John Philpin - The Murder Channel

I LOOKED INTO FELIX ZRBNYS EYES.
THEY HELD NO LIFE.

He hurled the young TV producer like a rag doll

He held a nine-millimeter handgun aimed at my face

Then, abruptly he moved past me to the elevator

I stepped into the studio

A camera technician lay unconscious against the wall

Behind the news desk, the news anchor, his head twisted at an impossible angle, had become BTTs latest bulletin

Felix Zrbny had broken his neck.

Books by John Philpin

FICTION
T HE P RETTIEST F EATHERS (with Patricia Sierra)
T UNNEL OF N IGHT (with Patricia Sierra)
D REAMS IN THE K EY OF B LUE
T HE M URDER C HANNEL

NONFICTION
B EYOND M URDER (with John Donnelly)
S TALEMATE

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Christian Peet
for permission to reprint his poem True Crimes,
copyright 1997 by Christian Peet.

For M-dot-Jane, Steve the Bruce,
and Mouse the Cat

I want a term expressing the mighty
abstractions that incarnate themselves in all
individual sufferings of mans heart,
and I wish to have these abstractions presented
as impersonations,that is, as clothed with
human attributes of life, and with functions
pointing to flesh. Let us call them, therefore,
Our Ladies of Sorrow.

Thomas De Quincey, from
Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow

Good morning. Im Lily Nelson, and this is Boston Trial Television Headline News. Our two lead stories this morning are the weather, as Boston braces for what old-timers call a noreaster, and the court hearing for mass murderer Felix Zrbny. The big storm moving slowly up the coast has meteorologists reminiscing about the blizzard of seventy-eight. The judge in the Zrbny case has cloistered the proceeding. There will be no media coverage inside the courtroom, but we will be going live to the courthouse steps where, I am told, it is already snowing.

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 Bostons 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 usMax, me, and our wintering friends, the birdsthree 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 Boltonmy oldest friend, my daughter Lanes godfather, and the Boston police detective who had handed me my first homicide case twenty-five years earlierwho persuaded me to board the plane to Boston. He sent a fax asking me to attend a court hearing. The district attorneys 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 airports 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 didnt see any famous faces on the plane, I told Bolton as we shook hands.

There was a leak, he said. Were going out through a downstairs corridor. A couple of airport cops will escort us.

Whats the big deal?

No legal proceeding in years has received the media attention this ones getting. They cant get into the courtroom, so theyre 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 doesnt talk much anymore. Occasionally shell do an exclusive interview, but she owns Boston Trial Television. Theyre 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.