by John Philpin
I followed his gaze. “It’s their neighborhood.”
“That truck was parked there when my units came on the scene. Then Vigil came sliding in and turned the street into a battle zone.”
“Scanners?”
“We used a scrambled channel.”
I shrugged. “Any sign of Zrbny?”
“Nothing yet.”
A tac officer tapped on Bolton’s window. “We found a woman inside. She’s incoherent, hiding under a table in the kitchen. She doesn’t appear to be injured.”
We followed the cop through the basement apartment. A female officer leaned against the sink. She aimed her flashlight at a row of pill bottles on a shelf, Thorazine and Mellaril among others, prescribed for Sable Bannon.
I looked under the table where the young woman lay in the shadows, curled in fetal position and facing the wall. Her meds were antipsychotics. I had no way to know what reality she had created for herself when Zrbny passed through followed by Vigil and a cadre of heavily armed police officers, and gunfire exploded in and around her home.
My own experience, and the work of pioneering Scottish analyst R. D. Laing, had taught me that I had to enter her world. With gunfire echoing in the cellar, I had to work fast. My first step was to lower myself to the floor and sit, to be physically on the same plane with her.
“Ms. Bannon, my name is Lucas.”
I expected no response, and I received none. It was time to acknowledge the obvious.
“You’ve had a difficult day. When you are ready, you can tell me about it. I’d like to hear your voice, to hear what you have to say.”
The embedded instructions defined our roles: she will be able and willing to talk; I will listen.
I waited a moment, then verbally tugged at the frightened woman. “I didn’t think my knees were going to allow me to sit down here. They don’t always cooperate. This time they did.”
“I forgot to feed my fish,” she said.
“I’d like to help you do that now. You’ll have to show me where you keep the food, and how much you feed them.”
“That’s when I take my pills.”
It was a paired association, something that I had often seen among my patients.
“I noticed the medications on the shelf. Would you like to do that now?”
“Fish first,” she said, peering over her shoulder at me.
I extended my hand and she grabbed it, holding tight as she twisted around and slowly emerged from beneath the table. A burst of radio chatter from the hall startled her.
“That’s a police radio,” I said.
“Okay.”
She continued to move forward, held my forearm with her other hand, and we helped each other stand.
Bolton stepped into the doorway and said, “Lucas, get her out of here now.”
Sable Bannon tried to pull away, to retreat to her secure world under the table. I grabbed her around the waist.
A cop yelled from the cellar. “They’re coming out. Clear the fucking area.”
Another voice screamed, “Officer down.”
I half carried the trembling woman through the hall to the front of her apartment. Radio chatter was constant. Gunfire in the cellar was close.
“We’ll be safe outside,” I said.
She struggled less as we approached the front door. “Okay,” she whispered. “Wait. My flowers.”
She grabbed a paper bag from the sofa and held it to her throat.
Cops inside and outside cleared the doorway for us. One wrapped a blanket over her shoulders. We stepped from the warm apartment illuminated only by the streaks and arcs of flashlights, into a whipping, frigid blizzard illuminated by blinding banks of TV lights across the Muddy River. I shielded my eyes and tried to locate Bolton’s cruiser in the sea of vehicles and humanity that clogged the Riverway.
The man who emerged from the crowd smiled. I hesitated because I thought he wanted to tell me something. Then I saw the small-caliber handgun, heard three sharp cracks, and felt Sable Bannon go limp and slip from my arms.
I remember thinking that this was where a movie shifted to slow motion and the sound distorted, or black and white replaced color.
The flowers that spilled from her bag were yellow. The blood that bubbled from her mouth and spilled onto the snow was red. The crowd noise—the panicked screams, the shouted directions—played at the correct speed.
I dove into the crowd and tackled the smiling man. The gun fell from his hand and disappeared in the snow. There was nothing slow about my repeated hammering of his face.
I wanted the smile to disappear.
I wanted him dead.
