Vanishing Girls (18 page)

The B63 came and went. The Musketeers continued to wait. Another bus also used this stop, the B65. I had never taken it and I didn’t know its route. But when it arrived a few minutes later and the men lined up, I got on behind them, swiping my MetroCard as if I had always planned to make this journey today. I sat near enough to keep my eyes and ears open, but not so close that I would catch their attention.

They sat together at the back of the bus and never stopped talking. They reminded me of middle school girls. It wasn’t the first time I’d had that thought, but now it really struck me what that meant because of Dathi. I hadn’t known any preteenagers since having been one myself, and that was a long time ago. Now, suddenly, with Dathi in my home and life and family, I was being plunged back into that world; it was like getting tossed into the deep end when your swimming skills had been untested for too long. I vaguely remembered what it was like: any blood, any sharks, and you were a goner. Cruelty was the name of the game. Social pressures were like tides that pulled you and pushed you according to their own internal rhythms. Survival meant navigating the forces until graduation—and then you were free (until high school). That the Musketeers reminded me of a claque of tweens interested me now more than ever.
What was the bond between these three men
?

At Third Avenue, the bus turned and continued up Dean Street. Just before the stop at Classon Avenue, the men stood up and gathered at the side door. I waited until the last minute before following them out onto a derelict street of abandoned-looking warehouses, an auto body shop with its gate pulled down, and a few low brick buildings where you’d only live if you had to. I didn’t know whether to feel nervous or comforted that I wasn’t exactly alone here: Across the street, a larger group of men and some women, much like the Musketeers in their cheerful decrepitude, stood gathered in front of a nondescript door of an unmarked brick building. I walked slowly up the opposite sidewalk, focused forward, deciding what to do when suddenly the door opened and the people waiting formed what could pass for a line.

I watched as the line snaked through the door until they were all gone. When no one was left, I crossed the street and read a small sign on the front of the door:
St. Vincent de Paul Treatment Center, Mary Immaculate Hospital, Hours: M–F, 9:30–4:00
.

If I remembered correctly, this was the methadone clinic the Dekkers had been involved in funding. Apparently no one had considered it important to spend much on signage—but when you thought about it, it really didn’t matter. All those people had found their way here. My guess was that they’d had little choice in the matter; at least some of them had most likely been sent here by a judge.

I opened the door and walked in.

A big room with scuffed beige walls and a low dropped ceiling was filling with people waiting, some of whom had seated themselves in rows of bolted-down plastic chairs. The rest had formed into an unruly line in front of a little window that opened onto an office. Not knowing what else to do, and hoping not to bring attention to myself, I got in line. People were signing in on a clipboard at the window, then taking a seat. As we moved steadily forward, I formulated a plan: Since I was here, I would find out who the Three Musketeers were exactly. Take it from there.

There were five people between me and the last Musketeer; luckily the trio had stayed together in line. When I got to the window, a man in a green medical smock, with dark shadows drooping down his long face, looked at me with interest. I didn’t smile, just looked away, hoping he wouldn’t question me. At some point, I assumed, they would need identification; no one handed out methadone without it. Right now the addicts were just queuing up for their fixes, and my guess was that they were ID’d when the drug was dispensed. I wouldn’t be here that long.

I took the pen and started to sign my name. Well, not my name:
Janice Doen
. It was the first thing that sprang to mind; a variation of Jane Doe, it was one of the aliases I used sometimes working undercover back when I was a cop. I signed slowly enough to count up five spaces.

Marty Brilliant

Iggy Black

Jose R. Seraglio

I silently repeated the three names—Marty Iggy Jose, Brilliant Black Seraglio—on my way out the door. Alone on the sidewalk, I pulled out my BlackBerry and typed the names into an e-mail which I sent to myself. Then I slipped my phone back into my purse and headed back along Classon. I found the bus stop just a block away and stood under the Plexiglas shelter. The barrenness of this place unnerved me; there was no one else around. And then, suddenly, I heard my name.

“Karin! What are you doing in my neck of the woods?”

I looked up, for a moment recognizing her before realizing who she was.

“Mary. Tai Chi. Right?”

“At least I’ve still got
that
job.”

We smiled at each other. With her was a tall black teenager with a barely visible mustache and a floppy knit hat that swayed to the right. He stood close by her side. A sharp gust of wind sent them closer to me under the bus stop shelter. We barely knew each other, but we instinctively huddled for warmth.

