The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [29]
The chief deputy's mouth was tight. “Oscar, go out front and get Dr. Akin. He's kind of obliged to attend those rites, but I don't think they've got started out there yet. Tell him we've got Claxton on the phone.”
The coroner, Dr. Akin, came to the little office and stood with his foot on a chair, tapping his front teeth with a Good Shepherd fan while he had a brief tele?phone conference with the pathologist in Claxton. Then he agreed to everything.
So, in an embalming room with cabbage roses in the wallpaper and a picture molding beneath its high ceil?ing, in a white frame house of a type she understood, Clarice Starling met with her first direct evidence of Buffalo Bill.
The bright green body bag, tightly zipped, was the only modern object in the room. It lay on an oldfash?ioned porcelain embalming table, reflected many times in the glass panes of cabinets holding trochars and packages of RockHard Cavity Fluid.
Crawford went to the car for the fingerprint trans?mitter while Starling unpacked her equipment on the drainboard of a large double sink against the wall.
Too many people were in the room. Several deputies, the chief deputy, all had wandered in with them and showed no inclination to leave. It wasn't right. Why didn't Crawford come on and get rid of them?
The wallpaper billowed in a draft, billowed inward as the doctor turned on the big, dusty vent fan.
Clarice Starling, standing at the sink, needed now a prototype of courage more apt and powerful than any Marine parachute jump. The image came to her, and helped her, but it pierced her too:
Her mother, standing at the sink, washing blood out of her father's hat, running cold water over the hat, saying, “We'll be all right Clarice. Tell your brothers and sister to wash up and come to the table. We need to talk and then we'll fix our supper. ”
Starling took off her scarf and tied it over her hair like a mountain midwife. She took a pair of surgical gloves out of her kit. When she opened her mouth for the first time in Potter, her voice had more than its normal twang and the force of it brought Crawford to the door to listen. “Gentlemen. Gentlemen! You offi?cers and gentlemen! Listen here a minute. Please. Now let me take care of her.” She held her hands before their faces as she pulled on the gloves. “There's things we need to do for her. You brought her this far, and I know her folks would thank you if they could. Now please go on out and let me take care of her.”
Crawford saw them suddenly go quiet and respectful and urge each other out in whispers: “Come on, Jess. Let's go out in the yard.” And Crawford saw that the atmosphere had changed here in the presence of the dead: that wherever this victim came from, whoever she was, the river had carried her into the country, and while she lay helpless in this room in the
country, Clarice Starling had a special relationship to her. Crawford saw that in this place Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep the watch and when the watch is over, wash and dress the country dead.
Then there were only Crawford and Starling and the doctor in the room with the victim, Dr. Akin and Star?ling looking at each other with a kind of recognition. Both of them were oddly pleased, oddly abashed.
Crawford took a jar of Vicks VapoRub out of his pocket and offered it around. Starling watched to see what to do, and when Crawford and the doctor rubbed it around the rims of their nostrils, she did too.
She dug her cameras out of the equipment bag on the drainboard, her back to the room. Behind her she heard the zipper of the body bag go down.
Starling blinked at the