Epstein checks his watch before closing the door.
The Virgin Islands can wait.
CHAPTER 5
Mary: February 2005
The Dubble Bubble’s lost all its flavor, but Mary’s still chewing the gum as she shifts, nervously, in the backseat of Wendy’s big pickup truck. The girl sitting up front next to Wendy is a stranger to Mary. She’s chain-smoking menthols. The music is blaring; the seat is filthy and gross. Worried that her white jeans will get grody, Mary sits on her hands. Then, through the window, she sees a gigantic resort called the Breakers. It is resplendent, sun-drenched, not quite real—like something you’d see in the movies.
It makes for an interesting contrast.
“We’ll wait for her,” Wendy says to the girl in the passenger seat. “Then we can all go to the mall.”
“Which one?”
“The Gardens.”
It’s like she’s not there. Mary wants to say something about it, but she doesn’t know if the other girls would even respond. Wendy’s always seemed so much cooler than kids Mary’s age. This other girl’s just a mystery. And when Wendy does turn around to speak to Mary, her stare seems to slice right through the younger girl.
“Remember,” Wendy says, according to a probable cause affidavit filed by the Palm Beach police. “When he asks how old you are, say eighteen.”
The light changes, and Wendy turns back around but keeps looking at Mary in the rearview mirror.
“Got it?”
Mary nods.
“I mean it,” says Wendy.
Who would believe her? Anyone can see that Mary is younger than that.
“Okay,” she says. “I got it. Eighteen.”
Mary takes out her flip phone and sends Joe a text: “Your cousin is a BAMF.”
A badass motherfucker.
There’s no reply.
“Or maybe she’s just a bitch,” Mary texts.
Still no reply.
Joe must still be in church, Mary thinks.
They pass El Bravo Way and turn onto El Brillo Way.
Wendy’s driving slowly now, right at the speed limit. Once more, she says: “When the man asks your age, say eighteen.”
Mary nods again and smiles, slightly. She wants Wendy to see her smiling. To know that she’s got it all under control. But Wendy’s eyes are on the front gate now. It opens, she parks, and they walk past a guard.
“We’re here to see Jeff,” says Wendy.
The guard nods—of course you are—and leads them to the side door.
They’re in the kitchen now. Mary, Wendy, some middle-aged man. The man has a long face, bushy eyebrows, and thick silver hair—and he’s fit. As fit as the jocks that Mary goes to school with. Not attractive, exactly. He’s way too old for that. But confident, in a way that makes an impression.
Standing behind the man there’s a woman. She’s blond, very pretty, much taller than Wendy.
What a strange scene, Mary thinks. She can’t shake the feeling that the man is studying her. Then he nods, and he and Wendy walk out of the kitchen. A little while later, they’re back.
“Sarah,” the man says to the tall woman. “You can take Mary upstairs.”
Sarah takes Mary up a wide winding staircase carpeted in pink. Together they walk down a hall that’s got photographs on the wall—naked women. Long curtains cover windows and don’t let in much light. In the air, there’s a strong lavender fragrance.
Then they come to a room containing a green-and-pink sofa. There’s a large bathroom off to one side and doors on either side of the sofa. There’s a wooden armoire with sex toys on it. There’s a massage table, too, and a mural of a naked woman.
“Wait here,” says Sarah. “Jeff will be up in a moment.”
Mary’s too freaked out to do anything else. Fidgeting with her belt loops, she sits on the sofa, jumps up again.
Then she sees the picture.
All the girls in the photos are young. But the girl in this one’s just a baby.
Much younger than Mary herself.
The girl’s smiling, but the smile’s mixed with something else—some sort of anxiety that’s out of place on such a small face. And what she’s doing is shocking: pulling her underwear off to the side. Flashing one of her tiny apple-round butt cheeks toward the camera.
Mary gasps. She turns around. And there’s Epstein standing in front of her, wearing nothing but a towel.
