Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter 1)

“I am,” Crawford said.

“See you in two hours.”

Crawford hailed his secretary. “Sarah, order a helicopter. I want the next thing smoking and I don’t care whose it is—ours, DCPD or Marines. I’ll be on the roof in five minutes. Call Documents, tell them to have a document case up there. Tell Herbert to scramble a search team. On the roof. Five minutes.”

/> He picked up Chilton’s line.

“Dr. Chilton, we have to search Lecter’s cell without his knowledge and we need your help. Have you mentioned this to anybody else?”

“No.”

“Where’s the cleaning man who found the note?”

“He’s here in my office.”

“Keep him there, please, and tell him to keep quiet. How long has Lecter been out of his cell?”

“About half an hour.”

“Is that unusually long?”

“No, not yet. But it takes only about a half-hour to clean it. Soon he’ll begin to wonder what’s wrong.”

“Okay, do this for me: Call your building superintendent or engineer, whoever’s in charge. Tell him to shut off the water in the building and to pull the circuit breakers on Lecter’s hall. Have the super walk down the hall past the holding cell carrying tools. He’ll be in a hurry, pissed off, too busy to answer any questions—got it? Tell him he’ll get an explanation from me. Have the garbage pickup canceled for today if they haven’t already come. Don’t touch the note, okay? We’re coming.”

Crawford called the section chief, Scientific Analysis. “Brian, I have a note coming in on the fly, possibly from the Tooth Fairy. Number-one priority. It has to go back where it came from within the hour and unmarked. It’ll go to Hair and Fiber, Latent Prints, and Documents, then to you, so coordinate with them, will you? . . . Yes. I’ll walk it through. I’ll deliver it to you myself.”

It was warm—the federally mandated eighty degrees—in the elevator when Crawford came down from the roof with the note, his hair blown silly by the helicopter blast. He was mopping his face by the time he reached the Hair and Fiber section of the laboratory.

Hair and Fiber is a small section, calm and busy. The common room is stacked with boxes of evidence sent by police departments all over the country; swatches of tape that have sealed mouths and bound wrists, torn and stained clothing, deathbed sheets.

Crawford spotted Beverly Katz through the window of an examining room as he wove his way between the boxes. She had a pair of child’s coveralls suspended from a hanger over a table covered with white paper. Working under bright lights in the draft-free room, she brushed the coveralls with a metal spatula, carefully working with the wale and across it, with the nap and against it. A sprinkle of dirt and sand fell to the paper. With it, falling through the still air more slowly than sand but faster than lint, came a tightly coiled hair. She cocked her head and looked at it with her bright robin’s eye.

Crawford could see her lips moving. He knew what she was saying.

“Gotcha.”

That’s what she always said.

Crawford pecked on the glass and she came out fast, stripping off her white gloves.

“It hasn’t been printed yet, right?”

“No.”

“I’m set up in the next examining room.” She put on a fresh pair of gloves while Crawford opened the document case.

The note, in two pieces, was contained gently between two sheets of plastic film. Beverly Katz saw the tooth impressions and glanced up at Crawford, not wasting time with the question.

He nodded: The impressions matched the clear overlay of the killer’s bite he had carried with him to Chesapeake.

Crawford watched through the window as she lifted the note on a slender dowel and hung it over white paper. She looked it over with a powerful glass, then fanned it gently. She tapped the dowel with the edge of a spatula and went over the paper beneath it with the magnifying glass.

Crawford looked at his watch.

Katz flipped the note over another dowel to get the reverse side up. She removed one tiny object from its surface with tweezers almost as fine as a hair.

She photographed the torn ends of the note under high magnification and returned it to its case. She put a clean pair of white gloves in the case with it. The white gloves—the signal not to touch—would always be beside the evidence until it was checked for fingerprints.