The Doll Maker Read online

  Jessica made a copy, put them on a desk and returned a few phone calls. When Byrne showed up she handed it to him.

  Byrne scanned the report. ‘Look at this,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There was trace amounts of psilocin in her system.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know what that is.’

  ‘It’s an hallucinogen,’ Byrne said. ‘Psilocin and psilocybin are the active ingredients in magic mushrooms.’

  Jessica looked up from the document. ‘And you know this how?’

  ‘I read a lot.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Byrne sat down at a computer terminal. ‘Plus, I’m older than slate. And I’ve run into it a few times.’

  He got online, made a search, and navigated to a website devoted to hallucinatory drugs. He printed off the main page devoted to mushrooms and handed a copy to Jessica.

  ‘It’s a Schedule One drug,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Yes it is,’ Byrne said.

  According to the DEA, Schedule 1 drugs – heroin, ecstasy, methaqualone, LSD, and others – were drugs with no currently accepted medical use, and had a high potential for abuse.

  How much this changed they didn’t know. Yet. But Jessica had to admit that it was unexpected. After looking through Nicole’s room, and cruising the girl’s email and browsing history on her laptop, there was little indication that Nicole Solomon did any illicit drugs.

  ‘So, Nicole Solomon – good girl Nicole, good student Nicole, never been in trouble Nicole – suddenly decides to start doing mushroom?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘It doesn’t compute, does it?’

  ‘It does not,’ Jessica said. ‘So there’s a good chance it was fed to her.’

  ‘This is what I’m thinking,’ Byrne replied. He opened up the binder, retrieved the documents related to Nicole Solomon’s autopsy. He flipped a page.

  ‘Stomach contents are consistent with the Egg McMuffins her father said she had that morning. There was some undigested chocolate.’

  ‘So, Nicole goes to breakfast with her father, takes a taxi cab to her school, then attends a movie at the Franklin Institute. At some point in this timeline – in the taxi, at the school, on the bus, at the Institute – she decides that she is a drug user, perhaps for the first time in her life, and takes magic mushrooms.’

  ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Just about everything,’ Jessica said. ‘How much do you really know about magic mushrooms?’

  Byrne put his left hand flat on the desk, raised his right hand. ‘I have never once ingested a Schedule One drug.’

  ‘Willing to submit to a polygraph on that?’

  Byrne looked at his watch. ‘Is it six o’clock already?’

  Jessica laughed. ‘We should get Vince in on this,’ she said.

  ‘I agree.’

  Vincent Balzano was a detective with the Narcotics Field Unit North. If it was an illegal drug, and it was being sold or consumed anywhere in Philadelphia County, Vincent, or his partner Lou Cefferati, would know about it.

  Jessica picked up the phone, dialed Vince’s number at the station house. After a few seconds, there was an answer.

  ‘Cefferati.’

  ‘Lou, this is Jessica Balzano.’

  ‘Hey, bright eyes. How are you?’

  ‘Old and sassy.’

  ‘I believe the sassy part.’

  ‘How’s Jeanie?’

  Lou Cefferati’s daughter Jeanie had been diagnosed with ALS – Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s Disease – at the age of seventeen. There was a yearly fundraiser for the condition, one in which Lou Cefferati was deeply involved. Jessica, along with just about every detective she knew, made it a point to attend every year.

  ‘She’s good,’ Lou said. ‘Day at a time.’

  Jeanie Cefferati had been given only a few years to live at the time of her diagnosis. That was eight years ago. Jessica had never met a stronger or more positive person than Jeanie Cefferati.

  ‘Is Vince around?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘He’s on the street,’ Lou said. ‘Got a message for him?’

  ‘No message,’ Jessica said. Whenever Vincent was on duty, Jessica never called his cell phone. He always had his mobile phone on silent, or turned off, when he was on the street – a poorly timed ring tone could mean death to a detective in narcotics – but it was not worth the chance that he had forgotten to do so.

  ‘Just have him give me a call,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Does he have your number?’

  ‘Smart ass.’

  ‘Been accused of worse,’ Lou said. ‘Just ask my ex.’

  ‘Be safe, detective.’

  Jessica hung up the phone. She turned back to the toxicology report. She’d read so many of them in her time that they all tended to look the same. She looked again at the ME’s report on Nicole’s last meal, thinking:

  Who among us, in their last hours, ever speculated that some rushed-through meal, some gourmet extravaganza, some instantly forgotten fast food would one day be a document on a homicide detective’s desk?

  For a crazy moment Jessica closed her eyes, and tried to remember her three previous meals. There was the sandwich she’d had for lunch, a Sinatra hoagie from Sarcone’s: prosciutto, roasted garlic, fresh mozzarella, drizzled with red wine vinegar and oil. You don’t forget a Sinatra hoagie. Maybe it was the garlic.

  For breakfast, a pair of small croissants.

  Last night’s dinner? She couldn’t remember.

  Jessica was all but certain that Nicole Solomon had no idea that an Egg McMuffin would be her last meal.

  19

  ‘Brandon Altschuld, please.’

