Warren Murphy: Fade to Black

One final blow to the head, and Walter Anderson collapsed in a bloody heap to the floor, never to move again. The front door slammed shut behind him, cutting off the view of the cracked flagstone walk, the repairs of which would now be left to the new, future owners of the Anderson house.

"GET THOSE DAMN CAMERAS out of here!" Lieutenant Frederick Jonston had yelled that three times already, growing angrier each time. No one seemed to want to listen tonight.

One of the uniforms disengaged from crowd control and headed over to the cluster of reporters. A few other officers followed his lead. Together, they corralled the members of the press back behind the yellow sawhorses.

It was a zoo. At first Jonston had wanted to string up whoever had alerted the media by their eyeballs, but the detective found out after arriving on the scene that the press had received a cryptic phone call from the hostage takers themselves. Just as the police had.

"They still not answering?" Jonston asked the sergeant on the radiophone in the car next to him. "Nothing, Lieutenant."

Leaning on the open door of the squad car, Jonston looked at the house. Upper middle class. Neatly tended grounds. Nice neighborhood. He frowned.

Lights from the roofs of a dozen cruisers and the dashboards of as many unmarked cars sliced through the postmidnight darkness.

This hostage drama had gone on for four hours. If Jonston had his way, it would not go on another four.

He turned to the sergeant. "How long's it been?"

"More than twenty minutes."

That was the last time they'd heard from the men holding the Anderson family.

One of the hostage takers' victims was already dead. They had let the son-maybe seventeen years old-get as far as the front door before shooting him in the back of the head. There had been a lot of screaming inside after that.

Crouching low, Kevlar-outfitted officers had dragged the boy behind police lines. But he was a lost cause. Jonston's concern right then was the rest of the family. As far as he knew, the other three-father, mother and daughter-were still alive inside. He intended to keep them that way.

"It's been too long," Jonston mused.

Cameras whirred all around. Some were network. The curse of being so close to Washington.

A few men were clustered around him. SWAT-team members, hostage negotiators and other detectives. The microphones were far enough away that they couldn't pick up his words.

"Let's do it," Jonston whispered gruffly. "Take them out if you have to. Whatever force is necessary to save the family. I don't want any more dead. Understood?"

There was not a single questioning word.

The assault began less than three minutes later. Tear-gas canisters were launched through front and side windows. A split second later, doors were kicked open simultaneously in kitchen, garage, basement and front hall.

Two men went in through the shattered livingroom picture window, rolling to alert crouches on the glass-covered floor.

Though their timed movements were textbook perfect, none of the efforts made by police were necessary.

The first men in the living room found the Anderson family. The father was piled in a corner, dead from an apparent beating to the head.

The mother and eight-year-old daughter were on the couch. Each had a clear plastic garbage bag over her head. The mother's had been tied with a bathrobe belt, the daughter's with a short extension cord. Warm mist from their last, desperate breaths clung to the interior of the bags. Their sightless eyes gazed in horror at the vacant air before them.

Across the room the television played; silently turned to a channel covering the hostage story. Although the power to the home had been cut, the TV was plugged into a black battery box. A retractable silver antenna wobbled in the smoky air.

The tear-gas haze cleared a few minutes later. Lieutenant Jonston was ushered into the living room. His face contorted in disgust at the sight of the dead family.

"Where are they?" he demanded, his voice a low growl.

In reply, a shout issued from the basement. "Down here!"

Dozens of boots and shoes clattered on the old wooden staircase as the men hurried downstairs. Several SWAT-team members were gathered before an area at the front of the cellar that had once been sectioned off for use as a coal chute in the old house. Jonston bulled his way through the men into the narrow alcove.

Stones and mortar that hadn't been disturbed in a hundred years were collapsed in a pile near the foundation wall. A black tunnel extended beyond. Jonston heard the radio squawk of officers within the depths of the burrow.

"Where does it go?" he demanded levelly.

"We don't know yet, Lieutenant," replied a heavily armored officer crouching before the opening. "It's pretty deep. Looks like they might have been tunneling it for days. Weeks, even. Must have just broken through tonight."

Jonston glanced up at a small window above him. It sat directly over the tunnel. The dirty panes faced the street, blocked by a thick evergreen. Blue squad car lights swept the window.

The killers had slipped out beneath his own feet. "I want them found now!" Jonston snapped. The escape tunnel led to the sewer system. Fanning out, the police discovered a cap had been loosened on a street near some woods three blocks away from the Anderson house. No one had seen any suspicious vehicles or men on foot. No one had seen a thing. The killers got away scot-free.

After the police were through combing the home, and relatives were finally allowed inside, it was learned that the only things missing were the Anderson daughter's Girl Scout beret and sash. The killer or killers had left both cash and jewelry.

In a further bizarre twist that capped the whole macabre affair, a small independent film entitled Suburban Decay was released three days later. In the film, a family with the surname Anderson was terrorized and finally murdered by a psychotic neighbor. The film's killer-an antihero who was eventually successful in his efforts to elude authorities-used a tunnel to escape.

Because of the real-life similarities, the movie was elevated above the art houses and film festivals where such films generally languished. It was bought by a major distributor and went on to make 14.8 million dollars, a box-office take almost 250 times the original cost of the film.

When it was suggested by a print reporter that the mild success of the movie was based solely on public fascination with the real-life Anderson case, a studio spokesman was quoted as saying, "We are saddened by the loss of the friends and family of the Andersons. It is a loss that we, too, feel. We cannot, however, let bizarre similarities to current events compromise the artistic integrity of this studio. Life goes on."

Reading this report from the comfort of his den, Lieutenant Frederick Jonston made only one bitter comment. "Yeah. It goes on for some."

Afterward, he wadded the newspaper and threw it in the trash bin next to his cluttered desk. He missed.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he had stopped trying to pretend he was interested in what his employer was saying five minutes before. He had stopped actually listening to what was being said four minutes and fifty-eight seconds earlier. What he had gleaned in those first two seconds before his eyes glazed over and his mind wandered had something to do with bombs or guns or some other things that went boom. At least he thought that's what it was about.

Remo didn't like bombs. They always took the fun out of everything. He thought about bombs for a little while. Ticking, exploding. Sometimes, when they went off they were very bright. Almost pretty. Like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Remo watched a bomb explode in his mind. He yawned. "Remo, are you paying attention?"