Hannibal - Thomas Harris [154]
Hannibal
Chapter 90
MORNING AND yellow sunlight in the playroom at Muskrat Farm. The great stuffed animals with their button eyes regard the body of Cordell, covered now. Even in the middle of winter, a bluebottle fly has found the body and is walking over the covering sheet where blood has soaked through.
Had Margot Verger known the raw ablative tension suffered by the principals in a mediaridden homicide, she might never have stuffed the eel down her brother's throat..Her decision not to try to clean up the mess at Muskrat Farm and to simply duck until the storm was over was a wise one. No one living saw her at Muskrat when Mason and the others were killed.
Her story was that the first frantic call from the midnight relief nurse wakened her in the house she shared with Judy. She came to the scene and arrived shortly after the first sheriff's officers.
The lead investigator for the sheriff's department, Detective Clarence Franks, was a youngish man with eyes a bit too close together, but he was not stupid as Margot had hoped he would be.
“Can't just anybody come up here in that elevator, it takes a key to get in, right?”
Franks asked her. The detective and Margot sat awkwardly side by side on the love seat.
“I suppose so, if that's the way they came.”
“`They,' Ms Verger? Do you think there might be more than one?”
“I have no idea, Mr. Franks.”
She had seen her brother's body still joined to the eel and covered by a sheet. Someone had unplugged the respirator. The criminalists were taking samples of aquarium water and taking swipes of blood from the floor. She could see in Mason's hand the piece of Dr Lector's scalp. They hadn't found it yet. The criminalists looked to Margot like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Detective Franks was busy scribbling in his notebook.
“Do they know who those other poor people are?”
Margot said. “Did they have families?”
“We're working it out,” Franks said. “There were three weapons we can trace.”
In fact, the sheriff's department was not sure how many persons had died in the barn, as the pigs had disappeared into the deep woods dragging with them the depleted remains for later.
“In the course of this investigation, we might have to ask you and youryour longtime companion to undergo a polygraph examination, that's a lie detector, would you consent to that, Ms Verger?”
“Mr. Franks, I'll do anything to catch these people. To specifically answer your question, ask me and Judy when you need us. Should I talk to the family lawyer?”
“Not if you don't have anything to hide, Ms Verger.”
“Hide?”
Margot managed tears.
“Please, I have to do this, Ms Verger.”
Franks started to put his hand on her massive shoulder and thought better of it.
Hannibal
Chapter 91
STARLING WOKE in the freshsmelling semidark, knowing in some primal way that she was near the sea. She moved slightly on the bed. She felt a deep soreness all over, and then she fell away from consciousness again. When next she woke, a voice was talking quietly to her, offering a warm cup. She drank from it, and the taste was similar to the herbal tea Mapp's grandmother sent her.
Day and evening again, the smell of fresh flowers in the house, and once the faint sting of a needle. Like the thud and crackle of distant fireworks, the remnants of fear and pain popped on the horizon, but not close, never close. She was in the garden of the hurricane's eye.
“Waking. Waking, calm. Waking in a pleasant room,” a voice said. She heard faint chamber music.
She felt very clean and her skin was scented with mint, some ointment that gave a deep comforting warmth.
Starling opened her eyes wide.
Dr Lecter stood at a distance from her, very still, as he had stood in his cell when she first saw him. We are accustomed to seeing him unfettered now. It is not shocking to see him in open space with another mortal creature.
“Good evening, Clarice.”
“Good evening, Dr Lecter,” she said, responding in kind with no real idea of the time.