“It’s going around. Couple of people at work came down with it and stayed out a week.”

“Can we talk about last night, Billy?”

“It won’t happen again.”

“How do you know that?”

“I feel it.” But in fact there was no feeling in his voice. He sounded numb, even irritated. It was as if a force field of denial had thickened around him in the hours since we’d seen each other.

“There’s this support group called POPPA—”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“You can’t avoid it forever.”

“There are more important things than me and my problems, Karin. That girl who was hit by the car last night?”

The thought of her angelic face, her blue manicure, sank my heart. “Abby Dekker. I looked it up this morning, but no one’s reported much besides the basics.”

“She lives a few blocks from here but we haven’t been able to reach her parents. I told Dash I’d get over there; she was stressing because one of her kids is in a holiday show at school and she ‘can’t be in two places at once,’ blah blah blah.” But in recounting Ladasha’s words, he smiled and gently shook his head. Sometimes I thought the tension between them made work a little more interesting for him, other times I just thought she ought to stop complaining.

“Mac knows the dad—Reed Dekker. He’s a banker at Goldman Sachs.”

“Mac have any private contacts for him? His secretary says he didn’t come in today and doesn’t know where he is, and no one answers the phone at home.”

“I don’t think so. I read that Abby goes to Packer. Did you try the school secretary?”

“Won’t give us private information over the phone. All we want to do is locate the parents so they can get to the hospital.”

“Right.”

“The school secretary said she’d call the house, and mentioned that the mom’s an at-home parent. I’m going over there now.”

“I’ll join you.”

“Come on, Karin—”

“Thanks.” I stood up. “I’ll get my coat.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it. I meant come on, you can’t go with me. It’s going to start looking unprofessional if you keep showing up when I’m on the job. Or Dash might think I don’t think she’s a good partner, which is a complication I don’t need.”

“I have some errands to run in that direction.”

“What direction?”

It was true: He hadn’t told me the Dekkers’ address. I got my coat and purse, anyway, and waited for Billy in the front hall.

“Almost done tying the princess, Pirate Bill!” Ben told Billy as he reluctantly crossed the living room in my direction.

“Good work, matey! Now . . . untie her and feed her to the sharks.”

Ben immediately complied, unraveling the twine.

“Thank you, Billy.” Chali smiled.

“I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone so cheerful in the face of adversity,” he said.

“You would be cheerful, too, if your daughter was about to arrive from India.”

“When’s the big day?”

“The first of January—New Year’s. I just received a flight update: she is now going to arrive one hour earlier. So much the better for me. I’m very excited, indeed.”

“That’s great news, Chali,” I said. She must have gotten the e-mail just now, otherwise I was sure she would have mentioned it earlier. She’d been planning this reunion with her daughter for a long time, and I suspected that she secretly planned not to send her back to her mother’s in India. The arrangement had worked well for them for the years Chali had been in the U.S. earning a living to send home to her impoverished family—enough to feed both grandmother and granddaughter, and pay tuition for Dathi at the local school—but her mother was older and not in the best health.

“You have no idea how much I miss that blessed child.”

“It’s been almost a year since they’ve seen each other,” I told Billy, as he slipped on his jacket. I opened the front door. “Back in a little while, Chali. I’m going with Billy . . . that is, I’m going to run some errands around the neighborhood.”

“You’re a sucky liar,” Billy said when we were down on the sidewalk.

“How do you know? Maybe I’m such a good liar that most of the time you can’t tell.”

We walked together along Bergen Street, back in the direction we’d been last night. When I noticed he’d stopped trying to dissuade me from coming along, I stopped pretending I wasn’t.

It turned out that the Dekkers were practically neighbors: They lived two blocks down Bergen between Hoyt and Nevins. It was just past two-thirty in the afternoon, and yet when we walked up the stoop and rang the bell, the house seemed oddly quiet. The freezing day was so bright that the windows shone like mirrors. No one answered. I rang again, and Billy leaned over to try and peek through a window but couldn’t see anything. The curtains were drawn, as if no one had gotten up that morning to let in the day.

Chapter 4

“Y
ou’re looking for the Dekkers.”

