Hannibal - Thomas Harris [110]
“This is Behavioral Science? I'm trying to get through to Jack Crawford, this is Sheriff Dumas in Clarendon Country, Virginia.”
“Sheriff, I'm Jack Crawford's assistant. He's in court today. I can help you. I'm Special Agent Starling.”
“I needed to speak to Jack Crawford. We got a fella in the morgue that's been trimmed up for meat, have I got the right department?”
“Yes sir, this is the mea - yes, sir, you certainly do. If you'll tell me exactly where you are, I'm on the way, and I'll alert Mr. Crawford as soon as he's through testifying.”
Starling's Mustang got enough secondgear rubber out of Quantico to make the Marine guard frown at her, and wag his finger, and keep himself from smiling.
Hannibal
Chapter 58
THE CLARENDON County Morgue in northern Virginia is attached to the county hospital by a short air lock with an exhaust fan in the ceiling and wide double doors at each end to facilitate access by the dead. A sheriffs deputy stood before these doors to keep out the five reporters and cameramen who crowded around him.
From behind the reporters, Starling stood on her tiptoes and held her badge high. When the deputy spotted it and nodded, she plunged through. Strobe lights flashed and a sun gun flared behind her.
Quiet in the autopsy room, only the clink of instruments put down in a metal tray.
The county morgue has four stainlesssteel autopsy tables, each with its scales and sink. Two of the tables were draped, the sheets oddly tented by the remains they covered. A routine hospital postmortem was in progress at the table nearest the windows. The pathologist and his assistant were doing something delicate and did not look up when Starling came in.
The thin shriek of an electric saw filled the room, and in a moment the pathologist carefully set aside the cap of a skull and lifted in his cupped hands a brain, which he placed on the scales. He whispered the weight into the microphone he wore, examined the organ in the scale pan, poked it with a gloved finger. When he spotted Starling over the shoulder of his assistant, he dumped the brain into the open chest cavity of the corpse, shot his rubber.gloves into a bin like a boy shooting rubber bands and came around the table to her.
Starling found shaking his hand a bit crawly.
“Clarice Starling, Special Agent, FBI.”
“I'm Dr Hollingsworth - medical examiner, hospital pathologist, chief cook and bottle washer.”
Hollingsworth has bright blue eyes, shiny as wellpeeled eggs. He spoke to his assistant without looking away from Starling. “Marlene, page the sheriff in cardiac ICU, and undrape those remains, please, ma'am.”
In Starling's experience medical examiners were usually intelligent but often silly and incautious in casual conversation, and they liked to show off. Hollingsworth followed Starling's eyes. “You're wondering about that brain?”
She nodded and showed him her open hands.
“We're not careless here, Special Agent Starling. It's a favor I do the undertaker, not putting the brain back in the skull. In this case they'll have an open coffin and a lengthy wake, and you can't prevent brain material leaking onto the pillow, so we stuff the skull with Huggies or whatever we have and close it back up, and I put a notch in the skull cap over both ears, so it won't slide. Family gets the whole body back, everybody's happy.”
“I understand.”
“Tell me if you understand that,” he said. Behind Starling, Dr Hollingsworth's assistant had removed the covering sheets from the autopsy tables.
Starling turned and saw it all in a single image that would last as long as she lived. Side by side on their stainlesssteel tables lay a deer and a man. From the deer projected a yellow arrow. The arrow shaft and the antlers had held up the covering sheet like tent poles.
The man had a shorter, thicker yellow arrow through his head transversely at the tips of his ears. He still wore one garment, a reversed baseball cap, pinned to his head by the