“This insect was found lodged behind the soft palate of a murder victim. I don’t know how it got there. Her body was in the Elk River in West Virginia, and she hadn’t been dead more than a few days.”
“It’s Buffalo Bill, I heard it on the radio,” Roden said.
“You didn’t hear about the insect on the radio, did you?” Starling said.
“No, but they said Elk River—are you coming in from that today, is that why you’re so late?”
“Yes,” Starling said.
“You must be tired, do you want some coffee?” Roden said.
“No, thank you.”
“Water?”
“No.”
“A Coke?”
“I don’t believe so. We want to know where this woman was held captive and where she was killed. We’re hoping this bug has some specialized habitat, or it’s limited in range, you know, or it only sleeps on some kind of tree—we want to know where this insect is from. I’m asking for your confidence because—if the perpetrator put the insect there deliberately—then only he would know that fact and we could use it to eliminate false confessions and save time. He’s killed six at least. Time’s eating us up.”
“Do you think he’s holding another woman right this minute, while we’re looking at his bug?” Roden asked in her face. His eyes were wide and his mouth open. She could see into his mouth, and she flashed for a second on something else.
“I don’t know.” A little shrill, that. “I don’t know,” she said again, to take the edge off it. “He’ll do it again as soon as he can.”
“So we’ll do this as soon as we can,” Pilcher said. “Don’t worry, we’re good at this. You couldn’t be in better hands.” He removed the brown object from the jar with a slender forceps and placed it on a sheet of white paper beneath the light. He swung a magnifying glass on a flexible arm over it.
The insect was long and it looked like a mummy. It was sheathed in a semitransparent cover that followed its general outlines like a sarcophagus. The appendages were bound so tightly against the body, they might have been carved in low relief. The little face looked wise.
“In the first place, it’s not anything that would normally infest a body outdoors, and it wouldn’t be in the water except by accident,” Pilcher said. “I don’t know how familiar you are with insects or how much you want to hear.”
“Let’s say I don’t know diddly. I want you to tell me the whole thing.”
“Okay, this is a pupa, an immature insect, in a chrysalis—that’s the cocoon that holds it while it transforms itself from a larva into an adult,” Pilcher said.
“Obtect pupa, Pilch?” Roden wrinkled his nose to hold his glasses up.
“Yeah, I think so. You want to pull down Chu on the immature insects? Okay, this is the pupal stage of a large insect. Most of the more advanced insects have a pupal stage. A lot of them spend the winter this way.”
“Book or look, Pilch?” Roden said.
“I’ll look.” Pilcher moved the specimen to the stage of a microscope and hunched over it with a dental probe in his hand. “Here we go: No distinct respiratory organs on the dorsocephalic region, spiracles on the mesothorax and some abdominals, let’s start with that.”
“Ummhumm,” Roden said, turning pages in a small manual. “Functional mandibles?”
“Nope.”
“Paired galeae of maxillae on the ventro meson?”
“Yep, yep.”
“Where are the antennae?”
“Adjacent to the mesal margin of the wings. Two pairs of wings, the inside pair are completely covered up. Only the bottom three abdominal segments are free. Little pointy cremaster—I’d say Lepidoptera.”
“That’s what it says here,” Roden said.
“It’s the family that includes the butterflies and moths. Covers a lot of territory,” Pilcher said.
“It’s gonna be tough if the wings are soaked. I’ll pull the references,” Roden said. “I guess there’s no way I can keep you from talking about me while I’m gone.”
“I guess not,” Pilcher said. “Roden’s all right,” he told Starling as soon as Roden left the room.
“I’m sure he is.”
“Are you now.” Pilcher seemed amused. “We were undergraduates together, working and glomming any kind of fellowship we could. He got one where he had to sit down in a coal mine waiting for proton decay. He just stayed in the dark too long. He’s all right. Just don’t mention proton decay.”
“I’ll try to talk around it.”
Pilcher turned away from the bright light. “It’s a big family, Lepidoptera. Maybe thirty thousand butterflies and a hundred thirty thousand moths. I’d like to take it out of the chrysalis—I’ll have to if we’re going to narrow it down.”
“Okay. Can you do it in one piece?”
“I think so. See, this one had started out on its own power before it died. It had started an irregular fracture in the chrysalis right here. This may take a little while.”
Pilcher spread the natural split in the case and eased the insect out. The bunched wings were soaked. Spreading them was like working with a wet, wadded facial tissue. No pattern was visible.
Roden was back with the books.
“Ready?” Pilcher said. “Okay, the prothoracic femur is concealed.”
“What about pilifers?”
“No pilifers,” Pilcher said. “Would you turn out the light, Officer Starling?”
She waited by the wall switch until Pilcher’s penlight came on. He stood back from the table and shined it on the specimen. The insect’s eyes glowed in the dark, reflecting the narrow beam.
“Owlet,” Roden said.
“Probably, but which one?” Pilcher said. “Give us the lights, please. It’s a Noctuid, Officer Starling—a night moth. How many Noctuids are there, Roden?”
