Vanishing Girls, page 5
“Oh.”
I was shocked. How could anyone not know their local precinct, where it was, how to reach it if necessary? But I kept my reaction to myself.
“Marta fed our cat Orangina over the weekend. I texted her a thank-you as soon as we got home last night but haven’t heard back from her, which is strange. She always answers right away from her iPhone. I have their house keys, should I—?” She didn’t wait for a response before darting into her house and returning with the keys. I couldn’t believe it. What if Billy’s ID was a fake? The legion of criminals and cons who could forge documents was mind-boggling. Maybe I was cynical because of my years working in law enforcement, but Gay’s naïveté floored me. Still, she had the keys, and she was coming up the Dekkers’ stoop jangling them in her hand, preparing to let us in; neither Billy nor I was lame enough to stop her from opening the door and going inside to take a look. As a cop, Billy couldn’t legally enter without a warrant; but as a civilian neighbor, I could. It was, after all, how Billy had introduced me: as a local mom, not a private investigator. I wasn’t working this case; I was just keeping Billy company.
“We take care of each other’s houses when we go away,” Gay said, turning a key in the bottom lock half a rotation, until we heard a click. She tried turning a second key in the top lock, but it didn’t budge. “Huh. I’ve done this a dozen times.”
“Maybe it’s already unlocked,” Billy suggested.
Gay turned the knob and the door opened. “That’s weird. They always use both locks. Now that I think of it . . .” Closing the door, she relocked the bottom and tried it again. “I didn’t think of this before, but the bottom one self-locks, so turning it partway means it was never double-locked. It seems like someone just pulled shut the door and left.”
Billy and I looked at each other.
Gay’s dark eyebrows pinched together as she opened the door again and went inside.
“Marta? It’s Gay! Are you there? Marta?”
I left Billy outside and followed Gay into a foyer made spacious by having been united with the living room in a feat of modern architecture that had opened up so many of the local brownstones. Antique details had been restored, giving the room a nineteenth-century warmth, and yet at the same time it was almost loftlike in its sense of free-flowing space. There was a lot of carved wood and modern rugs, contemporary light fixtures, antique furniture, high-end stereo equipment. At the foot of the stairs, beside a huge mirror, a pedestal held a tall vase, a twist of orange and red glass I doubted could hold a flower. It sat there like a dare: Break me. In one corner of the living room, a shiny baby grand piano was covered in framed photographs: a snapshot of a smiling Reed and Marta, whose dangling earrings were partially obscured by shoulder-length auburn hair that grazed her freckled shoulders; a professional portrait of the family of three; Reed and another man on a fishing boat; and half a dozen pictures of Abby as a baby, a toddler, a little girl, a sassy tween.
“Marta!” Gay proceeded through the parlor floor of the house she evidently knew fairly well. She disappeared through an arched door through which I could see the end of a kitchen island topped in speckled granite, where a ceramic bowl was heaped with Granny apples. I was following Gay, glancing around the dining area, when suddenly she screamed.
In the kitchen, a man lay faceup in a pool of blood that had been there long enough to spread before drying around the edges. He had the same brown hair I’d seen on Reed Dekker in the online photo, but this man was without a face; it had been blown away, leaving behind a gory sludge of flesh and bone. A constellation of blood spatter was sprayed across the white ceiling and half the nearest wall. I forced myself to look a moment longer before turning away. Reed Dekker couldn’t have been there more than a day because there was no sign of maggots. The smell was putrid. I covered my mouth and tried not to gag.
Gay ran past me, shaking, and I heard her crying to Billy out front.
“What?” he asked her. “Calm down, okay? I can’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
When I got outside, I found Billy standing there, baffled, as Gay dry-heaved over the frozen soil of a clay planter decorated with carved ribbons. Her cat, Orangina, had stepped onto the neighboring stoop and was watching her.
“What’s going on?” Billy asked me.
“Reed Dekker—he’s dead.”
His jaw dropped, as if a hinge had come loose, and I instinctively watched his eye for a shift in consciousness. Would I be able to see it when PTSD invaded his mind?
But nothing happened. He didn’t transform into Mr. Hyde. He sighed, reached for his phone, and said, “I’ll call it in.”
Within ten minutes, it began. Cop cars drove up and parked in the middle of the street, delivering investigators who joined Billy inside the house. The CSI guys arrived in a van that was probably white but was so dirty it looked gray, and hauled their gear up the stoop. Patrol cars closed off both ends of the block. Names of anyone coming onto or leaving the block were listed in a log. When the media arrived in droves, I stepped back into the house because I didn’t want to get dragged into the story. Gay was long gone, locked inside her brownstone.
Apparently the Dekkers lived on all four floors of the house, and investigators had swarmed throughout. Quick footsteps thudded above, and out of curiosity I followed the sound. I was amazed that no one stopped me. I knew from experience that it was pretty easy to spot rubberneckers at a crime scene—they tended to exude some combination of fear, confusion, or excitement—and I was good at blending in, having done this so many times back when I was on the force. A detective coming down the stairs nodded at me in passing; I nodded back and kept going.
