murder twelve minutes into the interview.
Patnode admitted to killing her in late August or early September 1986. As Walter reviewed the confession, he saw that the crime was a “classic” fit for the profile. Patnode went looking for a prostitute after drinking in a downtown bar, he told detectives, and picked up Weaver and paid her twenty dollars for a sexual encounter in his pickup truck. When that was done, he told her he was breaking up with his girlfriend and wanted a second, more extended sexual encounter, but Weaver objected. Patnode began to force her and she slapped him. He slapped her back hard, four or five times in the face, and then began punching her. She drew a small knife and cut him in self- defense.
“She kept trying to fight me off, but I was much bigger than her,” Patnode said. “I then grabbed her around the neck with both of my hands and started squeezing. I couldn’t stop, and I was feeling so angry. She was trying to get out of my grip, and I kept squeezing her neck. I don’t remember how long I squeezed her neck for, but she slowly stopped moving, and she went limp.”
Patnode began to drive home, wondering what to do with the body, when suddenly Weaver moaned and tried to sit up. Patnode said he grabbed a framing hammer from the center console of his truck and struck her on the head four or five times until she stopped moving. In a three-page confession, he also admitted to sexually violating the corpse before burying her at the edge of a field off Salt Springs Road in Manlius.
The Manlius detectives realized that Richard Walter’s profile was correct in another respect—Patnode was a serial killer. It was a month after killing Weaver on October 1 that Patnode picked up transvestite prostitute McLaughlin and killed him, and he was a likely suspect in other murders.
Weaver’s body went undetected for eleven years. Patnode had all but gotten away with two murders, and might never have been brought to justice if he’d buried Weaver deeper than eleven inches—and if Bender hadn’t been willing “to take a long shot rather than no shot at all.” In October 2002, Patnode was convicted of the murder. As Patnode wept and apologized, Judge Anthony Aloi sentenced him to the maximum penalty of twenty-five years to life in state prison for committing “an unbelievably heinous, atrocious, and cruel act.”
“Lorean Weaver may have been your ghost, Mr. Patnode, but she was a human being. She was a daughter. She was a sister. She was a mother. She was a memory to her family. She was a crack in their broken hearts for all those years. . . . Mr. Patnode,” he said, “you should remain in prison for the rest of your life.”
Lorean’s daughter, Schmillion Weaver, an infant when her mother disappeared, thanked the police for bringing justice to the killers. “I feel closure now,” she said.
“I knew it wasn’t Updegrove!” Bender repeated. “Rich, you got the wrong guy.”
“Frank,” Walter said wearily, “I’ve told you a thousand times a profile is not a suspect. It’s a description of the traits of the likely suspect based on a crime assessment, including the signature at the crime scene and a series of other probabilities. The profile was on the mark.”
But Bender, his eyes shining with glee, seemed not to understand or care about the distinction. The Girl with the Missing Face, the case everyone said was impossible, had turned into one of his greatest triumphs. And Walter had named the wrong guy.
If God had made Lorean Quincy Weaver the first time, Bender had re-created her in clay the second time, and he would never let Walter forget it.
• CHAPTER 53 •
THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL
The crowns of great trees made shadowy tracings on the moonlit peak, but the upstairs windows of the Greek Revival were black. Hedges hid the downstairs panes in shifting walls of darkness. The only light came from the far rear of the house, the orange glow of a cigarette floating under the proscenium arch of the music room. Sitting at his beloved 1926 Chickering grand, a classic American piano he had “stolen from a fool quite ignorant of its value,” the thin man placed the cigarette in the ashtray on the lid of the piano and his hands over the keys. He let his mind go, free as the cigarette smoke wending lazily in the faint moonlight by the spray of ostrich feathers in a black vase on the lid. The thin man, so disciplined to the cold beauty and rules of order, was consciously summoning chaos.
Of its own impulse a finger struck middle C.
