The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  “Did he ask for an attorney?” she wondered.

  “Not yet. So far, so good.”

  She thought of the typewritten note.

  “Is he straight?” she asked the voice while looking at the suspect for the first time. He was a short, wiry-muscled man, powerfully built, like a lightweight wrestler or boxer, with wavy black hair and bright blue eyes, a combination that was oddly unsettling to Detective Barren. He wore jeans and an orange tee-shirt that celebrated the University of Miami’s national football championship. To the detective, he seemed coiled; she watched the muscles on his arm flex. She thought how powerful that small arm was, and suddenly envisioned the short, chopping stroke of the hammer, an instant white flash of pain exploding into darkened nothingness.

  “He’s weird. Quoted the Koran a minute ago. Listen.”

  She concentrated on the three men in the interview room. Detective Moore was doing the questioning while Detective Perry sat, taking a few notes, but mostly fixing the suspect with an unwavering harsh glance, his eyes following each motion the suspect made, narrowing as the subject pontificated, equivocated, or evaded, narrowing evilly and threateningly as if angered to the point of violence by the lack of truth. Each time the detective shifted in his chair, the suspect moved uneasily. Detective Barren thought it a masterful performance.

  “Tell me why you bought the pantyhose.”

  “It was a present.”

  “For whom?”

  “Someone at home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Lebanon.”

  “What about the hammer?”

  “It was to fix my car.”

  “Where were you the night of September eighth?”

  “I was at home.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “I live alone.”

  “Why did you kill all those girls?”

  “I have killed nobody.”

  “So how come we found an earring belonging to a young lady named Lisa Williams at your house? And what about a pair of bloody pink panties just like the pair Andrea Thomas was wearing when some creep snatched her off the Miami-Dade campus? I suppose those were a present, too? And you’ve been a busy boy with the clippings, huh? Like to clip stories out of the newspaper, huh?”

  “Those are my things! My special things! You had no right to my things! I demand their return!”

  “Whoa, motherfucker. You ain’t demanding nothing.”

  “You are a devil.”

  “Yeah, maybe, ’cause then I’ll see your ass in hell.”

  “Never! I am a true believer.”

  “What? A believer in murder?”

  “There are unclean people in the world.”

  “Young women?”

  “Young women especially.”

  “Why are young women unclean?”

  “Hah! You know.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “No. You too are unclean. Infidel!”

  “Just me or all cops?”

  “Policemen, all policemen.”

  “You’d like to take a shot at me, huh?”

  “You are an infidel. The Book tells me that it is holy to kill an infidel. The Prophet says it is a passageway to heaven.”

  “Yeah, well, where you’re going, fella, ain’t much like heaven.”

  “It means nothing. It is only flesh.”

  “Tell me about the flesh.”

  “The flesh is evil. Purity comes from thoughts.”

  “What must you do with evil flesh?”

  “Destroy it.”

  “How many times did you do that?”

  “In my heart, many times.”

  “How about with your hands?”

  “This is between me and my master.”

  “Who is that?”

  “We have but one master who resides in the garden.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He speaks with me.”

  “Frequently?”

  “When he commands, I listen.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Educate yourself in the ways of the infidel. Learn her customs. Prepare for the holy war.”

  “When does the holy war begin?”

  The suspect laughed greatly, pitching back in his chair, opening his mouth wide, letting the snorts and whines of his voice flood the small room. Tears started to roll down his cheeks. He continued laughing for several minutes, uninterrupted by the detectives. Detective Barren listened to the sound and felt it rend her heart. Finally the suspect calmed, until only an occasional giggle slipped from his lips. He stared directly at Detective Perry, then spoke in an even, dreadful voice:

  “It has begun already.”

  Perry suddenly pushed himself out of his chair and smashed both of his fists down hard on the table separating him and the suspect. The sound was like a shot and Detective Barren saw the men in the room with her stiffen.

  “War on little girls, huh? Was fucking them part of the battle plan?”

  The suspect stared frozen at the detective.

  There was a silence.

  When he spoke it was deliberate, awful.

  “I know nothing about your unclean women.”

  He pointed a finger at the detective.

  “I will not speak more to you.”

  The finger suddenly slapped down on a piece of paper in front of the suspect. Detective Barren knew it was a constitutional rights form. The suspect started to drum his fingers on the page.

  “I do not have to speak to you . . .”

  The finger drumming sounded like small-caliber pistol fire.

  “I would like an attorney present . . .”

  The rapping sound increased in intensity.

  “Appoint one for me . . .”

  The fingers curled into a fist and slammed on the table.

  “I know my rights. I know my rights. I know my rights. I know my rights. I know my rights.”

  The two detectives stood, staring malevolently at the prisoner.

  “You do not scare me,” he said. “God is with me, and I fear none of your infidel justice. Bring me my attorney so that I may enjoy my rights! So I may delight in my rights! Do you hear? Sadegh Rhotzbadegh requires counsel, hah!”

