The Trophies
Janek repositioned himself against the soft white beach towel Monika had arranged upon the cushions of the chaise. It was not a tan he was after but heat. He wanted the sun to strike the center of his chest, wanted its dry hotness to enter his bared body and to spread.
Anything to drive away the chill within that made him tremble even now in the middle of this hot, windless December afternoon on the Isla de Cozumel.
The terrace where he lay exposed, naked except for a pair of green jungle-motif trunks Monika had bought for him at the airport, was just a few rock steps down from their came, perched sixty feet above the beach.
From where Janek lay he could see nothing except a line of palms clinging to the curving shore and a vast expanse of blue divided cleanly by the horizon. Below the line was placid cyan sea, above it serene azure sky, and not a whitecap or a cloud marred these seamless surfaces.
He turned to look at Monika. She lay topless on a matching chaise a few feet away, her oversize sunglasses on her nose, a German-language paperback open and face down on her belly. At first Janek thought she'd fallen off to sleep, but then he saw a smile spread slowly across her face.
'How're you doing?' he asked.
'Feeling dreamy,' she said. 'I love it here. How about you?'
'I'm definitely feeling warmer.'
'Well, you should. You need more sunscreen.' She rose, spread lotion onto her hands, came to him, and, standing behind, began to apply it slowly and evenly to his chest.
He gazed up at her. 'That's sexy.'
'It's meant to be.' She brushed her fingers lightly across his nipples. 'You're a very sexy man.'
'Thanks for saying that,' Janek said, 'but I don't feel very appetizing.
Pale, middle-aged, scarred…'
She spread the lotion very carefully over the wounds on his shoulder and his throat.
'You look good, Frank. A few days down here and you'll start feeling good, too. It may take time, but sooner or later your mind will catch up with your body.'
He glanced up at her again, then turned away, feeling tears rising involuntarily to his eyes. This had been happening regularly since the stabbing, and he hated himself for not being able to control it. He was glad he was wearing sunglasses; he didn't like to expose his vulnerability. But when he remembered that Monika had been with him in Venice when Kit had called and told him Jess was dead, he knew it was absurd to feel embarrassed with her. He pulled his glasses off.
'Either I feel cold and start to shake or else I tear up,' he said, turning so she could see his eyes. 'It's not because of pain or sadness, and certainly not remorse. I don't know why the hell it happens, Monika; but I don't like it, and I want it to stop.,, The police psychiatrist had told him the tears and shakes were delayed manifestations of stress. But there was a feeling that came with them, which he couldn't quite define. Monika wanted him,to let her help him explore it, but he felt he wasn't ready yet, that he had no words with which to express it. It was something dark that he had glimpsed which had entered his mind and gotten lost in the canyons of his brain and which now he feared because it made him feel cold or caused the tears to rise.
She made herself a place to sit beside him, then gently kissed his eyelids dry. Then she took his glasses and set them back on his face, carefully arranging the temples behind his ears.
'I never killed a woman before. Never even shot at one.
'You know gender isn't the issue, Frank.'
'A woman. It feels strange.'
'You're chivalrous.'
He smiled. 'I've only rarely been accused of that.'
'Oh, Frank…' She took his face between her palms.
'to kill a person even in self-defense-I understand how difficult it must be to live with that. And I know that no matter what Kit and Aaron say-that you had no choice, that surely she would have killed you if you hadn't killed her, that she was a sociopath, a murderer-I know none of that means anything so long as you're haunted. That's why we're here, to rest, talk, perhaps reorder all those terrible events. In the meantime, remember you're not tainted by your deed, not soiled by it in any way. But you are changed on account of it. So now your task is to come to terms with this new Frank that you are, to understand him and come to love him again.'
He took her hand. 'Thanks for saying that.'' 'I like being your lover-shrink. You know I do. Still, when the demons are within, only you can chase them out.' She paused. 'I love you. Please remember that.' He brought her hand to his lips.
'I won't forget.' they had come into his room during the week he was in the hospital, first Aaron, then Kit, then Aaron again, then Aaron and Kit together. On each visit they told him the story, rotating the puzzle so he could examine it from every side. But no matter how many different ways they told it, it always came out the same. The basic story, well constructed because they were excellent detectives, seemed to him wrong and incomplete. He listene to them, nodded, asked questions, and took in their answers, but in the end he told them that good as their story was, he was not going to buy it.
The facts were simple enough. The woman he had killed was named Diana Proctor. She was a librarian who paid a nominal rent to inhabit the basement apartment in Beverly Archer's house. Six years before, in Danbury, Connecticut, she had murdered three members of her family with an ax. Having been declared mentally incompetent, she'd been committed to Carlisle Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where, after five years of intensive treatment under Beverly's supervision, the entire hospital staff, led by its director, Dr. Carl Drucker, determined that she had made a full recovery and lobbied vigorously for her release.
On this matter of the release there was an important point. Hospital records showed, and Dr. Drucker verified, that Beverly Archer had not been in favor of setting Diana Proctor free. Diana wasn't ready yet, she had written; perhaps a few more years of therapy were indicated. But the rest of the staff was convinced of her recovery, so in the end Beverly reluctantly went along.
The girl seemed to function well in the city. She obtained a part-time job at the New York Society Library on East Seventy-ninth Street, where coworkers described her as congenial and her work as exemplary. She lived quietly in Dr. Archer's basement, undergoing sessions four times a week. She also joined the West Side Academy of Karate at Broadway and I 10th Street, where she became an accomplished martial artist. It was there that she met Jess Foy.
Other students at the academy described them as friends. And it was Diana who referred Jess to Archer when Jess asked her to recommend a therapist. In addition, it turned out that Diana was the so-called English girl in the fencing photograph Janek had found taped to the wall of Jess's closet. She was the owner, too, of the bow and arrows Janek had tracked down through the Salvation Army.
Mr. Yukio Katsakura, the sensei at the academy, described a violent match the two girls had fought in a private upstairs room the week that Jess was stabbed. The reason he hadn't mentioned this to Aaron, When he was interviewed early in the investigation, was that when he inquired about it, both women had smiled gaily and shrugged it off.
Katsakura had assumed they'd just gotten carried away, a not infrequent occurrence among young, well- motivated fighters.
One could only speculate as to why Diana had killed Jess. Possibly she became jealous of her friend, who was a superior athlete and martial artist and who she may have believed was favored by their therapist. Beverly herself theorized that Diana had made erotic overtures to Jess and, upon being rebuffed, had acted out her fury. But whatever Diana's rationale, the murderous act was part of the same insanity that had led her to slaughter her relatives one horrible Sunday morning six years before.
It was the Archer connection to three of the other victim clusters (Bertha Parce; Cynthia Morse the MacDonald brothers) that struck Janek as the story's most peculiar feature. As best the detectives were able to reconstruct, Diana became so obsessed with her therapist that when Beverly was asleep, Diana rummaged through her papers and came up with these victims' names. Then, out of some strange, twisted, perhaps jealousy-driven madness, she methodically located them, flew to where they lived, executed them, and glued their genitals, always leaving her wallflower signature behind.
There was no question that Diana thought of herself as a wallflower. She had described herself that way
