The Doll Maker Read online

  For a moment there was no sound. It was as if the city had collectively drawn a breath.

  Then came the screams from the people on the street who had seen what happened.

  Even before Jessica could approach the body a crowd had begun to form. Jessica turned to see Byrne walking up Wharton Street, trying to catch his wind.

  Jessica took out her badge, put it on a lanyard around her neck. She noted a sector car turning onto Wharton from Nineteenth. She beckoned it over, made a whirring gesture with her finger, and the patrol officer in the sector car turned on his bar lights.

  Jessica walked over to where Byrne stood. ‘Did you see what happened?’ she asked him.

  Byrne had not quite caught his breath yet. He put his hands on his knees, shook his head. With traffic stopped, Jessica made her way to the center of the street, next to where Jeffrey Malcolm’s mangled body was splayed. The impact had all but turned his lower body backwards on his frame. The bones of both legs were broken and pierced the skin. A portion of the right side of his skull was caved in, a long streak of blood and brain matter painted the asphalt. He was not breathing.

  Jessica snapped on a latex glove, reached in, feeling for a pulse, even though she knew what she knew. She found no pulse. Jeffrey Malcolm was dead. She turned, caught Byrne’s eye.

  ‘I’ll start a bus,’ Byrne said.

  Byrne stepped away, took out his phone, requested an ambulance. When he returned, Jessica asked:

  ‘What was he carrying?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything,’ Byrne said. ‘There’s a fence at the end of the alley behind his house. He got over it pretty quickly. Needless to say it took me a few seconds. By the time I hit the street he was rounding the corner. I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘He had something in his left hand. Something shiny. Silver.’

  Both Jessica and Byrne fanned out on the street. They looked curb to curb, and underneath the parked cars. When they reached the crashed delivery van – where the badly shaken driver was now giving a statement to one of the patrol officers – Jessica saw it. It was a small netbook computer, dented and scratched, lying against the curb right near a sewer grate. She got on her knees, reached under the cab, hoping she wasn’t going to be involved in one of those movie moments where the wrecked automobile bursts into flame at just the wrong moment. Nevertheless, she grabbed the laptop and got out of there as fast as she could.

  She walked back to where Byrne was standing. When the paramedics arrived, and the scene was secured, they stepped back down Nineteenth Street, found a newspaper box. Jessica put the laptop computer down on top of the box. She tore off her bloody glove, snapped on two fresh ones, opened the laptop.

  The desktop had only a few icons. She double clicked the mail icon, launching the program. There were dozens of recent emails, address to moneybear. All of the email messages contained links to sites that were clearly adult oriented.

  Jessica found a folder on the desktop called virus. She opened it to find another folder called quarantine. She opened that folder to find yet another folder called travelpics.

  Inside this folder were what had to be more than a hundred subfolders, all bearing a first name.

  Girls’ names.

  Jessica glanced at Byrne. Considering Jeffrey Malcolm’s legal history, there was little doubt as to what they were about to see. Jessica clicked one of the folders, one called Judianne. She was right. Inside the folder were a dozen pornographic pictures of a girl about six years old.

  Jessica closed the laptop. She would leave the subsequent investigation into the source of these photos to the RCFL, the Regional Computer Forensic Lab.

  The truth was, as creepy as Jeffrey Malcolm was on paper, and indeed was in person, they were only about to take a stolen car report from him, and leave him alone. For the moment. They were not about to search his premises or his person. There was no need to run.

  At least there was no reason immediately obvious to the two detectives.

  Now they had to know.

  Both Jessica and Byrne were well aware that there was a profound distinction between the interests and fetishes of adult men who were interested in underage girls – girls the age of Nicole Solomon – and girls the age of the children on Jeffrey Malcolm’s computer. Sometimes the distinction could be as fine as a year or so.

  With a sector car and EMS on site, and traffic being routed around the block, the scene was secure. Jessica and Byrne walked back to Malcolm’s row house in silence, each to their own thoughts.

  Because neither of them wanted to vault the fence in the alley, they decided to enter Malcolm’s row house via the damaged front door, and do what they could to secure the premises.

  While Jessica entered the house, and walked to the kitchen to lock the back door, Byrne went into the trunk of their departmental sedan and retrieved a large paper evidence bag for the laptop.

  When Jessica returned, she saw Byrne standing at the foot of the short driveway, arms crossed, staring straight ahead. She knew the look, the posture.

  ‘What’s going on, partner?’ she asked.

  For a few long moments Byrne said nothing. Then: ‘Are you ready for this?’

  ‘If I say yes, may I take it right back?’

  ‘You may.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ Jessica said, wondering just what could possibly be coming next. In the past forty-eight hours they had begun an investigation into the murder of a young girl, made notification to a man who put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, and now had come to a question a man who had run into traffic and been splattered curb to curb on a busy South Philly street. She was ready for anything. ‘I guess I’m ready.’

  She was not.

  Byrne took a few steps forward, turned the handle on the garage door, opened it.

  There, in the garage – a structure that had fifteen minutes earlier been completely empty – was Jeffrey Malcolm’s white Honda Accord.

