by John Philpin
I saw the words drift by, and I felt empty, confused.
Limited, but with unlimited potential.
Poets know more about life than shrinks, and they express what they know in pleasant rhythms without numbers.
Possibilities unrealized. Infinite.
at the crazy house on Halloween, the kids wore
masks and went trick-or-treating …
all the other days of the year the kids wore
masks, and lived without chocolate bars
What are you about, lad? You are forever behind your mask, banging around in your stone hallways, waiting. What are you waiting for?
I had looked into Felix Zrbny’s eyes, and I had seen only determination there. There was no life in those eyes.
are your dreams insane, too?
do you spin and mumble in sleep,
speak in rhyme, wear clothing backwards
and disregard time?
Each of us has a representational system, a preferred way of absorbing and describing the world. A kid from the country who visits the city might describe the noise, the incessant din emitted by a million people. Her dominant manner of experiencing her world is auditory. Someone else might report odors, the strange blend of a breeze from the harbor and the city’s exhaust.
Felix Zrbny knew the world visually.
The M. C. Escher print that hung on his bedroom wall and that Zrbny “disappeared” into was a two-dimensional representation of multiple dimensions.
Similar to TV, isn’t it, lad?
Edmund Kemper complained that his victims were aloof, not involved with him. He wanted a relationship, he said. The only way he knew to achieve his goal was to kill them. Kemper’s notion of relationship did not include give-and-take. He wanted their recognition, he wanted to control them, to be more than a passing participant in their lives. He would own them as completely as another person can be owned, by killing them.
At the age of fourteen, Felix Zrbny was powerless. Levana was gone, and his world was empty.
You saw Gina Radshaw and Shannon Waycross and Florence Dayle drift by one another—day after day. Each inhabited her own dimension and you watched them all. None of them saw you. They were supposed to comfort you in your grief, weren’t they? Tears, darkness, and sighs—emissaries from Levana—your lady of sorrow. You crawled into the picture and took ownership of their lives.
“Where does TV come into it?” I asked.
Zrbny had to be the one who called Pouldice. He told her what he was going to do before he left his house. Pouldice had reported Levana Zrbny’s abduction. She blasted the cops and made her own news. She became the media voice for Boston’s lost and stolen children.
Theresa Stallings was next.
Pouldice made her own news.
Zrbny had shown no interest in being released from the hospital. She visited him, they exchanged numerous phone calls, then he wanted out.
Neville Waycross interrupted you. Your business was unfinished.
“Three is three, damn it,” I muttered.
Bolton walked into the office and sat on the edge of his desk.
“I didn’t have to ask you to run that old plate,
did I?” I asked.
He said nothing.
“J-Cubed,” I said. “What have you got on his North Carolina arrests?”
“We’re pulling them now.”
“Were you able to preserve any standards?”
“We have hairs from Theresa’s brush.”
“If the car hasn’t been junked, can you find it?” I asked, thinking that a thorough forensic examination of the vehicle might still produce a hair or two for comparison.
“I’ve got an officer working on it.”
I pushed myself from the chair and walked to the door.
“Lucas, what does this have to do with Zrbny?”
“You’ll have to work Mr. Cubed,” I said. “I think he grabbed Levana Zrbny. I also think there’s a connection between that bald bastard and Pouldice, and we know she got herself in tight with Zrbny.”
“So, why did Zrbny suddenly decide he wanted out?”
“Maybe Wendy Pouldice led him to J-Cubed,” I said. “If that’s the case, you’d best pick him up before Zrbny gets to him.”
I walked to the door. “One other thing,” I said. “Have you had any recent dealings with Danny Kirkland?”
“No,” he said emphatically.
“He’s been following me around. Says he has a theory about what went down fifteen years ago.”
“We know what happened that day.”
“We don’t know who else Zrbny had targeted,” I said. “Waycross interrupted him.”
“Kirkland knows?”
I shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll stumble over him again.”
I HEADED FOR THE HOTEL TO CATCH UP ON my sleep and to grab something to eat. After that, I would try again to talk with Ms. Pouldice.
I was exhausted. My head touched the pillow and I was gone. There was no Cecil B. DeMille epic this time, no cast of dozens, no sound, no fury. Still, I slept only twenty minutes, then snapped to attention in bed in the darkened room.
“Fuck,” I bellowed, grabbing the TV remote and slamming buttons.
I had not watched what remained of Severance’s interview with Zrbny. He had been telling his tale of the goats and the troll modified for him by his sister.
“Then what?” Severance asked.
“I killed her.”
“You said nothing to her?”
“She never saw me, why would she hear me? I didn’t exist for her.”
“Felix, how many times did you stab this young woman?”
“Three, four.”
Severance hesitated and glanced at his notes. “Gina Radshaw was stabbed fifty-one times.”
“How many times was Levana stabbed?” Zrbny asked.
Again, Severance paused briefly. “Your sister vanished. She was never found. Were you seeking vengeance?”
Zrbny did not respond.
“Did you kill those women because your sister was gone, taken from you?”
