Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter 3)

CHAPTER

58

THE CLARENDON County Morgue in northern Virginia is attached to the county hospital by a short air lock with an exhaust fan in the ceiling and wide double doors at each end to facilitate access by the dead. A sheriff’s deputy stood before these doors to keep out the five reporters and cameramen who crowded around him.

From beh

ind the reporters, Starling stood on her tiptoes and held her badge high. When the deputy spotted it and nodded, she plunged through. Strobe lights flashed and a sun gun flared behind her.

Quiet in the autopsy room, only the clink of instruments put down in a metal tray.

The county morgue has four stainless-steel autopsy tables, each with its scales and sink. Two of the tables were draped, the sheets oddly tented by the remains they covered. A routine hospital postmortem was in progress at the table nearest the windows. The pathologist and his assistant were doing something delicate and did not look up when Starling came in.

The thin shriek of an electric saw filled the room, and in a moment the pathologist carefully set aside the cap of a skull and lifted in his cupped hands a brain, which he placed on the scales. He whispered the weight into the microphone he wore, examined the organ in the scale pan, poked it with a gloved finger. When he spotted Starling over the shoulder of his assistant, he dumped the brain into the open chest cavity of the corpse, shot his rubber gloves into a bin like a boy shooting rubber bands and came around the table to her.

Starling found shaking his hand a bit crawly.

“Clarice Starling, Special Agent, FBI.”

“I’m Dr. Hollingsworth—medical examiner, hospital pathologist, chief cook and bottle washer.” Hollingsworth has bright blue eyes, shiny as well-peeled eggs. He spoke to his assistant without looking away from Starling. “Marlene, page the sheriff in cardiac ICU, and un-drape those remains, please, ma’am.”

In Starling’s experience medical examiners were usually intelligent but often silly and incautious in casual conversation, and they liked to show off. Hollingsworth followed Starling’s eyes. “You’re wondering about that brain?”

She nodded and showed him her open hands.

“We’re not careless here, Special Agent Starling. It’s a favor I do the undertaker, not putting the brain back in the skull. In this case they’ll have an open coffin and a lengthy wake, and you can’t prevent brain material leaking onto the pillow, so we stuff the skull with Huggies or whatever we have and close it back up, and I put a notch in the skull cap over both ears, so it won’t slide. Family gets the whole body back, everybody’s happy.”

“I understand.”

“Tell me if you understand that,” he said. Behind Starling, Dr. Hollingsworth’s assistant had removed the covering sheets from the autopsy tables.

Starling turned and saw it all in a single image that would last as long as she lived. Side by side on their stainless-steel tables lay a deer and a man. From the deer projected a yellow arrow. The arrow shaft and the antlers had held up the covering sheet like tent poles.

The man had a shorter, thicker yellow arrow through his head transversely at the tips of his ears. He still wore one garment, a reversed baseball cap, pinned to his head by the arrow.

Looking at him, Starling suffered an absurd burp of laughter, suppressed so fast it might have sounded like dismay. The similar positions of the two bodies, on their sides instead of in the anatomical position, revealed that they had been butchered almost identically, the sirloin and loin removed with neatness and economy along with the small filets that lie beneath the spine.

A deer’s fur on stainless steel. Its head elevated by the antlers on the metal pillow block, the head turned and the eye white as though it tried to look back at the bright shaft that killed it—the creature, lying on its side in its own reflection in this place of obsessive order, seemed wilder, more alien to man than a deer ever seemed in the woods.

The man’s eyes were open, some blood came from his lachrymal ducts like tears.

“Odd to see them together,” Dr. Hollingsworth said. “Their hearts weighed exactly the same.” He looked at Starling and saw that she was all right. “One difference on the man, you can see here where the short ribs were separated from the spine and the lungs pulled out the back. They almost look like wings, don’t they?”

“Bloody Eagle,” Starling muttered, after a moment’s thought.

“I never saw it before.”

“Me either,” Starling said.

“There’s a term for that? What did you call it?”

“The Bloody Eagle. The literature at Quantico has it. It’s a Norse sacrificial custom. Chop through the short ribs and pull the lungs out the back, flatten them out like that to make wings. There was a neo-Viking doing it in Minnesota in the thirties.”

“You see a lot of this, I don’t mean this, but this kind of stuff.”

“Sometimes I do, yes.”

“It’s out of my line a little. We get mostly straightforward murders—people shot and knifed, but do you want to know what I think?”