Graham could hear traffic in the distance, and far away he heard a beagle on a case. A cicada started its numbing bandsaw buzz and drowned out the other sounds.
A thick limb just above him joined the trunk at a right angle to the Jacobi house. He pulled himself up until he could see, and leaned around the trunk to look at it.
Close by his cheek a soft-drink can was wedged between the limb and the trunk.
“I love it,” Graham whispered into the bark. “Oh sweet Jesus yes. Come on, can.”
Still, a child might have left it.
He climbed higher on his side of the tree, dicey work on small branches, and moved around until he could look down on the big limb.
A patch of outer bark on the upper side of the limb was shaved away, leaving a field of green inner bark the size of a playing card. Centered in the green rectangle, carved through to the white wood, Graham saw this:
It was done carefully and cleanly with a very sharp knife. It was not the work of a child.
Graham photographed the mark, carefully bracketing his exposures.
The view from the big limb was good, and it had been improved: The stub of a small branch jutted down from the limb above. It had been clipped off to clear the view. The fibers were compressed and the end slightly flattened in the cutting.
Graham looked for the severed branch. If it had been on the ground, he would have seen it. There, tangled in the limbs below, brown withered leaves amid the green foliage.
The laboratory would need both sides of the cut in order to measure the pitch of the cutting edges. That meant coming back here with a saw. He made several photographs of the stub. All the while he mumbled to himself.
I think that after you killed the cat and threw it into the yard, my man, you climbed up here and waited. I think you watched the children and passed the time whittling and dreaming. When night came, you saw them passing their bright windows and you watched the shades go down, and you saw the lights go out one by one. And after a while you climbed down and went in to them. Didn’t you? It wouldn’t be too hard a climb straight down from the big limb with a flashlight and the bright moon rising.
It was a hard enough climb for Graham. He stuck a twig into the opening of the soft-drink can, gently lifted it from the crotch of the tree, and descended, holding the twig in his teeth when he had to use both hands.
Back at the housing project, Graham found that someone had written “Levon is a doo-doo head” in the dust on the side of his car. The height of the writing indicated that even the youngest residents were well along in literacy.
He wondered if they had written on the Tooth Fairy’s car.
Graham sat for a few minutes looking up at the rows of windows. There appeared to be about a hundred units. It was possible that someone might remember a white stranger in the parking lot late at night. Even though a month had passed, it was well worth trying. To ask every resident, and get it done quickly, he would need the help of the Birmingham police.
He fought the temptation to send the drink can straight to Jimmy Price in Washington. He had to ask the Birmingham police for manpower. It would be better to give them what he had. Dusting the can would be a straightforward job. Trying for fingerprints etched by acid sweat was another matter. Price could still do it after Birmingham dusted, as long as the can wasn’t handled with bare fingers. Better give it to the police. He knew the FBI document section would fall on the carving like a rabid mongoose. Pictures of that for everybody, nothing lost there.
He called Birmingham Homicide from the Jacobi house. The detectives arrived just as the Realtor, Geehan, was ushering in his prospective buyers.
11
Eileen was reading a National Tattler article called “Filth in Your Bread!” when Dolarhyde came into the cafeteria. She had eaten only the filling in her tuna-salad sandwich.
Behind the red goggles Dolarhyde’s eyes zigged down the front page of the Tattler. Cover lines in addition to “Filth in Your Bread!” included “Elvis at Secret Love Retreat—Exclusive Pix!!” “Stunning Breakthrough for Cancer Victims!” and the big banner line “Hannibal the Cannibal Helps Lawmen—Cops Consult Fiend in ‘Tooth Fairy’ Murders.”
He stood at the window absently stirring his coffee until he heard Eileen get up. She dumped her tray in the trash container and was about to throw in the Tattler when Dolarhyde touched her shoulder.
“May I have that paper, Eileen?”
“Sure, Mr. D. I just get it for the horoscopes.”
Dolarhyde read it in his office with the door closed.
