The Murder Channel Page 5

  Bolton leaned away from the table. “I stayed with him until Social Services arrived. We sat in a small area off the cafeteria. He was shivering. I asked him if he wanted a blanket. He said he did, so I grabbed a shock blanket from the emergency locker and wrapped it around his shoulders. Then he told me his name. He was polite, spoke softly. The blood all over him was the only indication that he’d just killed three people. I had twenty minutes with him. I wouldn’t call it conversation. It was more like him talking to himself, mostly about his sister.”

  “You said he’s talked to Wendy Pouldice.”

  “Hospital records show that she visited on nine occasions in the last year and a half. There were also phone calls. We don’t know how many.”

  “Why Pouldice?”

  Bolton shrugged. “He wants to tell his story. She wants to broadcast it. I had hoped you could talk with Ross Kelly, the psychologist who’s been seeing Zrbny for the last three years. Kelly’s stuck in D.C. The Northeast Corridor is under a white blanket.”

  “I skimmed Kelly’s report.”

  “Kelly says that Zrbny knows the difference between right and wrong, but makes decisions based on his own thinking, regardless of the law.”

  “I agree. He also doesn’t experience emotion as we know it.” I got up and started pacing the room.

  “He doesn’t laugh, or cry, or get angry?” Bolton asked.

  “No, and he doesn’t know fear.”

  “So there’s no reason for him to not do whatever he wants,” he said, then realized what his observation meant. “He has no controls.”

  “No one knows what sets him in motion,” I said. “When he acts, he has no concern about the impact of his behavior. He said he was interrupted fifteen years ago. I’m convinced that if Waycross hadn’t stumbled onto him, others would have died. We don’t know who. We do know he doesn’t like to be interrupted.”

  “We have a unit sitting in Ravenwood,” Bolton said. “He doesn’t know the city anymore. The last time he was on the streets, he was fourteen years old. Maybe he’ll go back to what was familiar.”

  “Needle in a haystack,” I said. “We are fortunate that he’s an unusually large needle with a distinctive appearance who is running around the city carrying a three-foot-long shotgun. Ray, I want to see Zrbny’s house.”

  Conference rooms filled with self-styled sleuths do not catch killers. The senior sleuth—or presenter—elicits comments from her or his minions. These observations must coincide with the super-sleuth’s view of the crime, or the contributor receives no nod of approval. Participants depart with the illusion of consensus, then wait for a traffic cop to nail their serial killer for a taillight violation.

  If you expect to catch the bastard, you must carve out a space for him in your mind. Then allow that compartment to fill with him—his words, his smell, the residue of his actions. Get off your ass and climb into his world. When you can see his existence through his mind filters, you might have a 10 percent chance of getting to him.

  I had to feel and think like Felix Zrbny. Bolton would contend with Vigil.

  “We have to go through his father’s estate to get into the house,” Bolton said. “Couple of downtown lawyers.”

  “Keep your patrol unit away from the house for a couple of hours,” I said.

  “Lucas …”

  “Same rules as always. If I get nailed, I take the fall.”

  Bolton leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head.

  “This isn’t my kind of case anymore, Ray. It’s a manhunt, and you’ve got an army of cops out there digging into snowbanks looking for Zrbny. I do this my way or I don’t do it.”

  My last statement was a bluff and Ray knew it. We had been friends for too many years to allow me to bail out on him.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Also, I’d like to keep your thirty-eight for a while.”

  “Your license to carry still valid?” Bolton asked, then raised his hands. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.

  I SAT ON A WINDOW SEAT AND WATCHED THE snow blow in clouds around the streetlights that had glowed all afternoon. I felt Sable’s presence in the archway behind me, felt her eyes on the back of my neck.

  “How long have you lived here?” I asked.

  “They never release anyone before Halloween. They have too many suicides then. The patients cover themselves with bedsheets and pretend to be ghosts so no one can see them slitting their wrists. It was early November. There were still smashed pumpkins on the street. Were you in the hospital for a long time?”

