hapter 48

Crawford came out of the funeral home and looked up and down the street for Jeff with the car. Instead he saw Clarice Starling waiting under the awning, dressed in a dark suit, looking real in the light.

"Send me," she said.

Crawford had just picked out his wife's coffin and he carried in a paper sack a pair of her shoes he had mis¬takenly brought. He collected himself.

"Forgive me," Starling said. "I wouldn't came now if there were any other time. Send me."

Crawford jammed his hands in his pockets, turned his neck in his collar until it popped. His eyes were bright, maybe dangerous. "Send you where?"

"You sent me to get a feel for Catherine Martin--- let me go to the others. All we've got left is to find out how he hunts. How he finds them, how he picks them. I'm as good as anybody you've got at the cop stuff, better at some things. The victims are all women and there aren't any women working this. I can walk in a woman's room and know three times as much about her as a man would know, and you know that's a fact. Send me."

"You ready to accept a recycle?"

"Yes."

"Six months of your life, probably."

She didn't say anything.

Crawford stubbed at the grass with his toe. He looked up at her, at the prairie distance in her eyes. She had backbone, like Bella. "Who would you start with?"

"The first one. Fredrica Bimmel, Belvedere, Ohio."

"Not Kimberly Emberg, the one you saw."

"He didn't start with her." Mention Lecter? No. He'd see it on the hotline.

"Emberg would be the emotional choice, wouldn't she, Starling? Travel's by reimbursement. Got any money?" The banks wouldn't open for an hour.

"I've got some left on my Visa."

Crawford dug in his pockets. He gave her three hun¬dred dollars cash and a personal check.

"Go, Starling. Just to the first one. Post the hotline. Call me."

She raised her hand to him. She didn't touch his face or his hand, there didn't seem to be any place to touch, and she turned and ran for the Pinto.

Crawford patted his pockets as she drove away. He had given her the last cent he had with him.

"Baby needs a new pair of shoes," he said. "My baby doesn't need any shoes." He was crying in the middle of the sidewalk, sheets of tears on his face, a Section Chief of the FBI, silly now.

Jeff from the car saw his cheeks shine and backed into an alley where Crawford couldn't see him. Jeff got out of the car. He lit a cigarette and smoked furiously. As his gift to Crawford he would dawdle until Craw¬ford was dried off and pissed off and justified in chew¬ing him out.

Chapter 49

On the morning of the fourth day, Mr. Gumb was ready to harvest the hide.

He came in from shopping with the last things he needed, and it was hard to keep from running down the basement stairs. In the studio he unpacked his shop¬ping bags, new bias seam-binding, panels of stretchy Lycra to go under the plackets, a box of kosher salt. He had forgotten nothing.

In the workroom, he laid out his knives on a clean towel beside the long sinks. The knives were four: a sway-backed skinning knife, a delicate drop-point caper that perfectly followed the curve of the indent finger in close places, a scalpel for the closest work, and a World War I-era bayonet. The rolled edge of the bayonet is the finest tool for fleshing a hide without tearing it.

In addition he had a Strycker autopsy saw, which he hardly ever used and regretted buying.

Now he greased the head of a wig stand, packed coarse salt over the grease and set the stand in a shallow drip pan. Playfully he tweaked the nose on the face of the wig stand and blew it a kiss.

It was hard to behave in a responsible manner--- he wanted to fly about the room like Danny Kaye. He laughed and blew a moth away from his face with a gentle puff of air.

Time to start the aquarium pumps in his fresh tanks of solution. Oh, was there a nice chrysalis buried in the humus in the cage? He poked with his finger. Yes, there was.

The pistol, now.

The problem of killing this one had perplexed Mr. Gumb for days. Hanging her was out because he didn't want the pectoral mottling, and besides, he couldn't risk the knot tearing her behind the ear.

Mr. Gumb had learned from each of his previous efforts, sometimes painfully. He was determined to avoid some of the nightmares he'd gone through before. One cardinal principle: no matter how weak from hunger or faint with fright, they always fought you when they saw the apparatus.

He had in the past hunted young women through the blacked-out basement using his infrared goggles and light, and it was wonderful to do, watching them feel their way around, seeing them try to scrunch into cor¬ners. He liked to hunt them with the pistol. He liked to use the pistol. Always they became disoriented, lost their balance, ran into things. He could stand in abso¬lute darkness with his goggles on, wait until they took their hands down from their faces, and shoot them right in the head. Or in the legs first, below the knee so they could still crawl.

