The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Ca ses

PART ONE

THE MURDER ROOM

• CHAPTER 1 •

THE CONNOISSEURS OF MURDER

The great hall was filled with the lingering aroma of pork and mallard duck sausage as black-vested waiters appeared, shouldering cups of vanilla bean blancmange. Connoisseurs sat at tables between the hearths under glittering eighteenth-century chandeliers, chatting amiably in several languages. When the coffee arrived, a fine Colombian supremo steaming in its pots, the image of the corpse of a young man of uncommon beauty, lying on his back, materialized in the center of the room.

A gray winter light slanted into the hall, as the midday sun had sailed beyond the city, and the image on the large screen was crisp. The young man’s blond locks were matted in a corona of dried blood, his sculpted cheekbones reduced to a pulp. The police photograph had been taken at night in a restaurant alley, and the surrounding scene was obscured in darkness. Yet the strobe light had thrown the young man’s face into sharp relief. Out of the shadows of a distant southern night, the stark, wide-open eyes loomed over the room.

It was shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon, and the fifth and final course had been served to the connoisseurs of the Vidocq Society.

My goodness, said a short-haired young woman in a red dress. Patting her mouth with a napkin, she excused herself from the table and, a hand over her mouth, hurried to the door. William Fleisher, a big man in a magnificent blue suit, WLF embroidered on his custom shirt, sadly shook his large, bearded head. We need to do a better job screening guests, he said. Richard Walter, his gaunt cheekbones sunken in the wan light, glared at the departing figure. Frank Bender—clad in a tight black T-shirt and jeans, the only man in the hall not wearing a suit—whispered to the detective next to him, Nice legs.

Fleisher shook his head in wonderment at the two eccentric, moody geniuses with whom he had thrown in his lot. His partners were criminologists without peer or precedent in his thirty years with the feds.

Forensic psychologist Richard Walter was the coolest eye on murder in the world. Tall and acerbic, he spoke with a clipped propriety that had earned him the moniker the Englishman from certain criminal elements. Walter had spent twenty years treating the most violent psychopaths in the state of Michigan at the largest walled penitentiary in the world, in Jackson, and at one of the toughest, the old Romanesque castle in Marquette on Lake Superior. His habit of peering over the top of his owlish black glasses and boring into the souls of inmates was known as the Marquette stare, and it was a look to be avoided at all costs. He employed it to crack the façade of psychopaths. Walter was unsurpassed in his understanding of the darkest regions of the heart. In his spare time, moonlighting as a consulting detective, he was one of the small group of American criminologists who invented modern criminal profiling in the 1970s and ’80s to battle serial killers.

At Scotland Yard, which used him on the most extreme murder cases, he was known as the Living Sherlock Holmes—an epithet that horrified him.

"Richard looks like Basil Rathbone in The Hound of the Baskervilles , Fleisher said. He talks like him, he thinks like him."

"Whenever someone says that, Walter said, I look away and wait for the moment to pass, as if someone has just farted."

Frank Bender was the most celebrated forensic artist working at that time, perhaps in history. The wiry ex-boxer was muscled and balding, with a Van Dyke beard and piercing hazel eyes. For the occasion, he wore long sleeves that concealed his Navy tattoos. Bender, who grew up in tough North Philadelphia with bullets hitting the row house wall, was high school–educated, blunt-spoken, happily sex-addicted, and a psychic—a gift he was shy about in the roomful of cops. But cops were awed by his ability to keep six or seven girlfriends happy as well as his wife, and to catch Most Wanted mass murderers with a sketchpad and scalpel.

Frank, Walter liked to tease him. You would have been burned at the stake in the seventeenth century. Now you’ll just get shot in the back.

The tall, melancholy, deductive Walter and the manic, intuitive Bender were blood brothers and partners on major cases. A detective duo without precedent, the psychologist and artist were capable of penetrating secrets of the living and the dead. When they could stand each other.

Bender saw dead people; Walter was contemptuous of spiritualism. The artist counted his sexual conquests in the hundreds; the psychologist, divorced, shrank from the touch of man, woman, child, dog, and cat. Walter was the most orderly mind on a murder, Bender the most chaotic.

