Vanishing Girls (2 page)

Chapter 2

T
he world felt frozen in place as I walked through the midnight streets in a direction that led me away from my usual route. In the three years I’d lived in the area I had rarely ventured this way; normally I headed toward Smith Street with its shops and restaurants and subway, never away from it, toward Nevins. No one else was out. Not even a car. A film of ice covered everything: the front stoops of the sleeping brownstones, the tops of parked cars seaming either side of the street, the unevenly paved sidewalk. I had to tread carefully or I’d slip and fall.

After walking two and a half blocks into what felt like quieter and quieter territory, I turned right onto Nevins. The familiar neighborhood of gracious brownstones quickly gave way to desolation. A shuttered bodega sat beside an empty lot across the street from another empty lot. In the near distance you could see the hard, angular edge of a low-income housing project. It seemed darker here than in the opposite direction and then I realized why: Since turning onto Nevins, there had not been a single streetlamp. Any light here was ambient, bleeding from occasional late night windows. A couple blocks ahead, though, was a bright haze of activity. Half a dozen cop cars and a pair of ambulances sat there, doors agape, blue and red lights flashing. People milled around, shifting through headlight beams before merging back into darkness.

I picked up my pace, heading toward the action, which was where I expected to find Billy. But then, before I’d reached the nearest corner, I heard a voice.

“What the
fuck
?”

I reached into my coat pocket instinctively, now wishing I’d taken Mac’s advice and brought his gun. The voice sounded agitated, confused—and familiar. I turned, and in the shadows of a recessed doorway saw a black guy sitting on a step, gripping his knees, talking to himself.

“We’ll figure it out.”

I stepped closer, peered through the shadows.

“You’re never going to get away with this.”

In a sliver of light, I saw his face.

“Why don’t you just put the gun down, Jazz?”

His eye was unfocused. Even this close, he didn’t seem to see me.

“We’ll figure it out. There’s got to be some kind of misunderstanding.”

I knew where he was, because I recognized everything he was saying, though it was all out of order. He was back in that day, that horrible afternoon a year and a half ago when so much that mattered to him pivoted out of control with a single gunshot that exploded his right eye and broke his heart.

He had been unable to shoot Jasmine, because he was in love with her.

But she had had no trouble whatsoever pulling her trigger on him.

He looked at me suddenly, the black eye patch he always wore now angled over the right side of his face. His left eye glistened white in the darkness, centering its attention on me.

“Look,” he said. “Look. Do you believe this?”

Did he think I was there with him again—because I had been? If I hadn’t shown up on that rooftop, chances were he’d be dead.

“I believe it.”

“It isn’t happening.”

“It happened. In the past. Come back, Billy.”

He shivered. I wanted to reach down and zip up his blue parka but was afraid that it would startle him. Jasmine had shot him on a warm summer day. Apparently the flashback had returned him to June, and he had unzipped his jacket, despite tonight’s frigid December air.

A drop of sweat fell in a rivulet from his forehead down along his temple and landed on the collar of his jacket. He reached for my hand. His skin felt hotter than Mac’s.

“Take a deep breath, Billy, like this.” I breathed, held it, let it go.

After a moment he tried it, his left eye locked into mine. We breathed together, slowly in and slowly out. I watched his pupil dilate like a time lapse of a blooming rose.

“Not feeling so good,” he said.

“I know.”

“Where’s Mac?”

“Down with the flu.”

“Sorry.”

“Isn’t your fault.”

“No, about this.”

“Like I said, isn’t your fault.”

He leaned forward to glance down the street toward the flashing lights of the crime scene that had triggered his flashback. “Not looking forward to getting read my rights.”

He meant his partner,
Ladasha
.

“I’ll handle her.”

“I bet you will.” Now he smiled, and my pulse started to slow.

I stood back and helped tug him to his feet. Billy was a bit over six feet tall and I was a bit under. We stood side by side and I wound a supportive arm around his back.

