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Bruises and cuts too deep for a child to get falling off a bicycle, he said. Deep bruises around the head looked like thumbprints from an adult trying to steady the child for a haircut. It was a violent beating all right, but the medical examiner said he’d need the autopsy to determine cause of death.
    Weinstein held the boy, instinctively trying to shield him from the rain. Suddenly he felt anger surging through him. He looked at Palmer and saw the same fury in his friend’s eyes: Whoever did this should burn in hell.
    But Weinstein couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing. None of them could. The detectives were speculating that a mother or father, poor and pushed to the edge, had lost control during a bath and had been surprised trying to give the only burial they could afford. The dead boy somehow represented something beyond their grasp.
    Criminals were changing. Everything was changing. Philadelphia had watched Pat Boone sing at President Eisenhower’s inaugural ball the month before, and next month thousands of fans would crowd an Elvis Presley concert in Philadelphia. Everywhere the old order was dying, the new being born. The month before, the actor Humphrey Bogart, an icon of traditional masculinity, had died in Los Angeles the same week the Wham-O company made the first Frisbee for a new and liberated generation. Powerful new currents were upwelling, like an ocean turning over. Freedom and authenticity were the watchwords of the coming Age of Aquarius. Old injustices were being addressed, old boundaries smashed, deep longings unleashed.
    Killers were exploring new freedoms, finding deeper and more authentic selves, too.
    The patrolman looked into the small blue eyes, the dull orbs reflecting his own, and was overcome by a sadness tempered by thoughts he couldn’t explain. “I saw so much pain and terror there,” he said. The little face seemed to cry out to him. “Why did this happen? Why would someone do this to me?”
    His eyes met Palmer’s again with shared emotion: We’ll get the S.O.B., no matter what it takes.
    But who was the S.O.B.? What was the answer? Weinstein was a proud man, and it was difficult for him to admit, “I don’t have an answer for that.” He sensed he might never have the answer; it was beyond him. He felt shattered.
    The ambulance door slammed shut, and Weinstein looked up at the gray February sky and the rain falling over the field.

• CHAPTER 5 •
    COPS AND ROBBERS
    T he first boy put nickels in the chrome slot and sighed with pleasure as the small glass door opened on a slice of pie. His father turned the crank of the ornate chrome “liquid machine,” and coffee streamed from a dolphin’s head copied from a Pompeian fountain. Dinner with his father at the Horn and Hardart in Philadelphia, America’s first fast-food restaurant, was a special treat.
    The Automat is cool, he thought. It was a dazzling display of modern technology as impressive to him as the transistor radio and his father’s electric watch. A clean, orderly glass palace of meat loaf and macaroni and cheese, the Automat inspired an Irving Berlin theme song, “Let’s Get Another Cup of Coffee.” His dad whistled it during the Great Depression, and now it was the jingle for the TV show Father Knows Best .
    William (Billy) Fleisher looked forward to Saturday all week long. Saturday mornings in 1957 he went shopping with his mother. But later in the day he got to be with his father, ride with him in the big 1953 Buick sedan to pick up the early edition of the Sunday papers. His father was Dr. Herbert Fleisher, a Navy dentist who came back from the war and opened dental offices in the Nash Building. His father was brilliant, a tall, dark-haired, handsome man who was a double for the actor Robert Taylor. Billy saw him as Lancelot opposite Ava Gardner as Guinevere in the 1953 movie Knights of the Round Table . Herbert Fleisher was named “Philadelphia’s Best-Dressed Man” by the Bulletin. Nearly