William Lynn Fleisher was the glue that held the three together—the one, friends said, with a sail attached to the mast. The sartorial big man was the number two in charge of United States Customs law enforcement in three states, a world-class polygraph examiner and interrogator, a former FBI special agent, and an ex–Philadelphia beat cop. Fleisher was obsessed with the truth, had made himself a scholar of the history of truth-finding and an expert at distinguishing the truth from a lie. He used the polygraph to try to peer into the hearts of men to judge them, but really what he wanted to do was redeem them—both the criminals whose psychophysiological signs spiked with guilt, and their tragic victims whose suffering society forgot. The big man, it was said by his special agents, had gained a hundred pounds to make room for his heart.

Bender and Walter were the most astonishing investigative team Fleisher had ever seen, equal parts reason and revelation, when they turned their combustible gifts on a killer and not on each other, like a man trying to extinguish his own shadow. The stout federal agent was the administrator who allowed them to take shape and function in the world.

They had met that morning in Bender’s hall of bones, where a legendary and especially terrifying mob hit man had been the force that first brought them together, bonded in their fierce and awkward way, to create a private club of forensic avengers. Fleisher was sipping coffee with Bender at the kitchen table when the thin man entered the warehouse studio, nose wrinkled in disapproval at the cat smells and whatever else.

Richard! Bender shouted, pumping Walter’s hand enthusiastically, yet careful not to give a manly hug. Let me show you my new painting!

It was an enormous, brightly colored oil portrait of one of his many girlfriends, rendered in paint as thick as cake frosting. It was an eight-foot frontal nude; from the left nipple dangled a real brass ring.

Chrissie has the cutest little butt, Bender said quietly, smiling as if visited by a wonderful memory.

Walter stood with his nose upturned, which pushed his mouth into a frown, studying the painting for a long moment.

It’s smut, Frank, he declared, turning away. Simple smut. Bender howled with delight, as if there was no greater compliment. Walter glared at him. "Frank, Jesus Christ, you’re almost sixty years old, and you’re behaving like a fifteen-year-old Bolivian sex slave houseboy! You’re using sex as an antidote to depression. As I have tried to explain, at our age it is not healthy for one to live as if one is poised before a mirror ringed with stage lights. One day the lights will go out and you will look in the mirror and see nothing at all.

Now I’ll take some coffee, black, if it’s not too much trouble, Walter added. I’m not fussy, so long as it wasn’t boiled with a head.

Now with Fleisher in the great hall, Bender and Walter greeted each other warmly. The three men radiated an energy that seemed to animate the room. The habitual sadness in Fleisher’s brown eyes lifted like a mist as he looked proudly across the gathering. All morning forensic specialists from around the globe had been quietly arriving at Second and Walnut streets in Philadelphia. They had gathered as they arrived in the high-ceilinged Coffee Room and Subscription Room on the first floor of the tavern, where colonists had once discussed politics, trade, and ship movements over the latest magazines and Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. Fleisher had felt the heady buzz of reunited friends, peers, and rivals. But now as he studied the assembly of sleuths from seventeen American states and eleven foreign countries, he sensed that something special was happening. Each man and woman was more renowned than the next.

There was FBI agent Robert Ressler, tall and silver-haired, who had confronted Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and more serial killers, a term he coined, than anyone in history. He was accepting congratulations, and no small amount of teasing, for The Silence of the Lambs, the new hit movie featuring Hannibal The Cannibal Lecter being hunted by the FBI’s Jack Crawford, a character based partly on Ressler. Ressler was never far from his cohort Richard Walter. They were two of the greatest profilers in the world.

Of equal distinction were the forensic pathologists. Their table included Dr. Hal Fillinger of Philadelphia, who had proven that the Unicorn Killer, fugitive Ira Einhorn, had murdered his girlfriend Holly Maddux; Fillinger had arrived in his big white Cadillac with the Homicide Hal vanity plates. Next to him sat Dr. Richard Froede of Arizona, who would autopsy the remains of kidnapped CIA agent William Buckley, tortured, murdered, and dumped at a Beirut roadside by Islamic jihadists. Among the Philadelphia cops was Frank Friel, the former homicide captain who solved the 1981 assassination of mob underboss Philip Chicken Man Testa, immortalized in Bruce Springsteen’s song Atlantic City: . . . they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night . . . Fleisher saw noted investigators of the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, and a CIA friend who was leading the bureau’s secret war on Afghanistan, sitting with a colleague, a young blond female spook who loathed to show her face in public, even here. At the French table, with the agents from Interpol in Lyon, sat the director of Brigade de la Sûreté in Paris, the French equivalent of the FBI. Sûreté, founded in 1811 by Vidocq, had been the very first state investigative agency, later inspiring the creation of the FBI and Scotland Yard.

