Vanishing Girls (8 page)

“You must be loving this, then.” He winked, but managed to make it both warm and sardonic. I liked him. He pulled a rubber-banded stack of NYPD business cards out of his jacket pocket and handed me the bent one off the top:
Detective Jorge Vargas, 72nd Precinct
.

“ ‘Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect,’ ” I read from the upper corner of his card. “Sounds good to me.”

“Standard issue.”

“Even so.”

He put the stack of cards back in his pocket. When he removed his hand something flew out and clanked onto the sidewalk. He bent to pick it up.

“My girlfriend gave this to me; keeps flying off my finger.” He slipped the thick silver ring back onto his pinky. “She got it at the Brooklyn Flea and told me I had to wear it even though it doesn’t fit.”

“You can have it resized.”

“I’ll have to.”

“Unusual ring.” I took a closer look: a thin rod of roughened silver was melded along the top; it looked like someone had drawn a line across the base of his pinky.

“It’s a bar ring, she said. Handmade by a local artist.” He shrugged.

“I see why she likes it.” Though I didn’t, really. It was kind of cool, and kind of ugly. I didn’t really see the point.

“Can you stick around for a little while?” he asked me.

“Just for a bit, then I’ll have to get moving.”

“By the way, everyone calls me George. It’s easier, you know?”

I nodded, and he headed inside. A guy on his way out, in a navy jacket with big white letters reading
N.Y.C. CRIME SCENE UNIT
, high-fived him with one of his blue plastic gloves.

“Yo, Georgie boy!”

“Hey Bud.”

“Messy in there?”

“Not really.”

I remembered the drill: a heads-up here, a watch your step there. It was a workday for them. By now everyone knew that whoever that woman was in there had left her body behind like an abandoned meal. What was left was the cleanup. I steeled myself, and vowed to keep it personal on Chali’s behalf.

Cops were now starting to canvass door-to-door up and down the block. For a few minutes I chatted with a young reporter, who oddly didn’t ask who I was, which told me I was still passing for the press. And then Billy showed up with Ladasha. She pulled up behind George’s car; Billy hopped out of the passenger’s side before she had fully parked.

He bolted across the street and kissed my cheek. “What’s happening?”

“Detective George Vargas just went upstairs.”

“Seven-two?”

Precinct, he meant. “Yup.”

“Karin.” Ladasha joined us, both corners of her mouth puckering in frustration. She shook her head. “I am so sorry about this shit. Did I ever meet her?”

“Don’t know. Probably not.”

She shook her head and walked to the building’s front door, which was now propped open with a brick. “This lock?”

“I had to use a key to get in the front,” I told them. “But Chali’s apartment door was open.”

“Broken in?”

“No, just unlocked.”

“So how’d the asshole get in this time?” Ladasha stepped into the hall and looked at the inside of the door.

“Someone probably buzzed him in,” Billy stepped into the hallway, “or maybe he trailed someone inside.”

I followed them back into the building’s vestibule. A cop was canvassing inside, as well, standing outside the first-floor apartment, speaking with a beefy man in a sleeveless white T-shirt who looked as if he’d just been roused from sleep.

“You always home at this time of day?” I heard the cop ask.

“No, just lately.” The man had a strong accent I couldn’t place. “Lost my job last month.”

“You home Monday night?”

“Yes, most nights I’m at home.”

“Monday night, I said.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hear anything?”

“No, nothing. I heard nothing.”

The cop handed him a business card, told him to call if he thought of something. The man shut his door as fast as he could, but moments later a woman appeared in a five-and-dime housedress, her hair piled in curlers. She was wearing lipstick, and crying.

“Not Miss Chali!” She nearly threw herself at the cop who had just left her front door and was now standing at the foot of the stairs. “Tell me, please,
no, it isn’t true
!”

“Sorry, lady.” He left her standing there, weepy. Ladasha followed him up the stairs, rolling her eyes. Billy gave her a nod. I touched her shoulder as I passed.

“Where you going?” Ladasha turned and said when she realized I was still with them.

“She’s already been up there,” Billy defended me. “What’s the difference?”

The truth was, I didn’t want to go back into Chali’s apartment, but I was concerned about Billy entering another crime scene. I didn’t want him to see it without some moral support.

“Whatever.” Ladasha smirked.

The small apartment felt crowded with nearly a dozen investigators and technicians doing their work or just standing around talking. I could see George Vargas through the beaded curtain separating the bedroom. He had put his orange coffee cup on the desk, right on top of the manuscript I’d noticed before. I went over to pick up the cup and as I was about to touch it—just as I saw that the top page of the manuscript was a poem in Chali’s distinctive handwriting—Ladasha barked at me:

“What you doing now, girl?”

