Death row, thought Detective Barren. She nodded.
“And you can guess what the last box will be.”
She felt a momentary rush of satisfaction.
Detective Barren stood up. “Thank you,” she said.
“You want to be in on it when it goes down?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“All right. I’ll call.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
They shook hands and she walked out, for the first time in several days feeling hungry.
When she returned to her own office, two days later, after a hot, dirty day doing an inventory of car parts uncovered at a chop shop in the warehouse district, she found two memos on her desk. The first was from her own commander, listing a disposition of evidence gathered at the site where Susan’s body had been recovered. The second was an autopsy memo from the medical examiner’s officer. She read them carefully.
to: Det. Mercedes Barren
from: Lt. Ted March
merce: That was a bite mark. But it was too ragged to make a distinct mold and is therefore not of high evidentiary value. Saliva breakdown from swab of the area shows normal enzyme values, but trace alcohol rendered it difficult if not impossible to come up with blood type. Guy must have had a drink or two. Booze always screws things up. Even just a beer or two. Anyway, I’ve sent the entire sample back over to the lab again and told them to try again. The two prophylactics recovered at the scene contained different sperm samples. Both had deteriorated considerably. Still, one was Type A/Positive, the other O/Positive. Further breakdowns are underway. No workable prints on anything so far, but they’re going to try that laser evaluator on the soda cans. I’ll let you know. Pretty much a total wash so far. Sorry. But we’re going to keep trying.
to: Detective Mercedes Barren
from: Assistant ME Arthur Vaughn
detective: Cause of death of deceased white female, age eighteen, identified positive as Susan Lewis of Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania is massive trauma to the right rear portion of the occipital bone coupled with asphyxiation due to strangulation by nylon ligature around neck. (See autopsy protocol for precise cause.) Genital swabs negative. Acid phosphase test negative.
Detective: she was unconscious from the head blow when she was assaulted. She probably never regained consciousness when he strangled her. Sex act was premortem, however. But there were no signs of ejaculation. This could have been due to prophylactic device.
I’m terribly sorry about all of this. The autopsy protocol should answer any questions you have, but if it doesn’t don’t hesitate to call.
Detective Barren put the two reports in her pocketbook. She glanced at the autopsy protocol, with its schematic diagram and pages of verbatim description of her niece’s body, transcribed from the medical examiner’s tape recorder. Height. Weight. Brain: 1220 grams. Heart: 230 grams. Well-developed, post-adolescent female American. No abnormalities noted. Life reduced to so many facts and figures. No way to measure youth, enthusiasm, and future. Detective Barren felt queasy and was thankful that the medical examiner in his compulsive thoroughness had neglected to send the autopsy slides.
On her way home from the office that night, Detective Barren stopped at a small bookstore. The clerk was a beady-eyed man who rubbed his hands together frequently, punctuating his voice with body motion. Detective Barren thought him a perfect reincarnation of Uriah Heep.
“Something to escape in? A novel, I suppose, an adventure, or a gothic horror story. A romance, or a mystery. What shall it be?”
“Real escape,” said Detective Barren, “is substituting one reality for another.”
The clerk thought for a moment.
“You’re a nonfiction type, huh?”
“No. Maybe. I just don’t feel romantic. But I want something distracting.”
She left with two books. A history of the British campaign in the Falkland Islands and a new translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. There was a gourmet shop down the street, and she indulged herself in a pasta salad and a bottle of what the counterman assured her was an excellent California Chardonnay. She would eat well, she thought, read a bit. There was a football game on the television that night which she could watch until she fell sleep. This was a secret passion. She smiled to herself; she hid her enthusiasm from her co-workers. They were threatened enough by her female competence. If she tried to usurp their game as well . . . So she enjoyed in private. Buying single game tickets, sitting in the Orange Bowl end zone, or staying home and plopping down in front of her television by herself, her concession to her own gender represented perhaps by the glass of white wine in a cut-glass long-stemmed goblet rather than the can of light beer. But, she thought, she did dress for the occasion. If the Dolphins were playing, she would break out her aqua and orange tee-shirt and watch sweaty-palmed as any man. She recognized a level of foolishness in her behavior, but thought it harmed no one and she was comfortable with it. She thought of Susan, coming over one Sunday a year earlier and watching in almost open-mouthed amazement as Detective Barren, swearing frequently, unable to sit still, stalked around the living room of her apartment in obvious agony, relieved only by a forty-nine-yard field goal by the Dolphins’ kicker in the waning seconds of the game. Detective Barren smiled at the memory.
“If only they knew . . .” Susan had said.
“Shh. Secrecy,” her aunt replied. “Tell no one.”
“Oh, Aunt Merce,” Susan had said finally, “why is it I never know what to make of you?” And then they’d embraced. “But why football? Why sports?” the niece persisted.
“Because we all need victories in our lives,” Detective Barren replied.
