Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,26

polygraph, saying in tears, “I have read the Koran, and there is nothing between us. We share the same God.” Or that he considered himself a Christian, too. His wife was Catholic, and they’d hung a portrait of Jesus near the mantelpiece next to an idyllic photograph of two swans on a lovely pond. When friends asked him about it, he said, “That’s Michelle’s. I call that ‘Two Swans Getting Ready to Fuck’ ”—whereupon Michelle would cry, “Bill!”

“As for Jesus, yo, what can I tell you?” he added. “He was the first good guy in history.”

That was Fleisher. A character. A mensch. Crazy enough to try to love the world. Other cops said he’d gained a hundred pounds to accommodate his heart, that immense heart filled with longing.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the members of Shomrim, “many of us know Hal Fillinger, the great Philadelphia medical examiner. But it’s a first chance for a lot of us to meet Frank Bender, the brilliant forensic artist who’s making headlines solving murder cases with the Philadelphia Police Department.

“Fillinger discovering Bender one day in the Philadelphia morgue,” he added, “is the forensic equivalent of Lana Turner being discovered in Hollywood at Schwab’s Drugstore.”

Fleisher had shaken hands with Bender for the first time only minutes earlier. He had been impressed by the artist’s buoyant energy. But now as Bender stood and began to narrate the slide show of his forensic work, he was stunned by the artist’s uncanny ability.

He showed the bust of Anna Duval, the first murder victim he helped identify. From the gallery of the dead, the face of Linda Keyes also looked out at the room. Her unidentified skeleton had been found on a hilltop in Slatington, Pennsylvania; Bender’s bust ran in the Allentown Morning Call, and a man who lived 250 miles away in Salisbury, Pennsylvania, recognized his daughter Linda, missing for two years. Another bust led to the solving of a murder on North Leithgow Street in Philadelphia—the street Bender grew up on, just a few blocks from his house.

The case that touched Bender most deeply was a young black woman whose skeleton was found in a wooded area near a high school football field in North Philadelphia after being raped and murdered and dumped a year earlier. The frilly Ship ’n’ Shore–brand blouse found near the bones inspired Bender to sculpt her looking up as if to an imagined future beyond the grim neighborhood. When “the Girl with Hope,” as he called her, was exhibited at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, a niece recognized Rosella Atkinson, who had disappeared, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter, and brought Rosella’s mother, who looked at the plaster face and wept.

VIGIL FOR DAUGHTER ENDS IN MUSEUM, the Philadelphia Inquirer headline read.

After Bender’s speech, Fleisher went up and congratulated him warmly. The two men made enthusiastic plans to meet for lunch. Bender was eager to develop his forensic career through the connections of one of the most powerful federal lawmen in the Mid-Atlantic states. Fleisher was openly awed by the artist with paranormal crime-fighting abilities. “It’s sacrilegious for a veteran investigator to think this way,” he said, “but what he does goes beyond science and rationalism. Frank is the ultimate secret weapon for law enforcement.”

That first lunch led to a weekly ritual. The federal agent from the suburbs and the libertine Center City artist formed an unbreakable bond: Both men used suffering at the hands of their fathers as fuel for a fiery passion for justice. Fleisher was outraged by victims who were raped or murdered by criminals and then by the system; Bender was furious at cops who gave up on cases he was still passionate about, like the young woman whose skeleton was found enclosing the tiny skeleton of her unborn child in an abandoned Bucks County whiskey distillery. He had done a bust and his own investigation and was convinced it was a murder and he could name the killer, but authorities lacked the political will to care. Over sandwiches and coffee, Fleisher and Bender asked themselves a simple question: People were suffering, the bad guys were winning, and somebody had to do something.

Why not them?

• CHAPTER 9 •

COLD EYES FROM THE PAST

The big man, wide and squat, moved powerfully down the cracked and broken city sidewalk, 250 pounds in a hurry. His expansive white shirt was soaked through with sweat, and his jacket flapped, revealing a Walther PPK .380 handgun. The air reeked of garbage and urine; the stench