Jessica found it a bit disconcerting that she could enter this shop, any shop in her city, be inside for thirty seconds or so, and no one came out of the back room. She wondered if something was wrong.
She decided to give it a little more time. She looked at some of the larger dolls on the rear wall; some were the size of life-size children, some even larger. After a few moments, one of them moved.
Startled, Jessica realized that one of the life-size dolls was really a petite older woman. She had been standing there the whole time, letting Jessica and Byrne browse.
The woman looked to be in her late seventies or early eighties. She had cloud white hair and wore a beautiful lemon yellow cardigan over a white blouse. She wore a sapphire brooch pinned to her collar.
‘Are you E. Rose?’ Byrne asked the woman.
‘I am,’ the woman said.
‘Would that be Mrs or Ms Rose?’
The woman took a moment, studying Byrne, considering his question. It appeared as if she might not have heard the query, or felt the answer was beneath her dignity.
‘It would be Mrs Rose,’ she said. She had a slight accent, but Jessica could not immediately place it. It certainly wasn’t eastern Pennsylvania, and definitely not West Philly. The woman continued. ‘I was married at one time, of course, and for years I took my husband’s last name – I keep it still – as was the custom. And, in my opinion, should be now. But with my beloved now these many years in the ground, I haven’t seen the need or purpose of calling myself Mrs Rose.’
‘What shall I call you?’ Byrne asked.
‘Please call me Miss Emmaline.’
‘Miss Emmaline it is,’ he said. ‘My name is Kevin Byrne, and this is my partner, Jessica Balzano. We’re with the Philadelphia Police Department.’
‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance,’ she said. ‘Welcome to The Secret World.’
‘Do you own this shop?’ Byrne asked.
‘Oh, yes. I’ve been here since 1958.’
Byrne held up the card they had gotten from Bethany Quinn. ‘We got this from the granddaughter of a man named Carl Krause.’
‘Oh, my,’ she said. ‘I remember Carl. Very intense young man. Liked to work with miniatures. Not much call for them anymore.’
Jessica wanted to interject that the ‘young man’ had passed away more than a decade earlier, but felt it was not relevant. If the woman asked, she would tell her. Miss Emmaline did not ask.
‘May I show you a photograph?’ Byrne asked.
‘You may.’
Byrne reached into his bag, took out a pair of pictures. One photograph showed the doll they had found at the Gillen crime scene in its entirety, a ruler lying next to it for scale. The other photograph was a close-up of the doll’s face. Neither picture provided any context to either the victims or the crime scene itself. Byrne put them on the counter, turned them toward Miss Emmaline.
The woman lifted her glasses – held on a lanyard around her neck – and peered through them. She scanned both photographs carefully.
‘What can you tell us, if anything, about this doll?’ Byrne asked.
‘Perhaps a great deal, young man,’ she said. ‘But first there is something I’d like you to do for me.’
‘Of course,’ Byrne said. ‘What is it?’
‘I need to sit down,’ she said. She gestured over her left shoulder to a curtained doorway at the back of the shop. ‘My parlor is just through there. Can you help me? I seem to have misplaced my walking stick.’
‘It would be an honor.’ Byrne walked around the counter, offered his arm. Miss Emmaline took it.
‘Would you like me to lock the front door?’ Jessica asked.
The woman looked at Jessica. ‘Not to worry, my dear. There is a bell overhead, and my hearing is as good as it was when I was a little girl in Metairie, Louisiana, more than eighty years ago.’
A few moments later they stepped through the curtain into the small parlor, into Miss Emmaline’s past, into another era. The walls were draped in silk tapestries. The air smelled of lemon oil and mint tea.
And then there were the dolls. Exquisite dolls. All four walls held display cases. If the front window had been like nothing Jessica had ever seen, this was like nothing she could ever imagine.
There were three chairs; two on one side of the room, on either side of a small table; one nearer the curtain. Jessica took the one by the opening, positioned her chair so that she could see through the small gap in the velvet curtains, into the shop. A bell over the door was one thing. A Glock 17 was quite another.
