‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am for all of this.’
‘Happy to help,’ Dr Allen said. She stood up. ‘Shall we begin?’
The play therapy room was small, windowless, the walls painted a cheerful primrose yellow. Along one wall was a series of two-way mirrors. At the far end was a 24 × 36 inch box filled with white sand, standing about 24 inches from the floor.
The other side of the room, floor to ceiling, were shelves.
‘And this room is essentially the same as it was twelve years ago?’ Byrne asked.
‘It is,’ Dr Allen said. ‘The carpeting has changed. Twice, I think. It’s certainly been painted. When you have children passing through all day every day things can get messy.’
Byrne pointed at the bookshelves. ‘What about these objects?’
‘We’ve added some things, got rid of some. Many have been broken, of course, and had to be replaced.’
Byrne walked over to the built-in shelving, looked a little more closely at the objects. Because everything in the room was scaled for children, he felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
On the two top shelves on the right were buildings – houses, school, stores, castles, churches, a gas station. Two of the larger structures on the shelf looked to have doors that opened and closed. Beneath those objects were two shelves of vehicles. There were a number of cars and trucks, bicycles, airplanes, a pair of steam shovels. The lower shelf was devoted solely to prams and baby carriages, bassinets and high chairs.
The shelves on the left, floor to ceiling, were people – babies, children, teenagers, adults. The adults appeared to represent every imaginable profession, plus, as expected, kings, queens, princesses, and superheroes.
‘I’m not sure I know what play therapy is,’ Byrne said.
‘Play therapy is a way for a child to convey thoughts and feelings – what’s happening inside of them – without using words,’ Dr Allen said. ‘We ask them to create a world in the sand tray using figurines and other toys. There they can address their problems in a non-threatening environment.’
‘Is it easy to spot aberrant behaviors?’
‘Not easy,’ she said. ‘But young children aren’t yet practiced in hiding or masking their feelings. What we do is really equal parts art and science.’
‘How so?’
‘It is an art because a good deal of the therapy is based on the therapist’s ingenuity, sensitivity, and impulsiveness.’
‘And the science?’
‘This is where the research and clinical studies come in.’
Byrne looked back at the shelves. He thought about his own childhood, one about which he held no bad memories. He wondered what world he, as a six-year-old, would have created in a sand tray.
‘Are you ready to watch the video?’ Dr Allen asked.
‘I am.’
The adjoining room was long and narrow, and ran the length of the mirrored wall in the play therapy room. Along one wall was a built-in desk with four computer monitors.
Dr Allen sat down at one of the monitors. She motioned for Byrne to do the same at another. At the moment the screensaver on all four terminals was Winnie the Pooh and Tigger.
‘What you are going to watch is a play therapy session which I had with the two children. It’s about ten minutes long.’
‘Did you have contact with them before or since?’
Dr Allen shook her head. ‘What you’re about to see is my first contact with the children. And my last.’
She tapped a key. The same image appeared on both monitors. The first shot was a title and time code. The image then cut to the room next door.
It was an eye-level shot about three feet from the floor, perhaps slightly higher. It allowed a clear view of the sand tray.
When the boy and girl walked into the frame, Byrne felt a prickling sensation at the back of his neck.
Was he really looking at a pair of cold-blooded killers at six years old?
The girl was pretty and prim. She wore a white cardigan sweater and dark skirt, along with a white hat. The boy’s hair was neatly combed. He wore a white shirt, buttoned to the top, and dark trousers.
For ten minutes or so Byrne watched the girl and the boy create scenarios in the sand tray. The girl went to the shelves first. She seemed to hesitate before taking any of the dolls from the shelf.
‘When you present a grouping of dolls like this, what choices do they generally make?’ Byrne asked. ‘Do they pick a mom and dad and kids? Do they pick just themselves and one parent?’
‘It depends. Their choices often reflect their home environment.’
‘And if they were abandoned?’
‘Then they might not choose any of the adult dolls.’
As if on cue, the little girl brought a handful of dolls to the sand tray. None were adults. Only one was a boy. She put them in a circle, facing in. She put the boy behind one of the girls.
A few moments later the boy brought over an adult doll, a woman. He placed the doll outside the circle, behind the boy doll, facing the other way.
After a few moments, he began to dig a shallow hole, a hole into which he placed the woman doll, burying her up to her neck.
Was this his mother? Had the boy gotten the note from Crystal Anders, and now she was all but dead to him?
Byrne watched the little boy and girl carefully. They were never more than a few feet from each other. Every so often, when the girl dropped something, or got sand on her dress, the boy would pick up the object, or brush her off.
He was very protective.
Every so often, the girl would turn two of the dolls to face each other, pairing them off, two by two.
‘Why is she doing that?’ Byrne asked.
‘The dolls become the child’s family. They will act out, with the dolls, often what happens at home. So, if they are experiencing violence, they may bang the doll’s head, or hit another doll. They can act out not only what they see, but what they wish would happen.’
‘Is this typical of play therapy?’
