The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

“Red and white, I think.”

  “Excellent. And some Baby’s Breath to set them off, I would imagine.”

  “They look lovely.”

  “Thank you.”

  Detective Barren paid and the woman handed her the box. “I get a little crazy,” said the woman.

  “I beg your pardon?” replied the detective.

  “You see, I end up spending most of the day talking to the flowers and plants. Sometimes I forget how to talk with people. I’m sure your, uh, friend will enjoy those.”

  “My lover,” said the detective.

  She clutched the flower box under her arm and tried to remember how many years had passed since she’d been to John Barren’s grave.

  The early September air had not even the slightest intimation of fall. Instead it hung heavy with residual summer heat, liar’s blue sky broken with a few huge white clouds; a day for lazing about in August memories, ignoring the January inevitability of the Delaware Valley, with its snow, cold wind off the river, ice, and frequent visitations of what the natives called slush storms, an unfortunate mingling of ice, sleet, snow, and rain together in an impenetrable, chilling, slippery impossibility. One of those storms, thought Detective Barren with a small smile. She had been caught outside, battery dead, boots soaked. When she finally returned to her home, empty, cold, alone, she had vowed to start over somewhere warm. Miami.

  She placed the flowers on the passenger seat of the rental car and drove out of Lambertville, across the bridge over the river to New Hope. The town, filled with the quaint, the precious, and the upscale, stretched out on either side of the river; in a few moments she had left it behind, traveling slowly through the warm afternoon, down a shaded road, toward the cemetery. She wondered for a moment why the family had ever moved closer to Philadelphia when it was so pretty in the country. She had a sudden picture of her father, learning of his appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, swinging her mother like some buckaroo at a square dance. He had taught mathematical theory and quantum mechanics; his intelligence daunting, his worldliness absent. She smiled. He would not have understood for an instant why she was a policewoman. He would have admired some of the deductive reasoning, some of the investigative tactics, some of the apparent precision of police work, but he would have been confused and dismayed by the truths of the profession and the ever-present rubbing up against evil. He certainly would not have understood why his daughter loved it so, though he would have admired the basic simplicity of her devotion: that it was the easiest way to achieve some good in a world filled with—in her mind she hesitated, as she had so often over the past few days—filled with creeps who kill eighteen-year-old girls suffused with life and promise and future and goodness. Detective Barren drove on, the warm memory of her father sliding away in the shadows, replaced by a sketchpad in her mind, and her imagination trying to draw in the features of a killer. She almost missed the entrance to the cemetery.

  Someone had placed a small American flag on John Barren’s grave, and for a moment she wasn’t sure that she wanted it there. Then she relented, thinking, If this gives the local VFW some satisfaction, who am I to refuse it? That was what gravesites and memorials are for, she thought, the living. She could not look at the headstone and the parched grass that covered the plot and envision John below in a coffin. She caught her breath suddenly at a memory:

  Remains nonviewable.

  The coffin had a tag on one handle. It was probably supposed to be removed before she saw it, but she had seen.

  In her unruly grief she had puzzled at the tag.

  Remains nonviewable.

  She had thought first, strangely, that it meant that John was naked, and that the Army, in a silly, foolish, masculine way, was trying to protect everyone from embarrassment. She had wanted to say to the men surrounding the coffin, Don’t be so stupid. Of course we saw each other naked. We delighted in those moments. We were lovers in high school, in college, on the night he was drafted and in the hours before he took the bus to basic training, and constantly in the two short weeks of leave before he went overseas. In the summer, down at the Jersey Shore, we would sneak out after our parents had gone to bed and meet in the moonlight and roll naked in the sand dunes.

  Remains nonviewable.

  She’d considered those two strange words. Remains—well, that was John. Nonviewable—well, that meant she couldn’t see him. She wondered why. What had they done to him? She tried to ask, but discovered that a young dead man’s bride didn’t get straight answers. She’d been hugged instead and told that it was all for the better, and told that it was God’s Will and war was hell and any number of things that, to her mind, didn’t seem to have a great deal of relevance to the issue. She had begun to grow impatient and increasingly distraught, which only made the mili­tary men and family men all the more frustrating in their denial. Finally, as her voice had started to rise and her demands grew more strident, she’d felt a hand clamp her arm tightly. It had been the funeral director; a man she’d never seen before. He’d looked at her intensely, then, to the surprise of her family, led her into a side office. He had sat her down, businesslike, in a chair across from his desk. For a moment he’d shuffled papers, while she sat, waiting. Finally he discovered what he was searching for. “They didn’t tell you, did they?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. She hadn’t known what he was talking about.

  “They just told you he was dead, right?”

  That was true. She nodded her head.

  “Well,” he said brusquely, then suddenly slowing, “you sure you want to know?”

  Know what? she wondered, but she nodded again.

  “All right,” he said. Sadness crawled into his voice. “Corporal Barren was killed while on routine patrol in the Quang Tri province. The man next to him stepped on a land mine. A big one. It killed your husband and two others.”

