The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five)

by Abigail Padgett

  After a warm shower Bo stretched comfortably between reindeer sheets and listened to Molly's soft snore from her basket. The rain was pleasant, soporific. In a while, Bo was asleep. Until something began pounding.

  Groggily she propped herself on an elbow and heard Eva's voice, the door opening. Then a smell of burning wood, electric sparks, wet ashes. Muted voices, Eva's and a man's.

  "What's going on?" she called, rousing Molly to growl halfheartedly.

  The burnt smell reminded her of the dream she'd had. Goblin Market in flames. Except the restaurant which became Goblin Market at night was a cement-block and stucco building that couldn't really burn. A kitchen fire, maybe. But nothing drastic.

  "Go back to sleep, Bradley," Pete Cullen's voice boomed from the living room. "It's all over."

  Sure. With a come-on like that she'd just doze right off. His voice held an edge of vindication, of justice satisfied.

  "What's all over, Pete?" she asked, dragging herself fully awake and into the kitchen. "Let's nuke up some coffee."

  "Malcolm's dead," Cullen pronounced. "Coffee sounds good."

  He appeared exactly as he had earlier, Bo noticed, yet he reeked of smoke and ashes. And as usual he was not bubbling over with a need to explain his remarks.

  "Jasper Malcolm?" she asked.

  "Roasted," Cullen said comfortably. "Burned that dried-out old Victorian to the ground and himself with it. Probably shot himself or something before the fire got too hot. Medical examiner's got the remains. We'll know tomorrow."

  "Start at Point A," Bo told him. "What happened up at St. Dymphna's? Go from there."

  "Here's what happened," he boomed into the microwave from which he was pulling a large cup of coffee. "The old pervert got wind of an arrest the FBI made in Chicago. One of the honchos in the doll-porn scheme. Seems like this network of baby rapers, a few of 'em ex-cons but mostly run-of-the-mill business types, found each other on the Internet. One, a guy named Dwight Bliss—can you believe a pervert name like that?—runs this outfit in New Orleans making Mardi Gras gimcracks. You know, beads and masks and stuff. So Bliss gets a contract for a couple thousand fancy Mardi Gras dolls and discovers there are dolls out there that look so real you can photograph 'em through a scrim or a little out of focus and nobody'll know they're not the real thing. He and his little friends are one extended hard-on when their guy in Denver, who's a court reporter, does some research and finds out you can sell pictures of dolls doing anything, and it's perfectly legal."

  "Pete," Eva insisted, "what happened here?”

  "Don't know yet how Malcolm was involved in this, but police in Chicago got the guy there on something else entirely, a bunch of little shit—suspicion of mail fraud, nonpayment of child support, an old car-theft warrant from a hundred years ago in Milwaukee—that stuff. It was set up. So Malcolm gets word of this, right? And goes butt-up. He's dead, and he knows it. Only a matter of time until he's wearing denim behind a razor-wire fence, selling his jaw to the only scum higher than him on the totem pole for the dubious pleasure of staying alive. Not a pretty—"

  "Pete, your enjoyment of these imagined details is becoming tedious," Eva interrupted, "as well as repugnant. What actually happened?"

  "Uh," Cullen grunted. "I really hate that little bastard. Sorry. Anyway, I think he meant to do this all along, take out the rest of his 'little girls'—Tamlin, Beryl, then Janny—before taking himself out. The head nun up in the Julian place said they received a special-delivery shipment late last night. A ton of old dolls, she said, valuable and all packed and labeled. Enough to sell and keep the convent going for years. He had it all planned, see? Had his ducks in a row."

  "What ducks?" Bo asked. "Why would he donate his collection to St. Dymphna's if he's this monster? And what happened to Beryl?"

  "She lucked out, said she was at some meeting most of the evening, a support group. When the cops came by later to tell her the old man was dead, she laughed. Said her support group would probably throw a party. Malcolm may have come by looking for her, but he missed. And the guy's got this religious streak, used to make some kind of Catholic dolls. In his wacked-out mind he probably bought his way out of hell by giving a bunch of dolls to a bunch of nuns. These creeps think like that."

  Bo slumped on a barstool and stirred sugar into her coffee. "So how did he get Tamlin?" she asked.

