by John Philpin
“I saw you on Unsolved Mysteries,” Beck said, before I could speak.
“I wasn’t the fugitive they were hunting,” I said.
She laughed.
“I’m Lucas Frank. I called this morning and left a message for Ben Moffatt. He should be expecting me.”
“Let’s see. Ben’s on Ward 6. Just a moment.”
She punched buttons on her phone, waited, punched more, then delivered her message. “He’ll be right down,” she said. “It’s just terrible about Felix Zrbny. I never met him. We aren’t allowed on the wards, and even if we were, I wouldn’t go there. Some of the attendants referred to him as the Gentle Giant. Not so gentle, I’d say.”
The man in the bathrobe made another pass. “Nelson.” Thump, thump.
Ben Moffatt emerged from a door marked Restricted Access.
“Dr. Kelly suggested that I talk with you,” I said.
“I don’t know what I can tell you that he can’t,” Moffatt said, directing me to one of the many vinyl sofas in the waiting area.
“I’m trying to understand how Felix Zrbny thinks, how his delusions are expressed in his behavior. If I can accomplish that, I might be able to come up with an idea where he is, perhaps narrow the search a bit.”
“Wow,” Moffatt said, pushing his hands through his hair. “I don’t know how he thinks. Felix is a bright, complex man. Did Dr. Kelly tell you about the Escher print?”
I nodded. “And the lady of sorrow, the De Quincey reference. I have no idea how any of that fits together, and I don’t understand the role that his sister’s disappearance plays in all this.”
“Levana,” he said. “When Mrs. Zrbny committed suicide, her husband was totally overwhelmed. People usually bounce back after a tragedy. There’s a healing process, then they try to put a life together. He couldn’t do that. Felix and Levana took care of each other. She was older, so mostly she looked after him, but he did his share of the cooking, washing dishes, laundry. They were friends. He’d always been a loner. Levana was more outgoing. She led. He followed.”
“Ben,” Beck called. “Ralph’s coming through with the laundry cart.”
Moffatt excused himself, unlocked the door, and crossed the lobby with a short, one-armed man pushing a laundry bin. Moffatt unlocked then secured the second door.
“D-wing,” he called to Beck as he returned and settled into the sofa. “The day Levana was abducted—”
“You sound certain of that.”
“I don’t think Felix ever lied to me. He withheld. If I asked him a direct question that he didn’t want to answer, he just didn’t. One time when he was talking about Levana, I said, ‘You saw her grabbed, didn’t you?’ He sat there stone-faced.”
“He might have had the same response if he had killed his sister.”
Moffatt shrugged. “Maybe, but I don’t see it happening that way. I think he blamed himself for what happened. The next couple of years it gnawed at him. He needed someone in his life. There was no one. That’s when he became obsessed with the Escher print. He saw it as a finite world with infinite unrealized possibilities. That’s a quote. If people shared space, but on different planes, they couldn’t see or touch each other. He knew his victims. He believed that not only did they not know him, but that they refused to see him. When he stumbled across the De Quincey passage, his delusional system crystallized. Levana is the mythical force that inspires and empowers a family member to present a newborn child to the world. Then Levana watches as the child develops, and pays special attention to a child who is grieving.”
“Felix was in grief over his sister,” I said, catching Moffatt’s direction.
“Levana’s ladies of sorrow were tears, sighs, and darkness.”
It was the same thing Kelly had told me.
“Tears,” Moffatt said. “He told me about walking out of a classroom in high school. Gina Radshaw was outide the door crying. He tried to talk to her, to see if there was anything he could do to help. She never looked at him. She ran out of the building. His lady of tears.”
“And someone who could not, or did not see him,” I suggested.
“You’re catching on. Florence Dayle needed help turning a faucet that was stuck. She led Felix into the cellar. He said she sighed these huge, breathy sighs, as if she were impossibly sad. She never looked at him. When he had done what she asked, she told him to leave.”
“Shannon Waycross was dark skinned.”
