LeRoi was eventually charged with the murder of four people, but police speculated he had killed at least a dozen, and as many as twenty-three of his parishioners had gone missing over the years. He’d fathered forty-six (some articles say forty-two and some say they are not all his) children with these “nuns.”

While LeRoi died in prison in 2006, as far as I could tell, his family still lived in the tall corner town house at the end of my block, and the church was in operation, headed by LeRoi’s oldest son.

The story had come back into the news lately; maybe that’s why the cop had brought it up. I clicked PLAY on a recent video from a local station’s website—deep dramatic narration over slow zooms of black-and-white photos—a crying woman had been abandoned by one of LeRoi’s nuns as a toddler. She was fully aware that LeRoi was her father, but her mother had gone missing shortly after leaving her with an aunt and she had never been able to locate her.

Tears stream down her cheeks as she says, “I went to my father in prison when he was still alive. I said, ‘Did you kill my mom?’ He told me, ‘No.’”

She says, as if to reassure herself, “I believe him.” The girl chokes back a sob, looks around anxiously, and then says, “He has never lied to me.”

The newscaster asks anyone with information to come forward and the story ends.

I found myself continuously clicking this video, despite knowing that it all comes to nothing. I was waiting for the old photo of the mother standing among LeRoi’s family in the eighties. It’s a big group shot, with LeRoi front and center in a maroon velvet suit, looking directly at the camera, his face serious. He’s handsome—smooth skin, pouty lips, curly hair slicked back with pomade. The camera pans across all the women of various ages and skin tones standing around him, zooms in on the mother. She is young, but not as young as many of the girls. She’s looking at the camera expressionless with serious, dead eyes.

THERE WAS A MIDDLE-AGED BLACK MAN WHO SOMETIMES SAID hello to me in the elevator. We spoke as the old contraption made its sluggish climb to the fifth floor and I tried not to stare at his glass eye, tried to look into the real one.

“You live in Roxanne’s old place,” he said. “Across from the trash chute.”

I nodded.

“She used to have me over sometimes. To smoke pot with her—weird old lady, but nice.”

“Do you hear the church?” I asked him.

“The church?” he said. “Which one?”

“You don’t hear singing from the church down the block?”