The Stolen Ones

by Richard Montanari

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  Colleen nodded. Jessica wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Do you want to stop?’

  At this, Colleen took a deep breath, exhaled. She shook her head. I’m fine, she mouthed silently.

  Byrne took a few more moments, scrutinizing his daughter’s eyes. Jessica could see that Byrne was having second thoughts about allowing this to happen. She glanced at Miriam. The woman was sitting with her hands in her lap, looking out the window. In the powdery late winter light Jessica could see the young woman who had gone to work at the Delaware Valley State Hospital sixty years earlier.

  Byrne stood up, reached out, touched the woman on her shoulder. She looked up at him. Byrne signed: ‘Would you like to continue?’

  After a moment the woman smiled at Byrne. She took his hands in hers, and formed the proper ASL sign for the word continue.

  Byrne smiled, repeated the question, this time signing properly. The woman nodded. Byrne crossed the room, stood again by the door. Colleen looked over. Byrne nodded.

  Colleen glanced at the laptop screen. She seemed a bit lost. The old woman got her attention, and continued.

  ‘By the time I was promoted to be the assistant to one of the administrators, I had already lost all my hearing, but I learned to lip read pretty well as a child, and I took to ASL rather quickly. At that time there were almost 6,500 patients at Cold River, in fifty-eight buildings.’

  Miriam reached out to her tray, took the plastic cup in both hands. Jessica wanted to sprint across the room and get it for her, but she could see the pride the woman took in doing it herself. When she had taken a few sips, she continued.

  ‘At that time a lot of prefab housing was built to the west of the hospital, and a lot of the staff bought them. Some of them went for as little as four thousand dollars. Imagine.’

  Colleen smiled, signed: ‘A good sofa costs four thousand dollars today.’

  ‘It does?’

  The woman looked at Jessica, winked.

  ‘After that I worked my way up in administration. Andrew died in nineteen seventy-eight. We had no children. Work was my life. Eventually the governor ordered Cold River to be closed in phases. That was the beginning of the end.’ She took another sip of water. ‘Cold River was bad in the later years. We all knew how bad it was.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Colleen asked.

  ‘You have to understand. The nineteen seventies and eighties were a time of great strides in the research, development and administration of revolutionary new medications. Thorazine was on the way out. Prozac was being developed.’

  Colleen pointed to the next question on the laptop, looked at her father. Byrne nodded.

  ‘Did you ever hear of a patient called Null?’

  The woman looked confused for a moment. She turned to look at Colleen, who finger-spelled the word null. Although the woman did not immediately respond, Jessica could see that the name meant something to her.

  ‘You hear all sorts of things in an institution the size of Cold River. At its height, on any given day, there were more than seven thousand human beings in those buildings, and people will talk. Add to the mix the fact that a large percentage of those people – and by no means do I mean this to be constrained to patients only – were given to hallucinations, and you begin to doubt a great deal of what you hear.’

  She paused again, massaged her hands. Jessica sensed that they were coming to the end of the interview.

  ‘There were a lot of well-known doctors, both clinicians and researchers, who passed through Cold River over the years. There was one man who caused quite a stir when he arrived. His name was Dr Godehard Kirsch. They even built that new building for him. G10. It stayed open after the hospital closed. He died in a fire there.’

  ‘When did Dr Kirsch come to Cold River?’

  The old woman looked out the window for a few moments, perhaps gathering her thoughts. The rain looked to be turning to snow.

  ‘I think it was nineteen ninety-one or ’ninety-two. I was only in G10 twice, mind you,’ she signed. ‘And that was only the first floor. The basement was sealed off from the rest of the staff and personnel.’

  ‘What sort of work did Dr Kirsch do?’

  ‘I never met the man, nor knew anybody who did. I never saw any of the documents that they produced, but his work was said to be in the area of dream engineering.’

  Byrne stepped forward, typed a new question. Colleen signed what Byrne wrote.