“The detective brought this cup in. I was just—”

“Nuh uh!” She wagged a finger at me. “And you know it.”

I backed away from the poem and the cup and any sense of proprietorship over the things Chali had left behind.

Billy passed through the beads with a rattle of sound, and then stopped suddenly. He stood beside George Vargas—very still, both looking at Chali for the first time.

I came up behind Billy and there she was, laid out on an unzipped black body bag atop a gurney on the floor. But it wasn’t Chali anymore. It was a slab of bloated flesh carved open between her breasts. The knife was gone now; it would have been segregated as evidence. Her face in death had distorted into a grotesque parody of her living self. The smell was even worse than before. I turned sharply away, pressing my nose into Billy’s shoulder. Through the fabric of his jacket I could feel him shaking. I looked at his face. His left pupil was small as a pinprick, stuck to her body. The skin on his face had erupted with perspiration.

“Billy,” I whispered.

He didn’t move.

“Look at me.”

He couldn’t.

“Come here.” I tried to pull him away, but he had turned to stone.

“I didn’t want to do it.” The remorse in his voice frightened me. “You didn’t give me any choice.”

“What the hell?” Ladasha spoke as she burst through the beads. “You a piece of work, my man.” I glanced at her and she flashed me a concerned look that betrayed the irreverence of her words. “You wanna take my pal outside for a breath of fresh air? If you can find any in Brooklyn, that is.”

So she knew. But then why wouldn’t she? She spent far more time with him than I did, and his PTSD symptoms weren’t exactly subtle.

“What’s with him?” I heard George Vargas ask Ladasha as I led Billy out by the elbow.

“He’s a whole other story,” I heard her say. “Always crying out of his one good eye.”

“Where’d he get the patch?”

She didn’t answer that. “You caught the case?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Ladasha.”

He chuckled, and then they were beyond my hearing. I had Billy at the top of the stairs now. He was still shaking and his gaze still seemed frozen, so I moved him forward and down as carefully as I could. A couple of cops who edged past us on their way up the stairs gave us funny looks. But then, in minutes, we were back outside on the street. I walked Billy toward Fifth Avenue, away from the activity, and by the time we reached the corner he started to come back from the land of the lost.

“It happened again,” he muttered.

“You remember?”

He shook his head. “It leaves me with a sickish feeling. That’s how I know.”

“You don’t remember what you said?”

“What did I say?”

He had been talking to Chali’s body: “I didn’t want to do it. You didn’t give me any choice.” But how could I repeat that to him? It was bewildering, disturbing. I didn’t know what it meant. On Sunday night when I’d found him in a kind of fugue state in which he’d been tossed right back into the past, he had repeated verbatim the words he had spoken to Jasmine right before she’d shot his eye out. But what he’d said tonight was new to me, as if conjured from a different reality; I couldn’t recall him saying anything of the sort to her that night on the roof. It was as if he had killed her in retribution and was apologizing. A sickening feeling rippled through my stomach.

“I don’t remember what happens,” he said. “It’s like I disappear.”

“As soon as you walked into the room. It seems to be triggered by . . .” I couldn’t say it: dead women.

“I can’t even remember what I saw. How bad was it?”

“Bad.”

“Chali, of all people.” He shook his head. “She’s not exactly his type.”

“Up until the other day, all his victims were sex workers.”

“Could be a copycat, some other nut out there who got hold of the same kind of knife.”

“Didn’t you tell me those knives haven’t been made in decades?”

“eBay, maybe.” He rubbed his eye. “Who knows?”

“I wonder what Abby would tell us if she could talk.”

He looked at me; thin red veins had laced the white of his left eye.

“Monday night, after I got home, Chali wanted to tell me something. It sounded important, but I was too wiped out to talk. I asked her to wait until Tuesday.”

“Any idea what it was about?”

“None at all.”

We walked back down the block and stood close together in the cold as Chali was carried out. Detective George Vargas joined us, puffing steamy breath onto his bare hands. We watched as her body, now zipped into a black bag and strapped to the gurney, was quickly shoved into the back of the ambulance and the doors were slammed shut. It was freezing out and they wanted to get on their way.

“She have any family you know of?” Vargas asked me.

“A mother, a daughter and a brother, back in India.”

His eyebrows slid upward. “That’ll be a fun conversation. They speak English?”