  17

  The crowd at Finnigan’s Wake, the legendary Irish pub at Third and Spring Garden Streets, was lively for a weekday night.

  Kevin Byrne did not join in the fun. He sat alone at the front bar, nursing his first Tullamore Dew.

  Cops always knew who, among their ranks, wanted to talk, needed to talk, and those who needed to be left alone. Byrne figured his vibe was the latter. So much so that two stools on either side of him were empty. Every so often Margaret, one of the best bartenders in the city, would glance his way, expecting him to raise his empty glass, calling for another round.

  So far, the double Dew on the rocks had been enough.

  Byrne thought about Jeffrey Malcolm, and what it must have been like in his last few seconds, when he knew he was going to die. People who are addicted to pornography, especially child pornography, are hoarders, and there is no one thing in their lives – not money, not possessions, not family or friends – that is more important than their collections. They never seem to be able to delete a single image. In the end, it seems, Malcolm gave his life for it.

  Was the man, in any way, connected to the murder of Nicole Solomon? They might never know. Malcolm’s car had been transported to the police garage, and was currently being processed for evidence.

  Byrne thought about Valerie Beckert, and how it was a different obsession that drove her to kidnap and murder little Thomas Rule.

  Byrne dropped a twenty on the bar.

  Twenty minutes later, against all reason, he turned onto the expressway.

  The drive to Muncy would take about four hours, taking Byrne northwest through Allentown, Hazelton, Berwick. Even though traffic was light, Byrne found himself following the speed limit, perhaps because he was unsure if this was something he really wanted to do. More than once he eyed an exit with the thought of turning back.

  About midnight he pulled off at Rt. 54, ordered coffee at a service plaza.

  He sat in a booth, took out the binder that held the case files for the homicide of Thomas Rule. He had many times gone over eve
ry page, every photograph, every scientific report. And while it was true that sometimes, even after years of staring at something, a new angle or idea might suddenly appear, Byrne did not think this would be the case with the Thomas Rule evidence.

  The investigation into the boy’s death was closed. Byrne was looking at the data in the hopes of finding out what happened to Thaddeus Woodman and the other children

  He opened the folder, looked at the lab reports, his eyes bleary from the lack of sleep.

  He then went to the photographs of the victim. The first in the series was taken at Fairmount Park. Valerie Beckert had wrapped the boy in an old shower curtain liner, securing it with packing tape. The first photograph, take by CSU, showed the small figure, barely discernible through the translucent material.

  The second crime scene photograph was of the victim, lying on the unfurled plastic sheet. In this picture Thomas Rule was on his back, his hands to his sides. He wore dark trousers and a light colored crewneck sweater. If it were not for the deep welt around his neck, it would appear that he was sleeping.

  Byrne opened a second folder. It was not officially part of any record kept by the PPD. This folder was his own, one he kept to chronicle the disappearance of Thaddeus Woodman.

  He picked up the photo of Thaddeus, an Olan Mills type. The smiling, dark-haired boy was in that painful and awkward stage between baby teeth and permanent teeth, a time when a haircut was more of an inconvenience than anything related to vanity. He had inquisitive eyes, an untamable cowlick. Byrne tried to imagine the boy as a pre-teen, a teenager, a young man.

  How tall were you going to be, Thaddeus?

  What were you going to do for a living?

  What were going to be your sports? Baseball? Football? Basketball? Hockey?

  Were you going to be a husband and a father?

  Were you going to be a good man?

  Byrne often wished he could be the kind of person who could hold out hope for things like this, that he would one day have the answers to these questions. He was not that kind of person. More than two decades unearthing the darkest impulses of the human heart had forever stolen this from him.

  Thaddeus Woodman was dead.

  And, in two weeks, his killer would be, too.

  When Byrne went out to his car in the service plaza lot he was all but certain he would go back to Philadelphia. He knew he was on a fool’s errand, and that by the time he reached the three p.m. mark later that day, he would hit the wall of exhaustion, and be all but useless in his part of the investigation that mattered at the moment: the senseless, brutal murder of Nicole Solomon.

  But still he pressed on, driven by an opaque, unnamable energy, one born of the belief that Valerie Beckert was a mass murderer.

  Byrne arrived at SCI Muncy at just after two a.m. He knew that Deputy Superintendent Barbara Wagner had the night off, and it was for that reason Byrne had chosen to drive the nearly two hundred miles to Muncy in the first place. Barbara was good people, former PPD, and he didn’t want her to experience any blowback if his little plan backfired.

  Byrne did not know all the internal politics of the corrections system, but he knew that inmate #209871 – also known as Valerie Beckert – was not mandated by law to meet with anyone, including the only three classifications of people who had access to her at this point in the process; that being her attorney, her clergy, and her family.

  Byrne also realized that his credentials as a city detective would pull little weight at a State Correctional Institution – indeed, an often bitter rivalry and sense of mistrust existed between law enforcement officers and corrections officials. Still, in his experience, he found that it was harder to blow him off in person than it was on the phone, and it was for this reason he had not called ahead.

  He should have. As it turned out, he’d made the trip for nothing.

