Vanishing Girls (3 page)

I came up close, into the cloud of sweet perfume she usually wore in abundance. (“Because it beats the sweat lodge of the precinct, the pigsty of my house, and the stink of a dead body,” she once told me.)

“Could be a stomach flu,” I said. “He was throwing up when I found him down the block.”

She grimaced. “Thanks for sharing. What’re you doing here, anyway?”

“I was passing.”

“You in the van with the other white lady? Just passing together?”

I smiled, unsure if she was messing with me in good humor or if it was the generic racial anger she was so good at. At some point Billy would need to explain to her what was going on with him, but it would have to be at the right moment. And this wasn’t it. My guess was he’d take her out for a drink one night. Ladasha was better, more relaxed, when she’d had a few; a hard coating melted off and a luscious warmth came on display. I’d seen it once.

“Thanks, Karin,” Billy said. “I appreciate the help; I’m good now.” But he didn’t look good. He looked defeated. I had never had a flashback but had heard they drew you into the past in a way that felt so real it was overpowering; that it was like a movie appearing inside your mind, engulfing you.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded, but wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t want to leave him like this. But I also didn’t want to embarrass him on the job. Then Ladasha saved the day.

“You get the hell out of here, Billy. I can’t afford to catch your germs; I’ve got kids and the last thing I need is a barf fest at home. And I don’t need you contaminating the crime scene.”

“I’m fine.” He sounded numb.

“I
said
. . .” She glared at him, and I almost expected her to count to three like he was one of her children.

“Dash is right. You should get to bed.” I looked at her. “Mac’s also down with the flu.”

“Like I’ve been saying”—Ladasha shook her head—“
men
.”

The cluster of investigators working on the sidewalk had thinned enough that now, when I glanced over, I saw her. The dead woman was flat on her back on the icy pavement, her skin already turning blue-gray, a tiny nose ring in her right nostril flickering in the glare of a headlight. She wore a lacy blue bra. One arm was flung above her head as if he had pulled hard to wrest off her shirt. Her head was twisted at an odd angle; he must have broken her neck when he strangled her, as he had with two other victims. She lay in a pool of blood that had spread around her from the wound between her breasts, where the signature Bowie knife protruded. I had read descriptions of the murders in the newspaper, and Billy had told us some of the details, but seeing it . . . her . . . in the flesh, dead but still bleeding, destroyed by some monster who couldn’t understand that she had been a real person with a real life . . . that probably someone out there had loved her, despite her profession . . . that she had been someone’s child, possibly a sister, a granddaughter, maybe even a mother. The cold irreverence of the murder shocked me more than the body itself lying there. I had been a soldier and a cop; I had seen a lot of dead bodies. But I would never get used to the horrors, or the randomness, of the twisted motivations that led to this kind of viciousness.

Suddenly woozy, I crossed the street to the opposite curb, braced myself against a parking sign, closed my eyes, and waited for it to pass.

“So now she’s got the stomach thing, too?” I heard Ladasha whine.

“Guess so,” Billy said, but my guess was he knew better. I noticed that he kept his back to the dead woman, offsetting the possibility of another flashback coming on at the sight of her.

I watched from across the street as the body was zipped into a black bag and lifted onto a stretcher. Concealed, the young woman inside the bag looked as small as the girl up the street. The stretcher was loaded into the back of the ambulance, which drove slowly away.

Both ambulances were gone now, one to a hospital, the other to the coroner. I could see from a distance that the other scene was dissipating. The white van drove off up a side street. The last investigator was packing up his equipment.

Billy said something to Ladasha that I couldn’t hear. She shook her head, rolled her eyes, and walked away. As he crossed the street to join me, I watched Ladasha approach a forensic tech at the place on the sidewalk where the body had been found. A blood-mottled chalk outline of the young woman’s final moments glowed in the dark, a semipermanent reminder that would be gone with the next rain.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll walk you home.”

“No, I’ll walk
you
home.”