“Our lady of darkness. She hid behind sunglasses, said she didn’t want the newspaper Felix was selling.”
Moffatt was able to see the significance of themes in Zrbny’s life. Approach; a service offered or provided; rejection.
“What tipped him?” I asked.
“Radshaw worked in his neighborhood. Waycross and Dayle lived there. No one of them knew any of the others. When Radshaw left work, she walked past both of the other women’s houses. They were next-door neighbors, but they didn’t know one another, and neither knew Radshaw.”
“Escher,” I said.
Moffatt smiled. “Some docs are slow to catch on. You’re okay.”
“Why would Zrbny say he’d been interrupted?” I asked. “There are three ladies of sorrow. He killed three times.”
“I wondered about that. I wouldn’t describe Felix as rigid exactly, but his thinking is ordered. Even at his most delusional he is organized. Sorry. I can’t do the math on that one.”
“Is there any reality referent for the Escher print?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “Felix told me about the dungeons at the top of Ravenwood. It’s an old fort that was used in both World Wars to watch the coast for the enemy. The area is fenced off now because the field that surrounds it is riddled with sinkholes and old wells. There’s a lookout tower and hundreds of yards of underground corridors and cells. I don’t know how it fits, but I think that’s the piece of reality in his delusions.”
“When I visited his home, I found a copy of the print with a photograph taped to the middle of it.”
Moffatt smiled. “Wendy Pouldice?”
“How did you know?”
“Think about it. She’s the eyes for all of us. She’s at the center watching what others can’t see or don’t want to see. Then she has her stories for TV. She visited Felix a number of times.”
My young man in the bathrobe halted his journey six feet from us, yelled “Nelson,” and thumped himself. He performed a ninety-degree turn with military precision.
“Schizophrenic,” I said.
“He has been with us three months. His meds are still not regulated.”
“Why does he have to jump-start his heart so often?”
“Do you know Paul Nelson?”
“Haven’t had the pleasure. Do you mind?”
I followed Nelson until he came to a stop and completed his ritual. “Mr. Nelson, may I inspect your battery?” I asked.
Nelson yanked open his bathrobe and displayed a smashed Walkman clipped to his pajamas. The tape player lacked covers for its battery compartment and tape housing.
“May I?” I asked, pointing at his “battery.”
He slipped it from his waistband and handed it to me. I examined it carefully.
“I see two choices,” I said. “We can recharge this battery, or we can replace it. What would you prefer, Mr. Nelson?”
“Recharge,” he snapped, and waggled his fingers in front of his face. “Recharge and charge it.”
I opened my pocketknife’s screwdriver blade, poked and probed at the black plastic box, yanked out the knife’s corkscrew and scraped what was left of the tape heads, then returned it to Nelson.
“Good as new,” I said. “I’ll put it on your account. I think you’ll find that these adjustments will allow you to complete your journey.”
“Recharge and charge it,” he said again, clipping the Walkman in place and surging across the lobby.
“Who is his therapist?” I asked, returning to the sofa.
“He’s b
een evaluated,” Moffatt said. “He hasn’t been assigned.”
“Whoever gets him will need a pocketknife, and a ledger card for Nelson’s account. He’ll be manageable, and when his meds are adjusted you should see some improvement. Where were we?”
Moffatt smiled. “I wish you worked here,” he said. “We were talking about Boston’s own Barbara Walters.”
“Right. We left her in the middle of Escher, didn’t we?”
“I asked Felix if he knew Pouldice fifteen years ago. It was one of those times that he didn’t answer.”
I watched Nelson cruise the lobby without breaking stride. “Does he have any hope of release?” I asked.
“None. He was a preacher in one of those off-the-map religions. He became convinced that his wife and two kids were inhabited by the devil.”
“So he killed them.”
“Then dismembered them looking for Satan. Somebody called the cops when the parsonage started to smell bad.”
“What did he do with their hearts?”
“The cops never found the hearts,” Moffatt said, walking me to the sally port.