  “But why can’t I . . .”

  “Because there wasn’t enough of him left to look at.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence filled the room. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Kennedy would’ve got us out,” the funeral director said. “But we had to kill him. I think he was our only shot. My boy’s there now. God, I’m scared. It seems like I bury another boy each week. I’m so sorry for you.”

  “You must love your boy,” she said.

  “Yes. A great deal.”

  “He wasn’t clumsy, you know.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “John. He was graceful. He was a beautiful athlete. He scored touchdowns and he made baskets and home runs. He would never have stepped on a mine.”

  She thought of the old children’s rhyme: Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a mine, break my heart for all time.

  Remains nonviewable.

  “Hello, lover,” she said. She took the flowers out of the box.

  Detective Barren sat on the gravesite, with her back against the headstone, obscuring her husband’s name and the dates of his life. Her eyes were lifted toward the sky; she watched the clouds meander across the great blue expanse with what she thought was an admirable purposelessness. She played the children’s game of trying to guess what each cloud’s shape was like; she thought of elephants and whales and rhinoceroses. She thought that Susan would have seen only fish and aquatic mammals. She allowed herself a pleasurable fantasy, that there was a heaven up beyond the clouds and that John was waiting there for Susan. The idea comforted her some, but she felt tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She wiped them away swiftly. She was alone in the cemetery. She thought that she was fortunate, that her behavior was decidedly ungrave. She felt a small wind that cut an edge off the heat, rustling in the trees. She laughed, not in humor but in sadness, and spoke out loud:

  “Oh, Johnny. I’m almost forty and you’ve been dead eighteen years, a
nd I still miss the hell out of you.

  “I guess it was Susan, you see. You were dead and she got born and she was so tiny and helpless and sick. Boy. Colic and then respiratory problems and God knows what else. It just overwhelmed Annie, you see. And Ben, well, his business was just starting and he worked all the time. And so I just got caught up in it. Sitting up all night so that Annie could get a few hours’ sleep. Rocking her. Walking her. Back and forth, back and forth. All those little baby tears, you see, all the pain and hurt she was feeling, well, I was feeling too. It was as if the two of us could cry together and feel a little better and I think if it hadn’t been for her, I don’t think I would have made it. You big creep! You had no right to get yourself killed!”

  She stopped.

  She remembered a night, crammed together in a small bed in his dormitory room when he told her that he had refused to submit his request for a student deferment from the draft. It wasn’t fair, he’d said. All the farm boys and ghetto kids were getting slaughtered while the lawyers’ sons went to Ivy League schools in safety. The system was unfair and inequitable and evil and he wouldn’t participate in the evil. If he got drafted, so be it. If he passed his physical, so be it. Don’t worry, he’d said. The Army won’t want me. Troublemaker. Anarchist. Rabble-rouser. I’d make a lousy soldier. They’d yell charge and I’d ask where and why, and how come, and why not over there and let’s take a vote. They had laughed at the improbable picture of John Barren leading a group discussion on whether to charge the enemy or not, arguing pros and cons. But her laughter hid a great misshapen fear, and when the letter that began with greetings from the president arrived, she’d insisted they get married, thinking only that she had to have his name, that it was important.

  “Susan got better,” Detective Barren said. “It seemed to take forever, but she got better. And suddenly she was a little girl and Annie was a little older and less scared of everything and Ben’s job wasn’t so hard and I guess it was okay, then, just to become Auntie Merce because she was going to live, and I guess I knew I was too.”

  Detective Barren suddenly choked on her thoughts.

  “Oh, God, Johnny, and now someone’s gone and killed her! My baby. She was so much like you. You’d have loved her, too. She was like the baby we’d have had. Doesn’t that sound trite? Don’t laugh at me for being a sentimentalist. I know you, you were worse than me. You were the one that always cried in movies. Remember Tunes of Glory? At the Alec Guinness festival? First we saw The Ladykillers and you insisted we stay for the second feature. Remember? After John Mills had shot himself and Guinness goes a little crazy and begins to do a slow death march in front of the other men of the mess? The bagpipes were faint and you were sitting there in the theater with tears just streaming down your face, so don’t call me the emotional one. And in high school, remember, when Tommy O’Connor couldn’t shoot against St. Brendan’s and he threw you the ball and you went straight up, the whole place screaming or holding their breath, championship on the line, thirty feet from the basket? Nothing but net, you said, but every time I brought that up, you started crying, you old schmooze. You won and it made you cry. I guess Susan would have cried, too. She cried over sick whales that beached themselves and seals that didn’t have the sense to flee from hunters and seabirds covered with oil. Those are the things you would have cried over, too.”

  Detective Barren took a deep breath.

  I’m crazy, she thought.

  Talking to a dead husband about a dead niece.

  But they’ve killed my love, she said to herself.

  All of it.

