Wallflower (18 page)

"But there's still a chance on the bow and arrows," Sergeant Hunter told him as he led Janek rapidly down a long corridor lit by naked bulbs past cages filled with donations. The whole place smelled like a dry cleaning establishment. The sergeant's dog, an overweight dachshund named Clarence, scampered ahead. Hunter, dragging one foot behind him, strove mightily to keep up.

"We've got rooms here filled with anything you'd ever need," Hunter said. The sergeant had bloodshot eyes, wild hair, and a ragged gray-streaked beard. "We've got a room of shoes, a room of crutches, a room of old dentist's equipment. We got pots and pans, lawn mower parts, old chemistry and Erector sets." Hunter rattled off other types of items processed at the warehouse: pinball machines; waffle irons; bathroom scales. "Would you believe we've even got a cage here filled with discarded artificial limbs? Strange maybe, but think about it. A guy loses his leg, say, in the war, and the vet hospital fits him out with a spare. Then he dies. So what does his widow do? Bury it with him is one possibility. Another is she calls us up. 'Can't stand looking at it,' she cries. 'Get it out of here.' And we take it, the way we take darn near anything. 'For every pot there's a top'—that's what my mother used to say."

The weapons room was not a cage. It had a solid door. "Don't want just anyone nosing around in here," Hunter said, working a key inside the outsize padlock while Clarence, the dachshund, dribbled saliva over Janek's shoes.

There were no actual guns inside the weapons room, though there were plenty of toy models and realistic replicas. The array of other weaponry was fascinating, ranging from the kinds of sticks with nail points used to clean up parks to a huge wooden sword with the word "Excalibur" burned into its blade. In between there was a hoard of tomahawks and African-style spears, assorted clubs,
maces, cudgels, blackjacks and shillelaghs, sundry bomb and mine casings, numerous darts, slingshots, catapults, boomerangs, brass knuckles sets, and, in one corner, a homemade guillotine.

The archery equipment was positioned against one wall. Gazing at the crossbows, longbows, competition bows, and myriad quivers filled with arrows all bunched together in a vertical pile, Janek wondered how he'd manage to recognize the equipment that had belonged to Jess. He'd barely glanced at the bow when he'd discovered it in her closet and tossed it with the quiver into the pile of clothing on her bed.

But there was one important thing he did remember about it: The gear had seemed almost new. Scanning the bows before him, he reached for the one that appeared the least scuffed up. He pulled it out and examined it. The name
DIANA
was scrawled in blue grease pencil on the inside curve just above the handle. The handwriting didn't resemble Jess's, but the bow had an elegant feel to it that made him think it was the right one. He set it aside and knelt to examine the quivers.

He rejected ones made of wood or hide. The one he'd held that night had been aluminum. There were three of these, all relatively unsoiled. He took all three and emptied them out onto the floor, being careful to keep the arrows of each in separate piles. Then, with Hunter standing behind him and the dog, Clarence, sputtering through slobbering chops, he inspected each arrow, many of which were tipped with extremely sharp points, and, when he had done that, the interior of each quiver. Finding nothing, he turned the quivers over. On the bottom of the first he found
DIANA
written in the same blue cursive script. He stuffed its arrows back inside.

"
This is it," he said, looking up at Hunter.

The sergeant shook his head, incredulous.
"
Got to congratulate you. All the years I worked in this dump, you're the first guy came around looking for something he gave away and ended up finding it." He pointed to his dog, vigorously wagging its tail.
"
See, even Clarence is amazed."

D
iana:
It was only later on the Brooklyn Bridge, driving back to Manhattan, that Janek thought of Diana, the huntress, twin sister to Apollo, virgin goddess of the moon, usually depicted holding a bow.

What difference did the archery stuff make anyway? he asked himself. And the moment he asked the answer came to him like a blow. It was not that he'd forgotten to look inside the quiver that had kept him up the night before. It was the word connection between Jess's possessing a bow and arrow and the name of her therapist:
Archer.

"O
h
, she
is
a piece of work is Dr.
Beverly Archer," Aaron said, shaking his head.

