The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris [45]
She parked the Pinto beneath FBI headquarters at Tenth and Pennsylvania. Two television crews were set up on the sidewalk, reporters looking overgroomed in the lights. They were intoning standup reports with the J. Edgar Hoover Building in the background. Starling skirted the lights and walked the two blocks to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
She could see a few lighted windows high in the old building. A Baltimore County Police van was parked in the semicircular drive. Crawford's driver, Jeff, waited at the wheel of a new surveillance van behind it. When he saw Starling coming, he spoke into a handheld radio.
The Silence of the Lambsr
CHAPTER 18
The guard took Clarice Starling to the second level above the Smithsonian's great stuffed elephant. The elevator door opened onto that vast dim floor and Crawford was waiting there alone, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat.
“Evening, Starling.”
“Hello,” she said.
Crawford spoke over her shoulder to the guard. “We can make it from here by ourselves, Officer, thank you.”
Crawford and Starling walked side by side along a corridor in the stacked trays and cases of anthropologi?cal specimens. A few ceiling lights were on, not many. As she fell with him into the hunched, reflective atti?tude of a campus stroll, Starling became aware that Crawford wanted to put his hand on her shoulder, that he would have done it if it were possible for him to touch her.
She waited for him to say something. Finally she stopped, put her hands in her pockets too, and they faced each other across the passage in the silence of the bones.
Crawford leaned his head back against the cases and took a deep breath through his nose. “Catherine Martin's probably still alive,” he said.
Starling nodded, kept her head down after the last nod. Maybe he would find it easier to talk if she didn't look at him. He was steady, but something had hold of him. Starling wondered for a second if his wife had died. Or maybe spending all day with Catherine's grieving mother had done it.
“Memphis was pretty much of a wipe,” he said. “He got her on the parking lot, I think. Nobody saw it. She went in her apartment and then she came back out for some reason. She didn't mean to stay out long--- she left the door ajar and flipped the deadbolt so it wouldn't lock behind her. Her keys were on top of the TV. Noth?ing disturbed inside. I don't think she was in the apart?ment long. She never got as far as her answering machine in the bedroom. The message light was still blinking when her yoyo boyfriend finally called the police.” Crawford idly let his hand fall into a tray of bones, and quickly took it out again.
“So now he's got her, Starling. The networks agreed not to do a countdown on the evening news--- Dr. Bloom thinks it eggs him on. A couple of the tabloids'll do it anyway.”
In one previous abduction, clothing slit up the back had been found soon enough to identify a Buffalo Bill victim while she was still being held alive. Starling remembered the blackbordered countdown on the front pages of the trash papers. It reached eighteen days before the body floated.
“So Catherine Baker Martin's waiting in BilYs green room, Starling, and we have maybe a week: That's at the outside--- Bloom thinks his period's getting shorter.”
This seemed like a lot of talk for Crawford. The theatrical “green room” reference smacked of bullshit. Starling waited for him to get to the point, and then he did.
“But this time, Starling, this time we may have a little break.”
She looked up at him beneath her brows, hopeful and watchful too.
“We've got another insect. Your fellows, Pilcher and that... other one.”
'Roden."
“They're working on it.” .
“Where was it--- Cincinnati?--- the girl in the freezer?”
“No. Come on and I'll show you. Let's see what you think