“Want to just ditch this joint?” I asked.

“Can’t. I’m on the job.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“It’s a free country.” But I sensed he was glad I’d offered.

As we got closer, I realized that in the distance what had looked like one crime scene was actually two. The first cluster of police and paramedics surrounded a stretcher on the ground where someone was being readied for a trip to the hospital. A minivan had stopped in the street and a middle-aged woman I took to be its driver was talking to a couple of cops who were noting everything she said.

“I was driving by and I saw someone just lying there.”

“You always out alone this late at night?”

“I was going to the pharmacy to fill a prescription for my son. His fever spiked and the doctor said—”

But the two cops glanced at each other dubiously. The victim looked badly injured, as if he or she had been struck by a car. The woman’s van was the only civilian vehicle here, though it was always possible that someone else had hit and run. With no witnesses hanging around, and one of the parties unconscious, it was her word against nothing.

“Neergaard is open twenty-four/seven, in Park Slope, in case you ever need to know.” She reached into her purse and produced a white prescription slip. “This is the quickest way there; no traffic lights.”

From what I could see there wasn’t any blood on the front of her car, though it was dark out. I cringed at the thought of someone ramming whoever it was with a two-ton hunk of metal and speeding off. Either way, I doubted that a garden-variety car accident could have triggered Billy’s reaction.

“What’s going on up there?” I looked into the near distance, at the other crime scene, which appeared busier than this one.

His face tensed. “Seems my friend is back at it.”

His “friend,” though, was
not
a friend, and the frustrated bitterness in Billy’s calling him that went through me like a swallow of poison. Billy had been hunting for the Working Girl Killer for over a year, to no avail; and now, apparently, the brutal creep feared throughout the city had found his third victim in Brooklyn. For a year before the challenge of catching him, stopping him, had landed on Billy’s desk, he had left seven prostitutes dead across Manhattan. Some members of the Manhattan task force had transitioned to a Brooklyn task force, and the hunt continued across boroughs. Looking down the long, dark stretch of Nevins, the forlorn street suddenly made sense: It was a red-light district, without the red lights.

“And then this kid here got hit by a car.”

“Kid?”

“A girl—ten, twelve years old, we’re guessing.”

I felt a twist of alarm, then outrage. What was a kid doing out past midnight? Especially
here
.

“Are you thinking she was hit by the unsub on his way out?” That ghostly unknown subject of the ongoing investigation, who struck like a tornado, then evaporated like fog.

“It’s a possibility.”

I moved closer to the stretcher and in a dull spray of headlight from one of the cop cars, saw her face: small, with creamy darkish skin as if she’d just returned from an island vacation, and silky hair the color of burned wheat, a long strand of which spilled over the side of the stretcher. She wore small gold star earrings and her fingernails were painted blue, with the perfect sheen of a fresh manicure. Her feet were bare; each toenail was painted a different color.

“Where are her shoes?” I asked Billy.

“Wasn’t wearing any, from what we can tell. Got some fresh cuts on her feet.”

“Did she run away from home?”

“Who knows?”

“She looks young for that.” If she had been an older teenager, it would have been anyone’s first guess. And if she had been black, there might even have been an insinuation floating in the air that she was out working the streets, despite her tender age. But that fresh blue manicure, and that whimsical pedicure, seemed to tell another story. She was wearing pink flannel pajama bottoms prancing with white sheep. I turned away and closed my eyes.

“Karin, we have no idea why she was out here.” He sounded so sad, and so frustrated, and so hopeless that I automatically reached out to grab his hand. His palm was sweaty but I didn’t let go.

The paramedics carefully lifted the girl into the back of the ambulance. One hopped in with her, while the other closed the doors and hurried to the front to drive.

“Where’s her family?” I asked.

“We don’t know who she is yet—we’re canvassing the area, see if she’s from somewhere around here.”

But when kids went missing in the middle of the night, sometimes their parents didn’t even realize it until morning. What were the odds her parents wouldn’t even answer the bell?

