Vanishing Girls (22 page)

Chapter 20

I
t was fully night when we came up out of the F train station at Bergen Street. I waited for my BlackBerry to chime the news that I had a voice mail waiting, but there was nothing: Billy still hadn’t returned my call. I tried him on his landline at the precinct but whoever answered said he hadn’t been seen all day.

When we walked into the house, the first thing I heard was the television news being delivered in an urgent tone.

Mac appeared, looking worn out. “Dathi, you must be hungry. There’s some takeout in the kitchen. Ben’s in there—”

“He’s eating all alone?” I interrupted.

But before he could answer, and as Dathi went to join Ben, Mac steered me into the living room. I sat on the couch without taking off my coat.

“Watch this. They’re about to loop it again. Maybe they’ll add something new.”

I sat beside him on the couch, my attention fixed on the clean-cut anchor who filled the screen.

“We’re still waiting for the chief of police to come out and make a statement,” he announced. His white hair blended with the snowbanks behind him, turning him ghostly pale. The whole city was so snowbound now, I couldn’t tell where he was.

“To recap: Breaking news in the hunt for the Working Girl Killer that’s kept the city wondering, and looking over its shoulder, for two years now. Father Ximens Dandolos of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was arrested tonight in connection with the case. This after the source of the murder weapon used in the latest murder, of a nanny in Brooklyn two weeks before Christmas—the first nonprostitute killed in this case—was traced to a hardware store in Brooklyn where illegal knife sales have been under scrutiny by the district attorney’s office. That’s all the information we have now; no word yet on whether that knife is considered an exact match for the ones used in what is thought to be the work of a single serial killer, or how Father Dandolos might fit in. Stay tuned.”

I soughed off my coat and left it puddled behind me where I sat. “Wow.”

“Walczak.” Mac grimaced. “Selling knives under the counter. Looking us right in the eye and giving us a load of—” He glanced back at the kitchen, where the children were eating, and stopped himself from fully indicting Eddie Walczak without any evidence. And then that weak thread of suspicion snapped when the anchor reappeared on screen with an update:

“This just in! We’re told that the knife used in the latest murder by the Working Girl Killer was purchased just three weeks ago at a Lowe’s hardware store on Second Avenue in Brooklyn. A credit card used to make a purchase of other supplies at the same time confirms a witness’s allegation that the supplies and the knife were bought by the same person—the superintendent of St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Cobble Hill. The super, Rustilav Chuikov, often shops at Lowe’s on errands for the church. He was questioned earlier today by the police—they specified that he is
not
a suspect, but a person of interest.”

“How can he even say that with a straight face?” I shook my head. “Person of interest,
right
.”

They segued into a report on the New York State law making the possession of a knife that “looks like a weapon” illegal without a hunting or fishing license, and the outright ban on the sale of switchblades and gravity knives. Bowie knives fell under the first category: legal to purchase, but not to carry without the proper license. Because an employee at Lowe’s had been running a black market on the illegal knives, any knife he sold, over or under the table, had been tracked in a special investigation. Before long, there was more about the case:

“The man you see here—” A square-jawed Russian, with a gold front tooth that flashed in the spotlight when he spoke, filled the screen in a close-up I guessed he could have lived without. “Rustilav Chuikov, who’s called Rusty, says he knows nothing about the purchase of any knives at Lowe’s or anyplace else. Listen.”

Rusty spoke into a microphone so close to his mouth that it was enclosed in bursts of vapor each time his breath hit the cold air. “I have not bought any knife, in December, today, or any other day. What would I want with a knife like that? Nothing! That is all I can say right now.”

As soon as he was done, the anchorman’s voice returned, discussing the knife. As he spoke, a photograph showed an exact replica of the Bowie knife purchased from the now-arrested employee at Lowe’s—the knife that killed Chali. The knife, with its elongated blade curving at the tip and shiny new wood-grain handle, was just like the one I’d seen protruding from her chest.

“For more on the phenomenon of serial killers, here is CNN criminologist . . .”

The camera switched from the knife to the face of a spiffily dressed man with short salt-and-pepper hair, sitting at a desk in a newsroom, smiling at the camera. Mac muted the volume.

“Well, either the press hasn’t caught on to the possibility of a copycat, or they were asked not to talk about it,” I said. “I kept expecting them to show a picture of the Stark Bowie, too.”

“They also didn’t mention the souvenirs.” That an item of clothing was missing from each victim was valuable information only if no one else knew about it; it was the trump card for separating copycats and wannabes from the real McCoy.

“Billy still hasn’t called me back.” I checked my phone again. “Did you talk to him at all today?”