“I came out in the middle of the night to help you, so let me help you.”

“You already did. And now I’m better.”

“Just like that?”

He nodded. “It hits you like a freight train, and then it passes.”

“Do I look like I want to talk to you now?” I heard the bark of Ladasha’s unmistakable voice. Billy and I both turned around: one of the guys from the television van was approaching her with a microphone. He must have been a newbie crime reporter who had never encountered Ladasha before; the veterans knew to wait for the right moment.

“I just wanted to ask a question—”

“What did I just say?”

The reporter stared at her.

“I said, what did I just say?”

“You said—”

“That’s right.” She turned her back on him, and got to work bossing the tech, who grinned and said something I couldn’t hear that elicited a shout of bright laughter from Ladasha.

“Piece of work,” Billy muttered.

“Call me crazy, but I sort of like her.”

“She’s good at what she does. What we do.”

“You’ll have to tell her, Billy.”

“I know.”

We walked together along Nevins Street, back in the direction of my house. The spot where the girl had been found was empty now, with just some adhesive backings left behind by the paramedics.

We turned onto Bergen Street and were back in the comforting enclave of brownstones I had come to think of as my neighborhood, a local concept with boundaries measured by the block. Sometimes only half a block could thrust you into another world.

“What time is it?” Having removed my watch when I’d washed the dishes, I’d lost track of time. It could have been one in the morning, or five. All I knew was that it was still dark out, and bitterly cold.

“Time for a drink. Join me?”

We had come to the Brooklyn Inn, a nineteenthcentury bar on the corner of Bergen and Hoyt. I had never been inside.

I yawned. The night was already as good as gone. “Why not?”

Walking into the bar felt like tripping backward into the nineteenth century: dark wood paneling, long wooden bar, wood stools with leather seats, panels of ornate stained glass above a door separating the bar from a back room, gas lamps fitted for electricity but only dribbling light. A surprising number of people sat at the bar, drinking and talking; you’d have thought people would be in bed so they could get up for work on Monday morning. But then I corrected myself; since the economy tanked and the Great Recession started, so many people didn’t have jobs anymore that the bars must have been one of the rare businesses thriving as a result.

We bellied up to the bar and ordered a couple of “seasonal specials”—which, according to the chalkboard above the bar, would come “hot and mysterious”—from a bartender with a black goatee and diamond earrings. He slid a bowl of peanuts toward us and I immediately dug in, suddenly realizing that I was hungry.

“Do they have food here?” I asked Billy.

He shook his head. “Just the nuts.”

I took another handful. In the mirror behind the bar I saw the reflection of a round white clock. It was only ten, and I felt relieved for a moment before realizing that it had been midnight when I’d left the house and the clock was reflected backward. It was two in the morning.

Our drinks arrived: mulled cider with rum. The sweet, piping hot liquid went straight to my head, warming and relaxing me so quickly I peeled off my sweater and pushed up the long sleeves of my cotton T-shirt. Billy likewise shed his jacket and unbuttoned the top of his shirt.

We ordered another round.

“So,” I began. “Talk to me.”

“What can I say?” He leaned back on his stool enough to weave his fingers together over his belly. A powdery whiteness coated his brown knuckles; something about his creased dry skin made me feel what I interpreted as his loneliness. Or maybe it just made me sad that, after his ordeal tonight, the best he could do for comfort was go to a bar with me. He had never married, though I knew he had loved and I knew he had lost. It pained me to think that the most enduring element of his life, his work on the police for over twenty years, seemed to be turning toxic for him.

“How long have you been having flashbacks?”

His dark eye rolled up toward the brown-painted ceiling of decorative tin squares, as if counting backward in time, figuring it out. But I suspected he knew the answer by heart—and didn’t want to talk about it. Something like that would have been up there with receiving a dreaded diagnosis: One minute you’re fine, the next minute you’re dying. You remembered when it happened.

Finally he answered, “About four months. Just told Mac recently.”

“That’s a long time to suffer alone.”

