The Murder Channel (24 page)

“Did they ask you for money?”

“They looked at me,” he said. “Then they looked away. I watched people. It was a novelty for me. I
thought I had been launched into a city in mourning. So many people wear black. Trench coats and broad hats for the men; pants and sweaters and jackets for the women. Is this fashion, or an expression of mood? Have you noticed everyone wearing packs? They have little ones strapped to their waists and big ones on their backs filled with their gear.”

Zrbny turned to look at me. “What is that gear, that stuff they carry with them at all times? A credit card doesn’t take up much space. A change of shoes, perhaps? Weapons? What is in those packs? If Levana were alive, if I had killed no one, if we had completed our education and entered professions, would we too have become pack-carrying rats scurrying through the subway?”

He turned again and watched the highway ahead.

“Perhaps I am insane,” Zrbny said. “So is this world.”

As we approached the city, he gave directions like someone who had spent his life prowling the streets. He knew the shortcuts, the best routes to avoid traffic. I did not have to ask. He had seen it on TV.

“There are many questions I would like to ask you,” I said.

“I will get out in Brookline Village,” he said. “When I do, you will drive away. Tomorrow morning at eleven, go to the Public Garden and enter
from Arlington Street. When you reach the third bench on your left, sit down and stay there. When I arrive, I’ll give you my gun and answer your questions. Then you can turn me over to the police.”

I did not understand, but I was in no position to demand an explanation. I stopped at a streetlight and Zrbny stepped from the car.

“I have no desire to kill you,” he said. “You tried to help Sable.”

With that, he slammed the door, wound his way through traffic, and disappeared between two buildings.

I WAITED UNTIL LAST LIGHT, THEN WALKED
into Ravenwood.

As I approached the crest of the hill, I saw a police cruiser’s light bar. The cops had parked there, waiting for me to come home.

“Tomorrow,” I muttered. “Not now.”

I climbed over a snowbank and struggled through the drifts into the woods. I moved parallel to Ridge Road, eventually intersecting the old and familiar path. The big rock squatted downhill on my left. To my right, where a gray birch and an oak had marked my entrance to the dungeons, pines, poplar, and sumac claimed the terrain.

I studied angles and distances, then crashed into the undergrowth and dug through the snow and a fifteen-year accumulation of matted leaves and pine needles. My fingers throbbed with freezing pain as I grasped the loop handle and yanked open the iron door.

The odor of dampness and dirt and rot spilled on warm air from the hole in the earth. I crawled forward
on my stomach, crouched, and turned when I reached the five-foot concrete drainage pipe. I slithered back and pulled the door into place.

My hands ached as I crept the hundred yards through the black, dank conduit, and finally stood in the cistern beneath the dungeons. I groped at the rough walls until I found the iron ladder, still securely bolted in place, and climbed.

The fort was a work of genius—simple in function, complex in design. Its many levels, corridors, and cells were like an animal’s arteries and veins. There were no breaks, no disruptions in space. However disguised it might be, there was only continuity.

At the top of the ladder, I stepped into what I had always called the great room, a sixty-by forty-foot space with a fifteen-foot ceiling and a single doorway. I felt the spaciousness; I could not see it. As a child—and now—I imagined knights or generals sitting at an immense hardwood table drinking wine from silver goblets or whiskey from the bottle.

Even in the coldest winters, I had never known the temperature in the dungeons to dip below fifty degrees. The earth’s warmth spread through the maze of corridors, insulated by concrete walls that were six inches thick.

I stepped through the doorway and into the main tunnel. Despite my knowledge of the place, I moved slowly, wary of watery pits that had opened in my absence.

To be alone in impenetrable darkness is not to be
deprived of sensation. Through the years of my childhood, I was more comfortable in these halls than I was in my home. Other kids were warned away by parents or police. My mother and father were oblivious to the fort’s existence.

The cops who patrolled the hill never caught me. If they arrived as I wound my way through the field, I kept going, knowing they would not follow. If they sat and waited, I retreated to the path and used the entrance only I knew.

I found the narrow corridor that I wanted and turned to my left. The squeak and scratch of rats scuttling ahead of me echoed in the long hall. The familiar, shit-sweet stench of decomposing flesh wafted on the air.

Bats fluttered past my head. I could not see them, but I heard and felt their presence.

Thirty yards in I discovered the cell. I groped in the darkness and found the wood that I had carried to the room and stacked fifteen years earlier. Despite rot, enough fragments of boards and tree branches remained intact for me to start a small fire. I found my box of wooden matches still sealed in plastic and ignited the first few scraps of tinder.

Small flames spread from the half dozen matches to the wood shavings and splinters and licked at the pine sticks and small boards. There was little light at first, but as the fire caught and I felt its warmth on my hands, I gazed beyond the flames at my sister Levant’s skull.

“I’VE MADE A FRIEND FOR LIFE,” I ANNOUNCED
to Bolton, collapsing into the chair in front of his desk.

He leaned back and waited.

“I drove Felix Zrbny back from Pouldice’s place in New Hampshire.”

“And?”

“He wanted out in Brookline Village. I didn’t argue with him because he had a gun aimed at me.”

“Where did he go?”

I shrugged. “He disappeared into an alley.”

Bolton pushed his hand through his hair and sighed.

“Braverman’s dead,” I said. “Felix and I agree that neither of us killed him. Pouldice wasn’t around. Your boot gun is at the scene.”

Bolton winced. “Did you notify the New Hampshire authorities?”

“Not with a gun pointed at me.”

“I’ll call them.”

“The study was trashed. Somebody went looking for something.”

