The Traveller (2 page)

‘Not a few minutes. Not on a stretcher. I want to see what happened to her.’

‘Merce. For Christ’s sake …’

‘I want to see.’

“Why? It will just make it harder.’

‘How the hell would you know? How the hell could it make anything harder?’

A sudden flash of light burst behind the lieutenant. He turned and Detective Barren saw a police photographer moving in and out of position. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘I want to see now.’

‘All right,’ said the lieutenant, stepping aside. ‘It’s your nightmare.’

She marched past him quickly.

Then she stopped.

She took a deep breath.

She closed her eyes once, picturing her niece’s smile.

She took another deep breath and carefully approached the body. She thought: Remember everything! Fix it in your mind. She forced her eyes to scan the ground around the shape she could not yet look at. Sandy dirt and leaves. Nothing that would produce a solid shoeprint. With a practiced eye, she estimated the distance between the parking lot and the location of the shape — she couldn’t, in her mind, speak body. Twenty yards. A good dumping distance. She tried to think analytically: There was a problem. It was always easier if the - again her thoughts were staggered and mentally she hesitated - victims were discovered in the location where the homicide took place. Invariably there would be some physical evidence. She continued to scan the ground, hearing the lieutenant’s voice behind her: ‘Merce, we searched the area very carefully, you don’t have to …’ But she ignored him, knelt, and felt the consistency of the dirt. She thought: If some of this stuck to the shoes, we could make a match. Without turning to see if he was still there, she spoke out loud, ‘Take earth samples from the entire area.’ After a momentary pause, she heard a grunt of assent. She continued, thinking, strength, strength, until she was next to the shape. All right, she said to herself. Look at Susan. Memorize what happened to her this night. Look at her. Look at every part of her. Don’t miss anything. And she raised her eyes to the shape. ‘Susan,’ she said out loud, but softly.

She was aware of the other people moving about her, but only in a peripheral sense. That they had faces, that they were people she knew, colleagues, friends, she was aware, but only in the most subliminal fashion. Later, she would try to remember who was there, at the scene, and be unable.

‘Susan,’ she said again.

‘Is that your niece, Susan Lewis?’ It was the lieutenant’s voice.

‘Yes.’

She hesitated.

‘It was.’

She felt suddenly overcome by heat, as if one of the spotlights had singled her out, covering her with a solid beam of intense brightness. She gulped a great breath of air, then another, fighting a dizzying sensation. She remembered the moment years earlier when she’d realized that she was shot, that the warmth she felt was the lifeblood flowing from her, and she fought with the same intensity to prevent her eyes from rolling back, as if giving into the blackness of unconsciousness would be as fatal now as it would have been then.

‘Merce?’

She heard a voice.

‘Are you all right?’

She was rooted.

‘Somebody get fire-rescue!’

Then she managed to shake her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to be okay.’

What a silly thing to say, she thought.

‘You sure? You want to sit down?’

She did not know who she was talking to. She shook her head again.

‘I’m okay.’

Someone was holding her arm. She snatched it loose.

‘Check her fingernails/ she said. ‘She would have fought hard. We may have a scratched-up suspect.’

She saw the medical examiner bend over the body, gingerly lift each hand, and, using a small scalpel, gendy

scrape the contents under each nail into small plastic evidence bags. ‘Not much there,’ he said.

‘She would have fought like a tiger,’ Detective Barren insisted.

‘Perhaps he didn’t give her a chance. There’s severe trauma to the back of the head. Blunt instrument. She was probably unconscious when he did this.’ The doctor motioned at the pantyhose that were wrapped tightly around Susan’s throat. Detective Barren stared for a moment at the bluish cast to the skin.

‘Check the knot,’ she said.

‘I already looked,’ said the doctor. ‘Simple square knot. Page one of the Boy Scout Handbook.’