That was childish and a waste. They were useless afterward and he had quit doing it altogether.

In his current project, he had offered showers up¬stairs to the first three, before he booted them down the staircase with a noose around their necks--- no problem. But the fourth had been a disaster. He'd had to use the pistol in the bathroom and it had taken an hour to clean up. He thought about the girl, wet, goosebumps on her, and how she shivered when he cocked the pistol. He liked to cock it, snick snick, one big bang and no more racket.

He liked his pistol,, and well he should, because it was a very handsome piece, a stainless steel Colt Py¬thon with a six-inch barrel. All Python actions are tuned at the Colt custom shop, and this one was a pleasure to feel. He cocked it now and squeezed it off, catching the hammer with his thumb. He loaded the Python and put it on the workroom counter.

Mr. Gumb wanted very much to offer this one a shampoo, because he wanted to watch it comb out the hair. He could learn much for his own grooming about how the hair lay on the head. But this one was tall and probably strong. This one was too rare to risk having to waste the whole thing with gunshot wounds.

No, he'd get his hoisting tackle from the bathroom, offer her a bath, and when she had put herself securely in the hoisting sling he'd bring her halfway up the shaft of the oubliette and shoot her several times low in the spine. When she lost consciousness he could do the rest with chloroform.

That's it. He'd go upstairs now and get out of his clothes. He'd wake up Precious and watch his video with her and then go to work, naked in the warm basement, naked as the day he was born.

He felt almost giddy going up the stairs. Quickly out of his clothes and into his robe. He plugged in his videocassette.

"Precious, come on Precious. Busybusy day. Come on, Sweetheart." He'd have to shut her up here in the upstairs bedroom while he got through with the noisy part in the basement--- she hated the noise and got terri¬bly upset. To keep her occupied, he'd gotten her a whole box of Chew-eez while he was out shopping.

"Precious." When she didn't come, he called in the hall, "Precious!" and then in the kitchen, and in the basement, "Precious!" When he called at the door of the oubliette room, he got an answer:

"She's down here you son of a bitch," Catherine Martin said.

Mr. Gumb sickened all over in a plunge of fear for Precious. Then rage tightened him again and, fists against the sides of his head, he pressed his forehead into the doorframe and tried to get hold of himself. One sound between a retch and a groan escaped him and the little dog answered with a yip.

He went to the workroom and got his pistol.

The string to the sanitation bucket was broken. He still wasn't sure how she'd done it. Last time the string was broken, he'd assumed she'd broken it in an absurd attempt to climb. They had tried to climb it before--- ¬they had done every fool thing imaginable.

He leaned over the opening, his voice carefully con¬trolled.

"Precious, are you all right? Answer me."

Catherine pinched the dog's plump behind. It yipped and paid her back with a nip on the arm.

"How's that?" Catherine said.

It seemed very unnatural to Mr. Gumb to speak to Catherine in this way, but he overcame his distaste.

"I'll lower a basket. You'll put her in it."

"You'll lower a telephone or I'll have to break her neck. I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to hurt this little dog. Just give me the telephone."

Mr. Gumb brought the pistol up. Catherine saw the muzzle extending past the light. She crouched, holding the dog above her, weaving it between her and the gun. She heard him cock the pistol.

"You shoot motherfucker you better kill me quick or I'll break her fucking neck. I swear to God."

She put the dog under her arm, put her hand around its muzzle, raised its head. "Back off, you son of a bitch." The little dog whined. The gun withdrew.

Catherine brushed the hair back from her wet fore¬head with her free hand. "I didn't mean to insult you," she said. "Just lower me a phone. I want a live phone. You can go away, I don't care about you, I never saw you. I'll take good care of Precious."

"No."

"I'll see she has everything. Think about her welfare; not just yourself. You shoot in here, she'll be deaf whatever happens. All I want's a live telephone. Get a long extension, get five or six and clip them together--- ¬they come with the connections on the ends--- and -lower it down here. I'd air-freight you the dog any¬where. My family has dogs. My mother loves dogs. You can run, I don't care what you do."

"You won't get any more water, you've had your last water.''

"She won't get any either, and I won't give her any from my water bottle. I'm sorry to tell you, I think her leg's broken." This was a lie--- the lithe dog, along with the baited bucket, had fallen onto Catherine and it was Catherine who suffered a scratched cheek from the dog's scrabbling claw. She couldn't put it down or he'd see it didn't limp. "She's in pain. Her leg's all crooked and she's trying to lick it. It just makes me sick," Cath¬erine lied. "I've got to get her to a vet."

