The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [25]
Maybe it felt like this.
She opened the file.
He had done it five times that they knew of, had Bill. At least five times, and probably more, over the past ten months he had abducted a woman, killed her and skinned her. (Starling's eye raced down the autopsy protocols to the free histamine tests to confirm that he killed them before he did the rest.)
He dumped each body in running water when he was through with it. Each was found in a different river, downstream from an interstate highway crossing, each in a different state. Everyone knew Buffalo Bill was a traveling man. That was all the law knew about him, absolutely all, except that he had at least one gun. It had six lands and grooves, lefthand twist--- possibly a Colt revolver or a Colt clone. Skidmarks on recovered bullets indicated he preferred to fire .38 Specials in the longer chambers of a .357.
The rivers left no fingerprints, no trace evidence of hair or fiber.
He was almost certain to be a white male: white because serial murderers usually kill within their own ethnic group and all the victims were white; male be?cause female serial murderers are almost unknown in our time.
Two bigcity columnists had found a headline in e.e. cummings' deadly little poem “Buffalo Bill”:... how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death
Someone, maybe Crawford, had pasted the quota?tion inside the cover of the file.
There was no clear correlation between where Bill abducted the young women and where he dumped them.
In the cases where the bodies were found soon enough for an accurate determination of time of death, police learned another thing the killer did: Bill kept them for a while, alive. These victims did not die until a week to ten days after they were abducted. That meant he had to have a place to keep them and a place to work in privacy. It meant he wasn't a drifter. He was more of a trapdoor spider. With his own digs. Some?where.
That horrified the public more than anything--- his holding them for a week or more, knowing he would kill them.
Two were hanged, three shot. There was no evidence of rape or physical abuse prior to death, and the au?topsy protocols recorded no evidence of “specifically genital” disfigurement, though pathologists noted it would be almost impossible to determine these things in the more deteriorated bodies.
All were found naked. In two cases, articles of the victims' outer clothing were found beside the road near their homes, slit up the back like funeral suits.
Starling got through the photographs all right. Float?ers are the worst kind of dead to deal with, physically. There is an absolute pathos about them, too, as there often is about homicide victims out of doors. The in?dignities the victim suffers, the exposure to the ele?ments and to casual eyes, anger you if your job permits you anger.
Often, at indoor homicides, evidences of a victim's unpleasant personal practices, and the victim's own victims--- beaten spouses, abused children--- crowd around to whisper that the dead one had it coming, and many times he did.
But nobody had this coming. Here they had not even their skins as they lay on littered riverbanks amid the outboardoil bottles and sandwich bags that are our common squalor. The coldweather ones largely re?tained their faces. Starling reminded herself that their teeth were not bared in pain, that turtles and fish in the course of feeding had created that expression. Bill peeled the torsos and mostly left the limbs alone.
They wouldn't have been so hard to look at, Starling thought, if this airplane cabin wasn't so warm and if the damned plane didn't have this crawly yaw as one prop caught the air better than the other, and if the God damned sun didn't splinter so on the scratched win?dows and jab like a headache.
It's possible to catch him. Starling squeezed on that thought to help herself sit in this eversmaller airplane cabin with her lap full of awful information. She could help stop him cold. Then they could put this slightly