in defense of his son.
“That’s exactly my point, Jim. Many times what young people will do if they feel they have failed their own class or standards is they will regress back to a lower class or group because the pressure for performance isn’t as great,” the profiler continued. “Then across time those who have any substance in them at all will repair themselves, pull themselves back up to the expected standard, and join their own class. I know that sounds elitist but that’s just the way it is.”
“I was excited for Scott because he was really turning things around,” said Dunn.
Walter nodded. “He’s staying away from drugs, doing well on his job. And while he’s screwing his brains out with Leisha Hamilton, as twentysomethings are wont to do, he’s found a better thing, the real thing, in Jessica. He’s working his way back to legitimate society. Then of course Leisha finds out she was going to be dumped and you don’t dump Leisha Hamilton, she dumps you. He had the bad fortune of forming an alliance with a violent psychopath. He’s not the first. They don’t call it ‘psychopathic charm’ for nothing.”
Dunn sighed.
“Jim, we’re not just solving a murder. Scott was cut short of his ability to rehabilitate himself and be honorable and productive. What we’re doing—part of the ethic of being a father—is to take up that challenge for him and make a strike for decency.”
“What do we do next?” Dunn’s eyes were fastened on the thin man.
“The Lubbock Police Department must call me and request my help. The Vidocq Society does not become involved in a case unless it is invited in with full cooperation by the police department. Until that happens, all we’ve done is have a conversation.”
“I’ll call them right away. They’ll understand,” Dunn said passionately. “They’ll have to.”
“Then it’s up to the police to call me,” Walter said, “or we have wasted our time. And another thing.”
Dunn appeared dazed. He was feeling relieved, emboldened, optimistic, and overwhelmed all at once.
The thin man’s face sharpened in the sallow light of the room.
“The Vidocq Society will help you as best we can. As for myself, I’m not going to let that bitch get away with murder.”
• CHAPTER 33 •
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
The week before Christmas a little blond girl, dead for thirty years, materialized on a screen in the City Tavern. The tiny figure, bruised and beaten, ashen face drained of life, shimmered in the midday sunlight in the front of the room. Fleisher started trembling. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.
That morning in the Strawbridge & Clothier department store, he’d seen Ebenezer Scrooge quaver before the Ghost of Christmas Past in the store’s annual portrayal of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But the slain little girl before him now, nine-year-old Carol Ann Dougherty, was not a figment of anyone’s imagination, and Fleisher was not trembling in fear. He was shaking in fury.
Dougherty’s murder was one of the saddest and most disturbing images of his childhood. Carol Ann had been found raped and murdered in St. Mark’s Church in Bristol, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb not far from Fleisher’s house, in October 1962. A fifth-grader at the parish school, she had been killed in an era when police and the public were not fully aware of the perverse sexual needs of many priests, or the long practice in the Roman Catholic Church of allowing pedophile priests, cloaked wolves, to prey on victims, simply transferring them from flock to vulnerable flock. Carol’s killer had never been brought to justice.
Now on the morning of December 17, 1992, as the Vidocq Society began its examination of the Choir Loft Murder, Fleisher converted his anger into a desire to fix the past. Thirty years, one month, and twenty-five days after the murder, Bristol police chief Frank Peranteau and detective Randy Moore stood before the society to present the case. Peranteau had said, “We need all the help we can get.” A series of articles in the Bucks County Courier Times by reporter J. D. Mullane had recently reawakened interest in the county’s coldest case. The county district attorney had impaneled a grand jury to investigate it. Chief Peranteau had inherited the case from Chief Vincent Faragalli, retired now for thirteen years, who had obsessed over it. Faragalli kept Carol’s picture in his wallet.
The case was always “ just out of reach,” investigators said.
Now the screen in the Long Room showed Dougherty lying on her back in the choir loft the