The Doll Maker

by Richard Montanari

  Byrne got out of the car, locked it, walked to the rear entrance to the bodega.

  A few minutes later he walked out the back door of the sandwich shop. Before stepping into the light he glanced at his car, its video app running. His iPhone was still propped on the dash where he’d left it. If Trumbo had come to rescue his now-disabled weapon from the trashcan, Byrne would at least know about it.

  Seeing the alley just as he’d left it, Byrne headed to his car. He didn’t take three steps before he heard the unmistakable sound of the hammer being drawn back on a revolver.

  Byrne turned slowly, hands out to his sides, and came face to face with Allan Wayne Trumbo. In Trumbo’s hand was a Smith and Wesson .22.

  ‘You 5-0?’ Trumbo asked.

  Byrne just nodded.

  ‘Homicide?’

  Byrne said nothing.

  Trumbo stepped behind Byrne, reached around, removed Byrne’s sidearm from his holster. He placed it on the ground, kicked it toward the wall. He stepped back around to face Byrne, standing more than a few feet away. Trumbo had, of course, done this a few times. You don’t stand within arm’s length. That only happened in the movies, and only when the hero slapped the gun from the bad guy’s hand.

  Byrne was no hero.

  ‘I didn’t shoot that old man,’ Trumbo said.

  ‘What old man?’

  ‘Don’t fuck with me, motherfucker. I know why you’re here.’

  Byrne squared off, never taking his eyes from Trumbo’s eyes. ‘You need to think about this.’

  Trumbo looked down the alley, at no one at all, then back at Byrne. It was street theater, starring, as always, the man with the gun. ‘Excuse me?’

  Byrne watched the barrel of the weapon, looking for the slightest shake that would signal trouble. For the moment the man’s hands were steady.

  ‘What I mean to say is, you need to reconsider the next few minutes of your life.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘It is,’ Byrne said. ‘We have you in that store, Trumbo. Two cameras. Front and side. Not sure why you took off the mask, but that’s your business.’ Byrne lowered his hands slightly. ‘It was bad enough you killed Ahmed, and you will go down for that. But if you kill a police officer, I guarantee you that you don’t sleep fifteen minutes straight for the rest of your life. You need to think about this. Your life starts now.’

  Trumbo looked at the weapon in his hand, back at Byrne. ‘You’re telling me what I need to do? Maybe you catch a hot one tonight.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Trumbo cocked the .22 Byrne felt an icy drop of sweat trickle down his spine. He’d pushed this too far.

  ‘Let’s just call it friendly advice,’ Byrne said with a lot more confidence than he felt.

  ‘Oh, you my friend now?’

  Byrne said nothing.

  Trumbo nodded at the Chevy parked at the turnoff in the alley. ‘That yours?’

  Byrne nodded.

  ‘Nice car,’ he said with a smirk. ‘Keys in it?’

  Byrne looked down and to his left. ‘In my left front pocket.’

  ‘Okay, then. Slow – and I mean slow like I fuck your wife – and with two fingers, I want you to get me them keys.’

  Before Byrne could move, the night air was sliced by the sound of a young woman’s laugh. The sound was so odd, in this scenario, at this late hour, that both men froze.

  An instant later they turned to see two rather inebriated people – a young man and a young woman – walking toward them up the alley, arm in arm.

  Byrne closed his eyes, waited for the three gunshots, one of which would certainly end his life. When he didn’t hear them, he opened his eyes.

  The man entering the alley was in his thirties, fair haired, with a droopy Fu Manchu mustache. He wore faded Levi’s and a short denim jacket. He had his arm around a dark-eyed beauty – tight black jeans, hoop earrings. She was a few years younger. When the young woman saw the man with the gun she stopped, her eyes wide with fear.

  She stepped behind Fu Manchu, doing her best not to look at the man with the gun.

  ‘Whoa,’ Fu Manchu said, slowly putting his hands up and out front.

  ‘D’fuck you doing?’ Trumbo asked, his hands now trembling. ‘Get the fuck out of here.’

  Byrne saw that the woman had already managed to slip out of her heels.

  Nobody did anything.

  ‘Wait,’ the woman began. ‘You’re saying I can go?’

