The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  “What happened at practice the next day?”

  “I got sick.”

  “Right. So how many did you really have?”

  He tried to grin but it died quickly. “A bunch.”

  “How are you sure that this happened the night Susan disappeared.”

  “Because of the movie. It was only shown once.”

  “What was the title?”

  He hesitated, then brightened. “It was about that battleship they had the revolution on . . .”

  Detective Barren thought suddenly of a baby carriage bouncing down a wide flight of stairs. “Potemkin?”

  “That’s it!”

  “But, Tony,” the dark-haired girl interrupted, “I think that was the one they showed the next night. The night Susan disappeared they showed the war one, you know, with the knights and the ice breaks, that one. I think.”

  “I don’t know about that one,” he said.

  “Alexander Nevsky,” Detective Barren said. She sighed.

  “Still, you’re certain the suspect never moved from his seat.”

  “Pretty certain. I mean, I was dancing a bit. And I had to spend some time in the head. And you know, it was a party. You know, when some of the guys from the team came in, I had to get up and greet them . . .”

  “So you weren’t sitting next to him the whole time?”

  “Well, not the whole time.”

  Detective Barren glanced at the young man’s wrist. Great witness, she thought. Drunk. Willing to lie to his coaches and probably anyone else. Can’t remember details. Probably can’t remember what day it was. She looked at him again. I hope he makes the pros, she thought. No wonder his story was discounted by the county detectives. A grand jury would have laughed at it.

  “Ever wear a watch?”

  “Nah. Just get it stolen out of your gym locker.”

  “So you can’t be certain what time it was.”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “Okay, what did the suspect drink?”

  “I bought him one. Tonic water. Like I said, weird.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just tonic water. With a lime twist.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, not that much to it. He and I pretty much sat there, right until the stroke of midnight, when Cinderella popped through the door. And I grabbed her before the wolves jumped on, know what 1 mean? I mean, this place can get pretty rowdy some nights. What the dude did next, I don’t know. The place was really getting down . . .”

  Susan’s friend smiled. “Susan knew that, you know. That’s why she and I made the pact to split. If we’d stayed till midnight, let me tell you, this place is a zoo. We’d never have made it out alive . . .”

  This was a joke and the other students laughed in shared familiarity.

  “Susan didn’t,” Detective Barren said.

  Some two weeks after taking her leave from the department, Detective Mercedes Barren drove through a blistering afternoon down to the park where Susan’s body had been uncovered. It was summer and the heat rose off the highway before her, creating a wavy vaporous curtain. She thought to herself that she had reached a decisive position in her investigation. Days spent maneuvering about the University of Miami and reviewing forensic documents had convinced her of two things: Sadegh Rhotzbadegh was the natural, obvious suspect in the murder. He was at the scene of her disappearance, he had clipped the newspaper story of the murder, just as he had the others, the crime itself was performed in his style. All the other victims had been bashed and strangled. She thought to herself that if this had been her case, she would have devoted all her efforts to finding some noncircumstantial link between Susan and Rhotzbadegh. The tiniest of connections would have resulted in a first-degree murder indictment for sure. But Detective Barren was equally certain that he had not perpetrated the crime, primarily, she thought, because of the lack of some evidentiary link.

  It’s too simple, she thought.

  She remembered the slight shake of the head.

  Not him, she thought. Too obvious. Trace alcohol.

  She frowned and mentally castigated herself: Find something!

  She turned down the road to the park, which in the bright daylight seemed to have none of the malevolence she recalled from the night of Susan’s murder. She rounded the corner to the main parking area and stared out at the opaque light bay waters that seemed to blend with the pale sky above in an endless enveloping China blue. There was no wind and the wavelets slid up against the shoreline, lapping at the gnarled mangroves, making a slight noise not unlike that of a faucet dripping. Detective Barren could smell cooking; there were families grilling lunch on open barbecue fires. The inevitable sounds of small children playing seemed distant, like background music.

  She parked and hesitated, looking across the nearly empty parking area toward the underbrush and trees where the body had been hidden. Then, sighing, she got out of her car, locking the door, and started walking toward the spot. From the edge of the tarmac, she started counting. Susan weighed one hundred and eighteen pounds. She imagined slinging her niece’s body over her shoulder. Fireman’s carry. Deadweight is more difficult, more unwieldy. She thought how slight the Arab was, but knew that meant nothing; his arms were powerful. He could easily have carried her. But that meant nothing. She counted the distance in her head, one yard, two, up to twenty-two, before stopping and looking down at the sandy dirt. He’d already killed her, the detective thought, she did not feel the rudeness of this dumping.

  He, she thought. Whoever he is.

  But where? she wondered. The Arab’s car was clean. Absolutely clean. Microscopic tests had been run on the rugs in the passenger area and on front and rear seat fabrics. Samples from the trunk, too, were put under a spectrograph. No blood. No hair. No skin. No residue of death.

  Mentally she added that to her score sheet.