They may have voyaged into the early twentieth century, but this was still West Philadelphia.
‘Back when we lived in Plaquemines Parish, my father was a merchant seaman,’ Miss Emmaline said. ‘He was a big man, you see, well over six feet tall, and he had enormous hands. But still he could thread the finest needle for my mother when she made school outfits for my sisters and me. My mother was a treasured seamstress, known far and wide throughout the parish for her delicate work.’
The woman pointed to a doll sitting in a glass case to her left, a small porcelain figure that looked to be a contemporary of Marie Antoinette. ‘Mama sewed this brocade,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’
Jessica marveled at the workmanship. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
‘Were you always interested in dolls?’ Byrne asked.
Miss Emmaline sipped her tea. ‘Some, but not more than most girls of an age,’ she said. ‘My grandfather was a minister, and this was a time when, if you appeared to live above your means, and you were of the cloth, the people of your parish might look upon this as an extravagance, a reason to withhold their coins from the collection basket. Dolls back then were expensive things, long before they were made of plastic. Dolls were a luxury item in my parish, and a little girl with a collection? Well, cher, that would surely have caused a scandal.’
‘When did you start collecting?’ Byrne asked.
‘I think I became interested first in all things old, not just antique dolls,’ she said. She stopped, again sipped her tea. ‘Now that I’m old I find the notion so terribly quaint.’
‘Old? Not for years,’ Byrne said.
Miss Emmaline smiled. ‘Heartbreaker.’ She glanced at Jessica. ‘Is he always this charming?’
‘Always,’ Jessica said.
Miss Emmaline put down her cup, an elegant china demitasse, continued.
‘When my sisters and I were small, my grandmother only took out her doll on special occasions,’ she said. ‘Mostly on our birthdays, sometimes on holidays.’
‘She had just the one doll?’ Byrne asked.
‘Yes. She was a Bru, very beautiful.’
‘What is a Bru?’
‘Bru is a line of dolls created in the late 1800s in France. Mostly they were made of porcelain, though some were made of gutta-percha. They are considered by some – myself included – to be the finest dolls ever made.’
‘And your grandmother had one of these?’
Miss Emmaline nodded. ‘Her name was Sarah Jane. The doll, not my grandmother. We had to be bathed and scrubbed every time we touched Sarah Jane, had to have very clean hands when we held her. When we got older, and took to tomboying, we had to wear our Easter gloves. Imagine.’
While Miss Emmaline talked, Jessica found her attention being drawn to one of the dolls on display. The doll, on top of the dresser to Jessica’s left, was big, and its eyes were looking off to the side. They seemed to be looking at Jessica.
‘I see you’ve noticed Carlene,’ Miss Emmaline said. ‘She’s what’s known as a Googly doll.’
Miss Emmaline pointed at the doll’s face, continued.
‘You see how the eyes are somewhat oversized and glancing off to the side? This is a trait of the Googly, although many other dolls and figurines and popular images have this trait.’
‘The Campbell kids,’ Byrne said.
‘Very good, young man,’ she said. ‘The two children in the Ca
mpbell soup advertisements are most certainly in the Googly tradition.’
The headquarters for the Campbell Soup company had for many years been located in Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia.
Just about anyone in Philadelphia or Camden with the last name of Campbell was nicknamed Soupy.
Jessica thought about the Gillen crime scene, how the doll was in one corner, and the victims directly across.
Was the doll looking at the victims? Was that the invitation?
Byrne held up the photo of the doll found at the crime scene. ‘Is this a doll you may have sold in this shop?’
‘It is,’ she said. ‘But I believe I have not seen this particular doll before.’
‘Is there any way to tell where this doll may have been purchased?’ Byrne asked. ‘Any markings?’
‘Antique dolls can have any number of marks,’ Miss Emmaline said. ‘The manufacturer’s identification mark on an antique doll often appears on the back of the head, which is usually hidden by the wig. But marks can appear on the shoulder plate, on the chest or back, sometimes on the soles of the feet.’