I turned to my right. A small woman with curly black hair stood on the neighboring stoop, watching us. Her front door hung open, allowing a glimpse of a polished oak floor, the curved end of a banister, a chandelier dripping glittery glass. In the living room beyond the hall was a child-sized easel with a primitive drawing of a tree. An orange cat rubbed its face against the doorway but didn’t venture out into the cold.

“We are,” Billy answered.

“Well, who are you?”

I could feel Billy’s irritation emanate like heat, and jumped in to intercept a potentially tense conversation.

“It’s about Abby.”

She nodded. “So you’re friends of theirs. I’m Gay.” She didn’t flinch saying that; she must have been used to it. I noticed she was wearing a wedding ring.

“I’m Karin Schaeffer. I live two blocks up. Do I recognize you from the playground?” A lie; I had never seen her before, but I wanted her trust. “My son, Ben, is almost four. We go there all the time.”

Gay smiled. “That’s probably it. My daughter, Sara, is five. So, what about Abby?”

“I hate to be the one to tell you, but she was hit by a car last night, and we haven’t been able to reach her parents.”

Horror and suspicion passed in waves over Gay’s expression. She appeared to wonder how it was that we knew about this while she, the Dekkers’ next-door neighbor, hadn’t heard. Billy must have also sensed we were losing her because he reached into his pocket for his wallet and brought out his police identification.

“Karin’s a friend of mine, she does live up the street, but I’m a detective with the Eight-four.”

“What’s the Eight-four?” Gay stepped closer on her stoop to get a better look at Billy’s ID.

“That’s your local precinct.”

“Oh.”

I was shocked. How could anyone not know their local precinct, where it was, how to reach it if necessary? But I kept my reaction to myself.

“Marta fed our cat Orangina over the weekend. I texted her a thank-you as soon as we got home last night but haven’t heard back from her, which is strange. She always answers right away from her iPhone. I have their house keys, should I—?” She didn’t wait for a response before darting into her house and returning with the keys. I couldn’t believe it. What if Billy’s ID was a fake? The legion of criminals and cons who could forge documents was mind-boggling. Maybe I was cynical because of my years working in law enforcement, but Gay’s naïveté floored me. Still, she had the keys, and she was coming up the Dekkers’ stoop jangling them in her hand, preparing to let us in; neither Billy nor I was lame enough to stop her from opening the door and going inside to take a look. As a cop, Billy couldn’t legally enter without a warrant; but as a civilian neighbor, I could. It was, after all, how Billy had introduced me: as a local mom, not a private investigator. I wasn’t working this case; I was just keeping Billy company.

“We take care of each other’s houses when we go away,” Gay said, turning a key in the bottom lock half a rotation, until we heard a click. She tried turning a second key in the top lock, but it didn’t budge. “Huh. I’ve done this a dozen times.”

“Maybe it’s already unlocked,” Billy suggested.

Gay turned the knob and the door opened. “That’s weird. They always use both locks. Now that I think of it . . .” Closing the door, she relocked the bottom and tried it again. “I didn’t think of this before, but the bottom one self-locks, so turning it partway means it was never double-locked. It seems like someone just pulled shut the door and left.”

Billy and I looked at each other.

Gay’s dark eyebrows pinched together as she opened the door again and went inside.

“Marta? It’s Gay! Are you there? Marta?”

I left Billy outside and followed Gay into a foyer made spacious by having been united with the living room in a feat of modern architecture that had opened up so many of the local brownstones. Antique details had been restored, giving the room a nineteenth-century warmth, and yet at the same time it was almost loftlike in its sense of free-flowing space. There was a lot of carved wood and modern rugs, contemporary light fixtures, antique furniture, high-end stereo equipment. At the foot of the stairs, beside a huge mirror, a pedestal held a tall vase, a twist of orange and red glass I doubted could hold a flower. It sat there like a dare:
Break me
. In one corner of the living room, a shiny baby grand piano was covered in framed photographs: a snapshot of a smiling Reed and Marta, whose dangling earrings were partially obscured by shoulder-length auburn hair that grazed her freckled shoulders; a professional portrait of the family of three; Reed and another man on a fishing boat; and half a dozen pictures of Abby as a baby, a toddler, a little girl, a sassy tween.

