Read Online Infamy by Robert K. Tanenbaum - Free Book Online Page B

before pointing across to the wolf. “I like seeing the animals, but I think about them living their lives in cages, and it makes me sad,” she said. “I think they’re in pain, not because they’re being mistreated but because they don’t belong in captivity. A lot of them go crazy, especially the smart ones, or the ones who know what it was like to live in the wild. For them, only death can set them free from the suffering.” As she’d paused, the wolf stopped his pacing and looked at her. “It’s the only thing that will free me, too.”
    â€œDon’t say that,” he’d responded, though they both knew it was true.
    She’d reached up to touch his cheek and sighed. “It’s okay, Butch. I look forward to the day when I’m no longer in this pain. It’s destroying more than my body; it’s taking my mind, especially when I need morphine. I feel like I’m losing myself, and that’s no life . . .” She stopped what she was saying and shuddered as if in sudden agony.
    Karp had put his arm around her. “We shouldn’t have come,” he said bitterly. “This was too much.”
    â€œYou’re wrong,” she’d replied. “I’m so glad we had this time. When I’m gone, I want you to have a million memories of me. I’m still alive if I’m remembered by those who I love and who love me.”
    Karp’s father arrived with the glass of water. This time she didn’t resist when he insisted that they take a taxi all the way back to Brooklyn. In fact, she’d slept most of the way and gone straight to bed when they arrived.
    There were no more fun trips into the city, and she never made it to any more of his basketball games. Butch had to learn how to give her the pain- and mind-numbing shots of morphine by practicing on an orange, and he watched her deteriorate until at last she was freed by death.
    Looking back, Karp could trace his desire to be a prosecuting attorney to his mother’s battle against cancer. He’d come to see cancer as a type of evil, and he’d been powerless to stop it or protect his innocent mother. Crimes that people committed against other innocent people were another type of evil, but one he could do something about, and by putting evil people behind bars, he could protect the innocent.
    The Central Park Zoo, which was officially opened in 1934 when a haphazard menagerie on the grounds was designated, had changed a lot since the days when Karp visited with his family. By the 1960s, the buildings and pens had fallen into sad disrepair; neighbors of Central Park complained of the smells and visitors of the deplorable conditions the animals were kept in. Eventually, activists forced its closing and renovation, with thegates opening again in 1988 on a modern facility with habitats designed to recreate the natural environment the animals came from.
    That was the zoo his own children had known, the one whose empty pathways beneath the tall trees he was walking on now to where a killer held hostages. But when he pictured the zoo in his mind, it was always the old grounds, the wolf pen, and that last visit with his mother.
    Approaching the Bird House and grizzly bear habitat, Karp made his way to the SWAT team command center behind two armored trucks that had been parked as a barrier between those assembled and the gunman. A television camera crew was on the scene, and he recognized the young woman reporter from the shooting scene now smiling triumphantly in between “live” takes. Meanwhile, heavily armed Special Ops police officers were taking position on the sides of the building. He spotted Fulton, who’d been watching for him. The big detective waved him over to where he was listening to a police negotiator speaking to someone—he presumed the suspect—on a cell phone.
    â€œWhat do we have, Clay?” Karp asked.
    â€œI might have