  "He knew the drill up there. They take turns praying all night. There's always one of them praying in their chapel, around the clock. They take hour shifts. All he had to do was wait until his daughter showed up. The shovel, incidentally, was from the convent tool shed. He grabbed it, waited in the trees, and then whacked her. It was about eight o'clock when the next one came in and found her. It could have happened anytime between seven and eight. She died instantly."

  "But why?" Bo insisted. "Why would he want to kill off his family?"

  "Why do nuts do anything?" Cullen shrugged. "They don't live in the same world we do. Malcolm was a nut, a sicko. End of story."

  Bo toyed with the idea of pouring her coffee over Pete Cullen's head as Eva rose to stand between them.

  "Thank you for coming by, Pete," she murmured. "At least we can rest comfortably in the knowledge that Janny is safe."

  "Hey, can I finish my coffee?" he said as Eva pushed him toward the door.

  "No, you can't. And thank you again for bringing us the news of Jasper Malcolm's death. It's been a very difficult evening. Good night."

  Pete Cullen looked stricken. "What did I say?” he asked. "I've never been any good at talking."

  "Really?" Eva smiled. "Perhaps we can work on that. Later."

  When he was gone Bo walked Molly briefly on the rainslick street, thinking about the old dollmaker. He was strange. Cullen's dislike of him wasn't surprising. But had he been the cunning sociopath the ex-cop described? Bo remembered aqua-blue eyes, the slender hands working at clay under plastic film. Maybe, she nodded to herself. But she hadn't sensed it. Neither had she sensed anything else about the old man. Or had she?

  The case might be over, but there was something more to discover. Something about an ugly carving of St. Francis. And something about Madge Aldenhoven. There would be no rest Bo decided, until she knew the whole story.

  Chapter 24

  At five a.m. Bo heard Eva Broussard open the apartment door and pad down the steps to the street. Molly stirred at the sound, then circled irritably in her sheepskin bed and went back to sleep.

  "Some guard dog," Bo whispered. "What does it take? FBI storm troopers in strapless pink chiffon?"

  After coffee and a bowl of leftover jambalaya, Bo dressed in paint-stained sweater and jeans, forced Molly briefly outside, then hurried to the Pathfinder. The morning air was clean and strewn with gulls inspecting the beach for delicacies washed ashore during the night. Bo watched as a large herring gull flapped skyward trailing fish entrails from its beak.

  "Ycchh!" she yelled at the bird even though what she was about to do might arguably fall in the same category. Scavenging, she admitted, was scavenging.

  Fifteen minutes later she surveyed Jasper Malcolm's ruined home. Or the charred sculpture that was left of it. The fire crew had erected a chain-link barrier fence from which yellow warning tape flapped in the chilly breeze.

  dangerous keep out, it announced every two feet.

  The roof had collapsed when the walls could no longer support it. But most of it had been hauled in pieces to the back of the lot. Probably to facilitate location of Jasper Malcolm's body. Nothing remained of the attic or second story but the towering brick chimney which had vented four fireplaces when the house was heated by burning coal. Against the winter sky the blackened bricks seemed to sway, threaten to fall. A hazard, it would be pulled down by wrecking crews from the city within hours. But for now it merely stood bleak and exposed, howling softly as the cold wind moved through it. Walking to the end of the temporary fence, Bo pushed it away from its wooden pole support. Then she stepped inside.

  A damp,
acrid warmth rose from the rubble and stung her eyes. The same smell Pete Cullen had brought to her apartment. For a moment she stopped as an unpleasant series of questions arose in her mind. Why had Cullen been here last night? Had he actually gone up to Julian as Eva assumed, or had he merely repeated for their edification the story he'd heard from the Backcountry Sheriff's Department during the phone call he received as the rest of them were leaving for the hospital and Patrick's birth? Where had Pete Cullen been during those hours?

  Bo stepped gingerly across the frame of the side door to Malcolm's studio, which had collapsed with its aluminum awning still attached. Cullen, she realized, was no less strange than the man he had watched so bitterly for over a decade. An aging ex-cop working off-record with the FBI to track doll pornography? As a board hissed and creaked at her feet she realized how peculiar that story was. And even if it were true, how far would Pete Cullen go to bring down his quarry? He'd hated Jasper Malcolm for years. Too many years. What would he have felt when he knew his nemesis had murdered once again, and once again escaped detection?

