The Murder Channel by John Philpin Page A

might say, ‘Levana would like this show,’ or, ‘Your mother would think this was racy.’ He used that word, ‘racy,’ whenever he saw a girl in a tight sweater or short skirt.”
    I paused, picturing my father in his chair
watching TV. “He didn’t delude himself that my sister and mother were alive. He had new relationships with them as dead people.”
    “I’m sorry,” Sable whispered.
    At night I heard him pray to his plastic Jesus and say good night to his girls. They were there in the house, their souls lingering in the air like the suffocating scent of pine that my father sprayed to mask the stench of meat fried in oil and garlic and onions. When he watched TV, sometimes he looked up, as if one of them drifted across the room and caressed his slick black hair.
    “God will tuck you in, Levana,” he said.
    And, “We will be together again, Magda.”
    I doubted that my mother was looking forward to that reunion.
    I looked at Sable, at her intense and caring eyes barely visible in the dim light. “I used to walk into the room and hear my father mumbling to his dead family,” I said. “I wanted to tell him that I was dead. I thought maybe he would talk to me then. He seldom spoke to me. I don’t think he saw me after my mother died. He gave me instructions. He asked about my day. The evening meal was a silent time, then he watched TV and talked with the dead. Sometimes for emphasis he said things twice. No one ever came back to life.”
    “What happened to your sister?”
    Levana walked twenty yards ahead of me on Ridge Road. A white car stopped beside her, and she
leaned down to the passenger window. I figured she was giving directions to the driver. Then someone yanked her from the sidewalk through the window, and the car screeched away.
    “I don’t know what happened to her,” I said. “She vanished.”
    “You were very close to her.”
    “Our mother was dead. Our father spent the time that he wasn’t at his shop, at church or in the cemetery. Levana and I promised to take care of each other.”
    “Then she went away, or what?”
    I looked at Sable’s wide dark eyes. They were like Levana’s round innocent eyes, always in awe, as if she were amazed by life.
    I returned my gaze to the blowing snow. “She went away,” I said.

RAY BOLTON SAT AT HIS DESK. NEVILLE Waycross leaned against the wall.
    “Pouldice give you the time of day?” Bolton asked.
    “Tonight,” I said, pushing aside some papers and sitting on the corner of his desk. “We have a date.”
    Bolton’s eyes widened.
    “Don’t worry. I’ll pick up some condoms. You get anything out of Fremont?”
    Bolton shook his head. “We had eight of his cronies in here. Nothing. Wilson’s driver dumped the car in a parking garage downtown. The technicians are lifting prints now. Wilson has a half-brother, Nicky Noonan. A patrol unit is bringing him in. Wilson and Noonan share more than a fraternal history.”
    “Any leads on Zrbny?”
    “Sure,” Bolton said, leaning back in his chair. “He was at the kiosk in Harvard Square before the deputies picked him up at the hospital this morning. He had lunch at Durgin Park, the Union Oyster House, and a cafeteria on Park Street.”
    “Big guy, big appetite,” I muttered.
    “But nobody ever really sees him,” Waycross said. “It’s what I was telling you earlier, Lucas.”
    “I know what Neville means,” Bolton said. “Fifteen years ago we interviewed kids at the school he attended. If they remembered him at all, it was as a name that took up space in the classroom. A couple of teachers said he was bright, but didn’t apply himself.”
    “He’s like a ghost,” Waycross continued. “Ray, what was it the kids said about him disappearing into the hillside?”
    Bolton sighed. “Just that. Kids would see him on the path through the woods. Then they wouldn’t. They thought he had a cave up there. Lucas, how much time do we have?”
    A parole board released Edmund Emil Kemper III