“Not since yesterday.” Mac dialed Billy on his own phone, but there was still no answer.

“I wonder if he’s still mad at me,” I said.

“He’s just stressed. He’ll get over it.”

By the time Ben was asleep and Dathi was tucked into her bed, the recycled story had picked up a few more details. The news crew was now stationed on Court Street, just a few blocks from our house, in front of the Congress Street entrance to the church. I recognized the plaque behind the journalist who now addressed the city:

“In a shocking twist to a notorious case, the priest who presides over this storied Roman Catholic church in upscale Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been arrested in connection with the serial killings, known as the Working Girl Murders, which have terrorized New York City for nearly two years now. Father Ximens Dandolos, who has been the pastor of St. Paul’s and St. Agnes for twenty-five years, is now said to be the very person who signed a credit card receipt at Lowe’s hardware store when the knife that was used to brutally murder this woman was purchased.”

Chali’s smiling face appeared on the screen. I froze, seeing her alive and happy—I hadn’t thought of her that way in so long. Mac’s hand landed gently on my back.

The sound of footsteps alerted us that Dathi was on her way upstairs.

“Turn it off!” I fumbled for the remote, and found it wedged between the couch cushions; but it was too late.

She stood at the top of the stairs in her new flannel nightgown, staring at her mother’s face.

“What are they saying?” she asked in a hoarse, sleepy voice. “Have they found my mother’s killer?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But they’re not sure.”

I went back downstairs with her and sat beside her bed in the dark until she was almost asleep, holding her hand. There was a charged quality to the silence; I felt there was something she wanted to tell me, but wasn’t ready to speak.

Finally I leaned over to kiss her forehead. “Good night, sweetie.”

“She knew my mother,” Dathi whispered.

“Who?”

“Abby. She knew my mother.”

I assumed Dathi was embellishing, weaving her old world with her new one, adding invented details to create a better picture. I knew how hard it was to think, starkly, in one
before
and another
after
, to accept that you had to let go of what was gone.

I didn’t argue with her. I kissed her forehead. Shut her door and went back upstairs. The anchorman was back with the latest.

“In a new development on a roller-coaster night as police scramble to finally identify the serial murderer known to all of New York City as the Working Girl Killer, a close friend of the priest who was just arrested as a person of interest in the case has reportedly committed suicide. Public middle school teacher Steve Campbell was found by his wife just hours ago, hanging from a pipe outside the service entrance of his apartment in Carroll Gardens.”

A headshot of Steve Campbell popped onscreen, the kind taken by school photographers in front of a wavy blue background. It was presumably an old yearbook photo from an earlier era in his teaching career, because he looked a good decade younger than he had this afternoon.
Dead?
It was hard to process, having just seen him. He had seemed so happy and hopeful about the plans for Abby to move in.

The news anchor went on to report the little he could about Steve Campbell, which wasn’t much. He had been found by Linda two hours ago. When the image of an unattended podium appeared on screen, and a voiceover said they were still waiting for the police chief to appear for a news conference, I turned off the TV. If the press had found out that the Campbells were Abby’s guardians, and made any connection between her parents’ deaths and the Working Girl Murders, they weren’t saying.

Steve Campbell—was
he
the “other priest”? I recalled my surprise at not seeing him anywhere near Father X during the arrest this afternoon. Had he sprinted off at the first sign of trouble? I could see it: something hidden suddenly revealed as a curtain is pulled back; the naked horror of being caught on a stage where you never wanted to be seen.

What was going on at that church?

Mac and I were both working our phones now, trying every number we could think of to find Billy. Mac was so frustrated to reach Billy’s voice mail again that he threw his BlackBerry on the floor; the back popped off and flew across the living room. I held mine in my hand, squeezing it, as if I could force it to ring with the call I wanted.

Silent seconds blurred into silent minutes. Mac turned the TV back on and rewatched the relooped replay of the same story.

I badly wanted to talk to Dathi, to press her harder about whether Abby had told her anything else. But when I returned to her room and cracked open her door, I could hear by the slow rhythm of her breathing that she had finally fallen asleep. For a moment I thought about waking her up, but didn’t have the heart.

Chapter 21

N
ot untypically, the morning clock ran ahead of us and there was no time to talk before Dathi had eaten, and was dressed and ready to run out the door to catch her bus. Our conversation would have to wait until after school. I wasn’t sure what could be gained from it now, anyway; the investigations were heating up fast and whatever there was to find, they would find it—that was what I told myself.
Back off
.

After dropping Ben at nursery school, and like clockwork passing the Three Musketeers on their way along Smith Street to their morning bus, I watched them recede in the direction of Atlantic Avenue. Now that I knew who they were—now that they had names and backgrounds and challenges—they didn’t repulse me anymore. They saddened me. Like a mother, I hoped for the best for them while bracing for the worst.

