He rolled his eyes. No one else called him that. Although Walter liked the forensic artist, he didn’t enjoy being “shaped” by anyone. Furthermore, he didn’t feel the need for human contact at that moment. He would dispatch of Bender quickly.
“Rich, a producer at
“That’s wonderful, Frank. I hope it works out for you.”
“He’s the bank vice president who killed his whole family in New Jersey. He’s been on the lam for eighteen years!”
“Yes.”
“He’s committed the most notorious crime in New Jersey since the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in 1922.”
“It was 1932, Frank.”
“Right.”
Walter said nothing, creating a vacuum in the conversation. It was like a drawbridge pulling up.
Bender waded into the moat. “Rich, I thought maybe you’d want to help me. You could do the profile. I told
Walter said nothing. He looked around the room. His music, books, the classical lines of the library—for years these had been his constant companions. Home alone with a bottle of wine, he gazed fondly at his antiques and felt the powerful presence of the men and women who had lived with them; he imagined these spirits as friends and family. He was quite happy living alone. “In point of fact,” he said, “I care not a whit for the general run of humanity.”
Although he was compulsively charming and social, and regaled perfect strangers in bars with true-life Gothic horrors like a slumming Poe, there were few people in the world he could really talk to, even in law enforcement. He had married his profession, driven to be “one of the five best in the world,” and accepted the sacrifices. He was obsessed with things that decent people were happiest not knowing about. His was a dark vision, the same one that made Machiavelli and Dostoevsky embittered men and geniuses for the ages.
Now Bender was pushing him toward a partner’s intimacy of the kind one saw in cop buddy movies and read about in storybooks. Instinctively he shrank from Bender’s salesman’s affect. “I quite like Frank,” he said to himself. But bamboozling excitement was something normal people didn’t use unless they were selling something shiny and hollow. In his long experience with the criminal and the craven, it was the tool of a seducer and user.
“Rich, why don’t you come to Philadelphia? It’s spring, the weather’s nicer here.
“We’ll see what happens,” Walter said stiffly.
“I really want to catch this guy. The FBI hasn’t had a clue for decades, and now they’re using computer- drawn facial reconstructions. They don’t believe in what I’m doing—the old human way, the real artist way, looking for the unique human characteristics. I want to know what List was thinking when he killed his family, what he’s like now. I want to get into his head.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“This will really show up the FBI when we nail him together.”
Walter laughed. “Now you’re talking.”
The darkness of the studio surrounded the halo of light on the makeshift kitchen table.
On the table was a stack of newspaper clippings as yellow and wrinkled as the gaunt face studying them through owlish black glasses.
On November 9, 1971, John Emil List, a former bank vice president and Sunday school teacher in prosperous Westfield, New Jersey, had killed his wife, three young children, and elderly mother. The fastidious killer had left the lights blazing in his great house, Breezy Knoll, along with a polite note apologizing to his mother-in-law, a thoughtful list of sales prospects for his boss at the insurance company, another note instructing his pastor to remove him from the congregation rolls. Fretting over the noise of his car, he’d steered the old Impala and its coughing muffler into a quiet predawn November rain and disappeared.
Walter lit a Kool and leaned back with his right hand bringing the cigarette to his lips. His left hand crossed over to grip his right bicep and he took a draw and lowered his head to think. He had been reading for an hour. As soon as Walter arrived in Philadelphia on an early flight from Lansing, Michigan, Bender had attempted a hearty hug or slap on the back, but Walter had successfully pushed him off with a firm handshake.
Walter had Spartan needs on a case. An ashtray was essential, and black coffee. Bender offered to make coffee, but Walter snarled, “Not from
It took a few minutes before the psychologist recovered from the decrepit atmosphere of the art studio. It seemed to him that Bender fancied himself a male version of Circe, a sorcerer who turned his visitors into supplicant females and shrunken heads.
Now Walter blocked out the background noise and odors and concentrated on the five murders. He envisioned each in its turn, until the monstrosity was reduced in his mind to cold-blooded calculation. Eighteen years before, List had made his move. Walter saw the slaughter as theatrically staged, an intricately planned performance designed to hide List’s true motive in plain sight and cover his tracks. Now it was Walter’s turn—his chance to unmask the deceit and expose the fugitive’s hiding place. It was just the two of them in a deadly chess game, a battle of mind and will with no boundaries of time or space.
Killers always make mistakes. What mistakes had List made?
The cops always miss something. What had the FBI and the police missed?
Walter had been moonlighting as a consulting detective on the most challenging and depraved murder cases in the world for more than a decade. It was what he did in his “spare hours” while working full-time for the Michigan Department of Corrections.
• CHAPTER 16 •
THE PERFECT MASS MURDER
Early on that November morning, John List stood at his office window on the first floor of Breezy Knoll and watched the milk truck drive away. As usual Herbert Arbast, the milkman, had entered the unlocked back door to the nineteen-room, three-story Victorian and entered the butler’s pantry where Helen taped her handwritten order on the refrigerator: six quarts of milk, butter, and eggs, twice a week. That morning instead was posted a curt note from John instructing the milkman to stop deliveries “until further notice.” The family was going on vacation, the neat, careful handwriting explained. List and his wife, Helen; Patty, the oldest, blond and leggy like her mother and a budding actress; the two young boys, Fred and John Jr.; and John’s eighty-five-year-old mother, Alma, would be gone “for a while.”
At forty-six years of age, John List stood a gangly six foot one, gaunt-faced and straight-backed, with receding dark hair and a long, bony jaw. An accountant, former bank vice president, and Sunday school teacher in the Lutheran Church, he was an exceptionally bright and meticulous man. On his desk lay two beautifully kept handguns, gleaming with oil—a small, .22-caliber automatic Colt that had belonged to his father, and a classic Steyr 1912 automatic John had brought back from World War II. The Steyr was a World War I gun that had been retooled by the Nazis to carry a special nine-millimeter cartridge. Each pistol was loaded with eight rounds.
As the milkman left, empty bottles rattling in his carrier, List stood listening for the routine noises of morning. He heard Helen’s soft footsteps coming downstairs to the kitchen. With the gentle sounds of the flame firing under the kettle as it jangled onto the stove, he waited a few minutes, then picked up the Steyr. His wife was sitting at the breakfast table over toast and coffee, her morning wake-up ritual. She wore a bathrobe and red satin teddy, and looked out the window. She was dreaming her thoughts into the bleak gray sky, and heard nothing until she sensed a shadow two feet behind her and half-turned to look. She never saw her husband or the bullet he fired into the left side of her head from eighteen inches away. The shot knocked Helen to the linoleum floor, a bite of toast jammed
