71

NIGEL BUTLER’S HOME was a tidy row house on Forty-second Street, near Locust. The outside was as ordinary as any well-kept brick row house in Philadelphia—a pair of flower boxes beneath the two front windows, a cheerful red door, a brass mailbox. If the detectives were correct in their assumptions, a full litany of horrors had been planned inside.

Angel Blue’s real name was Angelika Butler. Angelika had been twenty years old when she was found in a North Philly gas station bathroom, dead from a heroin overdose. Or so the medical examiner’s office had officially ruled.

“I have a daughter studying acting,” Nigel Butler had said.

True statement, wrong verb tense.

Byrne told Jessica about the night he and Phil Kessler had gotten the call to investigate a dead girl in that North Philly gas station. Jessica told Byrne in detail of her two meetings with Butler. One, when she had met him at his office at Drexel. The other when Butler had stopped by the Roundhouse with books. She told Byrne of the series of eight-by-ten head shots of Butler in his many stage characters. Nigel Butler was an accomplished actor.

But Nigel Butler’s real life was a much darker piece of drama. Before leaving the Roundhouse, Byrne had run a PDCH on the man. A police department criminal history was a basic criminal history report. Nigel Butler had twice been investigated for sexually abusing his daughter: once when she was ten; once when she was twelve. Both times the investigation had hit a dead end when Angelika had recanted her story.

When Angelika had entered the adult-film world, and met an unseemly end, it had probably sent Butler over the edge—jealousy, rage, paternal concern, sexual obsession. Who knew? The point was, Nigel Butler was now at the center of their investigation.

Yet even with all this circumstantial evidence, they still did not have enough for a search warrant of Nigel Butler’s house. At that moment, Paul DiCarlo was going down a list of judges trying to change that.

Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez were staking out Butler’s office at Drexel. The university had told them that Professor Butler was out of town for three days, and could not be reached. Eric Chavez had used his charm to find out that Butler had allegedly gone camping in the Poconos. Ike Buchanan had already put in a call to the Monroe County sheriff’s office.

As they approached the door, Byrne and Jessica caught each other’s eye. If their suspicions were correct, they were standing in front of the Actor’s door. How would it play out? Hard? Easy? No door ever gave a clue. They drew their weapons, held them at their sides, glanced up and down the block.

Now was the time.

Byrne knocked on the door. Waited. No answer. He rang the bell, knocked again. Again, nothing.

They took a few steps back, looked at the house. Two windows upstairs. Both had white curtains drawn. The window to what was certainly the living room had matching curtains, slightly parted. Not enough to see in. The row house was in the middle of the block. If they wanted to go around back, they would have to walk all the way around. Byrne decided to knock again. Louder. He stepped back to the door.

That’s when they heard the shots. They came from inside the house. A large-caliber weapon. Three quick blasts that rattled the windows.

They would not need a search warrant after all.

Kevin Byrne slammed a shoulder into the door. Once, twice, three times. It splintered open on the fourth attempt. “Police!” he yelled. He rolled into the house, gun raised. Jessica called for backup on her two-way, then followed, Glock poised, ready.

To the left, a small living room and dining room. Mid-day dark. Empty. Ahead, a hallway to what was probably the kitchen. Stairs up and down to the left. Byrne met Jessica’s eyes. She would take the upstairs. Jessica let her eyes adjust. She scanned the floor in the living room and hallway. No blood. Outside, two sector cars screeched to a halt.

For the moment, the house was deathly quiet.

Then there was music. A piano. Heavy footsteps. Byrne and Jessica leveled their weapons toward the stairs. Sounds were coming from the basement. Two uniformed officers arrived at the door. Jessica instructed them to check upstairs. They drew their weapons, made their way up the steps. Jessica and Byrne began to descend the stairs into the basement.

The music became louder. Strings. The sound of waves on a beach.

Then came a voice.

“Is that the house?” a boy asked.

“That’s it,” a man answered.

A few moments of silence. A dog barked.

“Hey. I knew there was a dog,” the boy said.

Before Jessica and Byrne could round the corner into the basement, they looked at each other. And understood. There had been no gunshots. It had been a movie. When they stepped into the dim basement, they saw that the film was Road to Perdition. The film was playing on a large plasma screen, running through a 5.1 Dolby system, the volume cranked very high. The gunfire was from the film. The windows had rattled courtesy of a very large subwoofer. On the screen, Tom Hanks and Tyler Hoechlin stood on a beach.

