Now Walter blocked out the background noise and odors and concentrated on the five murders. He envisioned each in its turn, until the monstrosity was reduced in his mind to cold-blooded calculation. Eighteen years before, List had made his move. Walter saw the slaughter as theatrically staged, an intricately planned performance designed to hide List’s true motive in plain sight and cover his tracks. Now it was Walter’s turn-his chance to unmask the deceit and expose the fugitive’s hiding place. It was just the two of them in a deadly chess game, a battle of mind and will with no boundaries of time or space.

Killers always make mistakes. What mistakes had List made?

The cops always miss something. What had the FBI and the police missed?

Walter had been moonlighting as a consulting detective on the most challenging and depraved murder cases in the world for more than a decade. It was what he did in his “spare hours” while working full-time for the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Early on that November morning, John List stood at his office window on the first floor of Breezy Knoll and watched the milk truck drive away. As usual Herbert Arbast, the milkman, had entered the unlocked back door to the nineteen-room, three-story Victorian and entered the butler’s pantry where Helen taped her handwritten order on the refrigerator: six quarts of milk, butter, and eggs, twice a week. That morning instead was posted a curt note from John instructing the milkman to stop deliveries “until further notice.” The family was going on vacation, the neat, careful handwriting explained. List and his wife, Helen; Patty, the oldest, blond and leggy like her mother and a budding actress; the two young boys, Fred and John Jr.; and John’s eighty-five-year-old mother, Alma, would be gone “for a while.”

At forty-six years of age, John List stood a gangly six foot one, gaunt-faced and straight-backed, with receding dark hair and a long, bony jaw. An accountant, former bank vice president, and Sunday school teacher in the Lutheran Church, he was an exceptionally bright and meticulous man. On his desk lay two beautifully kept handguns, gleaming with oil-a small,.22-caliber automatic Colt that had belonged to his father, and a classic Steyr 1912 automatic John had brought back from World War II. The Steyr was a World War I gun that had been retooled by the Nazis to carry a special nine-millimeter cartridge. Each pistol was loaded with eight rounds.

As the milkman left, empty bottles rattling in his carrier, List stood listening for the routine noises of morning. He heard Helen’s soft footsteps coming downstairs to the kitchen. With the gentle sounds of the flame firing under the kettle as it jangled onto the stove, he waited a few minutes, then picked up the Steyr. His wife was sitting at the breakfast table over toast and coffee, her morning wake-up ritual. She wore a bathrobe and red satin teddy, and looked out the window. She was dreaming her thoughts into the bleak gray sky, and heard nothing until she sensed a shadow two feet behind her and half-turned to look. She never saw her husband or the bullet he fired into the left side of her head from eighteen inches away. The shot knocked Helen to the linoleum floor, a bite of toast jammed into the back of her throat. Walter noted that List fired several aimless shots at the wall, one pinging a radiator, but the children were at school and heard nothing. If any noises escaped the foot-thick walls of Breezy Knoll, they were carried away on the cold November breeze. What police had called for decades the perfectly planned murders had begun to move like clockwork. As his wife lay dying on the kitchen floor, List headed up the back stairs.

His mother’s cozy apartment, where he read the Bible with her most evenings, was on the third floor. Alma, tall and gray-haired, was standing in the small kitchen holding a plate with butter, waiting for the toast to pop, as he opened the door without knocking. “What was that noise downstairs?” she asked. Without a word, List raised the Steyr and shot his mother above the left eye from point-blank range. She died as she hit the tile floor. Walter noted, with one eyebrow arching above the old newspaper account, what List had done next. He shoved her body into a narrow hall space with a force that shattered her knees, and threw a carpet runner on top of her. He covered his dead mother’s face with a dish towel.

Heading back downstairs, he dragged his wife’s body through the center hall to the ballroom, and laid her facedown on a sleeping bag under the Tiffany dome skylight. He placed two other open sleeping bags perpendicular to Helen’s, whose body formed the top of a T, and covered Helen’s body with a bath towel. He covered his wife’s head with a dish towel.

Next he went upstairs to his wife’s bedroom, smeared his bloody hands all over the sheets until he vomited, then showered and shaved. Wearing a fresh suit and necktie, his hair combed and fingernails cleaned, he walked crisply downstairs as if to start an ordinary business day. There was much to do.

He called the office of State Mutual Life, where he sold insurance, and left a message on the machine canceling his ten o’clock appointment. He said he was taking the family to North Carolina to be with his wife’s mother, who was seriously ill. Then he wrote school notes for his children-Patricia, sixteen, at the high school; and John Jr. and Frederick, fifteen and thirteen, at the junior high-explaining their absence for several days because of the emergency family trip. He went outside to rake leaves while waiting for the kids to come home from school. It was cloudy and nearly freezing, a record low for November 9, and a neighbor woman was surprised to see List in his dark overcoat and tie meticulously raking the yard. After working up a sweat, he fixed himself a sandwich and ate lunch at the table where he had killed his wife over breakfast.

Walter noted the steady, implacable routine. Mr. List was being productive and efficient. He was having a good day.

Shortly after noon, List picked up his daughter, Patty, at school. She was sick and had asked to come home, and didn’t feel well enough to work her after-school job at the insurance office. As she gathered her books in the backseat, he walked quickly into the house before her, and was hiding behind the door when she entered the kitchen. List shot her in the head from behind. Dragging her body through the house, he made a forty-foot track of blood parallel to his wife’s blood, and laid her on one of the open sleeping bags. He covered his daughter’s face with a rag.

At one o’clock, List, cleaned up and, wearing fresh business attire, went into town to do errands. He put a thirty-day stop on the mail. At Suburban Trust bank, he cashed out more than $2,000 in U.S. savings bonds, the last of his mother’s savings. She died unaware he’d already gone through all of the $200,000 her husband had left her. He mailed a special delivery letter to himself at Hillside Avenue with a key wrapped in a folded blank sheet of paper.

At approximately three o’clock, young Fred, his thirteen-year-old son, called from the insurance office where he, too, had an after-school job, wondering, “What happened to Patty?” He wanted to come home. List picked him up at the insurance office, drove home, and hurried into the house to retrieve the gun he’d left behind the kitchen door. He shot Fred in the back of the head before he got his coat off. His father pulled the boy’s small body onto the sleeping bag beside Patty. He covered Freddie’s face with a small rag.

At four o’clock, John Jr., his husky fifteen-year-old, came home early from soccer practice, and sprang away from his father hiding behind the door with a gun. He grabbed his father’s hand as bullets blasted a kitchen cabinet, a dining room window frame, the ceiling. As List stalked his son through the house, a pistol in each hand, bullets caught the boy in the back, behind the neck, in the head, and he fell, breaking his jaw. Walter knew that a fifteen-year-old male had a narcissistic selfishness, a will to survive, unmatched at any other age, and John Jr. wouldn’t quit. He crawled desperately away from his father in the parlor. List stood over him and pumped eight bullets into his oldest son. A ninth into the eye and a tenth through the heart were required before the boy would lie still.