Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [1]
Later Crawford realized that Graham did it involuntarily, that sometimes he tried to stop and couldn't.
Crawford dipped into his jacket pocket with two fingers. He flipped two photographs across the table, face up.
“All dead,” he said.
Graham stared at him a moment before picking up the pictures.
They were only snapshots: A woman, followed by three children and a duck, carried picnic items up the bank of a pond. A family stood behind a cake.
After half a minute he put the photographs down again. He pushed them into a stack with his finger and looked far down the beach where the boy hunkered, examining something in the sand. The woman stood watching, hand on her hip, spent waves creaming around her ankles. She leaned inland to swing her wet hair off her shoulders.
Graham, ignoring his guest, watched Molly and the boy for as long as he had looked at the pictures.
Crawford was pleased. He kept the satisfaction out of his face with the same care he had used to choose the site of this conver?sation. He thought he had Graham. Let it cook.
Three remarkably ugly dogs wandered up and flopped to the ground around the table.
“My God,” Crawford said.
“These are probably dogs,” Graham explained. “People dump small ones here all the time. I can give away the cute ones. The rest stay around and get to be big ones.”
“They're fat enough.”
“Molly's a sucker for strays.”
“You've got a nice life here, Will. Molly and the boy. How old is he?”
“Eleven.”
“Goodlooking kid. He's going to be taller than you.”
Graham nodded. “His father was. I'm lucky here. I know that.”
“I wanted to bring Phyllis down here. Florida. Get a place when I retire, and stop living like a cave fish. She says all her friends are in Arlington.”
“I meant to thank her for the books she brought me in the hospi?tal, but I never did. Tell her for me.”
“I'll tell her.”
Two small bright birds lit on the table, hoping to find jelly. Crawford watched them hop around until they flew away.
“Will, this freak seems to be in phase with the moon. He killed the Jacobis in Birmingham on Saturday night, June 28, full moon. He killed the Leeds family in Atlanta night before last, July 26. That's one day short of a lunar month. So if we're lucky we may have a little over three weeks before he does it again.”
“I don't think you want to wait here in the Keys and read about the next one in your Miami Herald. Hell, I'm not the pope, I'm not saying what you ought to do, but I want to ask you, do you respect my judgment, Will?”
“Yes.”
“I think we have a better chance to get him fast if you help. Hell, Will, saddle up and help us. Go to Atlanta and Birmingham and look, then come on to Washington. Just TDY.”
Graham did not reply.
Crawford waited while five waves lapped the beach. Then he got up and slung his suit coat over his shoulder. “Let's talk after dinner.”
“Stay and eat.”
Crawford shook his head. “I'll come back later. There'll be messages at the Holiday Inn and I'll be a while on the phone. Tell Molly thanks, though.”
Crawford's rented car raised thin dust that settled on the bushes beside the shell road.
Graham returned to the table. He was afraid that this was how he would remember the end of Sugarloaf Keyice melting in two tea glasses and paper napkins fluttering off the redwood table in the breeze and Molly and Willy far down the beach.
# # #
Sunset on Sugarloaf, the herons still and the red sun swelling.
Will Graham and Molly Foster Graham sat on a bleached drift log, their faces orange in the sunset, backs in violet shadow. She picked up his hand.
“Crawford stopped by to see me at the shop before he came out here,” she said. “He asked directions to the house. I tried to call you. You really ought to answer the phone once in a while. We saw the car when we got home and went