3. Several times over the next few days Detective Barren fought off the urge to telephone the county homicide detectives. As she went about her own business, processing other crimes, working evidence, she envisioned what was happening. She saw the tail working the killer, silently mirroring his movements while other detectives ran down his whereabouts, started showing his picture to witnesses, putting together all the minor pieces of a criminal case.
Some ten days after Susan’s murder, Detective Barren was on the witness stand in a murder case; from the locations that shell casings had been discovered inside the house where a drug dealer and his girlfriend had been murdered, Detective Barren had reconstructed the entire crime. Her testimony was important, not crucial; consequently her cross-examination by the contract killer’s high-priced attorney was more of a badgering than a blistering. She knew that she could not be shaken on facts; she was working hard, however, not to let the attorney so confuse the jury that the impact of what she had to say was lost.
She heard the attorney drone another question:
“So, because the shell casings were located here, you concluded that the killer stood where?”
“If you will refer to the diagram, marked into evidence as state’s exhibit twelve, counsel, you will see that casings were discovered some twenty-four inches from the doorway to the bedroom. A Browning Nine-Millimeter ejects casings at a constant rate. Consequently, it is possible with a degree of scientific certainty to say precisely where the shooter was standing.”
“They couldn’t roll?”
“The rug in that portion of the room is a two-inch shag carpet, counsel.”
“Did you measure it?”
“Yes.”
The attorney turned toward his notes. Detective Barren fixed her eyes on the defendant. He was a wiry, small Colombian immigrant, uneducated save in methods and modes of death. He would be convicted, she thought, and within thirty seconds another would get off the next Avianca flight to take his place. Killers were the Kleenex of the drug industry; they were used a few times and then discarded unceremoniously.
Her eyes drifted up past the defendant, and she saw Lieutenant Burns enter the back of the court
room. For a moment she connected him with the killer on trial. Then she saw him surreptitiously give her a thumbs-up sign.
Her imagination leaped.
She watched the lieutenant stride down the center aisle of the courtroom and bend over the barrier to whisper a few words into a bored-looking prosecutor’s ear. He sat up straight, swiveled, and then rose to his feet.
Detective Barren looked at the lieutenant, who smiled at her, but only a small smile, just the slightest upturning at the corners of the mouth.
“Your honor,” the young prosecutor said, “may we come to side-bar?”
“Is it important?” asked the judge.
“I believe so,” replied the prosecutor.
The defense attorney, the court stenographer, and the prosecutor all walked around to the judge’s side, where the jury could not hear them. There was a moment of conversation, then the three returned to their seats. The judge turned to the jury.
“We’re going to take a brief recess now, then the state will continue with another witness.” He looked at Detective Barren. “Detective, apparently your services are needed elsewhere. You are subject to recall, so please remember that you are under oath at all times.”
Detective Barren nodded. She swallowed.
The judge frowned. “Detective, the stenographer cannot record a nod of the head.”
“Yes, your honor. Under oath. I understand.”
Detective Barren and the lieutenant hurried from the courtroom. As they passed through a sally port entrance and then through a metal detector, the lieutenant said, “They whacked the fucker about ninety minutes ago. He’s at county homicide being questioned. They’re doing his house and car now. Search warrant got issued this morning. Hell, you probably passed it on the way into court. We tried to reach you, but you were on the stand. So I decided to come get you myself.”
Detective Barren nodded.
The two hurried outside. It was Florida fall, a subtle lessening of the oppressive heat of summer. A mild breeze caused the flags outside the courthouse to buffet about.
“Why’d they move on him?” she asked.
“The tail watched the creep buy two pairs of women’s pantyhose last night at an all-night drugstore. He stashed them in a locker at the University of Miami, along with a ball-peen hammer.”
“Who is he?”
“A weirdo and a foreigner. He’s some sort of Arab. Kind of a professional student, from what I’ve heard. Took courses all over the place. Registered with a bunch of different names, too. We’ll know more soon.” The lieutenant paused at the door of an unmarked cruiser. “You want to watch the questioning or the search of his place?”
She thought for a moment.
“Let’s swing by his house, then go over to county.”
“You got it.”
The city washed past the windshield as they drove to the suspect’s house. The lieutenant drove swiftly, not speaking. Detective Barren tried to fix a picture of the suspect in her head and was unable. She chided herself; good police work required one to draw suspicions and conclusions on the basis of fact. She knew nothing about this man, she thought. Wait. Absorb. Collect. That was how she would come to know him. The lieutenant slowed the car and took an exit for the airport. A few blocks shy of the airport, he turned onto a nondescript street. It was a place of small cinderblock houses, with mostly Latin and black families. Many homes had chainlink fences surrounding them and large dogs patrolling within. This was an urban normality; the largest of dogs lived in the fringe areas, the working-class neighborhoods that were so vulnerable to robbery, where both husband and wife went off to work each day. The houses were set back slightly from the street, but without foliage. The street was devoid of trees, even the palms that seemed everywhere in the city. Detective Barren thought it was a singularly uninviting place; in the summer the heat probably turned the entire street into a single hot, insistently dusty place where tensions and angers bred with the same intensity that bacteria did.
