The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [105]
She'd have to give the file back tomorrow and, if she wanted this copy to be complete, sooner or later she had to insert her report. In the warm laundry room, in the washing machine's comforting chug, she took off the rubber bands that held the file together. She laid out the papers on the clothesfolding shelf and tried to do the insert without seeing any of the pictures, without thinking of what pictures might be added soon. The map was on top, that was fine. But there was handwrit?ing on the map.
Dr. Lecter's elegant script ran across the Great Lakes, and it said:
Clarice, does this random scattering of sites seem
overdone to you? Doesn't it seem desperately ran-
dom? Random past all possible convenience?
Does it suggest to you the elaborations of a bad
liar?
Ta,
Hannibal Lecter
P.S. Don't bother to flip through, there isn't any-
?thing else.
It took twenty minutes of pageturning to be sure there wasn't anything else.
Starling called the hotline from the pay phone in the hall and read the message to Burroughs. She wondered when Burroughs slept.
“I have to tell you, Starling, the market in Lecter information is way down,” Burroughs said. “Did Jack call you about Billy Rubin?”
“No.”
She leaned against the wall with her eyes closed while, he described Dr. Lecter's joke.
“I don't know,” he said at last. “Jack says they'll go on with the sexchange clinics, but how hard? If you look at the information in the computer, the way the field entries are styled, you can see that all the Lecter information, yours and the stuff from Memphis, has special prefixes. All the Baltimore stuff or all the Mem?phis stuff or both can be knocked out of consideration with one button. I think Justice wants to push the button on all of it. I got a memo here suggesting the bug in Klaus' throat was, let's see, 'flotsam.' ”
“You'll punch this up for Mr. Crawford, though,” Starling said.
“Sure, I'll put it on his screen, but we're not calling him right now. You shouldn't either. Bella died a little while ago.”
“Oh,” Starling said.
“Listen, on the bright side, our guys in Baltimore took a look at Lecter's cell in the asylum. That orderly, Barney, helped out. They got brass grindings off a bolt head in Lecter's cot where he made his handcuff key. Hang in there, kid. You're gonna come out smelling like a rose.”
“Thank you, Mr. Burroughs. Good night.”
Smelling like a rose. Putting Vicks VapoRub under her nostrils.
Daylight coming on the last day of Catherine Mar?tin' s life.
What could Dr. Lecter mean?
There was no knowing what Dr. Lecter knew. When she first gave him the file, she expected him to enjoy the pictures and use the file as a prop while he told her what he already knew about Buffalo Bill.
Maybe he was always lying to her, just as he lied to Senator Martin. Maybe he didn't know or understand anything about Buffalo Bill.
He sees very clearly--- he damn sure sees through me. It's hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well. At Starling's age it hadn't happened to her much.
Desperately random, Dr. Lecter said.
Starling and Crawford and everyone else had stared at the map with its dots marking the abductions and body dumps. It had looked to Starling like a black constellation with a date beside each star, and she knew Behavioral Science had once tried imposing zodiac signs on the map without result.
If Dr. Lecter was reading for recreation, why would he fool with the map? She could see him flipping through the report, making fun of the prose style of some of the contributors.
There was no pattern in the abductions and body dumps, no relationships of convenience, no coordina?tion in time with any known business conventions, any spate of burglaries or clothesline thefts or other fetish?-oriented crimes.
Back in the laundry room, with the dryer spinning, Starling walked her fingers over the map. Here an ab?duction, there the dump. Here the second abduction, there