The Murder Channel (25 page)

“There’s another consideration,” I said without turning from the window. “I doubt that you would want to see your friend shot down by police.”

“Jesus, no,” he said, an edge of panic creeping into his voice.

“He killed a deputy sheriff,” I continued. “Cops hate cop killers.”

“He said he’ll meet you tomorrow,” Amsden protested. “Felix doesn’t lie.”

“What if a police officer stumbles across him tonight?” I asked, turning to survey three low storage lofts, sheets of plywood supported by two-by-fours.

“The cops won’t find Felix. They can’t. Jesus. Felix is very smart.”

I nodded as I walked to the loft on my far right and placed my hand on a box of toilet tissue. “On the off chance that they did find him, he couldn’t visit with you again, could he?”

“Those crates ain’t up there sturdy,” he said with a tremor in his voice.

I faced Amsden and stared at his eyes. He shifted his glance.

“May I call you Ralph?” I asked.

He did not answer.

“You have no plans to leave here, Ralph, do you?”

“No. Jesus. I wouldn’t know what to do out there.”

I waited several moments. “Ralph?”

“Felix is with his sister. Leave him be. If you go in there after him, everybody gets hurt. Jesus.”

“In where?”

He shot a glance at the window. “The dungeons.”

“The old fort at Ravenwood?”

He nodded curtly.

“That’s the place I told you about,” Moffatt said.

“Felix won’t let you take him away from his sister,” Amsden said.

MOFFATT ESCORTED ME BACK THROUGH THE
corridors to the lobby. “You threatened him,” he said, “but I’ll be damned if I know how you did it.”

“I suggest that you get one of your maintenance people to do a routine check on basement window security,” I told Moffatt. “I think Ralph has been offering his Lincoln bedroom to guests.”

AS I WALKED TO MY CAR, I EXPECTED TO
run into Danny Kirkland. “Conditioned response,” I muttered.

His office was his apartment on Beacon Street. Perhaps it was time to hear his theory.

The brownstone, an impossible homer from Fenway Park, was ten blocks east of my old office. There were six apartments, Kirkland lived on the top floor, and the street door required no key. The drawback was the walk up three flights.

I pounded on his door. It did not open, but the door behind me did.

“You looking for Danny?” a young woman asked.

“I thought I might catch him in.”

She shook her head. “I think he’s dead. Someone should call the cops.”

“Why do you think he’s dead?”

“I heard a gunshot. I don’t have a phone or I would’ve called. I was afraid to open the door. Everybody else in the building works days. I work nights. There was the bang, then I heard the door click shut and the guy go down the stairs. I knew you weren’t him coming back. He’s much bigger.”

I wedged my knife between the hollow door and the jamb, then nudged the door with my foot. It swung open.

“Are you a cop?” she asked.

“I work with the police. Is there a public phone nearby?”

“On the corner.”

I handed her Bolton’s card. “Please call him. Tell him to get over here.”

She took the card, vanished into her apartment, reappeared in a parka, and ran down the stairs.

I stepped into Kirkland’s kitchenette. He had piled dishes in the sink, Kmart’s blue light specials encrusted with tomato sauce and bits of what might have been ground beef. Empty Ragu jars littered the counter.

I moved to the right, into the dining-living area. A sofa bed was open, its stained gray sheets emitting a lethal smell. I avoided a coffee table strewn with empty beer cans and overfilled ashtrays. Kirkland lay on the floor between the table and bed, his nose and jaw broken, one eye closed, one oddly open. A single, large-caliber shot to the head had ended his pain.

I retreated around the table and gazed into the room Kirkland used for an office. The space was a blizzard of discarded files, computer disks, notebooks, and photographs.

Ray Bolton appeared in the doorway.

“J-Cubed was right about your aftershave,” I said. “It precedes you.”

“Saves the trouble of waiting to be announced.”

“Looks like someone else had an interest in Kirkland’s theories,” I said.

“Think they got what they came after?”

“If he had it, he would have given it up when he saw the gun.”

“This could have nothing to do with Zrbny,” Bolton said. “Kirkland wasn’t Mr. Popular.”

“This shit looks like Pouldice’s study,” I said. “Braverman caught the big one with his head; so did Danny. You know how I feel about coincidence.”

THE SMALL FIRE BURNED STEADILY.

Two friends had joined Levana since my last visit. One, like my sister, was a disarrayed pile of bones. The second accounted for the lingering odor of decomposition. She had been in the dungeons for only a few months.

My hands and fingers had warmed and I could flex them. I removed the matches from the plastic bag, neatly folded the scraps of Levant’s clothing that remained, and placed them in the bag. I lifted her skull from the bone pile and rested it on the soft clothes. Then I resealed the bag.

When I was twelve and walked through the tunnels in search of my sister, I found her dead, her body punctured fifty-one times. I touched each wound as I counted, wishing that I could force the blood back into her body. I stayed with her that night, and told my father that I had wandered through Ravenwood searching for Levana. I kissed her forehead, held her hand, and wept for the last time in my life.

I waited two years to hear her voice, to hear my
lady of sorrow. Levana was the keeper of all tears and sighs, and all darkness inhered in her.

I picked up my plastic bag and moved through the narrow hall to the main corridor and back to the great room. It was there that I heard the thrum of a helicopter and felt its steady pounding overhead.

