The Murder Channel (8 page)

Waycross led the way through the cellar and up the stairs into the dining room. “When his wife died, Mr. Zrbny divided his time between his meat market and her grave. Felix and his sister were pretty much on their own. They became close, inseparable really. He loved her, depended on her. One day she didn’t come home.”

Waycross walked to the kitchen and opened a cupboard, displaying a rack of butcher knives. “Mr. Zrbny knew how to cut beef. Everybody around here bought their meat from him. He was a proud man, a deeply religious man. He was a first-generation. American. Magda, his wife, was from the old country. He loved life. She wanted to go home. The knife that’s missing from the rack is the one that Felix used.”

“Carbon steel blades,” I said.

“The old man kept them immaculate. He sharpened them weekly.”

The blades and rivets had rusted. Blackened bloodstains marred the faded wood handles.

Waycross stood at the window. “You can’t see much through the snow. My yard was over there.
The fence is gone. Zrbny sat here and ate cereal, left the bowl on the table. He watched Shannon.”

He was right. The blowing snow obscured the view. I saw how close the houses were, but little more.

I entered Zrbny’s room, its walls decorated like any adolescent’s. From one wall, Jim Morrison glared through spread fingers. On another, Pink Floyd was comfortably numb.

“There’s his Escher,” Waycross said, pointing at a black-and-white print on the wall. “I’m convinced that has something to do with the murders, but I don’t know what. How many human figures do you count?”

M. C. Escher had created a small world of people who exist on different planes, people near enough to collide, but unaware of one another, each burdened with her or his isolation. They entered and exited through heavy wooden doors and carried baskets and trays and sacks. None of them knew of the existence of the others.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “A dozen?”

“It’s called
Relativity.
Sometimes I count fifteen people, sometimes sixteen. I get dizzy looking at it. Dr. Kelly said that Zrbny stared at that print for hours and liked to ‘disappear into the picture.’ I’m not sure what he meant by that, but I have an idea.”

“What did he see in there?” I muttered.

“I see loneliness,” Waycross said. “It’s bleak.”

“What does it have to do with the killings?”

Waycross stared at the print. “I don’t know. I have felt close to understanding, but then the overhead light doesn’t go on. To kill someone … that’s an emotional act. The docs say Zrbny doesn’t feel a damn thing.”

“We’re unique in the animal kingdom,” I said. “For us, murder is also an intraspecies predatory act.”

I yanked open Zrbny’s desk drawers.

“Homicide took boxes of his personal stuff out of here. I don’t imagine there’s much left.”

“A few photographs, papers, a book on Escher, another on Albrecht Dürer. Smart kid.”

“That’s his sister,” Waycross said, pointing at a faded Polaroid.

Levana Zrbny looked fifteen or sixteen, short dark hair, wide smile.

Another photo in the drawer had been clipped from a magazine and taped to a small copy of the same Escher print that was tacked on his wall. “She looks familiar,” I said.

Waycross shrugged. “It’s faded. Looks like a publicity photo.”

“He stuck her in the middle of the people who drift past one another,” I said, pocketing the photo. “Felix Zrbny had a complicated design in mind. What happened that afternoon, Neville?”

He sat on the desk playing with a pencil. “From the beginning?”

“The reports are sterile.”

“I drove into Ravenwood on Ledge Road,” he began, nodding at the front of the house. “One hundred yards north of here, there’s a sharp curve in the road. On the left, just before the curve, there was a path through the woods. Maybe it’s still there. I don’t know. Neighborhood kids used it as a shortcut to the bus stop. As I entered the curve, I saw a boy, a teenager, walk out of the woods at the path. I thought he was hurt. His clothes were soaked with blood. There was blood on his face. I stopped the cruiser and ran back to the path. The kid was gone. There were blood drops on the ground, and I followed them into the woods. I thought he went that way, that he was in shock, wandering around dazed. I got as far as the clearing, thirty yards from Ledge Road, and I saw the girl’s body. I checked for a pulse. It was obvious that she was dead.” Waycross shook his head. “Her throat was cut.”

“That was Gina Radshaw.”

He nodded. “I ran to my car and radioed for backup. Then I returned to the end of the path, examined the ground, and saw that I could follow the blood drops in the other direction, into the street. I came back on Ledge Road to the Dayle residence. I didn’t know who lived there. I thought it might be the kid’s house. There was blood on the walk and on the porch steps. When he walked out of the house, he was carrying a large knife. It was
covered with blood. I told him to put down the knife. He just stood there. He wasn’t looking at me. He was smiling, staring off somewhere. I heard what I thought was a backup unit turning onto Ledge Road, so I waited.”

He dropped the pencil and gazed out at the snow. “Whenever I ended my shift, I cleared with dispatch and locked my service revolver in the glove compartment. Shannon didn’t like guns in the house. The whole thing happened so fast, I didn’t think about my weapon. I was responding to an injured boy.”

Waycross sighed. “What I thought was backup was a TV news van. I couldn’t figure that out. Even if they’d been monitoring a police scanner and heard my call, they couldn’t get there that fast. There was a man with a camera, and a woman, Wendy Pouldice, with a microphone. That’s when I realized that I didn’t have my gun. I waved them back. I was concerned about their safety. Then Zrbny charged me with the knife. I was able to disarm him and get him on the ground. Backup arrived then.”

“The reports quote Zrbny saying, ‘Smile. They judge appearances here.’ ”

“I knew he was crazy. I would have been a great defense witness.”

Uniformed officers had removed Zrbny. Waycross entered Mrs. Dayle’s home and found her sprawled across a basket of laundry, her throat slit.

