The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter 2)

She leaned against the wall with her eyes closed while he described Dr. Lecter’s joke.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Jack says they’ll go on with the sex-change clinics, but how hard? If you look at the information in the computer, the way the field entries are styled, you can see that all the Lecter information, yours and the stuff from Memphis, has special prefixes. All the Baltimore stuff or all the Memphis stuff or both can be knocked out of consideration with one button. I think Justice wants to push the button on all of it. I got a memo here suggesting the bug in Klaus’ throat was, let’s see, ‘flotsam.’”

“You’ll punch this

up for Mr. Crawford, though,” Starling said.

“Sure, I’ll put it on his screen, but we’re not calling him right now. You shouldn’t either. Bella died a little while ago.”

“Oh,” Starling said.

“Listen, on the bright side, our guys in Baltimore took a look at Lecter’s cell in the asylum. That orderly, Barney, helped out. They got brass grindings off a bolt head in Lecter’s cot where he made his handcuff key. Hang in there, kid. You’re gonna come out smelling like a rose.”

“Thank you, Mr. Burroughs. Good night.”

Smelling like a rose. Putting Vicks VapoRub under her nostrils.

Daylight coming on the last day of Catherine Martin’s life.

What could Dr. Lecter mean?

There was no knowing what Dr. Lecter knew. When she first gave him the file, she expected him to enjoy the pictures and use the file as a prop while he told her what he already knew about Buffalo Bill.

Maybe he was always lying to her, just as he lied to Senator Martin. Maybe he didn’t know or understand anything about Buffalo Bill.

He sees very clearly—he damn sure sees through me. It’s hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well. At Starling’s age it hadn’t happened to her much.

Desperately random, Dr. Lecter said.

Starling and Crawford and everyone else had stared at the map with its dots marking the abductions and body dumps. It had looked to Starling like a black constellation with a date beside each star, and she knew Behavioral Science had once tried imposing zodiac signs on the map without result.

If Dr. Lecter was reading for recreation, why would he fool with the map? She could see him flipping through the report, making fun of the prose style of some of the contributors.

There was no pattern in the abductions and body dumps, no relationships of convenience, no coordination in time with any known business conventions, any spate of burglaries or clothesline thefts or other fetish-oriented crimes.

Back in the laundry room, with the dryer spinning, Starling walked her fingers over the map. Here an abduction, there the dump. Here the second abduction, there the dump. Here the third and—. But are these dates backward or, no, the second body was discovered first.

That fact was recorded, unremarked, in smudged ink beside the location on the map. The body of the second woman abducted was found first, floating in the Wabash River in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, just below Interstate 65.

The first young woman reported missing was taken from Belvedere, Ohio, near Columbus, and found much later in the Blackwater River in Missouri, outside of Lone Jack. The body was weighted. No others were weighted.

The body of the first victim was sunk in water in a remote area. The second was dumped in a river upstream from a city, where quick discovery was certain.

Why?

The one he started with was well hidden, the second one, not.

Why?

What does “desperately random” mean?

The first, first. What did Dr. Lecter say about “first”? What did anything mean that Dr. Lecter said?

Starling looked at the notes she had scribbled on the airplane from Memphis.

Dr. Lecter said there was enough in the file to locate the killer. “Simplicity,” he said. What about “first,” where was first? Here—“First principles” were important. “First principles” sounded like pretentious bullshit when he said it.

What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.