Freddy Lounds had two bylines in the same double-page center spread. The main story was a breathless reconstruction of the Jacobi and Leeds murders. Since the police had not divulged many of the specifics, Lounds consulted his imagination for lurid details.
Dolarhyde found them banal.
The sidebar was more interesting:
INSANE FIEND CONSULTED IN MASS MURDERS
BY COP HE TRIED TO KILL
by Freddy Lounds
Baltimore, MD.—Federal manhunters, stymied in their search for the “Tooth Fairy,” psychopathic slayer of entire families in Birmingham and Atlanta, have turned to the most savage killer in captivity for help.
Dr. Hannibal Lecter, whose unspeakable practices were reported in these pages three years ago, was consulted this week in his maximum-security-asylum cell by ace investigator William (Will) Graham.
Graham suffered a near-fatal slashing at Lecter’s hands when he unmasked the mass murderer.
He was brought back from early retirement to spearhead the hunt for the “Tooth Fairy.”
What went on in this bizarre meeting of two mortal enemies? What was Graham after?
“It takes one to catch one,” a high federal official told this reporter. He was referring to Lecter, known as “Hannibal the Cannibal,” who is both a psychiatrist and a mass murderer.
OR WAS HE REFERRING TO GRAHAM???
The Tattler has learned that Graham, former instructor in forensics at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., was once confined to a mental institution for a period of four weeks. . . .
Federal officials refused to say why they placed a man with a history of mental instability at the forefront of a desperate manhunt.
The nature of Graham’s mental problem was not revealed, but one former psychiatric worker called it “deep depression.”
Garmon Evans, a paraprofessional formerly employed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, said Graham was admitted to the psychiatric wing soon after he killed Garrett Jacob Hobbs, the “Minnesota Shrike.” Graham shot Hobbs to death in 1975, ending Hobbs’s eight-month reign of terror in Minneapolis.
Evans said Graham was withdrawn and refused to eat or speak during the first weeks of his stay.
Graham has never been an FBI agent. Veteran observers attribute this to the Bureau’s strict screening procedures, designed to detect instability.
Federal sources would reveal only that Graham originally worked in the FBI crime laboratory and was assigned teaching duties at the FBI Academy after outstanding work both in the laboratory and in the field, where he served as a “special investigator.”
The Tattler learned that before his federal service, Graham was in the homicide division of the New Orleans police department, a post he left to attend graduate school in forensics at George Washington University.
One New Orleans officer who served with Graham commented, “Well, you can call him retired, but the feds like to know he’s around. It’s like having a king snake under the house. They may not see him much, but it’s nice to know he’s there to eat the moccasins.”
Dr. Lecter is confined for the rest of his life. If he is ever declared sane, he will have to stand trial on nine counts of first-degree murder.
Lecter’s attorney says the mass murderer spends his time writing useful articles for the scientific journals and has an “ongoing dialogue” by mail with some of the most respected figures in psychiatry.
Dolarhyde stopped
reading and looked at the pictures. There were two of them above the sidebar. One showed Lecter pinned against the side of a state trooper’s car. The other was the picture of Will Graham taken by Freddy Lounds outside the Baltimore State Hospital. A small photograph of Lounds ran beside each of his bylines.
Dolarhyde looked at the pictures for a long time. He ran the tip of his forefinger over them slowly, back and forth, his touch exquisitely sensitive to the rough newsprint. Ink left a smudge on his fingertip. He wet the smudge with his tongue and wiped it off on a Kleenex. Then he cut out the sidebar and put it in his pocket.
On his way home from the plant, Dolarhyde bought toilet paper of the quick-dissolving kind used in boats and campers, and a nasal inhaler.
He felt good despite his hay fever; like many people who have undergone extensive rhinoplasty, Dolarhyde had no hair in his nose and hay fever plagued him. So did upper respiratory infections.
