Dried blossoms drooped from the cut-crystal bud vases on the pillars. The limousine’s table was folded down and covered with a linen cloth. On it, a decanter gleamed through dust. A spider had built between the decanter and the short candlestick beside it.
She tried to picture Lecter, or someone, sitting here with her present companion and having a drink and trying to show him the Valentines. And what else? Working carefully, disturbing the figure as little as possible, she frisked it for identification. There was none. In a jacket pocket she found the bands of material left over from adjusting the length of the trousers—the dinner clothes were probably new when they were put on the figure.
Starling poked the lump in the trousers. Too hard, even for high school, she reflected. She spread the fly with her fingers and shined her light inside, on a dildo of polished, inlaid wood. Good-sized one, too. She wondered if she was depraved.
Carefully she turned the jar and examined the sides and back of the head for wounds. There were none visible. The name of a laboratory supply company was cast in the glass.
Considering the face again, she believed she learned something that would last her. Looking with purpose at this face, with its tongue changing color where it touched the glass, was not as bad as Miggs swallowing his tongue in her dreams. She felt she could look at anything, if she had something positive to do about it. Starling was young.
* * *
In the ten seconds after her WPIK-TV mobile news unit slid to a stop, Jonetta Johnson put in her earrings, powdered her beautiful brown face, and cased the situation. She and her news crew, monitoring the Baltimore County police radio, had arrived at Split City ahead of the patrol cars.
All the news crew saw in their headlights was Clarice Starling, standing in front of the garage door with her flashlight and her little laminated ID card, her hair plastered down by the drizzle.
Jonetta Johnson could spot a rookie every time. She climbed out with the camera crew behind her and approached Starling. The bright lights came on.
Mr. Yow sank so far down in his Buick that only his hat was visible above the window sill.
“Jonetta Johnson, WPIK news, did you report a homicide?”
Starling did not look like very much law and she knew it. “I’m a federal officer, this is a crime scene. I have to secure it until the Baltimore authorities—”
The assistant cameraman had grabbed the bottom of the garage door and was trying to lift it.
“Hold it,” Starling said. “I’m talking to you, sir. Hold it. Back off, please. I’m not kidding with you. Help me out here.” She wished hard for a badge, a uniform, anything.
“Okay, Harry,” the newswoman said. “Ah, officer, we want to cooperate in every way. Frankly, this crew costs money and I just want to know whether to even keep them here until the other authorities arrive. Will you tell me if there’s a body in there? Camera’s off, just between us. Tell me and we’ll wait. We’ll be good, I promise. How about it?”
“I’d wait if I were you,” Starling said.
“Thanks, you won’t be sorry,” Jonetta Johnson said. “Look, I’ve got some information on Split City Mini-Storage that you could probably use. Would you shine your light on the clipboard? Let’s see if I can find it here.”
“WEYE mobile unit just turned in at the gate, Joney,” the man, Harry, said.
“Let’s see if I can find it here, Officer, here it is. There was a scandal about two years ago when they tried to prove this place was trucking and storing—was it fireworks?” Jonetta Johnson glanced over Starling’s shoulder once too often.
Starling turned to see the cameraman on his back, his head and shoulders in the garage, the assistant squatting beside him, ready to pass the minicam under the door.
“Hey!” Starling said. She dropped to her knees on the wet ground beside him and tugged at his shirt. “You can’t go in there. Hey! I told you not to do that.”
And all the time the men were talking to her, constantly, gently. “We won’t touch anything. We’re pros, you don’t have to worry. The cops will let us in anyway. It’s all right, honey.”
Their cozening backseat manner put her over.
She ran to a bumper jack at the end of the door and pumped the handle. The door came down two inches, with a grinding screech. She pumped it again. Now the door was touching the man’s chest. When he didn’t come out, she pulled the handle out of the socket and carried it back to the prone cameraman. There were other bright television lights now, and in the glare of them she banged the door above him hard with the jack handle, showering dust and rust down on him.
“Give me your attention,” she said. “You don’t listen, do you? Come out of there. Now. You’re one second from arrest for obstruction of justice.”
“Take it easy,” the assistant said. He put his hand on her. She turned on him. There were shouted questions from behind the glare and she heard sirens.
“Hands off and back off, buster.” She stood on the cameraman’s ankle and faced the assistant, the jack handle hanging by her side. She did not raise the jack handle. It was just as well. She looked bad enough on television as it was.
CHAPTER 9
The odors of the violent ward seemed more intense in the semidarkness. A TV set playing without sound in the corridor threw Starling’s shadow on the bars of Dr. Lecter’s cage.
She could not see into the dark behind the bars, but she didn’t ask the orderly to turn up the lights from his station. The whole ward would light at once and she knew the Baltimore County police had had the lights full on for hours while they shouted questions at Lecter. He had refused to speak, but responded by folding for them an origami chicken that pecked when the tail was manipulated up and down. The senior officer, furious, had crushed the chicken in the lobby ashtray as he gestured for Starling to go in.