Butler had known they were coming. Butler had set this all up for their benefit. The Actor was not ready for his final curtain.

“Clear!” one of the uniforms shouted above them.

But the two detectives already knew that. Nigel Butler was gone.

The house was empty.

         

BYRNE REWOUND THE tape to the scene where Tom Hanks’s character—Michael Sullivan—kills the man he believes to be responsible for the murder of his wife and one of his sons. In the film, Sullivan shoots the man in a bathtub at a hotel.

The scene had been replaced with the murder of Seth Goldman.

         

SIX DETECTIVES SCOURED every inch of Nigel Butler’s row house. On the basement walls were even more head shots of Butler’s various stage roles: Shylock, Harold Hill, Jean Valjean.

They had issued a nationwide APB on Nigel Butler. State, county, local, and federal law enforcement agencies all had a photograph of the man, as well as a description and license plate of his car. Another six detectives fanned out across the Drexel campus.

In the basement was a wall of prerecorded videotapes, DVDs, and reels of sixteen-millimeter film. What they did not find were any video editing decks. No camcorder, no homemade videotapes, no evidence that Butler had spliced footage of the homicides into prerecorded tapes. Within an hour they would, with any luck, have a warrant to search the film department and all its offices at Drexel. Jessica was searching the basement when Byrne called her from the first floor. When she got upstairs and into the living room, she found Byrne by the bookshelf.

“You’re not to going to believe this,” Byrne said. In his hand was a large, leatherette-bound photo album. He flipped to a page about halfway through the book.

Jessica took the photo album from him. What she saw nearly took her breath away. There were a dozen pages of photographs of the teenage Angelika Butler. In some she was standing alone: at a birthday party, at a park. In some she was with a young man. A boyfriend perhaps.

In almost all of the pictures, Angelika’s head had been replaced with a cutout photograph of a movie star—Bette Davis, Emily Watson, Jean Arthur, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly. The young man’s face had been defaced with what might have been a knife or an ice pick. Page after page, Angelika Butler—in the guise of Elizabeth Taylor, Jeanne Crain, Rhonda Fleming—stood next to a man whose face had been obliterated in a terrible rage. In some instances, there were rips in the page where the young man’s face once was.

“Kevin.” Jessica pointed to one picture, a picture where Angelika Butler wore the mask of a very young Joan Crawford, a picture where her defaced companion sat on a bench next to her.

In this picture, the man was wearing a shoulder holster.

72

HOW LONG HAS it been? I know to the hour. Three years, two weeks, one day, twenty-one hours. The landscape has changed. The topography of my heart has not. I think of the thousands and thousands of people who have passed by this place in the past three years, the thousands of dramas unfolding. Despite all our claims to the contrary, we really do not care about each other. I see it every day. We are all simply extras in the movie, not even worthy of a credit. If we have a line, perhaps, we will be remembered. If not, we take our meager pay and strive to be the lead in someone’s life.

Mostly, we fail. Remember your fifth kiss? The third time you made love? Of course not. Just the first. Just the last.

I glance at my watch. I pour the gasoline.

Act III.

I light the match.

I think of Backdraft. Firestarter. Frequency. Ladder 49.

I think of Angelika.

73

BY ONE O’CLOCK they had set up a situation room at the Roundhouse. Every piece of paper found in Nigel Butler’s house had been boxed and tagged and was currently being sifted through for an address, a telephone number, or anything else that might provide a lead as to where he might have gone. If there really was a cabin in the Poconos, there was no rental receipt found, no deed located, no pictures taken.

The lab had the photo albums and had reported that the glue used to affix the photographs of movie stars to the face of Angelika Butler was standard white craft glue, but what was surprising was that it was fresh. In some instances, according to the lab, the glue was still wet. Whoever had glued those pictures into the album had done so in the past forty-eight hours.

         

AT ONE TEN, the call for which they were both hoping and dreading came in. It was Nick Palladino. Jessica took the call, put him on the speakerphone.

“What’s up, Nick?”

“I think we found Nigel Butler.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s parked in his car. North Philly.”

“Where?”

“In the parking lot of an old gas station on Girard.”