“If Nelson has the devil on his tail,” I said, paraphrasing the Robert Johnson song, “he’s going to need that battery in tip-top condition.”
I thanked Moffatt for his help and waited for the various electronic doors to click me back into Boston’s winter. Danny Kirkland was there to greet me.
“Where’s Brother Waycross today?” he asked. I ignored him.
“I’m getting tired of the fuckin’ snow,” he said.
“I’m tired of you,” I told him, walking to my car.
Kirkland tagged along. “I’m gonna give you more than I should,” he said. “A sample, a preview of coming attractions.”
“Where’s my popcorn?”
“Funny, Doc. Zrbny says he was interrupted fifteen years ago, right?”
I continued walking.
“He knew who he was gonna kill before he went out that afternoon.”
I stopped at my car.
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
I waited.
“So he knows who he didn’t kill, right?”
“Get to the profound insight part,” I said.
He shrugged. “I ain’t got that part because I haven’t seen the fuckin’ reports.”
“Got a theory?”
“Shit yes, I have a theory. That’s where the sharing comes in. Out of all those boxes in your hotel room, there’s maybe six pieces of paper I gotta see. The theory holds water or it don’t. Either way I tell you.”
My impulse was to dismiss Kirkland and his theory, but he wrestled with the same conundrum that gnawed at me. Zrbny had sought and found and killed his requisite trinity of ladies and then, he said, Waycross had interrupted him.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, climbing into the Ford and driving off.
RALPH PUSHED OPEN THE DOOR TO HIS bedroom-storage area. He was early.
“That shrink who was on TV is sitting in the lobby talking to Ben Moffatt,” Ralph said. “It’s weird to see someone on TV and then see him for real.”
“He isn’t just digging up background on me,” I said. “He’s tracking me.”
“You ain’t worried?”
Two hours earlier a TV bio had described Lucas Frank as an expert on violent behavior, a retired psychiatrist and independent profiler. Originally from Boston, he now lived in the Michigan woods. They also reported that he had been accused of discharging a firearm in Riddle’s Bar. In some strange parallel way, he was as thorough as I, and appeared to share some of the same goals.
“He won’t find me until I’m ready to be found,” I told Ralph.
“You gonna kill him?”
I ignored the question because I did not know the answer.
“Felix, do you know why I killed the hot dog vendor at Fenway Park?” Ralph asked. “I broke my fingernail trying to open the fuckin’ little package of mustard. It hurt like a bastard. Ah, I was pissed off at the Red Sox anyway.”
“You shot him?”
“Then half the bleachers piled on me, but I almost got away. That’s important. There were so many guys piled on me, they didn’t know who was who. I squirmed out, but there was a cop there by then. Felix, will I see you again?”
“I don’t know,” I told him.
BREAKING OUT OF THE HOSPITAL PROVED to be easier than breaking in.
The snow had tapered to flurries, and the wind had stopped. Evening personnel were in the building; day staff had gone. No guards wandered the grounds with flashlights.
I crossed the yard to where my maple branch extended over the razor wire and hung down with the weight of the snow. I jumped, grabbed the lowered branch, and hoisted myself into the tree.
I crawled the length of the branch to the trunk, then dropped to the ground. Traffic was light as I jogged the sidewalk to Jamaica Plain.
There were four cars—three of them buried in drifts—in Riddle’s parking lot. I looked through the restaurant window. One man leaned on the bar and watched TV. J-Cubed sat huddled with three men at a rear table. The restaurant section was empty.
I waded through the snow, testing windows and doors on the side of the building. At the back a wooden platform led to a flight of stairs and a door. Its glass panel had long ago been replaced with plywood and hardware cloth, and it was secured with rotting planks. I ripped away the boards and leaned against the door, shoving until nails squealed loose and the door opened.
Riddle’s storage area contained cases of beer and whiskey piled to the ceiling. I moved slowly among cartons of napkins and peanuts, crates of relish, mustard, and salsa. There was another door, unlocked, that opened on the hallway to the men’s room. People who drink, I reasoned, must eventually visit the bathroom, so I slipped into the cracked-tile, piss-stinking room and waited.
