rters interviewed each other in the parking lot at Stone-hinge. Memphis and Shelby County authorities ducked their heads to unaccustomed banks of microphones. In a jostling, squealing hell of lens flare and audio feedback, they listed the things they didn’t know. Still-photographers stooped and darted, backpedaling into the TV minicams whenever investigators entered or left Catherine Baker Martin’s apartment.
A brief, ironic cheer went up in the Academy recreation room when Crawford’s face appeared briefly in the apartment window. Starling smiled on one side of her mouth.
She wondered if Buffalo Bill was watching. She wondered what he thought of Crawford’s face or if he even knew who Crawford was.
Others seemed to think Bill might be watching, too.
There was Senator Martin, on television live with Peter Jennings. She stood alone in her child’s bedroom, a Southwestern University pennant and posters favoring Wile E. Coyote and the Equal Rights Amendment on the wall behind her.
She was a tall woman with a strong, plain face.
“I’m speaking now to the person who is holding my daughter,” she said. She walked closer to the camera, causing an unscheduled refocus, and spoke as she never would have spoken to a terrorist.
“You have the power to let my daughter go unharmed. Her name is Catherine. She’s very gentle and understanding. Please let my daughter go, please release her unharmed. You have control of this situation. You have the power. You are in charge. I know you can feel love and compassion. You can protect her against anything that might want to harm her. You now have a wonderful chance to show the whole world that you are capable of great kindness, that you are big enough to treat others better than the world has treated you. Her name is Catherine.”
Senator Martin’s eyes cut away from the camera as the picture switched to a home movie of a toddler helping herself walk by hanging on to the mane of a large collie.
The Senator’s voice went on: “The film you’re seeing now is Catherine as a little child. Release Catherine. Release her unharmed anywhere in this country and you’ll have my help and my friendship.”
Now a series of still photographs—Catherine Martin at eight, holding the tiller of a sailboat. The boat was up on blocks and her father was painting the hull. Two recent photographs of the young woman, a full shot and a close-up of her face.
Now back to the Senator in close-up: “I promise you in front of this entire country, you’ll have my unstinting aid whenever you need it. I’m well equipped to help you. I am a United States Senator. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. I am deeply involved in the Strategic Defense Initiative, the space weapons systems which everyone calls ‘Star Wars.’ If you have enemies, I will fight them. If anyone interferes with you, I can stop them. You can call me at any time, day or night. Catherine is my daughter’s name. Please, show us your strength,” Senator Martin said in closing, “release Catherine unharmed.”
“Boy, is that smart,” Starling said. She was trembling like a terrier. “Jesus, that’s smart.”
“What, the Star Wars?” Mapp said. “If the aliens are trying to control Buffalo Bill’s thoughts from another planet, Senator Martin can protect him—is that the pitch?”
Starling nodded. “A lot of paranoid schizophrenics have that specific hallucination—alien control. If that’s the way Bill’s wired, maybe this approach could bring him out. It’s a damn good shot, though, and she stood up there and fired it, didn’t she? At the least it might buy Catherine a few more days. They may have time to work on Bill a little. Or they may not; Crawford thinks his period may be getting shorter. They can try this, they can try other things.”
“Nothing I wouldn’t try if he had one of mine. Why did she keep saying ‘Catherine,’ why the name all the time?”
“She’s trying to make Buffalo Bill see Catherine as a person. They’re thinking he’ll have to depersonalize her, he’ll have to see her as an object before he can tear her up. Serial murderers talk about that in prison interviews, some of them. They say it’s like working on a doll.”
“Do you see Crawford behind Senator Martin’s statement?”
“Maybe, or maybe Dr. Bloom—there he is,” Starling said. On the screen was an interview taped several weeks earlier with Dr. Alan Bloom of the University of Chicago on the subject of serial murder.
Dr. Bloom refused to compare Buffalo Bill with Francis Dolarhyde or Garrett Hobbs, or any of the others in his experience. He refused to use the term “Buffalo Bill.” In fact he didn’t say much at all, but he was known to be an expert, probably the expert on the subject, and the network wanted to show his face.
They used his final statement for the snapper at the end of the report: “There’s nothing we can threaten him with that’s more terrible than what he faces every day. What we can do is ask him to come to us. We can promise him kind treatment and relief, and we can mean it absolutely and sincerely.”
“Couldn’t we all use some relief,” Mapp said. “Damn if I couldn’t use some relief myself. Slick obfuscation and facile bullshit, I love it. He didn’t tell them anything, but then he probably didn’t stir Bill up much either.”
“I can stop thinking about that kid in West Virginia for a while,” Starling said, “it goes away for, say, a half an hour at a time, and then it pokes me in the throat. Glitter polish on her nails—let me not get into it.”
Mapp, rummaging among her many enthusiasms, lightened Starling’s gloom at dinner and fascinated eavesdroppers by comparing slant-rhymes in the works of Stevie Wonder and Emily Dickinson.
On the way back to the room, Starling snatched a message out of her box and read this: Please call Albert Roden, and a telephone number.
“That just proves my theory,” she told Mapp as they flopped on their beds with their books.
“What’s that?”
“You meet two guys, right? The wrong one’ll call you every God damned time.”
“I been knowing that.”
The telephone rang.