The Doll Maker (33 page)

None of this was good news to Jessica and Byrne.

‘Do we know where Crystal’s children went?’ Jessica asked.

‘One of two places. The John and Jane Does went to Toledo and Youngstown. Four each.’ Paris held up a document, but did not show it to either Jessica or Byrne. ‘I called the Youngstown facility, and was told that the home closed a year after the children got there. From there they went to a home outside Pittsburgh. I called
that
home, and found out they closed eleven months later. All twenty-one kids living there at the time went to one facility.’

Paris handed Jessica the document. It was a fax from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Welfare.

When Jessica saw the address of the group home, she felt her pulse spike.

The foster home was in North Philadelphia.

Jessica wanted to hug detective Jack Paris, but it would have been inappropriate. Instead she smiled, wagged a finger. ‘You could have just told us this.’

‘Now what would be the fun in that?’

‘I’m never playing poker with you,’ Jessica said. ‘Mind if I ask a question?’

‘Not at all.’

‘When Crystal mentioned the father’s name, I saw you react.’

Paris raised an eyebrow. ‘You should be a detective.’ He gestured to a corner of the lobby, overlooking Superior Avenue. They walked over.

Paris lowered his voice. Most of the people passing by were cops, but there were a number of civilians, as well.

‘She said the children’s father was a man named Ezekiel Moss.’

‘What about him?’ Byrne asked.

‘About twenty years ago we had an Ezekiel Moss on radar. Very bad actor. Allegedly killed eight prostitutes, that we know of, over the course of thirty-six months. Long-haul trucker used to make a Georgia to Detroit run.’

‘And you’re thinking he may have passed through Weirton, West Virginia.’

‘If it’s the same Ezekiel Moss.’

‘It’s certainly on the route,’ Byrne said. ‘What happened to him?’

Paris shrugged, ran a hand over his chin. ‘In the wind. I walk by that wanted poster every day. I still think he’s going to pop up one day, but he’s probably gone underground or dead. Either way, he’s stopped hunting.’

‘You think he’s the father of her kids?’

Paris held up his iPhone. On it was a mug shot of a wiry, hard-looking man in his thirties. ‘Let’s find out.’

They passed through a series of locked doors, went down in an elevator to the basement. There Jessica saw a pair of holding cells, one of which held Crystal Anders.

Paris excused himself, walked past a security station, and into her cell. When Crystal saw him, she stood up.

Jessica and Byrne watched as Paris showed her the picture on his phone, the mug shot of Ezekiel Moss.

Crystal Anders fell to her knees.

They had their answer.

Paris dropped them at the USAir gate at Hopkins International airport.

He got out, flashed a badge at one of the TSA agents. The man nodded.

Paris shook hands with both detectives.

‘I can’t thank you enough for this, detective,’ Byrne said.

‘Any time. If we hadn’t put Crystal in the box, I wouldn’t have this fresh page on Ezekiel Moss. Strange how things work in this business.’

‘If you ever think about moving, the PPD would be lucky to have you.’

‘Thanks, but I’m happy here. After all, we did get the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Sorry about that.’

‘You did, indeed,’ Byrne said. ‘But we have those World Series pennants.’

Paris smiled. ‘Just the two, though, right?’

The two men shook hands. ‘Be safe.’

This time Jessica did hug Paris.

After checking in, Jessica turned to see Paris standing on the sidewalk, hands on hips, looking toward his city. She had the feeling that they would one day again cross paths, and that whatever route Detective Jack Paris had pointed them down, they had helped do the same for him.

Paris’s case began when a man named Ezekiel Moss first lifted his hand in madness to another human being.

Their case might just turn on the same legacy of evil.

Byrne was fatigued – travel always exhausted him – but found some energy around eight p.m.

Tonight’s project was the room off the parlor, the one with the smallest of the three fireplaces in it.

