The Murder Channel Read online

  I sat cross-legged on the floor, inhaling the acrid stench of cordite, listening to the rescue workers’ semichaotic shouting, patting Robbie’s arm, and telling him he would be fine.

  The deputy knew he would be fine. Maybe I was telling myself that we would all survive, while thinking what a strange and violent people we are.

  … ran up the courthouse steps waving an automatic weapon. It was absolute chaos, Lisa. We dropped over the wall. Demonstrators, reporters from other networks, and local residents who were here out of curiosity all dove for cover. We heard automatic weapon fire. We heard return fire, and we heard what we think were four explosions. We know that a sheriff’s deputy is dead. A second deputy has been injured. Ted Blais, a Vietnam veteran from Charlestown, tells us that the explosions we heard were grenades. He heard plenty of those in Quang Tri Province in the late sixties. We’re going to move back from the wall, Lisa….

  THE VAN ROCKED AND SKIDDED ON WHAT I assumed was Storrow Drive. Dirt coated the single rear window and I had no view. I did not want one.

  Outside in the world everything has been thought and said. There is nothing new, except perhaps the shifting, ragged skyline.

  Language evolves, and creates the illusion of a metamorphosis. We acquire nouns or change nouns into verbs, and the world seems marvelously new, brightly colored, glistening with opportunity. I know this because I saw it on TV. We have become advertisements for ourselves. The most intimate relationships unfold in a room brightly illuminated by a cathode ray tube.

  I am a killer. I have no other identity. My formal education ended after grade eight. There will be no careers for me in web site design, investments, land development.

  I have no illusions about freedom. When it arrives, I expect the experience to be fleeting—a few days, a week. I want no more time than that.

  I have business that I must attend to, an ending to write. I do not want to be among you any longer than is necessary.

  You watch TV and become enraged. You have lost any ability you might have had to know that this is entertainment. Hundreds were blown to pieces in Oklahoma. Schoolkids were massacred in Colorado. Pipe bombs exploded in Georgia. You were riveted to the images. You refused to pull yourself from the colors and sounds of slaughter or soft drink commercials. You wept and screamed and were titillated.

  At the end of one hour or four, you pressed a button on your remote.

  You talk about the horror. You dial the phone. You surf the Internet seeking chat. Whether you examine crimes of fiction or crimes of fact, everyone has an opinion, none of them humble, and all of you miss the point.

  Those who gaze into the eyes of God continue to kneel before the altar. No one has turned away from the Lord and become licentious, lustful, homicidal. Each of us holds our seeds of destruction, and each of us decides whether to tend the garden.

  I expect my crop to flourish. I am honest. You are not.

  Why do some of us prowl the city carrying instruments of death, while others sit at home watching the evening news? Why do some become accountants, and others pilots?

  You take great pride in conquering disease, then new maladies come along, strains of virus that are resistant to all medication.

  You piss into the wind and saturate your shirt.

  If my weapon of choice is a firearm, you blame the gun, and petition to disarm the nation. You install metal detectors in public buildings and call it prevention, mindless that the fertilizer and diesel fuel that shattered Oklahoma City contained no metal parts and were not brought into the federal building.

  After Columbine High School the President ordered an investigation of how violence is sold to children, as if a phantom industry makes its profits by enticing kids to engage in repetitive acts of destruction. The President’s wife asked, “What kind of values are we promoting when a child can walk into a store and find video games where you win based on how many people you can kill or how many places you can blow up?”

  Thousands of years ago a monkey threw a rock at another monkey and war was born. War games quickly followed.

  This country and this world are defined by wars. We killed Native Americans. Perhaps the graphics were not as good as they are today, but John Wayne killed Indians with impunity. The President played his virtual games with real cruise missiles that whispered into Baghdad, and bombs that dropped silently on Belgrade.

  You believe that slapping tablets of the Ten Commandments in your schools and other public buildings will stop the killing that happens there. If I had stepped from my house on that hot August morning fifteen years ago and seen Thou Shalt Not Kill writ large in neon across the heavens, it would not have deterred me. I might have taken a moment to enjoy the color, so out of place in the dismal Boston sky, but I would have hesitated no longer than that.

  You search for the reasons behind violence, when what you seek is inside, in your soul, in the essence of your being.

  You are religious, but you are not spiritual.

  You are a strange people.

  When I killed, I was young and impatient. I tried to consummate my drama in a single afternoon. There was no terror, no sense of impending doom, no commercial message, and I left my mission undone. Nearly everyone had forgotten me.

  I know that what I will do is wrong, so I have passed the first test of sanity. I am not driven by an irresistible impulse. I could conform my behavior to the requirements of the law.

  I choose not to.

  The county van swerved violently to the left, then the right.

  O’Brien drove. Finneran cursed.

  The van heeled wildly and landed on its side, sliding, metal crunching metal, glass shattering. I hit the back wall, the floor, settled on a side wall, and watched my blood drip onto the chipped black paint.

  The doors sprung open in the collision. I rolled to my knees and scrambled to the rear through billowing black smoke. I crawled through the opening onto the snow, where flames licked at the vehicle’s chassis.

