The Traveller by John Katzenbach Read Free Book Online Page B

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 unac—
    counted 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