He stared at me. Swallowed once. Looked at us in the mirror behind the bar and nodded his head slowly. I couldn’t tell if he was reacting to the part about it having been a long time, or suffering, or being alone, or all of it.

“I didn’t want it to be happening. I hoped it would go away.”

“How many times?”

“Tonight was number three.”

“Always at a crime scene?”

He looked back at me and nodded.

“Have you talked to anyone about post-traumatic stress disorder?”

“Only in the psych sessions after I got shot. But I was fine then. And if I was going to get PTSD I would have already had it.”

“Pete Soronack.”

He nodded.

“Des Lee.”

He looked away.

Pete and Des hadn’t known each other, but the entire NYPD knew about them, as did much of the city. Both officers had experienced on-the-job violence, both had had three mandatory sessions with psychologists, both had taken a standard leave of absence, both had been cleared to return to work. Then, a year or so later, they came together by chance at a crime scene—both had been patrolling near the Queens neighborhood at the same time when a domestic violence call came in—and when they got to the house and faced the enraged husband waving a loaded gun, both officers froze up. It was Pete’s first flashback. Later it would come out that Des had hidden the fact that he’d been having them for seven weeks. Both were suffering from what was called chronic PTSD, delayed onset. So there they were, visiting the past like time travelers who had left their bodies behind, and in the minutes before they came to, and before other cops arrived to back them up, the wife was shot dead and the husband killed himself. All in front of their six-year-old son.

“You should talk to someone now,” I said.

“Karin, I don’t want my career to end under that cloud.”

But I had just seen him in the grip of a flashback and I knew he wasn’t in control of them. There was no question in my mind that, if he didn’t deal with this as soon as possible, his career would inevitably come crashing down. “I don’t think you have much choice.”

He swiveled away from me, glanced at the back room. “There’s a pool table. Feel like hitting some balls?”

I looked into the mirror. It wasn’t ten past nine (as if the evening could get earlier as it progressed); it was now ten to three. The night ticked onward, it was almost morning, and there was no point trying to sleep before Ben’s regular six
A.M.
wakeup. With Mac sick, I’d be the one taking him to nursery school at nine.

“Sure.”

The pool table was angled in the middle of an empty room with maroon walls and tall barred windows. Wooden stools lined two walls. There was a musty, airless smell—leftover smoke from past centuries, decades of spilled drinks. On a normal night at prime time this room was probably packed. People’s names, presumably from earlier in the evening, were scrawled on a chalkboard waiting list propped against a narrow counter.

We played for an hour, not talking anymore about Billy’s looming problem. Or the fact that his
friend
the serial killer had struck again tonight, or that an unidentified girl had been found unconscious and alone on a desolate strip near a murder. We were both exhausted, it was late, so we just played pool. At three-thirty, the bartender called for last drinks. At four, the lights unceremoniously switched off. We discovered that we were the last to leave, besides the bartender, who locked up behind us. He nodded at us before turning to go, his diamond earrings catching light from a streetlamp, sending two quick flashes into the darkness. Billy and I were alone on the quiet street.

“Thanks again, Karin.” He leaned in to kiss my cheek.

“Promise me you’ll get some help.”

The way he grinned, I knew he wouldn’t.

Chapter 3

H
aving found that a small amount of sleep is sometimes worse than none at all, I made some coffee, ate an early breakfast, and stayed up reading until Ben woke up at six o’clock. I heard his light footsteps in the downstairs hall and hurried to intercept him before he disturbed Mac.

“Mommy!” He paused outside my bedroom door, turned and ran to me at the foot of the stairs. I caught him in my arms, in all his flannel softness, and buried my nose in the mess of his hair.

“Shh,” I whispered. “Daddy still doesn’t feel well. Let’s let him sleep.”