  Upon arriving – after nearly four hours on increasingly snowy Pennsylvania roads – he was told that Valerie Beckert had already been moved to SCI Rockview to await her ultimate fate.

  In consolation, after meeting with the superintendent herself – a pleasant and understanding woman named Gretchen Allenby – Byrne was offered a small suite of rooms in which to shower and take a nap before heading back on the journey to Philadelphia.

  Byrne needed both, but declined.

  He stood in the all but empty visitor’s parking lot, hoping the frigid night air would revive him. Before long a car pulled into the lot, parked a few spaces to Byrne’s left. It was a large four-door sedan, perhaps a decade old, its finish caked with road salt. Before the driver cut the lights, Byrne saw the license plate, and the small crucifix in the corner.

  The man who emerged from the car was in his late fifties or early sixties, fit and trim for his age. He wore a dark blue overcoat, charcoal fedora. He also wore a priest’s collar. In his hands was a thick stack of manila folders.

  Byrne walked over to the priest’s car. ‘Good morning, Father.’

  A little startled, the man looked up. He searched Byrne’s face for recognition, found none.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see you standing there.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not to worry.’ He pointed at the main building. ‘It’s a little scarier inside.’

  Although Byrne was much taller than the priest, and the parking lot was dark, Byrne saw no fear or apprehension in the man’s face. Even in the dim light, Byrne could see a pair of small scars on the priest’s right cheek, but the man’s nose was straight and true. Apparently, the chaplain had won more fights than he’d lost. Byrne wished he could say the same for himself.

  Byrne extended a hand in greeting. ‘Kevin Byrne.’

  The man smiled, shifted the stack of folders. ‘Sounds Philly Irish.’

  Byrne returned the smile. ‘Born and bred.’

  The priest put out his hand. ‘Tom Corey.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Father.’

  ‘Back in the day, I spent some time at St. Anthony’s,’ he said. ‘Do they still call it the Devil’s Pocket around there?’

  ‘Only by old-timers like me.’

  The scene drew out, but it was not uncomfortable, nor a moment unknown to either man. Still, it was Byrne’s duty to find entrance to the conversation.

  ‘Do you have a second?’ Byrne asked.

  Father Corey closed the trunk of his car, put the folders down. ‘I do.’

  Byrne had no idea where to begin. He just began. ‘I’m a homicide detective with the PPD. I’ve run up against something that I just can’t seem to shake.’

  Father Corey just listened.

  ‘I came up here to see one of the inmates,’ Byrne said. ‘I’m not even sure why, or what I would say when I saw her.’

  It appeared that Father Corey expected Byrne to continue. When he did not, the priest asked: ‘May I ask who it is you came to see?’

  There was no reason not to tell him. ‘The inmate’s name is Valerie Beckert.’

  The priest’s face did not register surprise. Despite some widely held perceptions, the carrying out of the death penalty, especially in Pennsylvania, was not a common occurrence. For women, it was even rarer, almost unknown. The burden on a prison chaplain at such a time as this had to be heavy. It was one thing to prepare a person for the end of life in a hospital or hospice. In such a grim and forbidding environment as this one, it had to be much harder. Byrne did not envy the man his cargo.

  ‘I was the arresting officer,’ Byrne added.

  Byrne knew that whatever Valerie had told Father Corey – if indeed she had said anything to him – was between her and her confessor. For many reasons, not the least of which was his own Catholic upbringing, Byrne did not ask the question.

  ‘I’m sure you’re aware that, at this late date, her contact with the outside world is quite limited.’

  ‘I know,’ Byrne said. ‘It’s just …’

  Father Corey waited a few moments. ‘A matter of faith?’ he asked.

  Byrne
hadn’t thought of it in these terms, but he imagined it was. ‘I think it probably is.’

  Father Corey nodded, looked at the prison complex, the high stone walls, back. ‘In the end, what we do, it’s all about faith, right? What I mean is, I have to have faith in the system. I have to believe that everybody along the way did their jobs, and that no mistakes were made. I have to have faith that all these women are here for a reason. Especially a woman in Valerie Beckert’s position.’

  Byrne understood. While it was true that many of the people he encountered in his job had broken the law, it was not part of his mandate to make life easier for them. It was just the opposite. His job was to make the lives of everyone else a little safer by putting criminals behind bars.

  Yet, in many ways, the job of a prison chaplain was the reverse. Everyone Father Corey encountered was also a criminal, but it was the priest’s purview to help them find a path to salvation, no matter how heinous the crime. Byrne had never considered what a difficult job it was until this very second.

  ‘Can you tell me about your concerns?’ the priest asked.

  Byrne gave the man a brief rundown of the circumstances surrounding the other missing children.

  ‘But you have no proof of this,’ Father Corey said.

  ‘No, Father.’

  The priest once again looked at the prison complex, back. ‘Hebrews says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’

  ‘I believe she did these crimes, Father. And if she never confesses to them, once she is gone, the families will never know peace. I feel that they deserve to know, no matter how painful it will be. I feel that the burden of not knowing is worse.’

  ‘And what about your burden?’

  ‘Father?’

  ‘The burden you’ve placed upon your own shoulders to find these answers. How long will you carry it?’