Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [65]
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In the interview with Lounds, Graham made statements no investigator would make and no straight newspaper would credit.
He speculated that the Tooth Fairy was ugly, impotent with persons of the opposite sex, and he claimed falsely that the killer had sexually molested his male victims. Graham said that the Tooth Fairy doubtless was the laughingstock of his acquaintances and the product of an incestuous home.
He emphasized that the Tooth Fairy obviously was not as intelligent as Hannibal Lecter. He promised to provide the Tattler with more observations and insights about the killer as they occurred to him. Many lawinforcement people disagreed with him, he said, but as long as he was heading the investigation, the Tattler could count on getting the straight stuff from him.
Lounds took a lot of pictures.
The key shot was taken in Graham's “Washington hideaway,” an apartment he had “borrowed to use until he squashed the Fairy.” It was the only place where he could “find solitude” in the “carnival atmosphere” of the investigation.
The photograph showed Graham in a bathrobe at a desk, studying late into the night. He was poring over a grotesque “artist's conception” of “the Fairy.”
Behind him a slice of the floodlit Capitol dome could be seen through the window. Most importantly, in the lowerleft corner of the window, blurred but readable, was the sign of a popular motel across the street.
The Tooth Fairy could find the apartment if he wanted to.
At FBI headquarters, Graham was photographed in front of a mass spectrometer. It had nothing to do with the case, but Lounds thought it looked impressive.
Graham even consented to have his picture taken with Lounds interviewing him. They did it in front of the vast gun racks in Firearms and Toolmarks. Lounds held a ninemillimeter automatic of the same type as the Tooth Fairy's weapon. Graham pointed to the homemade silencer, fashioned from a length of televisionantenna mast.
Dr. Bloom was surprised to see Graham put a comradely hand on Lounds's shoulder just before Crawford clicked the shutter.
The interview and pictures were set to appear in the Tattler published the next day, Monday, August 11. As soon as he had the material, Lounds left for Chicago. He said he wanted to supervise the layout himself. He made arrangements to meet Crawford on Tuesday afternoon five blocks from the trap.
Starting Tuesday, when the Tattler became generally available, two traps would be baited for the monster.
Graham would go each evening to his “temporary residence” shown in the Tattler picture.
A coded personal notice in the same issue invited the Tooth Fairy to a mail drop in Annapolis watched around the clock. If he were suspicious of the mail drop, he might think the effort to catch him was concentrated there. Then Graham would be a more appealling target, the FBI reasoned.
Florida authorities provided a stillwatch at Sugarloaf Key.
There was an air of dissatisfaction among the hunters - two major stakeouts took manpower that could be used elsewhere, and Graham's presence at the trap each night would limit his movement to the Washington area.
Though Crawford's judgment told him this was the best move, the whole procedure was too passive for his taste. He felt they were playing games with themselves in the dark of the moon with less than two weeks to go before it rose full again.
Sunday and Monday passed in curiously jerky time. The minutes dragged and the hours flew.
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Spurgen, chief SWAT instructor at Quantico, circled the apartment block on Monday afternoon. Graham rode beside him. Crawford was in the back seat.
“The pedestrian traffic falls off around sevenfifteen. Everybody's settled in for dinner,” Spurgen said. With his wiry, compact body and his baseball cap tipped back on his head, he looked like an infielder. “Give