‘Are these marks stamped in?’
‘Sometimes. It depends on the material. Marks can also be incised into the material, or attached as a label or decal. It depends.’
Jessica felt she knew where her partner was going with this. It made her blood run cold.
Miss Emmaline held up the photograph. ‘It’s hard to tell much from this photograph. If you could bring the doll here, I might be able to tell you more,’ she said. ‘If I saw the mark, I could tell you exactly who made this doll, almost to the day when, and perhaps where it might have been purchased.’
‘We can do that,’ Byrne replied. ‘We appreciate the offer.’
‘Not at all.’
‘May I ask if you run this shop by yourself, Miss Emmaline?’
‘Mostly,’ she said. ‘I live just upstairs, so there is not much of a commute. Then there are a few neighborhood girls who come in and help clean once in a while. It’s not too hard to get girls to work in a shop like this. I pay them what I can.’
A few minutes later they stepped back into the shop. Jessica was glad to see the place had not been burgled. She was turning into such a cynic in her old age.
Byrne turned to Miss Emmaline. ‘I was just wondering. Do all dolls have names?’
Miss Emmaline looked at Byrne as if he had asked her whether or not the sun rose in the east. ‘Of course they do, young man,’ she said. ‘To a lot of people dolls are almost living things. To many, dolls are members of the family.’ She gestured to the dolls displayed around the room. ‘These are my family now.’
Byrne buttoned his coat. ‘Well, again, thanks so much for your time.’
‘It has been my pleasure. I have enjoyed this visit immensely, and I hope I have been of some assistance to the Philadelphia Police Department. You have been an assistance to me more times than I care to remember.’
‘You’ve been a great help, Miss Emmaline.’
‘Please let me know when you might come by with that doll. I’ll try to carve out a moment in my hectic schedule,’ she said with a wink.
‘May I ask one more question?’ Jessica asked.
‘You may.’
‘What happened to Sarah Jane?’
Miss Emmaline looked out the shop window, perhaps imagining the world as it was when little girls had to wear their Easter gloves to handle their grandmother’s prized bisque doll.
‘My mother had three sisters, you see. When my grandfather’s farm was sold, after his death, the contents were well picked over. My mother was the youngest, so she pretty much got what was left at the bottom. The last time I saw Sarah Jane she was in my cousin’s Ruthie’s hands, looking out the back window of Uncle Frederick’s 1937 Ford.’
Jessica wanted to ask if Cousin Ruthie’s hands were clean at the time, but the despondent look on Miss Emmaline’s face told her they were not.
It took a few moments for Jessica to come back to the twenty-first century after walking out of Miss Emmaline’s shop. She felt as if she had just time-traveled. She liked whatever place they had gone to, though, she’d liked it a great deal.
They got in the car, buckled up. They sat in silence for almost a full minute.
‘You want to know if the killer marked Nicole Solomon and the Gillen boys, don’t you?’ Jessica asked.
‘It crossed my mind.’
‘You want to know if there is a mark on the backs of their heads.’
Byrne said nothing. He didn’t have to.
‘I’ll let them know we’re coming,’ Jessica said.
She took out her phone, and called the ME’s office.
Of the eight divisions under the purview of the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, the most active was the forensic investigation unit. In addition to its main charter – that being to determine whether or not a death comes under the jurisdiction of the MEO, and to investigate the circumstances surrounding a death – it sometimes, in conjunction with the city’s detective units, aided in notification of next of kin.
Working with the other divisions – pathology, toxicology, histology, as well as forensic odontology and forensic anthropology – the ME’s office processed more than six thousand cases of death every year. Add to this the division’s bereavement support services, and the recently established Fatality Review program, which strove to find ways to prevent future injuries and fatalities for the citizens of Philadelphia, the office was never silent for long.
All homicide detectives and other police personnel had their ideas about crime prevention, of course, but, for the sake of political expediency, and job longevity, most kept these thoughts to themselves.
