“An adult winged insect.”
“But what else?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a term from the dead religion of psychoanalysis. An imago is an image of the parent buried in the unconscious from infancy and bound with infantile affect. The word comes from the wax portrait busts of their ancestors the ancient Romans carried in funeral processions.… Even the phlegmatic Crawford must see some significance in the insect chrysalis.”
“Nothing to jump on except checking the entomology journals’ subscription lists against known sex offenders in the descriptor index.”
“First, let’s drop Buffalo Bill. It’s a misleading term and has nothing to do with the person you want. For convenience we’ll call him Billy. I’ll give you a precis of what I think. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“The significance of the chrysalis is change. Worm into butterfly, or moth. Billy thinks he wants to change. He’s making himself a girl suit out of real girls. Hence the large victims—he has to have things that fit. The number of victims suggests he may see it as a series of molts. He’s doing this in a two-story house, did you find out why two stories?”
“For a while he was hanging them on the stairs.”
“Correct.”
“Dr. Lecter, there’s no correlation that I ever saw between transsexualism and violence—transsexuals are passive types, usually.”
“That’s true, Clarice. Sometimes you see a tendency to surgical addiction—cosmetically, transsexuals are hard to satisfy—but that’s about all. Billy’s not a real transsexual. You’re very close, Clarice, to the way you’re going to catch him, do you realize that?”
“No, Dr. Lecter.”
“Good. Then you won’t mind telling me what happened to you after your father’s death.”
Starling looked at the scarred top of the school desk.
“I don’t imagine the answer’s in your papers, Clarice.”
“My mother kept us together for more than two years.”
“Doing what?”
“Working as a motel maid in the daytime, cooking at a café at night.”
“And then?”
“I went to my mother’s cousin and her husband in Montana.”
“Just you?”
“I was the oldest.”
“The town did nothing for your family?”
“A check for five hundred dollars.”
“Curious there was no insurance. Clarice, you said your father hit the shotgun slide on the door of his pickup.”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t have a patrol car?”
“No.”
“It happened at night.”