The chamber on the second floor of the City Tavern was the historic Long Room, forty-four feet long and narrow with a soaring chapel ceiling, the first ballroom in the New World, where General George Washington had toasted his election to the presidency as cannons boomed across the city and Madeira glasses smashed. By modern standards it was austere, a pale green chamber with chair rails and candle sconces. But now it had been arranged to re-create the spirit of a second-floor chamber in Paris in 1833. In the upstairs room of No. 12 rue Cloche-Perce, Vidocq had run the first private detective agency in history, Le Bureau des Renseignements (Office of Information), seventeen years before the Pinkerton Agency was founded in the United States. It was the first room in history designed for a group of men to systematically deduce and brainstorm solutions to murder cases.

In the north corner of the room, overlooking the Delaware River, a bronze bust of Eugène François Vidocq rested on an oak pedestal. The wide, arrogant face was stippled in shadows from the heavy green drapes, beneath crossed French and American flags. In the room at No. 12 rue Cloche-Perce, in the flickering shadows of hissing gaslights, Vidocq and his men kept intricate records to track criminals’ patterns. They discussed motive and modus operandi in greater detail than ever before in history. They made plaster casts of shoe impressions and studied bullets to link them to crimes. They worked under paintings of Damiens being quartered, John the Baptist losing his head, and Ravaillac being tortured. They were the first modern criminologists. Convinced of their superior knowledge of the criminal mind, Vidocq had chosen them from the ranks of ex-convicts, like himself.

Each of the men and women at the long tables wore a red-white-blue pin on their lapels—Les Couleurs, the colors of France, the signature of their status as Vidocq Society Members (VSMs). There were eighty-two VSMs, one for each year of Vidocq’s life. It was the world’s most exclusive club, open, regardless of race, sex, age, or national origin, only to the best detectives and forensic scientists on the planet. They had been called the greatest gathering of forensic detectives ever assembled in one room. No police agency in the world has the luxury of this kind of talent, Fleisher said. The New York Times declared the Vidocq Society The Heirs of Holmes. This is not a gathering of a ragtag bunch of Baker Street Irregulars playing dutiful amanuensis to Sherlock Holmes’s genius, the Times said. Nor are they a bunch of good-natured Archie Goodwins, filling the role of narrator and legman to the sedentary but brilliant Nero Wolfe in the mystery novels of Rex Stout. . . . It is a group that collectively has hundreds of years of crime-solving experience.

The Vidocq Society’s mission was simple and straightforward: As many as one in three murders in the United States went unsolved. It was a well of suffering scarcely known to the journalists who claimed crime was sensational and overblown, or the millions of Americans entertained nightly by it on TV. Murder was a scourge that had taken more than a million lives, more than most of the American wars ever fought in the twentieth century. Cops were overworked, departments underfunded; the criminal justice system favored the rights of criminals over victims. In a world that had forgotten its heroes, they resolved, by the light of a twelfth-century chivalric pledge, to hunt down murderers in cold cases, punish the guilty, free the innocent, and avenge, protect, and succor families victimized by murder. They resolved to work pro bono rather than swat a golf ball around in Florida or Arizona. They met on the third Thursday of every month; they were the Thursday Club. The eighty-two of them pledged themselves to their cause until death, when the rosette would be pinned on another man or woman chosen to fight for a better world.

The old Victorian brownstone on Locust Street in Philadelphia, headquarters of the Vidocq Society, was besieged with requests from around the world from cops and victims seeking an audience in the private chamber in City Tavern. A congressman who wanted to solve a murder in his family. A federal agent in Washington who needed another pair of eyes on the assassination of a woman agent in broad daylight while jogging. A young, small-town Tennessee cop overmatched by an elderly millionaire serial killer who moved from state to state killing his wives. But the Vidocq Society would not touch a case unless it was a murder, the victim had committed no crimes, and the case was at least two years old, officially a cold case. Our mission is to help the police at their request, working quietly in the background without fanfare, to act as an agent for justice, Fleisher said. In all cases, the society required the presence in the room of the municipal police officers, state or federal agents, or government prosecutors working on the cold case; families looking for vengeance became too emotional without official support. Yet in rare instances, when police corruption was suspected, an ordinary citizen was granted an audience before the Vidocq Society. This afternoon was one of those cases, when an ordinary citizen had earned an audience before the forensic court of last resort.

