by John Philpin
“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.”
… outside Felix Zrbny’s former home in Ravenwood. Two men who have a significant interest in this case are inside. Neville Waycross, the former police detective whose wife was one of Zrbny’s victims, has joined Lucas Frank, the former Boston psychiatrist summoned by the Commonwealth in their aborted attempt …
“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.
“It’s down cellar,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
She led me down the stairs to a concrete room illuminated by a single, buzzing fluorescent tube. “My husband took care of these things,” she said, guiding me past the furnace to a wall of pipes and circuit breakers and faucets and wood-carving tools.
“He left,” she said simply.
I stared at the oddly shaped blades, each with a red-stained, numbered handle. “Those were his,” she said, following my gaze. “Here’s the tap.”
There are many different kinds of cutting, I thought, and so many different objects to cut.
I turned the red handle and heard the surge of water through the pipes.
“Now get out,” Mrs. Dayle said.
As I ate breakfast that morning, I watched her pin towels in place.
Then I walked to my bedroom, yanked on the previous day’s jeans, and stared at my Escher print—the oblivious wandering people who resembled zombies—thumbtacked on the wall beside my bed.
“We turn here,” Sable said, pointing at the sign for the Riverway. “Did you forget?”
“I was thinking about something.”
“Will you tell me about your voices?” she asked as we turned the corner.
That morning years ago, I returned to the kitchen window just as Mrs. Dayle picked up her empty laundry basket, held her sore back, and walked slowly to her basement door.
In the next yard, beyond a fence, Shannon Waycross sunned herself. She and her husband were new in Ravenwood that summer. They had not signed up for the Informer. Her skin was already tanned, but she coated herself with lotion, taking great care with her stomach and upper breasts, then reclined behind her sunglasses. I knew little about her, except that she was beautiful, dark, mysterious, and alone.
“I call her my lady of sorrow,” I said now.
Sable shuffled through the deep snow. “Why do you call her that?” she asked.
“I read it somewhere when I was in school. There is a lady of tears, one of sighs, one of darkness. They are ladies of sorrow. I liked the passage because it contained my sister’s name, Levana.”
“That’s a pretty name. What does it mean?”
“My parents liked the sound of it. I don’t think it means anything.”
“What do your ladies of sorrow talk about?”
“There’s only one, but she has different sounds.”
That summer day, I heard the steady beat of a drum, an intermittent whistle or pipe, the buzz of insects, and songbirds fluting in the distance. I listened to drops of moisture collect on the refrigerator’s fruit crisper, then follow the condensation down the plastic panel. When the trickles merged, collided to create a torrent, I heard the roar of angry water that swept away everything in its path.
“What does she say?” Sable asked.
That day when I looked up, the sun had moved across the top of the sky. We had a scrawny maple tree that cast a slight shadow in the backyard, not enough to call shade.
“A woman lay on her stomach, her top untied, her head tucked into her folded arms. My lady of sorrow said, ‘Today.’ Then it echoed inside. ‘Today.’”
I knew what to do.
“She said only one word?”
Sable’s voice conveyed her disappointment.
“The rest was from dreams. She hasn’t spoken in years. I am waiting to hear from her.”
We turned onto the walk for her building, stamped the snow from our feet, and stepped down to the apartment. I returned to the window seat and watched the fish. Sable sat on the floor, her coat still tight around her.
“What happened to the woman?” she asked.
“What woman?”
“The one who was sunning herself.”
“She died.”
Sable was silent. She examined the backs of her hands, gazed at the fish tank, the ceiling, the door. Finally she looked at me.
“Were you sad?”
“About what?”
“When that lady died.”
I stared at a small, iridescent gray fish, darting first to the bottom of the tank, then to the top.
“I don’t remember,” I said, thinking that I never had been able to focus on the moment when Shannon Waycross stopped breathing.
I JOINED BOLTON AT THE INTERROGATION room’s observation area. Inside, a slightly built, wiry man sat with his shaved head back, his eyes closed, his hands clasped across his stomach.
“John Jay Johnson,” Bolton said. “Also known as J-Cubed. His real name is Dermott Fremont. He’s Vigil’s head honcho. The crew hangs out at Riddle’s Bar in Jamaica Plain. Fremont runs Vigil from there, over his draft Guinness.”
“He doesn’t seem terribly upset to be here,” I said.
“Fremont plays the game well. Twenty years ago, Charlotte, North Carolina, popped him twice for statutory rape but couldn’t make either charge stick. We’ve had him in for assault, aggravated assault, impersonating a police officer. Six months in a county house of corrections is all the time he’s done.”
“Can’t expect him to stay off the street longer than that,” I said. “He has to make the world safe for anarchy. You headed in there?”
“I’ll go through the motions with him.”
“Where does Wendy Pouldice hang out these days?”
&nb
sp; “You’ll get less from her than I’ll get from Fremont.”
“Perhaps I can exude charm. That won’t work for you.”
Bolton smiled. “She bought the Towers, a complex at the end of Huntington Avenue off the Riverway. She lives on the top floor. BTT occupies the bottom three floors. She’ll be in her office now.”
“Waycross thinks that Zrbny called her the day of the murders.”
“You’ll never get it out of her,” he said.
“Anything more on the shooter?”
“We’ve identified him—Albie Wilson. He’s a small-timer from Chelsea. Witnesses on the front steps tell us a car and driver waited for Wilson. When the shotguns fired, the driver split. There may have been a second car in the alley next to the courthouse. We don’t have confirmation on that.”
I watched as Bolton entered the interrogation room.
Fremont’s eyes were still closed when he said, “Detective Bolton, when are you going to find another aftershave lotion?”
“You tell me about the courthouse this morning,” Bolton said. “I’ll buy another fragrance just for you.”
Bolton pulled out a chair and sat.
Fremont remained motionless. “You know I don’t like court.”
“That’s precisely why I invited you here. The shooter was a friend of yours, Albie Wilson.”
“Never heard of him. Lots of people wear the tattoo who don’t have any connection with us.”
“How did you know he had a tattoo?”
Fremont opened his eyes, smiled, and sat forward in the chair. “I saw it on TV.”
Dermott Fremont was cocky street scum, an urban guerrilla who had traded his pipe bombs for Mac-10s when he moved north.
I turned and walked from the observation area.
WENDY POULDICE WAS WORKING THE CRIME beat for a South Shore newspaper when Antone Costa carved his way across Cape Cod. I had no involvement in the case, but Wendy called me before Costa was named as a suspect in a double murder. Two young women had vanished from a Provincetown boardinghouse where they were vacationing. Police had found their mutilated remains in an isolated area where Costa buried his drug stash.
