‘We have a hit on the red van with the Moochie vanity plate,’ he said. He checked his notepad. ‘It’s registered to a man named Anthony Mucinelli.’
‘Let me guess,’ Byrne said. ‘He’s either in jail, on parole, or out on bail.’
‘Door number three,’ Bình said. ‘Charged with assault. I cross-referenced him with Jeffrey Malcolm, and it turns out they both used the same bail bondsman.’
‘And that bondsman is Liberty 24 Bonds,’ Byrne said.
‘Right again,’ Bình said. ‘They’re located on—’
‘Lancaster Avenue,’ Jessica said. It all started to click. Liberty 24 Bonds was two doors down from Miss Emmaline’s shop, The Secret World.
‘Okay,’ Bình said. ‘You guys are spooky. I heard about this.’
‘And I’ll bet you called Liberty 24,’ Byrne said.
‘I did,’ Bình replied. ‘The guy told me they were broken into about three months ago. He said they had some files stolen.’
‘That’s how they’re targeting the vehicles they’re using,’ Jessica said. ‘They’re stealing cars from people who would never call the police.’
‘I asked the guy at Liberty 24 to compile a list of the other files that were missing,’ Bình said. ‘He jacked me around for a few seconds, but I let him know that these files are related to homicides, and that I was going to make his life quite difficult. He came around. I asked him if he had any clients who worked for an exterminating company. He said yes.’
‘The van that was spotted near the Gillen crime scene in Strawberry Mansion,’ Jessica said. ‘The one with the faded cockroach logo on the door.’
‘The same. It turns out the man in question used to own his own bug service, but that was before he turned to a life of crime, and before his current stint in Curran-Fromhold, where he’s been for the past three months.’
‘What about the other files?’ Westbrook asked.
Bình held up his cell. ‘Waiting for that call now.’
At this, the ME’s investigator emerged from the alley, having pronounced Andrea Skolnik dead. The detectives were now free to begin to process the scene.
Jessica snapped on a latex glove, stepped forward. She looked beneath the bench on which the victim was in repose. As expected, there was an envelope.
Knowing that CSU had photographs of the envelope in situ, Jessica reached under, carefully peeled off the tape, removed the envelope. She handed it to Bình, who was on the lead team with John Shepherd.
It was another invitation.
You are invited!
December 2 at Midnight
See you at our thé dansant!
Jessica glanced at the card. Unlike the first two invitations, it was not a week away. The killers were stepping up the game. It was two days away.
And, for the first time, there was a time of day listed.
‘There’s something else in the envelope,’ Bình said.
He held it up to the light.
‘Two invitations?’ Shepherd asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
Bình reached inside, pulled out the card by its corner. It was a rectangular document, light blue in color. It looked to be old, corners bent, colors faded. He handed it to Jessica. It read:
Pan American World Airways System
Passenger Contract Ticket
Baggage Check
It was an old airline ticket from the now defunct carrier, Pan Am.
Byrne took out his phone. ‘You remember that email you sent me? The email about the search you did after the Gillen boys were found?’
‘What about it?’
Byrne found what he was looking for. ‘Some of the hits were about how to paint a swing set, one was about the oil painting of the girl on a swing, another one was about the Fred Astaire movie.’
‘I remember.’
‘And one of the hits was about an—’
‘Ella Fitzgerald song,’ Jessica said.
Byrne showed her the screen on his phone.
These Foolish Things.
The song lyrics were the templates for the killings.
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations.
Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations.
All the references were there. The allusions to painted swings, to the tinkling piano in the next apartment, to the cigarette with lipstick traces, and now, at the Andrea Skolnik crime scene, the Île de France with gulls around it.
And an airline ticket to romantic places.
Jessica scanned the ticket.
It was issued to Jean Marie Sauveterre.
When Jessica and Byrne arrived at The Secret World there was only a solitary spotlight on in the display window.
Although they were not exactly following procedure, they decided not to take the chance of upsetting Emmaline Rose with the request. She was still in Penn Presbyterian, still sedated.
Byrne called in a favor from a friend who worked as a locksmith. He had them inside in seconds.
They entered the shop, deciding, for the moment, to keep the lights off in the main area. As they made their way to the back parlor, Jessica noticed the glow from the front window display washing over the dolls on the shelves. It was eerie. It seemed as if they were watched by a thousand crystal eyes.
The back room was much as Jessica remembered it. Nothing seemed out of place. Because there was no overhead light, they switched on the three table lamps. It helped chase the gloom.
They walked to the bookshelves. Five of the large volumes dealt with the history of doll making. One dealt with French doll-making from 1530 to 2000. The other dealt with doll making in the US during the twentieth century.
Jessica scanned the book on France, found only a single mention of Jean Marie Sauveterre. While Byrne paged through the book on US doll makers, Jessica pulled some of the other volumes from the shelf. Most were catalogs. Out of four books, she found only one other mention of Jean Marie Sauveterre, a listing that mentioned him having been a member of a doll-maker society.
When she slipped the books back onto the shelf, she glanced over at Byrne. He had put his book down, opened to a page near the back. He was staring out through the opening that gave way to the shop, his phone in hand.