Mr. Gumb's groan of rage and anguish made the little dog cry. "You think she's in pain," Mr. Gumb said. "You don't know what pain is. You hurt her and I'll scald you."

When she heard him pounding up the stairs Cather¬ine Martin sat down, shaken by gross jerks in her arms and legs. She couldn't hold the dog, she couldn't hold her water, she couldn't hold anything.

When the little dog climbed into her lap she hugged it, grateful far the warmth.

Chapter 50

Feathers rode on the thick brown water, curled feathers blown from the coops, carried on breaths of air that shivered the skin of the river.

The houses on Fell Street, Fredrica Bimmel's street, were termed waterfront on the weathered realtors' signs because their backyards ended at a slough, a backwater of the Licking River in Belvedere, Ohio, a Rust Belt town of 112,000, east of Columbus.

It was a shabby neighborhood of big, old houses. A few of them had been bought cheap by young couples and renovated with Sears Best enamel, making the rest of the houses look worse. The Bimmel house had not been renovated.

Clarice Starling stood for a moment in Fredrica's backyard looking at the feathers on the water, her hands deep in the pockets of her trenchcoat. There was some rotten snow in the reeds, blue beneath the blue sky on this mild winter day.

Behind her Starling could hear Fredrica's father ham¬mering in the city, of pigeon-coops, the Orvieto of pi¬geon coops rising from the water's edge and reaching almost to the house. She hadn't seen Mr. Bimmel yet.

The neighbors said he was there. Their faces were closed when they said it.

Starling was having some trouble with herself. At that moment in the night when she knew she had to leave the Academy to hunt Buffalo Bill, a lot of extra¬neous noises had stopped. She felt a pure new silence in the center of her mind, and a calm there. In a differ¬ent place, down the front of her, she felt in flashes that she was a truant and a fool.

The petty annoyances of the morning hadn't touched her--- not the gymnasium stink of the airplane to Co¬lumbus, not the confusion and ineptitude at the rental-car counter. She'd snapped at the car clerk to make him move, but she hadn't felt anything.

Starling had paid a high price for this time and she meant to use it as she thought best. Her time could be up at any moment, if Crawford was overruled and they pulled her credentials.

She should hurry, but to think about why, to dwell on Catherine's plight on this final day, would be to waste the day entirely. To think of her in real time, being processed at this moment as Kimberly Emberg and Fredrica Bimmel had been processed, would jam all other thought.

The breeze fell off, the water still as death. Near her feet a curled feather spun on the surface tension. Hang on, Catherine.

Starling caught her lip between her teeth. If he shot her, she hoped he'd do a competent job of it.

Teach us to care and not to care.

Teach us to be still.

She turned to the leaning stack of coops and fol¬lowed a path of boards laid on the mud between them, toward the sound of hammering. The hundreds of pi¬geons were of all sizes and colors; there were tall knock-kneed ones and pouters with their chests stuck out. Eyes bright, heads jerking as they paced, the birds spread their wings in the pale sun and made pleasant sounds as she passed.

Fredrica's father, Gustav Bimmel, was a tall man, flat and wide-hipped with red-rimmed eyes of watery blue. A knit cap was pulled down to his eyebrows. He was building another coop on sawhorses in front of his work shed. Starling smelled vodka on his breath as he squinted at her identification.

"I don't know nothing new to tell you," he said. "The policemen come back here night before last. They went back over my statement with me again. Read it back to me. 'Is that right? Is that right?' I told him, I said hell yes, if that wasn't right I wouldn't have told you in the first place."

"I'm trying to get an idea where the--- get an idea where the kidnapper might have seen Fredrica, Mr. Bimmel. Where he might have spotted her and decided to take her away."

"She went into Columbus on the bus to see about a job at that store there. The police said she got to the interview all right. She never came home. We don't know where else she went that day, The FBI got her Master Charge slips, but there wasn't nothing for that day. You know all that, don't you?"

"About the credit card, yes sir, I do. Mr. Bimmel, do you have Fredrica's things, are they here?

"Her room's in the top of the house."

"May I see?"

It took him a moment to decide where to lay down his hammer. "All right," he said, "come along."

Chapter 51

Jack Crawford's office in the FBI's Washington headquarters was painted an oppressive gray, but it had big windows.

