Wallflower

sexual fantasies' about Jess. Second time I put on some stress, and suddenly I started picking up on her anger. She's good at concealing, but the rage shows through, which tells me how strong it must be inside. She gives me a plausible but phony explanation as to why Jess may have wanted to quit on her, a lot of brilliant but tortured analysis about the fencing incident, and some strange stuff about a good hiding place being an irrevocable hiding place-whatever the hell that means. I don't know what the bottom line is on her, Aaron, but something about her isn't right.'

Aaron picked up a jelly roll. 'She's weird, Frank. Ever meet a shrink who wasn't? You don't think she's the Happy Families killer, do you?'

He shook his head. 'How could she be? But still… I don't see Jess relating to a person like that.'

Aaron put down his cup. 'I know what you're thinking.'

'What am I thinking?'

'That maybe the feds didn't conceal their case all that well. Maybe it leaked out. This guy Chun-he's a shrink. So maybe he spilled to another shrink, and Archer heard about it through the grapevine and did a copycat job on Jess.'

Janek smiled. 'Swear to God, Aaron-I never thought of that. But now that you bring it up Aaron nodded. 'Yeah, Frank-I'll check the little lady out.'

Laura Dorance couldn't remember who referred Jess to Dr. Archer. 'I think it was one of her friends,' she said.

But when Janek called around, none of Jess's friends would admit to having made the referral.

That night, as he walked home from the subway, he noticed an unshaven man in a seedy suit lingering near the front door of his building. As he approached, the man stared at him.

'Janek?'

Janek stared back. 'Who's asking?'

The man unclenched his hand. He'd been holding an old newspaper clipping. He showed it to Janek. It was a picture taken at the time of the Switch trial. Oh-oh, Janek thought.

'It's you, isn't it?' The man's breath stank of cabbage. There was dandruff on his shoulders.

'So what?' Janek said.

'You guys work long hours. I've been waiting here since five.

As the man put his hand into his pocket, Janek tensed, reached beneath his jacket, gripped the handle of his Colt. But when he saw the paper with the blue legal backing, he relaxed and let go of his gun.

'I am serving you, Lieutenant,' the man said, offering Janek the document.

Janek snapped it out of his hand. One look told him what it was. He stared at the man with disgust.

'Great business you're in.'

'Hey, don't take it out on me, fella! Just doing my job.'

Janek brushed by him and entered his building. Inside his apartment he sat down and read the document. It was notice that a lawsuit had been filed by the firm of Streep amp; Holster on behalf of its client, one Clarence 'Rusty' Glickman, wherein Glickman alleged unlawful assault resulting in severe physical and psychological injury, for which he demanded a jury trial and one million dollars' damages.

Janek didn't sleep well that night. Somethingsomething he'd seen that could be important-nagged at him. Unable to recall what it was, he flopped from side to side in torment.

At two in the morning he remembered and sat up: The arrows! Iforgot to look inside the quiver!

The next morning he phoned Laura and asked her if she'd saved it.

'A bow and arrow set-I don't remember anything like that.'

'It was in her dorm-room closet.'

'I never saw it. I couldn't even bear to go up to her room. When you called and told, us it was all right to move out her stuff, Stanton went up there to collect her swords. He's put them out on consignment with a dealer. We decided to give away the rest of her things. Stanton phoned the Salvation Army. they sent over a truck.'

'Do you happen to know if Stanton turned up an ivory-handled switchblade knife?'

Laura asked him to hold while she checked Stanton's list. A minute later she was back.

'Lots of knives but no switchblade. Sorry, Frank.'

The Salvation Army sorted its pickups at its general warehouse in Brooklyn. Once inside the building, bulk donations were broken up.

Toys went to one floor, furniture to another, clothing to a third, etc.

Items such as archery equipment, unsuitable for general sale, were relegated to a special area.

By the time Janek found a friendly sergeant willing to help him, the bulk of Jess's stuff had long been sorted and shipped back out of the building, distributed to various sales outlets in and around the city.

'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 dam 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, her 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.'

Diana: 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