… don’t know how many are dead. We’ve heard three. We’ve heard as many as nine. What we know for certain is that Felix Zrbny was inside the building when the confrontation with tactical officers began. We don’t know if Zrbny is among the dead. Bob, I don’t recall a day like this. The assault on the courthouse where three died, the accident that resulted in Zrbny’s escape, now this. I talked with one witness who described the scene in the building’s cellar. He said there were bodies all over the place. We will continue our nonstop coverage. I understand that we are now providing national and international feeds, and don’t forget that there are summaries of the day’s events, and background information at our web site, WWW dot …
EDDIE HAD QUIT SHOVELING FOR THE NIGHT. The snow was deep on the Towers’ esplanade.
I avoided the main entrance and followed the ramp that led to the underground parking area. I waited only a few minutes until the steel garage doored cranked open and a car drove out. I slipped from the shadows and ducked inside.
At the rear, beyond the rows of cars, a security guard sat in an enclosed area behind a desk, watching silent monitors, video shots of hallways and elevators. As I approached, I saw that one of the monitors was a muted version of Bob Britton at the BTT news desk. His mouth moved. His face twisted in mock astonishment.
I pulled open the glass door and stepped inside.
A shot of the Riverway row-apartment buildings replaced Britton on the monitor. A banner at the bottom of the screen read Viewer Discretion Advised.
The security guard turned in his chair. “Can I help you?” he asked.
I stared at the TV as the camera closed in on a man with his arm around Sable. She had a blanket thrown across her shoulders, and the man protected her from the crowd, the storm, and the lights.
“They’ve been showing that for the last half hour,” the guard said. “Gruesome. You got some ID?”
“Wendy Pouldice is expecting me.”
“She give you a card?”
I fished in my pockets, then froze. The monitor showed a man shove his way through the crowd. Sable spun away from her protector and fell. The old man who had been guiding her surged after the shooter and dragged him to the snow-covered street. Then Britton’s silent running mouth returned to the screen.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“The girl? She’s dead.”
The pain at the back of my neck shot into my spine. As I turned and walked slowly away from the desk, the buzzing in my head threatened to topple me.
“Mister, you okay?”
I continued to walk.
My eyes watered, my vision blurred.
Insects buzzed on a distant summer day. There was no snow, and everyone except me expected my sister Levana to walk through the door at any minute.
“Hey. You can’t get out that way.”
The guard approached from behind. “How did you get in here, anyway?” he asked.
I stopped walking and pressed my hands against the sides of my head. He continued to talk. I heard noise, but the only words I understood were those whispered inside my head: “The dead never do come back to life.”
I turned, grabbed him by the throat, and lifted him from the pavement. He squirmed, kicked, emitted gurgling noises, drooled, and eventually died.
I STEPPED FROM THE ELEVATOR ON THE SECOND flo
or and walked to the studio doors. When I opened the door, a young woman with a clipboard leaned against me to push me back into the hall. I grabbed her and threw her. She landed with a crack halfway to the elevator, her clipboard clattering against the wall and across the floor.
I entered the set and closed the door. The person operating the camera held up four fingers, then three, two, and pointed at Bob Britton, who looked up from a sheaf of papers with dramatic flair.
“For those of you just joining us,” the anchor said, in a throaty baritone that sounded nothing like the voice I had heard in Guzman’s, “we’re going to return live to the scene of the ‘Riverway Shootout,’ but first we’re going to replay the tape of an incident from earlier this evening. What you’re about to see is real. It happened less than an hour ago. We advise viewer discretion due to the explicit violence that is certain to upset some viewers.”
Britton returned to his pile of papers.
The camera operator waited while the tape ran. After a moment he said, “Bob,” and began his finger countdown.
“At the center of today’s eruption of violence in the city,” Britton began, “is one man, mass murderer Felix Zrbny.”
I moved through the darkened studio to Britton’s left.
