He drew up a rough grid chart, showed it to Aaron, instructed him to get a police artist to paint it on their largest wall.
"And while he's in here with a brush," Janek said, pointing, "maybe he can do something about that crust."
He also assigned Aaron to talk to all the members of the Greg Gale group.
"Check them all out; get them alone; squeeze them hard. If you smell anything murderous or that smacks of a cult, let me know. But please keep the details of the fun and games to yourself. I'd just as soon not hear any more about Jess's sex life."
Aaron understood.
Janek had set himself another task. He taxied to La Guardia Airport, found a seat on the noon shuttle to Boston, then sat in the plane for an hour before it left the gate.
There were numerous announcements from the pilot: Air traffic was snarled up and down the eastern seaboard; half a foot of snow had fallen on Logan in Boston. Stewardesses prowled the cabin, offering tiny cellophane bags containing honey-roasted cashews. Then everyone was ordered off the plane. Then, suddenly, mysteriously, they all were ordered back on. And then, with undue haste it seemed to Janek, the plane reved up and took off with a roar.
When he reached Boston, it was nearly three o'clock Janek took one look at the taxi line, found his way to the subway, transferred at Park Street, and fifty minutes later got off at Harvard Square. Some helpful students guided him to the Law School, an immensely long building, where numerous assistant D.A.s of his acquaintance had, in their student days, undergone excruciating torture.
Janek appeared in the doorway of Dr. David Chun's second-floor office just as the psychiatrist, already in his overcoat, was stuffing file folders into a briefcase.
Chun was not pleased to see him. "You should have called, Lieutenant. Unfortunately I can't talk to you now. I'm going home before the snow gets too deep." "The snow stopped falling a couple hours ago, Doctor," Janek replied. "If you wait another hour, everthing'll be shoveled out."
Chun stared at him. "You know better than to show up here without an appointment. Please tell me why didn't you call."
"I didn't think you'd see me. So I came up anyway, took a chance."
Chun sat down. "Why didn't you think I'd see you?"
Janek sat, too. He'd gotten the psychiatrist's attention. Now all he had to do was hold it.
"You were upset down in Quantico. I had the feeling you wished Sullivan had never involved you in the case. Something frightens you about it, something you don't want to discuss. I need to hear you discuss it, Doctor. That's why I came."
Chun studied him. "You're different from Sullivan. You're a listener.
II try to be.
Chun thought a moment before he spoke. "Okay, Lieutenant, take a seat outside. I'll give my wife a call; then we'll talk."
When Chun came out, he was carrying his briefcase and still wearing his overcoat. Uh-oh, Janek thought, he's changed his mind. But Chun was no less anxious to talk; he just didn't want to do it in his office.
He guided Janek across Harvard Yard. Students were walking briskly on the freshly shoveled paths, and some freshmen were putting finishing touches on a snowman that bore a vague resemblance to Fidel Castro.
Janek watched while a rosy-cheeked girl in a white ski parka struck a piece of black wood into the effigy's mouth to simulate a cigar.
At Harvard Square the snow had turned to slush. A newsdealer hawked hometown papers. Chun led Janek 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.