“It’s Allie Boy,” Bender said with a far-off look, turning the words over like golden coins of prophecy. “Allie Boy Persico is the man with the bad stomach.”

Now they’d have to catch Nauss without unseen help.

Before he escaped from prison in a pine armoire like Odysseus breaching the walls of Troy in a wooden horse, Robert Thomas Nauss had more in common with the monsters of antiquity than its heroes. He was a lean young man with a bearded face like a portrait of Jesus and soft brown eyes that blazed like a biker from hell. Men in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, quaked when Bobby Nauss strode into a bar with his Warlock gang members, bristling with black leather, chains, and threat. His soulless eyes were the last mortal sight of several pretty young women who vanished into the Tinicum marshes, police believed. Nauss was convicted of one murder and suspected of two others, in addition to his convictions for rape, robbery, and drug trafficking.

On the evening of December 11, 1971, the Warlock leader went on a date with his petite blond girlfriend, Elizabeth Landy, a twenty-one-year-old Philadelphia beauty queen. At the home of a fellow biker, they got into an argument and he tried to choke her, but Elizabeth hid in a locked bathroom. Later they made up and went to bed-where he bludgeoned her to death with a baseball bat. He strung her corpse up in a garage to show off to his biker buddies, and boasted, “She won’t bother me anymore.” Nauss cut off her hands and feet and covered her with lime to hasten decomposition and buried her in a shallow grave near the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Nauss was the first man in Pennsylvania history convicted of first-degree murder without a body. Landy has never been found. 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. Where we gonna arrest him, at the chamber of commerce breakfast? The country club?

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 Life magazine. Working with her forensic teammate, legendary anthropologist Clyde Snow, she’d rebuilt the skulls of seven of the unidentified victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

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 Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine, to Frank Bender, “A fellow seeker in the vineyard of the forensic sciences.”

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 The Fall of the House of Usher on cable.

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.”