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 killers, 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 the 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.
That 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 I 14th 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 Jos6 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
