Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter 1)

“I don’t know, but I promise you he saw Mrs. Jacobi or saw the whole family before he checked out their house. Unless he followed them down there from Detroit, he spotted Mrs. Jacobi sometime between April 10, when they moved to Birmingham, and the end of April, when the door was changed. Sometime in that period he was in Birmingham. The bureau’s going on with it down there?”

“Cops too,” Crawford said. “Tell me this: How did he know there was an inside door from the basement into the house? You couldn’t count on that—not in the South.”

“He saw the inside of the house, no question.”

“Has your buddy Metcalf got the Jacobi bank statements?”

“I’m sure he does.”

“Let’s see what service calls they paid for between April 10 and the end of the month. I know the service calls have been checked for a couple of weeks back from the killings, but maybe we aren’t looking back far enough. Same for the Leedses.”

“We always figured he looked around inside the Leeds house,” Graham said. “From the alley he couldn’t have seen the glass in the kitchen door. There’s a latticed porch back there. But he was ready with his glass cutter. And they didn’t have any service calls for three months before they were killed.”

“If he’s casing this far ahead, maybe we didn’t check back far enough. We will now. At the Leedses’ though—when he was in the alley reading meters behind the Leeds house two days before he killed them—maybe he saw them going in the house. He could have looked in there while the porch door was open.”

“No, the doors don’t line up—remember? Look here.”

Graham threaded the projector with the Leeds home movie.

The Leedses’ gray Scottie perked up his ears and ran to the kitchen door. Valerie Leeds and the children came in carrying groceries. Through the kitchen door nothing but lattice was visible.

“All right, you want to get Byron Metcalf busy on the bank statement for April? Any kind of service call or purchase that a door-to-door salesman might handle. No—I’ll do that while you wind up the profile. Have you got Metcalf’s number?”

Seeing the Leedses preoccupied Graham. Absently he told Crawford three numbers for Byron Metcalf.

He ran the films again while Crawford used the phone in the jury room.

The Leeds film first.

There was the Leedses’ dog. It wore no collar, and the neighborhood was full of dogs, but the Dragon knew which dog was theirs.

Here was Valerie Leeds. The sight of her tugged at Graham. There was the door behind her, vulnerable with its big glass pane. Her children played on the courtroom screen.

Graham had never felt as close to the Jacobis as he did to the Leedses. Their movie disturbed him now. It bothered him that he had thought of the Jacobis as chalk marks on a bloody floor.

There were the Jacobi children, ranged around the corner of the table, the birthday candles flickering on their faces.

For a flash Graham saw the blob of candle wax on the Jacobis’ bedside table, the bloodstains around the corner of the bedroom at the Leedses’. Something . . .

Crawford was coming back. “Metcalf said to ask you—”

“Don’t talk to me!”

Crawford wasn’t offended. He waited stock-still and his little eyes grew narrow and bright.

The film ran on, its light and shadows playing over Graham’s face.

There was the Jacobis’ cat. The Dragon knew it was the Jacobis’ cat.

There was the inside basement door.

There was the outside basement door with its padlock. The Dragon had brought a bolt cutter.

The film ended. Finally it came off the reel and the end flapped around and around.

Everything the Dragon needed to know was on the two films.

They hadn’t been shown in public, there wasn’t any film club, film festi . . .