I entered the north tunnel and walked fifty yards to the circular iron stairway that led to the top of the lookout tower. I climbed slowly, testing the strength of the support pins driven into the stone wall a hundred years earlier. The rhythmic throb grew louder as I neared the observation area, and became deafening when I stepped out against the retaining wall. A police helicopter hovered at eye level, churning ice crystals and frigid air against my face, illuminating the field below with its halogen spotlights.

Heavily armed and armored tactical officers jogged across the field on compact aluminum snow-shoes. They were prepared. The terrain would not swallow them, but the dungeons would.

I descended the stairs, wound my way back to the great room, and climbed down the ladder into the cistern. Above me, boots clattered on the concrete, lights arced and flashed briefly. I waited until I heard an officer’s startled shout followed by radio chatter.

I wound the top of the plastic bag around my hand and crawled through the conduit, dimly aware of the continuing noise behind me. Eventually all sound faded except the distant helicopter blades whipping the air.

I SHOWERED, THEN LINGERED OVER A LONG
breakfast in the hotel restaurant. One local paper had caught up with
ZRBNY: FOUR DEAD IN JAMAICA PLAIN BAR.
Another paper reported the
SLAUGHTER ON HUNTINGTON AVENUE.
Riddle’s was not on Huntington, nor was it remotely near a Tenth Avenue, and even if Richard Rodgers were alive I doubted he would do the score. Danny Kirkland made page two. There was no mention of the head in the hall outside my door.

“BTT is still covering the bloodbath in Boston,” Bolton said as he joined me.

He had grabbed a
New York Times
on his way in.

“Same as the
Globe,”
I muttered.

“What?”

“The
Times
owns the
Globe.”

“No way.”

I shrugged.

“Lucas,
The New York Times
does not own
The Boston Globe.”

“That fact seems to come as a shock to most people,” I said. “I thought I’d have to get Lane adult diapers when I told her. What time is it?”

“When are you gonna get a watch?”

“Never wore one in my life. Lane keeps giving them to me, and I keep shoving them in drawers. I refuse to be a slave to time.”

“Then why are you asking me?”

“Never mind,” I said, flipping open Hearst’s Boston effort.

“Seven-fifteen.”

“Plenty of time.”

Bolton ordered ham and eggs. “Two officers injured last night,” he announced. “Like you said, no Zrbny.”

“I want my half hour with him,” I said.

“Lucas …”

“I’m the bait. It’s my call.”

“Suppose he walks in there and blows off your head.”

“He won’t,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt.

Bolton described how he would deploy his officers around the Public Garden. “The chopper will be to the east,” he said, “at a thousand feet above the Park Street Underground. There will be a marksman on a roof behind you, and another on Boylston Street.”

“Did Pouldice survive the night?”

“She left a message. Says she’s coming in this afternoon, that she had nothing to do with Braverman. She heard shots and ran.”

“I have to be in the Public Garden at eleven,” I said, pushing aside the newspaper.

“You trust Zrbny, don’t you?”

“More than I trust
The New York Times.
Their management doesn’t like Noam Chomsky. I do.”

“When I’ve had my coffee, I’ll ask who he is,” he said. “I know there’s no point trying to talk you out of—”

“None,” I said.

“I was going to suggest that I—”

“No.”

“—walk in with you.”

I grabbed the newspaper and read
Dilbert.

“You get like this when you’re nervous,” he said.

I looked up from the comics. “Astute,” I said. “I’d be a damn fool to not be nervous.”

“Why do you keep doing stuff like this? Let me do my job.”

I slapped down the comics. “When Zrbny reenters the system, the behavioral entrepreneurs with their questionnaires will be the only people who get to talk to him. Then there will be a spate of books, and a herd of former FBI something-or-others will hit the talk show circuit. They won’t know shit about Felix Zrbny, but they’ll toss labels like rice at a wedding, coin clever descriptive phrases, and borrow money against their royalty
checks. You will be as locked out as everyone else while the public is led to believe crap that is more the product of a theorist’s ego than it is of Zrbny’s psyche.” I leaned across the table. “Ray, haven’t we had this discussion before?”

“Twenty-five years ago,” he said with a wry smile. “In your kitchen.”

WHILE BLITHELY WALTZING THROUGH MY
conversation with Bolton, I had managed to distance any sense of the reality of what my morning entailed. But as I emerged from the subway at the corner of Arlington and Boylston Streets, that reality hit me like an eighteen-wheeler.

I walked to meet a killer, alone, on a park bench in the Boston Public Garden. No swan boats; no cops for a half hour. Before panic got its foothold, I told myself that if Felix Zrbny wanted me dead, I would be dead. He had held a gun on me twice, and one of those times for nearly three hours.

Whenever I think about dying, I am comforted by the notion that there is nothing beyond life. I don’t want to deal with clouds and harps and angels, or demons and fires and pitchforks. I much prefer to simply hop on the Oblivion Express and have done with it.

Also, despite Zrbny’s gift of Fremont’s head, I did not think he had summoned me to practice his precision anatomical work.

Perhaps Zrbny could not help himself. Maybe he knew that, and maybe there were enough circuits still clicking upstairs for him to realize that he had arrived at the end of the line. He had created a stir that would remain in the media for weeks, certain to be followed by a televised trial on BTT.

The city slowly returned to life. Trucks spewed diesel fumes. Automobile traffic strained more than usual to stop at lights. Cars slid into intersections, creating more than the customary din of bumper crunches.