Dr. Hannibal Lecter did that with a linoleum knife. It happened a year before Molly met Graham, and it very nearly killed him. Dr. Lecter, known in the tabloids as “Hannibal the Cannibal,” was the second psychopath Graham had caught.
When he finally got out of the hospital, Graham resigned from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, left Washington and found a job as a diesel mechanic in the boatyard at Marathon in the Florida Keys. It was a trade he grew up with. He slept in a trailer at the boatyard until Molly and her good ramshackle house on Sugarloaf Key.
Now he straddled the drift log and held both her hands. Her feet burrowed under his.
“All right, Molly. Crawford thinks I have a knack for the monsters. It’s like a superstition with him.”
“Do you believe it?”
Graham watched three pelicans fly in line across the tidal flats. “Molly, an intelligent psychopath—particularly a sadist—is hard to catch for several reasons. First, there’s no traceable motive. So you can’t go that way. And most of the time you won’t have any help from informants. See, there’s a lot more stooling than sleuthing behind most arrests, but in a case like this there won’t be any informants. He may not even know that he’s doing it. So you have to take whatever evidence you have and extrapolate. You try to reconstruct his thinking. You try to find patterns.”
“And follow him and find him,” Molly said. “I’m afraid if you go after this maniac, or whatever he is—I’m afraid he’ll do you like the last one did. That’s it. That’s what scares me.”
“He’ll never see me or know my name, Molly. The police, they’ll have to take him down if they can find him, not me. Crawford just wants another point of view.”
She watched the red sun spread over the sea. High cirrus glowed above it.
Graham loved the way she turned her head, artlessly giving him her less perfect profile. He could see the pulse in her throat, and remembered suddenly and completely the taste of salt on her skin. He swallowed and said, “What the hell can I do?”
“What you’ve already decided. If you stay here and there’s more killing, maybe it would sour this place for you. High Noon and all that crap. If it’s that way, you weren’t really asking.”
“If I were asking, what would you say?”
“Stay here with me. Me. Me. Me. And Willy, I’d drag him in if it would do any good. I’m supposed to dry my eyes and wave my hanky. If things don’t go so well, I’ll have the satisfaction that you did the right thing. That’ll last about as long as taps. Then I can go home and switch one side of the blanket on.”
“I’d be at the back of the pack.”
“Never in your life. I’m selfish, huh?”
“I don’t care.”
“Neither do I. It’s keen and sweet here. All the things that happen to you before make you know it. Value it, I mean.”
He nodded.
“Don’t want to lose it either way,” she said.
“Nope. We won’t, either.”
Darkness fell quickly and Jupiter appeared, low in the southwest.
They walked back to the house beside the rising gibbous moon. Far out past the tidal flats, bait fish leaped for their lives.
Crawford came back after dinner. He had taken off his coat and tie and rolled up his sleeves for the casual effect. Molly
thought Crawford’s thick pale forearms were repulsive. To her he looked like a damnably wise ape. She served him coffee under the porch fan and sat with him while Graham and Willy went out to feed the dogs. She said nothing. Moths batted softly at the screens.
“He looks good, Molly,” Crawford said. “You both do—skinny and brown.”
“Whatever I say, you’ll take him anyway, won’t you?”
“Yeah. I have to. I have to do it. But I swear to God, Molly, I’ll make it as easy on him as I can. He’s changed. It’s great you got married.”
“He’s better and better. He doesn’t dream so often now. He was really obsessed with the dogs for a while. Now he just takes care of them; he doesn’t talk about them all the time. You’re his friend, Jack. Why can’t you leave him alone?”
“Because it’s his bad luck to be the best. Because he doesn’t think like other people. Somehow he never got in a rut.”
“He thinks you want him to look at evidence.”