  I crawled through the snow in my shackles. At the front of the overturned vehicle, I pulled myself up and slid to the passenger-side door. It was jammed. I spun around to a sitting position, raised my legs, and brought them down hard, the leg irons splintering the window. A second blow shattered enough of the glass so that I could lower myself into the smoke-filled cab.

  Finneran’s keys were hooked to his belt. I slipped easily out of the handcuffs and harness, then doubled over in the cramped space to unlock the leg chains. Flames appeared under the dash.

  O’Brien was dead, crushed when his side of the van collapsed inward.

  Finneran was unconscious. I unsnapped his seat belt and shoved him through the broken window onto the side of the van. I grabbed a shotgun from its rack, tossed it out, then pulled myself through the jagged space.

  Cars passed. One stopped on the opposite side of the drive. A woman got out and stood in the road slush holding a cell phone.

  I threw Finneran over my shoulder and carried him along the roadside, placing him in the snow.

  More traffic passed, a few drivers craning their necks, most paying closer attention to the slick road. The woman across the highway talked into her phone. I wondered if she had called 911 or a news hotline.

  Flames swept the county van. Thirty yards away, where I stood in the snow and biting wind, I felt the heat. Then the vehicle lifted with a roar and shuddered. Fragments of steel shot like bottle rockets into the sky.

  Finneran moaned. I grabbed his nine-millimeter handgun and an extra clip, removed the money from his wallet, glanced a final time at the roadway, and ran through the snow beside the river.

  Freedom had arrived sooner than I expected. I wore no shackles, waited for no one to unlock doors. I ran through the cold, wet, winter air.

  Then I stopped running.

  Chance determined my sweet liberty. No one freed me. No person assisted me.

  I was free to run for only one reason.

  I gazed at the gray skyline, much of it hidden in
the the snow. To someone standing in a lighted window across the drive, I was obscured, a blurred figure inside a blowing white cloud.

  At the hospital the doctors and their aides agreed that I lacked the capacity for empathy, that I had zero ability to comprehend the impact of my behavior on others, especially my victims and their families. The experts were wrong. I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew that others would experience fear and sadness and loathing. I did comprehend. I did not care.

  I know what I am doing now, and I am the only one who knows.

  I turned and slowly retraced my steps.

  The woman stood by her car gesturing and chattering into her phone.

  Finneran moved his arm.

  I waited until the woman watched me, then I aimed the gun at Finneran’s head, stared at the woman, and squeezed the trigger twice.

  The shroud of snowfall muffled the sound.

  The woman dove into her car.

  I did not look down at the deputy.

  … all we know right now is that the Suffolk County van transporting Felix Zrbny was involved in a weather-related accident. Those are not my words. We got that from a deputy sheriff. We were told earlier, before this place erupted in gunfire, that there was a delay in transporting the prisoner. I have to wonder, Lisa, if the authorities knew about the accident and witheld that information. This now from inside the court. The Honorable David Devaine is dead. The respected jurist stepped from his office into a hailstorm of gunfire and was brutally cut down. Judge Devaine will be remembered as …

  I SLID MY PLASTIC KEY-CARD THROUGH THE slot, waited for the red light to switch to green, then pushed open the door.

  In addition to the standard hotel decor, a dozen cardboard file boxes stood like a wall between me and the bed. I walked slowly around the edifice in search of labels, dropped my duffel, and put on my reading glasses. Each carton was numbered and bore a sticker listing its contents.

  “Well, that’s something,” I muttered.

  I felt no need to dig into the cartons. Zrbny’s hearing had been forcibly postponed, and when Logan Airport reopened—twenty-four hours tops—I was headed home to Lake Albert.

  But Felix Zrbny intrigued me and I had nothing else to do, so I sat at the writing desk and perused session notes, test results, case summaries, and formal reports. I made a game of guessing the theoretical orientation of the authors—Freudian, behavioral, cognitive, neo-Freudian—until I came to a report by Randy Severance, M.D., a former colleague. In 1994 the Criminal Psychiatric Unit had requested an independent psychiatric assessment. Severance interviewed Zrbny for three hours and submitted his findings. One section of the report caught my attention.

  Patient describes auditory hallucinations (ego-syntonic) in the days prior to, and on the day of, the homicides. States that his voices are warm, comforting, female, and nondirective. He calls them “My lady of sorrow.”

  Patient indicates no recurrence since his hospitalization.

  “That’s a quote from something,” I said.

  Perhaps I was thinking of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers written on paper bags in a French jail cell.

  Severance’s conclusion was based on what he did not know:

  Felix Zrbny must be considered dangerous because he responds to a fixed, idiosyncratic set of stimuli. We do not know what they are, nor do we know what they mean to him.

  Severance included a videotape of his session with Zrbny. I popped it into the VCR. The video was pale; the audio sucked. I considered it more evidence that we have not mastered technology. Microchips and transistors have had me by the balls for years.

  Bolton had told me that Zrbny was six foot seven and nearly three hundred pounds. I imagined another Edmund Kemper, the California genius-giant who killed his grandparents when he was fifteen, spent five years in California’s Atascadero State Hospital, then emerged to kill six young women, his mother, and his mother’s best friend.