“I think the daughter does; don’t know about the rest of the family.”

I knew little about them other than details of Dathi’s upcoming visit. When I thought of that, my heart sank deeper. Chali had been anticipating their reunion for months and my guess was that Dathi had also looked forward to it with special enthusiasm. They hadn’t seen each other for a long time. I wished there was some way to keep the news from Dathi and Granny, but that, of course, was impossible. The idea of an unexpected call from a New York City detective seemed equally impossible.

“I’ll make the call,” I offered. “I’ll just need the phone number for her mother’s house. There was an address book on Chali’s desk upstairs. Her last name is Das, and her daughter’s name is Dathi—Arundathi is the full name. Arundathi Das. Chali’s full name was Panchali Das. And her mother’s name was Edha . . . but I don’t know her last name. It must be different.”

The warmth of Billy’s hand on my shoulder reminded me to slow down; I was talking fast, the little I knew spilling out, as if fast-pedaling backward could somehow change things. Bring Chali back to life. Tears trickled down my cheeks and I wiped them off with the cold back of a leather glove.

Vargas nodded. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll see if I can find you the number.”

L
ater, when I got home with Ben, Mac was half sitting on the couch in the dark, fast asleep, with his face tilted toward the ceiling. His breathing sounded like sawing wood. He was fully dressed, his winter boots tied in double knots.

My mother sat on the armchair near the couch, an open book in her lap, the upturned beam of her book light accentuating her puffy face and the purplish saggy skin beneath her eyes. She had been crying. So she knew.

“He couldn’t make it out the door,” she whispered.

Clearly, though, he’d tried.

As I leaned over to touch my frozen lips to Mac’s burning forehead, I felt the firm touch of my mother’s hand on my back. Tears rushed to my eyes, and I heard her gasp for breath in the way she always did when she was determined not to break down.

Chapter 8

A
t quarter to six the next morning I slid out of bed as quietly as I could, hoping not to disturb Mac, only to learn that he was already awake. When he moaned, I also learned that he still wasn’t feeling any better. I reached out to touch his forehead: still feverish.

“This is lasting a long time,” I whispered so my voice wouldn’t wake Ben down the hall.

“Day five.”

“At least you can still think.”

“I’m not thinking. I’m just lying here.”

“Well, you counted to five.”

He managed a small laugh that digressed into a coughing spree.

“I think you should see Dr. Velasquez, let her listen to your chest.”

“Karin—it’s the flu. It’ll pass.” Another series of wet, raspy coughs barreled through him.

I wasn’t going to argue; I would just go ahead and make the appointment. Convince him later.

“Do you want some tea and toast, or do you want to keep sleeping?”

“Tea and toast would be nice.”

“Be right back.”

The house was freezing at this early hour; the thermostats weren’t set to raise the temperature for another fifteen minutes. I put on my robe and slippers and went quietly upstairs to the kitchen. It was dark outside and the overhead light, when I turned it on, felt overly bright. I put on a kettle of water, started a pot of coffee, and sat at the table to wait.

The pad of paper where I had written Edha Sengupta’s full name and phone number in India was sitting where I’d left it last night after George Vargas had called with the information. Edha and Dathi lived in the small house in the village of Sahalwada, where Chali had been raised along with her brother, Ishat. India was ten and a half hours ahead of New York, making it four-thirty in the morning their time when George had called me last night. I’d decided to wait to make the call, to allow them one last night of good sleep.

I had been awake half the night thinking about how I would break the news. It would devastate them, I knew that. But it had to be done, and it had to be done by me. At this point not a single close friend had materialized to mourn Chali in this country. I was beginning to understand just how quietly she had lived her life here: Outside of working for us a steady twenty-five hours a week, and freelancing around babysitting for others to fill in her off hours, she had kept to herself. Her recent life had been an exercise in preparing for her daughter to join her. I’d begun to suspect that Chali’s plans for Dathi might have been more urgent than I’d realized; she herself had been married off at the age of thirteen, and Dathi was now twelve. Perhaps she was hurrying to save Dathi from what seemed like an inevitable trajectory toward a dreaded fate.

It would be almost four-thirty in the afternoon there now. I wondered if Dathi would be home from school, or if I might catch Edha alone, which would be better. That way, she could react, gather herself, and decide how best to tell Dathi, the depth of whose disappointment was now growing to uncomfortable proportions in my imagination.

I dialed in the international codes and then the number. There were a couple of halting, faraway sounding rings, and then the line went dead. I tried three more times, always with the same result. Finally I called an international operator, who told me that the phone number had been disconnected.