Jessica glanced at Byrne. It was clear that he didn’t need to be told which gas station. He had been there once. He knew.

“Is he in custody?” Byrne asked.

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

Palladino took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. It seemed like a full minute passed before he answered. “He’s sitting behind the wheel of his car,” Palladino said.

A few more excruciating seconds passed. “Yeah? And?” Byrne asked.

“And the car is on fire.”

74

BY THE TIME they arrived, the PFD had extinguished the fire. The acrid smell of burning vinyl and immolated flesh hung upon the already humid summer air, steaming the entire block with a thick redolence of unnatural death. The car was a blackened husk; the front tires were melted into the asphalt.

As they got closer, Jessica and Byrne could see that the figure behind the wheel was charred beyond recognition, its flesh still smoldering. The corpse’s hands were fused to the steering wheel. The blackened skull offered two empty caves where eyes once were. Smoke and greasy vapor rose from seared bone.

Four sector cars ringed the crime scene. A handful of uniformed officers directed traffic, kept the growing crowd away.

The arson unit would tell them exactly what happened here eventually, at least in the physical sense. When the fire started. How the fire started. Whether an accelerant was used. The psychological canvas on which this had all been painted was going to take a lot longer to profile and analyze.

Byrne considered the boarded-up structure before him. He recalled the last time he had come here, the night they had found Angelika Butler’s body in the ladies’ room. He had been a different man then. He recalled how he and Phil Kessler had pulled into the lot, parking just about where Nigel Butler’s ruined shell of a car stood now. The man who had found the body—a homeless man who had teetered between running, in case he would be implicated, and staying, in case there was some sort of reward—had nervously pointed to the ladies’ room. Within minutes they had determined that this was probably just another overdose, another young life thrown to the wind.

Although he couldn’t swear to it, Byrne would bet that he had slept well that night. The thought made him sick to his stomach.

Angelika Butler had deserved every bit of his attention, just like Gracie Devlin. He had let Angelika down.

75

THE MOOD WAS mixed at the Roundhouse. For what it was worth, the media was prepared to run with the story as a tale of a father’s revenge. Those in the Homicide Unit, however, knew they had not exactly triumphed in the closing of this case. This was not a shining moment in the 255-year history of the department.

But life, and death, went on.

Since the discovery of the car, there had been two new, unrelated homicides.

         

AT SIX O’CLOCK Jocelyn Post entered the duty room, six CSU evidence bags in hand. “We found something in the trash at that gas station you should see. These were in a plastic portfolio, stuffed into a Dumpster.”

Jocelyn arrayed the six bags on the table. In the bags were eleven-by-fourteens. They were the lobby cards—miniature movie posters originally designed for display in a movie theater’s lobby—to Psycho, Fatal Attraction, Scarface, Les Diaboliques, and Road to Perdition. In addition, there was the torn corner from what might have been a sixth card.

“Do you know what movie this one is from?” Jessica asked, holding up the sixth bag. The piece of glossy cardboard had a partial bar code on it.

“No idea,” Jocelyn said. “But I made a digital image and sent it to the lab.”

It was probably a movie that Nigel Butler never got to, Jessica thought. It was hopefully a movie that Nigel Butler never got to.

“Well, let’s follow up on it anyway,” Jessica said.

“You got it, Detective.”

         

BY SEVEN O’CLOCK, preliminary reports had been written, detectives were filing out. There was none of the joy or elation at having brought a bad man to justice usually prevalent at a time like this. Everyone felt relief that this bizarre and ugly chapter was closed. Everyone just wanted a long, hot shower, and a long, cold drink. The six o’clock news had broadcast video footage of the burned and smoldering shell of the car at the North Philly gas station. THE ACTOR’S FINAL PERFORMANCE? the crawl asked.

Jessica got up, stretched. She felt as if she hadn’t slept in days. She probably hadn’t. She was so tired, she couldn’t remember. She walked over to Byrne’s desk.

“Buy you dinner?”

“Sure,” Byrne said. “What do you have a taste for?”

“I want something big and greasy and unhealthy,” Jessica said. “Something with a lot of breading and a carb count that has a comma.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Before they could gather their belongings and leave the room they heard a sound. A rapid, beeping sound. At first, no one paid much attention. This was the Roundhouse, after all, a building full of beepers, pagers, cell phones, PDAs. Something was always beeping, pinging, clicking, faxing, ringing.

