Jim Dunn was a good man. I’m going to try to find a way to help him, Fleisher thought.

Fleisher spoke rapidly with the no-nonsense tone he used when he wasn’t cracking jokes.

“OK, Jim. We get hundreds of requests, and most people we can’t help. But we’ll try to give you some advice and guidance. I’ll call Frank Friel, who is the police chief in Bensalem, near you in Bucks County, and we’ll both meet with you at his office.” Dunn said he would come with his wife, Barbara. The meeting was set for eight the next morning.

Dunn was speechless. “Mr. Fleisher, I don’t know what to say.” “Frank was a legendary police captain with the city of Philadelphia,” Fleisher continued. “He’s a Vidocq Society Member and one of the most astute men I know on homicide cases. I don’t know if we’ll be able to help beyond this. But if anyone can give you guidance, it’s Frank.”

The night flight from London landed in Philadelphia in the rain. The thin man in coach was not pleased. “It’s ugly, I’m exhausted, I’m miserable, it’s not good,” Walter mumbled. “And I’m out of my last goddamn cigarette.” He was disgusted by the sallow faces in the gloomy concourse, and got in the taxi thinking, I’ve got to get away from stupid people. The other passengers gave the gaunt, stiff-backed gentleman with the shining aluminum attaché a wide berth. This pleased him. “It reduces the time I must spend with the dull and ignorant.” The last thing he needed was someone to start asking him who killed JonBenet Ramsey, or who Jack the Ripper really was.

Walter was physically spent. On the road he lived on cigarettes, Chardonnay, cheeseburgers, and sedatives for long flights. Sleeping little, he often fell ill during trips, and depended on the kindness of strangers-pathologists in London to prescribe medicine, a boy in Istanbul to follow the frail American around with a chair, kindly folks everywhere to help him find his way. He was always getting lost. To restore his self, he told the cabbie, he needed to find the essentials: cigarettes, diet soda, laxatives, and a drink.

“The cigarettes must be Kool Menthol Kings. The diet soda must be red. The laxative must work.” Then he’d collapse in his hotel bed.

The trip to Scotland Yard had nearly done him in. He had been woozy with lack of sleep when he lectured to three hundred of the brightest minds in the Home Office on murder. Walter had consulted with London ’s Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard, for years on major cases. He would later help them catch the serial killer of homosexuals who terrorized London, explaining that the slayer threw his victims out high windows because this variety of killer was enchanted by nasty sarcastic puns, in this case “Fairies can’t fly!”

At Scotland Yard, “they consider me a guru-the guru of all perversity,” he said with humor and no small pride-meaning sadism, Munchausen syndrome, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and the other “isms” he seemed to grasp as if he’d created them. But the Brits were damned tired of hearing how smart the Americans were on the most difficult murder cases.

Looking out across the sea of faces, he saw the narrowed eyes of “the enemies of my ideas”-the Old Guard, old men trapped in the orthodox nineteenth-century procedural method of murder investigation. Walter was a heretic. The depth of the psychology of the murdering mind, its artistic, symbolic expressions in the positioning of the body just so, the hidden meaning of the knife in the chest (six inches long, the average penis length; look for a perp, like most sex criminals filling the prisons in seething rage, who couldn’t get it up). They were horrified by him. He was peddling “a cross between New Age folderol and witchcraft.” His challenge was to convince them his work was empirical, “not just bad gas from a good meal.”

He started by trying to amuse them with his “tale of woe.” After working a full day at the prison in Lansing, Michigan, he’d driven to Detroit, flown all night to London without sleeping a wink. He’d landed and “fumbled around like I do, getting lost in the airport and train system,” losing more time. He’d arrived at the Philadelphia office at 11:30 A.M., eager to rest for the speech the next day. “Oh, no,” they said. “The speech is today. It’s right now!” He was standing before them now nearly cataleptic with fatigue, and hoped for their forbearance.

It was true, but they were not amused. “They didn’t seem to care I hadn’t slept in thirty hours.” Instead, sensing his weakness, they attacked. Even one of his friends set him up, put him on the spot.

Now he had his Philadelphia cab driver stop at an all-night drugstore. Walter found the essentials and put them on the counter. The young clerk asked for ID to buy the cigarettes. He glared at her in disbelief.

“Madam, you’re carding me! I’m sixty goddamn years old! Look at this face!” Sweeping out the door, he muttered, “I’ll go somewhere where they require an IQ above seventy.”

Later in his Center City hotel room, overlooking Broad Street, he calmed down with a cigarette. His temper had come from addiction. “My exercise is inhaling,” he’d joke, or, “My exercise is coughing after smoking.” He was not proud of it, it was simply a fact. “During nicotine withdrawal, I become like a hawk eyeing a mouse. I simply cannot tolerate human frailty.”

He did not apologize for it. It was the cost of being R. Walter, bane to psychopaths on four continents. “With psychopaths I am far more predatory and in control, using a surgeon’s knife, in the superior position rather than being vulnerable to the biological charms of addiction,” he said. “And I am always in the superior position.”

Walter had many friends and more than a few enemies. Some forensic scientists refused to sit next to him at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention because he verbally destroyed presenters every year. Friends described him as a shining blade, too sharp for everyday use. Walter saw life, as Teddy Roosevelt once did, as a test of manhood. “One of the final tests as a man matures,” he said, “is to identify those things one loves enough to protect.” He’d risk his life to protect or avenge man, woman, or child. Like Roland and Siegfried in the old and forgotten stories, he would go alone into the cave in the dark with the sword when it counted. A week after Walter’s trip to Scotland Yard, FBI agent Robert Ressler had signed a copy of his new book, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI, “To Richard Walter, My good friend and fellow monster slayer.”

The red light was blinking on the telephone in his hotel room. A goddamn red light, he thought. Who the hell wants me now? He was planning to go to the bar. He wanted to hear only five words the rest of the night: “What will it be, sir?”

Reluctantly he picked up the phone. There were two messages. The first was from Bill Fleisher welcoming him to Philadelphia -and asking a favor.

“Richard, would you call Jim Dunn? He’s a bereaved father from Bucks County whose son disappeared a year ago in west Texas, a murder; the cops haven’t a clue. The case has got your name on it. Jim’s a good guy, and I felt sorry for him. Maybe you can find a way to help him when you’re in town.” Scowling, Walter wrote down the number.

The second message was from Dr. Richard Shepherd, forensic pathologist at Guy’s Hospital, London, internationally known consultant to Scotland Yard, the queen’s coroner. Shepherd, a good friend, had introduced Walter to the Scotland Yard audience. Shepherd was tall, commanding, a wicked wit, a pilot (bored with an AAFS convention in Chicago, he rented a small plane and flew over Lake Michigan), and a pathologist of “unsurpassed brilliance.” Walter hoped he was calling to apologize. By the end of his speech Walter felt he’d done passably well, parried with the critics, held his own. Then Shepherd pulled the doozy.