‘I expected to see them again, so I treated this as a first session. I allowed them to see a spectrum of things, and do whatever they wanted,’ she said. ‘You don’t allow a child to hurt themselves, of course, but you want them to tell their story and feel comfortable doing it.’
The boy and girl stood next to the sand tray. The girl held a doll that could have been herself. The boy held the adult woman doll. He held it upside down.
‘Whenever you approach the child, you allow them to displace what is going on in the home with these creatures,’ she said.
Onscreen, the little girl took out the tea set, and placed a small cup in front of each one of the dolls. As she lifted each cup to the doll’s lips, the boy followed her. When the girl moved on – after every doll had a sip of tea – the boy took each doll, and placed it face down in the sand.
When they were done, the little girl sat on a chair, facing the camera. She took off her hat, and placed it on her lap.
There, on the left side of her head, was a barrette. A barrette in the shape of a swan.
The same barrette they’d found on Nicole Solomon.
A few minutes earlier Byrne had wondered if he was looking at a pair of cold-blooded killers at the age of six.
Now he was certain.
Byrne stood on the bank of the Schuylkill River, near the East Falls Bridge. He often came to the rivers to think.
Dr Allen had graciously allowed him to take the videotape with him, and promised to make the calls necessary to try and track the path of the boy and girl after Vista House closed.
They now had a direct line from that moment, eighteen years ago, when a teenaged girl in Weirton, West Virginia met a long-haul trucker, a malevolent spirit that haunted the corridor from Atlanta to Detroit.
When Byrne got back in the car he looked at the drawings on the seat next to him. The picture on top was the one with the obliterated little girl.
Room is blue. Room is d
ark.
By the time he reached the expressway he understood.
55
When Jessica entered the Video Monitoring Unit, located on the first floor of the Roundhouse, Maria Caruso was chatting with one of the officers assigned there.
The large room was arrayed with three tiers of long tables, each with a handful of wired terminals where a technician could jack in a laptop, or an all-in-one desktop, and from there monitor any of the city’s hundreds of pole cameras.
At the front of the room was a huge, ten-foot diameter screen, a display available to mirror any of the terminals. Right now, on the screen, was a frozen, high-angle daytime shot of a Philadelphia street corner.
‘What do we have?’ Jessica asked.
‘This is surveillance video of the street corner where Nicole Solomon was last seen with her friend, Naomi Burris.’
‘We have a pole cam there?’
‘No,’ Maria said. ‘This is a SafeCam video.’
SafeCam was a fairly new citizen outreach program whereby the location of private surveillance cameras – those owned by homeowners and business owners – were mapped by the PPD and Homeland Security.
If and when a crime occurred near the location of a particular SafeCam camera, the department would contact the homeowner or business owner to see if there was any footage. Not all SafeCam participants had systems that recorded audio and video to a hard drive, or Secure Digital card, and they were in no way legally bound by law to share the footage, if it existed.
The program had, to date, been a resounding success, at least as far as the department was concerned. With more than 2400 SafeCams in the program, in a little over a year there had been nearly two hundred cases solved.
On the screen, the angle showed Nicole Solomon, with her back to the camera, waiting at the light to cross the street.
Jessica found that she was holding her breath. It wasn’t often – in fact, she could only remember a handful of times, via videotape or surveillance footage – that she got to see a victim of homicide alive in the minutes or hours before they were killed. She couldn’t help but think that Sophie was just a few years younger than Nicole Solomon.
Soon a group of four people approached Nicole from behind. One was an older woman, with a cane in one hand, and a shopping bag in the other. The other was a tall man, African-American, talking on a cell phone. The other two – a young woman and young man – stepped up to the curb on Nicole’s left.
Was this the girl from Miss Emmaline’s shop? Was this the young man in the sketch they had gotten from Denny Wargo? It was impossible to tell.
After a few moments, the young man on Nicole’s left turned to her. Nicole looked at him. They spoke for a short while. Other people gathered behind them and to Nicole’s right, further obscuring the view. It was maddening.
When the light changed, the group proceeded across the street, then disappeared from the frame.
‘Do we pick them up on another cam? One of ours?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I checked all our pole cams for three blocks.’
‘What about private security?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Maria said.
Jessica was just about to pick up the phone and call the Comm Unit when she heard hard-soled shoes coming down the hallway. Fast. Both she and Maria looked at the doorway, and saw Josh Bontrager nearly run by the entrance to the Video Monitoring Unit.
Josh Bontrager had a tendency to run whenever he had important news.
‘I followed up on your visit to Woodside,’ Bontrager said to Jessica. ‘And also on the lead that David Solomon – along with other personnel from Woodside – did some consulting work with Philadelphia County, as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.’
‘What kind of work?’ Maria asked.
‘Well, they had two psychiatrists and four social workers on staff then. If the sheriff’s office or the courts were backlogged with the therapists they usually contracted with, and they needed help with an evaluation, they called Woodside, or some other mental health provider, and they sent someone over.’
‘And you’re saying Solomon did some of this work for the courts?’