  ‘You deaf? I said get the fuck out of here.’

  The young woman backed up a few paces, now keeping her eyes on the man with the gun, then turned and ran down the alley, to the corner, and disappeared.

  While Trumbo was momentarily distracted, Byrne inched toward his weapon on the ground.

  ‘You too,’ Trumbo said to Fu Manchu. ‘This ain’t your business.’

  The young man kept his hands out to his sides. ‘I hear you, boss,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

  ‘Just back up and follow your bitch.’’

  A look came over Fu Manchu’s face, one Byrne recognized as acknowledgment. ‘I know you,’ the young man said.

  ‘You know me?’ Trumbo asked.

  The young man smiled. ‘Yeah. We met in ’09. Summer.’

  ‘I don’t know you, man,’ Trumbo said. The gun hand began to tremble. Never a good sign, in Byrne’s experience, and he had enough experience in situations like this for three lifetimes.

  ‘Yeah. You’re Mickey’s cousin. Mickey Costello.’

  ‘I know who my fucking cousin is,’ Trumbo said. ‘How you know Mickey?’

  ‘Same way I know you, bro. We did that body shop up on Cambria. Me and Mickey took the door; you and Bobby Sanzo drove the van.’

  Trumbo wiped the sweat from his forehead, began to nod. ‘Yeah. Yeah. All right. You’re …’

  ‘Spider.’ He pulled up a sleeve to reveal a highly detailed tat of a spider and a web. At his wrist was a fly, trapped in the web.

  ‘Spider. I remember.’ Trumbo was sweating profusely now. ‘Bobby’s dead, you know.’

  ‘Heard.’

  ‘Got cut pulling that dime in Graterford.’

  Fu Manchu shook his head. ‘He was in Dannemora. In New York.’

  ‘Right,’ Trumbo said. ‘Dannemora.’

  It was clearly a test, and Fu Manchu apparently passed. He nodded at Byrne.

  ‘What you got going on here, my brother?’

  Trumbo gave the man a brief rundown on the situation.

  Fu Manchu pointed at the trashcan. ‘That’s the can?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go get it? I got this.’

  ‘You got this?’

  The man lifted up the front of his shirt. There, in his waistband, was the grip of a 9mm semi auto.

  ‘Nice,’ Trumbo said.

  ‘It stops the rain.’

  As is the way of the street, Fu Manchu got bumped up a notch.

  Trumbo nodded at Byrne. ‘He doesn’t fucking move.’

  ‘Not one inch, my brother.’

  Trumbo stuck his .22 into the back of his jeans, walked over to the trashcan. He tipped it onto its side, began to fumble around. After a few seconds he reached in, pulled out the greasy brown bag. He lofted it, feeling the heft. He looked inside.

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  Before Trumbo could stand up, Fu Manchu took a step forward. He put the barrel of his Glock to the back of Trumbo’s head.

  Trumbo: ‘You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.’

  ‘No joke,’ Fu Manchu said. He pulled the .22 from Trumbo’s waistband, then took out a pair of stainless steel handcuffs. ‘Put your hands behind your back.’

  Byrne watched Trumbo’s eyes shift back and forth, looking for a play. There was none. He was on his knees, unarmed, with a gun to his head. Byrne soon saw resignation. Trumbo complied.

  With Trumbo now handcuffed, Fu Manchu reached into his back pocket, produced a leather wallet, flicked it open. He held it in front of Trumbo’s ey
es. Trumbo focused, read the name aloud:

  ‘Joshua Bontrager?’

  ‘That’s Detective Joshua Bontrager to you, sir.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, a cop?’

  ‘Well, I am,’ Bontrager said. ‘Our Lord and Savior, however, was not.’

  Trumbo said nothing. Bontrager reached up, gently peeled away the false mustache.

  If Trumbo had seen the pole cameras come down out on the block, he had not seen the two go up on the rooftops of the two buildings that formed the alley, cameras pointing directly down at them. The whole time Byrne had been in Ahmed’s Grocery – less than a minute – the alley had been under video surveillance from a nearby van, where Josh Bontrager and fellow officers were waiting to step in if needed.

  And man were they ever needed, Byrne thought.

