She was Angel Blue.
He flipped through the file. He soon found what he was looking for. She was not just another stiff. She was, of course, somebody’s daughter.
As he reached for the phone, it rang, the sound echoing in tandem with the question caroming off the walls of his heart:
How will you pay?
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?”
