Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter 1)

The diner was bright and clean. Graham’s hands trembled and he slopped coffee in his saucer.

He saw Crawford’s cigarette smoke bothering a couple in the next booth. The couple ate in a peptic silence, their resentment hanging in the smoke.

Two women, apparently mother and daughter, argued at a table near the door. They spoke in low voices, anger ugly in their faces. Graham could feel their anger on his face and neck.

Crawford was griping about having to testify at a trial in Washington in the morning. He was afraid the trial could tie him up for several days. As he lit another cigarette, he peered across the flame at Graham’s hands and his color.

“Atlanta and Birmingham can run the thumbprint against their known sex offenders,” Crawford said. “So can we. And Price has dug a single print out of the files before. He’ll program the FINDER with it—we’ve come a long way with that just since you left.”

FINDER, the FBI’s automated fingerprint reader and processor, might recognize the thumbprint on an incoming fingerprint card from some unrelated case.

“When we get him, that print and his teeth will put him away,” Crawford said. “What we have to do, we have to figure on what he could be. We have to swing a wide loop. Indulge me, now. Say we’ve arrested a good suspect. You walk in and see him. What is there about him that doesn’t surprise you?”

“I don’t know, Jack. Goddammit, he’s got no face for me. We could spend a lot of time looking for people we’ve invented. Have you talked to Bloom?”

“On the phone last night. Bloom doubts he’s suicidal, and so does Heimlich. Bloom was only here a couple of hours the first day, but he and Heimlich have the whole file. Bloom’s examining Ph.D. candidates this week. He said tell you hello. Do you have his number in Chicago?”

“I have it.”

Graham liked Dr. Alan Bloom, a small round man with sad eyes, a good forensic psychiatrist—maybe the best. Graham appreciated the fact that Dr. Bloom had never displayed professional interest in him. That was not always the case with psychiatrists.

“Bloom says he wouldn’t be surprised if we heard from the Tooth Fairy. He might write us a note,” Crawford said.

“On a bedroom wall.”

“Bloom thinks he might be disfigured or he may believe he’s disfigured. He told me not to give that a lot of weight. ‘I won’t set up a straw man to chase,

Jack,’ is what he told me. ‘That would be a distraction and would diffuse the effort.’ Said they taught him to talk like that in graduate school.”

“He’s right,” Graham said.

“You could tell something about him or you wouldn’t have found that fingerprint,” Crawford said.

“That was the evidence on the damn wall, Jack. Don’t put this on me. Look, don’t expect too much from me, all right?”

“Oh, we’ll get him. You know we’ll get him, don’t you?”

“I know it. One way or the other.”

“What’s one way?”

“We’ll find evidence we’ve overlooked.”

“What’s the other?”

“He’ll do it and do it until one night he makes too much noise going in and the husband gets to a gun in time.”

“No other possibilities?”

“You think I’m going to spot him across a crowded room? No, that’s Ezio Pinza you’re thinking about, does that. The Tooth Fairy will go on and on until we get smart or get lucky. He won’t stop.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s got a genuine taste for it.”

“See, you do know something about him,” Crawford said.

Graham did not speak again until they were on the sidewalk. “Wait until the next full moon,” he told Crawford. “Then tell me how much I know about him.”