  She bent down and felt the dirt where Susan’s body had lain. Come on, she thought. Some cosmic message. Some idea. Something.

  But she felt nothing.

  All she was aware of was that it was hot. Children were playing. And Susan’s murderer was outside somewhere.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

  She looked back down and had a sudden vision of Susan lying before her. She remembered with awful clarity the pantyhose biting into her neck, the swatch of blood behind her head, the violation of the haphazard way she had been flung to the ground, her legs akimbo, her sex exposed.

  How cruel, she thought.

  Then she shook her head.

  There is something, she thought. Think. She considered the blunt trauma to the back of Susan’s head. If I could find a weapon, she thought. Or the real location of the murder. Locations almost always speak of personalities. She went over in her mind all the forensic tests done on Susan’s body. If I had a subject, she thought, maybe I could find something. She thought again of the pantyhose and an idea struck her.

  She stood, turned rapidly, and returned to her car.

  She noticed a small girl watching her. She had blond hair and an open, mischievous face. She was wearing a little girl’s bikini bathing suit and that made Detective Barren smile. The child was eating a vanilla ice cream cone and it was melting about her, giving her shy grin a white outline. Detective Barren waved and the little girl half-waved back before turning and racing away. Trust no one, Detective Barren thought as she watched the little girl disappear amidst the trees and shadows, heading toward the beach and play area. Grow up and trust no one.

  She had always hated visiting the morgue, not because of the bodies that were filleted there but because of the harsh bright lights which filled the rooms with an otherworldly glow. It seemed to her the light blended in some unusual way with the smell of formaldehyde and antiseptics which covered
everything in the morgue. She preferred to think of death as something dark and private, which was the opposite of the atmosphere in the morgue, where people wandered in and out in a near constant parade. She watched from a corner of the theater as the medical examiner plucked various organs from a split body while talking into an overhead tape recorder microphone. His voice was monotonal until he found something that interested him, at which point it soared up an octave into a little boy’s pitch. She saw the medical examiner root about inside the body, finally scooping a small shape from the bloody mass, and, raising it high into the light, he said in a delighted singsong, “See, detective, how small death can be?”

  She didn’t reply and he dropped the shape into a specimen container. “. . . In left coronary artery, at approximately three centimeters, one bullet fragment, nearly intact, apparently twenty-two or perhaps twenty-five caliber. This was the cause of death . . . impact severing artery, causing sudden massive loss of blood, shock, instantaneous heart seizure . . .”

  He looked over his shoulder at Detective Barren.

  “In other words he took it in the ticker . . . The news boys like the shoot-outs with machine guns and shotguns and all that fancy television stuff. But some things haven’t changed in twenty years. You want to kill somebody coolly and professionally? A small-­caliber bullet with a magnum load fired into the heart at close range. Or, if you need a variation, right here, at the base of the skull . . .” He tapped the back of his head with his index finger. “. . . A little pop! and your man’s history. Or woman. No fuss. No mess. No people diving for cover. No innocent bystanders gunned down. No explosions. And, from my point of view, a big advantage. A little hole, right here . . .” He thumped his chest and the sound seemed to echo in the small room. “An Uzi or an Ingram makes a complete mess out of a person. No class. No class at all.”

  He looked back down at the shape on the slab before him.

  “. . . My kind of murder. No doubt about it. Simple. Direct and to the point, if you please, thank you, ma’am.”

  He shook his head and looked at Detective Barren. “I heard you were on a medical leave. What brings you around here?”

  “I need to talk about . . .”

  “. . . Your niece. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what’s the question?”

  The medical examiner looked over at one of the orderlies who was replacing a shrouded body into a refrigerated container. “Hey, Jesús! Go get me file number eighty-six dash one eleven four, huh? Pronto, please. Susan Lewis is the name.”

  Detective Barren watched the orderly exit.

  “He won’t take more than a minute or two,” said the medical examiner. “Still, what is it that’s bothering you?”

  “Susan was . . .”

  “Asphyxiated. Cause of death was strangulation. Method of death was a pair of pantyhose around her neck. She was unconscious when it happened. You know all this. You were there and you saw the report.”

  “Knocked out by the blow on the back of the head?”

  “Ahhhh, yes. Probably.”

  “You’re not certain?”

  “Well, the trauma to the back of her head was severe. It might have caused her demise in and of itself. But it always made me wonder.” The orderly returned and handed over a manila envelope. “Right. Here it is . . .” He read momentarily. “Right. Left hemisphere . . . tissue loss . . . brain matter lost . . . well, what bothered me is that not much of the detritus from that blow was at the scene. I mean, there was just what you would expect from ordinary leakage from a wound that severe.”

  “I don’t know that I follow . . .”

