Vanishing Girls (25 page)

He pulled his hand out.

The light flashed off suddenly.

We backed out of the interior crawl space and sat back, hunched among the now disarranged pile of the Dekkers’ stuff. I knelt across from him, hands on knees, about to get up. And then he looked at me. I looked at him. We stared at each other in the kind of empty silence you feel sitting on the beach when another winter is behind you and you’re not sure what to make of the murky distance of an indistinguishable horizon.

Chapter 26

M
aybe it shouldn’t have, but it felt like an honor when Mac and I were invited back to the task force the next morning to witness Billy and Ladasha’s interrogation of Father Ximens Dandolos; after two days of stubborn silence, he had finally agreed to talk. Though in fact it was not so much an honor as a practicality: Having unofficially met and spoken with Eddie Walczak and Joey Esposito, Mac and I were in a position to know things the task force didn’t. Transcripts could not replace the nuances of a face-to-face conversation. And so, just in case something Father X said triggered a connection that might otherwise be missed, we were there to listen and observe. After that, we promised to “keep our noses out of it,” in Ladasha’s words.

We sat behind the one-way glass separating the Eight-four’s dingy interrogation room from a row of chairs in what felt like a closet. In front of us—me, Mac, Sam, and George—Billy and Ladasha prepared.

It started like a show, in a way: You shuffled your chair around, sound-checked the video recorder, made sure your bra wasn’t sticking out of your V-neck sweater and tossed your coiled hair extensions back off your shoulders (if you were Ladasha), straightened your belt and took a long sip of water (if you were Billy), generally and dramatically ignoring Father X on the other side of the stained, scratched table. You made the interviewee nervous by delaying the start of something dreaded, in a reverse psychology that was part torture, part payback, part groundwork. Basically, you tried to seize the power before they did. There was a lot at stake: You were fighting for the truth, but the guy on the other side of the table was fighting for his life.

Father X waited in his chair, squarely facing them, sitting straight, his hands folded together on the table. In the orange jumpsuit, stripped of the authority of his collar, he looked frailer and older than I had seen him before. His hair was greasy and thin across his freckled scalp. Dark purple bags weighed down his eyes. Even from where I sat, behind the glass, his fingernails looked long and ragged.

“Ready?” Billy asked Ladasha.

“Ready.”

He switched on the video camera and she recited aloud the details of the day and hour, and listed who was present in the room. And then they began.

“Okay,” Ladasha said to Father X, “talk.”

He took a deep breath and sighed so deeply, it sounded like a wave crashing to shore on our side of the microphone. He closed his eyes, gathering himself one last time, and then opened them.

“Where do you want me to begin?”

“At the beginning,” Billy said calmly. “We have as much time as we need. There’s no rush.”

Father X cleared his throat. “I met Reed and Marta Dekker about ten years ago, when they joined St. Paul’s. They had just moved to the neighborhood, bought a house, and were settling in. Reed was a banker; despite everything, he was a very smart man.”

Ladasha rolled her eyes, and tapped her pen hard, twice, against the side of the table. “Skip the fan club bullshit, okay?”

“Hey, Dash.” Billy touched her arm to calm her. She shot him a look. But something told me they were working together on this. Billy was going to be the listening ear for Father X, Ladasha the provocateur teasing his anger—she was good at that. “Sorry about that, Father. Go on.”

“Abby was about a year old, and Reed and Marta had just gotten married. Reed was a widower. That was what he told us all, even Marta: He said that his first wife had died in childbirth, and Abby was their baby. Eventually I found out the truth.” His eyes clamped shut a moment, then he continued, “Reed and Steve had been running their trips to Brazil for years. They got girls from wherever they could, including local traffickers, it didn’t matter how. Tina was one of the kids from here. He liked her in particular. When she became pregnant by him, he kept his eye on her where she was living, in a slum in Rio where they had set up an orphanage of sorts, though no effort was ever made to find families for those children; they were housed, but barely.

“When Abby was born, Reed kept her, because she was his. I honestly can’t explain to you why he wanted to have her. It’s not what you think—I’m fairly certain he never abused her. I think he actually loved her, in his way. I don’t know. I just don’t know.” His voice began to dissolve in emotion.

“Keep talking,” Ladasha said sharply.