“You lost your other jobs?” I recalled now that she’d mentioned she had three.

“Yup. Two in one week. Fremont’s looking for a part-time job now, but there isn’t much out there for teenagers.” I looked at the boy, and she remembered to introduce him: “My son, Fremont.”

“Karin.”

We nodded at each other, refreshing our smiles.

“Fremont’s got the day off from school,” Mary said. “Teacher prep or something.”

The bus came and we all piled on.

By the time we reached my stop, just outside the YMCA where they also got off, I’d been reminded that Mary was a single mother and learned that Fremont was her only child. I didn’t know it as a fact, but I had a feeling she’d never been married, particularly since Billy had told me she was a lesbian. Still, you never knew. They had lived in Prospect Heights since “before it started getting gentrified,” which told me it had been
really
desolate before, as not a single sign of gentrification had leaped out at me during my brief visit.

“So what were you doing all the way out there?” Mary asked. We stood together on the sidewalk as the bus pulled back into traffic.

“Kind of an informal investigation.” I explained briefly, but enough to capture her attention.

“I’ve been following those stories in the news. I’m a true-crime
nut
. I read all those articles and sometimes I even read the books.”

“She hides them when people come over,” Fremont said.

“A lot of people think it’s twisted to be interested in stuff like that. And I don’t know why I am—but I am.”

“Then you know my story.” Before I could stop myself, because I rarely talked about it anymore, I told her about my first family and how it ended. Mary linked arms with Fremont, listening intently, pulling him closer as I got to the end. Her eyes teared and now, forty-five minutes into our fast friendship, she used her free arm to offer me a hug.

“Listen”—I pulled away—“maybe this is crazy, but if you need work, and you aren’t proud, I have a job. It could even be two jobs: babysitting in the afternoons for my son—he’s almost four—and office work in the mornings for my husband, Mac. He’s a private investigator.”

Mary’s face glowed so brightly she could have lit up Atlantic Avenue all on her own. She looked up at Fremont. “Pinch me!”

He had a musical laugh.

“I mean it, Karin,” Mary said. “I was just telling Fremont how much I miss playing with him when he was a sweet little guy. And you
know
I’d like nothing better than to work for a private eye. I mean,
really
.”

“So you will?”

“I was starting to wonder how I was going to pay the rent.”

Fremont looked at her, alarmed. “I didn’t know that, Mom.”

“It’s okay: I just got two new jobs! What did I tell you—a window closes so a door can open.”

“Can you come by tomorrow afternoon? It’s Saturday so everyone should be home. You can meet Mac, and we can go over the details.”

“Okay. I’m giving a Tai Chi lesson right here at three o’clock. How’s four?”

“Perfect.”

We parted ways, glancing back at each other to smile and wave. I knew it was risky to offer so much at once to someone I hardly knew, but I had a strong gut feeling that this was an excellent idea. Anyway, how could Mary not be a better assistant than Star? Even if it didn’t work out, it was worth a try. In fact, maybe this was the real reason I had followed those men all the way to Classon Avenue this morning; maybe it had nothing to do with Father X or the Dekkers or any of that. Maybe my karma had meant for Mary and me to run into each other at just the right moment, when we needed each other. Or maybe both impulses had led me in a meaningful direction: finding Mary
and
following the Musketeers.

As I crossed Atlantic onto Boerum Place, I speed-dialed Mac with the news. His reaction was immediate and strong.

“You what?”

I told him again: I’d been to a methadone clinic in Prospect Heights; and I’d hired Mary Salter to work for us.

“We’ll talk later,” he said, hanging up abruptly at the sound of something crashing in the background. Star must have been there. I reminded myself: He would thank me.

Next I called Billy and told him about my surprise encounter with Mary, but left out the part about following the Three Musketeers to rehab. I was worried he’d distrust my impulse to connect those far-flung dots on the Dekker map, and I would need his help finding out who they were. I’d have to play that one right.

“Oh Jesus, Karin. You hired my Tai Chi teacher to work for you?”

“She needs the work, and she’s great.”

“That she is.” A phone rang in the background and a voice called out to someone; he was in the detectives unit. Good.

“Did you know she has a black son?” I asked Billy.

“Half-black. She told me about him. Had herself inseminated back when she was living with her ex-girlfriend. It was a long-term thing but it didn’t survive parenthood.”

“Well, he seems like a nice boy. They seem really close.”

“She’s crazy about him, that’s for sure.”

“So Billy—I need a favor. Can I stop by the precinct?”

