The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [20]
And all the time the men were talking to her, con?stantly, gently. “We won't touch anything. We're pros, you don't have to worry. The cops will let us in any?way. It's all right, honey.”
Their cozening backseat manner put her over.
She ran to a bumper jack at the end of the door and pumped the handle: The door came down two inches, with a grinding screech. She pumped it again. Now the door was touching the man's chest. When he didn't come out, she pulled the handle out of the socket and carried it back to the prone cameraman. There were other bright television lights now, and in the glare of them she banged the door above him hard with the jack handle, showering dust and rust down on him.
“Give me your attention,” she said. “You don't lis?ten, do you? Come out of there. Now. You're one sec?ond from arrest for obstruction of justice.”
“Take it easy,” the assistant said. He put his hand on her. She turned on him. There were shouted questions from behind the glare and she heard sirens.
“Hands off and back off, buster.” She stood on the cameraman's ankle and faced the assistant, the jack handle hanging by her side. She did not raise the jack handle. It was just as well. She looked bad enough on television as it was.
The Silence of the Lambsr
CHAPTER 9
The odors of the violent ward seemed more in?tense in the semidarkness. A TV set playing without sound in the corridor threw Starling's shadow on the bars of Dr. Lecter's cage.
She could not see into the dark behind the bars, but she didn't ask the orderly to turn up the lights from his station. The whole ward would light at once and she knew the Baltimore County police had had the lights full on for hours while they shouted questions at Lecter. He had refused to speak, but responded by folding for them an origami chicken that pecked when the tail was manipulated up and down. The senior officer, furious, had crushed the chicken in the lobby ashtray as he gestured for Starling to go in.
“Dr. Lecter?” She heard her own breathing, and breathing down the hall, but from Miggs' empty cell, no breathing. Miggs' cell was vastly empty. She felt its silence like a draft.
Starling knew Lecter was watching her from the darkness. Two minutes passed. Her legs and back ached from her struggle with the garage door, and her clothes were damp. She sat on her coat on the floor, well back from the bars, her feet tucked under her, and lifted her wet, bedraggled hair over her collar to get it off her neck.
Behind her on the TV screen, an evangelist waved his arms.
“Dr. Lecter, we both know what this is. They think you'll talk to me.”
Silence. Down the hall, someone whistled “Over the Sea to Skye.”
After five minutes, she said, “It was strange going in there. Sometime I'd like to talk to you about it.”
Starling jumped when the food carrier rolled out of Lecter's cell. There was a clean, folded towel in the tray. She hadn't heard him move.
She looked at it and, with a sense of falling, took it and toweled her hair. “Thanks,” she said.
“Why don't you ask me about Buffalo Bill?” His voice was close, at her level. He must be sitting on the floor too.
“Do you know something about him?”
“I might if I saw the case.”
“I don't have that case,” Starling said.
“You won't have this one, either, when they're through using you.”
“I know.”
“You could get the files on Buffalo Bill. The reports and the pictures. I'd like to see it.”
I'll bet you would. “Dr. Lecter, you started this. Now please tell me about the person in the Packard.”
“You found an entire person? Odd. I only saw a head. Where do you suppose the rest came from?”
“All right. Whose head was it?”
“What can you tell?”
“They've only done the preliminary stuff. White male, about twentyseven, both American and Euro?pean dentistry. Who was he?”
“Raspail's lover. Raspail, of the gluey flute.”
“What were the circumstances--- how did he die?”
“Circumlocution, Officer Starling?”
“No, I'll ask it later.”
“Let me save