The kettle whistled and I jumped to turn it off before it woke Ben too early. I needed a few minutes to think. Then I opened my laptop on the kitchen table and searched old e-mails for Dathi’s name. She had contacted me once, about two months ago, just after my miscarriage, to send a poem she’d written for my lost daughter. I’d been touched by the sweetness of her gesture and the eloquence of the poem, written in English, which she studied in school:

She rides a tiger

Away from the fire

Into the sky

A lotus flower in her hand.

On the petals

Are her name

And your name

Written in water.

I reread the poem before hitting reply to open a blank e-mail. My first reply, two months ago, had been a simple thank-you. This time my note was equally simple, and bore a request.

Hi Dathi,

I need to speak with your grandmother. I called the house but the phone number no longer works. Would you please ask her to call me?

Warmly,

Karin

I hoped that the directness of my note, and the total omission of any mention of Chali, didn’t alarm her; but it seemed that less information was best until I had a chance to speak with Edha. I hit send, then made Mac his tea and toast.

T
he next morning, I sat in Dr. Velasquez’s waiting room with Mac, who shivered and coughed at times uncontrollably. It had taken me a full day to argue him into this visit, but finally he’d stopped objecting. He couldn’t deny he was getting sicker.

When his name was called, he insisted on going alone—giving me
that look
to remind me I wasn’t his mother. I waited for what felt like a long time, constantly checking my BlackBerry in case Dathi finally responded—but so far no luck. It had now been four full days since Chali’s death, two days since I’d found her, and over twenty-four hours since I’d first tried to reach the family. I decided to give it until the end of the day before trying to track down Chali’s brother.

When Mac finally reemerged, he was holding a prescription. “Bronchial pneumonia,” he croaked, “on top of flu.”

“What did I tell you?”

He wouldn’t admit how right I’d been, but he handed me the prescription slip in a gesture of acquiescence. I just managed to get him home, give him the first double whammy of his Z-Pak, and tuck him back into bed before it was time to pick up Ben.

I hurried along Smith Street toward the nursery school with a sinking feeling edging on panic. Too much was happening all at once. Flu was one thing, but pneumonia? Then I thought of Chali and braced against another plunge of anxiety. It stunned me every time I recalled the sight of her corpse in that tub of bloodied water. Mac would recover. But we would never see Chali again.

Once, a few years ago, I’d overheard someone at a party refer to me as a “murder magnet.” I’d almost spun around to protest before realizing that it was true. Up until then, my life had indeed attracted mayhem, and I had jumped right into it when it arrived. But in each case there had been special circumstances: first, to protect my remaining family; and second, to find my missing husband. I wasn’t a passive person and I’d had no real choice but to pursue evil when it had touched my life.

But why now? When things had finally calmed down and life had found a normalcy, why had murder found me again?

Because of Mac’s and my now indirect connection to law enforcement and thus to crime—our work, my studies, our friendship with Billy—the dark side was always near. But these days we were only observers, watching it overshadow other people’s lives, not our own. Even Sunday night’s murder on Nevins Street and the Dekker tragedy, while eerily close to home, were not exactly personal. I’d thought we’d found solid footing on safer ground. But Chali’s murder
was
personal. Her brutal loss was an undertow pulling us back into a darkness I’d thought we’d banished. Apparently, for unfathomable reasons, I
was
a murder magnet.

Why?

Chali, though a practicing Christian, had told me once that she believed in karma, that your actions in a previous life determined your destiny in your next incarnation. I’d almost laughed when she’d talked about karma while wearing a crucifix around her neck. She’d grown up in a Hindu world and was the sum of different belief systems, even if they were at times contradictory. In fact, not being religious myself, her philosophical contradictions made her all the more likable to me. She was as complicated, ridiculous, and sincere as the rest of humankind. It was what made the world work and not-work. Who was I to argue?

The thing was—and it struck me now as I opened the front door of the nursery school, where the noon crowd was starting to filter out into the winter afternoon with their mothers or fathers or babysitters—if Chali had really believed in karma, why had she continued to work for me once she’d learned my history?
I was a murder magnet
. Hadn’t that worried her? Maybe it was the Christian in her that had inspired her to stay.

As soon as I walked into the classroom, which was festooned with colorful holiday decorations, Ben flew into my arms. I hugged him and kissed him and for a moment the sweet warmth of his cheek against my lips melted away all my uncertainties. He still hadn’t challenged my claim that Chali, who was usually the one to pick him up from school, and whom he adored, was home sick with the flu “like Daddy.” Sooner or later, I would have to tell him the truth, or at least some version of it. Death, in its permanence, was not in the conceptual scope of such a young child. I would tell him she was gone or away, and hope he didn’t ask me why or for how long. Later, when the moment was right, I would tell him the precise truth.