“That’s the sort of question that you’re supposed to answer,” Zrbny said.
“Do you remember stabbing Gina Radshaw after she was dead?”
“I know what I did.”
Severance sighed. “When you feel angry, what is it like? What is your experience of that feeling?”
Zrbny was silent.
“For someone to stab another person so many times …”
“That’s what you believe.”
“Help me to understand what you believe.”
Zrbny continued to stare at Severance, his body rigid. “Someone should have asked me that a long time ago. I intend to remain here. What difference does it make? You will write a report and nothing will change.”
Severance looked helpless.
“I’m a case, a file, a pile of papers. Add yours to the stack.”
Zrbny stood and walked out of camera range. The tape ended.
Something got you moving in a different direction, lad.
I grabbed the phone and stared at the instructions for making a call. I put on my glasses and read the damn thing. How the fuck was I supposed to know whether I was making a local call? I punched the number for the desk. The young man who answered had mastered the Boston version of the British accent. He sounded as if he had a large growth under his tongue, and feared to part his lips because he might expose the mass.
“Place this call for me,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t do that from here. If you consult the hotel services manual provided—”
“What do you do in an emergency?”
He stalled only momentarily. “Call 911.”
“If you can do that from there, you can do this.”
I gave him Pouldice’s number.
“Sir …”
“Would you rather continue sounding like Surrey, or should I come down there and knock you back into Southie?”
>
“Just a moment.”
The effort was a waste of time. No one answered.
Severance had conveyed his bias that rage was a necessary component when a killer stabs a victim fifty-one times. Zrbny did not share that bias. I wondered if, like many other killers, Zrbny split away his feelings, dissociated, or if he was something different—not unique, but rare—an emotional primitive who simply did what he believed needed to be done.
A delusional psychopath.
Severance asked how many times Zrbny stabbed Gina Radshaw.
“Three, four.”
Was the response deceptive? Was he unaware? Or did he just not give a shit?
“How many times was Levana stabbed?”
As I dressed I considered Zrbny’s linking the two young women’s deaths.
“Did you kill those women because your sister was gone, taken from you?” Severance had asked.
Severance did what any shrink would do: he accepted the metaphor, the implied meaning.
I sat down hard on the bed.
That was not a metaphor, was it, lad? You know how many times your sister was stabbed.
I grabbed my coat and ran for the door.
The next twenty seconds—from when I yanked open the door until I told the fraudulent Brit kid from Southie to call 911—were like a nightmare ripped from Stephen King’s notebook.
I froze in the doorway, trying to understand a Halloween prank in January.
The puddle of gore was no trick.
On the floor, staring vacantly skyward, was Dermott Fremont’s head.
I CAUGHT A RIDE WITH A TRUCKER HEADING west on the Massachusetts Turnpike. He was a small, wiry man—a younger version of Ralph Amsden, I thought—and a talker.
“I’m meeting some buddies at a truck stop outside of Springfield,” he said. “One of them’s driving a flatbed north. He’ll get you close to Claremont.”
I thanked him and watched highway crews with bucket loaders and dump trucks clearing the tons of snow.
“Hell of a storm,” he said. “Don’t usually see this kind of snowfall here. Colorado maybe, or up in the Sierras.”
He did not seem to mind that I had little to say. He was content to have company, an audience for his stories.
His friend was a squat, heavyset trucker named Gary Baylor. The two men shared stories for an hour in the truck stop, then Baylor and I climbed into the cab of his flatbed and drove north.
I was twelve when my sister disappeared into Fremont’s white car and I followed, running up the hill to the dungeons. I stood inside the entrance and heard water dripping—like the soft tap of tears falling into their own shallow pool. As I moved deeper into the concrete bunker, the afternoon sunlight faded and the darkness swallowed me. I heard breathing, as if someone sighed deeply, far ahead in the tunnel or on a different level or on the other side of the wall.
My body shook, vibrated like a plucked strand of taut wire. Terror would not allow me to speak, to call my sister’s name, to scream. I knew the dungeons, their secret passages, water-filled holes, rat-infested crevices, and corridors that went nowhere.
“You been up this way before?” Baylor asked.
“I’ve never been out of Massachusetts.”
“It’s nice country. Can’t see much of it now.”
“There doesn’t seem to be as much snow here,” I said.
“The storm veered off the coast. Boston and New York got hammered. It’s even worse around D.C.”
We drove in silence for a few moments, then Baylor said, “If you’re coming up here looking for work, you won’t have any trouble finding it. None of the jobs pay much, though.”
“I have to see someone.”
“Girlfriend?”
“A woman I had an agreement with.”
“She jump off the seesaw, did she? Shit. I’m on my fourth wife. I don’t know anything more about women now than I did when I was in high school.”
Baylor’s tale of his aborted marriages and flawed wives consumed the miles. I thought of Wendy Pouldice.
My father was in church the first time she knocked on the door. “He won’t talk to you,” I told her. “He doesn’t talk to me.”
