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.
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.
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.
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.
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