When Jessica and Byrne arrived at the huge complex on University Avenue, they pulled around to the rear.
The ME investigator on both the Nicole Solomon and Gillen boys’ cases was Steve Fenton.
A fit, athletic family man in his early forties, Fenton took every body he processed seriously. Where there was sometimes a measure of gallows humor within these walls, it never came from Steve Fenton. It was Jessica’s understanding that, as a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary, Fenton had at one time considered the clergy.
They met in the large intake room next to the loading bays. The bodies of Nicole Solomon, Robert Gillen, and Edward Gillen lay on stainless steel tables in the center of the room.
Behind them they heard the sound of insects – mostly blow flies – being zapped by the electronic zapper. If you spent enough time in this room – and mercifully Jessica did not – you almost didn’t hear it anymore.
‘I missed it on all three of them,’ Fenton said.
He brought the lighted magnifying lamp over the back of Nicole Solomon’s head. Jessica put on her glasses, leaned in. The mark was small, but unmistakable. Jessica stepped back, allowed Byrne to approach.
‘These are really easy to miss, Steve,’ Jessica said. ‘I can’t make out anything. What do they look like to you?’
‘They’re numbers,’ he said. ‘The number ten on Nicole Solomon, eleven on Robert Gillen, and twelve on Edward. I had Dr Patel take a look. He concurs.’
Dr Rajiv Patel was the medical examiner for Philadelphia County. If ever there was an overworked, underpaid position, it was his.
‘Were these marks done pre- or post-mortem?’ Byrne asked.
‘Post,’ Fenton said. ‘No bleeding, no clotting.’
‘Do you know what the marks were made with?’
‘Not sure, yet,’ he said. ‘But I’d say presumptively it was some kind of needle.’
‘Needle as in knitting needle or hypodermic needle?’ Byrne asked.
‘Much smaller than a knitting needle. I’d say it was maybe a milliner’s or a sharp.’
‘A sharp?’
‘That’s the term for your basic needle used for hand sewing. My mother worked as an in-house seamstress for Wanamaker’s, so I grew up around t
his stuff.’
Fenton methodically, and reverently, pulled the sheets over the bodies, turned back to the detectives. ‘I’d say the needles that made these marks are of the kind used for fine tailoring.’
‘Did you take any photographs?’ Byrne asked.
‘I did.’ Fenton snapped off his gloves. He walked over to the desk in the corner, retrieved a nine by twelve envelope. He handed it to Byrne.
‘Thanks,’ Byrne said.
Fenton took a moment, looked at the three small forms beneath the gray sheets in the center of the room, back at the detectives. Whatever he was about to say was not going to come easily. He cleared his throat.
‘My daughter Catherine turns thirteen, next week,’ he said. ‘She goes to the same school Nicole Solomon went to. We have a flyer on our refrigerator door about that movie at the Franklin Institute.’ He glanced again at the bodies. The sound of blowflies ceased for a moment. Fenton looked back. ‘Cathy had to get her braces tightened that day. If she hadn’t, she would have been on that bus.’
For a few moments, no one said anything. The look on Steve Fenton’s face said it all.
Let’s catch this guy.
They rode in silence on the way back to the Roundhouse. Jessica was certain that the images floating through her partner’s mind were all but identical to the images in hers.
The killer was marking his victims with a sewing needle, after they had died.
Neither detective said it out loud, but there could be no mistake.
The killer was turning his victims into dolls.
34
The last interior door in Valerie Beckert’s house – the final door of twenty-six with a lock that required a skeleton key to open – was to a room off the pantry, perhaps once used as a broom closet. Inside were now the remnants of a corn broom, and a fine layer of dust. An upper shelf was lined with yellowed paper in a red gingham pattern.
The skeleton key in Byrne’s hand – a tarnished brass key that had been attached to Valerie’s key ring, a key that did not work in any other door in the house – locked and unlocked this door. Byrne tried it twice to make sure.
The Doll Maker Page 18