Father X wiped his face dry with the flats of his trembling hands.

“I have a gambling problem.” He attempted a pathetic smile, which vanished into abandonment, shame. “I got into debt, and started borrowing from the parish. I always meant to pay it back. I did, at first. But then it got to be too much and I couldn’t. So I stopped trying. By the time Reed discovered the accounting discrepancies, it had gone pretty far.”

I glanced at Sam, who answered my question: “Dekker volunteered financial services for St. Paul’s.”

“Why did Father X allow anyone to look at the books?”

She shrugged. “Protocol—someone had to, so he went with it. He isn’t the sharpest thief.”

“Reed needed a way to launder the money that financed the trips to Brazil,” Father X continued, “so he made a deal with me: He could balance St. Paul’s books, erase the entire debt, and fund me when I needed, in exchange for something
he
needed. I didn’t ask too many questions at first. I never imagined it had anything to do with harming anyone.”

“Well what did you think it was?” Ladasha snapped, and Billy touched her arm again, this time leaving it there.

“White-collar crime, I assumed.” Father X’s head sagged to his chest, then lifted it with such effort you’d think it weighed a hundred pounds. “Some kind of investments he wasn’t supposed to be making. He was a banker. He was very wealthy. I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. Until . . .”

Through the glass, you could see Billy’s fingers tense on Ladasha’s arm. She didn’t flinch. I shifted forward in my seat.

“ . . . the first girl found her way back, and threatened to expose him. He tried to buy her silence, but she didn’t want money. She wanted, well, I suppose, revenge. He seemed to realize that this could happen again. My understanding is that he planned it meticulously: When they found him, he would kill them, and make it look like a different sort of crime. He called it ‘misdirection,’ and at the beginning it seemed to work.”

Girls, abducted as children, enslaved in prostitution, brutally murdered to keep them quiet. And Father X just went along with it? Because of a gambling addiction? This was beyond the narcissistic self-preservation of your typical addict; even he, pushed into a corner, might have found a speck of conscience still left to act upon. This was pure psychopathology. The worst kind of silence: passive malevolence: unthinkable: unforgivable. And yet I suspected, from my fledgling studies of forensic psychology, that in a court of law Father X’s claim of a gambling addiction—if that, other than his silence, was his worst contribution to the horror all those children endured—could offer just the right dose of mitigating circumstance to blur the lines of absolute responsibility. It made me sick to think it.

Billy and Ladasha, somehow, managed to hold their tongues and continue listening as if Father X was telling a reasonable story.

“It started to happen more and more over the last two years. It was getting really difficult.”

“How did they find him?”

“I don’t know how the first one located Reed, but the rest? Facebook.” He grinned, and chills corkscrewed up my spine. If he wanted any of us to share in the irony of that, he was barking up the wrong tree.

“It wasn’t going to end on its own. I’m glad it’s over.” His voice was like an exhalation, as if now he could breathe, when in fact the worst was yet to come. Life in prison was no picnic for anyone, especially pedophiles (or their close associates). Unless he succeeded in doing his priest thing and blinding his new colleagues as to his true self. Why not? It had worked for him for years.

“So you’re telling us that Reed did not sexually abuse Abby,” Billy said. “Is that correct?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“What about other men?”

“I believe not. He loved her. He kept her protected.”

“Did he know she knew?”

Father X’s expression froze a moment. “I don’t understand.”

“She found his stash,” Billy said with such calm precision it was like cutting glass. “She saw it all. We thought maybe you were aware of that.”

There was a pause, a bubble of quiet, in which it became clear that Father X had probably not been aware of Abby’s discovery of her father’s hiding place.

“No. I wasn’t aware of that.” His tone was such a hollow whisper, you almost felt sorry for him, but there was no way you ever really could.

“Can you tell me why you were spending so much time in Abby’s room at the hospital?” Billy asked.

“Because of Steve. I was afraid to leave her alone with him. I care about her. I watched her grow up.”

“So, what, you were gonna move into the house with the Campbells?” Ladasha blurted out. “Jesus Christ, spare me.”

“I didn’t know what I was going to do yet.”

“And Marta?” Billy asked. “How much did she know?”

