Vanishing Girls, page 12
“You must be Father Dandolos.” Billy extended his hand with a smile. “I’m Detective Billy Staples, Eighty-fourth Precinct.”
“Yes, of course. Good to meet you in person; I always like to match a face with a voice. And please, call me Father X; everyone else does.” Father X took Billy’s hand but instead of shaking it, clasped it between his own smooth, liver-spotted hands. He had a thick head of white hair and small eyes that appeared to sink into a doughy face. When he smiled, his cheeks tightened and flushed pink; otherwise his skin was slack, hanging in jowls off his jaw.
“This is Karin Schaeffer,” Billy introduced me, “a private investigator consulting on the case.”
Father X clasped my hand; his skin was cool and damp.
“Let me introduce Steve and Linda Campbell,” he said. “They were close friends of Reed and Marta.”
Steve’s lips pressed together, igniting deep lines astride a mouth that was unusually wide; I recognized him from somewhere, but couldn’t place him. “We still can’t quite get over the shock of what happened to them.”
“I don’t think we ever will. They were our very best friends.” Linda smiled sadly and nodded for what seemed a long time. Her skin made her appear older than she had from a distance: nearly sixty, I guessed. Steve looked younger, but appearances could deceive. “And all the good works they did, well, it’s going to be hard to step into their shoes.”
“Did you know them from the church?” Billy asked.
“Just about all our friends are from the church.”
“That’s right,” Steve agreed.
“And to think,” Linda said, “if Marta and Reed had gone to the party with us Sunday night, they might still be alive. Marta said she wasn’t feeling well. If anyone had imagined this could have happened, we would have insisted they join us.” She shook her head and dissolved in tears.
“It’s past, Lindy,” Steve told her, patting her shoulder; the back of his hand was blanketed with pale hair. Her tears escalated, and he wrapped his arm around her. “It’s been a tough day. We were at Reed’s lawyer’s this morning to hear the will. They named us as Abby’s guardians.” There was no word for the emotion that consumed his face when he said that: sadness, joy, regret, gratitude, panic. I couldn’t read him. All I knew was that I felt sorry for the Campbells, who struck me as ill equipped to take on any of this: first their best friends’ murders, and now their child.
A nurse rattled a cart along the hall and then veered into Abby’s room. With her was the small red-haired woman, the care coordinator Sasha Mendelssohn, whom we’d met on my other visit.
“Bath time for Abby,” Sasha cheerfully announced. Though obviously it wouldn’t be too cheerful a bath, given that the nurse would be sponge-bathing a battered, comatose child. “Good to see you again, Detective. And hello to you, too . . .”
“Karin.”
“Right.”
“Any improvement?” Billy asked.
“Still waiting for the brain swelling to go down more than it has. I can tell you it isn’t worse, if that’s any consolation.”
“Last time you mentioned the possibility of taking her out of the coma temporarily so we could—”
“I realize how eager you are to talk to Abby about what happened. Believe me, the hospital’s been fending off pressure from every direction all week. Reporters hound us every time we step out the front door. But the message doesn’t change: We won’t consider bringing her out at least until the swelling’s gone down, and it hasn’t gone down enough yet. I’m sorry.”
It was true: You couldn’t walk down the street or turn on the television without an update on Abby Dekker’s status. Everyone in the city wanted to know what she knew, if anything, about the Working Girl Killer. Was the media frenzy right: was Patrick Scott guilty of all the murders, or was someone else lurking? Everyone was afraid she or a loved one would be next. And everyone wanted it to stop. Something about it being so close to Christmas seemed to accentuate the communal anguish and hope for a miracle in the form of a resurrected child.
“I understand.” But Billy’s tone betrayed impatience.
“If you want to see her before her bath, now’s your chance,” Sasha said.
“It’s been a long day,” Steve said, “and tomorrow’s a school day for me—I’m a middle school teacher, we start bright and early. Think we’ll be heading home now.”
“Mind if I take your phone number?” Billy asked. “Love to talk to you tomorrow.”
Steve dug his free hand into his pocket for his wallet and managed to slip out a business card with one shaking hand, while Linda continued to sob at his side. “Call anytime.”
Father X patted Linda on the back as Steve led her away. “It has been a very long day.”
“I think I saw you here pretty early this morning,” Sasha said to Father X as we all headed into Abby’s room. A big, cheerful hand-drawn collage crowded with goofy class photos and kids’ signatures now hung on the wall facing her bed. Half a dozen Mylar balloons were clustered in a far corner of the ceiling. She lay there silently, oblivious to it all.
“Oh yes. I was here before nine. I’ve been reading aloud to her.”
Sasha glanced at a book spread open, facedown, on the guest chair. “A Wrinkle in Time. That was one of my favorites when I was a kid.”
“It’s as good today as it ever was,” Father X agreed. “They say people in comas can hear. I thought reading to her might help, somehow.”
“Well, it can’t hurt.” Sasha smiled.