  While Byrne waited for the public defender to come onto the line, he looked at the box on the car seat next to him. In the failing light of day he thought, not for the first time, that it looked the same as just about every other box from the evidence storage room. Unless you could see the name and case number on the outside, along with the date, you would have no way of knowing what was inside.

  This box held the few scant items found in Valerie Beckert’s car on the night she was arrested.

  From the phone: ‘This is Brandon Altschuld.’

  ‘Mr Altschuld, my name is Kevin Byrne. I’m a homicide detective with the PPD.’

  Silence. A long, protracted moment. Byrne continued.

  ‘I was the arresting officer in the Valerie—’

  ‘I know who you are, detective,’ Altschuld said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  The man was throwing down serious attitude, but Byrne had expected it. There was never, nor would there ever be, any love between defense attorneys and the police, and for good reason. Byrne knew that, at least with high priced representation, the arrogance was gilded by expense accounts, media glory and, if the case was high profile enough, a possible book contract. With public defenders – a job with low pay, long hours, and very little chance for fame – the police were the sworn mortal enemy, a protected class that broke every statute they were sworn to uphold if it meant clearing the streets of people they considered vermin.

  ‘I’m calling to make a request regarding Valerie Beckert,’ Byrne said.

  More silence. Altschuld was going to make him work for everything. Also expected.

  Finally: ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I’d like to speak to your client,’ Byrne said.

  Byrne heard the man make a sound about as close to a laugh as possible, without actually laughing.

  ‘Is that right?’ Altschuld asked. ‘What could you possibly have to talk about with my client?’

  Byrne knew they would get to this, but he didn’t think it would be this soon. He tried to leaven his tone with one of respect for the man’s profession. ‘I think that she might have some important information about other cases.’

  ‘Really? Other homicides?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Byrne said. ‘They are not open—’

 
‘Then why are we having this conversation? I know I wasn’t her counsel when she was tried, but as I recall you had her in an interview room for about six hours after she was arrested. Why would you think she’s going to tell you anything now? It’s been ten years.’

  There was no answer to this. At least, not one that would move the ball forward. ‘Look, Mr Altschuld, I know that—’

  ‘You had your chance. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is going to take my client’s life in less than two weeks’ time, Detective Byrne. My client has made peace with that sad fact. I suggest you do the same.’

  ‘If you could just—’

  ‘Have a nice day.’

  Before Byrne could respond, the man ended the call. Byrne had to stop himself from throwing his phone out the window. He’d broken so many phones this way in the past few years that he’d considered buying them in bulk. Instead, he clicked off, took a deep breath, then gently put the phone in his pocket.

  He glanced out the passenger-side window, tried to calm himself. The call had gone worse than he expected, and he’d expected it to go pretty badly.

  This section of Fairmount Park was all but deserted at this time of the early evening. He saw a pair of joggers on the winding path; a teenaged boy and his golden retriever playing a game of Frisbee catch.

  Byrne got out of his car, raised his collar to the wind and chilling mist. He crossed the field. When he reached the spot at which Valerie Beckert intended to bury Thomas Rule he stopped. He shoved his hands into his coat pocket, closed his eyes.

  He saw Valerie sitting on the bench, her hands cuffed behind her. The patrol officer who had detained her stood a few yards away. Thomas’s body lay on the ground at the side of the path, small and forever stilled. The tableau of these three figures were as vivid now as they had been that night.

  When Valerie had looked up, and met his eyes for the first time, Byrne had seen something in them he had only seen a few times before. There was no fear, no sense of shame or guilt, no remorse. Instead, for a fleeting instant, her eyes seemed to say that she had been waiting for this moment her whole life, along with something else that had stopped him cold.

  It seemed she had been waiting for him.

  The finial rose into the night sky, a bird of prey on the branch of a massive oak.

  The front yard was overgrown, the walk covered in dead leaves, small branches, wind-blown trash. The sign for the realty company was long rusted, its phone number and the name of the Realtor obscured by ten years of rain and snow and grime.

  When Byrne turned the key in the lock he thought for a moment he had the wrong one. He’d found the key on a small plastic fob in the evidence box he’d taken from the storage room at City Hall.

  He tried again. Right. Nothing. Left. Nothing. The lock seemed to be rusted shut. He tried once more, slowly rocking the key side to side. Eventually he felt the key turn, the tumblers fall.

  When he entered the foyer, the feeling descended upon him in a damp and disquieting wave.

  The foyer was empty, devoid of furniture, covered with a thick layer of dust. In one corner he saw shredded paper, the remnants of a roll of paper towels, the bottom chewed away and carried to some other part of the house, only small black mouse droppings left behind.

  Straight ahead, through an arched opening, was the living room. It was large, even for a Wynnefield center-hall colonial. At the far wall was a fireplace, bricked over in painted blocks. To the left were empty bookshelves, half the shelves missing.

  Byrne tried to rationalize why he came back here, but he knew the reasons resided in his heart, not his mind. He knew that the emotions that drew him here – the anger that accompanied the decade-old unwavering belief that the one-time occupant of this house had murdered more than one child – would cloud his judgment, but at the moment this did not matter to him.