Whatever it was, it beeped again.

“Where the hell is that coming from?” Jessica asked.

All the detectives in the room rechecked their cell phones, their pagers. No one had received a message.

Then, three more times in quick succession. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

It was coming from inside a box of files on a desk. Jessica looked into the box. There, in an evidence bag on top, was Stephanie Chandler’s cell phone. The bottom of the LCD screen was flashing. At some point during the day, Stephanie had received a call.

Jessica opened the bag, retrieved the phone. It had already been processed by CSU, so there was no reason to wear gloves.

1 MISSED CALL the readout proclaimed.

Jessica clicked the SHOW MESSAGE key. The LCD displayed a new screen. She showed the phone to Byrne. “Look.”

There was a new message. The readout declared that a private number had sent the file.

To a dead woman.

They ran it down to the AV unit.

         

“IT’S A MULTIMEDIA message,” Mateo said. “A video file.”

“When was it sent?” Byrne asked.

Mateo checked the readout, then his watch. “A little over four hours ago.”

“And it just came in now?”

“Sometimes that happens with really big files.”

“Any way to tell where it was sent from?”

Mateo shook his head. “Not from the phone.”

“If we play the video, it’s not going to delete itself or anything, will it?” Jessica asked.

“Hang on,” Mateo said.

He went into a drawer, retrieved a thin cable. He tried to plug it into the bottom of the phone. No fit. He tried another cable, failed again. The third one slipped into a small port. He plugged the other into a port on the front of a laptop. In a few moments, a program started on the laptop. Mateo tapped a few keys, and a progress bar appeared, apparently transferring the file from the phone to the computer. Byrne and Jessica looked at each other, once again in awe of Mateo Fuentes’s capabilities.

A minute later, he put a fresh CD-ROM in the drive, dragged and dropped an icon.

“Done,” he said. “We’ve got the file on the phone, on the hard drive, and on disc. No matter what happens, we’re backed up.”

“Okay,” Jessica said. She was a little surprised to find that her pulse was racing. She had no idea why. Maybe the file was nothing at all. She wanted to believe that with all her heart.

“You want to watch it now?” Mateo asked.

“Yes and no,” Jessica said. It was a video file, sent to the phone of a woman who had been dead for more than a week—a phone they had recently gotten courtesy of a sadistic serial killer who had just burned himself to death.

Or maybe that was all an illusion.

“I hear you,” Mateo said. “Here we go.” He clicked the PLAY arrow on the small button bar at the bottom of his video software screen. A few seconds later, the video rolled. The first few seconds of footage were a blur, as if the person holding the camera was whipping it right to left, then down, attempting to point it at the ground. When the image stabilized, and was brought into focus, they saw the subject of the video.

It was a baby.

A baby in a small pine coffin.

“Madre de Dios,” Mateo said. He made the sign of a cross.

As Byrne and Jessica stared in horror at the image, two things were clear. One was that the baby was very much alive. Two, that the video had a time code in the lower right-hand corner.

“This tape wasn’t made with a camera phone, was it?” Byrne asked.

“No,” Mateo said. “It looks like it was made with a basic camcorder. Probably an eight-millimeter tape camcorder, not a digital video model.”

“How can you tell?” Byrne asked.

“Quality of image, for one thing.”

On screen, a hand entered the frame, placing a lid on the wood coffin.

“Jesus Christ, no,” Byrne said.

And that was when the first shovel full of dirt landed on the box. Within seconds the box was completely covered.

“Oh my God.” Jessica felt nauseous. She turned away at the moment the screen went black.

“That’s the whole file,” Mateo said.

Byrne remained silent. He walked out of the room, immediately back in. “Run it again,” he said.

Mateo clicked PLAY again. The image went from a blurry moving image to clarity as it came to focus on the baby. Jessica forced herself to watch. She noticed that the time code on the tape was from ten o’clock that morning. It was already past eight o’clock. She took out her cell phone. Within in a few seconds she had Dr. Tom Weyrich on the phone. She explained her reason for calling. She didn’t know if her question fell within the area of expertise of a medical examiner, but she didn’t know who else to call.

“How big is the box?” Weyrich asked.

