Wallflower (14 page)

Janek appeared in the doorway of Dr. David Chun's second-floor office just as the psychiatrist, already in his overcoat, was stuffing file folders into a briefcase.

Chun was not pleased to see him.
"
You should have called, Lieutenant. Unfortunately I can't talk to you now. I'm going home before the snow gets too deep."

"
The snow stopped falling a couple hours ago, Doctor," Janek replied.
"
If you wait another hour, everything'll be shoveled out."

Chun stared at him.
"
You know better than to show up here without an appointment. Please tell me why didn't you call."

"I didn't think you'd see me. So I came up anyway, took a chance."

Chun sat down. "Why didn't you think I'd see you?"

Janek sat, too. He'd gotten the psychiatrist's attention. Now all he had to do was hold it.

"
You were upset down in Quantico. I had the feeling you wished Sullivan had never involved you in the case. Something frightens you about it, something you don't want to discuss. I need to hear you discuss it, Doctor. That's why I came."

Chun studied him.
"
You're different from Sullivan. You're a listener."

"I try to be."

Chun thought a moment before he spoke.
"
Okay, Lieutenant, take a seat outside. I'll give my wife a call; then we'll talk."

When Chun came out, he was carrying his briefcase and still wearing his overcoat.
Uh-oh,
Janek thought,
he's changed his mind.
But Chun was no less anxious to talk; he just didn't want to do it in his office.

He guided Janek across Harvard Yard. Students were walking briskly on the freshly shoveled paths, and some freshmen were putting finishing touches on a snowman that bore a vague resemblance to Fidel Castro. Janek watched while a rosy-cheeked girl in a white ski parka stuck a piece of black wood into the effigy's mouth to simulate a cigar.

At Harvard Square the snow had turned to slush. A news dealer hawked hometown papers. Chun led Janek through the Coop, past counters displaying Harvard running shorts and T-shirts with amusing slogans, then out a rear door and across a narrow street.

As they entered the dark lounge called Casablanca, Janek was struck by a throaty torch song rendition of
As Time Goes By
. The place, dominated by a huge blowup of Humphrey Bogart, was empty except for a few student couples. Janek glanced at the jukebox. It offered esoteric selections, old love songs from the forties and fifties, renditions by Dietrich and Piaf.

"Oh, yes, something
is
bothering me, Lieutenant," Dr. Chun said after they were seated and the doctor had ordered himself a double martini. "But you see, there's a strange thing about these serial cases. You work with them awhile, you're bound to go a little crazy. It's quite common to become depressed. Dealing with kill
ers, talking to them, interviewing them—that can bring you down a lot sometimes."

He smiled, a crisp, neat little smile, then gulped from his glass. Waiting for the doctor to continue, Janek sipped some scotch.

"Those of us who do this kind of work are aware of that. Inspector Sullivan, too. He's a bright man, stubborn at times, but like yourself, he's a hunter, so for him there's always the challenge of the chase. Not for me. My job is to profile. And to do that, I have to go inside a killer's mind. I never had any trouble with that before. But this case is different. Please tell me, Lieutenant, if you will, why
you
think it's different."

"
I
never said it was different."

"
But you believe it is or you wouldn't have come all this way." The same small, neat smile again. Chun lifted a toothpick from the holder on the table, used it to stab his martini olive.

Janek nodded.
"
I found your presentation fascinating. A confident, organized, highly competitive killer, sexually dysfunctional and all of that. But I missed something important, an explanation of why the victims were chosen."

Chun popped the olive into his mouth.
"
You've seen the hole. You're a perceptive man." He cleared his throat.
"
People who are murdered by a serial killer are not chosen for death by accident. In a sense, for which we must remember never to blame them, the victims select themselves. By the way they look or dress or talk they become attractive to the killer. Sometimes they become stand-ins for a parent or another person who has played a significant role in the killer's life. When we first started to work on Happy Families, we assumed that one person in each family, most likely a female, was the target and that the others were killed out of collateral rage or simply because they were witnesses. Then we found the case of the two brothers. So the gender thing broke down right there. To put it in a nutshell, I have analyzed these victims very carefully, charting every observable trait. And I cannot come up with a single common element of attractiveness. Except, of course, the families."

"
But everyone is a member of a family, Doctor. If that's the only
common element, why these particular families? For me the idea of families doesn't pattern out."

Chun swallowed the remains of his martini.
"
You're right, of course, and that, you see, is what frightens me so much about this case. That's why I wish Sullivan had never brought me into it." He screwed up his features the way he had in Quantico.
"
What I feel here is . . . I don't know quite how to express it. It's as if there's nothing here, nothing particular—do you follow what I'm saying? It's as if this killer doesn't care about anything. As if nothing attracts him. As if he only wants to kill. And as monstrous as a serial killer always is, usually there's some little thing, some small fascination with people no matter how twisted or perverse, that can help us to understand him, maybe even to sympathize a little bit. But here there's a void, a nothingness. I've never faced anything quite like it. It scares me, the blankness of it, the nihilism, the zeroness. Look at me, Lieutenant." Chun presented his face to Janek.
"
Can you see how terrified I am? Because where there is nothing, Lieutenant, no reason, no incentive, no caring, no human bond, then there is nothing to understand." Dr. Chun grinned helplessly.
"
There's just . . . nothing."

And with that the psychiatrist hung his head and stared disconsolately into his empty glass.

T
hat night, back in New York, the snow was swirling around the streetlamps, almost, it seemed to Janek, like bugs on a summer's night. He phoned Aaron from the airport, was surprised to learn that Jess's things were still in her dorm room.