When he had knocked out the brick in the fireplace, he found a number of old issues of
Life Magazine
lying across the andirons, all but intact. Perhaps Valerie Gautier, or the tenant before her, had meant to use them for kindling. He glanced briefly at the covers, all from within a six-month period in the early 1960s. The faces staring out at him brought him back. Marilyn Monroe, Rock Hudson, an impossibly youthful, incredibly blue-eyed Paul Newman.

They were all so very young in the pictures. They were all gone now.

As was a young girl named Nicole Solomon, and boys named Robert and Edward Gillen.

Against his better judgment Byrne stacked the magazines on the mantel. There was a pretty good chance that after he died, someone would be going through the house and find them again.

He had never been much of a pack rat, but now that he was living – although he was far from taking occupancy – in the largest place of his entire life, he had no intention of starting.

Byrne’s first order of business was to remove the old plaster from the walls. He had priced out restoring the plaster and had almost laughed into the phone when he heard the estimate. For a fleeting moment he thought the man had given him a price on the entire
job
, that being six rooms. Even
that
seemed high.

The truth was, he was being quoted a price on just the parlor.

Hearing that, making the decision to use drywall instead was a no-brainer.

By ten, Byrne had three of the four walls done. The hard part was knocking off the dried plaster that was keyed between the horizontal slats of wood lath.

There was one wall left.

He brought the lamp with the 200 watt bulb in it across the room, plugged it in. On this, the wall opposite the fireplace, he saw that there was a large rectangle, a shape that was lighter in color than the rest of the room. It appeared that there had, at one time, been a rather large painting in that space. The number of nail holes supported this theory. Unfortunately there was a fist-sized hole in the wood lath. Not a big deal, if the studs on either side were in good shape. They would still be able hang drywall.

He got a keyhole saw out of his toolbox, returned to the room, proceeded to cut out the splintered sections of wood lath.

When he got down to about waist level, he looked into the opening. There was something at the bottom. It looked like a wad of paper, folded into quarters. He walked to the kitchen, poked around his makeshift toolbox. None of the tools looked like they could do the job.

Byrne found a piece of door trim, drove a nail through it, bent it forward. He went back into the room in which he had been working, shone a flashlight down between the studs with one hand, and attempted to spear the paper with the other.

After a few attempts he got it.

He carefully brought the sheaf of papers up and out from behind the wall.

In the kitchen he unfolded the pages, and carefully smoothed them out on the table. They were large, perhaps ten inches by fourteen, and yellowed by time. On the front of the first page were a pair of drawings, clearly made by a child. The top drawing was of a rectangle, hastily – perhaps angrily – drawn in blue crayon. In the lower left-hand of the rectangle was a black mark, a vertical slash no more than a half-inch high.

Below this drawing was a large stick figure. It was drawn in brown crayon and appeared to be a man with big white gloves and a top hat.

A man with no face.

At the bottom were six words, all written in a child’s careful scrawl.

Room is blue. Room is dark.
 

Byrne looked at the drawing at the top of the first page. There was no question that the rectangle, furiously colored, was indeed blue. But what was the mark in the lower left-hand corner of the rectangle?

He went to the kitchen, opened up the box he had brought containing some basic office supplies – envelopes, rubber bands, his one and only stapler, a rubber-banded group of pencils. At the bottom was an old magnifying glass. He fished it out, gave it a shot of Windex, cleaned it off. He positioned himself under the overhead light and looked at the blue rectangle again.

What he had thought was merely a vertical black mark in the lower left-hand corner, was a drawing of a little girl. The stick figure drawing beneath the rectangle, the man wearing a top hat and big white gloves, was extremely crude.

The drawing of the little girl, even though no more than one inch high, was far more detailed. It looked to have been drawn with a fine-tipped pen, perhaps a fountain pen.

Byrne put the paper down on the table. He looked at all the other pages – six in all. On them were drawings of children; some were carefully rendered, some were primitive. One was a full page drawing of a girl. It was highly detailed – mouth, hair, dress, legs, feet, fingers – but the whole drawing was scribbled over, as if the child wanted to obliterate it.

