Walter smiled coldly. “I will sometimes sleep with the devil to get what I want. As it happens, Nauss is living somewhere in Michigan.”

Walter picked up several photographs of Nauss. He noted that the biker always wore a shirt that was patterned on one side and not the other. “It’s part of the personality type. He’s a black and white guy; there are no grays. I’ll tell you that when you find him in Michigan, Nauss will be driving a black Cadillac.”

Rappone’s brow crinkled in puzzlement. “How do you know that?”

“Ah,” Walter said. “Fair enough. We know he liked Cadillacs in the past. Cadillacs are prestige cars and he is a power guy who wants prestige and is cleaning up. Particularly rigid types like dark cars. Given his killer instincts it’d be either white or black, and he’d go for black. It’s declarative, pureness and evil at the same time.”

The faces around the table fell open with something like awe.

Bender’s grin grew wider. The marshals planned to present his finished bust of Nauss to America ’s Most Wanted, the Fox TV show. Bender could see that a man like Walter could be of great use in the future.

“It’s not wizardry,” Walter said later as they left the federal building. “It’s all a matter of probabilities. I’ve been around the block a few times.”

“Rich,” Bender said, “you can read criminals’ minds the way I read women.”

Walter’s face darkened around a scowl as Bender’s laugh rang down the gray canyon of Market Street.

In February 1988, America ’s Most Wanted broadcast Bender’s bust of Nauss. The sculpted face of the biker appeared dark-haired and clean-cut. Dozens of calls came in to the show’s tip line with sightings of Nauss from the East to the Midwest, but none amounted to anything.

Assuming he was still alive, the escaped prisoner and convicted killer remained at large.

Richard Walter was sitting in his small, classical white house in Lansing, Michigan, sipping wine and listening to opera in the civilizing presence of his antiques. The scowling, life-size samurai warrior, sword raised to attack, was a particular favorite. He was recalling his chat that day with a serial killer when the telephone rang, and he frowned.

Walter had been promoted to the largest walled prison in the world, the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson, from the desolate castle prison on Lake Superior. The high-tech prison gave him remarkable power over the inmates. He could turn off their hot showers by a remote switch, or put them on a diet of “Prison Loaf ”-all their meals blended and baked into a hard, tasteless brick. “You will learn to control yourself or I will control you,” he told them. Control gave him satisfaction, victory over chaos, and thus he found the voice on the telephone disconcerting. It blasted through the line, as loud and excited as a television car pitchman.

“Rich!”

He rolled his eyes. No one else called him that. Although Walter liked the forensic artist, he didn’t enjoy being “shaped” by anyone. Furthermore, he didn’t feel the need for human contact at that moment. He would dispatch of Bender quickly.

“Rich, a producer at America ’s Most Wanted called me, and they want me to do a facial age progression of John List-the most wanted mass murderer in America.”

“That’s wonderful, Frank. I hope it works out for you.”

“He’s the bank vice president who killed his whole family in New Jersey. He’s been on the lam for eighteen years!”

“Yes.”

“He’s committed the most notorious crime in New Jersey since the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in 1922.”

“It was 1932, Frank.”

“Right.”

Walter said nothing, creating a vacuum in the conversation. It was like a drawbridge pulling up.

Bender waded into the moat. “Rich, I thought maybe you’d want to help me. You could do the profile. I told AMW about you and they’re all for it.”

Walter said nothing. He looked around the room. His music, books, the classical lines of the library-for years these had been his constant companions. Home alone with a bottle of wine, he gazed fondly at his antiques and felt the powerful presence of the men and women who had lived with them; he imagined these spirits as friends and family. He was quite happy living alone. “In point of fact,” he said, “I care not a whit for the general run of humanity.”

Although he was compulsively charming and social, and regaled perfect strangers in bars with true-life Gothic horrors like a slumming Poe, there were few people in the world he could really talk to, even in law enforcement. He had married his profession, driven to be “one of the five best in the world,” and accepted the sacrifices. He was obsessed with things that decent people were happiest not knowing about. His was a dark vision, the same one that made Machiavelli and Dostoevsky embittered men and geniuses for the ages.

Now Bender was pushing him toward a partner’s intimacy of the kind one saw in cop buddy movies and read about in storybooks. Instinctively he shrank from Bender’s salesman’s affect. “I quite like Frank,” he said to himself. But bamboozling excitement was something normal people didn’t use unless they were selling something shiny and hollow. In his long experience with the criminal and the craven, it was the tool of a seducer and user.

“Rich, why don’t you come to Philadelphia? It’s spring, the weather’s nicer here. AMW will put you up in a bed-and-breakfast near my studio.”

“We’ll see what happens,” Walter said stiffly.

“I really want to catch this guy. The FBI hasn’t had a clue for decades, and now they’re using computer-drawn facial reconstructions. They don’t believe in what I’m doing-the old human way, the real artist way, looking for the unique human characteristics. I want to know what List was thinking when he killed his family, what he’s like now. I want to get into his head.”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“This will really show up the FBI when we nail him together.”

Walter laughed. “Now you’re talking.”

The darkness of the studio surrounded the halo of light on the makeshift kitchen table.

On the table was a stack of newspaper clippings as yellow and wrinkled as the gaunt face studying them through owlish black glasses. The New York Times, The Star-Ledger, Philadelphia Inquirer, and most every newspaper and TV station in America had broadcast the horror story as chilling as a Stephen King serial.

On November 9, 1971, John Emil List, a former bank vice president and Sunday school teacher in prosperous Westfield, New Jersey, had killed his wife, three young children, and elderly mother. The fastidious killer had left the lights blazing in his great house, Breezy Knoll, along with a polite note apologizing to his mother-in-law, a thoughtful list of sales prospects for his boss at the insurance company, another note instructing his pastor to remove him from the congregation rolls. Fretting over the noise of his car, he’d steered the old Impala and its coughing muffler into a quiet predawn November rain and disappeared.

Walter lit a Kool and leaned back with his right hand bringing the cigarette to his lips. His left hand crossed over to grip his right bicep and he took a draw and lowered his head to think. He had been reading for an hour. As soon as Walter arrived in Philadelphia on an early flight from Lansing, Michigan, Bender had attempted a hearty hug or slap on the back, but Walter had successfully pushed him off with a firm handshake.

Walter had Spartan needs on a case. An ashtray was essential, and black coffee. Bender offered to make coffee, but Walter snarled, “Not from that stove, my dear boy.” Bender got him takeout, handed him the file of newspaper stories, and went off gallivanting.

It took a few minutes before the psychologist recovered from the decrepit atmosphere of the art studio. It seemed to him that Bender fancied himself a male version of Circe, a sorcerer who turned his visitors into supplicant females and shrunken heads.