At one o’clock, Fleisher stood at the lectern and welcomed them from four continents to Philadelphia and the monthly convening of the Vidocq Society. Before lunch, he had led them in the Pledge of Allegiance, hand clamped over his heart, his voice the loudest in the room. He had introduced a pastor who asked that God favor and guide their undertakings for justice. Now Fleisher loosened the room with a joke about their purpose, to enjoy my great hobby, which is lunch. Then he reminded them somberly that their work was to speak for the dead who cannot speak for themselves. It was sacred work.

The essential method that Fleisher, Bender, and Walter had resurrected from the nineteenth century was deceptively simple: They had filled a room with detectives to unmask a crime of murder. Like Vidocq’s ex-cons, though far more sophisticated, they had at their disposal the most advanced forensic tools of their age. Busboys swarmed out of the kitchen and swept away the last of the silver and china, carded the remaining crumbs from the white tablecloths. As the coffee was poured, the historic chamber was no longer the Long Room. It was the Murder Room, reborn.

At ten past one, Fleisher introduced Mr. Antoine LeHavre of Louisiana. A rotund man in his forties with dark hair and a gentlemanly manner, LeHavre wore a sports jacket and eyes burdened with woe. He stood at the lectern, slightly to the right of the gruesome image of his slain friend. There was an air of anticipation, as never before had an ordinary citizen presented to the Vidocq Society, alone.

LeHavre began by thanking the society for inviting him. I know that you better than anyone else understand what I’ve been through, he said. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t do it anymore alone.

They had all seen enough cases to know the Murder Room was a place to walk far around, a step in life to bypass if you could. The chamber was invisible to a happy man. Agony lit the way. The room appeared to the suffering. They had seen his like before. He was one of the walking dead, zombified by the unsolved murder of a friend or loved one, a man willing to crawl to the end of the Earth to right a terrible wrong. But they saw something else as well, also well known among them: After four courses served hot, Antoine LeHavre was ready for revenge, served ice-cold.

• CHAPTER 2 •

THE MAN WHO GOT AWAY WITH MURDER

The killer got away with it—that’s what he couldn’t accept. The cops on the take didn’t bother him anymore, though he hoped they would be punished. Nor did the blind coroner, the witnesses who saw nothing, the deaf and dumb DA. He’d forgiven them all, even the hit man who kept his address on file. Lastly his callow lawyer who said, Let it go—there’s too much power against you. Let it go, Antoine. It’s how the world works. It’s the mob, for Chrissake. Which was a good point, an excellent point, except he couldn’t let Paul Bernard Allain go.

Allain’s bloodied face still shimmered in his dreams. His best friend was beaten to death right before his eyes, and he stood there helpless to pull him out of it. He couldn’t sit now and watch Paul go all the way, slip into infinity, unredeemed.

The man who got away with murder was going to pay.

As strong as his feelings were, he didn’t want revenge, only justice. Antoine LeHavre told his story simply and directly. He wanted to convey his gratitude for being granted an audience with the investigators, especially as a private citizen. He thanked Fleisher, who had said, Don’t worry, we’ll solve it.

A respectful hush had fallen over the room as LeHavre stood at the lectern. The tall windows reduced the sounds of the city to a distant hum. On the sidewalk below, tourists walking to Independence Hall passed the old brick tavern at Second and Chestnut streets without a glance; once the grandest establishment in the New World, the City Tavern was an Enlightenment castle lost in time. As Fleisher stepped onto the wide-plank floor, he had fallen under the room’s familiar spell. A history lover, Fleisher knew that Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and Franklin had dined here nightly during the Constitutional Convention, enjoying a feast of Reason and a flow of soul. The Masons held their first secret rituals on the North American continent in this room.

As LeHavre began his presentation, Fleisher thought of the tavern’s round pediment window, now obscured by taller buildings, which once commanded the New World harbor. It was the Masonic All-Seeing Eye that had blessed the colonies with the benediction Annuit Coeptis, God is favorable to our undertakings. He silently prayed that God was still watching.