All the drawings of adults, always a man, had some part missing.

There were no drawings of women.

At midnight he sat at the small card table in the kitchen, three fingers of Black Bush in a glass. The Thomas Rule binder was open in front of him.

On the night he had come to this house for the first time – the night Valerie Beckert had been arrested – he had signed into the crime scene log. It took nearly four hours for him and a pair of West Division detectives to search the premises, all to no avail.

The crime scene log in front of him showed him signing in, then out four hours and six minutes later.

But there was something in the log that he was not able to explain, something that had haunted him for ten years. Now, sitting in the very house, it hit home.

The crime scene log showed him signing back in at midnight that same night, then signing out forty-four minutes later.

Forty-four minutes. Not unusual, but he had no memory of doing so.

It was at a time in his life when he suffered from migraines with aura, but even then he had never lost track of time.

Why had he come back to the house that night? What had he done while he was here? What, if anything, had he discovered? And, most importantly, if he had found something, where was it now?

He did not have an explanation for any of this.

He thought of these things as he pulled up a chair, placed it before the front window. He shut off the kitchen light, poured himself another drink, brought the drawings with him, sat in the chair.

As fatigue overtook him, he lost all sense of time and place.

When he was startled awake, two hours later, he was still in the chair. His dreams had been violent. The house had been filled with cries of anguish and pain.

Forty-four minutes. Six children missing.

Byrne looked out the window, his heart pounding . The street was silent and still, the shadow of the house a long di Chirico painting on the pavement.

What was happening to him?

Room is blue
.

Room is dark.
 

Jessica was so preoccupied walking across the parking lot at the Roundhouse that she almost walked right into the man.

She had gotten up early, got the kids ready, made breakfast for herself and Vincent, and managed to get in a three mile run all before seven a.m. She was still in her running clothes when she drove in to work.

‘Oh, I’m
sorry
,’ she said. She stepped back, looked at the man, and had that strange feeling of
déjà vu –
not based on having done this precise thing before, but rather the feeling of having met this man in a different situation, a different life.

‘Hello, detective,’ he said.

When he smiled, she placed him. The man was FBI Special Agent Terry Cahill.

‘
Terry
,’ she said. ‘My God, how long has it been?’

He smiled, thought for a moment. ‘A long time.’

She gave him a hug. Not professional, but she liked Terry, and they were far from being deployed in the same squad.

Agent Terry Cahill worked out of the Philadelphia field office of the FBI. His office had worked with the PPD on many notable joint task forces over the years, quite often with the Narcotics and Auto Units, and just as often with Homicide. If a body crossed state lines, or a victim was kidnapped, the FBI offered assistance. Many times it wasn’t an offer, but rather a request from PPD brass.

Jessica and Byrne, as well as the entire PPD, had once worked with Terry Cahill and his team to hunt down a very bad man nicknamed The Actor a few years earlier, a case during which Cahill had been injured.

You would never know that now. Terry Cahill looked great.

‘You’re so tan,’ Jessica said.

‘It’s a full time job,’ he said.

‘So, have you been assigned to the Miami office or something?’

‘Actually, I’ve been liaison with the consulate in Mexico City for the past year or so. The cartels keep us pretty busy. Back in Philly to stay.’

‘Well,
hola
and
bienvenido
.’

‘
Gracias
.’

‘What brings you to our humble
casa
?’

‘Got something I think you should see.’

Jessica waited for more. More was not was forthcoming. ‘
Me
or
us
or the whole of PPD?’

‘Are you still partnered with Kevin?’

‘For life,’ she said. ‘We’re like pigeons and Catholics.’

‘I think you should call him.’

The ride to the rest area off I-476, just south of the Borough of Emmaus, in Lehigh County, took a little over an hour. On the way, Jessica and Byrne rode in virtual silence. The fact that they had discovered – more accurately, the FBI had discovered – additional evidence concerning this series of murders, broadened the investigation even further.