by John Philpin
Again, Zrbny did not respond.
“What were your thoughts as you stood in the clearing and waited?”
“Excellent,” I said.
Before I could hear Zrbny’s response, someone knocked on the door.
Danny Kirkland gazed beyond me into the room. “Just what I figured,” he said. “Bolton set you up with the case files.”
“You are the same persistent little prick you always were,” I said. “Go away.”
“Did you find it yet?”
Kirkland represented everything foul about the news business. In a 1982 triple homicide he obtained a set of crime scene photographs and sold them to a tabloid. Three years later he got his hands on a profile I had completed in a serial murder case. That document showed up in the morning papers, along with my recommendations to police on how to apply pressure to the killer. It was an excellent guide for a killer on how to avoid arrest.
I sighed. “Did I find what?” I asked.
“Doc, I’m way ahead of you on this. I’ve been working the case for more than a year. I think I know what went down. You let me look at a couple of those files and I’ll lay it out for you.”
I slammed the door.
There was no mystery about what happened fifteen years earlier. For a variety of intrapsychic reasons, Felix Zrbny embarked on a killing spree. He was caught in the act and never denied what he had done. Case closed, until now.
I grabbed a file labeled “Interviews with Victims’ Relatives.” Susan Morgan, Florence Dayle’s sister, wanted the Commonwealth to “fry the bastard.” The sentiment was understandable. Gina Radshaw’s parents were deeply religious, searching for some meaning in the actions they attributed more to God than to Felix Zrbny. Shannon Waycross’s mother was in blame-the-cops mode. Her son-in-law, a homicide detective after all, lived three houses away from Zrbny and should have known the kid was a maniac.
More pounding on the door convinced me that Kirkland was back for another round. I was wrong.
“Zrbny’s loose,” Bolton said, walking in and placing two shopping bags on the table.
“He escaped?”
“The sheriff’s van that was transporting him flipped on Storrow Drive. One deputy died in the crash. Zrbny dragged the other to safety before the van blew. He ran off, then he came back and shot the deputy. That was three hours ago.”
I pushed away a mound of reports. “Sauerbraten?”
“With potato salad. There’s a six-pack of Beck’s dark in there, too.”
“I can’t think on an empty stomach,” I said.
“All units are aware of him,” Bolton continued, nodding at the window. “The forecast is for sixteen inches of that stuff, with blizzard conditions overnight. Not much is moving out there.”
Bolton sighed. “Zrbny dragged the deputy out of the van and carried him to safety. He took off. Then he came back and blew the guy away. I don’t get it.”
I shrugged. “You guys interrupted him. He’s letting you know he has killing to do.”
“After fifteen years.”
“Watch some of this,” I said.
I rewound the Severance tape and hit Play.
“What were your thoughts as you stood in the clearing and waited?” Severance asked.
After a pause, Zrbny smiled and said, “‘Who’s that walking on my bridge?’ When I was very young, my sister read to me. My favorite story was The Three Billy Goats Gruff.’ I pleaded with her to change the ending, so she did. The troll won. No one walked on his bridge.”
“He’s nuts,” Bolton muttered.
“Zrbny is crazy,” I said, “and he’s crazy like a fox.”
“He can’t be both.”
I switched off the tape. “Oh yes he can,” I said. “He has a taste of freedom. He likes it. Zrbny is in survival mode. He’ll kill when he feels like it. He has demonstrated that. I don’t think he’s delusional. He won’t initiate a deliberated kill or series of kills until he becomes delusional.”
“So, he’s dangerous, but he will become a lot more dangerous, and we don’t know when or why.”
“You’ve got it,” I said.
I JOGGED ALONG THE RIVERBANK.
At Boston University, I crossed a footbridge, walked through the campus, then headed for Beacon Street. The few people I saw played on toboggans or skis, threw snowballs, or stared into the blowing snow.
The time and climate of my offenses were remote. It was the year of Orwell, 1984, a scorching August day in the summer of my nightmares.
