The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  “Say nothing,” Jeffers said in a low, awful voice. “Avoid eye contact until I make my choice. But smile and look happy.”

  She tried but knew she looked merely pathetic.

  She concentrated instead on walking steadily.

  She knew what was happening, or, at least, she suddenly knew that she was about to add another nightmare to that possessed by the derelict, but she felt helpless to do anything. Not that anything occurred to her to do, save cooperate.

  Look out at the sky, she said to herself. Stare up into the few lights around. She saw the moon hanging above the branches of a tree and suddenly remembered a tune from childhood: The fox went out on a chilly night . . . And he prayed to the moon to give him light . . . For he’d many a mile to go that night . . . Before he reached the town-o, town-o, town-o. The music flowed through her mind like a comforting wave.

  They walked around the block three times, each time passing a pair or a threesome of men hurrying through the blackness of the secondary street. On their fourth turn around the block, as they were approaching their car, she felt Jeffers stiffen next to her. She could sense his muscles tightening, and she realized he’d put his hand into his camera bag.

  “This could be it,” Jeffers said.

  They continued to walk toward the solitary man, who was hurrying in their direction.

  “Slow a little,” Jeffers said. “I want to pass this guy in the shadow of that tree.”

  She saw that equidistant between them and the man was a large tree that added shadow to the night.

  “Keep smiling,” Jeffers said.

  She had a sudden vision of herself being swept out to sea by a violent undertow. She clung to his arm, suddenly afraid that she would stumble or faint.

  Jeffers arranged all his sensations. His eyes darted about the area, taking in all the emptiness. His ears were tuned to noises, searching for some telltale, out-of-the-ordinary sound. He even sniffed the air. He thought he was on fire, or that he was in love, and that every nerve end in his body was on edge, throbbing. Beneath his hand the metal of the pistol seemed glowing hot. He forced himself to measure his pace, slow, so that he would come abreast with the man at the precise moment, the darkest moment. A death march, he thought abruptly.

  They moved together.

  Jeffers estimated the distance: fifty feet. Then, suddenly, twenty feet. Then ten, and he nodded at the man and smiled.

  The man was young, probably no more than twenty-five. Who are you? Jeffers wondered in an instant. Have you loved your life? The man’s blond hair was cropped close over his ears and neck. Jeffers noticed that the man had a small gold stud in one ear. He wore a simple open sportshirt and slacks, with a sweater tossed over his shoulders in studied casual appearance.

  Jeffers nodded again at the man, and the man returned the look with a small, wan, slightly nervous smile. Jeffers squeezed hard on Anne Hampton’s arm and he saw her smile as well.

  The man walked abreast, then past.

  As the man stepped through Jeffers’ peripheral vision, Jeffers slipped the gun from his bag, his finger resting on the trigger.

  Jeffers had time only to say to himself: Be calm.

  Then he spun around, directly behind the man, dropping Anne Hamp­ton’s arm so that he could raise both hands to the pistol grip. When the barrel reached out level with the man’s head, Jeffers fired twice.

  The cracking sound echoed down the street.

  The man pitched forward, slamming to the sidewalk.

  Anne Hampton stood frozen. She tried to lift her hands to her eyes to cover them, then stopped, staring out in terror.

  Jeffers leaped over the man, who lay facedown in a growing pool of blood. He was careful not to touch the man or the blood. The man did not move. Jeffers bent down, fired one more shot into the man’s back, searching for the heart. Then, in the same fluid, continuous movement, he put the gun back into his bag and came out with the Nikon. He raised it to his eye and she heard the motordrive whir as the film advanced. Just as swiftly, he finished, returning the camera to the bag.

  He grabbed Anne Hampton’s arm and half-dragged her down toward their car.

  He pulled open the door and thrust her swiftly into the seat. In an instant he’d jumped around to the driver’s side. He did not squeal the tires, but started the car simply and efficiently, rolling slowly past the body on the sidewalk, down the empty street.