He read to Janek from his notes, compiled after five days of investigation and surveillance, as they sat together in their office, the grid on the wall nearly filled in now with the activities of Jess's final days.

"
You've been to her house, Frank. You know the routine. No receptionist. Patients ring and get buzzed in. Two doors to her office, one to the waiting room, the other opening directly to the front hall. That way nobody sees anybody, conventional practice in therapeutic circles. But maybe there's more to it here. Maybe this one doesn't want people to notice something not so conventional, from what I understand. Get this: All her patients are young women."

"
No guys?"

"
Just females."

"
Interesting," Janek said.
"
Tell me more."

"
She owns the building, lives in the apartment upstairs, rents the basement to a young woman, a librarian. I'd say the good doctor leads a tight, constricted life. All day long she sees patients. First appointment eight in the morning, last six at night. They all go in looking anxious and come out looking kind of dazed. Know
what I mean, Frank? Glassy-eyed, smiling, but the smile's the shit-eating kind, like they're all wrapped up in themselves, their dear little egos so nicely massaged and all. Whatever she does to them in there, they all look like they feel better afterwards. Then, when the last one leaves, she waits a few minutes, comes out to do her errands. Usual stuff around the neighborhood—shoemaker, dry cleaner, grocery store, that kind of crap. And that's it. She's out for maybe half an hour; then she's back inside. Lights go off downstairs. Lights come on upstairs. Nine-thirty or ten, upstairs lights go off, too. And there she is, locked in, snug as a bug in a rug. No social life, no dates, no friends I can find out about. Her work is her life. It's girls all day long. Except for two other interesting little things she does."

Janek knew how fond Aaron was of turning reports into sagas. He used all the tricks of the tale-teller's trade: asides; digressions; embellishments; authorial opinions. Best of all, he liked to evoke questions. So Janek asked him one:
"
What two other interesting little things does she do?"

Aaron smiled. "Tuesday nights she teaches a class in ' Problems of the Adolescent and Post-Adolescent Female' at the Eisenberg Psychoanalytic Institute in Chelsea. I checked the place out; it's a reputable institution, no quack joint. They train laypeople, mostly Ph.D.'s, who want to be professional analytic-oriented therapists."

"And the second thing?"

"That's the goody. Thursday mornings she's picked up by a car service, then driven out to a hospital called Carlisle in Derby, Connecticut. She's a one-day-a-week consultant out there. It's a special kind of hospital, Frank—a hospital for the criminally insane." Aaron tongued his lips to show how much he relished this juicy bit of information.

"So, an austere life devoted to work. That can be a rewarding way to live," Janek observed.

"So I hear, though I haven't tried it myself. But you were right, Frank. There
is
something about her. Maybe it's the expression on her face when she doesn't think anyone's looking. Lonely, desperate, tense, maybe even—"

"What?"

"I don't know." Aaron shrugged. "Angry. . . ."

He handed Janek her curriculum vitae and a photocopy of a professional paper she'd written for
The Review of Psychology.

"I can't make head or tail out of it. Maybe you'll have better luck," he said.

Janek glanced at the CV. The first line in the personal background section sent a clarifying wave crashing across his brain: "Place of birth: Cleveland, Ohio, 5/6/50."

T
hat night Janek read Archer's paper. He found it intelligent, coherent, and unusually compelling. In it she described three female patients: "Alice," "Wilma," and "Ginny." All three were in their early twenties, and each was tormented by an obsessive fixation upon what Archer called a "shaming incident," a traumatizing event in the girl's past that had inspired great shame and humiliation.

The patient Alice, a blond athlete from an affluent suburban family, could not go an hour without remembering in vivid detail the gloating expression on her younger sister's face while she, Alice, then ten years old, had been severely spanked by their mother for an act the younger sister had actually committed.

Alice was so obsessed with that injustice and the shame aroused by the witnessed punishment that she could barely function as a college student, often losing all concentration, once even in the middle of a final exam.

