The Traveller (39 page)

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 that

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.

9 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!

Martin Jeffers remembered staring at the dead bird in his brother’s hands.

No wonder he hated him so much. You can’t be born with a hatred like that. You have to construct it carefully out of cruelty and neglect, first removing any love or affection. That’s what he’d told the therapist. He’d asked the woman poised behind his head where he couldn’t see her, If you’d had a father like that, wouldn’t you want to become someone who cared about people? Someone who tried to help people? Why the hell do you think I’m here?

And, of course, the therapist said nothing.

The layered memories boiled about in Martin Jeffers’ mind.

Sonuvabitch, sonuvabitch, sonuvabitch.

No one said a word that night. No one ever said a thing. We all sat at the dinner table and acted like nothing had happened. He remembered his mother looking over at Doug and him and saying, I’m sorry the bird flew away. Both boys had adopted the same disbelieving stare, and

she’d finally averted her eyes and nothing more was said. She never knew a damn thing, he’d told the therapist. She just primped and preened and was forever touching them, especially with wet, nerve-racking kisses, and she never knew a damn thing about anything and if you tried to tell ber, she just turned away.

Their father just thrust food into his mouth.

Sonuvabitch.

Martin Jeffers rocked back in his seat. He saw himself again that morning as he fell from sleep’s pinnacle at the sound of his brother’s voice, awakening to the sight of the dead bird in his brother’s hands. The bird was stiff and broken.

Then, in his memory, he just saw his brother’s hands.

Then he thought: Ohmigod!

He said it out loud though there was no one near to hear him: ‘Ohmigod! No!’

He felt the force of memory crushed by his thought, like an exceptionally heavy weight loaded onto his shoulders.

“Oh no. Oh no, oh no,’ he said to himself. In an instant his mind filled with black sadness and horror.

And he realized suddenly, right at that moment, who’d killed the bird.

I am timid, thought Martin Jeffers.

Somehow all these things happened to the two of us and I became quiet and introverted and lonely and passive and he became …Jeffers stopped himself before putting a word to it.

He pictured his brother in his mind’s eye and saw his loose, flushed, grinning face. He forced himself to see his brother at moments of anger and he remembered the force of Douglas Jeffers’ silences. Those had always scared him. it recalled pleading with his brother to speak to him, to talk to him. He thought of the detective and the crime-scene photographs of her niece and he tried to reconcile the two visions. He shook his head.

Not Doug, he thought.

Then he had a worse thought: Why not?

He could not answer the question.

Martin Jeffers stood up and walked about his apartment. He lived on the ground floor of an old house in Pennington, New Jersey, a tiny town tucked between Hopewell and Trenton’s suburbs. Hopewell was just to the west of Princeton, and Martin Jeffers recalled with displeasure that whenever anyone mentioned Hopewell, even when they have been growing up, his brother had always reminded whoever was listening that the little, sleepy town was famous for one thing: It was the place where Lindbergh’s baby had been stolen.

The crime of the century, Martin Jeffers thought.

He felt cold and stepped to his window. He put his hand against the screen and felt the late-summer warmth. Still, he shivered, and pushed the window down sharply, leaving only a crack open.

They found the baby in the woods, he thought. Decomposed.

He wondered for an instant whether every state marked its history with crimes. He was taken aback when he realized how much his brother knew. He remembered Doug talking about the Camden Killer, who had walked out on a warm early September day in 1949 and calmly shot and killed thirteen people with a war souvenir Luger. A few years back, Doug had been fascinated to learn that his brother frequently saw this person the papers once described as a mad dog as he peacefully roamed the halls of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, a model patient for more than twenty-five years, never arguing when the orderlies came about with the daily dosage of Thorazine, Mellaril, or Haldol. Vitamin H, the patients called it. The Gamden Killer always took his without complaint. Not even a whimper of protest.