Free The Murder Channel by John Philpin Page A

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.
    I told Pouldice to send me the information she had, asked Bolton a few key questions, and allowed the facts to percolate.
    “How do you do this?” Pouldice had asked.
    No reporter asked me that question. They wanted a profile, long before that term was in vogue, and they did not care how they got it, provided its author had sufficient letters following her or his name and spoke in quotable quotes. Writers asked for
the
profile, as if there were only one to describe the vagaries of the human predator. When I explained that there were as many profiles as there were killers, and that no description was carved in stone but evolved as I acquired new information, they grew impatient. They had been sold the illusion of simplicity, and they didn’t want me mucking up their ten column-inches.
    Pouldice had no way of knowing that her question was the essential one, and the most difficult to answer if a profile was to have credibility. How did I arrive at my conclusions? What was the process?
    “I digested the information you sent me,” I told her, “then consulted the
I Ching.”
    She laughed. “Cut the shit, Doc. How do you work your magic?”
    I liked her immediately. For three years before we met, we talked on the phone about cases. She was with a Boston paper when Tyrell Mann threw his .44 caliber nutty at the Columbia Point Housing Project and left nine dead.
    “Meet me at Jake’s,” she said when she called.“We’ll split the tab.”
    Pouldice had been at Vassar, then slid down the Mass Pike to Boston University’s journalismschool, one of the best in the country. She had paid her dues covering DWIs and spousal assault cases in places where they were not supposed to happen—Cohasset, Hingham, Norwell.
    “I’ll never marry,” she told me over dinner at Jacob Wirth’s. “I hate kids, and I couldn’t stand the same fuck night after night. That whole concept is alien to me.”
    When my wife Savvy and I separated, and she moved her veterinary practice to a village near Kinshasa in what was then Zaire, Wendy Pouldice was the anchor for a city news program. She called and asked me out.
    “No murder,” she said.