  “Okay, she was hit, then strangled. Well, the theory of the case is that that Arab snatched her from outside the student union over at the university, banged her noggin, dumped her into his car, then took her to the park, raped her, strangled her, and abandoned her. But to me that simply didn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, the blow Susan received on the head would have, as I said, killed her. Probably pretty promptly. There would have been a mess all over his car. A mess he couldn’t clean up enough, realistically, to pass the spectrograph examination. And, if she had died while he was driving to the park, well, then the strangulation and the sexual congress would have been postmortem. Would have looked completely different. I mean, to a medical examiner it would look different.”

  “I think I see . . .”

  “There was one other thing. Beneath the circular pattern the pantyhose made around her neck, I found a few slight areas of bruising.”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you about,” said Detective Barren. “You mention those in one of the reports but not another. What were they? Could those have been finger-pressure bruises?”

  “Well, yes is the answer to that question. But put me on the stand and ask me under oath whether those bruises were caused by a pair of hands and I couldn’t testify to that, not to any degree of medical certainty. I mean, the marks were consistent with manual choking, but not conclusive. And they were just barely visible.”

  He hesitated before continuing.

  “I hate this, you see. I much prefer things to fit together with the scenario the homicide detectives arrive with. If you add into the picture this manual choking, well, where? When?”

  “Were you able to measure the distance between bruises?”

  The medical examiner smiled.

  “Good question. You always ask good questions, Detective. Yes. But only one possible combination . . .”

  He carefully slipped off his surgical gloves and approached Detective Barren. “The problem, medically, is finding the right finger-and-hand positioning . . .” He put his hands around Detective Barren’s throat. The medical examiner was a small, slight man, with mousy features and eyeglasses perennially perched on the end of his nose. But Detective Barren started at the strength in his thin fingers as they closed theatrically around her throat. “Here is your classic, Hollywood-in-the-nineteen-thirties strangulation, face to face. But see, if I’m a little taller”—he stood up on his tiptoes—“the angle changes. Or if you struggle, it changes . . .” The medical examiner kept moving his hands about Detective Barren’s throat as he spoke. She watched him like a man would watch a barber he didn’t quite trust shave him. “. . . And what about from behind? Changes things, too.”

  He dropped his hands.

  “Five and one-half inches.”

  “From where to where?”

  “My guess, and it is only a guess, I’d never, ever testify in court on this, is that the murderer’s hands had to be at least five and one-half inches from thumb to index finger.”

  The medical examiner snorted.

  “I hate this,” he said. “Really. Sometimes I get so frustrated with questions.”

  “Do you think Rhotzbadegh . . .”

  He cut her off.

  “Of course I do.” He stared at her. “Who else, tell me? The guy had desire. He was in the location. It pretty much followed his regular pattern. He killed her . . . that’s certain, really, I’m sure.”

  “But?”

  “But not exactly how they think it happened.”

  “Did you ever talk this over with them?”

  The medical examiner snorted again.

  “Of course!”

  He turned and walked back to the corpse on the examining table. He looked down into the body before him, then spoke up. “The trouble is, there’s no clear-cut indicator that it didn’t happen the way they believed it did. And, really, what difference does it make? He did it, just as sure as I’m standing here breathing, and this young fellow is lying there dead . . .” He poked the body several times with his finger, as if testing to be sure he was right.

  “But?”

  “But. But. But. But I�
�m a man who likes things in order. This is the way the body works: take something away, and voilà! It no longer functions properly. Sprain the ankle and you’ll start to limp. Take a bullet in the heart and you’ll die. Things out of whack and out of line. Things twisted and things obscured. Hate it, really. That’s why I like a good shooting. Dig around and bingo! There’s the bullet. No doubts about it. He’s dead. There’s the reason. Can’t stand loose ends . . .”

  He hesitated again.

  “You see, it makes no difference. And I may be off my rocker completely. That’s what the prosecutor told me, anyway.” He looked back over his shoulder at Detective Barren. “You know,” he said with a touch of sadness, “that if you show two different medical examiners the same set of facts they will reach different conclusions? Every time. You can bet on it. We’re the most contentious, disagreeing bunch. Everyone likes to think that, because we deal with the dead instead of the quick, we’re not subject to the same vagaries of diagnosis, guesswork, what have you. We are.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “Makes me sad.”

  The medical examiner seemed to be staring into the open chest of his subject. Detective Barren waited an instant before speaking.

  “Five and one-half inches?”

  “Right. For what it’s worth.”

  She turned and started to leave.

  “But it won’t prove anything,” he said after her. As she walked through the doors to the operating theater, she turned and saw the man bend over the remains, lost again in his work.

  In her apartment that night, Detective Barren poured herself a glass of red wine, remembering the words of the clerk in the liquor store who’d assured her this California cabernet was the equal of those priced twice as high. She had not told him that she could barely taste the difference and liked to slip an ice cube into her glass as well. She had stripped off her clothes after the visit to the morgue and taken a long shower, scrubbing herself fiercely—pathologically, she joked to ­herself —to remove the lingering stench from the death room. You can’t really smell it, she told herself as she had stepped from the shower, and then she had paused, sniffed the air, and finally said out loud, “Well, the hell you can’t.”