  The two detectives exited the room.

  “I am a true believer!” he shouted. “A true believer!”

  The suspect watched them go. Then he turned to the mirror and raised his middle finger. The tape recorder rolling silently in the corner captured another long, raucous burst of laughter before being switched off by a policeman who swore under his voice. Detective Barren stood up and sighed. At least, she noted, the man who killed Susan is easy to hate. And she took some comfort from that thought.

  Time slid around Detective Barren’s emotions.

  She resumed her day-to-day routine, forcing the arrest of the Lebanese student into a location of diminished prominence. There was a difficult day when she went to Susan’s dormitory room and packed all the books and clothes and papers away to send to her sister. She had come across a half-finished love letter to a boy named Jimmy, whom she had never met, that was filled with the mixed gushings of a young woman leaving her childhood behind so rapidly. She had read the words and connected them to a tall, gawky boy who’d stood self-consciously to the rear of the church during the service, and just to the side at the gravesite, unsure what his position was in the midst of the grief; embarassed, the detective thought, as she herself had once been, at the idea of being alive, and horrified at the awkward sense of relief that speaks inside youth at moments of death, saying: At least my life goes on. Detective Barren read: “. . . I cannot wait for the year to get going. In midterm we are going on a week-long laboratory
in the Bahamas. We take the research boat down and spend a week underwater. I wish you could be there to share it with me. I think about those last few nights and what we shared . . .” Detective Barren smiled. What had they shared? For an odd moment she hoped that her niece had known real passion and abandonment, given into desire completely. It would mitigate somewhat the violation of her last moments.

  Then she had put the letter away. Reading it, she thought, was somehow unfair. But she had experienced a momentary pleasure, as if Susan had, if not been resurrected, at least for the barest of instants been restored. This made the detective feel a great sense of guilt, and she had occupied herself with the packing, setting aside the letter and a few others like it for forwarding to the gawky boy.

  Keep busy, she told herself.

  Ten days after the arrest of Sadegh Rhotzbadegh she called Detective Perry at county homicide. It was late in the afternoon on a Tuesday, the day the grand jury usually met. He came to the telephone swiftly, apologetically.

  “Jesus, Merce, I’m sorry I haven’t called, it’s just been so goddamn busy . . .”

  “That’s all right,” she replied. “Did you go to the grand jury today?”

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “Explain that to me.”

  “Well, yes we went to the grand jury and yes, we’re expecting first-degree murder indictments today. But not on Susan’s case and one other.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Look, the MO was the same on all five homicides in Dade and one in Broward County at the community college there. He was taking a course up there in electrical engineering. Anyway, he had newspaper clippings of all six killings in his house. His blood type matches the blood from one of the semen samples found near Susan’s body—but not the other. And there’s the question of age on the sample that matches. His is a very common blood type and it was not possible to type it down much further. The best the lab could do was to get him into a twenty-five-percentile category.”

  “They couldn’t eliminate further?”

  “No. Same thing in the Broward case.”

  “So?”

  “On one of the other Dade cases there’s nothing, just the newspaper clipping.”

  “So?”

  “Well, the bottom line is, we link him through jewelry, through the lingerie discovered at his house, through a shoe, which for some ungodly reason he kept, to three of the six homicides. Link isn’t the right word. Nailed is more like it. So what it amounts to is this: we’re clearing all the cases. But we’re only going for three indictments. Now, we may introduce evidence of the others if it gets to a death-penalty phase of a trial—but that’s down the line.”

  Detective Barren sat silently, thinking.

  “Merce, I’m sorry. The point is, the guy’s going to go away. Maybe the death penalty. Isn’t that what counts?”

  “Don’t give up,” she said.

  “What?”

  “What about his car?”

  “It was clean except for an earring.”

  Detective Barren started to speak but was cut off.

  “. . . No—I know what you’re thinking. It belonged to one of the other girls. We haven’t matched the earring found at Susan’s body. If we could, well, bingo.”

  “Don’t give up.”

  “Merce, we won’t. We’ll keep at it. But you know how these things work. I have to justify manpower and time to my superiors. They’ve cleared the case. We’re going to get a conviction. The guy’s history. My bureaucracy isn’t any damn different from yours.”

  “Damn,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I feel cheated.”

  “Don’t look at it that way. Think of the people who commit murders and skate. C’mon, Merce, you know how unusual it is for us to make a case on some random killer like this creep. You got to be satisfied with seeing him do hard time for the cases we can lock.”

  “He never copped out?”

  “Nah. He’s too crazy smart for that. You know, one of his courses at the university was in constitutional law.”

  “He’s not . . .”

