The Murder Channel

THAT JANUARY MORNING I SHOULD HAVE
been stretched on the sofa in front of my wood-stove, the most recent George V. Higgins novel in my left hand, a cup of steaming coffee on the table to my right, with Max the cat ensconced on the top of the sofa reading over my shoulder, and both of us listening to Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Instead, against my will and against my very nature, I sat squeezed into a seat on a Boeing 737 descending six miles through a killer snowstorm to land at Boston’s Logan Airport.

“I must be fucking nuts,” I muttered.

I stuffed Higgins into my duffel bag. As much as I enjoyed his depictions of Beantown, my home for fifty years, I could not concentrate. Thoughts of meeting the Big Guy in the Sky distracted me.

I hated being pried out of my retreat in Lake Albert, Michigan. It is miles from anywhere significant. In winter, those miles seem like light-years, which is exactly what I prefer.

The woodshed was full; I had stocked the house
with books from the village bookseller, CDs from the village music shop. There was enough food to last us—Max, me, and our wintering friends, the birds—three months if necessary (and a bit longer if Max devoured any of our guests).

My only concession to human contact was a promise to Buck Semple, our village police chief, that I would meet him for lunch once a month at the Lake Albert Diner. The food was deep fried and artery clogging. John Prine, Kinky Friedman, and Waylon Jennings took turns ricocheting off the aluminum and Formica surfaces. Locals crowded in at noon and added to the dull roar, exchanging stories about their ice-fishing exploits.

While others, Buck included, complained of cabin fever or the more fashionable “seasonal affective disorder,” I relished my solitude.

It was Ray Bolton—my oldest friend, my daughter Lane’s godfather, and the Boston police detective who had handed me my first homicide case twenty-five years earlier—who persuaded me to board the plane to Boston. He sent a fax asking me to attend a court hearing. The district attorney’s office would pay my fee and expenses, he wrote. All I had to do was observe and advise.

I fired back a fax: “Observe who?”

Bolton responded: “Felix Zrbny.”

The name meant nothing to me. I assumed that Zrbny was a bad actor, wondered briefly if I should
recognize the name, then made arrangements to head east.

Nine years earlier, I had closed my Beacon Street practice in forensic psychiatry, retired from the business of reconstructing murders and developing personality profiles from the traces of self that killers invariably leave at crime scenes, and had run for the woods. I had not been in Boston since, although my retirement ended abruptly after five years in hiding when Lane, a homicide detective with the New York City Police Department, dumped a case in my lap. I pissed and moaned about it, but quickly realized that I had not lost my taste for the chase.

Since then, I have been selective about the cases I work, refusing even to consider a dozen or more requests a year, but occasionally getting hooked when a particularly challenging series of homicides washes ashore at Lake Albert.

I have never refused a request from Ray Bolton, and he has always been there when I need a favor. He respected my privacy, and knew that when winter settled on Michigan, I made like a bear and lived off my fat. For him to drag me from my cave in January meant that he had serious concerns about the gentleman with the vowel-deficient last name.

As the plane descended in its final approach to Logan, I glanced out the window. I hoped that our
pilot had better visibility than the whiteout that greeted me. I stared down, expecting to catch a glimpse of black water or the airport’s infamous seawall. I saw neither. The plane touched down, skidded a few times, then made its turn to the terminal. I still could not see a damn thing.

My sensory deprivation ended when I stepped into the waiting area and surveyed the milling crowd. Those with destinations forged ahead. A small army of greeters craned necks in search of relatives and friends. Bolton stood to one side, a nattily attired, six-foot, gray-haired African-American. Behind Bolton a dozen uniformed cops restrained a surging gaggle of media representatives wielding minicams and microphones.

“I didn’t see any famous faces on the plane,” I told Bolton as we shook hands.

“There was a leak,” he said. “We’re going out through a downstairs corridor. A couple of airport cops will escort us.”

“What’s the big deal?”

“No legal proceeding in years has received the media attention this one’s getting. They can’t get into the courtroom, so they’re hanging everywhere else. Wendy Pouldice had a reporter banging on my door at ten last night.”

“The talking face-lift? I remember her well.”

“Pouldice doesn’t talk much anymore. Occasionally she’ll do an exclusive interview, but she owns Boston Trial Television. They’re a tabloid imitation
of Court TV. BTT is her baby. She also owns controlling interest in a couple of radio stations and a magazine. She knew you were arriving this morning.”

I scanned the crowd. “Ms. Pouldice didn’t join the horde to greet me.”

“See the big guy with muscles on his muscles?”

“Looks like Jesse Ventura.”

“Donald Braverman. He works for Pouldice.”

“Why didn’t she send him to bang on your door?”

“She knows better.”

“Mean-looking prick,” I muttered.

“He’s got a rap sheet. Did a year in Concord on a weapons charge.”

I watched Braverman head for the ramp that led out of the gate area. “Why don’t I remember Felix Zrbny?”

Before Bolton could respond, two airport police officers arrived and directed us to a stairwell, then led us through a corridor that ended in a maintenance area. We waited as one of the officers listened to the chatter on a handheld radio.

After several minutes, the cop pushed open a door. “To the left,” he said.

We stepped into the blowing snow and walked to a waiting unmarked cruiser. The driver wore a Massachusetts State Police uniform.

“All the agencies in on this one?” I asked as I slipped into the back seat.

“We’ve never had to deal with a situation like this,” Bolton said, sliding in beside the trooper. “Fifteen years ago Felix Zrbny went on a killing spree. He was a kid, fourteen years old. The laws were different then. The case remained in juvenile court. Zrbny ended up in a mental health facility. At age twenty-one he was eligible to apply for release. He never did. At age twenty-five, according to the original court order, the Commonwealth surrendered legal custody, but the case had fallen through the cracks and Zrbny never complained. That was four years ago. Now he wants out.”

“And nobody wants him out,” I said.

Bolton nodded. “Zrbny’s therapist will testify that his patient considers the last fifteen years an interruption and is a high risk to kill again. Zrbny also intends to become a celebrity. He’s the one who is keeping the media pot stirred.”

“He said all this?”

“To his shrink. Zrbny has talked with Wendy Pouldice, but we’ll never know what that was about.”

“If I remember right, the only way you can keep him locked up now is to prove that he represents an imminent threat to himself or others. The criteria are the same as those in a civil commitment procedure with the Commonwealth as complainant.”

“Our representative from the attorney general’s office is May Langston. She’s convinced that Zrbny
is a threat to kill again. She doesn’t think she can persuade the court of that. The judge is David Devaine.”

I turned my attention to the East Boston traffic speeding toward Sumner Tunnel, undeterred by the snow. Another half inch of the white stuff and they would pay for their haste.

I had testified in Judge Devaine’s courtroom in the 1970s. For Devaine, an unpleasant little man with a hooked nose, the disposition of a pit bull terrier, and a high appellate reversal rate, the legal forum was not the Commonwealth’s. It was his own personal turf.

On a summer morning twenty years earlier, I sat at the rear of the courtroom reading
The Boston Globe.
Devaine entered from a side door, scurried to his elevated seat, shuffled papers, then peered over his half glasses.

“Commonwealth v. Hastings,”
the prosecutor said.

“I know what case it is,” Devaine snapped, then pointed at me. “Is he going to testify?”