“What did Zrbny have to say?”

“Let me make sure I get this right,” I said, gazing at the ceiling. “He has studied TV for fifteen years, it sucks and so does the world.”

“That’s it?”

“He wants to talk to me again tomorrow at the Public Garden. He said he would answer my questions then. He would like a half hour, then you can arrest him.”

I expected Bolton to come rocketing out of his chair. He did not. He cocked his head to the right.

“How do you know he didn’t kill Braverman?”

“I don’t know it. Braverman had been dead for a couple of hours. Zrbny’s entrance at the house impressed me as his first.”

“Pouldice?”

“No sign of her.”

“Would she kill Braverman?”

“She wouldn’t shoot it out with him. His gun had been fired. He had a half-inch hole in his forehead, not inflicted from close range. Someone is a good or lucky shot.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Zrbny didn’t say why he went up there. We know he was after Pouldice. Were they going to plan his TV career? Doubtful. He’s made the connection between Vigil and BTT, says Fremont and Pouldice
were high school chums in North Carolina. I figure he planned to break her neck like he’s doing to half the population. Why is he meeting me tomorrow to give himself up? I don’t know, Ray.”

“You’re supposed to know more than everything,” Bolton said.

“You’re not paying me enough. Maybe he plans to wrap up his business tonight.”

“Kill Pouldice?”

“I doubt that he could find her.”

Bolton sat in silence.

“What about Waycross?” I asked.

He shook his head. “When we couldn’t find him, I went to the monastery on Humboldt Avenue. He didn’t withdraw from the Brotherhood. When the news broke about Zrbny petitioning for release, the Brothers suspected that Waycross was drinking. They gave him a couple of breaks, then asked him to leave.”

Bolton swiveled in his chair and gazed out the window.

“Did they have any idea where he might be?” I asked.

“Someone will find him on the streets,” he said. “Maybe he’ll be alive, maybe not.”

After a pause, Bolton said, “You’re lucky Zrbny didn’t feed you to the bears. We wait until morning?”

I shrugged. “He’s calling the shots,” I said.

“What about Pouldice? She isn’t at the Towers. Her office hasn’t heard from her.”

“She’s a survivor,” I said, pushing myself from the chair. “She’ll show up, but not before Zrbny is in custody.”

“Where are you headed now?” Bolton asked.

“The psych unit. I want to have another talk with Ben Moffatt.”

MOFFATT MET ME IN THE LOBBY.

“Nelson must have had a tune-up,” I said, watching my bathrobed man cruise the waiting area.

“He says he feels much better,” Moffatt said with a smile.

As I described my encounter with Zrbny, Moffatt nodded. “When he aimed the gun at me,” he said, “I knew he wouldn’t shoot me. I also knew that I couldn’t push him.”

I had felt the same way. “He mentioned watching the Simpson trial with a friend,” I said.

“Ralph Amsden,” Moffatt said quickly. “He’s been here since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. Ralph and Felix were our very own odd couple. Ralph’s a fussy little guy, great mechanic, worked on ships’ boilers in the navy and pretty much keeps our ancient steam furnace operational. Felix was the new giant on the block, quiet, private, laid-back.”

“May I talk with Mr. Amsden?” I asked.

“Ralph hasn’t had a visitor since his sister died years ago. He’ll talk to you, but don’t expect him to tell you anything about Felix.”

Moffatt led me into a locked corridor and down a flight of stairs. “This is a secure area,” he said, “but it’s for maintenance and laundry. The kitchen is down here, too. Meals go to the wards on hand trucks.”

Hospital routines had not changed much from when I did my psychiatric residency decades earlier. The acrid smell of bleach mingled with the scent of corned beef hash.

“Ralph lives in a room near the furnace,” Moffatt explained. “He hasn’t had an assigned therapist in years. He’s content with his privacy, and the administration is happy to leave him alone.”

Moffatt tapped on an open door. “Ralph? You in there?”

“Hey, Ben. Jesus. Yeah. Come in.”

Amsden, the man I had watched push his laundry cart through the lobby on my previous visit, sat on a cot reading the Bible.

“Got a visitor who’d like to ask you some questions,” Ben said. “This is Dr. Frank.”

He bookmarked and closed his Bible. “Jesus. I seen you on TV.”

“Sometimes the camera can’t be avoided,” I said.

Amsden barked a dry laugh.

“This morning I drove from New Hampshire with your friend Felix.”

“Felix was in New Hampshire? Jesus. What was he doing there? I was up there one time. Don’t remember why.”

“I had hoped that you might have some idea why he went there, and where he’d be now. I dropped him off in Brookline Village.”

Amsden considered the information. “If I knew, and if I told you, you still couldn’t find him. When he’s ready to come in, he’ll come in.”

“He wants to meet me tomorrow morning,” I said.

The old man nodded. “If Felix said that, he’ll be there.”

“I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

“You can’t stop it,” Amsden said. “Jesus. One way or another, Felix will do what he needs to do. I had friends when I was in the service. He’s the only friend I had since. If I knew something, I still wouldn’t tell you.”

“I appreciate your honesty,” I said.

I scanned Ralph Amsden’s small corner of the world, dimly aware of his conversation with Ben Moffatt. A crucifix complemented his Bible. He had crates for furniture, a table, a rickety chair, and a TV that qualified for antique status. I crossed the room and gazed at his only window, a ground-level tilt window covered outside by a steel
grate. The gray paint around the window was chipped, and the accumulation of dust on the sill had recently been disturbed. The grate appeared secure, but the screw holes in the frame were empty.