Detective Barren stared at the pantyhose. She desperately wanted to loosen it, to put her niece at rest, as if by making her look as if she were only sleeping it would be true. She remembered a moment when she was growing up. She had been very young, no more than five or six, and the family dog had been hit by a car and killed. ‘Why is Lady dead?’ she’d asked her father. ‘Because her bones were broken,’ he replied. ‘But when I broke my wrist the doctor put a cast on it and now it is better,’ she had said. ‘Let’s put a cast on Lady.’ ‘But she lost all her blood, too,’ said her father. ‘Well,’ the child in her memory said with insistence grown of despair, ‘let’s put the blood back in.’ ‘Oh, my poor little child,’ said her father, ‘I wish we could. I wish it were so simple.’ And he’d wrapped big arms around her as she sobbed through the longest of childhood nighttimes.

She stared at Susan’s body and longed for those arms again.

“How about the wrists?’ she asked. ‘Any signs of restrain’-

said the doctor. ‘That tells us something.’

“Yeah.’ said a voice from the side. Detective Barren didn’t turn to see who was speaking. ‘It tells us this creep conked her before he had his fun. She probably never knew what hit her.’

Detective Barren’s eyes scanned down from the neck.

‘Is that a bite mark on the shoulder?’

‘Probably,’ said the medical examiner. ‘Got to check microscopically.’

She fixed her eyes for an instant on her niece’s torn blouse. Susan’s breasts were exposed, and she wanted to cover them. ‘Swab the neck for saliva,’ she said.

‘Did it,’ said the doctor. ‘Genital swabs, too. I’ll do it again when we get to the morgue.’

Detective Barren’s eyes slid down the body, inch by inch. One leg was flung over the other, almost coyly, as if even in death her niece was modest.

‘Was there any sign of laceration to the genitals?’

‘Not visible out here.’

Detective Barren paused, trying to take it all in.

‘Merce,’ said the doctor gently, ‘it’s pretty much like the other four. Mode of death. Positioning of the body. Dumping ground.’

Detective Barren looked up sharply.

‘Others? Other four?’

‘Didn’t Lieutenant Burns tell you? They think it’s this guy the papers are calling the Campus Killer. I thought they’d told you…’

‘No …’ she said. ‘No one told me.’

She took a deep breath.

‘But it makes perfectly good sense. It fits …’And her voice trailed off.

She heard the lieutenant’s voice next.

‘Probably his first of the semester. I mean, nothing is certain, but the general pattern is the same. We’re going to assign the case to him so the task force can work it — I think that’s best, Merce?’

‘Right.’

‘Seen enough now? Will you come over here and let me tell you what we’ve got and what we haven’t got?’

She nodded. She closed her eyes and turned away from the body. She hoped that they would move Susan soon, as if by pulling her out of the underbrush and dirt that it would start to restore some humanity to her, lessen

somehow the violation, diminish somehow the totality of her death.

She waited patiently next to the cars belonging to the crime-scene search specialists and the evidence technicians. They were all people she knew well, the night shift in the same office she worked. Individually, they all broke off from their duties within the yellow tape area and spoke to her, or touched her shoulder or grasped her hand, before going back to processing the scene. In a few moments Lieutenant Burns returned with two cups of coffee. She wrapped her hands around the Styrofoam cup he held out to her, suddenly chilled, though the tropical night was oppressively warm. He looked up at the sky, just starting to fade from dark, creeping gray light marking the edges of morning.

‘Do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘It might be better, all around, if you just…’

She interrupted quickly. ‘I want to know. Everything.’

‘Well,’ he started slowly. She knew he was trying to assess in his own mind whether sharing information with her would hinder the investigation. She knew he was wondering whether he was dealing with a policewoman or with a half-crazed relative. The trouble, she thought, was that he was dealing with both.

‘Lieutenant,’ she said, ‘I merely want to help. I have a good deal of expertise, as you know. I want to make myself available. But, if you think I’ll be in the way, I’ll back off…’

‘No, no, no,’ he replied quickly.

How simple, she thought. She knew that by offering to not ask questions she would get permission to ask every one.

“Look,’ the lieutenant continued, ‘things are pretty sketchy so far. Apparently she and some friends went out to a bar on the campus. There were a lot of people around, a lot of different guys hanging about. She danced with a number of different guys, too. About 10 p.m. she went outside to get some air. She went alone. Didn’t come back in. It wasn’t until a couple of hours later, just about

midnight, that her friends got worried and called the campus cops.

