“I expect so,” Crawford said.
“Lots of times they’ve got a crank telephone behind the seat in their Ramcharger, that’s a big fine right there, if you don’t have to go to the pen.”
Crawford raised his eyebrows.
“To telephone fish with,” Starling said. “Stun the fish with electric current when you hang the wires in the water and turn the crank. They come to the top and you just dip ’em out.”
“Right,” Lamar said, “are you from around here?”
“They do it lots of places,” Starling said.
Starling felt the urge to say something before they zipped up the bag, to make a gesture or express some kind of commitment. In the end, she just shook her head and got busy packing the samples into her case.
It was different with the body and problem out of sight. In this slack moment, what she’d been doing came in on her. Starling stripped off her gloves and turned the water on in the sink. With her back to the room, she ran water over her wrists. The water in the pipes wasn’t all that cool. Lamar, watching, disappeared into the hall. He came back from the Coke machine with an ice-cold can of soda, unopened, and offered it to her.
“No, thanks,” Starling said. “I don’t believe I’ll have one.”
“No, hold it under your neck there,” Lamar said, “and on that little bump at the back of your head. Cold’ll make you feel better. It does me.”
By the time Starling had finished taping the memo to the pathologist across the zipper of the body bag, Crawford’s fingerprint transmitter was clicking on the office desk.
Finding this victim so soon after the crime was a lucky break. Crawford was determined to identify her quickly and start a sweep around her home for witnesses to the abduction. His method was a lot of trouble to everyone, but it was fast.
Crawford carried a Litton Policefax fingerprint transmitter. Unlike federal-issue facsimile machines, the Policefax is compatible with most big-city police department systems. The fingerprint card Starling had assembled was barely dry.
“Load it, Starling, you’ve got the nimble fingers.”
Don’t smear it was what he meant, and Starling didn’t. It was hard, wrapping the glued-together composite card around the little drum while six wire rooms waited around the country.
Crawford was on the telephone to the FBI switchboard and wire room in Washington. “Dorothy, is everybody on? Okay, gentlemen, we’ll turn it down to one-twenty to keep it nice and sharp—check one-twenty, everybody? Atlanta, how about it? Okay, give me the picture wire … now.”
Then it was spinning at slow speed for clarity, sending the dead woman’s prints simultaneously to the FBI wire room and major police department wire rooms in the East. If Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, or any of the others got a hit on the fingerprints, a sweep would begin in minutes.
Next Crawford sent pictures of the victim’s teeth and photos of her face, the head draped by Starling with a towel in the event the supermarket press got hold of the photographs.
Three officers of the West Virginia State Police Criminal Investigation Section arrived from Charleston as they were leaving. Crawford did a lot of handshaking, passing out cards with the National Crime Information Center hotline number. Starling was interested to see how fast he got them into a male bonding mode. They sure would call up with anything they got, they sure would. You betcha and much oblige. Maybe it wasn’t male bonding, she decided; it worked on her too.
Lamar waved with his fingers from the porch as Crawford and Starling rode away with the deputy toward the Elk River. The Coke was still pretty cold. Lamar took it into the storeroom and fixed a refreshing beverage for himself.
CHAPTER 13
“Drop me at the lab, Jeff,” Crawford told the driver. “Then I want you to wait for Officer Starling at the Smithsonian. She’ll go on from there to Quantico.”
“Yes sir.”
They were crossing the Potomac River against the after-dinner traffic, coming into downtown Washington from National Airport.
The young man at the wheel seemed in awe of Crawford and drove with excessive caution, Starling thought. She didn’t blame him; it was an article of faith at the Academy that the last agent who’d committed a Full Fuck-Up in Crawford’s command now investigated pilfering at DEW-line installations along the Arctic Circle.
Crawford was not in a good humor. Nine hours had passed since he transmitted the fingerprints and pictures of the victim, and she remained unidentified. Along with the West Virginia troopers, he and Starling had worked the bridge and the riverbank until dark without result.
Starling had heard him on the phone from the airplane, arranging for an evening nurse at home.
The FBI plain-jane sedan seemed wonderfully quiet after the Blue Canoe, and talking was easier.
“I’ll post the hotline and the Latent Descriptor Index when I take your prints up to ID,” Crawford said. “You draft me an insert for the file. An insert, not a 302—do you know how to do it?”
“I know how.”
“Say I’m the Index, tell me what’s new.”
It took her a second to get it together—she was glad Crawford seemed interested in the scaffolding on the Jefferson Memorial as they passed by.
The Latent Descriptor Index in the Identification Section’s computer compares the characteristics of a crime under investigation to the known proclivities of criminals on file. When it finds pronounced similarities, it suggests suspects and produces their fingerprints. Then a human operator compares the file fingerprints with latent prints found at the scene. There were no prints yet on Buffalo Bill, but Crawford wanted to be ready.
The system requires brief, concise statements. Starling tried to come up with some.
“White female, late teens or early twenties, shot to death, lower torso and thighs flayed—”
“Starling, the Index already knows he kills young white women and skins their torsos—use ‘skinned,’ by the way, ‘flayed’ is an uncommon term another officer might not use, and you can’t be sure the damned thing will read a synonym. It already knows he dumps them in rivers. It doesn’t know what’s new here. What’s new here, Starling?”