Billy and I stood a few feet from Abby’s bed, looking at her. Her wounds had healed somewhat, and the bright violet of her bruises had faded to a greenish yellow. She was thinner now, and paler, with her hands lax at her sides and her blue nail polish as fresh as a week ago from disuse. I wondered how she would feel when she learned that the Campbells were going to be her new parents. And I wondered how long it would take for her to stop thinking of herself as an orphan, if she ever would.
Abby and Dathi both—two girls orphaned in twenty-four hours. I didn’t know them, really, but a word from either one of them, or both of them, was suddenly high on my wish list. As a mother who had lost two daughters, I felt I stood with them at the lip of their echoing void; ours was the kind of loss that couldn’t be filled by anyone but the people who were gone. No one else would do. And you never stopped yearning.
Billy, meanwhile, was lost in his own set of preoccupations as we watched Abby, so still and quiet in her deep, deep sleep.
Chapter 10
Early Tuesday morning, Billy stood in the foyer, breathing puffs of cold steam into the air even with the front door shut. He had on the same gray sweatpants and battered sneakers he’d been wearing to his and Mac’s biweekly basketball games for the past two years. He marched in place to warm himself up as he waited for Mac, who was downstairs with the new assistant, Star, who had arrived late.
“Hopefully it won’t be long. She started yesterday so she’s got the basic idea . . . I think.” I leaned close to whisper: “Just between us, she seems kind of flaky.”
“Weren’t you the one who interviewed her?”
“Oops.” I shrugged. “Come in for some coffee while you wait?”
He looked at his watch. “No thanks.”
“At least come sit in the living room with me.”
He followed me into the next room, but didn’t sit. I curled up on the couch where I’d left my laptop, mid-search for a new babysitter. I still hadn’t figured out how to explain any of this to Ben without breaking his heart. I had tried telling him that Chali might not be able to come back, only to field a demand to call her up. I’d changed the subject. We would have to tell him, really tell him, soon.
“Any news from Dathi?” Billy asked me.
“Nothing.” I didn’t elaborate; he knew how worried I was.
“We’ve got a new development in the case.”
I shot to the edge of the couch. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Relax—I’m telling you now. Women.”
“There you go again.”
“Just kidding.” He held up a flattened palm, and flashed me a smile.
I almost laughed, and fell back into the couch. “Start talking, Billy.”
“New guy hit the radar last night: Antonio Neng. Upper East Side, personal investor. Correction: disgruntled personal investor. Neng’s been harassing four different bankers, including Reed Dekker. Ranting and raving in e-mails, calling Dekker a ‘fat cat banker’ who ‘ruined his life,’ yada yada yada. He was in Brooklyn that Sunday night.”
“Witnesses?”
“Thirty witnesses saw him. He was freezing his ass off at a Bargemusic concert on the East River, down by Brooklyn Bridge Park. We checked it out: He was alone. People who know him say he isn’t into classical music. Likes hip-hop, rap, punk.”
“You said he was a personal investor—”
“Yeah, well, that’s what he calls himself on his Facebook page. A dozen years ago he sold a dry cleaning business he built up, and spent his time since then investing the profits into a small fortune. Lost a lot of it in 2008 and had to go back to work, but this time not as an owner. Now he’s behind the counter taking in people’s dirty clothes. Guess he doesn’t like it.”
“Harassment? Or stalking, too?”
“We’re finding out. The visit to Brooklyn makes us think he was getting into stalking, early stages though, because he was still building in excuses for being somewhere off his beaten path. Still not sure. Dash is working it this morning; I’ll get back on it after the game. Where’s Mac?” He took another look at his watch.
I went to the top of the stairs and called down: “Billy’s waiting!”
“Just another minute!” Mac called back up.
“So what are you thinking?” I returned to the couch. Billy had given up on Mac, and now sat in the chair across from me. He’d even halfway unzipped his jacket. “Are you looking at this guy for Nevins Street, too? Or just the Dekkers?”
“I don’t know—seems like a stretch. Dash and I, and just about everyone else on the task force, in our guts we think it’s two cases that intersected because Abby was hit by a car in the wrong place.”
I looked at him, processing that.
“Not that anywhere is the right place. But you know what I mean.” A slash of sunlight moved along the carpet; the room suddenly brightened and Billy squinted his eye. “Man, this room lights up. You look like you just dissolved into that couch.”
“I’m still here.”
“Karin, if you weren’t, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. And I mean that.”
I smiled. “Well, thanks. But what was that for?”
“Met with someone yesterday—a peer counselor. He got me to promise to sign up for Tai Chi, for starters; I’m supposed to do it today when I’m over at the Y.”
“It’ll be good for you.”
“Maybe, but it’ll suck more time out of my day, when already there aren’t enough hours.”
“Everyone’s busy, but you still have to give yourself time to—”
“How many people do you know who’ve got a serial killer on their to-do list?” He leaned back abruptly and slid his hands into his pockets. You could see his knuckles moving on tight fists under the thin fabric of the sweatpants.
