The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (20 page)

Cullen hadn't thought about Donny Barsky in thirty years, but now he wished those days were back. The days when criminals performed simple, obvious crimes like robbery, battery, murder. Breaking and entering was nice, too, he thought
.
Forgery, embezzling, arson, even the old-fashioned ones like poaching. These crimes were comprehensible. These crimes could be solved and their perpetrators sent to prison where they belonged.

Donny Barsky had been murdered in San Quentin, Cullen remembered. Something about a cigarette scam he'd been running, and somebody wanted a piece of the action. But Barsky got greedy and held out so the "somebody" arranged to have Barsky's throat cut with the edge of a spoon sharpened by hours of rubbing against cement floors. They were stupid. They killed each other. It all evened out. Not like now.

Now the crimes were weird and the criminals weirder. Cullen scowled at the stack of photos he'd just downloaded and printed off a Website called "Orthshu" accessible only through several time-consuming relays and created to eat so many megabytes of hard drive that nobody looky-looing out on the Web would tou
ch it. Orthshu was listed, as th
e law demanded, with all the
WebCrawler
services as a forum for communication within the orthopedic shoe industry. The cover had been picked for its ability to repel the typical computer buff, a male between fourteen and thirty-five who would not be cruising the Web looking for pictures of orthopedic shoes. For the occasional foot fe
tishist bound to wander in, Or
thshu's home page boasted
an elaborate five-color cross-
section of a shoe designed to lessen the pain of a foot condition called plantar fasciitis. There were byte-eating animated graphics with sound, highlighting marketing and sales information. All of it was accurate, updated weekly. Nobody bumbling on to Orthshu would know the site was bogus, a front for FBI communications with a handful of
retired cops and MPs all over th
e country. The photographs on Cullen's
desk, spooled in to his printer as pictures of shoes and then decoded by a rather simple software program, were of dolls.

"Shit," he said, loading the word with as much disgust as he could articulate, which wasn't much. At sixty-two, Pete Cullen had long since given up on language. He'd never trusted it to begin with. Before she left him for a personal injury lawyer with a ponytail, his wife Rae had spent eight years begging him to talk. But he couldn't. For the life of him, he could never think of a damn thing to say. At the end, when she was crying and packing to run off with the goddamn hairball, he'd looked at her hard and said, "This asshole, he talks?"

"Yes," she'd answered. "This asshole, he talks."

So he'd given her the divorce. No contest. Irreconcilable differences. For a long time after that there'd been some kind of jagged place in him, an aperture through which everything just blew. He felt insubstantial and sometimes had to press his big hands flat against the sides of his thighs or his rib cage or his skull just to reassure himself that he had form, that he looked like everybody else. And he was careful about his clothes, his detective's suits and ties. He looked good and he was good. The best, they said. And then one day he'd had enough, took an early retirement from the force and bought a cabin near the little mountain town of Julian, east of San Diego. He hadn't been there a month when somebody he'd worked with off and on for thirty years at the FBI called, and he was working again. When he felt like it
.
The photos stacked on his desk made him feel like it. A lot.

The first one out of the printer had been the usual—a legitimate ad for a collectible doll, placed in a few women's magazines with national circulation and a large number of local Sunday supplements. The list of newspaper ad sites, he noted
with interest, included every state except Arizona and California.

The doll was called Honeybunch, and had been
photographed in a lacy off-the-
shoulder drape that failed to cover its pudgy chest
.
It had also been
photographed nude to "reveal th
e attention to detai
l lavished on this adorable littl
e lady." The code words were in the text of the ad. "Realistic." "Lifelike." "Poseable." The
baby doll had been modeled on th
e body of a twelve-month-old child, but its makeup and flirtatious over-the-shoulder gaze were those of an attractive, and eager, woman. Something about it Cullen thought looked familiar. Something about the porcelain dimples, the cute pug nose
, the sculpturing of the upper li
p.

Pushing away from the computer in his state-of-the-art desk chair, he glided across the bare pine floors to a coffee table, grabbe
d the pack of unfi
ltered Luckies waiting there, and stood. Then he took the Sig Sauer from its shelf by the door, slid it under his belt and grabbed a denim jacket from its peg. The fire in the Franklin stove was banked. Time for a walk. Ducking under the doorframe, he stretched to his full six feet four in the cold outdoor air and breathed deeply. He was happy, he realized. Deeply, incredibly happy. And it was because of the doll. Because of the doll he might just get the second chance every cop dreams of. The impossible second chance to bust the SOB who stepped on your dick and got away with it
.

The deadbolt snapped with a satisfying thunk when he turned it
.
Then he activated the electronic security system which also protected the big Chevy truck in front of the cabin. If something were tampered with, he'd know it
.
First a beeper attached to his belt would signal that a field had been breached. Then the precise location of the breach would register on a battery-powered monitor hidden in one of the five mine shafts on his property, once the site of a working gold mine.

The system had only kicked
in once, when a pack of booze-
addled slobs in camo gear had missed closing time at the Julian liquor store and decided to raid the cabin for available alcohol when Cullen was out walking. They called themselves hunters and all carried sidearms as well as expensive rifles. Cullen had enjoyed blowing the hand-carved stock off a brand-new Remington before cuffing them to each other around the trunk of a huge live oak and leaving them there all night. It hadn't been necessary to say a single word until he phoned the sheriff the next morning.