  The snow looped in snakelike coils, snapped into taut lines, and swept away from the light. “Fifteen years.”

  There was a long silence. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “On Ward 6 we had a computer game,” I told her. “It had corridors and rooms and passages that descended level after level. At the start of the game you select a role to play, and that determines what weapons you carry to defend yourself against the monsters you meet on your journey. On the upper levels the monsters are easily defeated, but as you travel deeper they become more formidable. I was fourteen when they put me in the hospital. I played that game hour after hour. I was alone in those dungeons. I never met a friend or ally, only beasts that wanted to destroy me. I mastered the game. The hospital staff wanted me to socialize, to participate in their groups, to talk about my problems and listen to overmedicated, dribbling psychotics talk about theirs. They said the groups were therapeutic and my game was not. They were wrong, but it didn’t matter. When I won consistently, I grew bored with the tunnels and monsters, so I simply waited. Do you hear voices?”

  “They’re inside my head,” she said with authority. “I know that now.”

  “Does that make them less real?”

  She did not answer. I looked at her, at the tears that streaked her face.

  “Do you hear them?” she asked.

  I returned my attention to the window. “Not yet. I did. I will. That’s why I waited. Why are you crying?”

  “I lied to my counselor.”

  “You told her the voices went away.”

  “That’s why they let me live here.”

  “Do the voices frighten you?”

  “Oh, no. I hear the most wonderful and amazing things. They tell me books to read and recipes to try. They tell me to go out more, but I haven’t done that. I did see The Phantom of the Opera at the Wang Center. That was with my day group. We sat so high up, I got dizzy. I trust what I hear. They’ve never let me down.”

  She was silent again, staring at the back of my neck. Her eyes would be wide with expectation as she waited for me to tell her about the monologues in my mind. I wanted to look at her, and I did not want to. She was simple and fragile and weak and small.

  She was like my sister, Levana.

  “What is that building?” I asked, pointing across the Riverway and beyond the bridge at a tall concrete structure.

  Sable walked to the window. “It’s called the Towers. There are stores on the lower levels, kind of a mall, and some offices, then apartments or condominiums upstairs. I don’t know. There’s a grocery store, but it sells stuff like squid and snails, and everything is expensive. Mr. Guzman, the man who runs it, is nice, so I go there. If he’s not busy, he lets me listen to his Cuban music.”

  “Do you like to walk in the snow?”

  She nodded.

  “Get your coat.”

  The air was cold and fresh—new air, I thought—clean to breathe. Sable wrapped her wool coat tightly around her, yanked a red toque over her ears, and pulled on knitted mittens.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Across the bridge to the grocery store.”

  “You like squid?”

  We walked down the middle of the road through six inches of new-fallen snow. “I like grocery stores.”

  “Could you slow down? Your legs are much longer than mine.”

  She grabbed my arm with her mitte
ned hand. “Do you have your gun?” she asked. “If you do, please don’t shoot Mr. Guzman.”

  Sable accepted whatever reality was offered to her. I had invaded her home, and she clung to my arm like an old friend.

  “Until today I hadn’t walked in the snow for a long time,” I said, staring at the lights across the bridge.

  The Citgo was there, adjacent to the Towers, and beyond the gas station the glowing red neon of the Chinese restaurant. “I’ve seen this before,” I said. “On TV. Where’s the doughnut shop?”

  “It closed a few weeks ago. Sometimes I walked there for coffee but now they sell tires.”

  An old black man pushed snow with a scoop-shovel on the Towers’ esplanade. He smiled and nodded as we walked up the steps.

  “I don’t think it’s ever gonna stop snowin’,” he said.

  “It makes the world quiet,” I told him.

  “Too quiet, if you ask me,” he said with a laugh. “I ain’t heard the streetcar turn onto South Huntington since this afternoon. Not much traffic down this way, no sirens, no planes goin’ over. It’s like everybody died and went to heaven.”