“What I’m trying to say,” I tried, “is that time is relative. “When you have one of your attacks, and you break with what’s happening and go to wherever it is that you go . . . what happens to time then?”
“Poof.”
“In the overall equation, that’s time lost, right? So think of it as substituting planned Tai Chi sessions for unscheduled hallucinations.”
A genuine smile blossomed on his face, and you could see his hands relax in his pockets. “He also set me up with a psychiatrist who specializes in what ails me.”
“What ails you, Billy?”
“As if you don’t know.”
“I haven’t actually heard you say it yet. Maybe it would be good to practice, so you can be honest when you start therapy. Otherwise it doesn’t work.”
“You know what, Karin? You should be a therapist yourself.”
“I don’t want to be a therapist.” I sank into the couch cushions. Stared at him. Waited. “Go ahead: Say it.”
He enunciated each word awkwardly, like moving a stone around his mouth: “Post traumatic stress disorder. Satisfied?”
“Do you really think I’ll ever be satisfied?”
We burst into laughter, and just at that moment Mac walked into the living room wearing his basketball shorts and a T-shirt. His winter jacket hung open. “Ready?”
Billy stood up.
“Mac.” I followed them. “Are you seriously going outside in just your shorts?”
“No time to change, Karin.”
“You have pneumonia!”
“Had pneumonia.” He grabbed his keys out of the bowl by the front door.
He was much better, it was true; but still, I didn’t like it. “It’s just common sense to take it easy for a while. At least to keep warm.”
Billy laughed. Mac kissed my cheek, and they were gone.
I lowered the shades halfway to block out some of the blinding light, and settled back into the couch with my laptop. The e-mailed résumés, this time for babysitters, just kept flooding in. It was astounding. It would have been easier to have just a few replies and carefully pick among them; this deluge was overwhelming, and I feared I’d make a mistake. How could anyone replace Chali? It didn’t seem possible.
There was a crash downstairs and the sound of glass breaking.
“Oh shit!” Star shouted.
I found her standing in the downstairs hall, slumped against the gallery of Ben’s drawings. On the opposite wall, where we’d hung framed family photos, were two empty spaces. The glass in one of the frames had shattered into a spiderweb of cracks over a shot of me and Mac on our honeymoon in Greece, wearing our bathing suits; Mac in the ubiquitous T-shirt that covered his array of scars left from his near miss with a very bad criminal; I, round with pregnancy. Luckily the second frame’s glass was intact though one corner of the frame itself had broken.
“Are you all right?” I asked Star.
“I did a pirouette and I lost my balance.” Her lipstick was smudged.
“A pirouette?”
“I’m a dancer. I mean, I want to be.”
“I thought you worked at an investment bank.” For three years, as I recalled from her impressive résumé.
“Day job.” She smiled sheepishly, her short haircut curved like parentheses around her narrow face. “I’m also compulsively honest. I might as well tell you that, too.”
“Good to know.” I forced a smile. “Why don’t we clean this up?”
“I’ll do it! Just point me to the broom.”
I took her to the kitchen and, just as I was showing her where to find what she needed in the pantry closet, the house phone rang.
“I’ll answer it!”
“No! No need. Here.”
She grabbed the broom and dustpan and rushed back downstairs.
I took a calming breath, and answered on the fourth ring.
“Mrs. Schaeffer?”
“Speaking.”
“I’m calling about your reference,” a man said.
“If it’s about the job, it’s been filled.” Though I almost regretted saying that, sensing it might not stay filled for long.
“Job?”
“Are you calling about one of the ads we ran?”
“Chali Das, my tenant, she listed you as her reference when she applied for the apartment.”
I felt suddenly cold as my mind shifted gears back to last week. I could still see her body lying on the gurney. That horrifying wound.
“Yes, Chali.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Someone’s got to come and clean out the apartment. The cops are finished here, they told me. I have to rent it out or I can’t pay the mortgage.”
The thought of going through her things made me uneasy. I pulled the phone away from my ear, pulled myself together. “How is tomorrow morning?”
“Tomorrow’s fine. Friday by the latest. I’ve got people coming to see it over the weekend.”
I hung up the phone and stood there. After taking a few deep breaths, I went to my purse, found Detective Vargas’s phone number, and called him to confirm that they were really finished with the crime scene.
“Yup,” Vargas confirmed. “We’re all done there.”
“How is the investigation going?”
“Aren’t you getting regular updates from your colleagues at the Eight-four?”
“I don’t work with them.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“So?”
“Whatever Billy and Lalala told you, that’s the way it is. We’re working together, so what they know is what I know.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t mean it, though; I thought he was presumptuous, and rude, and he made me feel useless.
“My pleasure.” He didn’t mean it, either.
We hung up at the same time.
A toothless beggar in a Santa hat stood in front of me on the moving subway, his hand held out: a craggy map of a life of failures, pallid from addiction, brown tendrils of skin like parched rivers fading to extinction on a bloated pink palm.
