process.'
'So I shouldn't make too much of it?'
'You may make of it whatever you like,' the psychologist replied, rising. On their way to the door she turned to him again. 'Have you given any thought to what I said last time?' Janek nodded. 'I thought about it.'-' 'And dismissed it out of hand?'
'Not at all. But after I thought about it awhile, I decided you were wrong.'
Archer grinned. 'You work in a most dangerous and stressful field, Lieutenant. There's bound to be some distortion in your view of things.'
Janek smiled. 'Think I could use some therapy, Doctor?'
Her grin widened. 'We can all use therapy, Lieutenant. In your case I'd say it certainly wouldn't hurt.' they both chuckled over that. Then at the door Janek thanked her for her time. 'I hope we can talk again.'
The therapist nodded. 'Anytime, Lieutenant. Just give me a call. I shall always try to fit you in.'
That evening Janek took a long walk. Leaving his apartment at six o'clock, when the rush-hour traffic was just at its crest, he headed up Broadway to merge with the throngs still surging out of the subways. On his route he passed stores offering high- and low-fashion gar ments; markets offering sturgeon and pastrami; Chinese, Turkish, Lebanese, and Ethiopian restaurants; bars catering to gays and transvestites; panhandlers; dope dealers; homeless people living in cardboard boxes; old people sitting on benches; and aggressive young people on the make.
By the time he reached the Columbia University campus, he felt he had confronted a cross section of the human condition.
At 114th Street he turned into Riverside Park. Although it was a chilly November night, the joggers were out in force. He didn't see many lone runners; press and TV coverage about Jess was still in the public mind. But as he walked farther uptown, the number dwindled off, until, north of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, there were none at all.
It was a basic principle of his trade that the first step in any investigation was to go to the crime scene and get a feeling for the place. Since he and Aaron had taken over the case from Boyce, he had been putting such a visit off. Now, approaching the spot where Jess's body had been dragged off the jogging path, he felt his heartheat quicken.
The streetlamps were on, but in the long, narrow strip of parkland the foliage was dense and the shadows were deep. Despite the darkness, it didn't take him long to find the spot. Orange-tipped police stakes caught the ambient light cast by cars racing above on Riverside Drive. And then he was surprised. There were a good dozen bunches of flowers, mostly dfied up but all the more poignant for being so, arranged along the bottom row of stones of an old retaining wall just behind the site. Stubs of candles were set there, too, in little hardened pools of melted wax. People had heard that a fine young woman had died in this place; they had been moved, had come and left tangible evidence of their caring. So now in the underbrush, amidst the jettisoned Coke cans and discarded sandwich wrappers, a small shrine had been erected at the Scene of Suffering. It would last until the first heavy snow.
The glue: Janek was obsessed by it. The ice picks were bad enough; they didn't reflect the caring of a knife, the quick dispatch of a bullet, the hatred of a poison. Leaving the picks embedded was bad, too. You didn't bother to use something fine to take your victim's life; you used a throwaway. Like eating your dinner off a paper plate or drinking your wine from a Styrofoam cup, it was a way of showing your contempt.
But the glue was worse; the glue was truly awful. Janek had investigated many homicides in which victims had been bound. He'd seen handcuffs and rope burns and even barbed wire cutting into flesh. He'd seen his share of mutilations, too: cuts, slices, and, in the Switch Case, actual dismemberment, decapitation. But glue was different. Glue was made of animal wastes, old bones and hooves boiled down to a viscous jelly. Glue was what you used to stick pieces of wood together, not to bind the parts of a human being. Glue said: 'I don't desecrate by cutting; I'm not a psychotic acting out my rage.' Glue said: 'I'm cool, patient. I go about my chosen task the way an undertaker goes about his. I'm neat and careful and whistle a merry tune as I seal up people's body cavities.'
Janek thought he hated this killer more than any killer he had ever sought, not only because the man had taken the life of a person he had loved but also because he had done so with such dehumanizing scorn.
He was watching the late-evening news, trying to concentrate on an awful story about a ten-year-old boy set on fire because he refused to buy crack from a school bully, when his telephone rang. It was Monika calling with wonderful news. She would be coming through New York in three weeks' time, en route to a psychiatrists' conference in San Francisco.
'I hope you're planning to stay awhile,' Janek said.
'Can I take that as an invitation?'
'You bet you can! How much time can you give me?'
'Two or three days. Maybe a couple more on my way home.'
That wasn't very much, but it was better than nothing. 'How about a couple of years?' he asked. Monika laughed. 'Why don't you come out to San Francisco with me?'
'Sure. And take a little room down the hall so the chambermaids won't get any funny ideas.'
As they talked, he picked up the glass she'd given him, angled it so it caught the light.
'Maybe I ought to join you in Frisco,' he said. 'I've been spending so much time with shrinks lately I'm sure I'd feel right at home.'
Monika was intrigued by his account of his meeting with Dr. Chun but was skeptical about something Dr. Archer had said.
'It's true,' she told him, 'that a patient who wants to leave therapy can be acting out against an analyst who reminds her of a difficult figure in her life. But your goddaughter wasn't in treatment long enough to develop that kind of strong transference relationship.'
'How long would it take?' Janek asked.
'Several months at least.'
'Can you think of any other reason why Jess may have wanted to quit?'
'There could have been a lot of reasons. Anxiety caused by her therapy or a personal dislike for her therapist. I lost a patient once because he saw me unexpectedly in a nightclub.'
'What was so bad about that?'
'Normally nothing. But this man idealized me. When he saw me dancing with my husband in a sexy environment, he was thrown into such turmoil he couldn't relate to me any longer as his analyst.'
'You say he saw you. Did you see him, too?'
'Yes, our eyes met,' she said.
'How did you react?'
'I smiled at him.'
'Ever occur to you he might have followed you to the nightclub?'
She laughed. 'I never thought of that.'
'It could make all the difference,' he said. 'to me the question is did he quit therapy because he saw you or because you saw him?'
'And therein,' Monika said, laughing, 'must lie the difference between a detective and an analyst.'
Later he asked her if she thought Archer had deliberately misled him.
'I have no way of knowing,' she said, 'but her acting-out explanation strikes me as glib.' 'Well, suppose Jess ran into her unexpectedly at the knife show? Something happened there that changed her mood. But why would seeing Archer shake her up?'
'How did Jess'feel about knives?' 'She was passionate about them.'
'Well, then, that could have been it,' Monika said. 'Suddenly there was her analyst infringing on her territory. But it's all conjecture, isn't it?'
'It always is,' Janek agreed.
The next morning, over breakfast with Aaron at a Greek coffee shop around the corner from the Police Property Building, Janek described Dr.
Archer.
'Tiny woman, built like a butterball, kindly smile, bland, self-effacing voice, a little fussy, a little too precise about time. But when I stoke her up, she turns difficult. Doesn't want to answer questions, wants to ask them. The end of our first interview she tried to turn things around, make me think I was probing because I had 'unconscious