“When?”

“How about right now?”

“What if I told you I wasn’t at the precinct right now?”

“I’d tell you you’re a really bad liar.”

After that call I texted Mac, asking him if he could pick Ben up from school at noon, as I had an errand to run. He answered immediately that he could. Then I slipped my phone back into my purse and turned around in the direction of the Eighty-fourth Precinct.

Chapter 16

I
t was the first time I’d been inside the Eight-four conference room that had been given over to the search for the Working Girl Killer. The task force had been at it for a solid year here in Brooklyn, after a year based in Manhattan, and it showed in the comfortable familiarity of the dozen or so people working the case. Informal personal areas had been carved out along the big table that dominated the room and on the two credenzas against a far wall. Laptops, printers, coffee mugs, even a few photos of the cops’ smiling families—a shocking (to me) leap of faith given the array of grisly crime scene photos taped to the walls in the work-in-progress that was an endless investigation like this one. I still shuddered to think how many cops felt immune to the violence they encountered on a daily basis; but I also understood that, to do the job, it helped to convince yourself it would never touch you. You had to believe you were safe in a sea of brutality, and your family was your island hideaway. Look at their smiling faces, and for a split second you felt liberated from the realer-than-real world that was your daily job. How badly I wanted to tell them that they were deluded to feel safe. No one was safe; I had learned that the hardest way possible. But I would not be the one to break their bubble. Billy knew, though; his delusions of invincibility had exploded with his eye when the woman he’d loved had tried to kill him.

Ladasha was seated at the far end of the long table, working at the room’s big desktop computer; this would be the one “secure” connection where sensitive permission-only searches were preferably done, though it was doubtful that protocol was strictly followed anymore. Popping up from behind the monitor I could see the wide spray of Ladasha’s latest hair extension; it was Friday, her long-standing “date night,” which I knew she nearly always spent with girlfriends or family, going out for early dinners or maybe a movie; knowing her, she’d probably had a manicure, too.

She glanced up from the monitor and saw me walking in behind Billy, who had met me in the lobby.

“Hi Karin!” There was no sarcasm in her tone, for a change, which told me she either felt guilty for cheating on Billy with George over at the Seven-two, or she just didn’t want to tick me off.

I followed Billy to her end of the table, where I could see that her manicure was a hellacious red, and she was in the ViCAP database—the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program that collected, collated, and analyzed information on violent crimes throughout the country so investigators could track patterns quickly. I recalled the hours I’d spent with my head buried in ViCAP back when I was searching for the Domino Killer, not once thinking I’d ever find the handiwork of that psycho in my own house. As if she could read my thoughts, Ladasha clicked on another tab to bring up a Zappos page where apparently she’d been browsing high-heeled boots.

“If it’s lunchtime, I’m in,” she said.

“Not quite yet.” Billy navigated a chair to get in front of the computer. “Borrow this a minute?”

“Go ahead.” Ladasha yawned, exposing her gold tooth. “I’m not getting much of anywhere.”

Coming around to see the monitor, I was distracted by a section of wall covered in photographs of footprints in mud, dirt, snow, gravel.

Billy noticed me looking. “P-Pat’s footprints at nearly every crime scene.”

“You linked him?”

“I shouldn’t have said that.” As we talked, Billy got out of ViCAP and logged into the CRS database—the Criminal Records Section documented every single police encounter from a stop-and-frisk to an arrest to a point on your driver’s license. You could plug in a name and see if anything popped up. “He’s got a size ten shoe, like our guy. That’s all we know.”

“MR1123.” Ladasha rolled her eyes. A couple of the other investigators chuckled.

“Unfortunately P-Pat wears a popular model of a popular brand of sneakers,” Billy explained. “New Balance MR1123, same as our guy at five out of the eleven crime scenes. But our guy wore Clark’s desert boots, too, sometimes.”

“And Patty Scott doesn’t own any of those,” Ladasha said with a note of frustration. I watched her a moment to see if she’d glance at Billy’s feet, but she didn’t. She wouldn’t, in front of me. But you didn’t have to look to know that his shoe size was much bigger than Patrick Scott’s.

“Which means squat,” I said. “He could have them stashed in a locker at Port Authority, for all we know. He could—”

“Slow down.” Billy glared at me.

“Sorry.”

“Never apologize,” Ladasha forced a laugh, “and never explain. Who said that, anyway?”

