Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,37

that the task force’s long surveillance of Barbara Vorhauer had borne fruit. She had led the marshals right to her husband.

“You’re kidding me! What happened? ” The artist’s voice, childlike in its enthusiasms, rang across the line.

A night-shift nurse at Osteopathic Hospital, Barbara had gotten off work early in the morning as usual. But instead of taking her routine route home, she’d raced along a twisting, helter-skelter path designed to shake surveillance. Trained by Hans, Barbara had proven remarkably adept at avoiding the marshals for months.

But this time they kept pace with hairpin turns and U-turns, up blind alleys, and into the parking lot of the Penrose Diner. Barbara got out of her car and entered the diner. When she came out, she left her car in the parking lot and walked across the street to the Quality Inn, a twelve-story cylindrical edifice. Hans Vorhauer had picked the round hotel with views in all directions for a tryst with his wife.

Rappone posted a nondescript surveillance van in the hotel parking lot intending to wait out Vorhauer. The day wore on, and inside the van, four heavily armed U.S. Marshals kept a relentless eye on the hotel entrance, unable to leave the van even to use the bathroom. Any unusual movement would spook Vorhauer into fleeing. The surveillance continued all night long. By morning, Rappone had called for backup.

At 10 A.M., Vorhauer and his wife walked out of the hotel and were immediately surrounded by U.S. Marshals. The hit man raised his hands in surrender. He was wearing a light jacket, a hat, and sunglasses, and when he removed the hat his hairstyle was dramatically different: It was cut short and bleached blond.

“Good work, Visual Detective. I don’t know how you do it,” said a still-stunned Schneider, who had dropped by the studio to congratulate his artist partner. “A lot of people owe you an apology.”

“Good work yourself,” Bender said. “You’re the best detective I’ve ever worked with.”

“Want to go get a beer?”

“Nah, I’ve got to paint this head.”

Schneider looked at the bust of a dead man with a familiar face. “The Man in the Cornfield,” Bender called the unidentified white male in his twenties whose corpse had been found by a farmer plowing his fields in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Over the weeks they had worked together on the Vorhauer case, Schneider had watched him transform the skull of the Man in the Cornfield into a clay mold and finally a plaster cast. The white plaster bust had a heroic profile, a handsome long-haired young man with a strong jaw and a noble nose. The Man in the Cornfield looked like Theseus about to face the Minotaur. “Now that you’ve found Vorhauer”—Bender nodded toward the head—“maybe you can find out who this guy is.”

Schneider smirked. “You know nothing about him, right?”

“Nope, nothing.”

Lines of discontent etched the sides of the detective’s mouth. “Yeah, right. Tens of thousands of missing people in this country, and you want me to pull him out of a hat. I’m no magician. You think you are?”

The artist’s eyes glittered. “No, it’s a team effort.”

On his way home from Bender’s Philadelphia studio, Schneider stopped at the Upper Darby Police Department to get his mail. He hadn’t been to the station in weeks. When he wasn’t on loan to the U.S. Marshals Service, Schneider worked as a township detective, and because of his years investigating the Warlocks—and Vorhauer’s fellow escapee Nauss—Schneider was chosen as a key member of the Vorhauer and Nauss fugitive task forces. He was known in the department as an expert on biker gangs. As soon as he walked in the door, an officer hailed him to look at a photograph in a missing-person flyer. The officer said he’d just learned from an informant that the missing person in the flyer was a man named Edward Meyers, who had been killed by a biker gang and buried in the Pennsylvania hills.

“This is the guy. Do you know him?”

Schneider’s face opened in surprise. Staring out at him from the photograph was the Man in the Cornfield. “No, I don’t know him, but I saw him not fifteen minutes ago in Frank Bender’s studio.”

Oblivious to his colleague’s smirks and wisecracks, Schneider returned to the studio, and he and Bender held the flyer photograph alongside the bust. The Man in the Cornfield was a double for Edward Meyers. Police would match Meyers’s dental records to the skull and confirm it.

“We’re on a roll, Visual Detective,” Schneider said. He had