“This is the sixth victim, the first one scalped, the first one with triangular patches taken from the back of the shoulders, the first one shot in the chest, the first one with a cocoon in her throat.”
“You forgot broken fingernails.”
“No sir, she’s the second one with broken fingernails.”
“You’re right. Listen, in your insert for the file, note that the cocoon is confidential. We’ll use it to eliminate false confessions.”
“I’m wondering if he’s done that before—placed a cocoon or an insect,” Starling said. “It would be easy to miss in an autopsy, especially with a floater. You know, the medical examiner sees an obvious cause of death, it’s hot in there, and they want to get through … can we check back on that?”
“If we have to. You can count on the pathologists to say they didn’t miss anything, naturally. The Cincinnati Jane Doe’s still in the freezer out there. I’ll ask them to look at her, but the other four are in the ground. Exhumation orders stir people up. We had to do it with four patients who passed away under Dr. Lecter’s care, just to make sure what killed them. Let me tell you, it’s a lot of trouble and it upsets the relatives. I’ll do it if I have to, but we’ll see what you find out at the Smithsonian before I decide.”
“Scalping … that’s rare, isn’t it?”
“Uncommon, yes,” Crawford said.
“But Dr. Lecter said Buffalo Bill would do it. How did he know that?”
“He didn’t know it.”
“He said it, though.”
“It’s not a big surprise, Starling. I wasn’t surprised to see that. I should have said that it was rare until the Mengel case, remember that? Scalped the woman? There were two or three copycats after that. The papers, when they were playing around with the Buffalo Bill tag, they emphasized more than once that this
killer doesn’t take scalps. It’s no surprise after that—he probably follows his press. Lecter was guessing. He didn’t say when it would happen, so he could never be wrong. If we caught Bill and there was no scalping, Lecter could say we got him just before he did it.”
“Dr. Lecter also said Buffalo Bill lives in a two-story house. We never got into that. Why do you suppose he said it?”
“That’s not a guess. He’s very likely right, and he could have told you why, but he wanted to tease you with it. It’s the only weakness I ever saw in him—he has to look smart, smarter than anybody. He’s been doing it for years.”
“You said ask if I don’t know—well, I have to ask you to explain that.”
“Okay, two of the victims were hanged, right? High ligature marks, cervical displacement, definite hanging. As Dr. Lecter knows from personal experience, Starling, it’s very hard for one person to hang another against his will. People hang themselves from doorknobs all the time. They hang themselves sitting down, it’s easy. But it’s hard to hang somebody else—even when they’re bound up, they manage to get their feet under them, if there’s any support to find with their feet. A ladder’s threatening. Victims won’t climb it blindfolded and they sure won’t climb it if they can see the noose. The way it’s done is in a stairwell. Stairs are familiar. Tell them you’re taking them up to use the bathroom, whatever, walk them up with a hood on, slip the noose on, and boot them off the top step with the rope fastened to the landing railing. It’s the only good way in a house. Fellow in California popularized it. If Bill didn’t have a stairwell, he’d kill them another way. Now give me those names, the senior deputy from Potter and the state police guy, the ranking officer.”
Starling found them in her notepad, reading by a penlight held in her teeth.
“Good,” Crawford said. “When you’re posting a hotline, Starling, always credit the cops by name. They hear their own names, they get more friendly to the hotline. Fame helps them remember to call us if they get something. What does the burn on her leg say to you?”
“Depends if it’s postmortem.”
“If it is?”
“Then he’s got a closed truck or a van or a station wagon, something long.”
“Why?”
“Because the burn’s across the back of her calf.”
They were at Tenth and Pennsylvania, in front of the new FBI headquarters that nobody ever refers to as the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
“Jeff, you can let me out here,” Crawford said. “Right here, don’t go underneath. Stay in the car, Jeff, just pop the trunk. Come show me, Starling.”
She got out with Crawford while he retrieved his datafax and briefcase from the luggage compartment.
“He hauled the body in something big enough for the body to be stretched out on its back,” Starling said. “That’s the only way the back of her calf would rest on the floor over the exhaust pipe. In a car trunk like this, she’d be curled up on her side and—”
“Yeah, that’s how I see it,” Crawford said.
She realized then that he’d gotten her out of the car so he could speak with her privately.
“When I told that deputy he and I shouldn’t talk in front of a woman, that burned you, didn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“It was just smoke. I wanted to get him by himself.”
“I know that.”
“Okay.” Crawford slammed the trunk and turned away.
Starling couldn’t let it go.
“It matters, Mr. Crawford.”
He was turning back to her, laden with his fax machine and briefcase, and she had his full attention.
“Those cops know who you are,” she said. “They look at you to see how to act.” She stood steady, shrugged her shoulders, opened her palms. There it was, it was true.
Crawford performed a measurement on his cold scales.
“Duly noted, Starling. Now get on with the bug.”
“Yes sir.”
She watched him walk away, a middle-aged man laden with cases and rumpled from flying, his cuffs muddy from the riverbank, going home to what he did at home.
