The Doll Maker Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.