CHAPTER 6
Michael Reiter: March 2005
Chief Reiter looks more like a bank president than a cop. He’s well built, with an air of formality and discretion. But he’s got twenty-four years on the job. Decades earlier, he was a campus police officer in Pittsburgh. Then he rose, steadily, through the ranks in Palm Beach, moving up from patrol officer to detective, working vice, narcotics, and organized crime, then becoming a sergeant, captain, major, and assistant chief—a job he held for three years—before becoming chief of police. Reiter is what you’d call seasoned, although chief of police in Palm Beach is a job that calls upon his political skills as much as his street smarts.
Then again, from time to time, things do happen.
Once in a blue moon there are murders—though these are so rare that they tend to be remembered for decades.
Sometimes there are hurricanes to contend with, and, when the sea calms, human cargo washes up on the shore. Sometimes traffickers aim the bows of their boats at the glow of the Breakers resort, order their passengers to go overboard, then tell them to swim.
Most of the passengers are Haitian—men, women, and children who stake all they have on a chance at a life in America. From time to time, Palm Beach cops have to retrieve their bodies from the surf.
Things get busier during the wintertime, or, as the locals call it, the season. It’s when the very rich come to town, throw parties and balls, shop, and tangle traffic at the intersections around Worth Avenue. The population booms, and the men and women who work under Chief Reiter deal with fender benders, shoplifters, and snotty skateboarding teenagers. There are DUIs. Domestic disturbances. Choking victims and heart attacks. It’s routine stuff, but there’s always lots of it. Enough to keep the men and women who work for Reiter busy.
Chief Reiter’s proud of the team he has built. And, the team knows, they’re lucky to have him. Reiter’s extremely well qualified for the job. If anything, he’s overqualified, with a certificate from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and antiterrorist training at Quantico, courtesy of the FBI. It’s not brought up often at cocktail parties in Palm Beach, but several of the 9/11 hijackers lived in Palm Beach County. They took flight lessons at local airstrips. A few, including the mastermind, Mohamed Atta, had been regulars at 251 Sunrise, a chic nightclub in Palm Beach. There they had regaled any woman who would listen with made-up stories about their adventures as pilots.
But 251 Sunrise is shuttered now. The joint was shut down in 2004, after an avalanche of noise complaints. For the moment, Palm Beach is as quiet and calm as any place Reiter has dreamed about.
For the moment.
CHAPTER 7
Mary: March 2005
If there’s no traffic, Mary’s hometown is less than thirty minutes away from the island of Palm Beach. But in economic terms it’s a world away. Her high school is run by the county. Most of Mary’s classmates are black. Thirty percent are Hispanic, as she is. The rest are white. The school has a C rating, and lots of students receive free or discounted lunches. Mary is one of those students. But inch by inch, she’s working her way out of the crab barrel. A good kid, her teachers think. A kid with a future in front of her.
Weeks have gone by since her meeting with Epstein. She hasn’t told anyone about the visit. Still, other kids at the high school have noticed a change.
“Yo, Mary,” a friend says. “What’s up with you anyway?”
This is a kid who veers from nice to mean, depending on who else is around.
Still, a friend.
“Nothing,”
says Mary.
“You got your period?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Mary whispers.
There have been rumors going around, she knows that. Rumors started by a girl who has eyes for Joe.
“Whore,” her rival shouts in the hallway one day.
“You’re the whore,” Mary shouts back.
Mary rushes the girl, who shoves back, grabbing at Mary’s hair, twisting and tugging. Someone yells, “Catfight!” By the time the bell rings for next period, Mary’s sitting in the principal’s office.
She shakes her head in reply to the questions, stays silent, feeling humiliated.
Then, in her wallet, they find the three hundred dollars.
Mary’s too young and too small to be stripping. Besides, the bills are all twenties, not singles or fives. When they call Mary’s parents, her teachers suggest a more obvious explanation: Does Mary do drugs or deal them?