  Detective Barren showed her badge to a uniformed officer sitting at a desk, monitoring all the visitors to the Dade County Sheriff’s Office. She took the elevator to the third floor and followed her memory to the homicide division. There was a secretary there who made her wait on an uncomfortable plastic couch. She looked about her, noting the same blend of old and new office equipment. There was something about police work, she thought. Even when things are new, they lose their shine almost instantly. She wondered if there was some connection between the grime of the job and the never-clean atmosphere of police offices. Her eyes strayed to three pictures on the wall: the President, the Sheriff, and a third man she didn’t recognize. She stood and approached the unfamiliar picture. There was a small plaque beneath the portrait of a smiling, slightly overweight man with an American flag in the lapel on his jacket. The plaque was tarnished bronze. It had the man’s name and the inscription Killed in the Line of Duty and a date two years earlier.

  She remembered the case; he had been making a routine arrest, following a domestic that had been a homicide. A drunken father and son in Little Havana. A subject murder, the easiest of homicides: the father was standing over the body, sobbing, when the police arrived. He was so distraught that the uniforms simply sat him in a chair, without handcuffs. No one had suspected that he would explode when they tried to take him out, that he would seize a gun from a policeman’s holster and turn it on them. Detective Barren remembered the funeral, thinking of the full-dress uniforms, folded flag, and rifle salute, so much like the one she had known earlier. But what a silly way to die, she thought. Then, thinking again, she wondered what was a useful way to die. She turned away swiftly when Detective Perry entered the room.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “Let’s go to my office.”

  She followed him down a corridor.

  “Cubicle, really. Work space. We don’t really get a real office with doors anymore. This is progress, I guess.”

  She smiled and he motioned her toward a chair.

  “So?” he asked.

  “That’s my question,” she replied.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s something.” He tossed a sheet of paper across his desk to her. She took it and stared at a composite picture of a curly-haired, dark-complexioned man, not bad-looking except for a pair of deeply recessed eyes that gave him a slightly cadaverous look. But not enough so to throw one off, she thought.

  “Is this . . .”

  “Best we can do,” he interrupted. “It’s been distributed all over the city and all the campuses. It was on the television stations while you were at the funeral.”

  “Response?”

  “The usual. Everybody thinks it looks exactly like their landlord, or the neighbor who happens to owe them money, or the guy that’s dating their daughter. But we’re checking them out slowly. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, each of the killings has some distinctive features, but when you get everything settled they are pretty much the same. The girls have all been picked up at a mixer or a bar or a student union or a campus movie. Picked up isn’t right. Followed out is more likely. No one has seen the guy actually snatch his victim . . .”

  “But . . .”

  “Well, no buts. We’re interviewing people. We’re doing background checks on all sorts of people—gardeners, students, ­hangers-on—trying to find some guy who has experience on all the campuses and is young and with-it enough to blend in.”

  “That could take a while.”

  “We’ve got a dozen guys working on it.”

  Detective Barren thought for an instant. She wasn’t exactly getting the runaround, but nor was she getting the entire picture. And she perceived a sense of confidence in Detective Perry that didn’t blend with a portrait of legwork, long hours, and frustration. She had the sensation of being humored. She also knew that she had to come up with the right question to open the right door. She thought for a moment. Then it struck her.

  “What about assaults?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Detective Perry said.

  “So what you’ve been saying is that you’ve got a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but no makeable case out of the homicides. What about an assault? If this guy has been at
this for, how long? A year or more, I’d guess, then he has to have had a few near-misses. Screwed up. Been surprised by another student when he tried to snatch a victim. Something like that, huh? You tell me.”

  “Well,” Perry replied, drawing the word out. “That’s an interesting idea . . .”

  “Which I’m not the only person to think of.”

  “Well . . .” He hesitated.

  “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then answer.”

  He looked uncomfortable. He shuffled some papers. He looked around for help. “I wasn’t supposed to be that candid,” he admitted.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Can you back off? I mean . . .”

  “Forget it,” Detective Barren said. “I want to know.”

  “Okay, but I’m not gonna get too specific.”

  She nodded.

  “Twice.”

  She nodded again.

  “Twice the creep screwed up. Last time was the night before your niece got it. We got a partial license plate and a make.”

  “Have you got a name?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  Detective Barren stood up.

  “I’ll go to your boss. I’ll go to mine. I’ll go to the papers . . .”

  He motioned her to sit back down.

  “We got a name. And he’s got a tail. And when we got enough for a warrant, we’ll let you know.”

  “You sure?”

  “Nothing’s certain. Look, the papers have been all over this thing and a lot of details have been in the press. So we’re moving slowly, we want to make certain that we make this guy on a murder-one charge, not attempted assault. Hell, we want to make him on all five. That’s taking some time.”

  “Do it right,” she said.

  Detective Perry smiled, relieved.

  “That’s what I figured you’d say.”

  She looked at him.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s what I hoped you’d say.” He stood up. “I want this creep to understand boxes. The first box is the one I’m putting together for him. Everywhere he turns, I’m gonna have an answer. No way he can crawl out. The second box is gonna be a nine-by-eleven on the Raiford Riviera . . .”