  The young woman who had been with Bontrager – Detective Maria Caruso – came around the corner with a pair of uniformed officers from the 26th District.

  She looked at Bontrager standing over the handcuffed suspect. ‘Look at you, making friends in the big city already,’ she said.

  Bontrager smiled. ‘We’re not in Berks County any more, Auntie Em.’

  Maria laughed, high-fived Bontrager.

  There was a pretty good chance that Allan Wayne Trumbo did not see the humor in any of this.

  Byrne thought: What did they have? They had the suspect’s fingerprints on the weapon, the weapon was in the system, and they had the suspect in custody, down on his knees in a dirty alleyway in North Philly – where he belonged, at least for the moment – and all was right in William Penn’s ‘greene country towne.’

  Police were currently holding James ‘Spider’ Dimmock in the cells beneath the Roundhouse on an outstanding warrant. Although the resemblance would not hold up if the men were standing side by side, Josh Bontrager and Spider Dimmock looked enough alike for the purposes of this night detail, right down to the temporary tattoo and the stick-on mustache.

  Ten minutes later Byrne walked out of the alley. He had possibly once been this tired, but not for a long time. He approached the sector car in which Allan Wayne Trumbo was safely secured.

  Byrne opened the back door of the car, looked Trumbo in the eyes. There was a lot he wanted to say. In the end he said:

  ‘He had five children.’

  Trumbo glanced up, a confused look on his face.

  ‘Who did?’ he asked.

  Byrne looked heavenward, back at Trumbo. He wanted to draw down, cap the little asshole for target practice, or at the very least send him off with a broken jaw for pointing a gun at him, but that would have ruined everything. Instead, he reached into his pocket, retrieved something he’d purchased inside Ahmed’s Grocery, tossed it onto Trumbo’s lap.

  It was a package of TastyKake donuts.

  Coconut Crunch, to be exact.

  As hectic as the duty room of the Homicide Unit often was – at any given time there could be upwards of fifty people here, sometimes more – Byrne never ceased to marvel at how quiet it could be in the middle of the night. The PPD Homicide Unit ran 24/7, with three shifts of detectives.

  At this hour it was a handful of detectives working leads on computers, filling out the endless paperwork, making notes about the next day’s interviews.

  Byrne put in a call to the primary detective on the Ahmed’s Grocery case, alerting him to the arrest. The man had been sound asleep, but nothing woke you up faster or more refreshed than hearing that one of your cases – especially a brutal homicide – was on the way to closure. The detective, a lifer named Logan Evans, promised to pay for Byrne’s daughter’s wedding.

  It was a figure of speech. A few rounds of drinks at Finnigan’s Wake would probably do.

  Byrne needed to decelerate. Nothing was more life affirming, or exhilarating, than having a gun stuck in your face, and living to tell the tale.

  He grabbed a stack of newspapers, rifled through, looking for the front section. He found it, glanced at the date.

  It was from six days earlier.

  Doesn’t anybody in this place throw anything away?

  He went through the pile again, found nothing more recent. He poured some coffee, put his feet up.

  Before long a short item caught his eye. It was no more than a few column inches, written by a crime beat reporter for the Inquirer. Police everywhere had a love/hate relationship with crime beat reporters. Sometimes you needed them to get the word out about something. Sometimes you wanted to take them to the ground for leaking information that puts a suspect into the wind.

  This article fell into neither category.

  CONVICTED CHILD KILLER TO BE PUT TO DEATH

  My God, Byrne thought. Valerie Beckert was finally getting the hot shot.

  He thought back to the decade-old case. He had investigated the Thomas Rule homicide on his own because his partner at the time, Jimmy Purify, had been on medical leave.

  Investigate was an overstatement. There had been precious little to examine.

  On a hot August night, ten years earlier, police dispatch received a 911 call saying that a woman was observed in Fairmount Park trying to bury something. A sector car responded, and the two officers discovered that the ‘something’ the woman – nineteen-year-old Valerie Beckert – was trying to bury was a dead child, a four-year-old boy named Thomas Rule.

  Valerie Beckert was detained.

  When Byrne arrived on scene he found the woman sitting on a park bench, her hands cuffed behind her, her eyes dry. Byrne gave the woman her Miranda warnings, and asked if she had anything to say.