LeHavre was a furniture manufacturer in Louisiana, a civic leader. In the middle of June seven years earlier, he had taken a dozen of his employees, including Allain, a valuable office manager and a friend, to a minor-league baseball game under the lights. Afterward, they all repaired to a restaurant-bar. There Allain had become inebriated, and, out of character, made a small scene. The last LeHavre saw of him alive, he was being led out a side door by a bouncer. It all happened with a surreal speed. By the time LeHavre located Allain, he witnessed the end of a struggle in which two bouncers beat the young man unconscious. He never regained consciousness. LeHavre had been stunned and confused. Allain had no enemies. He was a young man with a wife and two young children, a churchgoer. The police and a series of private eyes were no help. His best guess was that it was a tragic misunderstanding: Allain, who was rarely inebriated and couldn’t handle it, had acted out and the bouncers overreacted and killed him. He suspected the police and DA had stonewalled the investigation at the request of the bar owners, who had well-known ties to the mob.

LeHavre was giving the presentation he had provided to the police, who had feigned interest seven years earlier. The second slide was even more gruesome: a close-up of the side of Allain’s head, severely battered, leaking what appeared to be cranial fluid. Murmurs swept the tables. Fleisher felt his own indrawn breath, the familiar welling behind the eyes. He couldn’t help himself: The view of a young man’s corpse always reminded him of the yearnings and lost promise of his own youth.

The Vidocq Society had become famous for cracking cases with its freewheeling style of investigation. Now, with a nod from Fleisher, it began.

Has any DNA testing been done? Fleisher asked.

No, LeHavre said. Blood and hair samples were lost before there was a chance to do any testing.

What do you mean, lost? asked a Navy intelligence officer.

There’s a receipt for the samples in the evidence locker. But the samples disappeared. The DA has refused to look into it.

Have you tried to exhume the body? Bender asked.

Yes, LeHavre replied. He was awaiting a ruling on his petition to do just that.

At the tables, the detectives shifted and rustled as they studied the police file and coroner’s report. Ressler, the famed FBI agent, leaned over to whisper to Homicide Hal, the white-haired dean of Philadelphia coroners, and Homicide Hal nodded. Walter and Bender kept their own counsel.

The room was silent, like an ocean drawing back, Walter recalled. As the last round of coffee was poured, the questions came in a burst, from forensic odontologists and medical examiners, explosives and firearms specialists, FBI, DEA, IRS, forensic anthropologists, ritual-murder experts, and psychiatrists.

Did the bouncer and Allain have a prior relationship? asked an NYPD homicide detective.

No, LeHavre said.

During the fight, Allain’s body had slammed against a door in the bar, splattering it with blood. Do you still have the door? Have tests been run on it?

No, LeHavre said. The door was repainted. Tests were never conducted on it, to his knowledge.

How have you documented the bar’s connection to the mob?

He hadn’t, but it was well known in the business community.

How long had you known the victim?

I met him when I hired him nine years ago.

Were you drinking with him that night?

No. I was at a table with other friends and employees.

What was your relationship?

He was one of my best employees. He came to me without a college education. We hire MBAs out of Vanderbilt and Tulane, but Paul made himself into one of the most capable managers I’ve ever had. He was exceptionally bright and dedicated, a natural leader.

The grilling continued for half an hour. As the questions and answers volleyed back and forth, LeHavre came alive. He seemed to sense the society’s real interest and a burden lifting. His whole manner had changed; in place of stoic resignation his face brightened, his answers grew more detailed and energetic. After years of carrying the investigative load by himself, stonewalled by the police, he stopped in the middle of the questioning to openly thank the Vidocq Society again. Frankly, after all this time going it alone, I’m overwhelmed at the level of interest and support.

This was a common response to the society’s efforts, although stoic law enforcement officers seldom expressed it aloud. Fleisher, right in front of LeHavre at the head table, sat beaming.

By 2 P.M., the men and women at the tables began to rustle in their chairs. Fleisher looked conspicuously at his wristwatch, and looked up and signaled to LeHavre that the session was over.

The VSMs had agencies to run, their own private cases to work, planes to catch. If members were interested enough to form a working group to dig deeper into the case, that would come later.

