Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,10

to follow.

It was an archetype made flesh in Richard Walter.

“You have to be on your game to beat me, Frank, and Bill,” Walter said. “If you knock us off our feet we’ll walk on our knees. If you knock us off our knees we’ll walk on our balls—and our balls have calluses.”

Now Fleisher scowled at his partners.

“There’s a reason a case is cold for many years. This isn’t TV. You need the family support, police commitment, the political winds blowing your way,” he said, counting them off on the fingers of a raised hand. “You need investigative brilliance—and you need luck. You got about one out of five in this case.”

Walter glared at Fleisher. The psychologist and federal agent complemented each other well, but their differences could be sharp along a philosophical fault line. Walter considered Fleisher a brilliant lawman but naïve about the nature of evil; Fleisher admired Walter’s cold eye for evil, yet the thin man’s Machiavellian view of human nature oppressed Fleisher’s generous heart and hopes for redemption for all men.

Typical Fleisher, Walter thought now, utterly conventional.

Walter looked over at Bender, who seemed to have entirely forgotten about the case, his attention having drifted elsewhere. Bender was brooding over his espresso, his light hazel eyes in the middle distance, where laughter sounded at a table of young women. Fleisher, following his partner’s eyes, quipped, “If I ever stop getting excited about that, shoot me.” Bender returned from his reverie and chuckled.

Walter, with his uncompromising, antiquated code of honor, considered Bender a knight of opposite color—a man who honored little but his own desires, with nearly sociopathic cunning. Yet together Bender and Walter saw around corners that other detectives, Fleisher included, did not. It was the impish Bender, a wizard with the gift of seeing the past and the future, who had brought the three men together and ever conspired to bust them apart. Bender was narcissistic, manipulative, well named; he bent rules and time, the boundaries of the grave and the connubial bed. “Frank,” Walter said, “is a shit stirrer. He thinks our motto is ‘One for all and all for one, and that’s me!’ ”

But nothing happened without Bender, or Walter, or Fleisher. No case went forward without accord between the three. Now they reminded themselves that they couldn’t solve every case. They had no formal subpoena, arrest, or investigative powers; their goal was merely to offer advice and counsel to the police and victims of crime who needed it. “If we help move a case along, we’ve done our job,” Fleisher repeated. In fact, wasn’t the idea originally to be a social club for detectives? To have fun?

By the time they had reached the grounds in their cups, Walter and Bender had decided that Antoine LeHavre, if he had indeed done it, was free to get away with murder as far as they were concerned.

PART TWO

FOUR BOYS

•CHAPTER 4 •

A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM

On Saturday, February 23, 1957, a cold rain spattered a lonely country road on the northern edge of Philadelphia, falling on a field of brush and vines slowly claiming an old cardboard box behind the tree line. Inside the box lay a small blue-eyed boy of perfect tapered form, naked and laid out with his arms by his side like a forgotten boy-king of Egypt. His sarcophagus was a J. C. Penney box of corrugated cardboard, three feet long and eighteen inches wide, marked FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE. Great and prolonged care had been taken.

The boy had been washed and groomed and wrapped in a coarse Navajo blanket as if ritually prepared for the next life. His hair was roughly chopped, his fingernails trimmed with a loving touch. His life had been extinguished in an ancient ritual designed to harvest his innocence and beauty by inflicting on him the greatest of cruelties. These were the abominable mixing of love and tenderness with betrayal, torture, and terror, culminating in the horror of his murder, which alone provided the climax for the killer or killers.

The ritual was often confused with Satanism but bowed to neither God nor the devil. In the soft landscape of eastern Pennsylvania in the middle of the Eisenhower 1950s, no one had a clue what the signs meant. The boy was scarred with deep cuts and bruises from head to toe.

He was only three feet, four inches tall. But he was too long for the box, and had been curled into the little cardboard coffin to fit. His head peeked