Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter 1)

“That’s it,” she said, handing the case back to Crawford. “One hair, maybe a thirty-second of an inch. A couple of blue grains. I’ll work it up. What else have you got?”

Crawford gave her three marked envelopes. “Hair from Lecter’s comb. Whiskers from the electric razor they let him use. This is hair from the cleaning man. Gotta go.”

“See you later,” Katz said. “Love your hair.”

Jimmy Price in Latent Fingerprints winced at the sight of the porous toilet paper. He squinted fiercely over the shoulder of his technician operating the helium-cadmium laser as they tried to find a fingerprint and make it fluoresce. Glowing smudges appeared on the paper, perspiration stains, nothing.

Crawford started to ask him a question, thought better of it, waited with the blue light reflecting off his glasses.

“We know three guys handled this without gloves, right?” Price said.

“Yeah, the cleanup man, Lecter, and Chilton.”

“The fellow scrubbing sinks probably had washed the oil off his fingers. But the others—this stuff is terrible.” Price held the paper to the light, forceps steady in his mottled old hand. “I could fume it, Jack, but I couldn’t guarantee the iodine stains would fade out in the time you’ve got.”

“Ninhydrin? Boost it with heat?” Ordinarily, Crawford would not have ventured a technical suggestion to Price, but he was floundering for anything. He expected a huffy reply, but the old man sounded rueful and sad.

“No. We couldn’t wash it after. I can’t get you a print off this, Jack. There isn’t one.”

“Fuck,” Crawford said.

The old man turned away. Crawford put his hand on Price’s bony shoulder. “Hell, Jimmy. If there was one, you’d have found it.”

Price didn’t answer. He was unpacking a pair of hands that had arrived in another matter. Dry ice smoked in his wastebasket. Crawford dropped the white gloves into the smoke.

Disappointment growling in his stomach, Crawford hurried on to Documents where Lloyd Bowman was waiting. Bowman had been called out of court and the abrupt shear in his concentration left him blinking like a man just wakened.

“I congratulate you on your hairstyle. A brave departure,” Bowman said, his hands quick and careful as he transferred the note to his work surface. “How long do I have?”

“Twenty minutes max.”

The two pieces of the note seemed to glow under Bowman’s lights. His blotter showed dark green through a jagged oblong hole in the upper piece.

“The main thing, the first thing, is how Lecter was to reply,” Crawford said when Bowman had finished reading.

“Instructions for answering were probably in the part torn out.” Bowman worked steadily with his lights and filters and copy camera as he talked. “Here in the top piece he says ‘I hope we can correspond . . .’ and then the hole begins. Lecter scratched over that with a felt-tip pen and then folded it and pinched most of it out.”

“He doesn’t have anything to cut with.”

Bowman photographed the tooth impressions and the back of the note under extremely oblique light, his shadow leaping from wall to wall as he moved the light through 360 degrees around the paper and his hands made phantom folding motions in the air.

“Now we can mash just a little.” Bowman put the note between two panes of glass to flatten the jagged edges of the hole. The tatters were smeared with vermilion ink. He was chanting under his breath. On the third repetition Crawford made out what he was saying. “You’re so sly, but so am I.”

Bowman switched filters on his small television camera and focused it on the note. He darkened the room until there was only the dull red glow of a lamp and the blue-green of his monitor screen.

The words “I hope we can correspond” and the jagged hole appeared enlarged on the screen. The ink smear was gone, and on the tattered edges appeared fragments of writing.

“Aniline dyes in colored inks are transparent to infrared,” Bowman said. “These could be the tips of T’s here and here. On the end is the tail of what could be an M or N, or possibly an R.” Bowman took a photograph and turned the lights on. “Jack, there are just two common ways of carrying on a communication that’s one-way blind—the phone and publication. Could Lecter take a fast phone call?”

“He can take calls, but it’s slow and they have to come in through the hospital switchboard.”

“Publication is the only safe way, then.”

“We know this sweetheart reads the Tattler. The stuff about Graham and Lecter was in the Tattler. I don’t know of any other paper that carried it.”

“Three T’s and an R in Tattler. Personal column, you think? It’s a place to look.”

Crawford checked with the FBI library, then telephoned instructions to the Chicago field office.