The day that I stood on Ridge Road and watched Levana disappear into the white car, I chased after them. The driver made the big curve and drove farther up the hill. I wondered where he was going; I had never seen that car on the hill. When he turned onto the road that led to the dungeons, I ran into the woods and climbed to the field near the lookout tower. I did not see the car, and I did not see my sister.
I ran across the meadow to the pullout where kids parked to make out. No one was there. The soft hiss of the breeze through the long grass was the only sound I heard. I turned and ran to one of the three entrances to the dungeons.
As I watched the image of myself step inside the concrete bunker—nearly as if I saw it on a TV screen—Riddle’s bathroom door opened. The man who walked to the urinal was slightly built, in his thirties, and bald like the rest of Vigil’s legions.
I stood on the toilet seat and reached down, grabbing him around the throat with my forearm. He struggled briefly, squirmed, kicked the stall. When he was unconscious, I dropped him, dragged his limp form into the stall, and broke his neck. The vertebral crunch of his spine echoed in the small bathroom.
In minutes a second man entered. “Newt? Where the fuck did you go?”
Newt’s friend, and then another, heightened my pile of corpses. Now I waited only for J-Cubed.
“What the fuck are you guys doing, jerking each other off?” he demanded, shoving open the bathroom door.
I grabbed him by the shirt collar and his belt, and slammed him against the tile wall. He crumpled to the floor. I lifted him and sat him in the sink, relieving him of a handgun and a Buck knife. Then I waited the few moments until he groaned his way to semiconsciousness.
“What do you want?” he mumbled.
He reached up and tenderly touched his bloody face. “You broke my nose. What the fuck are you doing?”
I waited for his head to clear, for him to see me, to recognize me.
My cue was when he focused his eyes and said, “Oh Jesus no.”
“You talk,” I said. “I listen.”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
I pushed open the stall door and al
lowed him to view his stack of dead friends.
“Fuck. You’re gonna kill me anyway.”
“If you don’t talk to me, I’ll break you bone by bone.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Start with my sister, Levana Zrbny. Seventeen years ago you dragged her into your car in Raven-wood. You took her to the old fort at the top of the hill.”
“No.”
I stuffed paper towels into his mouth. His eyes widened and he gagged.
I gripped the sink with my right hand, grabbed his wrist with my left, and yanked his elbow hard against my right forearm. He tried to lurch from the sink, but he was too slow. It was like ripping apart a turkey wing and glancing briefly at the exposed bone while you decide where to bite.
I slapped my hand across his mouthful of paper and held it there, muffling his roar of pain. Tears streamed from his eyes and flowed across the back of my hand. His arm dangled uselessly.
When he only whimpered and wept, I removed my hand, picked out the towels that he had not swallowed, and said again, “You talk. I listen.”
“I saw her on the road,” he began, gasping his words like Mrs. Dayle had. “I’d seen her before.”
BOLTON HAD JUST RETURNED FROM COURT. “I’ll be ecstatic when I don’t have to do this anymore,” he grumbled, loosening his necktie. “You talk to William Hennesy?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Lucas, that complaint is no joke.”
“I said I’ll take care of it. Right now it’s low on my list of things to do.”
I gave Bolton the old license plate that Adele Robbins had given me.
“What the hell is this?”
“If you can find out who had that plate eleven years ago, you can close Stallings and quit.” Bolton stared at me.
I told him about Adele, her theft of the license plate, and her witnessing Theresa Stallings’s abduction while working on a mammoth crossword. “She needed ‘caterwaul’ and she says your response time sucks.”
Bolton did not say a word. He took the plate and walked out of his office.
“I’m not finished,” I yelled after him.
I leaned back in my chair and allowed my eyes to close. The noise—voices, fingers tapping keyboards, phones whining, a door slamming—faded. Ben Moffatt’s words formed a visual tapestry, a banner announcing “a finite world with infinite unrealized possibilities.”