known as the “Marquette stare,” and it was a look to be avoided at all costs. He employed it to crack the facade 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
“Whenever someone says
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
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
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
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
In the north corner of the room, overlooking the Delaware River, a bronze bust of Eugene Francois 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