"
The college wants the room back," Aaron told him.
"
They've been bugging the Dorances to move her stuff out. But Boyce put a seal on the door, then never got around to inspecting it. Course, we already know what a dumb schmuck he is."

They met in midtown, rode up to the Columbia campus together,
then separated at 114th Street, Aaron to continue his interviews with the Greg Gale group, Janek to check out Jess's room.

The dorm was a modern high rise. A moody female student with badly bitten nails and stringy, unwashed hair manned the lobby security desk alongside a grizzled campus cop. An oddly mismatched pair, they screened visitors and checked student IDs.

When Janek told the girl where he was going, she gave him a curious look.

"Kids've been getting pretty spooked around that room," she muttered.

While he waited for the elevator, Janek perused the dorm bulletin board. It was layered with notices that collectively demonstrated the richness (or perhaps, he thought, the poverty) of American college life: a lecture on Icelandic poetry; a rally for Palestinian rights; a black lesbian tea dance; a plea for information on faculty-student sexual harassment, anonymity promised to informants.

On the twelfth floor he paused before Jess's door. The corridor carried a blend of sounds issuing from adjoining rooms: students talking, laughing; TV shows; heavy metal rock; someone practicing a cello far down the hall. It was the sound of young Americans, and it filled Janek with a bitter pain. A week before, Jess had lived within this sound, had contributed to it. Now her silent room
spooked the other kids.

The room he entered was small, a virtual monk's cell, containing a narrow bed covered with an Indian blanket, a pair of matching bookcases crammed with books, and a clean white Formica desk with a laptop computer centered on its top. A small CD player and a pair of earphones she probably used late at night lay on a little table beside her bed.

Janek sat down on the bed. He wanted to feel comfortable, but he couldn't. He glanced at the walls, which spoke so strongly of Jess. Almost every spare inch was covered with items from her edged weapons collection: fencing foils; rapiers; swords; daggers; knives. It was an odd hobby for a girl, but Jess had clung to it since she was twelve. She had fallen in love with the romance of swordplay from the day he had taken her to a repertory movie house to see José Ferrer in
Cyrano de Bergerac.

"Thrust home, thrust home. . ." she had repeated afterward on the street, exuberant as she mimicked Cyrano's elegant lunge.

Restless on the bed, Janek moved to the bookcases, then knelt to inspect the titles. There were numerous volumes devoted to fencing and edged weapons and also martial arts, which Jess had taken up when she started college.

Janek remembered her words:
"
There's so much crime around there, Frank. All sorts of muggings and stuff. A lot of the kids are scared to walk alone, but I want to learn to take care of myself." He remembered the way she'd tossed her hair when she'd added:
"
I don't like walking around afraid."

He sat for a long time on the bed, waiting for something to happen. The walls, the books, swords and knives—he waited for them to speak, to tell him what had frightened her. When they stayed silent, he knew it was time to take the room apart.

He searched the dresser first. He wept as he touched her clothes: neatly folded pairs of jeans, sweaters, jerseys, shirts, underwear. Her workout clothes moved him most, perhaps, he thought, because they seemed so intimate; within these garments she had moved, run, perspired. He examined everything, turned out every pair of socks, patted down every T-shirt, all to no avail. Aside from a comb, some costume jewelry, a pack of condoms, and miscellaneous coins, he found nothing.

When he was finished with the dresser, he went to work on the closet, checking the dresses, placing them lovingly on the bed, then exploring the interior of every sneaker and shoe. Behind the shoes he found a set of chromed weights and, inexplicably, a bow and a quiver full of arrows. When he had the closet empty, he stepped into it and peered around. Just above the door he saw a piece of cardboard. It was taped to the wall.

He hesitated. Behind that cardboard she had hidden something. Did he have the right to intrude?

But his role now was not that of a respectful godfather; he was a detective investigating a murder. He reached up and pulled the cardboard free. Several photographs floated to the floor.

He stooped to pick them up. They were Polaroids. A series of four shots, they showed Jess and another girl, wearing fencing pantaloons but also unmasked, and, mysteriously, bare to the waist, fighting with sabers like duelists.

At first he couldn't bear to look at them. The exposure of Jess's flesh, the way her pert young breasts were pointed, their tips so eager and erect . . . he felt obliged to avert his eyes.

What the hell was going on with her? What the hell did she think she was doing?

She was playing some weird sort of game, he decided—perhaps some species of charades. Whatever it was it had shamed her or she wouldn't have hidden the pictures. But it had also meant something important to her or she wouldn't have bothered to keep them.

He wondered who had taken the photographs. Their existence implied an observer. Then he remembered that Polaroid cameras contain self-timers, so the camera could have been mounted on a tripod and set to fire off automatically.

What are these pictures about? Do they have anything to do with her call?

As much as he hated the thought, he knew he had to examine them. Sweat broke out on his forehead as he held them closer, searching their backgrounds for clues. They had been taken in an all-white high-ceilinged room. No windows showed, but something about the slant of light made him think the pictures had been taken very early in the day.

The other girl had pale skin, short jet black hair, and icy blue eyes.

Who was she? What did she mean to Jess? Why on God's earth are they both bare-breasted? Were they posing, clowning around? Or were they really fighting?

From the intensity of their expressions they appeared to be duelists. In one shot, in a corner of the room, he could make out their discarded jackets.

Why were they fighting, risking disfigurement and injury? Were they settling some kind of grudge? Daring each other? Showing bravery? Exciting each other by the ritual of combat?