  ‘Who did you mean when you say “documents that they produced”?’ Who is they?’

  ‘Dr Kirsch assembled a small team. I believe there was an anesthesiologist, a psychiatric nurse and one orderly. They had a funny name. I don’t know if the name was official, but it was what they were known as throughout the rest of the facility.’

  ‘What were they called?’

  The old woman looked right at Jessica when she answered. ‘They were called Die Traumkaufleute.’ She finger-spelled the foreign words.

  Colleen did her best to type this. When she was finished, she asked: ‘Do you know what that means?’

  The old woman nodded. ‘I only know this because my mother’s family were German. The name means “‘The Dream Merchants”.’

  Byrne typed a final question. Colleen asked it.

  ‘What happened to the indigent patients who died at Cold River?’

  The woman took a long pause. For a moment, Jessica thought she might not answer. Finally, she signed: ‘I can’t say for sure, but we heard that many of them were buried in a field across Chancel Lane. In a place called Priory Park.’

  Before they left, Colleen showed the woman a list of names. Robert Freitag, Joan Delacroix, Edward Richmond, Leonard Pintar, Lucius Winter. One by one the woman shook her head. She did not know any of them.

  Colleen hugged the old woman, then turned away quickly. Jessica could see the tears in her eyes. She left the room first.

  As a nurse’s assistant took Miriam Gale’s blood pressure and temperature, Jessica looked at the small bookcase in the corner of the room.

  ‘Kevin.’

  Byrne looked over. There, on the woman’s shelf, were a handful of books. One of them was titled Nightworld by a man named Martin Léopold. She opened the book, turned to the back flap.

  There was no photograph, but rather a short bio.

  The author lives in Philadelphia.

  ‘Martin Léopold,’ Jessica said. ‘Do you think he’s the Leo your friend Lenny Pintar was talking about?’

  ‘He could very well be.’

  While Byrne brought the car around, Jessica lingered in the doorway, watching Miriam Gale sit by the window. Every so often she would massage her hands.

  Before she turned away, the woman raised her hands, signed something. Jessica wondered for whom it was meant.

  46

  Rachel sat in the hallway on the second floor. She could all but hear the sound of her sister’s footsteps running down the hall, for her sister had never walked anywhere. She was always so full of energy.

  Rachel stood up, took a deep breath, braced herself.

  She opened the door for the first time in almost three years. In the past three years the only people to enter this room were the cleaning ladies, and they had dusted and replaced the light bulbs as needed.

  There was no furniture in the room, nothing on the walls. The only indication that two little girls ever occupied the space were the notches on the casing of the closet, notches showing slow, steady growth, although Rachel had eventually topped out at just under five feet.

  Rachel sat on the floor in the corner, near the window. She recalled the time she and her sister had thought the shadow thrown by the large pin oak tree next to the house had been the claws of a giant lobster, and after that they would never eat lobster again, or crab for that matter.

  Rachel held her sister’s picture in hand, a photo taken of her in the days before she disappeared, her hands on her hips, her face fashioned into a diva pout
, a look Rachel remembered well.

  What am I doing? Rachel thought. All these years of looking at other houses, of crawling through crawlspaces, of walking through subterranean corridors and catacombs and sewers. Years of trying to relive the twilight walk they took, to find the raggedy man, to find the man in the white coat.

  Had it all been a dream?

  ‘Oh, Bean,’ she said through the tears. ‘What happened to you?’

  47

  After the party, Byrne and Ray Torrance sat in a quiet corner on the second floor of Finnigan’s Wake. Below them, on Spring Garden Street, the traffic crawled through the freezing rain, which the weatherman promised would become snow.

  ‘I don’t know the whole story, Ray,’ Byrne said. ‘I can’t make a move before I know the story.’

  Torrance put the locket down, took a few moments, began.

  ‘We had this case up in the Northeast. Series of break-ins.’

  Breaking and Entering was not in the purview of SVU. There had to be more. ‘What year are we talking?’