‘What is it?’ Jessica asked.
He pointed to the book.
Jessica picked it up, read the short bio. From it she learned that Jean Marie Sauveterre was born in Colmar, France, the son of a cobbler and a homemaker. He was educated at the Sorbonne, dropping out after only one year to pursue the craft of doll making. He moved to Paris and apprenticed to a man who had, in his youth, apprenticed himself with Pierre-François Jumeau, considered one of the premiere doll makers of the twentieth century.
At the age of thirty-two, Sauveterre moved to New Orleans, where he opened a shop in the French Quarter. At thirty-six he married, only to lose his wife a year later as she gave birth to their only child.
Beneath the article was a picture of the doll maker and his child.
‘Oh, my God,’ Jessica said.
59
On the night Paulette Sauveterre gave birth to her only child a, girl born three weeks early – a girl Paulette would name Valérie after her late grandmother – a series of powerful storms lashed the Delta. The former Paulette Giroux, once a celebrated actress on the stages of Paris and Avignon, died from complications from the birth two days later.
She had been just twenty-four.
It would be a week before Valérie’s father, Jean Marie Sauveterre, learned of either event. On those seven days he had been lost to his absinthe fever dreams, consorting, as he would for the rest of his life, with la fée verte.
Jean Marie Sauveterre, newly widowed at the age of thirty-seven, and ill-prepared for fatherhood, had his workshop on Royal Street in New Orleans. The small shop was tucked between a cozy brasserie and a cobbler shop, both popular with the local merchants and residents.
Sauveterre was a doll maker, a craftsman and artist in the
tradition of Bru and Jumeau. Unlike his predecessors in the world of bisque porcelain, he never became famous, nor did his work become lauded and collected by the wealthy.
When he saw his daughter for the first time – a full two weeks after her birth, swaddled in blankets at the newborn ward at the hospital – he knew what he must do. Fueled by the hellish delusions, he decided he would keep his daughter a child for her entire life, crafting each of his creations in her image.
This line, which he called Bébé V, produced hundreds of molds, but only a handful of finished dolls.
Over the next years Valérie was allowed out of her basement room for school, for church, but nothing else. She took her meals from a tray left at her door, and each night, at precisely eight o’clock, her door was locked and bolted from the outside.
In this place that sunlight never graced, a place of small shadows, Valérie’s world was lighted by candles. Her only friends and playmates were the dolls her father could not sell, each one imperfect in their own way, each one a miscreation. Like Valérie herself, each a slightly distorted mien of a girl.
By day Valérie Sauveterre lived in fear and isolation.
It was at night that her broken dolls gathered to play.
As a young teenager, Valérie would awaken before dawn each morning and, via the ducts and stone plenum space beneath the old shop, begin to explore the house and the surrounding buildings. It was then that she discovered the room next to her father’s workshop, the makeshift kitchen where he prepared his absinthe and other homemade potions, consorting night after night with la fée verte.
At around seven, each morning, she would watch the children pass by her basement window, each of them growing in health and stature.
None of her playmates grew. Each doll was to be a child forever.
One night, when she was thirteen, her father left her door unlocked. Valérie braved the corridor, and snuck into his workshop, a place she had never been. There she saw the doll parts – bisque heads, leather bodies, mohair lashes, crystal cut Bluette eyes – all displayed on racks and shelves. She touched them all, wondering which of them were her eyes, her lashes, which of the long tresses were her own.
She went through the drawers, being careful to not disturb any of the contents. She found letters from a woman named Josephine Giroux Beckert, a relative of Valerie’s deceased mother, a woman of means who lived in a place called Philadelphia.
Two years later, as another storm lashed the Delta, Valérie heard shouting, tortured cries of pain and anguish. It was her father’s voice, her father’s torment.
She awoke to a steaming dawn, the mist coming off the blistered cobblestones outside her basement window.
Her door was wide open.
With great apprehension, Valérie stepped out of her room. As she passed her father’s workshop she chanced a glance through the open doorway. Every doll in the shop – hundreds of figurines in various stages of creation – had been smashed to bits. The fireplace in the corner was piled high with charred, half-melted arms and legs and torsos. The floor glistened with shattered crystal eyes.
Valérie crept up the stairs.
There was a man in the kitchen, a heavyset policeman with skin the color of boiled shrimp. The policeman nodded a greeting, averted his eyes. Valérie wondered why. She glanced out the kitchen window, to the courtyard behind the shop. There Valérie saw her father on an ambulance gurney, his face and neck covered in dried blood.
He did not move.
Two weeks later, another stranger entered her home. This one was old and bent, and wore a shiny black suit that draped off his skeletal shoulders.
Without saying a word, the man handed Valérie a train ticket, along with a small, battered valise.
Jean Marie Sauveterre was dead, and his daughter, his imperfect doll, was free.
Two days later, Valerie stepped into her new home in Philadelphia.
60
‘Valerie Beckert is the doll-maker’s daughter.’
‘Yes,’ Byrne said. ‘Did you read the last paragraph?’
