Michael Capuzzo - The Murder Room - The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases

Hudson, Wisconsin, December 2004

The profiler would not shake hands with the priest. It was unacceptable, intolerable if he was to go in for the kill. And the profiler always went in for the kill. That was the thing that excited him most. It never ceased to enthrall him, even in retirement.

The priest had swept in, cassock whirling, smiling and pumping familiar hands, trailing an assistant “to puff himself up with more power,” the profiler noted. The Father was a large man, commanding in his black garb; bearded, youthful face cracked in a welcoming Midwestern smile. Next to him the profiler seemed shrunken, emaciated, pale as a ghost. He coughed up a lung with each cigarette, at least three times an hour. He also was an atheist, sneering and quite cynical about the whole question. But that was not the point.

The point was moral standards must be upheld as a matter of honor, a point of manhood. The more immediate point was control, and the thin man would not let the psychopath acquire it, not for a moment. Each moment in life, he believed, was a choice: a step toward good or evil, dominance or submission, authenticity or falsehood. He did not tolerate the lesser choices. He did not tolerate those who crossed the line invading common decency. This made him a lot of enemies. He was proud to have enemies. “One should never apologize for being right,” he said.

Now the big, fleshy hand near to God was outstretched toward the thin man in fellowship. The others, the police chief and two detectives, were watching.

The profiler wrinkled his aquiline nose in disgust, “as if I was being offered a piece of dog shit.” Swiftly he withdrew his hand and turned away. He was pleased to see a stricken look fleetingly cross the priest’s face. Then, “composure returned like a sheen coating the hollow man.”

It was always all about control. The profiler had instructed the chief how to introduce him. No name, no city or rank, only “this is a man from out of town who is an expert on murder.” Once the detective introduced the profiler as instructed, the thin man shook hands with the priest with Victorian courtesy, like the old-school gentleman he was. Then he sat in the corner, legs folded, lip turned in a sneer, quietly watching as the police asked the priest about the murders.

The police were no closer to an arrest than they had been that afternoon in broad daylight when the town was shocked from a century of innocence in such matters, unimagined and unimaginable, with the execution-style murder of two prominent citizens. The police had once had eleven suspects and now, two years later, had moved no further. The profiler studied the case file and chatted with the police for three hours before narrowing the eleven suspects to one. “It’s the priest,” he told the police. “Of course, I know you don’t want it to be the priest. Nonetheless, it’s the priest.” The thin man had appeared on the front page of the small-town newspaper declaring he was “quite confident” the mysterious murders would soon be solved. “If I were the killer,” he quipped, “I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.”

The police hadn’t known what to expect when they presented the cold case in the nineteenth-century men’s club in Philadelphia to the world’s greatest detectives. The French flags, the walnut paneling, the chandeliers made them nervous. There was an immense, portly, bearded man with a huge head, a man of a thousand jokes they called the Grand Inquisitor; a slim, short, muscular artist, bald with a white goatee and dressed all in black, who saw dead people; and the gaunt profiler with the face of Poe. There were a hundred others, famous sleuths, the FBI agent whose movie double nails Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs , investigators of the RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, too many to remember.

They said they’d consider taking the case, possibly organize a team.

Then one man, the thin man, got off the plane alone.

And now he watched as the priest sat before him and fielded questions from the police with dignity and poise. The priest sat erect with his elbows on the table, his hands tented as if in prayer. The detectives asked him about the young boys. The priest sat back with umbrage; the mere suggestion was an insult. The detectives pushed harder, with names and dates, until the priest had to admit to sex with the young teenagers. But the priest told the police they badly misunderstood. He was not assaulting the boys. He was teaching them sex education.

There was quiet. A detective looked to the corner and asked if the profiler had any questions.

The thin man leaned forward and removed his glasses to stare at the priest. “To begin with, if I were in charge of this investigation, you would not be wearing that costume.” He spat out the word “costume” as if it were something foul.

“I’m a priest twenty-four hours a day!” the priest objected.

The profiler gave the priest a merciless glare and scowled in deepening disgust. “Here, you are not representing the Roman Catholic Church. Here, in fact, what you’re doing is representing a failed man.”

The priest blanched and fell silent. The police resumed their questioning about the boys. The priest repeated his educational theory, his justifications. Of course, he got them drunk first; they were too ashamed of their bodies otherwise. Then he got them excited. But he didn’t bring them to climax. He was teaching them responsible sexuality. It’s not wrong to get a hard-on, it’s wrong to use it.

The thin man’s voice rose shrilly from the corner. “Ridiculous! You’re a pervert!”

The police asked the priest to remove his cassock. It had been the profiler’s idea. “With this sort of psychopath, we must do everything to rattle him.” Indeed the priest seemed a smaller man after he pulled off the cassock and removed the undershirt beneath. The police compared the tattoo on his shoulder with one a witness described. It was a match.

As the priest pulled his undergarment back on, and then his cassock, the profiler stood and approached him, coming very close, and gave him a death stare. He kept staring, implacable, his eyes as cold and unrelenting as a night wind, until the priest looked down and away. Suddenly, the profiler’s heart leaped in joy, though he kept his face expressionless as a smoothed stone.

The priest was crying!

“A tear of hatred slowly trilled down his cheek,” the thin man noted. “It was quite lovely.”

They were standing two feet apart, the man of law and the man of God. As the tear dissolved into the thick beard, the big man wiped it away, then looked up into the thin man’s eyes with loathing and slowly hissed:

“God… damn… it!”

The thin man couldn’t contain himself. He was grinning openly.

“Was it a thrill to hear this man of the cloth taking the name of the Lord in vain?” Indeed it was.

“I knew then the bitch was mine.”

In the beginning of the world all hope was lost. But there were three men:

The chieftain, the warrior, the shaman.