  ‘I think it was around ’ninety-seven,’ Torrance said. ‘Boogeyman stuff where a guy was coming into these houses in the middle of the night, going upstairs or whatever, and sitting in the bedrooms of these little girls.’

  ‘All girls?’

  Torrance nodded. ‘Yeah. All girls. They were all five or six years old. All blond.’

  ‘No assaults?’

  ‘No, believe it or not. That’s just it. This guy is just sitting in their rooms. No sexual contact, no contact at all. The only reason SVU got involved at all was the ages of the girls.

  ‘But there was one case where the guy came back a number of times. It was the first time he did that, as far as we could tell. So we get a call from the chief’s office to shut this guy down. I caught the case, set up a time with this girl’s family, and I went up and talked to her.’

  Torrance called for another drink.

  ‘So I go up there, and I meet the girl. A little doll. Her name was Marielle. Marielle Gray. Her nickname was Bean. I went up, talked to her, but I didn’t get much. The girl had an older sister, but the mother wouldn’t let me talk to her.’

  ‘Why?’

  Torrance shrugged. ‘The mother was a boozer. I guess she couldn’t deal with it. And that was it. There were no more reports after that.’

  ‘What spooked the guy?’

  ‘No idea,’ Torrance said. ‘But you know and I know that these guys don’t just stop.’

  Torrance’s drink came. He took a sip.

  ‘So, fast forward about ten years. I’m working this case, a runaway. Twelve-year-old boy. I’m down on South making a few inquiries, kicking the curbs. I look up and I see her standing across the street.’

  ‘The girl,’ Byrne said. ‘Marielle.’

  Torrance nodded. ‘I’m not sure how I knew it was her. I was thirty feet away, it was night, and it had been ten years. There was just something about her. I knew.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Torrance hesitated, sipped his drink. ‘She saw me, and I guess she knew, too. I imagine I hadn’t changed that much in those years. A little heavier, I suppose. A little slower. But she went from being this little kid to a young woman.’

  Byrne just listened.

  ‘I tried to get across South but it was a Friday night and there was a lot of traffic. A lot of people. By the time I got to the other side of the street, she was gone. When I got back to the office that night I went through my files, got the mother’s phone number, called, even though it was late.’

  ‘Did you talk to the mother?’

  Torrance shook his head. ‘That number belonged to someone else at that point. The guy – this very pissed-off guy who I awakened at one in the morning – told me that he’d had the number almost five years.’ Torrance drained his glass, rattled the cubes, calling for another. He looked at Byrne. Byrne shook his head.

  ‘When I saw her that night I knew she was on the game. I knew it, and I didn’t react fast enough.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Byrne asked.

  Torrance shrugged. ‘What could I do? I shook the bushes for a few weeks, bugged-out my confidential informants. I didn’t have a picture of her, so basically I was looking for a fifteen-year-old blond girl. That describes half the runaways in Philly.’

  The waitress brought Torrance his drink. He knocked back half of it in one gulp. Byrne had never seen Ray Torrance hit it this hard. But Byrne knew that this was a confessional.

  ‘So six months later I see her again. In Old City. She looked hard, Kevin. She’d put on weight. I could see that the streets were making her old before her time.’

  Byrne knew all too well what he meant. He’d seen it himself many times. And it happened a lot more quickly than people realized.

  ‘This time she didn’t see me. She was standing in the doorway waiting for someone. She had shopping bags in her hands, so I knew someone was paying for her clothes. I pulled my hat down low and crossed the street. I was standing in front of her before she could make a move.’

  ‘Is this when you gave her the locket?’

  Torrance nodded. ‘Yeah. I had picked it up at this little place near Eighteenth and Walnut. It was right after the first time I had seen her on South. I didn’t know if I would ever see her again, but I hoped, you know?’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘At first she made a move to run away. I blocked her in. She struggled with me for a few seconds, but I told her that I just wanted to talk. Nothing more. Just talk. After a little while she settled down.’

