The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  He looked out the window into the darkness.

  I will not believe, he said to himself angrily, that my brother is a murderer! They arrested a man for the crime this detective hounds me on! Why is she here?

  She isn’t, he said to himself.

  Where is she?

  When Detective Barren failed to call by noontime, he’d telephoned her hotel. There had been no answer in the room. He’d rung the desk clerk back and ascertained that she had not checked out.

  He tried to toughen himself inwardly. Just wait, he told himself. Wait for the next development. She has a lot of explaining to do. Wait to hear what she has to say.

  Then he thought: She’s not the only one who owes me an explanation.

  He crumpled a paper from his desktop and threw it on the floor. He picked up a pencil and broke it in half. He looked around for something to punch, but saw nothing suitable. He turned to the wall and slapped his open palm against the whitewashed surface until he felt it redden, and he welcomed the pain, a sensation that replaced, if only for a moment, his frustration. He thought of the detective and felt a great, uncontrollable anger. He wanted to scream at her: I want to know!

  Where the hell is she? he asked furiously.

  And then his anger fled him and he had the awful thought: Where the hell is he?

  Detective Mercedes Barren sat cross-legged on the floor of the living room in Douglas Jeffers’ apartment, surrounded by the mass of her search. She had turned on every light in the apartment, as if scared to allow any of night’s darkness to crawl in beside her. It was late and she was tired. She had systematically searched the entire place; from the toilet in the bathroom to the files of negatives in the darkroom. She had taken apart the couch and the bedding, hunting for weapons, without success. She had pulled everything out of the shelves in the kitchen. Every closet had been emptied. Clothes had been rifled, drawers dumped out, papers read and discarded. There was not even a ticket receipt from the Miami trip. Not even a picture postcard. The detritus of her search lay in piles about her.

  Useless, she thought.

  She could feel tears of rage and despair in her eyes.

  “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing,” she said out loud.

  She knew that he must have a safety deposit box, or a locker or a room somewhere else. Some place that collected the residue of crime. Something somewhere that connected him to her niece.

  She could barely stand the tension she felt in the room. That she was close to murder, she knew. She could sense it, smell it; it entered her body through every pore and orifice, covering her, absorbed within her. She recognized the sensation from a hundred crime scenes that she’d visited.

  That he was the killer was obvious. A glance at the bookcase had told her that. Virtually every book on the shelves was about some aspect of crime. Novels, textbooks, nonfiction accounts—all lined up in row after row. She was familiar with many, but not all, of the titles. That had impressed her deeply. He is a man who knows his business, she thought.

  But a literary interest in crime was not evidence.

  It was something she could show the brother, and he would just deny that it was anything other than a slightly morbid preoccupation, and certainly nothing out of the norm for someone who’d photographed so much upheaval and death. She looked up from her seat on the floor at the pictures that covered the walls and she wondered angrily how anyone could stand to be surrounded by so many violent and disturbing images.

  She had nothing. She pounded her fists on the floor.

  Then she picked up the letter from one brother to another and read it for the hundredth time:

  Dear Marty:

  If you get this note, one of a number of possible scenarios has come to pass. I suppose you will be expecting some kind of explanation.

  You don’t need one.

  You know it already.

  Still, I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve caused you.

  But it was unavoidable.

  Or maybe inevitable.

  See you in hell,

  Your loving brother,

  Doug

  p.s. What do you think of the pictures? Intense, no?

  Detective Barren dropped the note to her lap. It told her nothing. She was overcome by a massive, enraged hatred. Her heart seemed to burn in her chest. Her throat filled with vile-tasting bile. She wanted to spit in the face of the murderer. She wanted to get her own hands around his neck, just as he’d done to her niece.

  She wanted to say something out loud, but all that emerged from her throat was a growl, animal-like and savage.

  Finally words formed: “It’s not over,” she said. “I’m never finished with you. I will get you. I will get you. I will get you.”

  She thought of her niece. “Oh, Susan,” she moaned. But it was a sound less of sadness than of fury.

  Her anger stiffened her and she rose to her knees in the center of the room. Her eyes suddenly fixed on the self-portrait that hung on the wall in the corner. All she could see was the mocking smile, as if it were laughing at the futility of her efforts. Her hand shot out and seized the plastic-encased stone from the Olduvai Gorge, and, without thinking, without realizing anything save the rage that enveloped her, still kneeling on the floor, she wildly threw the artifact at the photograph.

  The sound of the shattering glass instantly composed her.

  She shut her eyes, took several deep breaths, and looked at the wall. She saw that the ancient rock had missed the picture of Douglas Jeffers, which still grinned in infuriating elusiveness out at her. Instead it had crashed into one of the other framed photographs, splintering the glass and knocking the picture from the wall to the floor.

  She sighed deeply and got to her feet.

  Feel better? she asked herself mockingly.

  She stepped over to the shattered picture frame.

