Bender howled with laughter. A guy who put himself out there like that, he thought, had to be a genius to back it up. Bender’s laughter came from deep in his gut, a bold, infectious sound.

“Why don’t you join us? ” the artist said with his natural eagerness, as effusive as a twelve-year-old boy. “We’re talking about cases.”

Walter smirked and further lowered the black spectacles on his aquiline nose. “I hope your talent exceeds your couture,” he said.

Bender laughed again even louder, ringing notes of pure joy. Gatliff grinned. Heads turned in the coffee shop.

Walter flushed to the flinty edge of his chin. It was terrible, he thought, the unwanted attention that TV crime shows had drawn to classic forensic science. He wanted to talk to Betty, not this straggler, clearly not a member of the academy. “Typical R. Walter, I became covertly hostile and sarcastic,” he recalled. “But Frank stuck like glue. I couldn’t get rid of the guy, and he laughed at my jokes. How can you hate anybody who laughs at your jokes?”

“What are you working on, Rich?” Walter bristled as he sat down. No one called him Rich.

“A few of us have been asked to do a profile of Jack the Ripper on the one hundredth anniversary of the murders, using modern profiling techniques,” Walter said. He lit a cigarette, shook the match out with two fingers, and leaned back to take a smoke.

“We’ll be presenting at the Home Office in London,” he said, going on, raising an eyebrow with good humor. “I had never looked at the case before, but it’s really quite obvious who the Ripper was. They got it right in the beginning but didn’t know why.”

Bender ogled the thin man. He had never met anyone like him. Lowering his head in his earnest fashion, Bender described his struggles doing the Nauss bust for the U.S. Marshals.

“I don’t know enough about the killer to be sure,” he said.

“Tell me about the murder,” Walter said.

Nauss, Bender said, had rejected his middle-class childhood to become a leader of the violent Warlock motorcycle gang. He described Nauss’s murder of Landy in detail.

“The problem is I don’t know enough about him to depict how he looks. The photographs are a decade old, and I don’t know his personality or habits. Is he married or single? Still slim or spreading with middle age? How does he eat? Does he exercise?”

Walter raised his eyebrow, signaling his interest. “I can tell you a bit about him. I’ve seen hundreds of cases like this, many involving bikers. He’s tremendously macho, aggressive, with an exaggerated sense of importance. He’s very concerned about image. He dispatched the body brutally, like tossing away trash, and simply for reasons of power, not sex or fantasy or Satanism or any other such nonsense. He’s just tired of her and wants to move on.”

Bender’s eyes gleamed like go lights. “Rich, maybe you and I could work on this case together.”

Walter frowned at Bender and leaned back, eyeballing him as if from a safe distance. He took a draw on his Kool and let the silence develop.

Bender leaned forward into the vacuum, speaking faster and with great enthusiasm.

“Rich, why don’t you come talk to the marshals tonight? I can set it up.”

“I’m afraid not, dear boy. It’s well known I won’t have my libations at the hotel bar interrupted.”

Bender laughed again. Walter took a long draw on a cigarette and turned inward. Bender is a very intense character, very intense, bright but off the wall, he thought. What the hell is he all about? Oh, well, I’ll never see him again.

At six the next morning, Walter shot out of a deep sleep in his hotel room. The telephone was ringing.

“Hi, Rich!” Bender sounded like he’d had five cups of coffee.

Oh, God, Walter thought. What have I gotten myself into now? He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for a Kool.

“The marshals want to meet with you today!”

Walter went to breakfast at the Downhome Diner with Bender and Tom Rappone, head of the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force in Philadelphia, to discuss the Nauss case. Bender played a trick on the somber psychologist. “You’ve got to try scrapple, Rich. It’s a classic Pennsylvania delicacy. You’ll love it.”

“What is it?”

“Meat.” The artist grinned.

Walter looked down at the odiferous brown extrusion of last-chance pork parts, snarled, and pushed his plate a foot away as Bender exploded in schoolyard laughter. Walter quietly took in black coffee and a cigarette, turning a hard flat gaze on the boisterous clown who seemed to be forcing his way into his life. “I was not pleased.”

At four that afternoon, the thin man sat in a conference room at the marshals’ office at Sixth and Market streets with Bender. With them at the table were Rappone and two other deputies.

“Listen up,” Rappone said.

Walter looked down at a yellow pad filled with scribbled notes, and cleared his throat.

“I’ve conducted a brief crime assessment of the Nauss murder,” he said. “Nauss was a closet case in the motorcycle gang in that he was very high up, but he also wanted to be in the mob, a promotion as it were. He had a middle-class background, and he’s going to be a little brighter than your average semi-organized PA killer and he’s going to be clever. He’s going to clean himself up a little bit, be not as scruffy; he’ll have more options available to him.”

Walter looked down at his pad. “Frank Bender is right. He’ll be clean-cut and living in the suburbs. He’ll be married to a compliant woman who has no idea about his past, and present a wholesome image to the community.”

Bender beamed like the father of a newborn son. “I agree with Rich. I think Nauss will be clean-shaven, short-haired, and living in suburbia,” he said. “He’s come from a good family and I think he’ll go back to what he’s known.”

The marshals exchanged doubtful looks across the table. One deputy pointed out that their few leads were consistent with a biker lifestyle. The marshals had set up a cabin in the Poconos for several weeks following a tip that the biker was hiding out in the Pennsylvania mountains. They followed another tip to a Western state, and set up surveillance across from a motorcycle parts distributor, with no luck.

Dennis Matulewicz, one of the lead agents, frowned. “I don’t know about this. A biker is a biker is a biker.”

Walter cleared his throat. “Not only is Frank right that Nauss is hiding in the suburbs, I have some idea what suburbs.”

Rappone leaned forward, his voice nearly caught in his throat. “How do you know that?”

Walter that morning had called the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, with 5,600 inmates, the world’s largest penal institution. The massive 1934-era prison complex, known as “Jacktown,” was one of the most notorious and feared of American prisons. Riots in the 1950s and 1970s had killed a guard and injured dozens of guards and inmates. Walter had recently started working there as a prison psychologist, counseling and evaluating the most depraved criminals in the state.

He had spoken on the telephone that morning with an inmate who had been a member of Nauss’s Pennsylvania motorcycle gang.

A heavy silence came over the table.

“Those guys never talk,” a deputy said.

Walter nodded. “Quite true. It is a fact that a gang member, a criminal biker, is a very rigid, power-based personality. As such he is extremely loyal and pathological in how he counts on the group. He has rigid standards and principles.” Walter paused and raised his eyebrow for dramatic effect. “But one can use that rigidity against him.” The marshals fell silent, waiting.

“I made the point that Nauss had shot somebody,” Walter said. “OK, fine, a real man can shoot someone. But he had shot and killed them in front of their child. It’s not macho to kill people in front of their children. It’s not a good thing; he’d broken a rule. And I used that to break apart the biker’s loyalties. Nauss was not living up to biker standards, Nauss was a bad guy, he’d done bad things, he’d not lived by the code a man must live by. I undermined Nauss’s masculinity to get the guy to talk.”