Her smooth skin, bright blue eyes, and gentle smile were framed by a shoulder-length fall of soft blond hair. “Maybe you and I should talk,” she said. “You hungry? How about a burger and fries?”
“I’m not supposed to go out.”
She considered that. “When will your dad be home?”
“He goes to the cemetery after church. He visits my mother’s grave.”
“Will he be gone another hour?”
“A little longer.”
“We have plenty of time. I’ll have you back before he gets here, and he won’t even know you were gone.”
Much later, when Pouldice tried to talk to my father, he was polite, but he refused. She visited me only when he was at his shop. She wanted to help, she told me.
“I will find out who did this to Levana,” she said.
“The police said she probably ran away.”
“I don’t believe that for a second. Do you?”
I hesitated, then shook my head.
“Tell me what you think happened,” she said, and eventually I did.
Now, the truck slowed. “Exit eight,” Baylor said. “I’ll drop you at a store down there. I gotta fill my thermos.”
“Which way is Claremont?”
“East,” he said. “It’s a long walk. This time of night there isn’t much traffic, and it’s a hell of lot colder than where we came from.”
“Is there a motel near here?”
“The City Line. When you cross the bridge, it’s on your right.”
I thanked Baylor, flipped up my coat collar, shoved my hands into my pockets, and headed east.
A pink neon sign with most of its letters illuminated announced the City Line Motel. A hand-painted board nailed to a picket fence advertised cable TV and hot showers. Two other makeshift signs read Vacancies and No Pets.
My room was the last in a row of a dozen in a low, wood-frame building. I sprawled on the bed, unwrapped a sandwich I’d bought from the night clerk, and grabbed the TV remote. Suddenly I had no interest in what they were saying about me. I dropped the remote and bit into my Italian cold cuts on a bulkie roll.
When Fremont’s tears had cascaded across the back of my hand, I flashed on the rivulets of condensation inside my refrigerator, and on an image of myself sitting on the kitchen floor feeling the cool air and watching the water flow across well-worn plastic paths. I listened for the sound of the water, but I heard only the whisper of Wendy Pouldice’s TV voice.
I could not call her then. She was on the air, alive in my TV. When I was ready—when I was clear in my mind about what I would do—then I would tell her.
Wendy, I would say, imagining her in a nightgown standing on her bed watching Mary Martin, then soaring into the air, flitting around the room, and flying through her window into the night. Wendy, I’m ready to show you what I saw. I’m going to start by cutting my way through the darkness. Bring your camera. Then I will put an end to the tears and silence and sighs, and my sister can sleep.
Wendy Pouldice would arrive with her camera crew and microphones. “This is ‘Local Scene’ with Wendy Pouldice, live from Ravenwood, where …”
Dermott Fremont had required considerably less persuasion to tell me his Wendy Pouldice story than to talk about my sister. Waiting for Ms. Local Scene to return from New Hampshire at her leisure was out of the question. She would return with me.
I bit into my sandwich and stared at the blank TV screen.
… nationwide manhunt, but the search focus is the greater Boston area. Boston police are being assisted in their effort by the FBI and the United States Marshals. A source close to the investigation told BTT just moments ago that police are confident they will apprehend Felix Zrbny, and that they expect to find the mass murderer here in the city. Informants continue to report sigh
ting Zrbny, who at six feet seven inches tall and nearly three hundred pounds should be hard to miss or to confuse with most other men his age. He is twenty-nine, has shoulder-length black hair and brown eyes. Zrbny is known to be armed and should be considered extremely dangerous. When we come back, we are going to recap …
“THREE MORE DEAD IN THE BATHROOM AT Riddle’s,” Bolton said as crime scene technicians worked in the hall outside my door. “All Vigil members. Zrbny broke their necks.”
“He waited for them.”
“That’s what it looks like. He stacked them like sacks of grain.”
“He wanted J-Cubed. If Zrbny had to kill a dozen to get this one, he would have.”
“Why do you get the head?”
“Both ears and the tail,” I muttered, thinking that Zrbny was more than a step ahead of me. “He’s watching us on TV. He knows who I am, why I’m here, the information I’m working with. He has the same information, but he obtained most of his firsthand. I think he saw Fremont kill his sister. Or maybe he saw her after Fremont was finished with her. He spent fifteen years putting it together. At the end, Pouldice was the catalyst.”
“The plate on the car in the courthouse alley came back to BTT. The station had a crew of two on the front steps. They had their own van. Braverman had the car.”
“He left the airport as soon as I got there,” I said. “He had plenty of time. Everyone was on schedule except Zrbny. He spoiled the party.”
I wondered if Zrbny knew the plans for his escape from the courthouse, then wondered if he had made the connection between Vigil and BTT.
I grabbed my coat. “I have to talk to Pouldice,” I said.
“Her office says she’s in seclusion. I sent two units to the Towers to bring in Braverman. He’s disappeared. Pouldice has an estate on the Connecticut River in New Hampshire. That’s where she is.”
“Braverman with her?”
“The office manager, Hannah Stanley, didn’t think so. She said Pouldice has always gone there alone.”