The Doll Maker (4 page)

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Authors: Richard Montanari

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BOOK: The Doll Maker
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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 eyes. 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.’

Barbara Wagner just listened.

‘I need to know if she’s confided in someone at Muncy.’

‘Okay,’ Barbara said. ‘But you know she has limited contact, right?’

‘I know,’ Byrne said. ‘But in three weeks she’s going to have
no
contact. With anyone. And her secrets are going to hell with her. I need to know. The
families
need to know.’

Byrne knew he was hitting this hard, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

‘Understood,’ Barbara said.

‘Do you think they’ll let me see her?’

‘Hard to say. If it was up to me, no problem.’

‘I know,’ Byrne said. ‘Thanks.’

As a convicted murderer on death row drew closer to his or her execution date, contact with outside visitors became more and more limited. In the final days it was down to clergy, legal counsel, and immediate family.

Detective Kevin Byrne was none of the above.

‘I can put in the request,’ Barbara said. ‘It’ll have to clear her counsel.’

‘Who’s her lawyer now?’

‘Hang on.’

Byrne heard Barbara tapping the keys on a keyboard.

‘Her latest is Brandon Altschuld, Esquire.’

‘Philly?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s a PD out of Allentown.’

When Valerie Beckert went on trial for first degree murder she was represented by a rather pricey firm in Philadelphia. Now, when she was no longer news, she had a public defender.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ Barbara added.

‘Thanks, Barb.’

‘You know how to thank me.’

Byrne laughed. ‘I have my cargo shorts and flip-flops already packed.’

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