When a stalled truck held him up for ten minutes on the Missouri River bridge to St. Charles, he sat patiently. His black van was carpeted, cool and quiet. Handel’s Water Music played on the stereo.
He rippled his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music and dabbed at his nose.
Two women in a convertible were in the lane beside him. They wore shorts and blouses tied across the midriff. Dolarhyde looked down into the convertible from his van. They seemed tired and bored squinting into the lowering sun. The woman on the passenger side had her head against the seat back and her feet on the dash. Her slumped posture made two creases across her bare stomach. Dolarhyde could see a suck mark on the inside of her thigh. She caught him looking, sat up and crossed her legs. He saw weary distaste in her face.
She said something to the woman at the wheel. Both looked straight ahead. He knew they were talking about him. He was so glad it did not make him angry. Few things made him angry anymore. He knew that he was developing a becoming dignity.
The music was very pleasant.
The traffic in front of Dolarhyde began to move. The lane beside him was still stalled. He looked forward to getting home. He tapped the wheel in time with the music and rolled down the window with his other hand.
He hawked and spit a blob of green phlegm into the lap of the woman beside him, hitting her just beside the navel. Her curses sounded high and thin over the Handel as he drove away.
Dolarhyde’s great ledger was at least a hundred years old. Bound in black leather with brass corners, it was so heavy a sturdy machine table supported it in the locked closet at the top of the stairs. From the moment he saw it at the bankruptcy sale of an old St. Louis printing company, Dolarhyde knew it should be his.
Now, bathed and in his kimono, he unlocked the closet and rolled it out. When the book was centered beneath the painting of the Great Red Dragon, he settled himself in a chair and opened it. The smell of foxed paper rose to his face.
Across the first page, in large letters he had illuminated himself, were the words from Revelation: “And There Came a Great Red Dragon Also . . .”
The first item in the book was the only one not neatly mounted. Loose between the pages was a yellowed photograph of Dolarhyde as a small child with his grandmother on the steps of the big house. He is holding to Grandmother’s skirt. Her arms are folded and her back is straight.
Dolarhyde turned past it. He ignored it as though it had been left there by mistake.
There were many clippings in the ledger, the earliest ones about the disappearances of elderly women in St. Louis and Toledo. Pages between the clippings were covered with Dolarhyde’s writing—black ink in a fine copperplate script not unlike William Blake’s own handwriting.
Fastened in the margins, ragged bits of scalp trailed their tails of hair like comets pressed in God’s scrap-book.
The Jacobi clippings from Birmingham were there, along with film cartridges and slides set in pockets glued to the pages.
So were stories on the Leedses, with film beside them.
The term “Tooth Fairy” had not appeared in the press until Atlanta. The name was marked out in all the Leeds stories.
Now Dolarhyde did the same with his Tattler clipping, obliterating “Tooth Fairy” with angry slashes of a red marker pen.
He turned to a new, blank page in his ledger and trimmed the Tattler clipping to fit. Should Graham’s picture go in? The words “Criminally Insane” carved in the stone above Graham offended Dolarhyde. He hated the sight of any place of confinement. Graham’s face was closed to him. He set it aside for the time being.
But Lecter . . . Lecter. This was not a good picture of the doctor. Dolarhyde had a better one, which he fetched from a box in his closet. It was published upon Lecter’s committal and showed the fine eyes. Still, it was not satisfactory. In Dolarhyde’s mind, Lecter’s likeness should be the dark portrait of a Renaissance prince. For Lecter, alone among all men, might have the sensitivity and experience to understand the glory, the majesty of Dolarhyde’s Becoming.
Dolarhyde felt that Lecter knew the unreality of the people who die to help you in these things—understood that they are not flesh, but light and air and color and quick sounds quickly ended when you change them. Like balloons of color bursting. That they are more important for the changing, more important than the lives they scrabble after, pleading.
Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.
Lecter was capable of understanding that blood and breath were only elements undergoing change to fuel his Radiance. Just as the source of light is burning.