  Torrance took another sip of his drink, continued. ‘I had rehearsed the speech I was going to give her for weeks, maybe months. Hell, I’d probably been thinking about it for ten years. But when I opened my mouth nothing came out. It all sort of vacated my brain when I looked into her eyes. Her young/old eyes. In that second I saw that little girl sitting at her dinette table. I knew that whatever I said wasn’t going to make any difference. Not at that moment. I just reached into my pocket, and pulled out the locket.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘At first she didn’t want to take it. I had considered this, of course. I had a speech for that eventuality, too.’

  Byrne saw Ray’s eyes begin to mist. He looked away for a few seconds, giving the man time. Torrance continued.

  ‘Standing in that alley, with my hands wrapped around her hand, knowing that she had the locket, I felt better. Not good, but better. There was now a link between us, and the possibility that she would get out of the life someday. I had given her a portal, something I’d rarely been able to do in my whole time in SVU.’

  Torrance drained his glass again, called for another. When he did this he met Byrne’s eyes, and saw in them the concern.

  ‘I’m okay, Kevin.’

  Byrne said nothing.

  ‘I was just about to give it one more shot, trying to talk her in, when I looked into her eyes and saw the fear. She was looking over my left shoulder when she drew her hand away from mine. The alley was pretty dark, but there was a light at the mouth of the alley, in a doorway that led to the kitchen of a hoagie shack. It cast a shadow on the wall. Before I could turn around I saw the shadow getting larger and I knew someone was coming down the alley. Fast.

  ‘The next thing I knew, my lower back caught fire. I was down on the ground. I tried to wrestle my weapon out of my holster but I suddenly felt as if I had no arms. I looked up and saw Marielle with her hands at her mouth. She was white as a sheet.’

  The waitress brought Torrance his drink. This time, he didn’t pick it up. He just stared into the amber liquid.

  ‘Right before I blacked out I looked back at the brick wall at the end of the alley, and saw the shadow of the man who cut me. All I remember was the hat.’

  ‘The hat?’

  Torrance nodded. ‘Yeah. The silhouette of a floppy hat.’

  Byrne didn’t have to ask about the next hours, days and weeks of Ray Torrance’s life. By e
leven o’clock on the night Ray Torrance was attacked every police officer in the city of Philadelphia was aware of what had happened to one of their own.

  In the end, there were no arrests. All trace of Ray Torrance’s attacker, and the girl, were gone.

  Byrne and a dozen detectives went to visit the man in the hospital a few days after the incident. That’s when Torrance told them about the locket, and what to do if they ever found it.

  Three weeks later Ray Torrance left the hospital, and the police force. As far as Byrne knew, no one in the PPD had spoken to the man until Byrne found him on the mountain. Years earlier Ray had given him a map to his cabin in the Poconos.

  ‘Do you have any idea what happened to Marielle?’ Byrne asked.

  Torrance shook his head.

  ‘She might be alive,’ Byrne said, before he could stop himself. He knew how it must have sounded to Ray. It sounded exactly as it would sound if someone tried to hand him the same line.

  ‘No she isn’t,’ Torrance said. ‘She’s dead. You know it, I know it.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Ray?’ Byrne asked. As the words left his lips he realized how inadequate they sounded, as well as how limited the scope would be.

  ‘I need in on this, Kevin.’

  And there it was.

  ‘I don’t know what I can do,’ Byrne said. ‘Back in the day, when you and I were coming up, it was a lot easier to fly under the radar. Now, not so much.’

  ‘I know I’m not on the job any more. Look at me. The job wouldn’t even have me any more. I just want to be in the loop, you know? I’ve got to know what happened.’

  ‘Right now it’s just a found child case,’ Byrne said. ‘This locket doesn’t tie her to any open investigation.’

  ‘My attempted murder case doesn’t count?’

  ‘Don’t go there, man.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Torrance said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was nothing to be sorry about. Byrne would probably have said the same thing.