Crawford stood at these windows with his clipboard held to the light, peering at a list off a God damned fuzzy dot-matrix printer that he'd told them to get rid of.

He'd come here from the funeral home and worked all morning, tweaking the Norwegians to hurry with their dental records on the missing seaman named Klaus, jerking San Diego's chain to check Benjamin Raspail's familiars at the Conservatory where he had taught, and stirring up Customs, which was supposed to be checking for import violations involving living insects.

Within five minutes of Crawford's arrival, FBI As¬sistant Director John Golby, head of the new interser¬vice task force, stuck his head in the office for a moment to say "Jack, we're all thinking about you. Everybody appreciates you coming in. Has the service been set yet?"

"The wake's tomorrow evening. Service is Saturday at eleven o'clock."

Golby nodded. "There's a UNICEF memorial, Jack, a fund. You want it to read Phyllis or Bella, we'll do it any way you like."

"Bella, John. Let's make it Bella."

"Can I do anything for you, Jack?"

Crawford shook his head. "I'm just working. I'm just gonna work now."

"Right," Golby said. He waited the decent interval. "Frederick Chilton asked for federal protective cus¬tody."

"Grand. John, is somebody in Baltimore talking to Everett Yow, Raspail's lawyer? I mentioned him to you. He might know something about Raspail's friends."

"Yeah, they're on it this morning. I just sent Bur¬roughs my memo on it. The Director's putting Lecter on the Most Wanted. Jack, if you need anything..." Golby raised his eyebrows and his hand and backed out of sight.

If you need anything.

Crawford turned to the windows. He had a fine view from his office. There was the handsome old Post Office building where he'd done some of his training. To the left was the old FBI headquarters. At. graduation, he'd filed thibugh J. Edgar Hoover's office with the others. Hoover stood on a little box and shook their hands in turn. That was the only time Crawford ever met the man. The next day he married Bella.

They had met in Livorno, Italy. He was Army, she NATO staff, and she was Phyllis then. They walked on the quays and a boatman called "Bella" across the glit¬tering water and she was always Bella to him after that. She was only Phyllis when they disagreed.

Bella's dead. That should change the view from these windows. It wasn't right this view stayed the same. Had to fucking die on me. Jesus, kid. I knew it was coming but it smarts.

What do they say about forced retirement at fifty-¬five? You fall in love with the Bureau, but it doesn't fall in love with you. He'd seen it.

Thank God, Bella had saved him from that. He hoped she was somewhere today and that she was comfortable at last. He hoped she could see in his heart.

The phone was buzzing its intraoffice buzz.

"Mr. Crawford, a Dr. Danielson from---"

"Right." Punch. "Jack Crawford, Doctor."

"Is this line secure, Mr. Crawford?"

"Yes. On this end it is."

"You're not taping, are you?"

"No, Dr. Danielson. Tell me what's on your mind."

"I want to make it clear this has nothing to do with anybody who was ever a patient at Johns Hopkins."

"Understood."

"If anything comes of it, I want you to make it clear to the public he's not a transsexual, he had nothing to do with this institution."

"Fine. You got it. Absolutely." Come on, you stuffy bas¬tard. Crawford would have said anything.

"He shoved Dr. Purvis down."

"Who, Dr. Danielson?"

"He applied to the program three years ago as John Grant of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania."

"Description?"

"Caucasian male, he was thirty-one. Six feet one, a hundred and ninety pounds. He came to be tested and did very well on the Wechsler intelligence scale--- ¬bright normal--- but the psychological testing and the interviews were another story. In fact, his House-Tree--Person and his TAT were spot-on with the sheet you gave me. You let me think Alan Bloom authored that little theory, but it was Hannibal Lecter, wasn't it?"

"Go on with Grant, Doctor."

"The board would have turned him down anyway, but by the time we met to discuss it, the question was moot because the background checks got him."

"Got him how."

"We routinely check with the police in an applicant's hometown. The Harrisburg police were after him for two assaults on homosexual men. The last one nearly died. He'd given us an address that turned out to be a boarding house he stayed in from time to time. The police got his fingerprints there and a credit-card gas receipt with his license number on it. His name wasn't John Grant at all, he'd just told us that. About a week later he waited outside the building here and shoved Dr. Purvis down, just for spite."

"What was his name, Dr. Danielson?"

"I'd better spell it for you, it's J-A-M-E G-U-M-B."