We headed outside where the noontime life of the neighborhood was in full swing: freelancers populating cafés; a Fresh Direct truck blocking an intersection and stirring a chorus of frustrated honking; the Three Musketeers making their way along Smith Street, chattering like a clique of preteen girls.

I ran a few holiday errands on our way home, trying to support our local stores and also find a few unique gifts to supplement all the stuff I was ordering online: books, a sweater and a hat/scarf set for Mac; books and chocolate for my mother; vintage LPs for my brother, Jon, who had rediscovered the joys of vinyl; jewelry for his wife, Andrea; and toys galore for all the kids. I’d shipped some directly to L.A. but some we’d have to carry. We were leaving in a week, by which time, according to Dr. Velasquez, Mac should be well enough to travel.

After lunch, while Ben napped in bed with Mac, I ordered the last of the gifts. Went through a few dozen more résumés before deciding not to bother; I’d interviewed two people I liked well enough and it would be easiest just to choose between them. As I was almost finished sorting through the day’s pileup of e-mails, a new one came in.

My heart jumped when I saw Dathi’s name appear on the screen.

Dear Karin,

I am so glad you wrote to me. I did not think of it but I should have written to you, because Mommy still hasn’t called anyone back. I’m living with Uncle Ishat now. There is some quite bad news. My dear Granny has passed away. It was on Tuesday, from a heart attack, the doctor said. We had her funeral today without Mommy knowing. I’m not sure if you should tell her. But I don’t want Uncle Ishat to tell her, either, because he is not nice about anything. Let me talk to her please. Or do you think I should wait until I get there? That way we can comfort each other. I have not been allowed to cry in my uncle’s house. I am not happy here, but it doesn’t matter, because soon I will be there with Mommy.

Please tell her to call us here at Ishat’s house. Here is his phone number.

Dathi

But she forgot to include the number. I immediately began to respond, and then in moments another e-mail from her appeared with her Uncle Ishat’s contact information. I transferred it into my cell phone and immediately dialed. I wanted to speak with Dathi. Not to tell her about her mother’s murder, but to reassure her by the sound of my voice that someone was out there thinking of her, just as her sweet poem had once reassured me that I was far from alone. Now that she’d lost both her mother and grandmother, and hearing that she didn’t feel welcome in her uncle’s home, I also hoped at least to learn that there was someone in her life she’d be able to count on now.

As the phone rang I realized that it was nearly midnight in India, and I almost hung up, but then Ishat answered. I introduced myself.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “My sister has spoken of you.”

I couldn’t claim that Chali had spoken to me much of him, because she hadn’t, except dismissively. Apparently, growing up an Indian boy turned you almost automatically into a misogynistic man, according to Chali, who had learned to express herself openly since landing here. I’d sensed she didn’t think much of him, but lied anyway.

“Yes, she’s also spoken highly of you.”

“I never mentioned that she spoke
highly
of you, madame.” And then a tepid laugh. “In any case, I’m glad you called because we have had no luck reaching my sister. She has simply not returned any of my messages.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not to mention that Dathi had just contacted me; it seemed late for her to be up, at the age of twelve, and true to her assessment he didn’t sound like a very nice man. I didn’t want to cause any trouble for her, so I decided to avoid telling him that I’d already heard about Granny’s heart attack.

“That’s why I called you, I—”

He cut me off before I could deliver my own wretched news.

“Our mother has passed away,” he said, “and I wanted Chali to be informed. Since she can’t find a moment to return my calls, I would ask you to inform her of the development. Our mother has been buried. There is no inheritance. The child is here with me until she travels to the U.S.”

“Does Dathi have any aunts? Any other relatives?”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“I also have some bad news.”

I steadied myself, and told him. I could hear him breathing heavily as I spoke but he said nothing and I couldn’t discern his reaction. There were no tears, no questions. All he said was, “I told Panchali not to go to New York City.”

“I was hoping to speak to Dathi. I know it’s late, but I’d very much like to say hello to her.”

“The girl has been asleep for hours.”

His outright lie, the cumulative effect of his arrogance, incensed me. Against my better judgment, I blurted out, “She just e-mailed me. It’s how I got your number.”

“I see. Well then. That computer her school gave her has been a nuisance from the start.” His icy tone alarmed me.