“Marta!” Gay proceeded through the parlor floor of the house she evidently knew fairly well. She disappeared through an arched door through which I could see the end of a kitchen island topped in speckled granite, where a ceramic bowl was heaped with Granny apples. I was following Gay, glancing around the dining area, when suddenly she screamed.

In the kitchen, a man lay faceup in a pool of blood that had been there long enough to spread before drying around the edges. He had the same brown hair I’d seen on Reed Dekker in the online photo, but this man was without a face; it had been blown away, leaving behind a gory sludge of flesh and bone. A constellation of blood spatter was sprayed across the white ceiling and half the nearest wall. I forced myself to look a moment longer before turning away. Reed Dekker couldn’t have been there more than a day because there was no sign of maggots. The smell was putrid. I covered my mouth and tried not to gag.

Gay ran past me, shaking, and I heard her crying to Billy out front.

“What?” he asked her. “Calm down, okay? I can’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

When I got outside, I found Billy standing there, baffled, as Gay dry-heaved over the frozen soil of a clay planter decorated with carved ribbons. Her cat, Orangina, had stepped onto the neighboring stoop and was watching her.

“What’s going on?” Billy asked me.

“Reed Dekker—he’s dead.”

His jaw dropped, as if a hinge had come loose, and I instinctively watched his eye for a shift in consciousness. Would I be able to see it when PTSD invaded his mind?

But nothing happened. He didn’t transform into Mr. Hyde. He sighed, reached for his phone, and said, “I’ll call it in.”

Within ten minutes, it began. Cop cars drove up and parked in the middle of the street, delivering investigators who joined Billy inside the house. The CSI guys arrived in a van that was probably white but was so dirty it looked gray, and hauled their gear up the stoop. Patrol cars closed off both ends of the block. Names of anyone coming onto or leaving the block were listed in a log. When the media arrived in droves, I stepped back into the house because I didn’t want to get dragged into the story. Gay was long gone, locked inside her brownstone.

Apparently the Dekkers lived on all four floors of the house, and investigators had swarmed throughout. Quick footsteps thudded above, and out of curiosity I followed the sound. I was amazed that no one stopped me. I knew from experience that it was pretty easy to spot rubberneckers at a crime scene—they tended to exude some combination of fear, confusion, or excitement—and I was good at blending in, having done this so many times back when I was on the force. A detective coming down the stairs nodded at me in passing; I nodded back and kept going.

The second floor of the house had three rooms: a guest room with a double bed and bright Marimekko curtains on the single window; an office with a plain desk holding a pair of flat-screen monitors facing an expensive chair; and a more casual living room than the one downstairs that was probably used as a family room, with a large flat-screen television on a wall opposite a comfy sectional couch. Books and games and dolls were scattered around. I saw only one investigator working on the second floor, which told me that the racket that had drawn my attention was coming from above.

As I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, the noise increased. I walked past what was presumably Abby’s bedroom at the top of the staircase: lavender walls, white built-in bookcases crammed with young adult novels, a messy desk with a white laptop and a jewelry tree dripping necklaces, a twin bed. The sense of chaos increased the farther I got down the hall, past a couple of closed doors to another bedroom at the opposite end.

Investigators had formed a second cluster in the master bedroom, around a king-sized bed. It was a large, apricot-painted room with two matching dressers and another wall-mounted flat-screen television facing the bed. Pale winter afternoon sunlight gave the room a sensation of having been stripped bare. Sprayed blood speckled the wall above the headboard in a weirdly graceful pattern that reminded me of the receding path of the only shooting star I had ever seen. I shifted my attention to the bed and tried to see past a clump of investigators.

From my view in the doorway all I could see was a pair of slender, waxy-looking bare feet. The woman’s toenails were freshly painted blue, like Abby’s fingernails; they must have recently gone for a mother-daughter manicure and pedicure. An agonizing reminder of my daughter’s murder six years ago curdled in my stomach; she, too, had been killed in her bed. Someone shifted and I saw Marta’s face—it was gone. I felt my own face screw up. Just then, one of the forensic techs stepped out of the cluster, looked over, and saw me. He was near the top of the bed and his rubber gloves were streaked with blood.