“Bolton came in behind me. He said he would seal the Dayle scene, and told me to secure the path into the woods. There were other media people on Ledge Road by then. I found three of them in the clearing and got them out, then waited until more of our units arrived.”

“When did you leave the scene?”

“It was late. After midnight. Everything was secure. The coroner and the crime scene technicians were there. The scenes were under control. I figured I’d grab a few hours’ sleep, then report back in.”

Waycross went home. His house was dark, he said. He expected to find Shannon in bed, but the bed had not been slept in. He searched the house and found nothing. The sound of the lawn sprinkler attracted his attention to the backyard, where he found his wife on the chaise lounge, her throat cut.

“We had a no-lawn-watering order. It didn’t make sense that she’d have the sprinklers on.”

Waycross stared at the snow. “After the funeral, I couldn’t stay in the house. I paced. I smoked. I drank. I lived with my sister for a couple of months. She was great, but her kids got on my nerves. It must have been terrible to be around me. The doc gave me pills to relax, but they didn’t work. Alcohol did the trick. I rented an apartment in Somerville and drank. Ray came by and tried to
talk to me. I barely remember him being there. My lieutenant called every couple of days, wanting to know when I was coming back. I snuck in one morning to pick up my check. There wasn’t any check. I’d gone through the compassionate leave, all my vacation time. I borrowed ten bucks from the dispatcher and got a bottle. The next two years are a blur. I woke up in the hospital. I’d had a slight stroke. Two of the Brothers found me on a Columbus Avenue sidewalk. I owe them my life.”

Waycross paused and looked at the Escher print. “He’s had all these years to prepare for freedom,” he said. “I have my own copy of that print. I’ve stared at it for hours. Felix Zrbny is right over there by the window, but he’s not. We should be able to touch him, but we can’t. We don’t even see him. He is so complete in his solitude of mind that we will never know him. The best we can do is to put him where he can’t hurt anyone else.”

I wondered whether Waycross’s intention was to return Zrbny to a secure facility, or something more lethal. He stared into the distance, his eyes radiating the same intensity I had seen in the courtroom. For a moment I thought I saw rage in those eyes.

“Neville, when you were struggling with him, he said, ‘Smile. They judge appearances here. ‘You felt that you were dealing with someone insane. Typically there is meaning in what—”

“I know what you’re getting at,” he interrupted. “What did Zrbny mean when he said that? My backup wasn’t backup. It was a truckload of TV personnel. I swear he knew that. I think he had called the media, and he was telling me to look my best.”

“ARE THERE ANY FISH IN THE RIVER?” I
asked as we returned across the bridge.

“Carp. Sometimes you can see them. They look like giant goldfish except they’re pale, sort of gray. The kids around here call them suckers.”

Ahead, a police cruiser turned from Huntington onto South Huntington. I wrapped my hand around the gun in my pocket. The cop had not seen us.

“The kids fish for them,” Sable said. “They bait their hooks with corn kernels.”

“On hot days in summer,” I said, “I tried to catch them. I never did. They sucked the bait off the hook.”

“Did you fish here?” she asked. “Near where I grew up.”

In Ravenwood, I thought, where I was a child, and Levana and I would climb the hill to the old fort—concrete bunkers and turret gun emplacements built in the early 1900s to guard the coast against invasion. We called them dungeons—winding, interlocking, underground tunnels. It was a
subterranean maze, corridors of parallel worlds separated by walls, deep shafts, and pools of dark water.

A tower stood to one side of what looked like a harmless open field. The building was round, constructed of chiseled, brown rectangular stones, and rose forty feet to a conical slate roof. The rotunda at the top offered an unobstructed view of the ocean.

That August morning when I forced myself awake, wearing only the jockey shorts and T-shirt I had slept in, I walked to the kitchen and retrieved one of my father’s meat-carving knives, and yanked open the door and sat on the stoop beside my bound stack of newspapers. I slipped the blade under the twine, and the bundle snapped open.

A familiar face smiled at me from the bottom of the front page. The photo caption read: “Gina Radshaw is spending her summer as a lifeguard at the Ravenwood Community Pool. Then it’s off to Dartmouth College for the local 1984 grad.”

I passed Gina Radshaw in the halls at school. Each day for weeks I glanced at her, absorbed her image, then quickly looked away. She talked with friends, laughed with them, greeted teachers. One day I walked out of science class and saw her standing in the hall crying. I was frightened, but went to her and asked if I could help. She smelled of soap and shampoo—so clean—and, unlike the other girls, she wore a dress. It was light blue and white and fragrant like subtle, sweet-smelling flowers.

Gina did not look at me. She turned and ran from the building.

My sister Levana would have attended college in the fall of 1984. I had imagined hugging her and crying and saying goodbye to her, knowing that it was only temporary.

She would say, “It’s okay, Felix. I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.”

Instead, my sister was dead.

I left the newspapers on the stoop and returned to the kitchen where I stood in the middle of the room, gazed around, and wondered what I was doing there. I must have wanted cereal, I thought, so I found a clean bowl, filled it with wheat flakes and milk, and sat in the breakfast nook at the rear window.

I read the cereal box; it told me to keep my life in balance. Grains, fruit, dairy products.

I looked out the window.

The unhappy Mrs. Dayle carried a laundry basket to her backyard clothesline. She placed it on the ground, clamped her hands to her lower back, looked at the sky, and shook her head.

Earlier in the month, when the city still allowed residents to water their lawns, Mrs. Dayle had come to her front door as I placed the
Informer
in the rack beneath her mailbox.

“I can’t turn the tap,” she said, wiping sweat from her forehead with her arm, “the one that controls the sprinklers.”

She smelled like soured milk, and she did not speak her words. She breathed them.