Free The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo

the sketch pad in the morgue, he consulted artist friends and his academy sculpture teacher on techniques. Working nights, he shaped a clay bust over the bones, made a plaster mold of the bust, painted the face, and crowned the head with a dark blond wig. “I saw every feature of her face,” he said. “And how the form of one part of her face flowed into all the other forms.” He brought the head into the morgue that Friday after midnight.
    The Philadelphia police had never used a forensic sculpture, but they distributed a photo of Frank’s bust of the murdered Jane Doe to the Philadelphia media, and published it in a missing-person flyer sent widely to East Coast police departments.
    Corpse number 5233 remained in the morgue, with no one to mourn or bury her. A New Jersey philanthropist offered her own cemetery plot so the “poor soul” wouldn’t end up in a pauper’s grave. But five months later, a New Jersey detective studying missing-person reports noticed a “remarkable” similarity between the bust of a woman in a Philadelphia Police Department circular and the photo of a woman reported missing by Chicago police.
    Anna Mary Duval, sixty-two, had left via Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on October 15, her family told the police. They didn’t know where she was going, and she never returned. Now authorities quickly confirmed that corpse 5233 found dumped at the Philadelphia airport was indeed the woman who’d boarded the plane in Chicago. Police still were unable to determine what drew her to the City of Brotherly Love, where she knew no one, or who had killed her and why. But Anna Mary Duval had been identified, sad as her story was, thanks to Bender’s artistic vision.
    Fillinger was stunned. The police had used sketch artists for years, with little success. Here was a full three-dimensional head sprung from the imagination of a high school–educated kid who didn’t know what “forensics” meant. Bender had been touched by a gift neither he nor anybody else could fully explain.
    Frank had his first ID and his first newspaper headlines. Within days, other police departments around the country began asking him to produce busts of unidentified murder victims.
    He was a natural. His wife was immensely proud of him, and it was a new income source. But the work was ghoulish, especially with two young daughters in the house. Heads were always popping out of shoeboxes and beer coolers. The worst part was the horrific odor of the cooking craniums, or the thought of them swarming with flesh-stripping beetles. Once, when bugs came flowing out of their old Hotpoint stove, Jan opened it to find the skull of an unknown sailor from the Russian ship Corinthus . Frank figured half an hour would dry it out enough to apply clay. “Frank!” she screamed. “Come take this fucking head out of the oven and go visit your mother.” It was a story they loved to tell.
    She didn’t know what “forensics” meant either. Spooked by her husband’s new vocation, Jan went to the library to research forensic art, and was proud to learn that esteemed European sculptors were doing the same thing.
    She wrote “Forensics” on a piece of paper and taped it to their refrigerator.

• CHAPTER 7 •
    SHADES OF THE DARK KNIGHT
    I n the eastern foothills of the Cascade Range, 150 miles from Seattle, is a view of a town nestled between two rivers and the high walls of the mountains like the dawn of the world. Down in the valley along the wide river are apple orchards and vineyards soaked in an arid, sunny climate like the Bordeaux region of France; Main Street is lined with shops. New to the town’s 6,882 families was a bumper crop of Granny Smiths, until a large man came walking down the hill calmly carrying a screaming child drenched in blood.
    It was autumn, with the smell of wood-smoke and ripening apples in the air and all the lawns on Eleventh Street neat and tended by the sidewalk where the boy struggled and cried against the