The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [27]
“No.”
“What if you... postulate... that he's making a dropoff and a new abduction on the same trip?” Star?ling asked, carefully avoiding the forbidden word as?sume. “He'd drop off the body first, wouldn't he, in case he got in trouble grabbing the next one? Then, if he was caught grabbing somebody, he might get off for assault, plead it down to zip if he didn't have a body in his car. So how about drawing vectors backward from each abduction site through the previous dump site? You've tried it.”
“That's a good idea, but he had it too. If he is doing both things in one trip, he's zigging around. We've run computer simulations, first with him westbound on the Interstates, then eastbound, then various combinations with the best dates we can put on the dumps and ab?ductions. You put it in the computer and smoke comes out. He lives in the East, it tells us. He's not in a moon cycle, it tells us. No convention dates in the cities corre?late. Nothing but feathers. No, he's seen us coming, Starling.”
“You think he's too careful to be a suicide.”
Crawford nodded. “Definitely too careful. He's found out how to have a meaningful relationship now, and he wants to do it a lot. I'm not getting my hopes up for a suicide.”
Crawford passed the pilot a cup of water from a thermos. He gave one to Starling and mixed himself an AlkaSeltzer.
Her stomach lifted as the airplane started down.
“Couple of things, Starling. I look for firstrate fo?rensics from you, but I need more than that. You don't say much, and that's okay, neither do I. But don't ever feel you've got to have a new fact to tell me before you can bring something up. There aren't any silly ques?tions. You'll see things that I won't, and I want to know what they are. Maybe you've got a knack for this. All of a sudden we've got this chance to see if you do.”
Listening to him, her stomach lifting and her expres?sion properly rapt, Starling wondered how long Craw?ford had known he'd use her on this case, how hungry for a chance he had wanted her to be. He was a leader, with a leader's frankandopen bullshit, all right.
“You think about him enough, you see where he's been, you get a feel for him,” Crawford went on. "You don't even dislike him all the time, hard as that is to believe. Then, if you're lucky, out of all the stuff you know, part of it plucks at you, tries to get your atten?tion. Always tell me when something plucks, Starling.
"Listen to me, a crime is confusing enough without the investigation mixing it up. Don't let a herd of po?licemen confuse you. Live right behind your eyes. Lis?ten to yourself. Keep the crime separate from what's going on around you now. Don't try to impose any pattern or symmetry on this guy. Stay open and let him show you.
“One other thing: an investigation like this is a zoo. It's spread out over a lot of jurisdictions, and a few are run by losers. We have to get along with them so they won't hold out on us. We're going to Potter, West Virginia. I don't know about these people we're going to. They may be fine or they may think we're the revenuers.”
The pilot lifted an earphone away from his head and spoke over his shoulder. “Final approach, Jack. You staying back there?”
“Yeah,” Crawford said. “School's out, Starling.”
The Silence of the Lambsr
CHAPTER 12
Now here is the Potter Funeral Home, the largest white frame house on Potter Street in Potter, West Virginia, serving as the morgue for Rankin County. The coroner is a family physician named Dr. Akin. If he rules that a death is questionable, the body is sent on to Claxton Regional Medical Center in the neigh?boring county, where they have a trained pathologist.
Clarice Starling, riding into Potter from the airstrip in the back of a sheriff's department cruiser, had to lean up close to the prisoner screen to hear the deputy at the wheel as he explained these things to Jack Crawford.
A service was about to get under way at the mortu?ary. The mourners in their country Sunday best filed up the sidewalk between leggy boxwoods and bunched on the