  Ahead on its side was the metal cabinet Malcolm had shown her, its paint now a landscape of black blisters. From its fallen drawers a hundred perfect spheres spilled onto the blackened tile floor. Bo picked one up and rubbed the grime from it against her jeans. A blue eye looked back at her. An angry blue eye. Bo dropped it and shuddered as it bounced against the still-intact tile and came to rest against something damp and gray. A cat.

  "Venerable Bede!" Bo cried happily. "You're alive!"

  The bedraggled feline eyed Bo suspiciously and then moved to rub against her leg. He was filthy, and patches of his fur were singed to the skin. Gently she picked up the shivering animal and tucked him under her sweater.

  "I don't know what I'm going to do with you, but don't worry, Bede," she told him. "I'll find you a home."

  The cat fastened claws into the thick waistband of her jeans and pushed against her, making himself easy to hold with one hand. Bo was honored by his trust. She'd never been a cat person.

  The firefighters had obviously cleared the fallen upper-story rubble from Jasper Malcolm's studio, she realized. This must be where they expected to find his body, and probably had, since no other area was cleared. On the ashy floor she saw a thousand shards of bisque, tiny noses, bits of painted lips. The doll heads, shattered when the house fell on them.

  Shivering, Bo began a random perusal of the wreckage. Charred boards, the remains of Malcolm's design table, a mound of baked clay, two little books. Curious, she kicked at the books and watched as the one on top fell open and blew apart, its pages turned to ash. But the one beneath it was partially intact, its title discernible.

  The Hours of Divine Office in English and Latin. The prayer book of a Roman Catholic priest.

  Bo nudged the burnt, leather-bound book with her foot, then picked it up. Old and well used, its colored marker ribbons still lay within its pages, one red, one yellow, one green, and one black. Gently Bo opened the ruined volume to its black marker. Ash Wednesday. Of course. The Christian day of penance when priests in sackcloth smudge the foreheads of the faithful with ashes as a reminder that all must die. And of what had Jasper Malcolm such a need of repentance that he read the Office of a priest? Bo wondered. The violation of his own innocent children? Sequential murder? Personal wealth gained from the purveyance of abject depravity? Which was the worst? And which of them was true?

  Riffling the pages, she felt something lodged between them A snapshot, its edges melted to the book's binding glue. Bo tugged it loose and stared in shock. The face looking back was younger, but familiar. It was the same face Bo had seen on her supervisor's desk in a dusty photo of Madge and her husband and two sons, probably taken at about the same time. The snapshot was of Madge, and of Jasper Malcolm.

  He had taken the photo, holding the camera at arm's length. His extended arm was visible in the picture, and his other arm was around Madge. The dollmaker would have been over sixty at the time, Bo guessed, but his face was handsome, radiant. And the look in Madge Aldenhoven's eyes was unmistakable as she smiled at him.

  "I don't believe this!" Bo whispered. "She was in love with him!"

  The realization was on a par with seeing your first-grade teacher at the beach in a bikini, Bo thought. That sense of shocked betrayal when a one-dimensional image is revealed to be complex, human. Had Madge, married and a mother of two, conducted an affair with a man connected to one of her cases? A man accused of molesting his own daughters? It was unthinkable.

  Bo scrutinized the photo again. Madge's arm was around his waist, her face too close to his for mere professional courtesy. When things turned out well, clients sometimes asked to have their social workers join them in pictures. Bo had done it more than once. Pictures of smiling children, reunited families. This was not one of those. This was a snapshot of lovers, preserved by a deliriously happy Jasper Malcolm in perhaps Madge Aldenhoven's lifelong weakest moment. Bo was sure he had turned to kiss her in the second after the shutter clicked. And that she had kissed him back, eagerly. It was that kind of picture.

  "Hey! What are you doin' in there?" a male voice shouted. "Get outta there!"

  Bo slipped the photo into her jeans pocket beneath the grip of Bede's paw, and turned to face a man in full-body white plastic protective gear, gloves, and an air-filtering face mask.

  "Just curious," she answered, ducking through the fence. "I live up the street, knew the old guy who lived here. A shame, huh? Say, what's the space suit about?"

