The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [42]
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
Starling's entry, late, into the classroom was not eased by Gracie Pitman, the young woman she had displaced in the shower. Gracie Pitman sat directly be?hind Starling. It seemed a long way to her seat. Gracie Pitmans tongue had time to make two fullrevolutions in her downy cheek before Starling could submerge into the class.
With no breakfast she sat through two hours of “The GoodFaith Warrant Exception to the Exclusionary Rule in Search and Seizure,” before she could get to the vending machine and chug a Coke.
She checked her box for a message at noon and there was nothing. It occurred to her then, as it had on a few other occasions in her life, that intense frustration tastes very much like the patent medicine called Fleet's that she'd had to take as a child.
Some days you wake up changed. This was one for Starling, she could tell. What she had seen yesterday at the Potter Funeral Home had caused in her a small tectonic shift.
Starling had studied psychology and criminology in a good school. In her life she had seen some of the hideously offhand ways in which the world breaks things. But she hadn't really known, and now she knew: sometimes the family of man produces, behind a human face, a mind whose pleasure is what lay on the porcelain table at Potter, West Virginia, in the room with the cabbage roses. Starling's first apprehension of that mind was worse than anything she could see on the autopsy scales. The knowledge would lie against her skin forever, and she knew she had to form a callus or it would wear her through.
The school routine didn't help her. All day she had the feeling that things were going on just over the horizon. She seemed to hear a vast murmur of events, like the sound from a distant stadium. Suggestions of movement unsettled her, groups passing in the hall?way, cloud shadows moving over, the sound of an air?plane.
After class Starling ran too many laps and then she swam. She swam until she thought about the floaters and then she didn't want the water on her anymore.
She watched the seven o'clock news with Mapp and a dozen other students in the recreation room. The abduction of Senator Martin's daughter was not the lead item, but it was first after the Geneva arms talks.
There was film from Memphis, starting with the sign of the Stonehinge Villas, shot across the revolving light of a patrol car. The media were blitzing the story and, with little new to report, reporters interviewed each other in the parking lot at Stonehinge. Memphis and Shelby County authorities ducked their heads to unac?customed banks of microphones. In a jostling, squeal?ing hell of lens flare and audio feedback, they listed the things they didn't know. Stillphotographers stooped and darted, backpedaling into the TV minicams when?ever investigators entered or left Catherine Baker Mar?tin's apartment.
A brief, ironic cheer went up in the Academy recrea?tion room when Crawford's face appeared briefly in the apartment window. Starling smiled on one side of her mouth.
She wondered if Buffalo Bill was watching. She wondered what he thought of Crawford's face or if he even knew who Crawford was.
Others seemed to think Bill might be watching, too.
There was Senator Martin, on television live with Peter Jennings. She stood alone in her child's bedroom, a Southwestern University pennant and posters favor?ing Wile E. Coyote and the Equal Rights Amendment on the wall behind her.
She was a tall woman with a strong, plain face.
“I'm speaking now to the person who is holding my daughter,” she said. She walked closer to the camera, causing an unscheduled refocus, and spoke as she never would have spoken to a terrorist.
“You have the power to let my daughter go un?harmed. Her name is Catherine. She's very gentle and understanding. Please let my daughter go, please re?lease her unharmed. You have control of this situation. You have the power. You are in charge. I know you can feel love and compassion. You can protect her against anything that might want to harm her. You now have a wonderful chance to show the