Fleisher joined LeHavre at the lectern. Thank you for coming, he said. We hope we’ve helped provide Mr. LeHavre with some new leads, taken the case a way down the path toward justice. As you know, he has no official help from law enforcement, so if any of you are interested in taking this further, you know where to find me. He grinned. Meanwhile, we’d like to give you this small token of appreciation for appearing before the Vidocq Society—the very first tool of deduction. He opened a small, polished wooden box and held up a wood-handled magnifying glass. For an instant the curved glass blazed with light.

Fleisher put the glass back in its box as the VSMs were standing to leave. Everybody, wait, he called out. Frank has something else.

Everyone sat down as Bender stood, his pure line of black emphasizing his bald head and white goatee, and waited a bit impatiently for it to be over, although they knew the forensic artist wouldn’t take long. While his partner Richard Walter possessed an arch, erudite, verbose style, Bender was known to be brutally plain and blunt-spoken, true to his Philadelphia row house roots. The muscular artist lowered his head, his eyes disappearing in shadows under the heavy brow, raised his arm to the front of the room, and pointed directly at LeHavre.

I know who killed Allain, he said evenly. You did. For my money, you’re the murderer.

An uproar swept the room. Fleisher stood and called for order. LeHavre’s face drained of color, but he said nothing. Then all eyes turned to Walter, the blade of a man in a blue suit, as he walked to the front of the gathering and asked for silence.

Ladies and gentlemen, he said, I might be wrong, OK, but I haven’t been wrong since 1949. Tittering laughter, a lone guffaw. Walter turned and stared at LeHavre. My impetuous friend may jump to wild, unsupported conclusions on occasion, but as it happens, in this instance Frank Bender is indeed quite right—you, sir, are quite clearly a psychopath. The profiler removed his spectacles, revealing small blue eyes set in a baleful stare.

Walter coolly described the presenter as a classic murdering personality who had sex with his employee before he killed him. LeHavre stood at the podium, his face a blank mask, and said nothing.

The first clue, Walter calmly noted, was that he detected a grand, slightly overinflated presence in our guest. I picked up what I considered to be a covered, macho effeminate voice, just that clip of language that made me raise my eyebrow and look up at him, notice him as it were, in a new way. Walter arched his left eyebrow for emphasis.

Studying the photographs of the young man who is the victim in this case, as it happens a young and very handsome man, it became clear to me the nature of the friendship the two men enjoyed, at least for a time. It was clearly a biblical alliance—the young, handsome man and the older, powerful but less attractive boss—and the whole issue of jealousy had come into play. And of course in these situations the guy who is the boss controls the money.

Walter looked up at the chandelier as if in contemplation. Now then, many times in such relationships, as one observes them, he said, you kiss the hand you dare not bite. But such relationships are notoriously unstable, especially in the homosexual realm. Almost always there comes a time where the young one is unfaithful, untrue, or goes in search of a new alliance, and what we have is punishment coming back—if this guy can’t have him nobody’s going to have him.

This is outrageous, LeHavre said softly, to no one in particular. He gathered his materials and began to move toward the door.

You see, it never made sense that a bouncer or bouncers had killed Allain, Walter went on. "What’s in it for them? Bouncers don’t kill people; they throw them out of bars.

Mr. LeHavre, for the pleasures of power and control, has thrust himself into the police investigation for years, he added. He believes he’s smarter than anyone. He smiled. "He enjoys playing that dangerous game of catch-me-if-you-can. Today we have witnessed an arrogant and vainglorious attempt to brag to a roomful of cops.

You see, the first rule of murder is the murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is . . . and you, sir, are attempting to extend the pleasure of murder by exploiting all of us here today. At that, you have failed. You are not smarter than any of us. You are bright but an underachiever, for which the triumph of murder compensates.

At the door, LeHavre turned back and said, You have no proof of this, of any of this, none whatsoever. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.

Walter spoke over the top of his glasses. You must have enjoyed it whilst it lasted.

Poor guy didn’t even get his magnifying glass, Fleisher said as he left the room with his partners. What did I tell you? I told you it was a case that merited attention, he added, a huge smile creasing his beard. Bender grinned and Walter glared at his partners.

Another Vidocq Society lunch, Bender said, another murder solved.

Fleisher said he was uncomfortable with his partners’ attack on LeHavre. I don’t see the evidence for it, he said.