  "Hazardous cleanup," the man grunted importantly. "Did you touch anything?"

  "No," Bo lied. "Why?"

  "Irradiated blood from chemotherapy. Your friend who died in there? He had cancer. The blood's dangerous. I gotta clean that area where you were before the wrecking crew gets here to take that chimney down. Can't you read? Look, it says 'dangerous keep out.' That means you."

  "No problem," Bo agreed, heading for the Pathfinder. "I was just leaving."

  So the old dollmaker had cancer, she thought as she sped back to Ocean Beach. Was receiving chemotherapy. May have been dying. That would explain the distribution of his doll collection, the enervation that left him sitting in a padded rocker on his porch for hours every day. Bo remembered the rocker. An artifact of extreme age. Would Jasper Malcolm have been able to drive all the way to St. Dymphna's in Julian, wait around in the cold until Tamlin entered the chapel, swing a garden shovel with sufficient force to kill her, then drive all the way back to San Diego in time to lure Rombo Perry to a vacant lot and stalk Janny on the beach? It seemed unlikely.

  At home Bo took Molly to her neighbor, secured the Venerable Bede in the kitchen on a bed of towels, then showered and dressed for work, wondering about Pete Cullen's role in the sequence of events. He couldn't have killed Tamlin; he was with Bo the entire day and had no motivation to do so in any event, although the same could not be said of Jasper Malcolm's death. So who had killed her? Or had anybody? With a shiver of chagrin she realized that they had only Cullen's story of that event, which might have been merely a ruse. It made no sense, but Bo had to be sure.

  "May I speak to Sister Mary Andrew?" she said into the phone minutes later. "Thank you."

  "This is Bo Bradley," she said when the Mother Superior answered. "I'm calling to extend my sympathy to you and the other sisters. What a shocking event."

  "Yes," the nun replied softly, confirming Cullen's story. "Such violence cannot be understood. Her funeral mass will be held tomorrow in the chapel. If you feel that it would be appropriate, you may bring her daughter. I've already contacted Beryl, the sister, but her father's phone seems to be out of order. The sister agreed to go to his home and tell him."

  “I’m afraid Jasper Malcolm died last night when his house burned," Bo said. "That's why his phone isn't usable. I'm sorry to burden you with more bad news. And I'll consider Janny attending the funeral, although at the moment I think it would be too much for her. Good-bye, Sister."

&
nbsp; Slipping the old snapshot into her purse, Bo drove to work and parked in front rather than near her own office at the back of the building. The copy room was in front, just behind the reception area. For once it wasn't occupied by a repairman dismantling any of the three chronically malfunctioning copiers. Bo ducked in, made an enlarged copy of the photo, then tucked both in her purse as she hiked the ramps and corridors leading to Court Investigations, her professional home. Madge Aldenhoven, casual in a denim skirt and penny loafers, was in the hall showing something to one of the other supervisors. It was a little quilt, Bo saw. A log cabin design in green and white calicos. A crib quilt.

  "Look, Bo," she said, "it's for little Patrick! I've been working on it for months. Estrella's husband called this morning with the news. Do you think she'll like it?"

  "You made this? Madge, it's fabulous!" Bo smiled. "And the color's just perfect. He's got red hair, you know."

  Edging into her own office. Bo watched as various other workers came out to admire Madge's handiwork. The supervisor's violet eyes were bright with pleasure. How could this be the same woman who routinely trampled the lives of strangers because the rules demanded it? How could Madge turn her back on Janny Malcolm and a thousand other lost children, then go home and lovingly stitch a quilt for Estrella's baby? Bo sighed and glanced at the old snapshot tucked in her purse. There was another Madge, she acknowledged. A human Madge who had, at least once, broken every rule in the book.

  "There's a message from the social worker over at women's detox," the supervisor called cheerily through Bo's open office door. "Police brought the mother of your Friday case in last night, again. The worker says she's in pretty bad shape, showing some brain damage as well as hepatitis, a collapsed lung, and acute colitis. She'll probably sign a termination of parental rights. The social worker's recommendation is to go for a pre-adopt placement on both kids. Just transfer the case over to foster care. We're not going to have to fight on this one."