She would have killed for him then. That was one of Crawford’s great talents.
CHAPTER 14
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History had been closed for hours, but Crawford had called ahead and a guard waited to let Clarice Starling in the Constitution Avenue entrance.
The lights were dimmed in the closed museum and the air was still. Only the colossal figure of a South Seas chieftain facing the entrance stood tall enough for the weak ceiling light to shine on his face.
Starling’s guide was a big black man in the neat turnout of the Smithsonian guards. She thought he resembled the chieftain as he raised his face to the elevator lights. There was a moment’s relief in her idle fancy, like rubbing a cramp.
The second level above the great stuffed elephant, a vast floor closed to the public, is shared by the departments of Anthropology and Entomology. The anthropologists call it the fourth floor. The entomologists contend it is the third. A few scientists from Agriculture say they have proof that it is the sixth. Each faction has a case in the old building with its additions and subdivisions.
Starling followed the guard into a dim maze of corridors walled high with wooden cases of anthropological specimens. Only the small labels revealed their contents.
“Thousands of people in these boxes,” the guard said. “Forty thousand specimens.”
He found office numbers with his flashlight and trailed the light over the labels as they went along.
Dyak baby carriers and ceremonial skulls gave way to Aphids, and they left Man for the older and more orderly world of Insects. Now the corridor was walled with big metal boxes painted pale green.
“Thirty million insects—and the spiders on top of that. Don’t lump the spiders in with the insects,” the guard advised. “Spider people jump all over you about that. There, the office that’s lit. Don’t try to come out by yourself. If they don’t say they’ll bring you down, call me at this extension, it’s the guard office. I’ll come get you.” He gave her a card and left her.
She was in the heart of Entomology, on a rotunda gallery high above the great stuffed elephant. There was the office with the lights on and the door open.
“Time, Pilch!” A man’s voice, shrill with excitement. “Let’s go here. Time!”
Starling stopped in the doorway. Two men sat at a laboratory table playing chess. Both were about thirty, one black-haired and lean, the other pudgy with wiry red hair. They appeared to be engrossed in the chessboard. If they noticed Starling, they gave no sign. If they noticed the enormous rhinoceros beetle slowly making its way across the board, weaving among the chessmen, they gave no sign of that either.
Then the beetle crossed the edge of the board.
“Time, Roden,” the lean one said instantly.
The pudgy one moved his bishop and immediately turned the beetle around and started it trudging back the other way.
“If the beetle just cuts across the corner, is time up then?” Starling asked.
“Of course time’s up then,” the pudgy one said loudly, without looking up. “Of course it’s up then. How do you play? Do you make him cross the whole board? Who do you play against, a sloth?”
“I have the specimen Special Agent Crawford called about.”
“I can’t imagine why we didn’t hear your siren,” the pudgy one said. “We’re waiting all night here to identify a bug for the FBI. Bugs’re all we do. Nobody said anything about Special Agent Crawford’s specimen. He should show his specimen privately to his family doctor. Time, Pilch!”
“I’d love to catch your whole routine another time,” Starling said, “but this is urgent, so let’s do it now. Time, Pilch.”
The black-haired one looked around at her, saw her leaning against the doorframe with her briefcase. He put the beetle on some rotten wood in a box and covered it with a lettuce leaf.
When he got up, he was tall.
“I’m Noble Pilcher,” he said. “That’s Albert Roden. You need an insect identified? We’re happy to help you.” Pilcher had a long friendly face, but his black eyes were a little witchy and too close together, and one of them had a slight cast that made it catch the light independently. He did not offer to shake hands. “You are…?”
“Clarice Starling.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Pilcher held the small jar to the light.
Roden came to look. “Where did you find it? Did you kill it with your gun? Did you see its mommy?”
It occurred to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.
“Shhh,” Pilcher said. “Tell us where you found it. Was it attached to anything—a twig or a leaf—or was it in the soil?”
“I see,” Starling said. “Nobody’s talked to you.”
“The Chairman asked us to stay late and identify a bug for the FBI,” Pilcher said.
“Told us,” Roden said. “Told us to stay late.”
“We do it all the time for Customs and the Department of Agriculture,” Pilcher said.
“But not in the middle of the night,” Roden said.
“I need to tell you a couple of things involving a criminal case,” Starling said. “I’m allowed to do that if you’ll keep it in confidence until the case is resolved. It’s important. It means some lives, and I’m not just saying that. Dr. Roden, can you tell me seriously that you’ll respect a confidence?”
“I’m not a doctor. Do I have to sign anything?”
“Not if your word’s any good. You’ll have to sign for the specimen if you need to keep it, that’s all.”
“Of course I’ll help you. I’m not uncaring.”
“Dr. Pilcher?”
“That’s true,” Pilcher said. “He’s not uncaring.”
“Confidence?”
“I won’t tell.”
“Pilch isn’t a doctor yet either,” Roden said. “We’re on an equal educational footing. But notice how he allowed you to call him that.” Roden placed the tip of his forefinger against his chin, as though pointing to his judicious expression. “Give us all the details. What might seem irrelevant to you could be vital information to an expert.”