Walking felt good, pumped up his brain. And the hills were crisscrossed by old gold mining roads, some so steep the wagons had dragged cut logs behind them to slow their descent. Overgrown trails now, the roads provided a palpable map for his legs. Sometimes he walked all night, thinking, like now.

The rest of the photos from FBI Headquarters in Virginia were grainy, far less professional than the slick magazine ad. And the rest of them demonstrated the real purpose for the doll, a purpose buried in coded language only a pervert would see in an ad for a toy. The rest of the shots were porn. Baby porn, mail-ordered to pusbags all over the world. Except there were no laws controlling the production and sale of doll pictures, even those featuring baby dolls so exquisitely fashioned that when shot through a scrim nobody could tell they weren't real. Doll porn, then, Cullen nodded to himself, glowering at the shadow of a Jeffrey pine. What the hell difference did it make? The idea, the very thought was the crime. And he was pretty sure he knew at least one of the criminals.

The dollmaker.

It had been years ago, just before Cullen's retirement
.
More than ten years, he calculated. More like twelve or thirteen. His hair had still been mostly sandy brown then, not stiff and gray. And he'd worn an intimi
dating black eye patch even on th
e firing range, where he continued to score at the marksman level despite having no depth perception. Somehow having only one eye suited him. He learned to see with his ears, his skin. Then or now he could drop anything from fifty yards, even in the dark. Especially in the dark, he thought grinning. That was his magic, that his skin had become an eye. But it hadn't worked with the dollmaker named Jasper Malcolm. Nothing had worked.

The old man was lying. Cullen had sensed that from the first interview. Somebody had tried to kill a couple of babies, Malcolm's granddaughters, in a beach cottage. The mother said a
stranger broke in. That was a li
e. The father said he hadn't been near the place, and that was probably also a lie. But the mother's father, this simpering old fairy who sp
ent his life making dolls, for c
hrissake, had looked Pete Cullen straight in h
is good eye and recited
poetry
!

Or at least it sounded like poetry. Something about doing what you weren't supposed to do and not doing what you were supposed to do, not being healthy. Stuff about God. The old creep had been crying, half crazy. Cullen had wanted to stomp him, just to shut him up. Not that he'd reall
y said anything. That was the li
e. Talking and talking, filling the air with noise, saying nothing. The old dollmaker knew who'd hurt those babies and covered it up with talk. Maybe he even did it himself. But Cullen had never been able to break him. Until now. Now he had something he could use to go back in. The doll in the porno shots had been created by Jasper Malcolm. Cullen was sure of it
.

* * *

Ricky Jr., marketed in 1956 after Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz made history by employing Lucy's pregnancy as a TV sitcom story line, was unimpressive. Made entirely of vinyl, it was indistinguishable from a hundred other inexpensive baby dolls mass-produced from the 1930s on. Jasper Malcolm smoothed his white goatee in a gesture immediately recognized by experienced collectors, even across the crowded floors of international doll shows. It meant that the doll before him failed to meet his standards. Still, the original packaging was intact and featured Lucy and Desi holding the worthless doll. The packaging alone would attract buyers. He placed it in a large carton labeled "American, 1950-1960." Then he turned to the next one.

Called Playmate, the 1955 Play
C
o
.
doll was completely unremarkable except for its molded vinyl head which boasted swept-under bangs and braids that fell to the doll's shoulders. An example of one of the early vinyl processes, it was valuable for the braids, which were difficult to mold. Subsequent vinyl head processing, he remembered, had abandoned braids, topknots, and ponytails because of frequent molding failures. He wrapped the doll carefully in acid-free paper and then bubble-wrap before boxing
it and fitting the box inside th
e larger carton. Each box was labeled with per
tinent information regarding th
e doll inside, the labels block-printed by hand. So far he'd packed over three hundred dolls, and he was tired.

"Bede, Compline!" he called to a large gray Persian cat batting at a catnip mouse among the dolls. Dutifully the animal moved to sit beside the old man now kneeling on a folded length of bubble-wrap, and licked a paw as the man read aloud from a frayed missal.

"I consider the days of old," Jasper Malcolm recited in a voice made tremulous by fatigue, "the years long past I remember. In the night I meditate in my heart; I ponder and my spirit broods..."

He had wanted to be a priest, had known after a while that he would love the priesthood with all his heart. Not Roman Catholic, of course. He was already married and a father when the realization struck him. Episcopalian, then. Dottie, bless her heart, had been so enthusiastic when he was accepted at the seminary.

There had been no way they could have known, then. No way to know of the evil that would shatter their lives. Afterward, after he'd fought it in every way he could and still failed, he accepted what had happened. He could never be a priest, but he could live as one. And so he recited the Divine Office of a contemplative religious every day—Matins at dawn, Lauds before breakfast, Vespers after dinner, and Compline in the dark of night. No one but his cat, the Venerable Bede, had ever shared this practice. It was quite proper, he had realized long ago, that he should live in solitude.

"Visit this house, O Lord; keep the devil's wily influence away from it," he prayed, and then stopped. The metaphoric dread embodied in the word "devil" could not be kept away, not any longer. Kimmy's death, so long awaited, would act as a catalyst now. Kimmy's death would activate a dormant series of catastrophes that only he would truly understand and that only he could ameliorate. Maybe. If only he had someone to help him. But there was no one. There had been no one since the accident almost thirty years ago. Since Dottie's death.