  “Not a chance. I mean, I’m sure they’ll give the old insanity plea a ride, and I got to admit the guy’s not playing with a full deck. Actually, it’s more like he’s shuffled a couple of decks together. I mean he’s definitely not all there. But even if Allah was whispering in his ear to kill those girls, he sure as hell wasn’t telling our boy also to rape them. That’s not how Allah works, even on his bad days. And it sure isn’t how some paranoid schizophrenic operates, either.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  Detective Barren felt uncomfortable, as if the room had suddenly grown hot. She heard Detective Perry’s voice on the line.

  “Look, Merce, don’t hesitate to call. If we get anything else I’ll let you know.”

  She thanked him and hung up the telephone.

  It was, she thought, completely unfair and unreasonable and precisely how the system of justice operates. She hated herself for being so familiar with the trade-offs and corner cutting that marks the legal system. That what had happened to Susan’s murder was completely understandable from the policeman’s point of view made her angrier. She was outraged with herself for understanding.

  She could not sleep that night. She watched all the late-night talk shows and finally read Aeschylus until dawn, when, as the first few lights of morning crept into her apartment, she changed to reading the opening stanzas of the Odyssey, but even the classics could not settle her. She went to work early that day and stayed late, working feverishly on paperwork, redoing reports, analyses, and crime-scene workups, rendering her output as perfect as she could make it, until, finally, well into the evening darkness again, she went home and after stripping to her underwear and a tee-shirt, she put her pillow and a blanket on the floor and slept on the hardwood, thinking all the time that she wanted to know no comfort.

  Liquid time enveloped her. She felt as if all her feelings had somehow been placed on hold while she waited for some sort of resolution to Susan’s death. After the indictment for three first-degree murder counts was announced, Detective Barren went to the chief of homicide prosecution at the state attorney’s office, reminding him, through her presence, that though uncharged with Susan’s death, the Lebanese student still was responsible for it. She attended every court hearing, every meeting by the two young prosecutors assigned to the cases. She reviewed the assembly of evidence, considered it, then went and reviewed it again. She tried to anticipate areas of weakness that could be exploited by the public defenders that were charged with defending Sadegh Rhotzbadegh. She sent memos to the prosecutors with her every consideration, then followed up the memos with either a visit or, at the least, a telephone call, until convinced that the perceived gap in the case was closed. She knew that they found her behavior infuriating, especially in the pedantic way she would go over every aspect of the case. But she had also seen too many cases lost by lack of vigor on the part of the prosecution, lack of anticipation, and she was determined that this would not happen.

  And when she had exhausted her mind and memory in constant review of evidence, she would go to the county jail, where the Lebanese student occupied a single cell in the highest-security wing. Past the electronic lock­ing systems, down corridors gray with the crimes of men, through metal detectors and past a sign that delcared: unauthorized entry to west wing is punishable by prosecution. She would draw up a chair in the corridor outside the cell where the Lebanese student lived and simply watch him. The first time she did that, he’d laughed and shouted obscenities in her direction. When that failed to change her visage, he’d exposed himself. Once he grabbed the bars of the cell, spitting, raging, trying to reach through at her. Finally, however, he cowered, removing himself to a spot behind the toilet, occasionally
peeking over the top to see if the detective was still there. She was careful never to speak to him, nor really listen to anything he might say. She let the force of her silence fill him, she hoped, with dread.

  She told no one of those clandestine visits. And the jail personnel, fully aware of the reasons behind her attention, never logged her entry or departure on any official form. It was, the captain of the security unit told her in passing, the least they could do.

  She attended the evidentiary hearing, when the defense tried to suppress the items seized at the student’s house. She sat in the front row, eyes pouring onto the back of the student. She knew he could feel her gaze, and it was with great satisfaction that she noticed him wiggle in his seat and occasionally turn and meet the detective’s glance. The evidence was not suppressed. She whispered, “Good going,” to her friend Fred, the county detective, after he finished his testimony. “Piece of cake,” he whispered back, striding out of the courtroom.

  She attended a mental competency hearing for Sadegh Rhotzbadegh. She heard the defense attorneys argue that their client was decompensating under great stress, which, she was glad to note, the judge said was a normal state for someone facing the death penalty.

  Months passed. Miami’s winter arrived. The daytime light seemed to gain a new clarity, unburdened by harsh tropical heat. At night Detective Barren would sit on her porch and let the cool air wash her like a bath. She thought of little save the upcoming trial; her only pleasure or release from the concentration on the case came when she would go to the old Orange Bowl, her end-zone ticket in hand, and stomp and cheer and wave a white handkerchief at the enemy as the Dolphins cruised through their schedule. When they lost the conference championship game on a bleak, New England sort of day, wet, steady drizzle and wind blowing in the open end of the stadium, chilling the shirt-sleeved crowd so unaccustomed to any weather other than warm, she felt an awful coldness inside. A fan’s death, she thought. Losses are inevitable, yet terrible. To follow the game was always, ultimately, to know the wretchedness of defeat. That night she consumed almost an entire bottle of wine before sleeping. She awakened with a headache, and thought that the team from Los Angeles was filled with Lebanese football players.