My dreams then were sick. They doused me with sweat and hammered at my head as if they wanted out. I waged war with angels and demons, struggled for balance and a way to hang on to what was left of my world, but I never escaped the slick-walled pit that hollowed itself out in my head. Always, I slid backward into the horror hole—black, hot, wet, bubbling with six-and eight-legged, armored insects—bugs from Kafka.
If anyone had asked, I would have told them about my visions, about waking and calling my sister’s name, forgetting for those few moments that my sister was dead.
That August morning I thought my father would ask. He pushed open my bedroom door, stood in the light from the hall, his jeans hoisted over his ample stomach, his starched white shirt already sweat-stained from the heat.
“Felix, your papers are here,” he said, then turned and walked away.
My papers—forty-two copies of the Informer that I delivered to neighbors in Ravenwood. My father expected me to jump out of bed, run to the shower, dress neatly, fill my canvas bag with Informers, and ride my bicycle through the subdivision wearing a smile.
My father always smiled. “Appearance is important,” he said, because my mother had always said those words.
“Smile, Felix,” she would say. “They judge appearances here.”
She talked with the crackling accent of Eastern Europe. Her fragmented sentences were homilies, each one crafted to elicit compliance with her paranoia. I often wished that she had never learned to speak English.
Each morning, my father slicked back his black hair, tucked in his white, laundered shirt, and walked to the bus that would take him downtown. He stood behind the meat counter at Zrbny’s Market and sawed quarter sides of beef, swung his cleaver through cartilage, and selected the proper steel blade to trim fat. By late morning his face was pink from exertion. By noon his apron and white shirt were stained crimson.
Appearance is important.
That morning, I kicked away my sheet and sat up. I was awake, feet on the floor, but the dreams had not thundered through to their finale.
The door clicked shut when my father left for the shop. I heard it from a great distance, deep in my hole where voices echoed and I could not escape.
Levana, a voice said, and I heard the echo, Levana.
I wondered why they called my sister.
Now I walked down Brookline Avenue to the Riverway and turned the corner. The once fashionable brick and brownstone buildings lining the Muddy River had been consumed by the city. I had seen the block on TV when the facades were not blackened with soot, not chipped from blowing debris and human depredation.
Snow whipped around me, biting into my face. My hands and feet were cold. As I approached the bridge on Huntington Avenue, bright green and blue and yellow light in a liquid rectangle grabbed my attention. An aquarium shop, I thought, and walked to the window to stare at the warm color. There was no sign, no offering of things to buy, and I could not see beyond the lighted fish tank.
I stepped over a low iron fence onto the walk and tried the door. It opened and I stepped inside.
I scanned the room—a ragged gray sofa, a battered orange coffee table, the remnants of a Christmas tree. A small, slender woman stood in an archway at the back of the room, her eyes wide, her short black hair framing her narrow face.
“Please don’t shoot me,” she said.
“I mean you no harm,” I said. “I won’t hurt you. I’m cold. I want to get warm, then I’ll leave.”
“I go
to day hospital,” she said, her face vacant of expression, her wide eyes empty. “They pay for this place. Are the police chasing you?”
She had startled me. That this was not a store, that it was someone’s home, startled me. This woman was a day-hospital patient, a psychiatric case. Someone considered her wiring faulty, as they did mine. I gave her an answer that I thought she would accept.
“I was in a hospital.”
“You ran away.”
“There was an accident.”
“Why do you have that rifle?”
I had forgotten the shotgun. I had run, jogged, and walked through the city carrying the Mossberg .410.
“It was in the van that crashed,” I said.
“Your head was bleeding. It’s not anymore.”
I touched the abrasion on my forehead. “They were transporting me to a court hearing and the van overturned.”
“I’m not strong enough to make you leave. My name is Sable.”
“Felix.”
“Like the cat. Why did you come here?”
“I was cold. I saw the light from the fish tank. I thought this was a pet store.”