We tiptoed upstairs and settled into the usual morning routine. Ben ate his bowl of oatmeal. I drank more coffee and sat with him as he chattered about a red sports car he’d seen on the street the day before. He adored all kinds of vehicles, especially snazzy cars; but I couldn’t keep my mind on what he was saying. My thoughts kept falling backward, to last night, to that little girl lying on the sidewalk. For some reason I couldn’t pinpoint, whenever I thought of her blue manicure I felt troubled.

“Vroom!” Ben must have had the yellow race car in his pajamas pocket because suddenly he was whizzing it across the table. It flew into the air and landed in his glass of juice. “Mommy, look! Maretti can swim!” Maretti being an amalgamation of the legendary race car driver Mario Andretti. Ben had begun to show signs that he was drawn to risk, like his mother, unfortunately.

“Now Maretti needs a bath.”

“No, he
likes
it.”

He finished his juice with the car floating in it. When he was through I rinsed it and put it in the dish drainer to dry, then got Ben ready for preschool. Our part-time babysitter, Chali, always picked him up at noon and spent the afternoon with him, to free me up to work with Mac or take classes or both. Today, after I dropped Ben off, I was looking forward to coming home and getting some sleep. He put on his helmet and I helped him into his jacket and mittens. I carried his three-wheeled scooter down the steps and off we went into the bright winter morning. The sheen of ice that had made the sidewalk so slippery last night had melted with the morning sun, for which I was grateful, given that trying to talk Ben out of riding his scooter to school always ignited a battle.

I jogged behind Ben as he zipped two blocks along Smith Street, me dodging passersby as they dodged him. Luckily he was a quick drop-off; we had been spared the emotional drama of separation anxieties that so often flared with early school experiences. He was parked in his classroom and I was out the door in three minutes.

Our routine was so regular that, on my way home, I passed all the usual suspects undertaking
their
morning rush: the guy in a business suit with his coat flapping open, running to the subway; the teenage girl wearing earmuff headphones, probably late for school but walking very slowly; the old Dominican man in his blue balaclava, seated on a bench in front of the Italian restaurant; and my favorites, the Three Musketeers, as I thought of them—three fortyish men in clothes that were always crisply clean but were styled for adolescents, with pants down low, bulky colorful sneakers, sideways baseball caps.

By the time I reached my corner and turned on Bergen, my only thought was:
sleep
.

H
ours later I woke up in a bed that felt sweltering and claustrophobic. Mac lay beside me, so still I was certain he was asleep. Between the closed winter windows, his fever, and his flu, the room felt unbearably stuffy. I kicked off the covers, stretched, and yawned.

“You’re awake.” His voice sounded rough and thin, as if worn out from coughing.

I leaned on my elbows and peered at the green glow of the digital clock across the room. “It’s after one. Are Ben and Chali home?”

“I heard them come in a little while ago.”

I lay back down. “Good.”

“So?”

“How are you feeling?”

“Like crap. What happened last night?”

“Oh boy . . . you don’t want to know.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if . . .” His voice trailed off in a coughing fit that crescendoed before dying down. In the meantime I went to the bathroom and refilled his glass of water. He sat partially up and drank deeply before turning to look at me. “Please don’t make me talk more than I have to.”

I reached over and touched his forehead. “We should take your temperature.”

He stared at me, annoyed. Obviously he had a fever. He had the flu. What he wanted was the story of last night.

I told him about finding Billy hallucinating on the sidewalk like a lonely derelict, about the girl, and about the murder. About how I tried to talk to Billy about PTSD, and how stubborn he was.

“It’s not going to end well if he doesn’t get help,” I finished.

Mac lay on his side, looking at me with fluey eyes. “When I’m better, I’ll talk to him.”

“It was really disturbing seeing that flashback in action. It had him under a spell; he was just gone.”

“That’s what they say.” He twisted back over to pull a tissue from the box beside his bed, blew his nose, and tossed the crumpled tissue into the trash can he’d pulled up next to him.

“How is it Billy developed PTSD,” I said, “but neither of us did? You could argue that what we went through was at least as bad.”

“Luck of the draw, I guess.”