A siren caught my attention: A cop car driving along Smith turned sharply onto Bergen in the direction of Court Street—and St. Paul’s Church. Standing at the intersection, I looked up that way to try and see what was happening, but it was too far. All I could make out were parked cars and revolving police lights. It was no surprise that the investigation would have wrapped its arms around the church buildings by now, and dug a few tentacles behind the altar and every pew. I knew I should have minded my own business, but I couldn’t resist walking up to Court Street, just to see.

Both the main entrance of the church and the rectory had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape, and pairs of uniforms stood guard.

“What’s happening in there?” I asked the first cop I saw, as if I didn’t know.

“Move along, please, ma’am.”

I walked around the corner to the Congress Street entrance, and asked again.

“Move along, lady.”

Across the snowy courtyard, through the leaded glass windows, I could see people moving around inside with a workaday efficiency: methodically searching, discussing last night’s movie, imagining today’s lunch. I recognized the young woman with the flowered boots from the task force. At this point, I pretty much knew that they’d be in there for hours, if not days, combing for anything that might be evidence in any of the three intertwined murder investigations. I wished I could go inside and be that proverbial fly on the wall. But even I knew there was just no way.

I decided to head over to Billy’s. We still couldn’t reach him, and I was worried. On my way there I texted Mac to let him know where I was going. I walked along Bergen Street, crossing Third Avenue into a strip of newly constructed high-rise “luxury” apartment buildings that were in the early stages of uniting two gentrified brownstone neighborhoods previously separated by industrial blight. Billy lived just on the other side, where Park Slope began.

“Karin!”

I turned around and there was Mac, breathless from jogging.

“I thought you were working that new case?” Another wayward husband, another angry wife, another bitter divorce in the making.

“Can’t concentrate; I’m worried about Billy, too. Anyway, Mary’s there and she’s amazing. I’ve already got her skip tracing. She’s a natural.”

We crossed Fourth Avenue onto Billy’s block. He lived in a ground-floor studio apartment of a brownstone on St. Mark’s Place, just shy of Fifth Avenue. The building had a blue double door leading to the foyer and upper floors. Billy’s entrance was below, separate from the other apartments. We opened the gate, passed through the small front area where the building’s garbage cans were kept, and went down a few steps to ring his bell.

After a couple of tries, I put my hand through the bars on his front window and rapped on the glass with my knuckles. “Billy? Are you there? Billy!”

“Looks like there’s a light on.” Mac shaded his eyes to peer inside. Squinting, I saw the glow from a lamp in the living room, but it was hard to focus past your own reflection in the glare of sunlight. “I think he’s in there.”

The lock on Billy’s outside door gate had been broken since we’d known him. Mac pushed it open, dug into his pocket, and took out the jackknife pick set he’d started carrying when he went into business for himself. I stood just outside while he got to work in the small, enclosed area between the inner and outer doors, deftly fiddling in the keyhole of the front doorknob until he found the right pick. The door popped open. I walked in behind Mac, closing the door behind us.

It was a large, open space: living room area on the street side, bedroom area on the garden side, galley kitchen in the middle. Two half-wall partitions split the spaces into almost-rooms; but it didn’t matter where you stood in the apartment: You could see everything.

Scanning the living room, the kitchen, and then the bedroom, the realization of what I really feared crystallized: that I would find Billy hanging or slumped or splayed. We hadn’t said it but it was why we were here: the possibility that his volatile misery may have lured him to the easy solution of ending his life. In the shadow of Steve Campbell’s suicide, the prospect felt even more urgent: There was the catalyst of PTSD, and then there were the lurking, looming suspicions that Ladasha and George Vargas had planted in my mind that Billy could be working both sides of the murders. I did not believe it. I knew that Mac didn’t believe it, either. And yet it simmered inside me as an impossible possibility.

We opened closets. Pushed back the shower curtain. Got down on our knees and looked under Billy’s double bed.

“He isn’t here,” Mac said.

“What’s that?” Over in the corner of his bedroom area there was a big shopping bag filled with a jumble of clothes. I pulled out the topmost piece: a low-cut purple shirt with an eye patterned out of rhinestones. The fabric felt cheap, and there was a noticeable rip along one seam and a smudge of lipstick along the neckline. “Why does he have all this?”

I leaned closer to make sure I was right: the bag was filled with women’s clothes: slinky gold leggings, black fishnets, skimpy halter tops, skirts so short they looked like strips of cloth. Old perfume wafted up out of the bag. I felt like vomiting.