Jessica had not. She turned back to the book.
The final entry in the brief article was about Sauveterre’s body of work. It stated that Sauveterre had crafted hundreds of dolls in his career, but a total of only sixteen dolls in his time in New Orleans. It said that, right up until his death, he seemed to be obsessed with making the perfect doll, a small bisque figurine in the visage of his daughter.
Sixteen dolls.
CSU found the number 9 on the Ezekiel Moss doll. The number on Nicole Solomon’s head was 10. The Gillen boys were 11 and 12. The ME’s investigator confirmed that there was a number carved into Andrea Skolnik’s scalp, the number 13.
If the killer’s plan was to take a life for each of these dolls, it meant that there were three more dolls to go.
‘Do we know if John and Bình have made the official notification to Marvin Skolnik yet?’ Byrne asked.
Jessica took out her phone, called John Shepherd. He answered on the first ring.
‘John, it’s Jessica.’
‘What’s up?’ Shepherd asked.
‘Have you made notification yet?’
‘We’re at the Skolnik house now.’
Jessica looked at Byrne. ‘John’s there now.’
Byrne held out his hand. ‘Let me talk to him.’
61
That summer in the house, all her friends were there – Thaddeus Woodman, Nancy Brisbane, Aaron Petroff, and Jason Telich.
It was a glorious time.
Though she could not bring the children to the park, Valerie made the house come alive with daffodils and roses. Each night they played music and games.
Valerie had never been happier.
A few weeks after meeting her newest friend, Aaron Petroff, Valerie visited the Philadelphia Zoo. She loved to come to the zoo in the off-peak season. It was far less crowded, and she had ample opportunity to watch the children.
Lost in thought about how to best handle her growing coterie of friends, Valerie turned the corner near Solitude House – the elegant manor house built by William Penn’s grandson John Penn, near the zoo’s Peacock Pavilion.
She almost didn’t notice the boy and girl at first. They seemed so small, dwarfed by the white stone manor. When she approached them the boy looked up. He had dark hair, fair skin, and deep green eyes. The girl had lighter hair than the boy – a chestnut shade – and blue eyes. They may have been brother and sister, though the resemblance was not that strong. They were, perhaps, seven or eight years old.
They were just sitting on a bench near the house, holding hands, not speaking to each other. There was no adult anywhere to be seen. Valerie wondered if they were being punished, or were told to sit on the bench while their caregiver went for some food or something to drink.
Somehow Valerie knew they were different. They were broken, yes, but not in a way that Valerie was.
Above all, what drew Valerie up the path to Solitude House – and into their world for the first time – was that the boy and girl were beautiful.
As beautiful as a bisque Sauveterre.
When they entered the house for the first time the boy and girl hesitated before stepping across the threshold.
‘It’s okay, mes chatons,’ Valerie said. ‘You are safe here.’
After a brief tour of the first and second floors, she introduced them to the other children. She then led them to her secret rooms, a place to which Valerie had never brought the others.
All the time they held each other’s hand.
When Valerie opened the door, and flipped on the light, she watched their faces. The girl was all but overwhelmed. The boy was as well, but he tried to mask it. It was clear to Valerie that the boy was very protective of the girl.
Over the next days and weeks Valerie watched the newspapers, waited for a knock on her door.
If the children were missed, it could not be proven by the media.
She taught them the basics
of doll mending.
They watched her with fascination as she made her special tea, watched as she crushed the mushrooms, poured the hot water over it, then strained the liquid. Sometimes she would use licorice tea, sweetening it with stevia from her window box herb garden.
They seemed to understand the need to fix that which is broken.
‘All dolls are mended here,’ Valerie told them. ‘This is our workshop.’
There were shelves of doll parts: heads, bodies, eyes, lashes. There was row after row of clothing. A dozen shelves held the wigs.
When Valerie felt they were ready, she put on the old record. The children just sat on the sofa, listening intently. It was a recording of her aunt Josephine, a collection of standards from the 1950s.
‘My aunt Josephine was a great singer,’ Valerie told them one day in July, slipping onto the turntable an old 45 rpm single record. ‘This was her favorite song. It will be yours, too. It is called “These Foolish Things.”’
Over the next few months Valerie played the song every evening, played it so often that the children had begun to sing along with the old recording. Sometimes, Valerie heard them humming the tune while they did their chores.
A few weeks after the boy and girl arrived she began to teach the boy to play the piano. He took to it very quickly, and with great enthusiasm. While the other children watched and listened, he often accompanied the record. After a while, Valerie, while listening from another room, could not tell which was the boy, and which was the recording.
It was during that summer that Valerie began to make her trips to Fairmount Park, stealing through the shadows of the night, her cargo as heavy as the growing burdens of her heart.
Sometimes, she thought, even with the help and company of her friends, it seemed that no amount of care could make the dolls whole again.
62
While Byrne waited for the video feed to be set up, he paced the small room next to the Video Monitoring Unit, attempting to calm himself. He tried to recall a time, any time, when he had been faced with what he was about to do. He could not think of a single instance.
The Doll Maker Page 31