“Nothing. Which is why things got so out of hand the night Tina turned up at their front door, looking for Abby. I believe Tina’s mere presence told the whole story, in so many words. Abby bears a striking resemblance to her birth mother—it would have been impossible for Marta not to see it.”

Billy and Ladasha glanced at each other.

“We didn’t see that,” Ladasha said.

“If you’d seen her before . . .”
her murder
; he couldn’t bring himself to say it, “ . . . well, there were traces of Abby in her face.”

“And you’d seen her before that?”

“Yes.”

“So what about you?” Billy planted his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “After a while, helping Reed and Steve keep their cover, you developed a taste yourself?”

Father X scowled instantly. “For children? Never.”

“We have a witness who saw you in the church closet, with a boy, about five years ago.”

Now the father’s cheeks reddened. He shook his head. “That charge was dismissed. The boy was a troublemaker, notorious for lying. He had problems with his sexual identity.
No one
believed that boy saw
me
. The priest was wearing a mask, the boy said. It was not
me
.”

“Okay. Then who was it?”

“A client of Reed’s and Steve’s. He had a fantasy of—” Father X averted his eyes a moment, ashamed.

“
Client?
” Ladasha now flung her pen across the room. “Why don’t you just say it straight!”

“A john.”

“A what?”

“A man . . . I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“A
rapist
. How ’bout that?”

Father X stared at her in dumb silence.

“How ’bout we call you what you are, Mr. High and Mighty? A
pimp
.”

“I was never—”

“What do you call it, then? I am a mother! I
know
when someone goes too far with a child.”

“Dash.” Billy’s tone was firm. “Enough.”

“Motherfucker’s a
pimp
just like the rest of them. Thinks he’s so holy. Take off his costume and look at him—he’s just a regular convict.”

Billy didn’t even try to stop her now. She ranted for a while, breaking down whatever might have been left of Father X’s fragile dignity. When she was worn out, she sat back and inspected her new manicure: a vivid purple.

“Okay now,” Billy said calmly, a stiff tug at the final layer, now that the surface was pummeled soft: “Tell us about the murders that were yours.”

He didn’t even try to deny it anymore. He appeared defeated, exhausted; his body now slumped in the chair. “Reed insisted I help him or he would turn me in. He said he had to keep an eye on Marta, he couldn’t leave the house to go after Tina, so I had to do it. I took the knife he left for me outside the door, hidden behind a flowerpot, and followed Tina to Nevins Street. I thought I couldn’t do it, but it was remarkably easy to kill her. I just did it. I made it look like Reed’s work. And then I saw headlights; a car was coming along. I darted away and noticed Abby running up the street. I wouldn’t have gone back to the Dekkers if I thought she was there. But she wasn’t, so I seized the opportunity. Reed had cornered me. I had killed for him. I had to end it. I went back to his house to let him know I’d taken care of Tina. He didn’t seem to realize Abby was gone, and I didn’t mention it. Marta was upstairs; I could hear her crying. I was shaking uncontrollably.” He held out a trembling hand to demonstrate; he faked it so well, you could see what a good bullshit artist he was, how he had managed to fool (almost) everyone. “He went to the kitchen to get me a glass of water. I hadn’t realized he kept a gun, but apparently he did: He set it down on the counter by the sink to fill the glass. I came up right behind him and picked up the gun. It was that simple. Obviously he thought he had complete control over me, that I wouldn’t dare cross him. As soon as he turned around—” He stopped talking. Swallowed so hard, his Adam’s apple scraped visibly up and down his throat. “Then I went upstairs to Marta. I had to end it. I had to.”

“What did you do with the gun?” Billy’s tone betrayed nothing. None of the shock or disgust he must have felt, listening to a description of multiple murders so logically enacted you couldn’t
not
think that Father X was the real thing: In his desperation to stop the killing, he had become a killer. Had it never occurred to him just to turn himself in? Stop Reed? Stop Steve? Protect the children? Why did he believe that the needs of one old man trumped those of so many?

“I dropped it in the Gowanus Canal, off the Carroll Street Bridge, where I thought no one would see me.”

I leaned closer to the glass, making sure not to miss a single word. He still hadn’t mentioned Chali.

“And then what?” Billy asked.

“I went home.”

“And?”

“I don’t know how to do this. It’s been torture every step of the way. Watching Abby lying there like that in the hospital—it was horrible.”