“What’s going on with him?” I dropped the purple top back into the bag.

“Strange.” But that was all Mac said, unwilling to put into words what we couldn’t help thinking.

“Let’s go talk to Dash,” I said.

“We should call her first.”

“I don’t think so. If they turn this place into a circus and it comes to nothing, that’s it for Billy.” His career would be over: unemployment by innuendo. “Let’s go over there and talk to her in person. Make sure.” I was tempted to bring the bag of clothes with us but knew better than to touch anything else. That was the moment I realized that I was still a cop (even if I wasn’t one) before I was a friend. If those clothes had belonged to the victims, Billy was on his own.

M
y heart nearly stopped when we walked into the task force conference room at the Eight-four and there was Billy, leaning back in a swivel chair at the far end of the table, his muddy cowboy boots crossed at the ankle and propped on the table. George Vargas was sitting with him, studying something on the desktop computer. Ladasha was standing at the wall, looking at some photos I hadn’t seen before, talking to a man who was taking notes.

“Jesus,” Mac muttered, when we walked in and saw him.

“Hey! Compadres!” Billy swung down his feet and leaned forward, smiling. “What brings you to Dodge City?”

“We’ve been trying to reach you.” My tone was stern, almost accusatory, but I didn’t regret it.

“Yeah, sorry. My battery ran out and my sister’s basement flooded—a pipe burst in one of their bathrooms. I’ve been there helping them bail out. What a mess.” He stared at us, his smile fading. “What’s going on?”

I didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved, but there wasn’t time to decide, and it didn’t matter now. “Why do you have a bag of sleazy women’s clothes in your bedroom?”

“Whoa!” Anger flashed across his face. “You were in my apartment?”

Mac stepped forward to get between Billy and me. “We were worried about you so we went over.”

I thought Billy was going to try to push past, but he didn’t. Instead, he deflated. “Those clothes were my niece’s; they were hand-me-downs for Dathi—but forget it.”

“Janine lets her daughter dress like a streetwalker?”

Billy shot me a hard look. Someone across the room stifled laughter.

“You actually thought Dathi would wear that stuff?”

“I didn’t even look in the bag, Karin. I just grabbed it and brought it home, dumped it off, and came to work.”

Ladasha spun to face him. “Yo, Billy, we’re
busy
here.”

“What the fuck, Dash? You just spent twenty minutes on the phone with one of your kids!”

“You disappear when all this is going on and you walk back in all
yo baby
and you think the rest of us who been here
all night long
shouldn’t talk to their kids?”

“Gimme a break—I had the day off.”

“Well, it’s not your day off now! Maybe you ought to tell your friends to visit some other time.”

George Vargas looked up from the computer; the stubble peppered across his shaved head glistened greenish under the fluorescent lighting.

Billy’s pupil, sharp as a grain of sand, fixed on Ladasha. “You know what, Dash? I am not your husband, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.”

“Good. Then we agree on something.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Mac whispered to me. “We found him, and it looks like those clothes are—”

But just at that moment the young detective I’d spotted through the church windows came in carrying a cardboard box. “Hey Karin, glad you’re here; something I want to show you.” I didn’t recall having actually met her, but Mac and I had taken on a kind of urban legend status around here, after the catastrophe with Jasmine a year and a half ago. She dropped the box on the table with a thud. “I’m Sam, by the way. Detective Sam Wright.”

“
You’re
Sam. Billy’s mentioned you, but I thought—”

“Yeah”—she grinned—“it’s kinda cool having a guy’s name. Well, it’s really Samantha.”

“Mac,” he introduced himself. “Karin’s husband.”

“Great to meet you.” Sam shook his hand vigorously.

“What do you have there?” Vargas came around to peek into the box.

“Goodies,” Sam said.

Item by item, the box was unloaded: a laptop; three CDs in unmarked paper sleeves; a guest book; a stack of loose photographs; a locked metal box; a paper bag containing a comb trailing gray hairs; another paper bag with a used toothbrush inside; some crumpled-up tissues.

“Gotta get that laptop right over to CCU,” Vargas said.

Billy looked at Mac and me: “Guess what? CCU traced a hacked user for Abby’s Facebook account—it wasn’t her operating it. The e-mail address routes through an overseas server with an IP in the Midwest. We haven’t matched it to a hard disk but maybe . . .” He glanced at the scuffed black laptop that had been pulled from the box.

But that would take time; the computer would have to be logged and then sent over to the CCU. Meanwhile, other items in the box might yield instant gratification.

Mac used his lock-pick set to open the metal box.

When I saw what was inside, it was hard to believe what I was looking at. But pictures don’t lie.