You may want to rethink it, Bill, Walter said. The guy didn’t get his jollies this time. The urge is insatiable. If he can’t stimulate himself sufficiently with memory, he’ll kill again.

• CHAPTER 3 •

THE KNIGHTS OF THE CAFÉ TABLE

After lunch, the VSMs exited the eighteenth-century tavern and hurried across the narrow and cobbled streets, making connections to Arizona, England, Egypt, France, and beyond; Fleisher, Bender, and Walter walked to a coffee shop on the corner. Murder will out, Chaucer wrote in The Canterbury Tales. This is my conclusion. But real life, Walter was fond of saying, was never so easy.

That’s bullshit! Fleisher said to his partners as heads turned to their small table. LeHavre is an innocent man until we prove otherwise. It’ll take a lot more than intuition to convince the police. The big man’s bearded face was flushed; in political infighting as during interrogations he was an overwhelming and mercurial force, bully, teddy bear, jokester, loyal friend, withering skeptic, con man, tickling feather—a needle poking for truth until it bled.

Vidocq Society cases were chosen by the founders in consultation with the society’s board of directors. The board included an assistant U.S. attorney, a naval intelligence officer, the security director of Sun Oil Company, an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent, a Philadelphia homicide detective, and an English professor specializing in Shakespeare and literary analysis of bomb threats and suicide notes. But Fleisher was board president as well as commissioner. He had masterfully steered through a quarter century of federal bureaucracy; no case went forward without his blessing.

Bender’s balding head reddened as it did when his paranormal revelations were questioned, which was almost always among world-weary cops. Bill, I know the killer was LeHavre, Bender said. I know it. Remember our first meeting, in the old Navy yard, this guy got up and spoke and I said, ‘He’s a Russian spy. I can feel it.’ And I was right!

Fleisher rolled his eyes, while Walter peered down his horn-rimmed glasses at the artist as if appraising a new species. Frank, in this case you may be right, but keep your day job. There’s no structure to your thinking. You’re like a fart in a bathtub! The thin man snorted with derision as Bender’s crimson deepened. Fleisher laughed and slowly shook his head.

Fleisher marveled at the forces that brought them together, and constantly threatened to tear them apart. By combining his partners’ deduction and intuition with his own leadership and investigative skills, they formed a tripartite Great Detective with skills seldom found in one man.

Richard is our Sherlock Holmes, Fleisher said with genuine admiration. He has the greatest deductive ability I’ve ever seen. As for Frank, only God can explain the things he does. Me, I’m just a fat Jewish kid who grew up reading true-crime comics and dreaming of being a detective.

It was fitting, Fleisher thought, that the idea of the great American detective was born in Philadelphia, just a few miles from where they sat—in a brownstone off Spring Garden Street, where Edgar Allan Poe, in 1841, created the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the first fictional detective—C. Auguste Dupin.

It was a new character type, which Poe is said to have borrowed from the life of Vidocq, whose memoirs, allegedly ghost-written by his friend Balzac, were an 1829 bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The new type was a darkly eccentric, deductive genius who outsmarted the police. Dupin possessed a peculiar analytic ability. . . . He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise. . . . He boasted . . . with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs. . . . This was Vidocq’s life, and the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes and all fictional sleuths to follow.

It was an archetype made flesh in Richard Walter.

You have to be on your game to beat me, Frank, and Bill, Walter said. If you knock us off our feet we’ll walk on our knees. If you knock us off our knees we’ll walk on our balls—and our balls have calluses.

Now Fleisher scowled at his partners.

There’s a reason a case is cold for many years. This isn’t TV. You need the family support, police commitment, the political winds blowing your way, he said, counting them off on the fingers of a raised hand. You need investigative brilliance—and you need luck. You got about one out of five in this case.

Walter glared at Fleisher. The psychologist and federal agent complemented each other well, but their differences could be sharp along a philosophical fault line. Walter considered Fleisher a brilliant lawman but naïve about the nature of evil; Fleisher admired Walter’s cold eye for evil, yet the thin man’s Machiavellian view of human nature oppressed Fleisher’s generous heart and hopes for redemption for all men.

Typical Fleisher, Walter thought now, utterly conventional.

