been a step behind Nauss for many frustrating years during the biker’s reign of terror on his home turf. He saw this as his big chance. “Now we’ve got to find Nauss.”
“Piece of cake, partner.” Bender beamed in pride, his silver incisor winking in his own skull.
Bender and Schneider were secretly excited about their chances of finally nabbing Vorhauer’s partner, the convicted killer Robert Thomas Nauss. Their enthusiasm was not dampened by the fact that the cunning Nauss had been on the lam for years after the prison break without once being seen by law enforcement, or that there was no reliable new information about his whereabouts or appearance. Nothing.
Success was all but assured, though it wasn’t something they could discuss with most cops. It had been foretold by a psychic.
The psychic was Penny Wright, a nearly blind woman who had helped Schneider on several cases. The marshal had taken Bender to meet her several weeks earlier, and she had predicted that they would capture their next fugitive in a building with a large column. After the Vorhauer arrest at the Quality Inn, Schneider and Bender realized the hotel’s unusual architecture was itself a large column. With new significance, they recalled Wright’s other prediction that after the column arrest the next fugitive they would catch would be a man with a bad stomach. Schneider was fired with excitement. “Nauss was shot in the stomach by a fellow Warlock gang member when he was younger,” he said. “I bet his stomach is giving him trouble.”
Bender agreed. Schneider looked at his Visual Detective partner with a widening sense of possibilities. He’d been chasing fugitives for a decade, to country safe houses and urban hideaways, against impossible odds. But now it seemed that even the Most Wanted criminals were merely hiding in folds and twists in time, their movements apparent to the strangely light-colored eyes of Frank Bender.
“Mr. Nauss,” Schneider said, “must be the Man with the Bad Stomach.”
Bender grinned.
“No doubt.”
• CHAPTER 13 •
THE MAN WITH THE BAD STOMACH
After midnight, Bender took Joan to the white underground room. They danced and drank vodka in clear glasses. Outside the wind wailed over the dark shuttered row houses and dying river. They watched David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Bender was reminded of Lynch’s dark but lovely Philadelphia vision and felt it “downloading” into him. “Philadelphia [is] . . . fantastically beautiful,” the filmmaker wrote. “Factories, smoke, railroads, diners, the strangest characters, the darkest night . . . so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world . . . I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and . . . I hear the wind, and I’m off into the darkness somewhere.” It was a blast of energy, but nothing helped.
In the middle of the night Joan returned home to her husband and two children in New Jersey. Bender crawled into bed with Jan for a brief, tortured rest. The sun rose pale and fractured by the dirt-streaked skylights. It was July, the steaming summer of 1987, and nothing could possibly help. His muse was gone.
“The Harmony of Form” was the name he gave his muse. Harmony was the blissful grace that allowed him to feel the inevitable shape of a dead man’s mouth based on the eyes and nose. He entered a trancelike state of creation that others mistook for God-like arrogance. In fact, in these moments Bender felt the lowest humility and love for the implicit order of things. “There’s a harmony flowing through everything: art, music, shape. Sometimes you can just feel the way things are and ought to be,” he said. Sometimes not. And then he was like a junkie standing before the last clinic cut from the budget.
Without his muse, the half-formed head of the sadistic killer Robert Thomas Nauss was a stubborn scornful lump of undead clay, a brown-mud Beelzebub. The reborn killer, of Bender’s own creation, seemed to be hiding from his true form, mocking him in a battle of wills. He felt like he lived with the spirit of his subjects, and Nauss was proving even trickier and nastier than Vorhauer. He was staring at the Warlock’s merciless clay eyes when the telephone scattered the cats in the shadows of the warehouse.
“Frank Bender.” His voice was clear and strong, an inverse of the chaos around him. The man on the phone introduced himself as Bob Leschorn, chief inspector of the U.S. Marshals Service at headquarters in McLean, Virginia. He sounded