  He believed that in the dark heart of this structure lived Valerie Beckert’s secrets.

  Byrne shut the door.

  He felt the house close in around him.

  With the evidence box under one arm, Byrne ascended the steps. He ran his hand along the rail. Somehow he knew that the fifth tread from the bottom would groan, that the handrail would have an inch or so of play halfway to the top. He did not know these things from any sense of remembrance or recall. This knowledge did not live in a part of him connected to the first time he had entered this house.

  At that time he’d moved through the space with a sense of urgency and dispatch, his training, his powers of observation, focused on finding clues and evidence that would lead him to the other children he was certain Valerie Beckert had murdered.

  They’d found nothing that night. There was no clothing, no murder weapons, no hair or fiber evidence, nothing that would indicate that any child – including Thomas Rule – had ever even paid a visit to the house.

  Did Valerie have another place of residence, somewhere she used as a killing room? he’d wondered at the time. They’d found no evidence of that, either.

  Byrne reached the top of the stairs, sat on the landing, opened the evidence box. There were only three items inside.

  There was a brightly colored box, a Happy Meal from McDonald’s, itself containing an object about which Byrne had thought many times over the past decade. He opened the Happy Meal box, picked up the toy, a rather faithful orange plastic casting of Nemo, from the Pixar film Finding Nemo. The toy, like the other objects in the main box, still held the residue of the black powder used to lift fingerprints.

  Byrne knew, based on Thomas Rule’s autopsy, that the boy had not eaten anything from McDonald’s on the day of his murder. He wondered which of the other children had eaten the Happy Meal, which of them had sat – frightened and tearful and alone – in the backseat of the car, this small plastic toy in hand. Byrne moved the tail, the two fins, wondering: Had Thaddeus Woodman done the same thing?

  He put the toy back into its box, picked up another item, a small bottle of baby aspirin. As he had on that night a decade earlier, he shook the bottle. There was only one pill left. Again, he wondered why Valerie Beckert had this in her car. Was she nursing the children through their summer colds, only to bring them to such a terrifying end?

  Byrne closed his eyes, summoned the feelings. He could all but hear Thomas Rule’s sobs in this space, hear his footsteps as he tried to escape from the monster that was Valerie Beckert.

  He opened his eyes, glanced around at the rolling gloom of the drafty house, took the third item from the box. It was a key ring. On it were three keys. One was for Valerie’s car, one was for the front door to this house, and a third key, an old skeleton type.

  What did it open? Byrne wondered. What secrets, what horror, would it reveal?

  Byrne put the keys back in the box, closed it, stood to leave.

  As he did, the floorboard creaked beneath his weight.

  20

  The floorboard creaked beneath her weight.

  She stopped, held her breath, listened.

  Silence.

  On her first night in this house, a many-roomed mansion in northwest Philadelphia, Valerie knew she was finally free.

  When her aunt Josephine was a young woman, they say she was a great beauty, a nightclub singer of modest fame, working the small clubs in and around Philadelphia and Camden, catching the eye of men young and old alike.

  By the time Valerie was trusted to the woman’s care, at the age of seventeen, following Valerie’s father’s death, Josephine had gained a good deal of weight, and the only singing in which she engaged was in the shower, or while she puttered in the small herb garden behind the house.

  Aunt Josephine, although often possessed of a mean temperament – a woman prone to violent, alcoholic fits – was a wonderful cook. Her waistline spoke the truth about this.

  It was her weight that would one day bring her life to a sudden, dreadful end.

  When Josephine’s husband Randall Beckert had died two years before Valerie came to Philadelphia, Josephine ca
shed in all his bonds, liquidated his accounts, and spirited the cash away like some mad monk.

  It took Valerie less than three weeks to find it all. She was skilled at navigating small passageways, and practiced at finding that which was meant to be hidden from searching eyes.

  For the first time in her life, Valerie had the run of a house.

  She had never felt so liberated.

  On most days, at just before dawn Valerie would rise, make herself coffee, and take up position in the front room. Once there, she would part the curtains a few inches, and wait for the children to pass by. By seven or so they would emerge from their houses, trundling along behind their harried mothers, walking alone, standing in wait for the school bus that stopped just a few yards from the walk.

  Valerie watched with something close to enchantment.

  She watched the boy on crutches who took the longest time to pass in front of the house. One day the boy stopped at the end of the walk, tried to arrange his weight sent askew by his book bag, knapsack and lunch bag. Valerie was certain the boy had seen her watching him.

  There was once a girl who wore a black patch over her right eye for the longest time. At first Valerie had thought it the result of some short-lived therapy, but after a few months the girl still wore it.

  There was another boy who walked with a limp. He had a sweet face, even when he struggled to keep up with the others.

  When she’d taken the trains to Philadelphia she’d had to leave behind her coterie of friends, but here she knew she would make many more.

  But there was something she had to do first.

  As she stole away to bed that night, just two days before the first day of spring, she glanced down the stairs. Her shadow was as long as the staircase itself.

  Valerie put her hand on the cap of the newel post at the top.

  It was loose.

  A few more turns and it would be even looser, she thought.

  Something like that could be dangerous.