Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,2

pieces of which were handed down to him from the oldest written Welsh sources, the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch. In these texts can be found fragments of the first historical record of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

The story, as told numberless times across the centuries, begins with the world in ruins. Crops wither, even the trees are dead, “tortured bones of a perished race, of monsters no mortal knows,” the poet cries. The wounded king ails in his castle, powerless. The king cannot act without help; he needs two other men to embark on a journey, men of great and unique talents to complement his own.

Why we ceaselessly tell this story is a mystery. Scientists cannot explain why Homo sapiens must take in oxygen and release certain stories to live.

Philosophers say the ultimate source of the story is the eternal human need to find, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “the promise enshrined in the Mysteries since the beginning of the world.” The prophets say it is our pathway through trials to the grace of God. A man of action might say the relevant point of more than a million years of human trial, error, and wisdom embedded in the story is entirely practical:

When the world breaks and needs fixing, the thing to do is find the right three men.

PART ONE

THE MURDER ROOM

• CHAPTER 1 •

THE CONNOISSEURS OF MURDER

The great hall was filled with the lingering aroma of pork and mallard duck sausage as black-vested waiters appeared, shouldering cups of vanilla bean blancmange. Connoisseurs sat at tables between the hearths under glittering eighteenth-century chandeliers, chatting amiably in several languages. When the coffee arrived, a fine Colombian supremo steaming in its pots, the image of the corpse of a young man of uncommon beauty, lying on his back, materialized in the center of the room.

A gray winter light slanted into the hall, as the midday sun had sailed beyond the city, and the image on the large screen was crisp. The young man’s blond locks were matted in a corona of dried blood, his sculpted cheekbones reduced to a pulp. The police photograph had been taken at night in a restaurant alley, and the surrounding scene was obscured in darkness. Yet the strobe light had thrown the young man’s face into sharp relief. Out of the shadows of a distant southern night, the stark, wide-open eyes loomed over the room.

It was shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon, and the fifth and final course had been served to the connoisseurs of the Vidocq Society.

“My goodness,” said a short-haired young woman in a red dress. Patting her mouth with a napkin, she excused herself from the table and, a hand over her mouth, hurried to the door. William Fleisher, a big man in a magnificent blue suit, WLF embroidered on his custom shirt, sadly shook his large, bearded head. “We need to do a better job screening guests,” he said. Richard Walter, his gaunt cheekbones sunken in the wan light, glared at the departing figure. Frank Bender—clad in a tight black T-shirt and jeans, the only man in the hall not wearing a suit—whispered to the detective next to him, “Nice legs.”

Fleisher shook his head in wonderment at the two eccentric, moody geniuses with whom he had thrown in his lot. His partners were criminologists without peer or precedent in his thirty years with the feds.

Forensic psychologist Richard Walter was the coolest eye on murder in the world. Tall and acerbic, he spoke with a clipped propriety that had earned him the moniker the Englishman from certain criminal elements. Walter had spent twenty years treating the most violent psychopaths in the state of Michigan at the largest walled penitentiary in the world, in Jackson, and at one of the toughest, the old Romanesque castle in Marquette on Lake Superior. His habit of peering over the top of his owlish black glasses and boring into the souls of inmates was known as the “Marquette stare,” and it was a look to be avoided at all costs. He employed it to crack the façade of psychopaths. Walter was unsurpassed in his understanding of the darkest regions of the heart. In his spare time, moonlighting as a consulting detective, he was one of the small group of American criminologists who invented modern criminal profiling in the 1970s and ’80s to battle serial killers.

At Scotland Yard, which used him on the most extreme murder cases, he