Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter 1)

“Good-looking kid. He’s going to be taller than you.”

Graham nodded. “His father was. I’m lucky here. I know that.”

“I wanted to bring Phyllis down here. Florida. Get a place when I retire, and stop living like a cave fish. She says all her friends are in Arlington.”

“I meant to thank her for the books she brought me in the hospital, but I never did. Tell her for me.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Two small bright birds lit on the table, hoping to find jelly. Crawford watched them hop around until they flew away.

“Will, this freak seems to be in phase with the moon. He killed the Jacobis in Birmingham on Saturday night, June 28, full moon. He killed the Leeds family in Atlanta night before last, July 26. That’s one day short of a lunar month. So if we’re lucky we may have a little over three weeks before he does it again.

“I don’t think you want to wait here in the Keys and read about the next one in your Miami Herald. Hell, I’m not the pope, I’m not saying what you ought to do, but I want to ask you, do you respect my judgment, Will?”

“Yes.”

“I think we have a better chance to get him fast if you help. Hell, Will, saddle up and help us. Go to Atlanta and Birmingham and look, then come on to Washington. Just TDY.”

Graham did not reply.

Crawford waited while five waves lapped the beach. Then he got up and slung his suit coat over his shoulder. “Let’s talk after dinner.”

“Stay and eat.”

Crawford shook his head. “I’ll come back later. There’ll be messages at the Holiday Inn and I’ll be a while on the phone. Tell Molly thanks, though.”

Crawford’s rented car raised thin dust that settled on the bushes beside the shell road.

Graham returned to the table. He was afraid that this was how he would remember the end of Sugarloaf Key—ice melting in two tea glasses and paper napkins fluttering off the redwood table in the breeze and Molly and Willy far down the beach.

Sunset on Sugarloaf, the herons still and the red sun swelling.

Will Graham and Molly Foster Graham sat on a bleached drift log, their faces orange in the sunset, backs in violet shadow. She picked up his hand.

“Crawford stopped by to see me at the shop before he came out here,” she said. “He asked directions to the house. I tried to call you. You really ought to answer the phone once in a while. We saw the car when we got home and went around to the beach.”

“What else did he ask you?”

“How you are.”

“And you said?”

“I said you’re fine and he should leave you the hell alone. What does he want you to do?”

“Look at evidence. I’m a forensic specialist, Molly. You’ve seen my diploma.”

“You mended a crack in the ceiling paper with your diploma, I saw that.” She straddled the log to face him. “If you missed your other life, what you used to do, I think you’d talk about it. You never do. You’re open and calm and easy now . . . I love that.”

“We have a good time, don’t we?”

Her single styptic blink told him he should have said something better. Before he could fix it, she went on.

“What you did for Crawford was bad for you. He has a lot of other people—the whole damn government I guess—why can’t he leave us alone?”

“Didn’t Crawford tell you that? He was my supervisor the two times I left the FBI Academy to go back to the field. Those two cases were the only ones like this he ever had, and Jack’s been working a long time. Now he’s got a new one. This kind of psychopath is very rare. He knows I’ve had . . . experience.”

“Yes, you have,” Molly said. His shirt was unbuttoned and she could see the looping scar across his stomach. It was finger width and raised, and it never tanned. It ran down from his left hipbone and turned up to notch his rib cage on the other side.