‘Just about the same time a couple of fruits down here in the park just getting it on in the bushes over there stumbled on the body …’ He held up his hand. ‘No. They didn’t see or hear anything. Literally stumbled, too. One of the guys fell right over it…’

The body, she thought. It. She bit her lip.

‘Girl disappears from campus. Body gets discovered in a park a couple of miles away. It wasn’t hard to put one and one together. And we’ve been here since. Her purse had your name in it. That’s why you were called. Your sister’s kid?’

Detective Barren nodded.

‘You want to make that call?’

Oh, God, she thought.

‘I will. When we clear here.’

‘There’s a pay phone over there. I wouldn’t want to make them wait. And it’s likely to be awhile before we finish …’

She became aware of the growing dawn light. The area was steadily losing its nighttime blackness, shapes taking form, becoming distinct as the darkness faded.

‘All right,’ she said.

She thought how utterly mundane and hopelessly banal the act of telephoning her sister and brother-in-law was. For a second she hoped that she did not have a quarter to put in the pay phone’s slot, then hoped that the telephone would be out of order. It was not. The operator answered with routine brightness, as if immune to the hour of the day. Detective Barren charged the call to her office. The operator asked her when someone would be there to confirm accepting the charges. Detective Barren told her someone was always there. Then she heard the electronic clicking of the number being dialed, and suddenly, before she was ready with the right words, the phone was ringing at her sister’s house. Think! Detective Barren thought. Find words! And she heard her sister’s voice, slightly groggy with sleep, on the other end of the line:

‘Yes, hello …”

“Annie, it’s Mcrce.’ She bit her lip.

Merce! How are you? What’s …’

“Annie. Listen carefully: It’s Susan. There’s been a …’ she fumbled. Accident? Incident? She just barreled on, oblivious, trying to keep her voice a professionally calm, even, flat tone. ‘Please sit down and ask Ben to get on the line …’

She heard her sister gasp and then call to her husband.

In a moment, he joined the line. ‘Merce, what is it?’ His voice was steady. Ben was an accountant. She hoped he would be as solid as numbers. She took a deep breath.

‘I don’t know any way of telling you this to make it easier, so I’ll just tell you. Susan is dead. She was killed last night. Murdered. I’m sorry.’

Detective Barren suddenly saw her sister, some eighteen years earlier, immense with pregnancy, a week from delivery, moving uncomfortably through the oppressive July heat that hung unforgiving in the dry Delaware Valley summer to sit at her side. Detective Barren had tenaciously clutched the flag the honor guard captain had bestowed on her, her own mind black, empty, reverberating with the chaplain’s words, blending with the crisp sound of the rifle volley fired over the grave. She’d had no words for any of the family or friends who’d sidled up self-consciously, wordless at the incongruity of someone as vigorous and young as John Barren dying, even in battle. Annie had settled herself onto the couch next to Detective Barren and when no one was watching, or at least when she thought no one was watching, had taken her sister’s hand and placed it on her great stomach and said with heartbreaking simplicity, ‘God took him unfairly, but here’s new life and you shouldn’t leave your love in the grave with him, but give it to this child instead.’

The child had been Susan.

For a moment, Detective Barren smiled at the memory, thinking: The baby saved my life.

And then, suddenly, swirling back into reality, she heard her sister’s first sob of broken mother’s anguish.

Ben had wanted to take the first flight to Miami, but she was able to dissuade him from that course. It would be simpler, she told them, if she made the arrangements with a funeral home to ship the body when the medical examiner finished the autopsy. She would accompany Susan’s body back on the airplane. Ben had said he would call a local funeral home to co-ordinate plans. Detective Barren told them that they would probably hear from the newspapers, perhaps even the television. She recommended that they cooperate; it was much easier, she said, and the reporters would be less likely to get in the way. She explained that preliminary indications were that Susan was the victim of a killer who had prowled the campuses of Miami’s various colleges the past year and that there was a task force of detectives assigned to the cases. Those detectives, she said, would be in touch. Ben had asked if she was sure about that killer, and she said nothing was certain but that it appeared to be the same. Ben had started to bluster, angry, but after spitting out a few words of rage, he’d stopped, lapsing into a continual stunned acquiescence. Annie said nothing. Detective Barren guessed that they were in different rooms, and that it would not be until they hung up and turned to face each other that full despair would hit them.