The second floor of the house had three rooms: a guest room with a double bed and bright Marimekko curtains on the single window; an office with a plain desk holding a pair of flat-screen monitors facing an expensive chair; and a more casual living room than the one downstairs that was probably used as a family room, with a large flat-screen television on a wall opposite a comfy sectional couch. Books and games and dolls were scattered around. I saw only one investigator working on the second floor, which told me that the racket that had drawn my attention was coming from above.
As I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, the noise increased. I walked past what was presumably Abby’s bedroom at the top of the staircase: lavender walls, white built-in bookcases crammed with young adult novels, a messy desk with a white laptop and a jewelry tree dripping necklaces, a twin bed. The sense of chaos increased the farther I got down the hall, past a couple of closed doors to another bedroom at the opposite end.
Investigators had formed a second cluster in the master bedroom, around a king-sized bed. It was a large, apricot-painted room with two matching dressers and another wall-mounted flat-screen television facing the bed. Pale winter afternoon sunlight gave the room a sensation of having been stripped bare. Sprayed blood speckled the wall above the headboard in a weirdly graceful pattern that reminded me of the receding path of the only shooting star I had ever seen. I shifted my attention to the bed and tried to see past a clump of investigators.
From my view in the doorway all I could see was a pair of slender, waxy-looking bare feet. The woman’s toenails were freshly painted blue, like Abby’s fingernails; they must have recently gone for a mother-daughter manicure and pedicure. An agonizing reminder of my daughter’s murder six years ago curdled in my stomach; she, too, had been killed in her bed. Someone shifted and I saw Marta’s face—it was gone. I felt my own face screw up. Just then, one of the forensic techs stepped out of the cluster, looked over, and saw me. He was near the top of the bed and his rubber gloves were streaked with blood.
“Can I help you?”
I had dropped my cool, slipped out of character, and he’d recognized an outsider.
I cleared my throat, gathered myself. “How long has she been dead?”
“Are you a reporter?”
Faces turned to look at me, none bearing an expression of warm greeting.
“No,” I assured them. “I’m a neighbor.”
“Get her out of here,” he snapped.
A uniformed cop escorted me back downstairs.
Billy came out of the kitchen when he saw me. As I was led to the front door, I glanced at him, concerned he’d tripped into a flashback again.
“You can let her go,” Billy told the cop, calmly; but once we were alone his tone heated up. “Why are you still here, Karin?”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Have you been upstairs?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t.” I worried that the sight of Marta Dekker would bring on another hallucination. Both Dekkers had been shot in the face as Billy had been, only with more devastating consequences. For Billy, the resonance would be inevitable.
Ladasha came out of the kitchen and saw me. “You some kind of crime scene groupie now, Karin?”
“I just happened to walk this way with Billy.”
“Do I need to tell your husband you and Billy here are gettin’ it on, or what?” She had her hands on her hips and her head cocked to the side. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw her wink.
“How was your kid’s holiday show?”
“Short and sweet.”
Billy put a hand on my arm and steered me forward. “Karin was just leaving, Dash.”
“So soon? The party just started!”
“See you around, Dash.” I looked at Billy, standing reluctantly at the foot of the stairs, shook my head, and repeated, “Don’t.”
Outside, a throng of neighbors had gathered behind a front line of media being held back by a pair of cops. Cameras flashed as soon as I appeared on the stoop. Compared with last night’s murder of a prostitute on a dark, squalid street, the afternoon slaying of a wealthy couple in a gentrified neighborhood was receiving significantly greater attention. It didn’t surprise me, but I couldn’t help thinking of the young woman sprawled on the frozen pavement last night. I still didn’t know her name and wondered if anyone did . . . or if anyone cared.
The front door shut behind me and the lock clicked. Reporters shouted questions as I came down the steps:
“What’s happening in there?”
“We heard two people are dead. Can you confirm that?”
“Can you please spell your name?”
“Is it accurate that there were two murders inside the house?”
“Is the owner Reed Dekker? Is he a banker? Is his wife Martha Dekker?”
Marta, I wanted to correct the young man with a snake tattoo curling up his neck out of his collar and both earlobes tattooed with eyes. Her name was Marta, not Martha. You don’t know anything about these people. I don’t know, either. No one knows what happened in there, or why they were murdered. But I held my silence as I stepped onto the sidewalk and walked down Bergen. The illustrated reporter trailed me, peppering me with questions, until I passed the barricade.
I was only halfway up my front stoop when Billy came walking swiftly up the block, jacket zipped all the way up to the top of his neck, hands thrust into his pockets. I turned around and watched him until he reached my bottom step.
“How’d you get past the reporters?” He was too distinctive to miss—a tall, black detective with an eye patch who had already been written up and interviewed in connection with the city’s notorious serial killer who was still on the loose. Billy was practically famous, and he didn’t like it.
“Walked fast. Kept my head down.”
“So—you saw her?”
He nodded, but now he wouldn’t look at me.
“You okay?”
“I felt a little shaky so I got out of there. Told Dash I was going to the hospital to see Abby.”
“Are you?”
“You coming with me?”
“You want me to?”
“No.” He smiled.
