Nauss, too, had disappeared since his escape from Graterford with Vorhauer three years before.
Bender stood back and looked at his bust of Nauss, or what he thought time and trouble had done to Nauss’s boyish face. It was less than a month after Vorhauer’s arrest, and the U.S. Marshals were waiting for Bender’s age-progression bust to jump-start another investigation, to reveal their quarry. Equally important, his wife, Jan, was expecting him to perform a second miracle to keep alive his string of big federal cases and its promise of bigger money. He had almost nothing to go on, less even than he had known about Vorhauer. At least there had been recent sightings of Vorhauer in the Philadelphia area, raw material for his sketches. There had been no sightings or leads in the Nauss case. The last photographs of Nauss were nearly a decade old, his 1977 intake pictures from the prison. In those photos Nauss was five foot nine, a lean, muscular, 190 pounds, bearded. His powerful arms were tattooed with a blue parrot, a skull and dagger, a swastika, and the legend “Born to Lose.”
Bender studied the prison photograph of the menacing biker, then looked back at the bust. The bust depicted a conservative, thirty-five-year-old man in a button-down shirt collar. The new Nauss was clean-shaven, with short, neat, dark hair trimmed over the ears. The killer resembled a young Clark Kent. No matter how hard he tried to depict the biker as a burly thug in middle age, his fingers sculpted an all-American suburban family man.
Bender nervously ran his teeth over his lower lip. His muse was directing him; the harmony in nature and proportion that just felt right when he achieved it. But he could hear the marshals guffawing once more.
The mob hit man was a blond, and now the killer biker was Mr. Main Street, clean-cut Rotarian, straight as a banker’s son-in-law?
He saw their faces twisted with skepticism.
Bender’s gut told him he was right once again. As a rule, he didn’t doubt himself any more than the moon questioned its pale light or the river its banks. He was the natural. He was the artist who saw dead people. Still, he possessed the humility of a perfectionist, the pride of a craftsman. He liked to check and recheck his assumptions. He was always eager to learn more.
After ten in the morning, he left the clean-cut killer’s head and walked back to his living area to clean up and put on a fresh shirt. He’d been up half the night, stripped to the waist like a rough tattooed John the Baptist with his hands on the head of a sadistic killer, mixing water and clay in a purification rite for a murdered girl. He needed some air. The city was filled with beautiful women and opportunity, he thought.
He combed his thinning blond hair in the mirror by the Fertility Godhead he had sculpted. Before noon, he threw on his coat and walked out into a bright fall morning, trailing his compact shadow along the broken sidewalk.
Eighteen blocks later, he went through a wide door into a great Egyptian-style lobby with sand-colored columns on all four sides supporting a balcony, and a chandelier that had dazzled presidents since Calvin Coolidge. The old Benjamin Franklin Hotel, affectionately dubbed “The Ben,” as it stooped over the years like a favorite tattered old uncle, had been the scene of a few crimes since 1925. But it had never seen anything like the hundreds of private eyes, blood-spatter experts, medical examiners, and even a few hypnotists who crowded the hotel that morning. The prestigious American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention was in town.
As Bender crossed the lobby, he hardly had time to recall his simmering resentment of the AAFS—he could speak before them but not join without a college degree—when a sturdy woman with strong hands flashed a friendly smile and a broad Oklahoma hello. Big, round horn-rimmed glasses magnified soft eyes that Hollywood would have picked to serve homemade pie. The look was deceiving. Betty Pat Gatliff was the grande dame of forensic artists. She’d helped pioneer the profession worldwide. She’d done a facial reconstruction of King Tut published in
Bender and Gatliff had met through the “Bone Detective” Wilton Krogman, who had worked with Eliot Ness and mentored the leading figures in what was once called “Skeletal ID.” Many years after his work on the Boy in the Box case, Krogman had introduced Bender to the facial skin thickness charts that had been developed since the nineteenth century. He had inscribed his classic book,
The bone cobblers exchanged a friendly hug, then went off to sit in the coffee shop alone, de rigueur for their grisly exclusive club.
Bender described the Nauss case and turned his palms up. “Betty, I need help,” he said. “I don’t have enough information about the subject.” Gatliff was talking about the challenge of rebuilding a Florida murder victim’s skull, missing the entire maxilla, for goodness sakes, when a tall, gaunt man in a blue suit appeared at the table and exclaimed, through a wisp of menthol smoke, “Betty!”
“Richard!” Gatliff said warmly. She gestured to her fellow artist. “Frank Bender, let me introduce you to my good friend Richard Walter. Richard is a forensic psychologist and criminal profiler.”
Bender gawked at the thin man’s long, withered face. He had the formal manners of a Victorian gentleman, but his small blue eyes glittered with irony. He hadn’t seen such a strange man since he caught
Walter’s cold eyes appraised the small, muscular artist with his tight black T-shirt and cocksure grin—a face like James Dean on laughing gas. The forensic psychologist pushed his large round black spectacles down on his nose and said sardonically, “Oh, my dear boy, I see we’re overdressed.”
Bender howled with laughter. A guy who put himself out there like that, he thought, had to be a genius to back it up. Bender’s laughter came from deep in his gut, a bold, infectious sound.
“Why don’t you join us? ” the artist said with his natural eagerness, as effusive as a twelve-year-old boy. “We’re talking about cases.”
Walter smirked and further lowered the black spectacles on his aquiline nose. “I hope your talent exceeds your couture,” he said.
Bender laughed again even louder, ringing notes of pure joy. Gatliff grinned. Heads turned in the coffee shop.
Walter flushed to the flinty edge of his chin. It was terrible, he thought, the unwanted attention that TV crime shows had drawn to classic forensic science. He wanted to talk to Betty, not this straggler, clearly not a member of the academy. “Typical R. Walter, I became covertly hostile and sarcastic,” he recalled. “But Frank stuck like glue. I couldn’t get rid of the guy, and he laughed at my jokes. How can you hate anybody who laughs at your jokes?”
“What are you working on, Rich?” Walter bristled as he sat down. No one called him Rich.
“A few of us have been asked to do a profile of Jack the Ripper on the one hundredth anniversary of the murders, using modern profiling techniques,” Walter said. He lit a cigarette, shook the match out with two fingers, and leaned back to take a smoke.
“We’ll be presenting at the Home Office in London,” he said, going on, raising an eyebrow with good humor. “I had never looked at the case before, but it’s really quite obvious who the Ripper was. They got it right in the beginning but didn’t know why.”
Bender ogled the thin man. He had never met anyone like him. Lowering his head in his earnest fashion, Bender described his struggles doing the Nauss bust for the U.S. Marshals.
“I don’t know enough about the killer to be sure,” he said.
“Tell me about the murder,” Walter said.
Nauss, Bender said, had rejected his middle-class childhood to become a leader of the violent Warlock motorcycle gang. He described Nauss’s murder of Landy in detail.
“The problem is I don’t know enough about him to depict how he looks. The photographs are a decade old, and I don’t know his personality or habits. Is he married or single? Still slim or spreading with middle age? How does he eat? Does he exercise?”
Walter raised his eyebrow, signaling his interest. “I can tell you a bit about him. I’ve seen hundreds of cases like this, many involving bikers. He’s tremendously macho, aggressive, with an exaggerated sense of importance. He’s very concerned about image. He dispatched the body brutally, like tossing away trash, and simply for reasons of power, not sex or fantasy or Satanism or any other such nonsense. He’s just tired of her and wants to move on.”
Bender’s eyes gleamed like go lights. “Rich, maybe you and I could work on this case together.”
Walter frowned at Bender and leaned back, eyeballing him as if from a safe distance. He took a draw on his