  According to his intelligence testing, Zrbny was every bit as bright as his West Coast counterpart. He had long black hair, dark eyes, and a blank expression that curiously suggested peace with himself.

  Zrbny sat rigidly erect in his chair, his hands resting on his knees.

  “Reminds me of Anthony Perkins in Psycho,” I muttered, “only bigger.”

  Severance directed him through the events of that August day years earlier.

  “I woke up,” Zrbny told him. “My father told me my papers were on the front step. I delivered newspapers in the neighborhood that year. Then my father left for his shop. He had his own meat market. I got up, pulled on my jeans, and ate breakfast.”

  Zrbny’s affect was as restricted as his body posture. His description of the events of that day was a tempered recitation. He was linear, strictly chronological.

  An occasional question from Severance forced Zrbny from his time sequence. I watched as he reoriented himself, then continued with his tale.

  “I went out to the stoop and cut the twine on my bundle of papers,” Zrbny said.

  “Go back for a moment,” Severance interrupted. “Where did you get the knife?”

  Zrbny’s eyes barely moved. He was silent. His head machinery was resetting. Zrbny was brittle, always at the edge of tipping over. I watched as he bookmarked his thoughts, then answered Severance’s question.

  “When I finished breakfast, I did what I always did,” Zrbny said. “I went to my father’s knife rack, grabbed one, and took it to the stoop.”

  “Go ahead,” Severance directed. Again, Zrbny had to pause, find his bookmark, and proceed.

  I listened to the interview and scanned police reports. One file contained only copies of police-log addenda, the summaries completed by officers days or weeks after the events they described. I have never been able to follow a crime chronology by relying on the logs. The dates are too confusing. This set documented phone calls made from Florence Dayle’s home. Either the report was filed two days after she was dead, or someone had used her phone then. Waycross was similar: a clerical error, or Shannon Waycross placed a call three hours after she was dead.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  When Severance arrived at his questions about the afternoon, Zrbny’s demeanor did not change. “Why did you leave your house that afternoon?” Severance asked.

  “It was something I sensed. I knew what to do.”

  “You have told others that there were voices.”

  “My lady of sorrow,” Zrbny said.

  “Please tell me about her.”

  Zrbny said nothing.

  “He’s protective of his hallucinations,” I said.

  “What does she say?” Severance asked.

  He stared straight ahead, silent.

  Severance moved on. “When the detective confronted you, did you know what you had done?” he asked.

  Again, Zrbny said nothing.

  “You killed three people. Did you know that?”

  “I am aware of what I did. Are you?”

  Severance hesitated, then asked the question that I wanted him to ask. “Did the detective interrupt you, Mr. Zrbny? Were there others whom you intended to kill that afternoon?”

  Zrbny leaned forward in his chair—the first time he had moved—and extended his hands, palms up. “Dr. Severance, if I wanted to kill you right here, right now, snap your neck and leave you quivering on the floor, I could. The attendants would not arrive soon enough to save you.”

  “You are a strong young man,” Severance said without flinching.

  “This guy is fucking amazing,” I said, jumping to my feet and finding a different angle to watch the TV.

  “When you left your house you knew what you were going to do,” Severance persisted.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you go first?”

  “That’s in the records.”

  Severance placed his notepad on his knee. “I’d like to hear it from you.”

  Zrbny slid back on his chair, sat erect, and placed his hands on his knees. I
imagined tumblers falling into place inside his massive head.

  Edmund Kemper had been far more successful in his intimidation of former FBI profiler Robert Ressler. When his structured interview ended, Ressler rang for a guard. None answered the page. Kemper said that he could easily kill Ressler. A simple acknowledgment and redirection of the conversation as Severance had done would have neutralized this encounter. Instead, a tense, thirty-minute exchange followed with Ressler on the defensive pointing out possible repercussions for Kemper. The killer shrugged it off; he had nothing to lose. The standoff ended with the guard’s arrival.

  “Shannon Waycross often slept on the lounge in her backyard,” Zrbny said. “Sometimes I watched her from my kitchen window. She seemed so far away from any moment, so aloof. I thought if she knew that in seconds she was going to die, and she didn’t know why, she wouldn’t care.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  The question did not compute for Zrbny.

  “Mad, sad, glad, scared?” Severance asked.

  Zrbny stared straight ahead.

  “You felt nothing?”

  “Is curiosity a feeling?”

  “Jesus,” I snapped. “He’s the real thing.”

  Felix Zrbny was totally congruent with what he said. He was guarded, but he was telling the truth. Severance had to dump the idea of feelings, go with Zrbny’s thoughts or get back to the voices. Join him in his crazy world.

  “You entered this woman’s backyard,” Severance said.

  Zrbny did not respond.

  “Did you speak to her? Did she speak to you?”

  After several moments of silence Severance said, “You walked from the Waycross residence and followed a path into the woods.”

  “To the clearing.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  Zrbny gazed fixedly ahead.

  “You waited,” Severance said.