  She turned and stared at the inert body as they slid past.

  Within a few seconds they were away.

  She saw that Jeffers was driving a preset route. She could feel the force of his concentration, as if he were creating a palpable sense out of his intelligence. After fifteen minutes she saw they had reached a deserted spot in a downtown warehouse area. Jeffers stopped the car and exited wordlessly. She waited for him to let her out, but he did not.

  At the back of the car, Jeffers removed the Missouri license plate, wiped it with a rag, and threw it into a dark plastic bag. He then tossed the bag into a dumpster, climbing up to make sure that the bag with the plate was well situated amidst other garbage.

  He got back into the car and they drove through the city into a suburban area. Jeffers stopped at a convenience store and used the light from the front of the building to see what he was doing. First he replaced his surgical gloves on his hands. Then he took out the envelope with the letter he’d written earlier in the day. Then he opened his file folder and pulled out a small brown manila envelope. He shook it open and Anne Hampton saw that there were several words cut from a newspaper. Jeffers produced a small plastic squeeze container of commonly used glue and fastened the words to the envelope. He used the glue to close the envelope.

  Then he spoke.

  “Can’t be too careful. Now, I know they can’t raise fingerprints from paper unless I put ink all over my fingers. But the FBI has all this new spectrographic equipment which I’m just getting familiar with and it can break down enzymes and Lord knows what. That’s why no saliva. If I licked that envelope shut, they could come up with my blood type, for example. Hell, for all I know, they could come up with my Social Security number. So, caution is the word.”

  He looked at her. His words had spun out in an excited, almost little-boy delight.

  “Look,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’re finished. We got away. Just a few odds and ends and we’re home free.”

  He finished with the envelope and put the car back in gear. In a moment he pulled up to the front of a large postal building. He jumped out of the car and put the envelope in one of the mail boxes.

  Back in the car he said, “Now just the gun and bullets, and everything’s set. But we won’t do those until tomorrow. At our leisure.”

  His adrenaline still flowing freely, he maneuvered the car back onto the interstate. Anne Hampton pivoted once in her seat, looking out the rear window toward the fading lights of the city.

  He saw her shiver.

  “Cold?”

  She nodded.

  He did nothing.

  “Tired?”

  She realized she was drained. She nodded again.

  “Hungry?”

  She thought she would be sick.

  “I’m famished.” he said. “I could eat the proverbial horse.”

  She thought: It’s endless. It’s forever.

  After a moment he spoke again. “It’s the strangest thing,” he began evenly. “The homophobe who has killed all those gays in St. Louis, I think seven before tonight, always writes in rhyme. At least according to the Post-Dispatch.”

  Jeffers shook his head.

  “The newspapers haven’t given him a nickname, which I think is kinda strange. I mean, usually when you have a series of killings like that, they slap some sobriquet on the poor guy. Like Gay Killer or Homo Homicides or something equally du
mb and borderline-offensive.”

  He looked at her and saw the weariness in her eyes.

  “Do you know what just happened?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said dully.

  He reached across the car and slapped her, but not too vigorously, thinking: She’s probably pretty tired.

  The crack against her cheek aroused Anne Hampton from the sense of lassitude and apathy that had overtaken her since the shots on the street.

  “Do you know what really happened?” he asked again.

  She shook her head.

  “Well, we went in and did a pretty good imitation of a number of other crimes that have taken place in that fair city over the past eighteen or so months. What we performed was what the police call a copycat killing. You see, they always withhold some detail or another from the press so that they are able to tell who’s doing what. Copycat killings frustrate the hell out of the police. You have to see it the way they do: While they’re all damn busy trying to find some maniac, along comes some other freak to mess up the works. It takes them time, we’re talking man-hours here, to sort the killings out. So, by the time whatever task force is assigned to this killer figures out what seems to have happened, we will have disappeared. No evidence. No leads . . .”