  “Well, just add this to the tab,” she said. She had no intention of cleaning anything up. She poked at it with her foot. It was a full-color shot of a riot on a city street. In the deep background was a pillar of smoke and fire, and in the foreground a melee of policemen, firemen, and their vehicles. The lights seemed to blend hypnotically. She kicked at it. “A good shot,” she said. “Not one of your best, but pretty damn good.” As she started to turn away, she noticed that a corner of the picture had peeled back when the frame had buckled and come loose after falling.

  She stopped then and looked down.

  She did not know exactly what it was that caught her attention. Perhaps it was the odd contrast between the vivid colors of the picture and the muted gray of the paper behind. She still was unsure what she was looking at, but she thought that something was unusual. She tried to remember whether she’d ever heard of someone mounting a photograph on top of another picture, the way some artists paint over earlier images on their canvases. She could not recall hearing of such a thing.

  Not allowing herself to hope for anything, she bent down and picked up the broken frame and photograph. She moved over to the desk and put it under the light. She examined the corner that had peeled. She touched the paper and saw that there seemed to be a double thickness. She grasped the top photo and tugged it gently.

  It slid back another inch, revealing a black-gray background beneath.

  She touched this underneath paper and felt the glossy exterior of a photograph.

  She breathed deeply.

  Move cautiously, she said to herself.

  She pulled at the photo again and it slowly peeled off, like an apple skin.

  One inch, then another. The two sheets of photo paper had not been glued solidly together. She worked the paper carefully, making certain that she did not rip the two. When it stuck, she moistened a finger with saliva and gently worked the top loose.

  It was only when the entire photograph cam
e free that she dared to look beneath. She thought in that instant of the sensation a child feels when picking off the top of a scab, that it is painful, but there is a great release when it comes off.

  She looked down and saw that there was a picture beneath the picture.

  She dropped the riot scene to the floor and looked at the other. It was black and white.

  The breath rushed out of her suddenly as the image took shape in her eyes.

  It was a nearly naked body.

  It was a young woman.

  Detective Barren’s hands shook. She could feel an instant clammy sweat moistening her forehead.

  “Susan,” she said.

  But then she looked again.

  The young woman’s legs were chunkier. Her hair was shorter. She was lying in a different position than that in which her niece had been found. And the underbrush, illuminated by the flash which cut away the darkness, was different; no Florida fronds and palms. The photograph’s subject seemed to be lying amidst Northern forest leaves. Detective Barren’s head spun and she felt flushed with a dizziness created by reining in sharply on her imagination. What she could make out of the young woman’s features seemed to be all wrong.

  “It’s not Susan,” she said.

  For the briefest of moments she felt defeated. It’s just another one of his damn pictures, she thought.

  Then she realized: it’s a snapshot. She saw none of the composition, the care, the attentiveness and thought that went into Douglas Jeffers’ work. It was a picture taken hastily, under duress. Under fire.

  She held it up.

  “You’re not Susan,” she said to the picture.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  She looked again and saw a large dark splotch on the young woman’s chest. Blood, she thought.

  She scanned the picture quickly for the signs of search, of police presence, of official investigation.

  There were none.

  And then, creeping unbidden into her imagination, came a thought that she would not contemplate. She dropped the picture to the table and looked up wildly. Around her were dozens of pictures, Jeffers’ home gallery. She jumped from the chair and tore from the wall a large photograph of two Far Eastern farmers and their brace of water buffalo, outlined against the changing sky of evening. She threw the picture frame violently to the floor.

  From the shattered glass, she picked up the picture. She felt the double thickness of paper. She tried to peel this photo back, but this time it seemed stuck. She bent it and creased it and worried at it swiftly, finally seizing a small X-acto knife from the desk and scraping away a part of the top picture.

  Beneath was another black and white image.

  She could see a naked leg. Then a naked arm. It was streaked with dark. She had seen too much blood in too many crime-scene photographs not to know what this was.

  She stopped and looked in panic at the walls.

  “Susan,” she said again, her voice a mirror reflecting agony. “Susan, oh, my God, Susan. You’re here somewhere.”

  Again her gaze swept the photo gallery. Suddenly she felt stupid, embarrassingly so.

  “Oh, my God, Susan, you’re not here alone.”

  It was so obvious that it terrified her more.

  “Oh, God, you’re all here,” she said to all the eyes in all the pictures that stared out at her. “All of you.”

  She felt nauseated. She pictured Douglas Jeffers, sitting casually in his living room, glancing up at the picture in her hands, of the men and the water buffalo. Only he wouldn’t see this image, he would see the one concealed beneath.

  She sat back hard on the floor, overcome by the faces that looked down from the walls at her. She slid past despair into a realm of utter agony. She thought: I am a reasonable person. I use logic, precision, science. My life is ordered, routine. I deal in facts that lead to logical deductions. I do my job with effectiveness and devotion. Things are in place.

  She shook her head.

  I lie poorly, she realized. Especially to myself.