A television van drove past us toward the other crime scene. We both watched it swerve around a pothole and finally stop at the nearest edge, adding its headlights to the already bright miasma that had gathered around another dead woman.

“The hooker was still warm when we got here,” Billy said.

I knew enough about the case to understand how unusual that was; normally, by the time they were discovered, the bodies were already decomposing.

“Same m.o.?”

“Yup.”

A prostitute in her twenties, first strangled, then finished off with a knife embedded between her breasts. It was always the same: a single piece of clothing missing, either a top or a bottom; and a Bowie knife, produced in Mississippi in 1963, by a now-defunct company called Stark. The knife hadn’t been manufactured for decades, had never been particularly popular, and was hard to find. It seemed someone had stocked up on them pre-Internet, probably paying cash someplace that wasn’t good at record keeping. In the years the investigation had been going on, not a single trace of who had accumulated the knives had been found. Ten knives, now, at least . . . or possibly more, if he planned to keep killing. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t.

The biggest break in the case came toward the beginning, when the second victim was identified as a twenty-five-year-old woman from upstate New York who had gone missing at the age of eleven and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. Of the eight victims the two task forces had been able to identify over time, all had disappeared between the ages of nine and twelve, during the late eighties and early to mid nineties. All had come from states along the East Coast, where they had vanished in transit between their homes, schools, and friends’ houses. In each case, they had been trusted to get places alone, and most of them had relished their new independence. In two cases, it was the girl’s first solo run without adult supervision. None of the girls were seen or heard from again until the day her body turned up in Manhattan, or Brooklyn, with a cord around her neck and a Bowie knife sunk deep in her chest.

“Another Dead Girl” had become a familiar headline.

It was a new twist on an old story: Kids vanished, turned up ruined or not at all. In this case, it appeared that some angry pimp or maybe an angry john had it in for them—another old story. The first problem was catching the creep who was doing this, and stopping him. The second problem was figuring out where all those girls were hiding, or being hidden, between then and now. It didn’t take a leap of imagination to guess that these girls were trafficked into the sex trade, considering the profession they all ultimately shared. But catching their killer was beginning to feel like a leap of faith. Connecting the dots between two known events—the girls vanishing, and the women turning up dead—had proven elusive for Billy and everyone else working the case for the past two years. The task force had swelled to include detectives from multiple local jurisdictions as well as specialists from the FBI; I remembered Billy complaining once that sometimes the investigation felt like it had grown too many legs to move in any one direction, that they were going nowhere fast.

Billy started moving up the street. Still holding hands, I moved with him. The closer we got, the more worried I grew that, like a moth to a flame, he would combust again once he stepped into the eerie brightness up ahead.

“Where you been, a-hole?” Ladasha turned on Billy the moment she spotted him, her long, tight braids cascading over one shoulder as she faced us. She was a short woman, dense-waisted, mother of five . . . baked awesome cookies at the holidays but didn’t mince words. “I been at this myself for an hour!”

A dozen investigators were at work at the scene, along with paramedics and cops. The least busy were the paramedics, as there was no one to save. A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, where a photographer was taking pictures of something I couldn’t see, presumably the victim.

“Sorry, Dash, I—”

“He’s coming down with the flu.”

She looked at me, a glint of humor in her eye. “You his mama now, Karin?”

“That’s right, I gave birth to him nine years before I was born.”

“Oh, you’re funny, girl.” A little smile cracked enough to show her gold tooth, one of the upper canines, a detail she clearly relished. “You know what I’m talking about. Don’t say you don’t.”

Ladasha had once confided in me that, as the divorced wife of two men and the mother of four sons, she was convinced that “male-kind” were all children, regardless of chronological age. While both her husbands left and all her sons struggled, her only daughter—a supercompetent honor student, athlete, and sought-after babysitter—was proof positive of Ladasha’s gender theory.

“Sorry,” Billy muttered.

“Yeah, ain’t that what they all say.”