She glanced at the aquarium. “It is pretty, but it’s not the same as having a black, furry cat. I can’t have a cat here, so they gave me fish. Fish need someone to care for them too. I have to remember to feed them. That’s how I remember to take my medication. I was going to make soup. Will you let me do that? Would you like some? It’s chicken noodle.”
I looked at the door.
“No one comes here,” she said. “Is that what you want to know? I probably shouldn’t tell you that, should I? Day hospital was canceled today because of the storm. That’s why I’m not there. No one is.”
“I’d like some soup,” I said.
“The bathroom is at the end of the hall. You can wash there. If you promise not to shoot me, I won’t try to run away. I seldom meet anyone new, and I never have anyone to talk to.”
The woman, Sable, was drab, gray, and plain. She wore a paint-spattered work shirt, and dark jeans. Her hair was black, trimmed close like a boy. She stood motionless in the doorway, waiting for my assurance that I would not kill her.
“I promise I won’t shoot you,” I said.
Sable disappeared through the arch. I followed her, found the hallway, then the small, L-shaped bathroom. There was another door opposite the kitchen.
“Where does this go?” I asked.
“The cellar. We’re supposed to put our trash out there. Cockroaches come in under the door at night. There’s a clanky furnace, a long hallway that connects all the buildings …. I don’t know. I don’t like to go out there. I can’t read Stephen King, either. Too scary.”
I ducked under heat pipes and stood at the bathroom mirror to examine the gash on my head. I heard Sable bang cabinets, cans, and pots.
“Alcohol and cotton balls are in the cabinet,” she called. “I think they are.”
I leaned the Mossberg against the wall, found the first aid supplies, and cleaned my wound. Then I applied gauze and adhesive tape.
Sable was like the young women in the general population at the criminal psych unit. She was buzzed out, probably on Prolixin or some other mind-numbing drug that creates the zombies who walk the back-ward shuffle. Like most of them, she was straightforward, perhaps too honest for her own good.
I felt a weight in my pocket and pulled out the deputy’s compact but powerful nine-millimeter handgun.
Sable stood in the doorway. “The soup is ready. When are you going to shoot someone?”
I looked at her dark, vacant eyes, then at the black and silver weapon in my hand. I considered avoiding the truth, but saw no point in that.
“I already did,” I said.
She gazed into the hallway, scratched her head with her right hand while biting her left index finger. Finally she said, “I made two cans. I hope you’re hungry. They’re both chicken, but one has rice and the other has noodles.”
I followed her into the small kitchen.
“I gave you the big bowl,” she said. “There are crackers, and there’s some cheese, but I don’t know how good it is.”
Sable shrugged. “My milk soured, so there’s only water.”
I sat opposite her at the small, Formica-topped table.
“Did you kill a nice person?”
“What difference would that make?”
She shrugged. “None, I guess. Now they must want you. They must be looking for you.”
We ate in silence for several moments, then Sable said, “Do you think you’re crazy? When I first knew I was crazy, it was a relief. I run away from them all the time in my head, so I know how to do it.”
“Them?”
“My mother, my doctor, the social workers, my counselor.”
She put down her spoon. “Felix, what is it like to kill a person? It doesn’t seem real to talk to someone who killed a person, but then it does, like it’s what the world has always been about. Someone dies, and someone is the killer.” She stared at me, waiting for my answer.
“It doesn’t feel like anything,” I told her. “It just is.”
Sable considered that. “Are you going to kill other people?”
“Yes,” I said. “Eat your soup. What will be, will be.”
She smiled. “I got that in a fortune cookie one time,” she said. “I think it means that events determine themselves, and I don’t believe that.”
“I read it on a tea box,” I told her. “Each of us decides what will be.”
“You just got free and you’ve already decided to kill more people.”
“I made that decision a long time ago,” I said. “This soup is good. Have some crackers.”
She stared at the box of Triscuits. “Funny. They don’t put fortunes on cracker boxes.”