“Let me just see how Mac’s doing. Give me a minute.”
Billy followed me inside. The house was quiet; Chali must have taken Ben out to the playground. Billy waited in the living room while I went downstairs to check on Mac. He was sleeping soundly. Back upstairs I left a note on the kitchen table letting Chali know I would be back later. I had already arranged for her to babysit tonight so Mac and I could go to the community meeting at seven o’clock to support Billy; now, unless Mac made a miraculous recovery, it would just be me.
We walked up to Court Street—the main commercial strip that ran from what I thought of as Deep Carroll Gardens, one of the last parts of the linked neighborhoods to be gentrified—to Brooklyn Heights, where we could catch the express train. Along the way, Billy filled me in.
“They were both shot once in the face from close range.”
“Find the weapon?”
“Not yet.” He shook his head. “Lot of rage there—someone didn’t like them very much.”
“Reed’s face . . .” I wished I could stop seeing it: obliterated. “You don’t think it was some random whacko who somehow got in?”
“No sign of breaking and entering.”
“So they opened the door to their killer.”
“Or he was already inside. Hopefully Abby can tell us.”
“You don’t think she—” But I couldn’t think that; there was no way that little girl in sheep pajamas was a killer.
“It doesn’t matter what I think, Karin. I’m just doing my job.”
“Are you running a GSR on her?” Though by now any gunshot residue would have been washed off her skin at the hospital.
“Her clothes are at the lab.”
We turned onto Joralemon Street and headed into the yawning stairwell that led into the subway. Partway down, I turned to Billy.
“Do you think this could be connected to the woman last night? Abby was found so close to the latest victim of—”
He didn’t let me finish. “That’s a serious stretch, Karin. The Dekkers’ house is right around the corner from Nevins Street . . . something happened in that house, and that’s where Abby ran because it was close. The Working Girl Killer kills hookers, and hookers work Nevins, that’s a well-known fact. It’s the city; you walk one block and you’re in a different universe. I wouldn’t look for connections that probably don’t exist.”
“But what are the odds of all that happening in such close proximity in one day and night?”
“It was a bad day in Brooklyn.”
“Maybe whoever was driving the car that hit Abby saw something.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Along with GSR, the lab’s looking for paint and metal trace from a car. It’s a long shot, but if it goes that way—if we luck out and find the car, and we find the driver—what are the odds that he killed the Dekkers, abducted Abby, she got away and he mowed her down with his car before pulling over to butcher another prostitute?”
“That’s ridiculous, Billy.”
“Exactly.”
“But if he or she saw something—”
“That would be great.” A sarcastic snort. He’d been a detective a long time; you learned not to hang hopes on what you might find, but to look at what was right in front of you.
“I hear you. But I have a feeling—”
“No feelings, Karin. Facts. Keep the feelings somewhere else. What I really need is to talk to Abby, or if she doesn’t wake up, find another witness who saw . . .”
His sentence drifted off, so I finished for him. “Anything at all.”
Billy flashed his badge to the ticket booth attendant, who buzzed open the gate for him. I swiped my MetroCard and went through the turnstile. We headed down another flight of steps and waited on the platform for a train. The subway had that familiar rotten egg smell, but it was warmer down here. The track started to rumble and soon the front of a train appeared with a green-encircled number five. We stopped talking and crowded in. For the next half hour we rode in silence. When we went back up to the street, we were on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, the sun was fading, and the sky was turning gray.
It was a ten-minute walk to the river and the Sixtyeighth Street entrance of New York–Presbyterian Hospital, where Abby had been admitted to the Komansky Children’s Center. As soon as we crossed York Avenue and entered the lead-in to the hospital’s circular driveway, we started seeing media vans with their tall antennas. There were five in all. Reporters hung around the bank of revolving doors, waiting for some action.
They surrounded Billy as soon as they saw him.
“No comment,” he said firmly, twice.
We pushed into the main entrance, a hive of activity beneath a vaulted ceiling, and were directed to the pediatric critical care unit. We knew we had reached the correct elevator when we encountered a few more reporters.
“Any thoughts about all those murders happening so close together,” a woman in a big fur hat asked, “and the kid getting hit by a car, pretty much all at the same time?”
Billy briefly turned a cold glare on her, before stepping into the elevator and riding with me to the fifth floor.
We stood in the hall outside Abby’s private room; we had been told to wait for someone who would fill us in and give us the ground rules of dealing with a coma patient, specifically this coma patient. I hated hospitals with their high-gloss floors and eerie quiet punctured by bursts of noise; their awful antiseptic chaos. The only nontraumatic thing that happened in a hospital was the birth of a baby, and sometimes even that was traumatic. I briefly thought of last October (of Julie or Marisa or Zoe) and almost succumbed to the sticky emotional turmoil that reached for me at times like this, but pushed it away before it latched on. I felt a cascade of triumph, then despair. Sometimes I wished for my Prozac back, but it hadn’t worked for me, at least not the way it was supposed to. I looked at Billy, wondering if antidepressants would help him. He was leaning against the wall with his eye closed. His breathing was so shallow I couldn’t see it.