At the end of the street she saw police cars lined up around the last of the small brown houses. There was a truck from the dog pound. The lieutenant motioned at it. “Seems the guy had one loyal Doberman. One of the SWAT guys had to blow it away.” An airplane, wheels and flaps down, passed frighteningly close overhead, drowning out in a huge flood of noise anything else the lieutenant was going to add. Detective Barren thought that if she had to listen to that sound with any frequency, she would have become a killer as well.
They parked the car and pushed through a small crowd of curious people who were watching the proceedings silently. Detective Barren saw a pair of homicide men she knew working the neighbors, making certain that they obtained any workable leads before the press was all over them. She nodded at the head of the team that was processing the house. He was a former street cop, not unlike herself, who had worked undercover a few too many times. In one of his last cases there had been a rather singular question about some drug money seized in a raid. A hundred thousand dollars in twenties and hundreds had been turned in to the property office, along with a kilo of cocaine. The defendants were two college students from the Northeast; they had told internal affairs that they had had more than a quarter million in cash when the raid went down, leaving some one hundred fifty thousand unaccounted for. A sticky situation that had resulted in the policeman being transferred and the two students receiving greatly diminished charges. The money was never recovered. Like many cops, Detective Barren had steadfastly refused to draw the obvious conclusion, preferring to believe that someone had lied and hoping that it wasn’t the policeman. Still, she thought as she approached him, he was an extremely competent detective, and she was in an odd way relieved.
“How ya doing, Fred?” she said.
“Good, Merce. And you?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“I’m real sorry for the reason you’re here.”
“Thanks, Fred. I appreciate your saying so.”
“This is the creep, Merce. Stone cold solid. Just walk inside and you can feel it.”
“I hope so.”
He held the door open for her. It was cool inside the small house. She could hear the air conditioner blasting. Probably the detectives turned it up, she thought. Still, for an instant she shivered, wondering whether it was the sudden change in the temperature.
At first glance the house seemed typical for a student. The bookcases were made from gray cinderblocks and pine boards, and rows of paperbacks vied for space. The furniture seemed threadbare and modest, a couch with a faded Indian print covering it thrown over it to conceal a rend in the fabric, a pair of sitting chairs covered in plastic, a worn brown wood table scarred with cigarette burns. On the walls there were travel posters for Switzerland, Ireland, and Canada, all showing bucolic lush green settings. Detective Barren swept it all into her head, thinking so far it added up to nothing.
“Pretty ordinary, huh?”
She turned to the voice.
“Fred, show me something interesting.”
“You just got to look a little closer. Check out the typewriter.”
There was a typewriter on the brown table with a sheet of paper in the platen. She stood over it and read what had been written:
unclean unclean unclean unclean unclean unclean unclean
unclean unclean unclean unclean unclean unclean unclean
God God God God God God God God God God God God God God
Kill
I must wash the earth
“We also found his trophy box.”
“His what?”
“Trophy box.”
“I don’t . . .”
“Forgive me, Merce, I forgot your connection.” The detective paused. “Apparently he kept something from his victims. Or at least something from some of them. In the closet was a shoebox with a bunch
of clippings about the killings, right up through the murder of your niece. There were some earrings and a ring or two also. Let’s see, a woman’s shoe and a pair of panties with a bloodstain on them.”
He hesitated.
“It was the kind of box that guys like us always pray for on one of these. I don’t know if there’s something there that will link him positively to every one of the killings, but there’s enough there to link him to some. And that means the sucker’s nailed, solid.”
She looked at him.
“I hope so.”
“Believe it. No doubt about it. The damn thing is, I’ll bet there’s a couple of crimes this creep’s done we didn’t even know about.”
He put his arm around her and started to lead her out.
“Don’t worry. The search is legal. The evidence is there. The guy’s probably copping out now. All there is to worry about is that weird note. He’s probably whacko. Why don’t you go see for yourself.”
“Thanks, Fred.”
“Think nothing of it. Don’t hesitate to call, anytime, if you need to know something.”
“I appreciate that. I feel better already.”
“Great.”
But she didn’t.
She turned to Lieutenant Burns, who was waiting for her outside. “I want to see this guy. In the flesh.”
She did not look back at the house as they pulled away.
At the county homicide office, she and Lieutenant Burns were escorted into a darkened room which had a two-way mirror which overlooked a second room. She shook hands with several other policemen who were assembled watching the questioning in the adjacent area. One man was operating a tape recorder in a corner. No one spoke. For an instant she was reminded of hundreds of movies and television shows she had seen. Someone offered her a chair and whispered, “He’s still denying everything, and he seems strong. They’ve been at him for two hours. I give him maybe another five minutes, maybe another five hours. Hard to tell.”
The Traveler Page 5