“Can I help you?”

I had dropped my cool, slipped out of character, and he’d recognized an outsider.

I cleared my throat, gathered myself. “How long has she been dead?”

“Are you a reporter?”

Faces turned to look at me, none bearing an expression of warm greeting.

“No,” I assured them. “I’m a neighbor.”

“Get her out of here,” he snapped.

A uniformed cop escorted me back downstairs.

Billy came out of the kitchen when he saw me. As I was led to the front door, I glanced at him, concerned he’d tripped into a flashback again.

“You can let her go,” Billy told the cop, calmly; but once we were alone his tone heated up. “Why are you still here, Karin?”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Have you been upstairs?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t.” I worried that the sight of Marta Dekker would bring on another hallucination. Both Dekkers had been shot in the face as Billy had been, only with more devastating consequences. For Billy, the resonance would be inevitable.

Ladasha came out of the kitchen and saw me. “You some kind of crime scene groupie now, Karin?”

“I just happened to walk this way with Billy.”

“Do I need to tell your husband you and Billy here are gettin’ it on, or what?” She had her hands on her hips and her head cocked to the side. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw her wink.

“How was your kid’s holiday show?”

“Short and sweet.”

Billy put a hand on my arm and steered me forward. “Karin was just leaving, Dash.”

“So soon? The party just started!”

“See you around, Dash.” I looked at Billy, standing reluctantly at the foot of the stairs, shook my head, and repeated, “
Don’t
.”

Outside, a throng of neighbors had gathered behind a front line of media being held back by a pair of cops. Cameras flashed as soon as I appeared on the stoop. Compared with last night’s murder of a prostitute on a dark, squalid street, the afternoon slaying of a wealthy couple in a gentrified neighborhood was receiving significantly greater attention. It didn’t surprise me, but I couldn’t help thinking of the young woman sprawled on the frozen pavement last night. I still didn’t know her name and wondered if anyone did . . . or if anyone cared.

The front door shut behind me and the lock clicked. Reporters shouted questions as I came down the steps:

“What’s happening in there?”

“We heard two people are dead. Can you confirm that?”

“Can you please spell your name?”

“Is it accurate that there were two murders inside the house?”

“Is the owner Reed Dekker? Is he a banker? Is his wife Martha Dekker?”

Marta
, I wanted to correct the young man with a snake tattoo curling up his neck out of his collar and both earlobes tattooed with eyes.
Her name was Marta, not Martha. You don’t know anything about these people. I don’t know, either. No one knows what happened in there, or why they were murdered.
But I held my silence as I stepped onto the sidewalk and walked down Bergen. The illustrated reporter trailed me, peppering me with questions, until I passed the barricade.

I
was only halfway up my front stoop when Billy came walking swiftly up the block, jacket zipped all the way up to the top of his neck, hands thrust into his pockets. I turned around and watched him until he reached my bottom step.

“How’d you get past the reporters?” He was too distinctive to miss—a tall, black detective with an eye patch who had already been written up and interviewed in connection with the city’s notorious serial killer who was still on the loose. Billy was practically famous, and he didn’t like it.

“Walked fast. Kept my head down.”

“So—you saw her?”

He nodded, but now he wouldn’t look at me.

“You okay?”

“I felt a little shaky so I got out of there. Told Dash I was going to the hospital to see Abby.”

“Are you?”

“You coming with me?”

“You want me to?”

“No.” He smiled.

“Let me just see how Mac’s doing. Give me a minute.”

Billy followed me inside. The house was quiet; Chali must have taken Ben out to the playground. Billy waited in the living room while I went downstairs to check on Mac. He was sleeping soundly. Back upstairs I left a note on the kitchen table letting Chali know I would be back later. I had already arranged for her to babysit tonight so Mac and I could go to the community meeting at seven o’clock to support Billy; now, unless Mac made a miraculous recovery, it would just be me.