  She saw that he was smiling, Cheshire Cat-like.

  “Oh, not completely without jeopardy, mind you. Someone could have seen us from one of the apartments in the area. Perhaps I dropped something, or you did, that we don’t know about. Something that some sullen, dogged detective can latch on to. You see, that’s half the excitement. The state of waiting for that knock on the door.”

  He rapped the steering wheel with his fingers and the drumming sound startled her.

  “You see, that’s what I figured out with all my studies. Usually police find killers because murderers and victims have some relationship which predates the murder. The police merely have to ascertain which relationship led to homicide. This is the vast majority of cases. Then there are the serial-type murders, where the crimes adopt a distinct pattern. Those are very difficult to solve, of course, because the killers meander about. Once you get into different jurisdictions, the police hamstring themselves. But I have great respect for the police. They’ve solved many more of these than you’d think. Often because the poor idiot screws something else up and the cops are on to him like sharks. Never underestimate the intuitive powers of a cop, I say. But, still, the hardest for them to figure out, obviously, are random, patternless killings.

  “I thought for a while that that was the type I should engage in. Simply go to a city, pick some poor folk out at random, blow them away. But I realized that that in itself would be a pattern, and eventually, somewhere, some cop would see it. It’s the million monkeys, million typewriters theory. Eventually one will type out Shakespeare’s complete works.

  “So what was I left with?”

  She did not really expect that he wanted her to answer.

  “I needed to combine this random quality with a pattern. I thought hard. I calculated. I figured. And do you know what I came up with?”

  Again she was quiet. His voice was mesmerizing.

  “A design with great simplicity, and thus great beauty.”

  He smiled.

  “I copy things. I continue studying. I find out everything there is to know about a Freeway Killer or a Campus Killer or a Green Mountain Killer. The press is so helpful with these titles. Then I just go out and organize a reasonable facsimile. So the police, who are looking for someone else entirely, have this aberrational killing on their hands in the midst of something bigger and, they think, more important. It gets ignored. Shunted aside. Put in the out basket. Filed.”

  He took a deep breath. “Most killers are caught because, in their arrogance and need, they put some signature on a crime. I am more humble. The act is what is important to me. Not signing it at the bottom. So, in order to murder, I become someone else. I put my mind inside that other person’s. I use details I know, and those I can surmise, and I create my own little perfection.

  “I arrive. I murder. I leave. And no one, save myself, is anything the wiser.”

  He waited an instant before continuing.

  “But I’ve grown so accomplished, too careful. Too clever, too perfect.” He shook his head.

  “A knock on the door? A warrant? Never happen. That’s not bravado speaking. Just efficiency and confidence.”

  She thought she heard sadness in his voice.

  “Actually, not much in the way of thrill much more.” He looked over at her. “It has, to be blunt, become just too damn easy.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’re here to help me bring all this to a proper, suitable, sufficiently volcanic conclusion.”

  He turned away.

  “You can go to sleep now,” he said. “I’m a bit wired. I think I’d rather drive.” He felt, suddenly, a great pleasurable release. He thought to himself: There. I’ve told somebody. Now the world will know.

  “Now we’re going home,” Jeffers said. “The slow route, granted. But home. Good night, Boswell.”

  She heard his voice and the word hit her consciousness: home. Try as she might, she couldn’t summon up a solid picture of her house and her parents. Instead, what jumped into her mind seemed vaporous and distant, as if hidden behind film, and she had difficulty telling what it was, though she knew it scared her.

  She felt the car surge forward and she closed her eyes and welcomed her new nightmare.

