Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,155

at all.” In October 2002, Patnode was convicted of the murder. As Patnode wept and apologized, Judge Anthony Aloi sentenced him to the maximum penalty of twenty-five years to life in state prison for committing “an unbelievably heinous, atrocious, and cruel act.”

“Lorean Weaver may have been your ghost, Mr. Patnode, but she was a human being. She was a daughter. She was a sister. She was a mother. She was a memory to her family. She was a crack in their broken hearts for all those years. . . . Mr. Patnode,” he said, “you should remain in prison for the rest of your life.”

Lorean’s daughter, Schmillion Weaver, an infant when her mother disappeared, thanked the police for bringing justice to the killers. “I feel closure now,” she said.

“I knew it wasn’t Updegrove!” Bender repeated. “Rich, you got the wrong guy.”

“Frank,” Walter said wearily, “I’ve told you a thousand times a profile is not a suspect. It’s a description of the traits of the likely suspect based on a crime assessment, including the signature at the crime scene and a series of other probabilities. The profile was on the mark.”

But Bender, his eyes shining with glee, seemed not to understand or care about the distinction. The Girl with the Missing Face, the case everyone said was impossible, had turned into one of his greatest triumphs. And Walter had named the wrong guy.

If God had made Lorean Quincy Weaver the first time, Bender had re-created her in clay the second time, and he would never let Walter forget it.

• CHAPTER 53 •

THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL

The crowns of great trees made shadowy tracings on the moonlit peak, but the upstairs windows of the Greek Revival were black. Hedges hid the downstairs panes in shifting walls of darkness. The only light came from the far rear of the house, the orange glow of a cigarette floating under the proscenium arch of the music room. Sitting at his beloved 1926 Chickering grand, a classic American piano he had “stolen from a fool quite ignorant of its value,” the thin man placed the cigarette in the ashtray on the lid of the piano and his hands over the keys. He let his mind go, free as the cigarette smoke wending lazily in the faint moonlight by the spray of ostrich feathers in a black vase on the lid. The thin man, so disciplined to the cold beauty and rules of order, was consciously summoning chaos.

Of its own impulse a finger struck middle C.

He had started at dusk with a variation on Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1, gloriously filling the house with music as it drained of light. Now, from the single key, a song of his own creation leaped into existence, spontaneous and brilliant. “I play my mood,” he said. He let his mood soar mightily, exalted in the knowledge that he was creating something new that would never fall on ears other than his own and he would never play again.

He had been a musical prodigy as a youth before the opera of the streets turned his head. Music was his joy, but also a discipline he practiced to enter the labyrinth of the criminal mind. “I do not know a great detective without musical sense,” he once said. “The problem the police often have is that one cannot analyze human behavior with merely logic. You can’t do it. Man is a creature of associative thinking.”

In the thrall of the creation he no longer sensed the darkness beyond the piano, the moonlight on the windowsill, the cigarette smoke bending in the soft breeze from the garden.

Walter was a proud scientist, disdainful of things of the spirit, who lived by strict rules of evidence, the logical assessment of a crime scene bathed in the unsparing light of deduction. Among murder investigators he was often reputed to be the coldest mind in the world. He worshipped the god of reason. Yet his was a classical mind finely tuned to the Doric columns and classical harmonies of his house, stubbornly resistant to modern illusions. Many in our time have forgotten, he said, that “reason is born of twins—rational thinking and emotion. When one denies emotion, it’s still there—we’re animals—and it bites you in the ass, expressing itself now as anger and vehemence. The Greeks struck this balance best.”

The warring Greek gods—Apollo, the sun god of order, forms, and rationalism; Dionysus, the wine god of revels, chaos, ecstasy—shared the same temple and space in men’s hearts, forever in