“Twenty-six hundred and … about twenty-six hundred have been described.”
“Not many this big, though. Okay, let’s see you shine, my man.”
Roden’s wiry red head covered the microscope.
“We have to go to chaetaxy now—studying the skin of the insect to narrow it down to one species,” Pilcher said. “Roden’s the best at it.”
Starling had the sense that a kindness had passed in the room.
Roden responded by starting a fierce argument with Pilcher over whether the specimen’s larval warts were arranged in circles or not. It raged on through the arrangement of the hairs on the abdomen.
“Erebus odora,” Roden said at last.
“Let’s go look,” Pilcher said.
They took the specimen with them, down in the elevator to the level just above the great stuffed elephant and back into an enormous quad filled with pale green boxes. What was formerly a great hall had been split into two levels with decks to provide more storage for the Smithsonian’s insects. They were in Neotropical now, moving into Noctuids. Pilcher consulted his notepad and stopped at a box chest-high in the great wall stack.
“You have to be careful with these things,” he said, sliding the heavy metal door off the box and setting it on the floor. “You drop one on your foot and you hop for weeks.”
He ran his finger down the stacked drawers, selected one, and pulled it out.
In the tray Starling saw the tiny preserved eggs, the caterpillar in a tube of alcohol, a cocoon peeled away from a specimen very similar to hers, and the adult—a big brown-black moth with a wingspan of nearly six inches, a furry body, and slender antennae.
“Erebus odor,” Pilcher said. “The Black Witch Moth.”
Roden was already turning pages. “‘A tropical species sometimes straying up to Canada in the fall,’” he read. “‘The larvae eat acacia, catclaw, and similar plants. Indigenous West Indies, Southern U.S., considered a pest in Hawaii.’”
Fuckola, Starling thought. “Nuts,” she said aloud. “They’re all over.”
“But they’re not all over all the time.” Pilcher’s head was down. He pulled at his chin.
“Do they double-brood, Roden?”
“Wait a second … yeah, in extreme south Florida and south Texas.”
“When?”
“May and August.”
“I was just thinking,” Pilcher said. “Your specimen’s a little better developed than the one we have, and it’s fresh. It had started fracturing its cocoon to come out. In the West Indies or Hawaii, maybe, I could understand it, but it’s winter here. In this country it would wait three months to come out. Unless it happened accidentally in a greenhouse, or somebody raised it.”
“Raised it how?”
“In a cage, in a warm place, with some acacia leaves for the larvae to eat until they’re ready to button up in their cocoons. It’s not hard to do.”
“Is it a popular hobby? Outside professional study, do a lot of people do it?”
“No, primarily it’s entomologists trying to get a perfect specimen, maybe a few collectors. There’s the silk industry too, they raise moths, but not this kind.”
“Entomologists must have periodicals, professional journals, people that sell equipment,” Starling said.
“Sure, and most of the publications come here.”
“Let me make you a bundle,” Roden said. “A couple of people here subscribe privately to the smaller newsletters—keep ’em locked up and make you give them a quarter just to look at the stupid things. I’ll have to get those in the morning.”
“I’ll see they’re picked up, thank you, Mr. Roden.”
Pilcher photocopied the references on Erebus odora and gave them to her, along with the insect. “I’ll take you down,” he said.
They waited for the elevator. “Most people love butterflies and hate moths,” he said. “But moths are more—interesting, engaging.”
“They’re destructive.”
“Some are, a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do.” Silence for one floor. “There’s a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears,” he offered. “That’s all they eat or drink.”
“What kind of tears? Whose tears?”
“The tears of large land mammals, about our size. The old definition of moth was ‘anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too.… Is this what you do all the time—hunt Buffalo Bill?”
“I do it all I can.”
Pilcher polished his teeth, his tongue moving behind his lips like a cat beneath the covers. “Do you ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer or the amusing house wine?”
“Not lately.”
“Will you go for some with me now? It’s not far.”
“No, but I’ll treat when this is over—and Mr. Roden can go too, naturally.”
“There’s nothing natural about that,” Pilcher said. And at the door, “I hope you’re through with this soon, Officer Starling.”
She hurried to the waiting car.
Ardelia Mapp had left Starling’s mail and half a Mounds candy bar on her bed. Mapp was asleep.
Starling carried her portable typewriter down to the laundry room, put it on the clothes-folding shelf and cranked in a carbon set. She had organized her notes on Erebus odora in her head on the ride back to Quantico, and she covered that quickly.
Then she ate the Mounds and wrote a memo to Crawford suggesting they cross-check the entomology publications’ computerized mailing lists against the FBI’s known offender files and the files in the cities closest to the abductions, plus felon and sex-offender files of Metro Dade, San Antonio, and Houston, the areas where the moths were most plentiful.
There was another thing, too, that she had to bring up for a second time: Let’s ask Dr. Lecter why he thought the perpetrator would start taking scalps.
She delivered the paper to the night duty officer and fell into her grateful bed, the voices of the day still whispering, softer than Mapp’s breathing across the room. On the swarming dark she saw the moth’s wise little face. Those glowing eyes had looked at Buffalo Bill.
Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half the world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.
CHAPTER 15
In East Memphis, Tennessee, Catherine Baker Martin and her best boyfriend were watching a late movie on television in his apartment and having a few hits off a bong pipe loaded with hashish. The commercial breaks grew longer and more frequent.
“I’ve got the munchies, want some popcorn?” she said.
“I’ll go get it, give me your keys.”
“Sit still. I need to see if Mom called, anyway.”
She got up from the couch, a tall young woman, big-boned and well fleshed, nearly heavy, with a handsome face and a lot of clean hair. She found her shoes under the coffee table and went outside.
The February evening was more raw than cold. A light fog off the Mississippi River hung breast-high over the big parking area. Directly overhead she could see the dying moon, pale and thin as a bone fishhook. Looking up made her a little dizzy. She started across the parking field, navigating steadily toward her own front door a hundred yards away.
The brown panel truck was parked near her apartment, among some motor homes and boats on trailers. She noticed it because it resembled the parcel delivery trucks which often brought presents from her mother.
As she passed near the truck, a lamp came on in the fog. It was a floor lamp with a shade, standing on the asphalt behind the truck. Beneath the lamp was an overstuffed armchair in red-flowered chintz, the big red flowers blooming in the fog. The two items were like a furniture grouping in a showroom.
Catherine Baker Martin blinked several times and kept going. She thought the word surreal and blamed the bong. She was all right. Somebody was moving in or moving out. In. Out. Somebody was always moving at the Stonehinge Villas. The curtain stirred in her apartment and she saw her cat on the sill, arching and pressing his side against the glass.
She had her key ready, and before she used it she looked back. A man climbed out of the back of the truck. She could see by the lamplight that he had a cast on his hand and his arm was in a sling. She went inside and locked the door behind her.
Catherine Baker Martin peeped around the curtain and saw the man trying to put the chair into the back of the truck. He gripped it with his good hand and tried to boost it with his knee. The chair fell over. He righted it, licked his finger and rubbed at a spot of parking-lot grime on the chintz.
She went outside.
“Help you with that.” She got the tone just right—helpful and that’s all.
“Would you? Thanks.” An odd, strained voice. Not a local accent.
The floor lamp lit his face from below, distorting his features, but she could see his body plainly. He had on pressed khaki trousers and some kind of chamois shirt, unbuttoned over a freckled chest. His chin and cheeks were hairless, as smooth as a woman’s, and his eyes only pinpoint gleams above his cheekbones in the shadows of the lamp.
He looked at her too, and she was sensitive to that. Men were often surprised at her size when she got close to them and some concealed it better than others.
“Good,” he said.
There was an unpleasant odor about the man, and she noticed with distaste that his chamois shirt still had hairs on it, curly ones across the shoulders and beneath the arms.
It was easy lifting the chair onto the low floor of the truck.
“Let’s slide it to the front, do you mind?” He climbed inside and moved some clutter, the big flat pans you can slide under a vehicle to drain the oil, and a small hand winch called a coffin hoist.
They pushed the chair forward until it was just behind the seats.
“Are you about a fourteen?” he said.
“What?”
“Would you hand me that rope? It’s just at your feet.”
When she bent to look, he brought the plaster cast down on the back of her head. She thought she’d bumped her head
and she raised her hand to it as the cast came down again, smashing her fingers against her skull, and down again, this time behind her ear, a succession of blows, none of them too hard, as she slumped over the chair. She slid to the floor of the truck and lay on her side.
The man watched her for a second, then pulled off his cast and the arm sling. Quickly he brought the lamp into the truck and closed the rear doors.
He pulled her collar back and, with a flashlight, read the size tag on her blouse.
“Good,” he said.
He slit the blouse up the back with a pair of bandage scissors, pulled the blouse off, and handcuffed her hands behind her. Spreading a mover’s pad on the floor of the truck, he rolled her onto her back.
She was not wearing a brassiere. He prodded her big breasts with his fingers and felt their weight and resilience.
“Good,” he said.
There was a pink suck mark on her left breast. He licked his finger to rub it as he had done the chintz and nodded when the lividity went away with light pressure. He rolled her onto her face and checked her scalp, parting her thick hair with his fingers. The padded cast hadn’t cut her.
He checked her pulse with two fingers on the side of her neck and found it strong.
“Gooood,” he said. He had a long way to drive to his two-story house and he’d rather not field-dress her here.
Catherine Baker Martin’s cat watched out the window as the truck pulled away, the taillights getting closer and closer together.
Behind the cat the telephone was ringing. The machine in the bedroom answered, its red light blinking in the dark.
The caller was Catherine’s mother, the junior U.S. Senator from Tennessee.
CHAPTER 16
In the 1980s, the Golden Age of Terrorism, procedures were in place to deal with a kidnapping affecting a member of Congress:
At 2:45 A.M. the special agent in charge of the Memphis FBI office reported to headquarters in Washington that Senator Ruth Martin’s only daughter had disappeared.