  ‘I killed him,’ is all she said.

  At the Roundhouse – the Police Administration Building at Eighth and Race Streets – Valerie signed a full confession, detailing how she had kidnapped the boy from a playground near his house, and how she strangled him.

  She did not detail why she had done it.

  When asked about whether or not there had been other boys, other victims, Valerie Beckert said nothing.

  Her car – an eight-year-old Chevy station wagon – was brought to the police garage and thoroughly processed. There were six different DNA profiles found, one of which belonged to Thomas Rule, one to Valerie Beckert. The rest were classified as unknowns.

  Investigators from the Crime Scene Unit also processed Valerie’s house – a large, six-bedroom Tudor in the Wynnefield section of the city – and found even less.

  If she had kidnapped and killed other children, and Byrne was convinced she had, she had either not kept them in her house, or had gone to great lengths to destroy any and all evidence of transference.

  The department, with help from the FBI, used methane probes in both the basement of Valerie’s house, as well a one square mile area of Fairmount Park near the attempted burial site, and found no other buried victims.

  Not much was known about Valerie Beckert. She had no Social Security number, no tax ID. There was no record of her birth, immunizations, schooling. She had never before been fingerprinted or arrested.

  The Wynnefield house, the deed to which was in Valerie’s name, had been recently owned by a woman named Josephine Beckert, a woman believed to be Valerie’s aunt. According to court records, Josephine Beckert died in a household accident a year before Valerie’s arrest.

  It was Byrne’s understanding that the Wynnefield house had stood vacant for the past ten years. The widely held belief that the house was, in some way, a chamber of horrors, did not go over well with potential buyers.

  And now, with Valerie Beckert’s execution date coming in less than three weeks, it would probably go into foreclosure, if it wasn’t already. Soon after, it would surely be demolished.

  It was late, but Byrne knew the deputy superintendent at the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, a 1400-bed facility for women, located in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, near Williamsport.

  Valerie Beckert was incarcerated at SCI Muncy, where she would be held until Phase III of her death sentence began, and then would be moved to SCI
Rockview, which was located near State College, Pennsylvania.

  Byrne picked up the phone, made the call. He was soon routed to the desk of Deputy Superintendent Barbara Louise Wagner. Wagner was a former PPD detective who had worked in the Special Victims Unit for many years until she decided to enter the Department of Corrections.

  They got their pleasantries out of the way. Byrne moved on to the reason for his call.

  ‘I need you to look into something for me, Barb.’

  ‘On one condition,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ Byrne said. ‘Name it.’

  ‘One of these days you and I go to Wildwood, check into a cheap motel, and snog like drunken ferrets for the whole weekend.’

  Barbara Wagner was Byrne’s age, perhaps a few years older, married as hell, with four or five grown kids, and at least as many grandchildren. Still, this was their game, and always had been. Byrne played along. It was fun.

  He needed fun.

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ he said.

  ‘I still have that black negligee from the first time you promised me.’

  ‘And I’ll bet it looks better than ever on you.’

  ‘Sweet talker.’

  Byrne laughed. ‘It’s a gift.’

  ‘What can I do for you, detective?’

  Byrne gathered his thoughts. ‘I need to know about an inmate.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Valerie Beckert.’

  ‘Ah, our girl of the hour,’ Barbara said. ‘Tick, tick, tick.’

  ‘Yeah. Won’t be long now.’

  ‘She was your case?’

  ‘Not much of a case,’ Byrne said. ‘At least not for Thomas Rule.’

  ‘Sorry to say I’m out of the loop on this one,’ Barbara said. ‘Fill me in.’

  Byrne explained the circumstances of Valerie Beckert’s arrest, conviction, and sentencing. He glossed over the details of Thomas Rule’s murder.

  ‘Christ,’ Barbara said.

  ‘I’m Catholic, but I think He must have been busy that day.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  Byrne had thought about this, but everything he intended to say suddenly vacated his head. He went on instinct.

  ‘There were more kids, Barb. I had her in the box for six hours. She didn’t ask for a lawyer, and I didn’t offer. In the end it didn’t matter. I couldn’t break her.’