He would like to meet Lecter, talk and share with him, rejoice with him in their shared vision, be recognized by him as John the Baptist recognized the One who came after, sit on him as the Dragon sat on 666 in Blake’s Revelation series, and film his death as, dying, he melded with the strength of the Dragon.
Dolarhyde pulled on a new pair of rubber gloves and went to his desk. He unrolled and discarded the outer layer of the toilet paper he had bought. Then he unrolled a strip of seven sheets and tore it off.
Printing carefully on the tissue with his left hand, he wrote a letter to Lecter.
Speech is never a reliable indicator of how a person writes; you never know. Dolarhyde’s speech was bent and pruned by disabilities real and imagined, and the difference between his speech and his writing was startling. Still, he found he could not say the most important things he felt.
He wanted to hear from Lecter. He needed a personal response before he could tell Dr. Lecter the important things.
How could he manage that? He rummaged through his box of Lecter clippings, read them all again.
Finally a simple way occurred to him and he wrote again.
The letter seemed too diffident and shy when he read it over. He had signed it “Avid Fan.”
He brooded over the signature for several minutes.
“Avid Fan” indeed. His chin rose an imperious fraction.
He put his gloved thumb in his mouth, removed his dentures, and placed them on the blotter.
The upper plate was unusual. The teeth were normal, straight and white, but the pink acrylic upper part was a tortuous shape cast to fit the twists and fissures of his gums. Attached to the plate was a soft plastic prosthesis with an obturator on top, which helped him close off his soft palate in speech.
He took a small case from his desk. It held another set of teeth. The upper casting was the same, but there was no prosthesis. The crooked teeth had dark stains between them and gave off a faint stench.
They were identical to Grandmother’s teeth in the bedside glass downstairs.
Dolarhyde’s nostrils flared at the odor. He opened his sunken smile and put them in place and wet them with his tongue.
He folded the letter across the signature and bit down hard on it. When he opened the letter again, the signature was enclosed in an oval bite mark; his notary seal, an imprimatur flecked with old blood.
12
Attorney Byron Metcalf took off his tie at five o’
clock, made himself a drink, and put his feet up on his desk.
“Sure you won’t have one?”
“Another time.” Graham, picking the cockleburs off his cuffs, was grateful for the air conditioning.
“I didn’t know the Jacobis very well,” Metcalf said. “They’d only been here three months. My wife and I were there for drinks a couple of times. Ed Jacobi came to me for a new will soon after he was transferred here, that’s how I met him.”
“But you’re his executor.”
“Yes. His wife was listed first as executor, then me as alternate in case she was deceased or infirm. He has a brother in Philadelphia, but I gather they weren’t close.”
“You were an assistant district attorney.”
“Yeah, 1968 to ’72. I ran for DA in ’72. It was close, but I lost. I’m not sorry now.”
“How do you see what happened here, Mr. Metcalf?”
“The first thing I thought about was Joseph Yablonski, the labor leader?”
Graham nodded.
“A crime with a motive, power in that case, disguised as an insane attack. We went over Ed Jacobi’s papers with a fine-tooth comb—Jerry Estridge from the DA’s office and I.
“Nothing. Nobody stood to make much money off Ed Jacobi’s death. He made a big salary and he had some patents paying off, but he spent it almost as fast as it came in. Everything was to go to the wife, with a little land in California entailed to the kids and their descendants. He had a small spendthrift trust set up for the surviving son. It’ll pay his way through three more years of college. I’m sure he’ll still be a freshman by then.”
“Niles Jacobi.”
“Yeah. The kid gave Ed a big pain in the ass. He lived with his mother in California. Went to Chino for theft. I gather his mother’s a flake. Ed went out there to see about him last year. Brought him back to Birmingham and put him in school at Bardwell Community College. Tried to keep him at home, but he dumped on the other kids and made it unpleasant for everybody. Mrs. Jacobi put up with it for a while, but finally they moved him to a dorm.”