Mary’s father knows better than that. “No,” he insists. A psychologist is called in. And then, Mary does start talking.
Once she does, she can’t stop.
It’s a wild story. Highly disturbing. A mansion in Palm Beach. A powerful man. This is all far from the principal’s wheelhouse. It’s definitely a matter for the police. In the meantime, the school’s recommending a transfer, purely temporarily, to a facility for troubled kids—ones with “issues.”
Mary’s a good girl, it’s true. But further confrontations at the high school will not be tolerated.
CHAPTER 8
Michele Pagan: March 2005
On March 15, Palm Beach police officer Michele Pagan takes the first call from Mary’s stepmother.
“Ma’am,” she says, “I’m going to have to ask you to come down to the station.”
“I don’t want to say anything more until I speak with my husband.”
“Ma’am, I appreciate that. But I’d urge you to come in. Let us find out what happened. Please.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“Please, ma’am. I’m here for the rest of the day. We’re on South County Road.”
At the station, Mary’s father does most of the talking.
“There was an incident,” he says. “At school. A fight between Mary and another girl. But please understand, our Mary’s not like that.”
Officer Pagan’s starting to feel as though she’s swimming in uncharted waters. She’s young, and the cases she’s worked before this have been minor. Robberies, that sort of thing. Pagan’s not used to the Gold Coast. She was educated in New York City, and, to her, the less affluent towns further in from the Coast might as well be somewhere in Georgia. Then again, she knows enough to know that in the back of the station, detectives are already whispering.
What’s a guy with that kind of money need with some girl from out west? The women around here could make a man cry.
Extortion?
The kid’s fourteen. What would she know from extortion?
Have you seen the shows these kids watch? They know about things we’ve never dreamed about.
No, Pagan thinks. This is her case.
She’s the one who’s going to work it.
CHAPTER 9
Mary: March 2005
Mary’s father and stepmother believe their girl. Officer Pagan believes Mary’s parents. Ergo, Mary must be telling the truth. The girl’s got a sweet, high, halting voice. Pagan interviews her twice, and both times, she speaks with her chin buried deep in her chest.
“Tell me, honey,” says Pagan. “What happened?”
In her notepad, Michele Pagan writes: While speaking to me, Mary became upset and started to cry.
“This white-haired guy came into the room,” Mary says. “Wearing only a towel around his waist. He took off the towel. And then he was all naked, and he lay down on a massage table.
“He was a really built guy. But his wee-wee was very tiny.”
Mary tells Pagan that Epstein spoke only to give her instructions, which he did in a stern voice. She tells Pagan that she was alone and didn’t know what to do.
She removed her pants, leaving her thong panties on, Pagan writes in her incident report.
She straddled his back, whereby her exposed buttocks were touching Epstein’s exposed buttocks.
Epstein then turned to his side and started to rub his penis in an up-and-down motion. Epstein pulled out a purple vibrator and began to massage Mary’s vaginal area.
Mary’s sure that Epstein ejaculated. “He used a towel to wipe himself down as he got off the table,” she says.
That week, Pagan’s assigned to the case, along with six detectives. Five men, two women. “A predator case,” one of them will say. “This is different from someone who is stealing. This predator is a smart person, and that’s his desire. He can’t stop.”
Within days, another victim comes into the station. She’s got a similar story.
It’s a tricky case, according to a source closely involved with the investigation, because the girls involved are far too young to use as bait in an attempt to catch Epstein committing another crime—even if they were willing to play along. Still, there are other strings that Chief Reiter’s team can start pulling.
Two weeks later, on March 31, Officer Pagan has Mary make a controlled call to Wendy Dobbs.
The first attempt goes straight to voice mail.
The next time Mary calls, Wendy picks up.
On the recordings made by Officer Pagan, Mary’s voice is tiny and tentative, while Wendy sounds mature, gruff, fully grown, like the femme fatale in some old black-and-white movie.