Jessica looked at the screen. The video was running for a third time. “Not sure,” she said. “Maybe twenty-four by thirty inches.”

“How deep?”

“I don’t know. It looks to be about sixteen inches or so.”

“Are there any holes in the top or sides?”

“Not in the top. Can’t see the sides.”

“How old is the baby?”

This part was easy. The baby looked to be about six months old. “Six months.”

Weyrich was silent for a few moments. “Well, I’m no expert at this. I’ll track someone down who is, though.”

“How much air does he have, Tom?”

“Hard to say,” Weyrich replied. “It’s just over five cubic feet inside the box. Even with that small of a lung capacity, I’d say no more than ten to twelve hours.”

Jessica looked at her watch again, even though she knew exactly what time it was. “Thanks, Tom. Call me if you talk to someone who can give this kid more time.”

Tom Weyrich knew what she meant. “I’m on it.”

Jessica hung up. She looked back at the screen. The video was at the beginning again. The baby smiled and moved his arms. At the outside, they had less than two hours to save his life. And he could be anywhere in the city.

         

MATEO MADE A second digital copy of the tape. The tape ran for a total of twenty-five seconds. When it was over, it cut to black. They watched it again and again, looking for something, anything, to give them a clue to where the baby might be. There were no other images on the recording. Mateo started it up again. The camera whipped downward. Mateo stopped it.

“The camera is on a tripod, and a fairly good one at that. At least for the home enthusiast. It’s a smooth tilt, which tells me that the neck on the tripod is a ball head.

“But look here,” Mateo continued. He started the recording again. As soon as he hit PLAY, he stopped it. On screen was an unrecognizable image. A thick vertical smudge of white against a reddish brown background.

“What is that?” Byrne asked.

“Not sure yet,” Mateo said. “Let me run it through the dTective unit. I’ll get a much clearer image. It will take a little time, though.”

“How long?

“Give me ten minutes.”

In an ordinary investigation, ten minutes would pass in a snap. To the baby in the coffin, it might be a lifetime.

Byrne and Jessica stood outside the AV Unit. Ike Buchanan walked into the room. “What’s up, Sarge?” Byrne asked.

“Ian Whitestone is here.”

Finally, Jessica thought. “Is he here to make a formal statement?”

“No,” Buchanan said. “Someone kidnapped his son this morning.”

         

WHITESTONE LOOKED AT the movie of the baby. They had transferred the clip to a VHS cassette. They watched it in the small snack room in the unit.

Whitestone was smaller than Jessica had expected. He had delicate hands. He wore two watches. He had come with a personal physician and someone who was probably a bodyguard. Whitestone identified the baby in the video as his son, Declan. He looked gut-shot.

“Why … why would someone do such a thing?” Whitestone asked.

“We were hoping you might be able to shed some light on that,” Byrne said.

According to Whitestone’s nanny, Aileen Scott, she had been taking Declan for a walk in his stroller at about nine thirty that morning. She had been struck from behind. When she awoke, hours later, she was in the back of an EMS rescue, on her way to Jefferson Hospital, and the baby was gone. The time frame told the detectives that, if the time code on the tape had not been manipulated, Declan Whitestone was buried within a thirty-minute drive of Center City. Probably closer.

“The FBI has been contacted,” Jessica said. A patched and back-on-the-job Terry Cahill was at that moment assembling a team. “We’re doing everything possible to find your son.”

They walked back into the common room, over to a desk. They put the crime scene photographs of Erin Halliwell, Seth Goldman, and Stephanie Chandler on the table. When Whitestone looked down, his knees buckled. He held on to the edge of the desk.

“What … what is this?” he asked.

“Both of these women were murdered. As was Mr. Goldman. We believe the man who kidnapped your son is responsible.” There was no need to tell Whitestone about Nigel Butler’s apparent suicide at this time.

“What are you saying? Are you saying that all of them are dead?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. Yes.”

Whitestone weaved. His face turned the color of dried bones. Jessica had seen it many times. He sat down hard.

“What was your relationship to Stephanie Chandler?” Byrne asked.

Whitestone hesitated. His hands were shaking. He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged, just a parched, clicking noise. He looked like a man at risk of a coronary.

“Mr. Whitestone?” Byrne asked.

Ian Whitestone took a deep breath. Through trembling lips he said, “I think I should talk to my lawyer.”