After describing the crippling effect of this memory, Archer went on to describe the treatment she had devised. This consisted of provoking the girl into emotionally reliving the shaming experience in all its humiliating aspects, but with the novel difference that in the reenactment the outcome for Alice was triumphant. This time, under Archer's guidance, Alice was able to "reread" the expression on her sister's face. This time it was not gloating that she saw but shame and deep remorse. Thus, by rewriting the script, encouraging Alice to devise a new ending in which she would
emerge victorious, Archer had managed to vitiate the destructive power of the memory and even to assist Alice in increasing her sense of personal confidence and self-respect.

After describing two similar cases, Archer held out hope for patients traumatized by early shame. Though a successful treatment could not be guaranteed, the therapist was encouraged to be as creative as possible in devising ways wherein the patient could work through the insult to her ego.

"Above all else," Archer wrote in the conclusion of her paper, "
we therapists must never underestimate the debilitating effects and the haunting power of early shaming incidents. Often patients will carry the burden of such incidents as baggage through their lives, baggage, moreover, that possesses the surrealistic quality of becoming increasingly heavy as the patient ages. Eventually, unless a cure is effected, the load may become so heavy that the patient will suffer terrifying stress or even break down totally beneath its crushing weight."

A
aron, wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts, stood at the far end of the office, nursing himself from a mug of coffee. It was early the following morning. A cold rain, which had fallen overnight, had frozen on the ground, creating sufficient ice to turn the sidewalks into bobsled tracks.

"Tell me about it, Frank," Aaron urged. "Let's see what you got."

Janek, perched on the corner of his desk, spread his arms. "I've got nothing, absolutely nothing. You know that."

"So tell me about nothing. Worst I can do is laugh in your face."

"It involves a number of leaps," Janek said.

Aaron bit off the end of a jelly roll. "Go ahead," he said. Leap."

Janek nodded. He stood and began to pace. "Two days before she was killed Jess tried to get in touch with me. Something was troubling her. About the same time she told her best friend she wanted to quit seeing her shrink." He turned to Aaron. "Leap number one: It was the shrink she wanted to talk to me about."

"Could be," Aaron said, biting off the center section of his roll. "I'll buy that. Go on."

Janek resumed pacing.
"
Jess was never involved with archery, but she had an unused archery set in her closet. Her shrink's name is Archer. Leap number two: The archery set's somehow connected to the shrink."

"Farfetched but. . ." Aaron made a wave motion with his hand. "Interesting," he conceded. "So far I got nothing to laugh at."

Janek nodded. "Try this. When Sullivan put his high-powered FBI computer to work on the Happy Families crimes, the only victim connection it came up with was that two of the people were from Cleveland. Now it turns out Archer's from Cleveland, too."

"So?"

"It starts to add up. I think Archer's involved. I think she did something or she knows something she's not telling. I think she found out Jess saw or suspected something about her and—"

"You think she's the Happy Families killer?"

Janek shrugged. "Well, I wouldn't go that far. Not yet."

Aaron gulped down the rest of his roll. "Now you've done it, Frank. That's a real stretch. Wanna know what I think?" Janek nodded. "It doesn't jell."

"Of course, it doesn't jell."

"So let's talk about it."

"
It's impossible. I'm the first to admit that. This tiny fat lady, forty years old—she couldn't possibly break into all those houses, murder all those people. She doesn't have the strength to be a stabbing machine. She may have the hatred, but she doesn't have the guts. The Cleveland connection—that's meaningless, too, because, among other things, only two of the victims are tied together that way. Then there're other dangles, like why would she want to glue their genitals, and what's the meaning of the weeds, and what could Jess have possibly seen, and how could tubby little Archer get in and out so fast, so clean, never seen by anyone, slick without a trace. And I guess the biggest dangle is how could a
trained psychologist with a full practice and a respectable career, who consults a day a week at a hospital for the criminally insane—how could such a person possibly be an insane killer herself? She's a healer, right? She specializes in helping young women traumatized by shaming events, right?" Janek paused.
"
So it's impossible—right?"