  We walked to the entrance, then crossed the lobby to where a lighted sign said Guzman Delicacies.

  “The trolley squeals on the tracks when it goes around the corner,” Sable said. “I always hear that, and sometimes I feel the rumble. I don’t miss it tonight.”

  I glanced at the elevators. The Towers’ offices were listed on a marquee. The residences were not.

  “Is that the only way up?” I asked.

  “The people who live here have different elevators at the end of that hall and around the corner,” Sable said, following my gaze. “There’s a buzzer system. You’re not supposed to go up there. I mean, it’s not like the Prudential Building. There’s no place to go to look at the city. Is that what you wanted to do?”

  “I want to go in here,” I said, stepping through the doorway into the grocery store.

  Elmo Guzman was a short, portly Cuban with a bushy black mustache. “Good afternoon, Sable,” he said. “It is always a pleasure to see you.”

  Sable’s face flushed a redder red than it had in the cold air, and she smiled. “Hello, Mr. Guzman. This is my friend Felix.”

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, young man. And you, Sable, how is the Spanish coming?”

  “It’s such a beautiful language,” she said, turning to me. “Mr. Guzman has been helping me learn Spanish. I had two years in high school and I thought I’d forgotten it all, but I hadn’t.”

  “You are an excellent student,” Guzman said. “Now, what can I help you with on this snowy day?”

  “A newspaper,” I said.

  “Those are the morning papers,” he said. “The later editions haven’t come in yet. With this storm, maybe they won’t. I don’t read the newspaper. I listen to what my customers say, and what Radio Havana says on the shortwave.”

  I glanced at his Grundig shortwave radio on a shelf beside a framed photograph of two smiling young Cuban soldiers. “Is that you?” I asked.

  Guzman laughed. “Fidel and Che,” he said. “I never met them.”

  “They are young in that picture.”

  “Most Cubans who leave the homeland say they flee the hated dictator who seized their land and buildings. Fidel took back the money they stole from the people. My son brought me here. One day I will go home. I love my country just the way it is.”

  “That must be a pleasant thought,” Sable said.

  Guzman smiled and nodded. “One day.”

  At that moment a man wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase walked into the store. He stamped his rubber-clad feet on Guzman’s floor.

  “Fuckin’ snow,” he said.

  “Terrible out there, Mr. Britton.”

  “What do you know? You been out?”

  “Just when I came here this morning.”

  “Two cigars. No late papers?”

  “Not yet. The storm.”

  “Shit.”

  I watched Mr. Britton, a man who was oblivious to other humans sharing the same space. He whipped out a fold of bills to pay for his cigars.

  “When you gonna get rid of that anti-American shit?” Britton asked, nodding at Guzman’s photo of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

  Guzman continued to smile. “It reminds me of home, Mr. Britton.”

  “They drove you out of Miami, didn’t they? Your own people.”

  “My son wanted me to come here. There is room in America for different thinking, and there are times when too much freedom can be not a good thing.”

  “You, too, are a capitalist pig,” Britton said.

  “Pah,” Guzman said, still smiling.

  The two men completed their exchange, and Britton left with his cigars.

  “That man doesn’t see people,” I said. “He might look in their direction, but he does not see them.”

  Guzman shook his head. “It’s nothing. You get used to it. Sable, how about some music?”

  She looked up at me.

  I nodded.

  FINDING A FOUR-WHEEL-DRIVE RENTAL proved easier than finding Ravenwood.

  The subdivision, a collection of 1950s-vintage ranch, split-, and tri-level homes, squatted on a hill. The houses were postwar crap, plywood and concrete blocks slapped together for the generation that created the baby boom. A few trees dotted the neighborhood, survivors of the toxic applications necessary to maintain the lawns like fairways. This was one of the days when it didn’t matter. Eight inches of snow had fallen.

