up. The police closed the case. The old men of the Vidocq Society smiled and nodded, but they knew in their hearts that Mary told the truth.
“We see the boy in three weeks, Bill,” Kelly reminded Bill Fleisher. “The fifty-second year.”
It was just the three of them now at the grave every Veterans Day, the anniversary of the reburial. The park cemetery was gray in the fall, but they brought armfuls of bright flowers. They stood at the tombstone and said a few words to one another and to God. Then they took pictures standing together behind the stone. There were years of pictures like a family album, once five and now three of them standing with the boy in their fedoras and military caps and autumn smiles, guardians of something nameless. It was a private ceremony; the media and public were not invited. They were carrying on Rem Bristow’s thirty-seven years of work, the blue unbroken line. Sometimes Kelly went alone, an errand of joy. The old man leaned down and kissed the stone. “I’ll see you soon, Jonathan.”
Fleisher wasn’t convinced that Mary had told the truth. But he believed “we’re going to get it. The case is solvable.”
Walter wrinkled his nose, as if he smelled sentimentality. “I know who killed the Boy in the Box,” he said, “and Mary’s mother isn’t it.” Walter said it was the young college student who discovered the boy but delayed reporting it for days because the cops had already been hassling him about being a Peeping Tom. The cops at the time couldn’t have understood the significance of the sexual perversion, the signs of the pathology in the suspicious man who discovered the body.
The student admitted he’d spied on the unwed mothers of the Good Shepherd Home, Walter said, and the newspapers in the 1950s didn’t publish the rest of the story: Hidden behind the tree line the young man masturbated as he watched the women across the street. “First, the guy’s an admitted liar and he’s a pervert. The police gave him a rough time about the peeping, but nothing came of it.” With his sexual perversion, he had already entered the Helix, the “House of Sadism.” He was on the growth curve of the sadistic killer.
“This is the guy who found the body,” Walter said. “I don’t believe in coincidences. As it happens, he’s still alive. He’s in his eighties. He’s had a long time to revel in the memory of raping and killing the boy. In fact, he’s still taking pleasure from it. The murder isn’t over until the murderer says it is.”
Fleisher looked over his shoulder to make sure no society women or laymen were in earshot. The Murder Room had unexpectedly rematerialized in the foyer of the Pen Ryn. Sexual sadism hadn’t been on the menu.
“Joe, I’ve got a job for you.” Walter turned to his friend Joe O’Kane, the burly, bearded crooner, poet, and federal agent. “I know where the killer lives. Are you game?”
O’Kane tonight had been singing sad Irish songs he wrote himself to a lovely blond woman, singing with a power that caused her to hold his hand, close her eyes, and tremble with the ancient trails of the O’Kanes. His eyes gleamed with Tullamore Dew, “the milk of my race.”
“I’m there,” O’Kane said in his strong tenor.
Walter had a simple plan. They’d park the Crown Vic on the crowded block in the small eastern Pennsylvania city. He saw it in his mind’s eye. He and the hulking O’Kane would knock on the row house door. An old man, living alone, would peek over the chain, white-haired, probably decrepit and smelling of booze, face tight.
The killer would most assuredly refuse to invite them in. With O’Kane behind him, Walter would set aside his Victorian manners. There was a child to remember, a child who would be a man of fifty-five now, probably a husband and father. It didn’t matter how many years had passed, who forgot or remembered that the boy had ever existed, what the movies and TV news said, who cared or who didn’t. There was fundamental decency at stake. “One is never too old to do the right thing.” He would push his way in, decline a seat if offered. His face would become stone, the prison stare he’d developed in Michigan long ago. Unsmiling, his eyebrow raised up like a blade, he would say, “My dear fellow, it’s high past time you and I had a man-to-boy chat.”
“Rich, can I come with you?” It was Bender.
Walter startled. Bender had already taken one of his well-publicized long shots in the case, and missed. His speculative bust of what the boy’s father might look like had gone out on
“Frank, what the hell you talkin’ about? You’ll be haunting me soon. Even more than you do now.”
Bender stared at him, grinning like a cat, a cat with a secret. He said nothing.
Walter flushed. “See,” he said, turning to the commissioner, the judge of truth and lies. “What’d I tell you? He’s such a flimflam artist I won’t believe he’s sick until he’s in the grave. He’s the type who would make a deal with the devil and beat it.”
“You guys.” Fleisher smiled and shook his head. “The greatest show on Earth.”
The three of them stood in the parking lot. The night was overcast, no stars. From the great house came the sound of voices, men talking. The lights were going out. The river was black, indistinct, an inky mass with land and sky. When the moon flickered on the water you could see it, wide and slow, moving in the dark.
Bender said he’d gotten full veteran’s benefits now from his time with the Navy, just as if he’d retired from it, because of the cancer.
Fleisher grinned. “Frank, with your fucking luck, you’ll get recalled to Afghanistan.”
They all laughed.
Fleisher looked up. He felt a touch of winter. “A beautiful night.” Bender’s voice was reverent. “It’s the form of nature. Can you see it, the harmony?”
“Bah.” Walter blew cigarette smoke into the night air.
“I’ll pray for you, Frank.” Fleisher and Michelle were getting in the car. “We all will. We love you.”
“Thanks, Bill.” He waved.
It was just the two of them, still standing.
The thin man coughed. Bender looked pale to him in the moonlight.
“I still won’t pray for you,” Walter said. “But I’ll cross my fingers.”
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS •
T
My deepest gratitude goes to federal agent, private eye, and Vidocq Society commissioner William Fleisher; forensic artist Frank Bender; and forensic psychologist and criminal profiler Richard Walter.
With Fleisher and Walter, I attended a forensics-law enforcement program at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, featuring two days of lectures by Vidocq Society Members, including Haskell Askin on forensic dentistry, Fleisher on truth detection, and Walter on the personality subtypes of sex murderers—a lecture I heard Walter give many times, to universities, at forensic conferences, and to more than a hundred prosecutors at the Philadelphia district attorney’s office. The three founders also gave me access to their personal lives, from Christmas dinners and New Year’s Eve parties to the people closest to them. Special thanks for the time and recollections of Michelle Fleisher and Elizabeth Fleisher; Gloria Alvarado, the Vidocq Society’s office secretary; Jan Bender; Joan Crescenz; the gifted editor Vanessa Bender; Nan and Morris Baker; Beverly Fraser; and Richard Walter’s extended family.
I am in debt to the Vidocq Society board of directors for its support, especially former U.S. Customs special agent Joseph M. O’Kane; former assistant U.S. attorney Barbara Cohan-Saavedra; polygraph examiner Nathan J.
