Hannibal - Thomas Harris [111]
Looking at him, Starling suffered an absurd burp of laughter, suppressed so fast it might have sounded like dismay. The similar positions of the two bodies, on their sides instead of in the anatomical position, revealed that they had been butchered almost identically, the sirloin and loin removed with neatness and economy along with the small filets that lie beneath the spine.
A deer's fur on stainless steel. Its head elevated by the antlers on the metal pillow block, the head turned and the eye white as though it tried to look back at the bright shaft that killed itthe creature, lying on its side in its own reflection in this place of obsessive order, seemed wilder, more alien to man than a deer ever seemed in the woods.
The man's eyes were open, some blood came from his lachrymal ducts like tears.
“Odd to see them together,” Dr Hollingsworth said. “Their hearts weighed exactly the same.”
He looked at Starling and saw that she was all right. “One difference on the man, you can see here where the short ribs were separated from the spine and.the lungs pulled out the back. They almost look like wings, don't they?”
“Bloody Eagle,” Starling muttered, after a moment's thought.
“I never saw it before.”
“Me either,” Starling said.
“There's a term for that? What did you call it?”
“The Bloody Eagle. The literature at Quantico has it. It's a Norse sacrificial custom. Chop through the short ribs and pull the lungs out the back, flatten them out like that to make wings. There was a neoViking doing it in Minnesota in the thirties.”
“You see a lot of this, I don't mean this, but this kind of stuff.”
“Sometimes I do, yes.”
“It's out of my line a little. We get mostly straightforward murders - people shot and knifed, but do you want to know what I think?”
“I'd like very much to know, Doctor.”
“I think the man, his ID says Donnie Barber, killed the deer illegally yesterday, the day before the season started - I know that's when it died. That arrow's consistent with the rest of his archery equipment. He was butchering it in a hurry. I haven't done the antigens on that blood on his hands, but it's deer blood. He was just going to take what deer hunters call the backstrap, and he started a sloppy job, this short ragged cut here. Then he got a big surprise, like this arrow through his head. Same color, but a different kind of arrow. No notch in the butt. Do you recognize it?”
“It looks like a crossbow quarrel,” Starling said.
“A second person, maybe the one with the crossbow, finished dressing the deer, doing a much better job, and then, by God, he did the man too. Look how precisely the hide is reflected here, how decisive the incisions are. Nothing spoiled or wasted. Michael DeBakey couldn't do it better. There's no sign of any kind of sexual interference with either of them. They were simply butchered for meat.”
Starling touched her lips with her knuckle. For a second the pathologist thought she was kissing an amulet.
“Dr Hollingsworth, were the livers missing?”
A beat of time before he replied, peering at her over his glasses. “The deer's liver is missing. Mr. Barber's liver apparently wasn't up to standard. It was partly excised and examined, there's an incision just along the portal vein. His liver is cirrhotic and discolored. It remains in the body, would you like to see?”
“No, thank you. What about the thymus?”
“The sweetbreads, yes, missing in both cases. Agent Starling, nobody's said the name yet, have they?”
“No,” Starling said. “Not yet.”.A puff from the air lock and a lean, weathered man in a tweed sports jacket and khaki pants stood in the doorway.
“Sheriff, how's Carleton?”
Hollingsworth said. “Agent Starling, this is Sheriff Dumas. The sheriff's brother is upstairs in cardiac ICU.”
“He's holding his own. They say he's stable, he's `guarded,' whatever that means,” the sheriff said. He called outside, “Come on in here, Wilburn.”
The sheriff shook Starling's hand and introduced the other man. “This is Officer Wilburn Moody, he's a game warden.”
“Sheriff. If you want to stay close to your brother