  I nearly did not recognize Neville Waycross. His hair and beard were trimmed, and the cassock and staff were gone. He wore a ski parka, jeans, and workboots, and stood on the sidewalk in front of the Zrbnys’ former home.

  “I thought you’d start here,” Waycross said.

  “I don’t enjoy being predictable,” I said. “Have you been inside?”

  “Not since the day I arrested him. May I join you?”

  “Give me the tour,” I said, shuffling through the snow to a door on the side of the garage.

  “Doesn’t the key fit the front?” Waycross asked.

  “I don’t have a key.”

  “Ray always said you didn’t have much respect for procedure.”

  “None,” I said, slipping a screwdriver between the door and jamb below the lock. “If you’re uncomfortable with the role of accessory, now’s the time to leave.”

  Waycross laughed. “Ray also told me that he gave you all the leeway you wanted.”

  “He’s afraid I’ll switch sides, become one of the bad guys,” I said as the door popped open. “Are you in disguise?”

  “This is something I have to do,” he said.

  “Did you leave the Brotherhood?” I asked.

  “If I remained in the Brotherhood, I couldn’t do anything about Felix Zrbny. Fifteen years ago, I interrupted him. I hated him. I wanted to kill him. I thought I was over that. Looks like I’m not.”

  We stepped into the garage. Dust and rust had taken their toll. Otherwise, tools were in place, the workbench was clear, circular blades for a meat slicer were labeled and hung in place.

  “Mr. Zrbny never drove,” Waycross said. “He used public transportation. The kids could’ve had a Ping-Pong table out here. Guess it never occurred to them.”

  “What do you remember about the family?”

  “Everything,” he said. “When Zrbny was ten, his mother committed suicide. She was depressed for years, in and out of hospitals. Two years after her death, Zrbny’s sister vanished. She’s listed as a missing person, presumed dead. Mr. Zrbny suffered a heart attack a week after his son’s arrest. He died six months later.”

  Waycross led the way through the cellar and up the stairs into the dining room. “When his wife died, Mr. Zrbny divided his time between his meat market and her grave. Felix and his sister were pretty much on their own. They became close, inseparable really. He loved her, depended on her. One day she didn’t come home.”

>   Waycross walked to the kitchen and opened a cupboard, displaying a rack of butcher knives. “Mr. Zrbny knew how to cut beef. Everybody around here bought their meat from him. He was a proud man, a deeply religious man. He was a first-generation. American. Magda, his wife, was from the old country. He loved life. She wanted to go home. The knife that’s missing from the rack is the one that Felix used.”

  “Carbon steel blades,” I said.

  “The old man kept them immaculate. He sharpened them weekly.”

  The blades and rivets had rusted. Blackened bloodstains marred the faded wood handles.

  Waycross stood at the window. “You can’t see much through the snow. My yard was over there. The fence is gone. Zrbny sat here and ate cereal, left the bowl on the table. He watched Shannon.”

  He was right. The blowing snow obscured the view. I saw how close the houses were, but little more.

  I entered Zrbny’s room, its walls decorated like any adolescent’s. From one wall, Jim Morrison glared through spread fingers. On another, Pink Floyd was comfortably numb.

  “There’s his Escher,” Waycross said, pointing at a black-and-white print on the wall. “I’m convinced that has something to do with the murders, but I don’t know what. How many human figures do you count?”

  M. C. Escher had created a small world of people who exist on different planes, people near enough to collide, but unaware of one another, each burdened with her or his isolation. They entered and exited through heavy wooden doors and carried baskets and trays and sacks. None of them knew of the existence of the others.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “A dozen?”

  “It’s called Relativity. Sometimes I count fifteen people, sometimes sixteen. I get dizzy looking at it. Dr. Kelly said that Zrbny stared at that print for hours and liked to ‘disappear into the picture.’ I’m not sure what he meant by that, but I have an idea.”

  “What did he see in there?” I muttered.

  “I see loneliness,” Waycross said. “It’s bleak.”