“On an August day fifteen years ago,” he continued, “the teenaged Zrbny embarked on a rampage that became known as the ‘Ravenwood Massacre.’ Zrbny stalked, savagely attacked, and killed three times that day. His choice of weapon was his father’s butcher knife, honed razor-sharp for cutting meat. His first victim was thirty-one-year-old Shannon Waycross, the wife of former Boston homicide detective Neville Waycross. She was the last victim found, her body discovered by her husband after he had disarmed and arrested Zrbny in front of the home of victim number three, Florence Dayle. The teenager fled to the Dayle residence after killing eighteen-year-old Gina Radshaw, a Ravenwood High School graduate who planned to attend Dartmouth College and pursue a career in business. Sources familiar with the investigation denied that any of the victims had been sexually assaulted. An expert on sexual homicide, investigative psychologist Fawn Hocksley-Bernquist, joins us now from our Providence studio. She is the author of the widely acclaimed Serial Murder, Sexual Motive. Welcome to ‘Boston Tonight,’ and to our continuing coverage of the ‘Riverway Shootout,’ Dr. Hocksley-Bernquist.”
As he listened to his expert’s response, I stepped into the light and onto the set.
“NONE OF THIS NEEDED TO HAPPEN,” I said, rubbing my sore hands.
Bolton sat beside me in the cruiser’s back seat. “I hope you’re not blaming yourself, Lucas.”
I shook my head. “No one person could create a mess like this.”
“You break any bones?”
“My hands hurt like hell. Nothing’s broken.”
Bolton’s people had wanted to do their job quietly. Seize Zrbny, lock him up, and go from there. Instead, Dermott Fremont’s crazy militia group and a media unconstrained by its own ethics had created a carnival of violence. By morning, politicians everywhere would be yelling about gun control, shoving God back into our lives, assigning armed guards at arcades and movie theaters, bringing unrestrained immorality and violence under control—as if there were a causal link between the two and anyone gave a shit.
“We don’t get to take a commercial break, do we?”
“No brew at halftime,” Bolton said.
“Any sign of Zrbny?”
“We found where he climbed out of the cellar. He emptied the shotgun at Vigil, drove them back at us, then ran. Tactical tracked him a block east. A snowplow wiped out his tracks.”
“Who killed Sable Bannon?”
“We haven’t identified him yet. He has the tattoo.”
I watched snow swirl past the car. “Why?”
There was no answer to that question—not yet, maybe not ever. Bolton was silent, staring at the palms of his hands as if he might discover an answer there.
I came to Boston to observe a man, and to offer my impressions to an assistant attorney general. May Langston was dead. So was the judge.
And I was caught in the middle of a war.
“What’s tonight’s body count?” I asked.
“Three Vigil dead, one wounded. One seventeen-year-old kid dead. Two officers wounded. Sable Bannon, age twenty-five, dead.”
He recited the dismal numbers. He knew them, would adjust them if they changed, and he would not forget.
“One of the tactical officers is in critical condition,” he added.
“This case is haunted,” I said. “It’s been haunted since 1984.”
“What are you thinking?”
I gazed beyond the klieg lights to the Towers, barely visible through the snow. “Neville Waycross radioed for backup in Ravenwood. Wendy Pouldice arrived. That day made her.”
“That day, some earlier help from Levana Zrbny’s disappearance, and the Stallings case.”
“What did she have to do with those two?”
“She had the inside track on both of them.”
“Educate me,” I said.
“I told you she lived in Ravenwood then. She took on Levana Zrbny’s disappearance as a personal crusade. Missing Persons had the case listed as unexplained. Pouldice called it an abduction, campaigned against the PD’s classification system, faulted us for inadequate response, and claimed to have a source who witnessed a man in a white car grab the kid.”
I wondered just how far back Pouldice and Felix Zrbny went. “What about Stallings?” I asked.
“That was a witnessed abduction.”
“I remember. The kid who saw it go down was so traumatized that she couldn’t tell you much.”
“Under hypnosis she remembered the white car parked near the playground a few days before the abduction, and the man with red hair.”
“How did she describe what she saw that day?”