  She spoke then, out loud, hoping that the sound of her own voice might chase her sudden runaway fear and comfort her.

  It didn’t.

  “Oh, my God, you’re all here. I don’t know who you are, or how many of you there are, but I know you’re all here. All of you. All of you. Oh, my God. All of you. My God, my God, my God. You’re all here. Oh, oh, oh no.”

  And then a thought she realized was worse:

  It’s up to me.

  X

  MANY ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

  15. Anne Hampton sat alone in the car, half-watching Douglas Jeffers as he fiddled under the hood, checking the oil and water. It was early morning and they were outside the Sweet Dreams Motel in Youngstown, Ohio, a short drive from Interstate 80. Jeffers had made a joke shortly after they had first set eyes on it, calling it The Bates Motel. She turned away and her eyes rested on the stack of notepads that she kept near her seat. She lifted up the pile and counted: eleven. She picked one out from the center of the stack and flipped open to the middle. She saw the words from one of Jeffers’ frequent history lessons: January 1958. Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Lincoln, Nebraska, and environs: “Murders without plan, without much rhyme, without thought or care, random pretty much, except for her family. A true American nightmare, when our children turn on us. Charlie styled himself a rebel after James Dean and killed ten people, including her baby sister. He went to the chair in ’59.” Below that entry she’d scrawled her synopsis of Jeffers’ terse commentary: “They were in love, but in the end she turned on him. She was fourteen years old.”

  When she had to hurry, her handwriting grew large and childlike, she thought, not like the careful, precise note-taking that she remembered from her courses at school. That was a vague and distant memory, as if her time at the university had been years beforehand, not merely weeks.

  Anne Hampton considered: “. . . In the end she turned on him.” Jeffers had said this bitterly, as if this were what was shocking, not the events that preceded it. She spoke the words out loud, under her voice, so that he could not hear her: “In the end she turned on him.”

  She must have wanted to live, thought Anne Hampton.

  She must have believed that life was dear and precious and that she could make something special of herself or maybe even just ordinary of herself despite all the blackness and blood and death, and that living was not ruined by what had happened to her. She was only fourteen and she knew there could be more. She must have felt something magical and wonderful and strong and decided to live.

  At any cost.

  Anne Hampton wondered where she could find this something, too.

  She gazed back down at the words on the white, blue-lined pages. Jeffers had once watched her as she wrote furiously and told her that she reminded him of many of the reporters that he’d worked with, men who’d had their own systems of shorthand that resulted in hieroglyphics that not even an expert cryptographer could read, but which to the author were as clear as a printed page.

  She shivered and remembered the dizzying sensation she’d felt two nights earlier when he’d announced that he needed to check her notes.

  The moment had been terrifying.

  He made the demand late, after they’d checked into another forgettable motel, dragging from too many hours on the highway, depleted by noise and speed and headlights that cut through the dark right into them. Jeffers had grabbed their bags and grunted, “Bring the notebooks.” She had carried them gingerly, agonizingly, as if she were not strong enough to hold anything else. He had opened the door and tossed their bags onto one of the twin beds. “Let me see,” he’d said. He had sat at a small vanity, poring over the pages. She had shrunk into a chair in the corner, trying to blank her mind. But one thought had flooded her im
agination: He won’t be able to understand the words and he will realize how useless and ineffectual I’ve been and, oh God, I’m lost. She’d shut her eyes, trying to shut out fear, but the scratchy sound of the pages turning had seemed deafening. After a few minutes he’d tossed the notebooks aside after quickly flipping through the final entries. He then stretched and said, “Christ, I’m tired. Look, these are okay. Good, actually. I can read them fine. Oh, there’s a rough spot occasionally, like when you were trying to write on that road up in Michigan with the frost heaves from last winter. Felt like a roller coaster and the writing kinda goes up and down, up and down, on the page.” He’d smiled. “But all in all I’d say you were doing a good job. Just fine. Like I knew you would.”

  She wished she’d felt less pleased by his praise.

  He had handed her back the notepads and then touched the top of her head, almost like patting an animal or bestowing a benediction. The sensation was relaxing to her at first. She’d remained seated, watching him exit into the bathroom.

  Then another fear returned.

  You are alone, she’d told herself. Don’t forget it.

  Don’t confuse the pleasure of praise with the pain of a blow. She’d tried to toughen her heart, lying awake in the darkness until sleep had captured all her mingled confusion and resolve.

  In the morning he’d told her how to use her memory as well as her notes; to take just a word or phrase down and then, through concentration, to recall word for word what was said. To her surprise she had discovered that by using his techniques it seemed her memory had gained a novel precision, which had pleased her, like receiving a gift. He also told her to note situations and times, that it would help her reconstruct the notebooks when he needed her to. She wondered, though, whether that was possible. It seemed to her that everything was disjointed, each location they visited was distinct and apart; the only linkage between the spots was Jeffers’ memory. Each stop, like his mood swings, was unexpected and equally frightening and dependent solely on his own rationale and his design.