Free Wallflower by William Bayer Page A

stabbing and gluing up a woman.
    Janek stood. "I don't know what to say to you. You messed around with my goddaughter's head. I'd like to think you couldn't help yourself, but still, it's hard to forgive. I'm not going to try. I think you've been honest with me. I appreciate that. No need to get up. I'll let myself out."
    But then, before he could turn, Gale stood up. He wanted to show Janek his photographs of Jess. Janek dreaded looking at them; he didn't want sordid images of her etched upon his mind. But he waited anyway while Gale dug the pictures out, and then he was surprised.
    Gale's photos were not posed tableaux like the mistress/slave picture over the fireplace. Rather, they were superb black-and-white action shots of Jess fencing in tournaments, en garde , thrusting, making parries and ripostes and lunge attacks against her opponents.
    He looked at them all carefully, admiring Gale's abilities as a photographer. Then he came upon a shot of Jess so fine, so powerful, he could not tear his eyes away. Gale had caught her just at the moment of a victory. Having scored, ripped off her mask, she met the gaze of his camera with a great broad, beaming grin of triumph.
    Gale watched him as he examined this picture. "Like it?" he asked. Janek nodded. "Take it. No, I mean it. I want you to have it." And before Janek could protest, Gale placed the print in a protective cover and presented it to him as a gift.
    Clutching this image of Jess as he rode back to his apartment, Janek knew, no matter what anyone said, that he would have to find out who had killed her. The little girl he had nurtured had grown into the magnificent woman in the photograph—and now she was dead. The wound this time was not just upon society, nor was it only upon Laura and Stanton. It was also upon himself, and it would not be closed for him until he had hunted her killer down.
    Oh, Jess, he thought . Jess.
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    T hat night, his second since his return from Europe, Janek finally got a full ration of sleep. But it was total exhaustion, not peace of mind, that closed his eyes. His last thought, before falling off, was that Jess seemed to have been at a crisis point at just the time she was killed. Was that significant or merely a coincidence? He posed the question, then collapsed into a spiral of fatigue.
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    I t was Laura Dorance who set up his appointment the following morning with Jess's shrink.
    Janek arrived before the first-floor office entrance of a converted two-story carriage house on East Eighty-first. He pressed the bell, gave his name to a disembodied voice, and was buzzed in. He found himself in a hall. Through an archway to his left there was a sparsely furnished waiting room. He entered, took a seat, thumbed through an old copy of Psychology Today, while a small radio, tuned at low volume to a classical station, yielded a gentle flow of Mozart.
    At precisely eleven o'clock Dr. Beverly Archer appeared in the doorway. A very short, fortyish butterball of a woman, she welcomed Janek with a sympathetic smile. Warm and friendly eyes, slightly rouged cheeks, curly, dull reddish hair, she had the kind of bland features one often associates with people in the mental health field. But her voice gave her away; it was throaty, low-pitched, intense.
    "Please come in, Lieutenant. I have forty minutes before my next appointment."
    He followed her into a comfortable consultation room. A desk, two easy chairs, an analyst's couch, and bookcases filled with psychiatric texts. On one wall hung a reproduction of Van Gogh's sunflowers; on the other, a cluster of diplomas.
    "Now what can I do for you?" Dr. Archer asked with a formal smile, after motioning him to one of the chairs.
    "I'm sure Mrs. Dorance told you—"
    "She said you were Jessica's godfather and that you're a New York City detective. But I must tell you from the start I'm most reluctant to discuss the contents of Jessica's sessions. Many people don't realize this, but the confidentiality