The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [40]
“Good,” he said.
There was an unpleasant odor about the man, and she noticed with distaste that his chamois shirt still had hairs on it, curly ones across the shoulders and beneath the arms.
It was easy lifting the chair onto the low floor of the truck.
“Let's slide it to the front, do you mind?” He climbed inside and moved some clutter, the big flat pans you can slide under a vehicle to drain the oil, and a small hand winch called a coffin hoist.
They pushed the chair forward until it was just be?hind the seats.
“Are you about a fourteen?” he said.
“What?”
“Would you hand me that rope? It's just at your feet.”
When she bent to look, he brought the plaster cast down on the back of her head. She thought she'd bumped her head and she raised her hand to it as the cast came down again, smashing her fingers against her skull, and down again, this time behind her ear, a suc?cession of blows, none of them too hard, as she slumped over the chair. She slid to the floor of the truck and lay on her side.
The man watched her for a second, then pulled off his cast and the arm sling. Quickly, he brought the lamp into the truck and closed the rear doors.
He pulled her collar back and, with a flashlight, read the size tag on her blouse.
“Good,” he said.
He slit the blouse up the back with a pair of bandage scissors, pulled the blouse off, and handcuffed her hands behind her. Spreading a mover's pad on the floor of the truck, he rolled her onto her back.
She was not wearing a brassiere. He prodded her big breasts with his fingers and felt their weight and resili?ence.
“Good,” he said.
There was a pink suck mark on her left breast. He licked his finger to rub it as he had done the chintz and nodded when the lividity went away with light pres?sure. He rolled her onto her face and checked her scalp, parting her thick hair with his fingers. The padded cast hadn't cut her.
He checked her pulse with two fingers on the side of her neck and found it strong.
“Gooood, ” he said. He had a long way to drive to his twostory house and he'd rather not fielddress her here.
Catherine Baker Martin's cat watched out the win?dow as the truck pulled away, the taillights getting closer and closer together.
Behind the cat the telephone was ringing. The ma?chine in the bedroom answered, its red light blinking in the dark.
The caller was Catherine's mother, the junior U.S. Senator from Tennessee.
The Silence of the Lambsr
CHAPTER 16
In the 1980s, the Golden Age of Terrorism, proce?dures were in place to deal with a kidnapping affecting a member of Congress:
At 2:45 A.M. the special agent in charge of the Mem?phis FBI office reported to headquarters in Washington that Senator Ruth Martin's only daughter had disap?peared.
At 3:00 A.M. two unmarked vans pulled out of the damp basement garage at the Washington field office, Buzzard's Point. One van went to the Senate Office Building, where technicians placed monitoring and re?cording equipment on the telephones in Senator Martin's office and put a Title 3 wiretap on the pay phones closest to the Senator's office. The Justice Department woke the most junior member of the Senate Select In?telligence Committee to provide the obligatory notice of the tap.
The other vehicle, an “eyeball van” with oneway glass and surveillance equipment, was parked on Vir?ginia Avenue to cover the front of the Watergate West, Senator Martin's Washington residence. Two of the van's occupants went inside to install monitoring equipment on the Senator's home telephones.
Bell Atlantic estimated the mean trace time at sev?enty seconds on any ransom call placed from a domes?tic digital switching system.
The Reactive Squad at Buzzard's Point went to dou?ble shifts in the event of a ransom drop in the Washing?ton area. Their radio procedure changed to mandatory encryption to protect any possible ransom drop from intrusion by news helicopters--- that kind of irresponsi?bility on the part of the news business was rare, but it had happened.
The Hostage Rescue Team went