The Traveller by John Katzenbach

journalese, a language with only the slightest connection to English. Murders were always brutal. So were beatings, except when they were savage. The cliches of the newspaper world created a type of safe shorthand — readers could absorb the words ‘brutally murdered’ and not have to know that the killer was in such a frenzy that he’d severed one girl’s nipple with a bite and clubbed another with an oaken branch like some berserk prehistoric man. Douglas Jeffers thought of the young women he’d seen walking from the house, laughing. He wondered for an instant whether at night she and her sorority sisters double-locked their doors, throwing solid deadbolts on memory. Jeffers pictured the house. He thought: They think of it as a place to stay, camaraderie for four years of college, but it’s more, it’s really a monument to something much more important: it marks the site where a prolific murderer started really to lose control and bring on his own end.
    Jeffers remembered the short, wavy-brown-haired man he’d first seen on assignment in a Miami courtroom many months after the terrible night at the sorority house. Idiot! he thought.
    His mind segmented the memory into pictures. Click! The killer turned. Click! The killer eyed him. Click! They stared at each other, locking eyes. Jeffers wondered if the man could see past his own little stage-show. Click! The killer’s mouth opened as he started to voice a word which evaporated into a slightly skewed, wry smile. Click! The killer turned back, smirking, glibly commenting on the trial work in front of him, angering the judge, alienating the jury, ensuring the inevitability of the result. Click! Jeffers caught that smirk, that dark edge of madness and fury, just before it was covered with sarcasm and arrogance. That was the picture he’d kept for his own file.
    What a fool! he thought again.
    Jeffers’ stomach twisted with the memory. The papers had called him intelligent!
    Jeffers shook his head sharply back and forth. What kind of intelligence can’t control his own passions? Where was the self-discipline? Where was the thoughtfulness, the planning, the invention, in bursting in the dead of night into a crowded sorority house and savaging the occupants? Out of control. Enthralled by desire. Weakness, Jeffers thought. Silly, schoolboy indulgence born of conceit.
    He remembered his own inner fury when his colleagues on newspapers and television had breathlessly marveled at the incongruity of an articulate, educated man who was a mass murderer. He looked like one of us. He talked like one of us. He acted like one of us. How could he be what the police said he was?
    Jeffers spat, angry.
    The truth was, Jeffers thought, he wasn’t.
    How simplistic. How foolish. So he was bright. So he was likeable.
    Well, does he like death row?
    He deserves it, Jeffers thought.
    First Degree Stupidity.
    He rose from his seat, aware again of the increasing heat of the day. He decided to go over to the student union to eat some lunch before making his final reconnoiter and executing his plans.
    The cafeteria was crowded, noisy, anonymous. Jeffers took his tray to a corner table and ate slowly, his map and course list spread before him, occasionally daring to look up and survey the melee of students. He thought that there was a nice symmetry in his behavior; he remembered the few months that he’d spent in college before dropping out to begin his career as a photographer. His time had been spent in much the same way as he was spending his time now. Alone. Quiet. Keeping to himself, watching, rather than joining. Listening rather than speaking. He remembered the awkwardness he’d felt, alone in his dormitory, separate from the easygoing welcome of the college community. It had been
    winter in the North, a frozen, regrettable day, gray-pitched and damp with the threat of snow, when he’d thrown his few clothes into a duffle bag, loaded his cameras, and stepped out to the edge of the