Walter looked over at Bender, who seemed to have entirely forgotten about the case, his attention having drifted elsewhere. Bender was brooding over his espresso, his light hazel eyes in the middle distance, where laughter sounded at a table of young women. Fleisher, following his partner’s eyes, quipped, If I ever stop getting excited about that, shoot me. Bender returned from his reverie and chuckled.

Walter, with his uncompromising, antiquated code of honor, considered Bender a knight of opposite color—a man who honored little but his own desires, with nearly sociopathic cunning. Yet together Bender and Walter saw around corners that other detectives, Fleisher included, did not. It was the impish Bender, a wizard with the gift of seeing the past and the future, who had brought the three men together and ever conspired to bust them apart. Bender was narcissistic, manipulative, well named; he bent rules and time, the boundaries of the grave and the connubial bed. Frank, Walter said, is a shit stirrer. He thinks our motto is ‘One for all and all for one, and that’s me!’

But nothing happened without Bender, or Walter, or Fleisher. No case went forward without accord between the three. Now they reminded themselves that they couldn’t solve every case. They had no formal subpoena, arrest, or investigative powers; their goal was merely to offer advice and counsel to the police and victims of crime who needed it. If we help move a case along, we’ve done our job, Fleisher repeated. In fact, wasn’t the idea originally to be a social club for detectives? To have fun?

By the time they had reached the grounds in their cups, Walter and Bender had decided that Antoine LeHavre, if he had indeed done it, was free to get away with murder as far as they were concerned.

PART TWO

FOUR BOYS

•CHAPTER 4 •

A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM

On Saturday, February 23, 1957, a cold rain spattered a lonely country road on the northern edge of Philadelphia, falling on a field of brush and vines slowly claiming an old cardboard box behind the tree line. Inside the box lay a small blue-eyed boy of perfect tapered form, naked and laid out with his arms by his side like a forgotten boy-king of Egypt. His sarcophagus was a J. C. Penney box of corrugated cardboard, three feet long and eighteen inches wide, marked FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE. Great and prolonged care had been taken.

The boy had been washed and groomed and wrapped in a coarse Navajo blanket as if ritually prepared for the next life. His hair was roughly chopped, his fingernails trimmed with a loving touch. His life had been extinguished in an ancient ritual designed to harvest his innocence and beauty by inflicting on him the greatest of cruelties. These were the abominable mixing of love and tenderness with betrayal, torture, and terror, culminating in the horror of his murder, which alone provided the climax for the killer or killers.

The ritual was often confused with Satanism but bowed to neither God nor the devil. In the soft landscape of eastern Pennsylvania in the middle of the Eisenhower 1950s, no one had a clue what the signs meant. The boy was scarred with deep cuts and bruises from head to toe.

He was only three feet, four inches tall. But he was too long for the box, and had been curled into the little cardboard coffin to fit. His head peeked out the open end, sightless eyes fixed on the sky. Moles tunneled under the wild grass that sprouted around the boy. Mice and insects rustled nearby in the underbrush, sensing the seeping blood.

He lay only fifteen feet from the road, but remained unseen. The narrow one-lane road was mostly quiet. The field was a last wild green patch surrounded by city, by hospitals and police stations and thousands of suburban homes. But the surrounding fields had changed little since colonial horses thundered and hounds bayed their call over the Fox Chase Inn. Now and again an automobile tunneled on the road south through the mist to Verree Road, past the woods and fields to the Verree house, still standing, once invaded by the British. Then the road fell quiet again.

It was a remote grave, carefully chosen.

It was warm for February but the rain cut with a raw chill. The land was hushed in an attitude of waiting. There had not been much snow for years but the big storms were coming. The oceans were spinning the thirty-year cycle. Climactic changes that would turn the 1960s into the snowiest decade in a century were already in the air.

The boy was decomposing very slowly in the cold. The animals had not gotten to him yet. Clouds fled; sun dried the eyes and little face. Night came and went. Orion the hunter glittered in the south, Jupiter was bright. The field fell dark and quiet, the boy’s lips white as the moon sailing with the winter stars. The sun rose without warmth. There was no movement left in him except gravity drawing his blood downward in his body.

That Saturday, city people whirred north to a city park with a creek Audubon had admired more than a hundred years earlier. A priest turned in to the quiet Good Shepherd Home for wayward girls, deep in the field across the street. In the afternoon John Stachowiak was bicycling by to