The Doll Maker Read Online Free PDF

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