The Murder Channel (5 page)

“When I finished breakfast, I did what I always did,” Zrbny said. “I went to my father’s knife rack, grabbed one, and took it to the stoop.”

“Go ahead,” Severance directed. Again, Zrbny had to pause, find his bookmark, and proceed.

I listened to the interview and scanned police reports. One file contained only copies of police-log addenda, the summaries completed by officers days or weeks after the events they described. I have never been able to follow a crime chronology by relying on the logs. The dates are too confusing. This set documented phone calls made from Florence Dayle’s home. Either the report was filed two days after she was dead, or someone had used
her phone then. Waycross was similar: a clerical error, or Shannon Waycross placed a call three hours after she was dead.

“Shit,” I muttered.

When Severance arrived at his questions about the afternoon, Zrbny’s demeanor did not change. “Why did you leave your house that afternoon?” Severance asked.

“It was something I sensed. I knew what to do.”

“You have told others that there were voices.”

“My lady of sorrow,” Zrbny said.

“Please tell me about her.”

Zrbny said nothing.

“He’s protective of his hallucinations,” I said.

“What does she say?” Severance asked.

He stared straight ahead, silent.

Severance moved on. “When the detective confronted you, did you know what you had done?” he asked.

Again, Zrbny said nothing.

“You killed three people. Did you know that?”

“I am aware of what I did. Are you?”

Severance hesitated, then asked the question that I wanted him to ask. “Did the detective interrupt you, Mr. Zrbny? Were there others whom you intended to kill that afternoon?”

Zrbny leaned forward in his chair—the first time he had moved—and extended his hands, palms up. “Dr. Severance, if I wanted to kill you right here,
right now, snap your neck and leave you quivering on the floor, I could. The attendants would not arrive soon enough to save you.”

“You are a strong young man,” Severance said without flinching.

“This guy is fucking amazing,” I said, jumping to my feet and finding a different angle to watch the TV.

“When you left your house you knew what you were going to do,” Severance persisted.

“Yes.”

“Where did you go first?”

“That’s in the records.”

Severance placed his notepad on his knee. “I’d like to hear it from you.”

Zrbny slid back on his chair, sat erect, and placed his hands on his knees. I imagined tumblers falling into place inside his massive head.

Edmund Kemper had been far more successful in his intimidation of former FBI profiler Robert Ressler. When his structured interview ended, Ressler rang for a guard. None answered the page. Kemper said that he could easily kill Ressler. A simple acknowledgment and redirection of the conversation as Severance had done would have neutralized this encounter. Instead, a tense, thirty-minute exchange followed with Ressler on the defensive pointing out possible repercussions for Kemper. The killer shrugged it off; he had nothing to lose. The standoff ended with the guard’s arrival.

“Shannon Waycross often slept on the lounge in her backyard,” Zrbny said. “Sometimes I watched her from my kitchen window. She seemed so far away from any moment, so aloof. I thought if she knew that in seconds she was going to die, and she didn’t know why, she wouldn’t care.”

“How did that make you feel?”

The question did not compute for Zrbny.

“Mad, sad, glad, scared?” Severance asked.

Zrbny stared straight ahead.

“You felt nothing?”

“Is curiosity a feeling?”

“Jesus,” I snapped. “He’s the real thing.”

Felix Zrbny was totally congruent with what he said. He was guarded, but he was telling the truth. Severance had to dump the idea of feelings, go with Zrbny’s thoughts or get back to the voices. Join him in his crazy world.

“You entered this woman’s backyard,” Severance said.

Zrbny did not respond.

“Did you speak to her? Did she speak to you?”

After several moments of silence Severance said, “You walked from the Waycross residence and followed a path into the woods.”

“To the clearing.”

“Why did you go there?”

Zrbny gazed fixedly ahead.

“You waited,” Severance said.

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.