  IX

  ANOTHER REGULAR SESSION OF

  THE LOST BOYS

  14. Martin Jeffers sat awake and alone.

  But his solitude was busy, peopled by memory. Once when they were young and vacationing on Cape Cod, his brother had found a young hawk with a damaged wing. The hawk summer, he thought. The drowning summer. He wondered for a moment why he thought of the bird, when it was the later events that August that had been so much more important. But his mind filled with the images of reflection. Doug had found the bird on a dirt road, hopping about in misery, wing dragging. For two weeks, Jeffers recalled, his brother spent every minute rooting about in the woods, turning over rotten logs, lifting up moss-covered rocks, in a constant search for bugs, beetles, small snakes, and snails, which he dutifully brought home to the bird, which gobbled them down and squawked for more. Martin Jeffers smiled. That’s what they named the bird: Squawk. In the little free time they’d had, they’d haunted the local lending library, taking home dozens of books on birds, tracts on falconry, and texts on veterinary medicine. After two weeks the hawk would perch on Doug’s shoulder to eat, and Martin Jeffers remembered the triumphant look on his brother’s face when he set the bird on the handlebars of his old bicycle and rode the bike and bird to town and back.

  Martin Jeffers put his hand to his forehead and shuddered.

  The old bastard, he thought. Doug was right to despise him.

  Their father had told him to get rid of the bird.

  Doug wouldn’t put the hawk in a cage and so it defecated all over the storeroom where he kept it. That had infuriated the druggist and he’d presented the two boys with a simple, terrible ultimatum: Cage it, free it, or else. It was the else part that was so ominous. If its wing won’t work, his brother had complained, it will die when we free it. He remembered his brother’s face reddening with anger. And you can’t put a wild thing in a cage! Douglas Jeffers had shouted. It will die. It will die surely and stupidly, gnawing desperately at the bars without comprehension. Doug was resolute. He always was. Martin Jeffers remembered trailing after his brother, running hard with his shorter legs, trying to keep up with the pace Douglas Jeffers set out of anger. My brother always moved quickly when enraged, Jeffers thought. Always in control, but fast.

  The bird had remained tenaciously on his brother�
�s shoulder, digging his claws into the shirt and muscle, turning his proud hawk face into the wind, while Douglas Jeffers rowed across the pond that separated their house from the path to the ocean. He’d pulled the rowboat onto the shore and set off down a worn route. They’d come to a wide field of sandy dirt, waist high in green seagrass and tangled beach-plum bushes. The ocean was a quarter mile away, just past a ridge of tall sand dunes, and Martin Jeffers remembered the sound of the waves echoing deeply in his memory. The breeze tossed the grass about them, and it seemed as if his brother were swimming through strong currents. The afternoon sun was bright, spiraling down with summer intensity onto their heads. Martin Jeffers saw his brother lift his arm, holding the hawk aloft, like he’d seen in picture books of medieval falconry. Then he tried to toss the bird skyward. Martin Jeffers saw the wings beating in a flurry, trying to lift up into the sky, then failing, falling back onto his brother’s arm. “It’s no good,” the older boy had said. “That wing just won’t make it.”

  Then he had added, “I knew it wouldn’t.”

  He said nothing else. They trudged back to their boat in silence. He’d rowed swiftly, pushing his back into the effort, as if he could make things different by force of strength.

  Martin Jeffers’ memory skipped ahead to the following morning. Doug had been up before him and had suddenly appeared at the side of his bed, hair tousled, face set, gray, and filled with rage. “Squawk’s dead,” his brother had said.

  The old bastard had killed the bird while they’d slept. He’d gone into the storeroom and grabbed the poor trusting brute and wrung its neck.

  Martin Jeffers was filled with a rage of his own. His heart swelled with the uncontroverted grief of childhood remembered.

  He was just a cruel and heartless man and I was damn glad that he got what was coming to him. I only wish it had hurt him more! He remembered shouting those words out at his own therapist, who had asked in an infuriatingly calm voice whether that was true or not. Of course it was true! He killed the bird! He’d hated us! He’d always hated us. It was the only thing he was ever consistent about. That and getting his own damn way. He would just as quickly have crept into our rooms at night and strangled us the same way! He wanted to!