“Hey, what’s up?” she says impatiently.
“Nothing,” says Mary.
“I talked to Jeffrey, and I’m going to his house tomorrow morning,” says Wendy. “I’m going to set something up for you.”
“Cool. Like, what do you think?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to talk to him tomorrow morning when I go to his house about it.”
“Um, how much would I get paid?”
“Talk to him. I’ll talk to him tomorrow, and then I’ll bring you in the next day. You can talk to him about it.”
So far, so good, thinks Officer Pagan. But she needs more. She looks at Mary expectantly, but not too expectantly, she hopes. She can imagine how hard it must be for the girl. Or maybe she can’t imagine it at all. But either way, Mary seems to have gotten the message. Straightening up in her chair, she begins to press Wendy.
“I don’t know,” Wendy says in response. “I don’t know. You’re going to have to talk to him about it. I mean, I don’t really work for him like that. I just bring girls to him and they work for him….You can ask him, like, ‘What can I do to make more money?’”
Mary keeps pressing.
“The more you do, the more you get paid,” Wendy says finally.
“Want me to bring my sister for you? So that we can get paid more or something?”
“Well, yeah. That’s what I’m saying. I’m working tomorrow, and me and him are going to put a schedule together for you and your sister. So I’ll call you tomorrow when I leave Jeffrey with a schedule.”
“Okay, well, I don’t have a phone. So if you guys call me, I’d have to know what time so I could get the phone.”
“Okay. I’ll leave you a message. That’s fine. I’ll leave you a message.”
CHAPTER 10
Noel St. Pierre: March 2005
Noel St. Pierre* thinks of the kids he grew up with in Haiti. His old neighborhood was pressed up against the jungle border that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, and some of the kids he knew would slip over. Those kids would stay in the DR for a few days, sometimes weeks. Some of them never returned. But the ones who did come back wouldn’t say too much about it.
Most of them didn’t talk much at all.
By the time he was ten, Noel had learned the truth about those kids. He’d learned that they’d ended up working as prostitutes.
This was how Noel St. Pierre had learned about
evil. There really were devils out in the world. Flesh-and-blood devils, and they were nothing like the demons he’d heard about in church. Noel had never forgotten the way those kids looked. The way they’d turned into old men and old women. They were like zombies trapped in children’s bodies. And now, in America, Noel’s been given a chance to help other kids.
That’s what the police have told him, at least.
Noel is a sanitation worker. Still strong at fifty, and lucky enough to have found his way to Palm Beach, he gets in to work before anyone else and keeps his white compactor truck clean, almost glistening. His pickup route runs hot and cold with the seasons. But even in the summer, with much less to do, he’s on the job early, braced for a six-hour shift that would break a lesser man’s back. In the winter, the job gets even harder. The Estate Section gets especially busy. Some of the parties have hundreds of guests. They leave behind mountains of refuse. That garbage gets picked up daily, or twice a day when requested. It’s carried by workers who slip, silently, under the porte cocheres. Then it gets whisked twenty miles away to a landfill that the garbagemen call Mount Trashmore.
Noel’s stretch of the Estate Section runs from the Everglades Club to the southernmost tip of the island. It encompasses Banyan Road, Jungle Road, El Bravo Way, and El Brillo Way. His performance record is spotless. As far as the Palm Beach PD is concerned, he’s the perfect man for the job.
Chief Reiter’s authorized a “trash pull”—a legal way to collect discarded evidence. In this case, evidence culled from Jeffrey Epstein’s garbage. But when the police call him, Noel St. Pierre simply assumes that another refugee boat has run aground on the beach. A sad thing, but something that does happen from time to time. His homeland, Haiti, is desperately poor. Run by despots who line their pockets while everyday people suffer.
Many of the refugees are illiterate.
Most of them speak only Creole.
“Eske ou ka ede nou, souple,” they ask.