“The Duke.” We all looked at the guy with a jet-black comb-over, sitting across the room nursing a Styrofoam cup of something.

“The who?” Ladasha asked.

“John Wayne,” a young woman answered, swinging a flowered Doc Marten boot onto the corner of the table and tugging a quick retie.

“Yo, peeps,” Ladasha barked, “shut down the movie streaming and get your faces back to work.”

“Right, Dash,” the young woman snapped back, but with humor. “As if we do anything else.”

I pulled up a chair beside Billy, aching to take over the mouse but forbidding the impulse. This was a favor and I needed his cooperation; push too hard and he’d shut me down.

“Whaddya got.” Billy’s hands poised to type.

“Marty Brilliant, Iggy Black, Jose R. Seraglio.”

“Who’s that?” Ladasha stepped close enough to peer over Billy’s shoulder.

“Neighborhood drug addicts,” I said. “Friends of Father X.”

“Where are you going with this?” she asked.

“Have you thought maybe you’re focusing too much on the wrong people, Dash?”

She stared at me.

“You know, Patrick Scott and the other guy.”

“Antonio Neng,” she said. “So far they’re the best we got, like it or not.” She was a good actress in front of Billy; she knew her lines.

“They’re both placed at or near the scenes on the same night,” Billy said. “Why wouldn’t we work them?”

“I know,” I said. “I’m with you on that. But I was just thinking . . .”

“Uh oh.”

“Billy, don’t you see? I’m thinking whoever got into Abby’s Facebook knows something and is sitting back, watching. I’m thinking it all somehow filters through the Dekkers.”

“Fucking CCU; they still haven’t called me.” You could see Billy’s jaw muscles ripple as he ground his teeth.

I touched his hand. “I’m thinking it connects to their church, through their ties to Father X. And maybe to some of his, you know, human projects.”

“Oo-wee.” Ladasha shook her head. “The priests, they ain’t just child rapists, now they’re killers, too!
Here we go.
Maybe you’ve been taking in too much news.”

“I didn’t say anything about the priest killing anyone, did I?”

“No, but—”

“All I want to do is check out these three guys, see what they do for Father X, and find out if they ever did odd jobs for the Dekkers. See who’s who in the bigger picture. I leaned closer to Billy. “Think about it:
Human trafficking, right here in Brownstone Brooklyn
.”

“
Billy
,” Ladasha’s tone shifted from mocking to serious. “I thought we agreed you weren’t gonna talk out of school.”

“I didn’t.”

“Then how—”

“So you’re already thinking along the same lines.” A spark caught inside me: Something was happening here.

“We’re thinking what we’re thinking, Karin,” Ladasha said. “But you are not a part of this. You only think you are.”

“Chali,” I reminded her, “made me a part of this. She recognized Reed Dekker, remember? She wanted to tell me something the night she was murdered by the Working Girl Killer.”

“We don’t
know
the same person killed Chali,” Billy said.

“Yeah, Karin,” Ladasha said, “and bottom line: You’re a bystander to all this. You’re not technically family of a victim, and you’re not on the case, either.”

“Chali’s daughter lives with me now. I need to be able to tell her why her mother died.”

Billy and Ladasha glanced at each other. She reluctantly nodded.

“All right.” Billy’s hands returned to the keyboard. “What were those names again?”

“Marty Brilliant, Iggy Black, Jose R. Seraglio. The Three Musketeers—that’s how I thought of them until today. They get their rehab at Mary Immaculate, one of the Dekkers’ pet projects, run by Father X out of St. Paul’s Church on Court Street. Every day of the week, these guys go from St. Paul’s to Mary Immaculate in Prospect Heights, and back again, like clockwork. What was Reed’s last call to Father X about?”

“Needed an odd job done.”

“Right. And who do you think he sent out on odd jobs?”

Billy glanced sharply at Ladasha. “Got that list?”

She turned to a stack of files and pulled one. Opened it and read aloud: “Yup, all there: Brilliant, Seraglio, and Black. Among others.”

“Okay, Billy,” I said. “Go ahead
:
Look them up.”

He did. And they were all there in the CRS, with enough of the blanks filled in to sketch out their histories.

Martin Brilliant hailed from Mill Basin, Brooklyn. His record showed fourteen arrests for petty crimes like pickpocketing, jumping the subway turnstiles, and possession of illicit drugs. He had done a year in prison for the drugs, but had pled out on all the other charges. He’d been ordered into rehab by the last judge he’d faced on a charge of disorderly conduct. About a year ago, he transitioned from a halfway house in Brownsville, Brooklyn to a building in Red Hook, called Sons of St. Paul’s, used to house recovering drug addicts who had found the Lord.