“Poor Billy. I hated seeing him like that.”

“Maybe I can talk to him later. I don’t care how sick I am; I’m not missing it.” Billy was being honored for his heroism and dedication to public safety at the monthly community/precinct meeting being held tonight at the local YMCA.

“No one wants to catch your flu, Mac.”

“I’ll stand off to the side.”

“How can you stand when you can hardly sit up for more than five minutes? Give it a rest. I’ll go.”

“We’ll see.”

“What’s the name of that support group for cops?” he asked.

“Can’t remember. But he’s in such denial, I don’t think he’d participate.”

He started to push himself out of bed.

“Where are you going?”

“Get my laptop.”

“I’ll get it.”

I went to his office down the hall and returned with his computer. Booted it up, turned on the bedside lamp, and sat on the bed Googling until I’d found the organization Mac was thinking of.

“POPPA—Police Organization Providing Peer Assistance.”

“That’s the one.”

I clicked on the link and started reading. “It says that about half of all traumatized cops get hit with PTSD sooner or later, but only a few go for help. This group is about cops helping cops. It’s a good idea.”

Mac nodded. Blew his nose.

“And it’s right here in New York City.”

He leaned in to see the laptop screen. “That’s great.”

“Except it might as well be in Minnesota,” I said. “If he won’t go for help, he won’t go.”

“We’ll work on him.”

I clicked through to the link titled “Officer Support Groups.” “There’s a meeting every two weeks in Lower Manhattan. Maybe if you went with him.”

“Good idea.” He was seized by yet another coughing fit and pitched forward to surrender to it. I put the box of tissues in front of him, turned back to the laptop, and opened a new search window. I wondered what the reporter—the one Ladasha had shouted at—had done with last night’s murder, and if the news had gone viral yet.

“Tenth Victim,” screamed the headline on the online edition of the
Daily News
. “Murder Mayhem Continues,” announced the front page of the
New York Post
. “Serial Killer Strikes Again—Preying on Prostitutes—Tenth Victim in Two Years,” was the meandering headline in the
New York Times
, buried in its city pages. All the pieces briefly mentioned the nearby traffic accident and the girl taken to the hospital, but nothing more.

I dug deeper, and learned that the local blogs had jumped on the plight of the barefoot girl who had been hit by a car. Brownstoner and Gothamist had both done pieces on her, which meant that by tomorrow the traditional news outlets would follow suit.

“She was taken to New York–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan,” I told Mac, scrolling down. “Her name is Abby Dekker, she’s eleven years old, a fifth grader at Packer, and she lives right here in Boerum Hill with her parents.”

“Dekker,” Mac said. “It rings a bell.”

I read down the page. “It says she’s unconscious. She’s been put in a medically induced coma to reduce swelling from a head injury.”

“Poor kid.”

“She was so
young
.”

“Is, not was,” he corrected me. “She’s alive.”

“Her family must be freaking out.”

“Google Dekker and see what pops up—I have a feeling I know that name.”

Mac edged closer to watch the screen while I did the search. The fourth item down—below a best-selling thriller author’s official Web site, a vacuum cleaner manufacturer, and a management firm—was a company profile for a man named Reed Dekker. A typical corporate photograph showed a middle-aged white man with brown hair neatly parted to the side. He was fairly handsome, with a serious demeanor and smiling eyes that hinted at satisfaction.

“I knew it!”

I looked at my husband, whose weary face had lit up. “You know him?”

“That’s Reed. I talk to him at the gym all the time. He told me he works for a bank.”

We both read the profile. “He doesn’t just work for a bank, Mac. Look at this. He’s a senior vice president at Goldman Sachs.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Do you know what those guys make? Millions, after their mega bonuses. I didn’t know you were hobnobbing with the super-rich at the gym.”

“We sweat together on neighboring elliptical machines, that’s about it.”

I read down Reed Dekker’s bio. “It says here . . . he lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn Heights. That’s funny. The blogs reported that Abby Dekker lives in Boerum Hill. I wonder what’s accurate.”

