Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter 1)

She looked up at him too quickly from the pad. She made a kiss with her mouth and pointed to the approaching nurse.

He tugged her thumb.

“Where?” he insisted, underlining twice.

“Oregon,” she said.

Crawford came a final time.

Graham was ready with his note. It said, “Teeth?”

“His grandmother’s,” Crawford said. “The ones we found in the house were his grandmother’s. St. Louis PD located one Ned Vogt—Dolarhyde’s mother was Vogt’s stepmother. Vogt saw Mrs. Dolarhyde when he was a kid, and he never forgot the teeth.

“That’s what I was calling you about when you ran into Dolarhyde. The Smithsonian had just called me. They finally had gotten the teeth from the Missouri authorities, just to examine for their own satisfaction. They noticed the upper part was made of vulcanite instead of acrylic like they use now. Nobody’s made vulcanite plates in thirty-five years.

“Dolarhyde had a new acrylic pair just like them made to fit him. The new ones were on his body. Smithsonian looked at some features on them—the fluting, they said, and rugae. Chinese manufacture. The old ones were Swiss.

“He had a key on him too, for a locker in Miami. Big book in there. Kind of a diary—hell of a thing. I’ll have it when you want to see it.

“Look, sport, I have to go back to Washington. I’ll get back down here the weekend, if I can. You gonna be okay?”

Graham drew a question mark, then scratched it out and wrote “sure.”

The nurse came after Crawford left. She shot some Demerol into his intravenous line and the clock grew fuzzy. He couldn’t keep up with the second hand.

He wondered if Demerol would work on your feelings. He could hold Molly a while with his face. Until they finished fixing it anyway. That would be a cheap shot. Hold her for what? He was drifting off and he hoped he wouldn’t dream.

He did drift between memory and dream, but it wasn’t so bad. He didn’t dream of Molly leaving, or of Dolarhyde. It was a long memory-dream of Shiloh, interrupted by lights shone in his face and the gasp and hiss of the blood-pressure cuff. . . .

It was spring, soon after he shot Garrett Jacob Hobbs, when Graham visited Shiloh.

On a soft April day he walked across the asphalt road to Bloody Pond. The new grass, still light green, grew down the slope to the water. The clear water had risen into the grass and the grass was visible in the water, growing down, down, as though it covered the bottom of the pond.

Graham knew what had happened there in April 1862.

He sat down in the grass, felt the damp ground through his trousers.

A tourist’s automobile went by and after it had passed, Graham saw movement behind it in the road. The car had broken a chicken snake’s back. It slid in endless figure eights across itself in the center of the asphalt road, sometimes showing its black back, sometimes its pale belly.

Shiloh’s awesome presence hooded him with cold, though he was sweating in the mild spring sun.

Graham got up off the grass, his trousers damp behind. He was light-headed.

The snake looped on itself. He stood over it, picked it up by the end of its smooth dry tail, and with a long fluid motion cracked it like a whip.

Its brains zinged into the pond. A bream rose to them.

He had thought Shiloh haunted, its beauty sinister like flags.

Now, drifting between memory and narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh was not sinister; it was indifferent. Beautiful Shiloh could witness anything. Its unforgivable beauty simply underscored the indifference of nature, the Green Machine. The loveliness of Shiloh mocked our plight.

He roused and watched the mindless clock, but he couldn’t stop thinking:

In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain.

There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.

Graham knew too well that he contained all the elements to make murder; perhaps mercy too.