Ignatius Black, Jr., grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in the Amsterdam Houses, one of the city’s sprawling low-income housing projects. He was the son of a taxi driver and a garment worker who divorced when he was two. He’d dropped out of high school, found work on the streets selling heroin, and ended up in prison for six years. He came out faithful, but gravitated back to drugs; he had lived at Sons of St. Paul’s for the last year and a half.

Last but not least, Jose R. Seraglio was a native of Boerum Hill, part of a big Dominican family of blue-collar workers that had mostly stayed in the neighborhood until rampant gentrification had put the store leasers out of business and made the homeowners rich enough to get out of the city, which had treated them shabbily. Jose had sat out the big migration of his family to New Jersey, stayed in the neighborhood, and been in and out of jail on a series of minor arrests. Like the others, he ended up a junkie of one kind or another, and ultimately found his way to Father X’s Red Hook parish-within-a-parish for semirehabilitated misfits. He had lived at Sons of St. Paul’s with his BFFs Marty and Iggy for coming on a year now.

“So it is what it is.” Billy leaned back in his chair. “They are who they are. Doesn’t mean squat.”

“What about this guy?” My fingertip touched another name on the list of Sons of St. Paul’s residents who shared quite a few arrest dates with Jose Seraglio, and had left the Red Hook residence a few months ago. “Edward Walczak—he was on the same rehab schedule as the Three Musketeers. Why did he leave?”

“Maybe he
graduated
.” Ladasha’s sarcasm was back in town.

Billy checked out recent arrests and current arraignments. “No sign of him anywhere in the system since then. But I wouldn’t worry about that; maybe he straightened out. Sometimes they do.”

“Look at that.” I picked up the mouse and clicked on a link:
Witness
. “The file is sealed because it involved a minor.”

Ladasha and I leaned in close enough to read the sparse information available about Edward Walczak’s brief run as a witness in a sex crimes case, five years ago, leveled against none other than Ximens Dandolos—Father X. Walczak had been subpoenaed but ultimately dismissed as unreliable based on his history with drugs and petty crime.

“There you go,” I said. “There it is.”

Ladasha folded her arms over her chest and stood there, silent. She didn’t so much as glance at Billy, who was staring hard at the screen. I couldn’t tell if this was new information to them, or if it bothered them that I had figured something out that they didn’t want anyone to know.

“I wonder where he lives.” I started to maneuver the cursor across the screen.

Billy reached over and took the mouse out of my hand. “Karin, listen: time for you to go.”

“It said Walczak grew up in the neighborhood. Is he still here?”

“You see”—Billy stood up now—“this could get real messy.”

“I know how to handle an investigation,” I argued, “and you know I would never invalidate evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” Ladasha challenged me. “You don’t seem to know better than to make up your mind in advance.”

“Why did Father X nearly have a heart attack the minute Abby woke up?” I looked from Billy’s face to Ladasha’s. Neither flinched. “What is he afraid she knows? What is she afraid to tell?”

They glared at each other but didn’t answer—either because they didn’t know, or there was something they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me. I knew that my unofficial visit was a distraction. I knew that Ladasha was right to be irritated with me. I knew that Billy was under enough stress and I shouldn’t be adding to it. If I couldn’t help, I shouldn’t be here. I knew all that. But still—there was something no one was seeing. Did it matter who saw it first?

I stood up and scanned the gruesome photomontage depicting repetitions of the same horrifying crime: young women, all prostitutes except Chali, strangled and then bludgeoned with a replica of a 1963 Bowie knife made by a long-defunct Mississippi company called Stark. Chali, though, had been stabbed with a different make knife. Photos of both knives were taped side by side on the wall. Someone had arranged them carefully, straight and level, so your eye focused on the subtle differences: the newer knife’s elongated blade curving at the tip, the shiny new wood grain handle, was exactly like the one I’d seen protruding from Chali’s chest. My own chest clamped at the sight of it. The Stark Bowie that was almost exactly the same, but not as shiny or sleek. It wasn’t a fancy knife or particularly popular, which was why it had been discontinued, and it was impossible to find them now even on eBay. Anyone’s best guess was that the killer had a stash of them. Maybe his stash finally ran out and he’d needed a close replacement. That, or there were two killers now.