… at the scene of the crash. As you can see behind me, the van exploded. The smell of burning gasoline permeates the air, Lisa. There is debris everywhere. The police have closed the road to traffic. This woman to my left, Micha Katz, was on her way to work when she witnessed the crash. She saw the van flip onto its side, and immediately got on her cell phone to call the BTT news-tip hotline. Ms. Katz will of course receive two tickets to this year’s Ice Capades, and our thanks for being an alert BTT Eye on the City. Felix Zrbny emerged from the back of that vehicle. You can see what’s left of it now. Zrbny rescued one of the deputies … we’re told this man’s name was Finneran, Michael Finneran … he was transporting the mass murderer to the hearing that probably would have resulted in a longer stay behind bars for him. We have to wonder if that’s what Zrbny was thinking when he returned and pumped two shots into the deputy’s head, killing him. Why did he do it? Ms. Katz, when you looked into Felix Zrbny’s eyes …
BOLTON AND I MOVED THE TABLE TO ACCOMmodate two chairs.
I opened beers; he peeled back aluminum foil to expose still-steaming sauerbraten and potato salad from Jacob Wirth’s. The cavernous German restaurant on Stuart Street was a favorite of mine from my college days. The nineteenth-century creaky floors, the sauerbraten and dark beer—an evening at “Jake’s” was as close to Munich as I could get without a plane ticket.
“Do you have any feel for Zrbny?” Bolton asked.
“Where’s the bread?”
“In the other bag.”
I found the dark German rye. “Severance was certain that Zrbny experienced auditory hallucinations.”
“Voices telling him what to do.”
I shook my head, savoring the flavor of the beef. “More like a companion and, from what Severance was able to determine, female. Zrbny’s mother died when he was ten. His sister Levana disappeared two years later.”
“That wasn’t my case, but I remember it. The kid was graduating high school, already accepted at college. Missing Persons wrote it off as a runaway. I figured she was abducted and murdered, but we had nothing to go on.”
“So what was Zrbny’s perception?” I asked rhetorically. “All the wo
men in his world abandoned him. He was left with a depressed butcher-father who didn’t know he had a son. Zrbny retreated inside his head and got his solace from his fantasies and his voices.”
“Until something set him in motion.”
“Consider the three killings,” I said, warming to my subject. “According to the reports, Zrbny watched Shannon Waycross from his kitchen window. What did he see?”
“Shannon was a beautiful young woman … long black hair, olive complexion, a dancer’s physique.”
“She was catching the sun in the privacy of her backyard. The temptation is to consider Zrbny’s behavior sexually motivated. That’s what the textbooks say. I don’t think so.”
“What then?”
“You gonna eat that sauerkraut?”
Bolton pushed the container to me.
“That’s one of the questions we have to answer. The second victim was Gina Radshaw. Her photograph was on the front page of the newspapers Zrbny delivered that morning. They attended the same school. She was a lifeguard at the community swimming pool in his neighborhood.”
“He had plenty of opportunity to see her.”
“Same with Florence Dayle. He delivered her newspaper. Her backyard was also visible from Zrbny’s kitchen window. These three women—one in her twenties, one in her teens, one in her forties—were visually available to him.”
“Knockwurst?” Bolton asked.
“Did you get mustard?”
“Horseradish. It’s in the bag.”
I grabbed two slices of rye, split the sausage, and slathered it with horseradish mustard.
“Do you realize we’re having sauerbraten and knockwurst?” Bolton asked.
“I bought stock in a cardiology practice,” I said.
“What Zrbny sees doesn’t fire up sexual fantasies,” Bolton said.
“The projective testing, the clinical notes, the reports, the behavioral history … nothing hints at sexual pathology. The victims’ visual availability triggered something, but what?”
“He had contact with Florence Dayle. He collected the newspaper money every week.”
“Waycross didn’t take the paper. Radshaw didn’t live in Ravenwood. It’s something in Zrbny’s head. We need to know what it is and what it means. For fifteen years he played games with the shrinks. Only Severance had a notion about what makes Zrbny tick. What was he like when you brought him in?”