He had started at dusk with a variation on Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1, gloriously filling the house with music as it drained of light. Now, from the single key, a song of his own creation leaped into existence, spontaneous and brilliant. “I play my mood,” he said. He let his mood soar mightily, exalted in the knowledge that he was creating something new that would never fall on ears other than his own and he would never play again.
He had been a musical prodigy as a youth before the opera of the streets turned his head. Music was his joy, but also a discipline he practiced to enter the labyrinth of the criminal mind. “I do not know a great detective without musical sense,” he once said. “The problem the police often have is that one cannot analyze human behavior with merely logic. You can’t do it. Man is a creature of associative thinking.”
In the thrall of the creation he no longer sensed the darkness beyond the piano, the moonlight on the windowsill, the cigarette smoke bending in the soft breeze from the garden.
Walter was a proud scientist, disdainful of things of the spirit, who lived by strict rules of evidence, the logical assessment of a crime scene bathed in the unsparing light of deduction. Among murder investigators he was often reputed to be the coldest mind in the world. He worshipped the god of reason. Yet his was a classical mind finely tuned to the Doric columns and classical harmonies of his house, stubbornly resistant to modern illusions. Many in our time have forgotten, he said, that “reason is born of twins—rational thinking and emotion. When one denies emotion, it’s still there—we’re animals—and it bites you in the ass, expressing itself now as anger and vehemence. The Greeks struck this balance best.”
The warring Greek gods—Apollo, the sun god of order, forms, and rationalism; Dionysus, the wine god of revels, chaos, ecstasy—shared the same temple and space in men’s hearts, forever in conflict. “As it happens,” he said, “Apollo was the Greek god of detectives; Dionysus was the god of murder.” A man could not think clearly without recognizing both sides of his nature, could not unite them without art or music.
As he played he closed his eyes and saw a boy materialize. He was a small boy in a dark wood on a winter night and he was very cold. He was tied up, perhaps to a tree. The boy was shivering and naked but did not cry anymore. There was an old church in the distance and maybe the boy heard its bells ringing. The night was clear and filled with stars. He felt terrible pain but even stronger were things he not could name, fear, confusion, sweet pleading love, anger, degradation, terror. Maybe he tried to speak but it’s not likely he could get a word out by then. He was not alone. The person who loved the boy the most, who had always taken care of him, who bathed him and dressed him, was there with him now, too. He could smell him close, a large shadow smiling in the darkness, near enough now to blot out the stars. The boy might have screamed then but it was not likely.
This was what happened. Walter was certain of it. The hidden story told by the condition of the body and the crime scene was incontrovertible. Dozens of good men had gone to their graves, afraid to face it. That was OK. It was natural. This darkest of shadows was death itself and men could only live by turning away. “The truth is, the cops just didn’t want to know.”
He saw into the present. He saw the old killer living alone on the edge of a city, a decrepit shell of wantonness and stale pleasure. He saw the old man who had committed the most diabolical of crimes, an especially depraved and merciless child sex murder that would shake any decent person’s soul. No doubt he was considered a little aloof or odd by his neighbors, a “funny old man,” it was a shame he had no family on the holidays, one of those old bachelors who stank of alcohol and cigarettes and showered once a week, not pleasant but nothing to worry about—if they only knew! It was many years later now and the old man had nothing left but his memories. Walter could see him in his dim row house turning the yellowed and crumbling newspaper pages with appalling arrogance to read about himself once again, reliving the sweet memory of the killing when he was young, the zenith of his power and achievement, the high point of his life! What kind of society allowed such a monster his freedom for nearly fifty years, while the nameless and innocent child, he would be a father now, perhaps a grandfather, moldered unknown and unmourned? Walter was offended to the core of his sense of decency. The old killer had exulted over his dark triumph for too long. It was time to go get him.
The piano thundered. This new creation of his seemed to summon shades from every corner of the parlor. It was thrilling to make but it was good he would never hear it again. It was the song of the beast.