“You can look at the file if you want. Several times she got to the point where she could say, ‘He took Theresa away,’ but that was it. She’d become hysterical then. We don’t know if the redhead took Theresa. We don’t know if the white car was involved.”
“What was Pouldice’s angle on it?”
“Another crusade. She donated the first five thousand dollars to the Stallings Fund, bought her way into the family. She did weekly stories for a year, generated a few leads, but nothing that went anywhere. She still does occasional features on the story. She called me a couple of months ago about the case.”
“What did she want?”
“She made an appointment to come in, then never showed.”
From the time I slid into Logan Airport, I felt as if I were riding a roller coaster operated by a drunk. I wanted to allow my mind to float on a sea of possibilities but I had no time. I was playing a game of catch-up and I hated it.
Albie Wilson could not have anticipated the change in security arrangements at the courthouse. He also had no way of knowing that Felix Zrbny was not in the courtroom. I believed that Wilson was there to liberate Zrbny.
Why would they want him out?
Bolton said that BTT arrived at the Riverway first, followed by Vigil. Neither outfit could have monitored the radio traffic. When I asked Wendy Pouldice about J-Cubed, she shot a look at her hired help. Perhaps I had stumbled into an unholy alliance between BTT and Vigil.
“Where’s Neville?” I asked.
“When you dropped him at the office, he went back to reading case files. Something in one of the reports hammered Neville hard. He nearly flew out of there. I’m afraid he’ll climb into a bottle, do some serious damage to himself. He’s already had a stroke. I’ve got a couple of people looking for him.”
“What did he see in the file?”
Bolton shook his head. “I figure it had something to do with Shannon’s murder.”
“I’m going back to the Towers,” I said. “I think there’s a connection between BTT and Vigil. I also think that Pouldice has talked to Zrbny since this morning.”
“Why would she tell you anything now?”
“Maybe if I neuter her battery-operated Neanderthal, she’ll be more receptive to my naturally charming self.”
“I’m told that Braverman often quotes lengthy passages from Bawdy Boston.”
I opened the car door. “Like I said. He’s a fucking Neanderthal.”
“How do you propose to neuter a guy that size?”
“Swiss Army knife,” I said, slamming the door and weaving my way through the haphazardly parked vehicles, the mob scene, and the drifting snow.
I had no idea what I would do. I knew only that I had to do something.
THE SECURITY OFFICER WAS NOT AT HIS post. Probably making rounds, I thought. I grabbed the desk phone to call Pouldice’s apartment. The line was dead.
“What a fucking outfit,” I muttered.
The elevator allowed me to enter, but refused to accept the third floor as a destination. The offices were closed. I punched 20, and a virtual voice instructed me to enter my identification number.
“I’m not trying to make a fucking withdrawal,” I growled.
I hit 2, which the machinery accepted. I felt the thrust upward, listened to the muted whirring, and waited until the computer-controlled box settled into a landing at what it considered the second floor. The doors opened and I stepped into the corridor.
The studio’s red On Air light was illuminated. The building had security personnel, so it must have a security office, I reasoned.
I walked back to the elevator and reviewed the directory. The lobby was one choice, but no one had been there, so I went with number two, the parking garage.
This time the doors opened on a glass-enclosed space containing a desk, a bank of security monitors, and no guard. “Where are the cops when you need them?” I muttered.
I fished in my pockets until I found my reading glasses, then examined a telephone two feet wide, with more buttons than a Hammond organ. It would not be long until an engineering degree was required to call next door.
A typed list to the right of the handset included “Ms. Pouldice—9#20.” I was making progress.
I grabbed the phone, punched the requisite keys, and looked up as I listened to the ring. One of the monitors was a silent feed from BTT. The camera focused on a guy with a bad hairpiece who, I assumed, was thinking he looked dignified and sounded knowledgeable. I have always considered tabloid TV more insidious than the printed crap that greets me at the supermarket checkout. Someone with an oiled voice—Stone Phillips, say—will always be more influential and incite more fantasies than a printed headline next to the Tic-Tacs and Bic lighters.