“She was hit in Boerum Hill . . .” He paused to sip his water.

“In the middle of the night. So it’s probably Boerum Hill. Maybe Reed put Brooklyn Heights in his bio because it sounds swankier. And it’s not like he can’t afford the Heights.”

“I liked the guy—”

“He’s not dead, either,” I reminded Mac. Though I knew why he’d made the slip: Tragedy changes a family. The Dekkers’ only child was hit by a car and was critically injured, in a coma. It wasn’t death, but to a parent it would feel too close. And Mac was a parent; he was feeling his gym buddy’s pain.

“You’re right. Reed Dekker isn’t—” He was interrupted by a knock on our bedroom door.

“Ben?” I said. “Chali?”

“I heard you talking,” Chali’s muffled voice answered from the hall.

“Come in.” I swung my legs around to sit on the edge of the bed, switched on the lamp on my bedside table, and waited.

“Put your hand on the knob,” I heard her say in the easy tone she used with Ben. “Good boy. Now turn.”

But nothing happened. So I got up to open the door. She was standing there holding a tray with two bowls of steaming soup, her long, black hair brushed neatly back into her usual ponytail. Slight, with sparkling brown eyes, Chali wasn’t classically pretty but she shone with special vibrancy and goodwill despite the fact that, in India, she was a Harijan, the “Children of God” caste better known as untouchables. It was a cruel distinction she had escaped by migrating to the great melting pot of New York City.

Chali was the other widow in my life, though hers had been vastly different widowhood from my mother’s or mine. Only twenty-six years old, she had a twelve-yearold daughter living back in India with her own mother; Chali had given birth at the age of fourteen after being forced into marriage to a sixty-four-year-old man. I had noticed that she didn’t seem particularly aggrieved when she told the story of waking up one morning four years ago to find her husband dead of a heart attack beside her. After a year of struggling in poverty to support herself and her young daughter, Dathi, she gave up and did what so many third-world mothers do, leaving their beloved children in the hands of a family member and traveling thousands of miles to put food in their family’s mouths from afar. In this way Chali was no different from scores of other nannies and housekeepers who flee to America, the women who reluctantly leave their own children behind to support them by taking care of other people’s families; but to me she was unique. Chali had a bright, unschooled wit, she was a refreshing combination of cheerful and honest, and she was reliable to a fault. She had never once let us down and I knew she never would. The longer she worked for us—over a year now—the more like family she became.

Ben pushed the door all the way open, jumped on the bed, and snuggled under the covers with Mac.

“Daddy’s on fire!”

“Daddy is sick,” Chali said. “Let him be.”

“It’s okay,” Mac said. “I could use the hugs.”

“Here, I brought you both some lunch.”

“Chali, that is so nice of you, but
I’m
not sick.”

She smiled. “So much the better. Now sit and take this bowl before it spills.”

I put one of the bowls on my bedside table, and helped Chali balance the tray on Mac’s lap. Together we propped some pillows behind him so he could manage the soup. As we set him up, Chali noticed the laptop screen showing Reed Dekker’s corporate portrait. She did a double take.

“I recognize him, but I don’t know why.”

“Mac knows him from the gym,” I said. “He lives in the neighborhood; you must have seen him around.”

“Probably that’s it.” She waggled her head in the subtle way she did for emphasis. “But the name, Dekker, that sounds familiar, too.”

“His daughter was hit by a car last night. That’s partly why I slept late—Billy was at the scene and I went to meet him.”

Ben squirmed out of Mac’s arms, slid off the edge of the bed to the floor, and darted out of the room.

“Stay in bed and rest,” Chali said, as she went after Ben. “I’ll come back later for the tray.”

I heard their footsteps go up the stairs and then move around on the parlor floor above.

We finished our soup. Then, before getting into the shower, I decided to check e-mail. There was nothing important. I was about to get up when I turned to Mac, who was lying down again with the covers pulled up to his chin.