‘Yes,’ Bontrager said. ‘But only six times. I cross-referenced his name on the log-in sheets with every name associated with these cases. I found one instance that jumped off the page. I think you’ll see why.’
Bontrager put the printout on the table. It was an intake log of people signing into one of the hearing rooms at the Criminal Justice Center. The readout listed names, room number, as well as the date and times signed in and out.
The date was ten years ago.
Jessica scanned the names. When she saw them her blood ran cold. Those in attendance were:
The Honorable Michael J. Gillen
David Solomon LCSW
Marvin Skolnik, Esq.
‘Why were they there that day?’ Maria asked.
‘It was a competency hearing,’ Bontrager said.
‘Whose hearing?’ Jessica asked.
The voice came from behind them.
‘It was Valerie Beckert’s.’
They all turned to see Byrne standing in the doorway.
‘How do you know?’ Jessica asked.
‘I was supposed to be there.’
Byrne explained to the task force the details of Valerie Beckert’s arrest, and that he had been scheduled to testify at her competency hearing, but was never called. He never entered the hearing room, and did not know who else was present.
‘So, David Solomon knew,’ Jessica said. ‘When Nicole was killed, her father saw that invitation, and knew. Someone was getting back at him for helping to put Beckert on Death Row.’
‘You were right,’ Bontrager said to Byrne. ‘Solomon probably believed Judge Gillen still lived in that house. That’s why he called.’
Byrne held up a fax. ‘Just got this from Mateo. He sent the voicemail recording of David Solomon to the Philly field office of the FBI, who sent it off to Quantico. They cleaned it up enough to hear what Solomon said. He did not say “not now” on that recording.’
‘What did he say?’ Jessica asked.
Byrne put the fax down on the table. The other detectives looked at it. It read:
Sha’aray dimah lo ninalu.
‘It’s Hebrew,’ Byrne said. ‘From The Talmud.’
‘Do we have a translation?’ Bontrager asked.
‘We do,’ Byrne said. He read from a second fax. ‘It means “the gates of weeping are not closed”.’
‘He thought he was warning Judge Gillen,’ Jessica said.
‘Probably so,’ Byrne said. ‘Obviously he was pretty unstable at that point.’
Byrne handed the videotape he had gotten from Dr Allen to Bontrager, who cued it on a VCR. For the next ten minutes everyone watched the recording of the boy and girl. At the moment the camera showed the little girl wearing the barrette, Byrne hit Pause.
‘Does that look like the girl who was working in Miss Emmaline’s shop?’ Byrne asked.
Jessica had no doubt. ‘It’s her,’ she said.
The next two videos to be played were the security video from Home Depot – in which the male subject who purchased the paint met up with a woman by the door – and the SafeCam video of the young man and woman meeting up with Nicole Solomon on the street.
They were the same people.
They were hunting a man and a woman.
‘I’ll get hard copies of these still frames out to the districts,’ Maria said. She sat down at a laptop and began the process.
‘Does this attorney, Marvin Skolnik, still practice in Philadelphia?’ Dana Westbrook asked.
Bontrager sat down at a computer terminal. ‘Hang on.’
He did a search, and soon came up with a website. Skolnik Powell Reedman. He clicked on a tab labeled The Partners. A fresh page loaded with three photographs. The top photograph and bio was for a Marvin Skolnik.
‘It has to be him,’ Westbrook said.
Jessica picked up a phone, put it on speaker, called the office number.
‘Good afternoon, Skolnik Powell Reedman. How may I direct your call?’
‘My name is Jessica Balzano. I’m a detective with the Philadelphia Police Department. May I speak with Mr Skolnik, please?’
‘I’m afraid Mr Skolnik is gone for the day. Would you like to—’
‘Who am I speaking to?’ Jessica asked.
‘This is Julie.’
‘Julie, it’s important that I speak with Mr Skolnik. Do you have a number where I could reach him?’
As Jessica said this she looked at Josh Bontrager. He shook his head. He had done a search for Marvin Skolnik’s home address. It wasn’t listed. This was not surprising.
‘I’m afraid I can’t give that information out.’
Jessica had, of course, hit this wall many times before. It didn’t make it any less frustrating.
‘I’m going to trust you here, Julie. By that I mean I’m going to tell you something, and I need it to stay between you and I.’
Pause. ‘Okay.’
‘Do I have your assurance on this?’
Another pause. ‘Yes.’
‘It’s possible that Mr Skolnik might be in danger. So, here’s what I want you to do. I’m sure part of your reluctance to give me this information is based on you not knowing that I am who I say I am. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘I understand. I want you to take two phone numbers down. Are you ready?’
‘Yes.’
Jessica gave Julie the non-emergency number for the PPD, followed by her cell number.
‘I want you to call Mr Skolnik,’ Jessica said. ‘If you reach him, have him call the second number I gave you. Tell him it’s extremely important that he calls me immediately. If you don’t reach him, I want you to call the first number I gave you – that’s the main number for the police – and ask for me. They will patch the call through to me. Again, my name is Detective Jessica Balzano.’
Jessica spelled her last name.
The Doll Maker Page 29