The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter 2)

So, in an embalming room with cabbage roses in the wallpaper and a picture molding beneath its high ceiling, in a white frame house of a type she understood, Clarice Starling met with her first direct evidence of Buffalo Bill.

The bright green body bag, tightly zipped, was the only modern object in the room. It lay on an old-fashioned porcelain embalming table, reflected many times in the glass panes of cabinets holding trochars and packages of Rock-Hard Cavity Fluid.

Crawford went to the car for the fingerprint transmitter while Starling unpacked her equipment on the drainboard of a large double sink against the wall.

Too many people were in the room. Several deputies, the chief deputy, all had wandered in with them and showed no inclination to leave. It wasn’t right. Why didn’t Crawford come on and get rid of them?

The wallpaper billowed in a draft, billowed inward as the doctor turned on the big, dusty vent fan.

Clarice Starling, standing at the sink, needed now a prototype of courage more apt and powerful than any Marine parachute jump. The image came to her, and helped her, but it pierced her too:

Her mother, standing at the sink, washing blood out of her father’s hat, running cold water over the hat, saying, “We’ll be all right, Clarice. Tell your brothers and sister to wash up and come to the table. We need to talk and then we’ll fix our supper.”

Starling took off her scarf and tied it over her hair like a mountain midwife. She took a pair of surgical gloves out of her kit. When she opened her mouth for the first time in Potter, her voice had more than its normal twang and the force of it brought Crawford to the door to listen. “Gentlemen. Gentlemen! You officers and gentlemen! Listen here a minute. Please. Now let me take care of her.” She held her hands before their faces as she pulled on the gloves. “There’s things we need to do for her. You brought her this far, and I know her folks would thank you if they could. Now please go on out and let me take care of her.”

Crawford saw them suddenly g

o quiet and respectful and urge each other out in whispers: “Come on, Jess. Let’s go out in the yard.” And Crawford saw that the atmosphere had changed here in the presence of the dead: that wherever this victim came from, whoever she was, the river had carried her into the country, and while she lay helpless in this room in the country, Clarice Starling had a special relationship to her. Crawford saw that in this place Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep the watch and when the watch is over, wash and dress the country dead.

Then there were only Crawford and Starling and the doctor in the room with the victim, Dr. Akin and Starling looking at each other with a kind of recognition. Both of them were oddly pleased, oddly abashed.

Crawford took a jar of Vicks VapoRub out of his pocket and offered it around. Starling watched to see what to do, and when Crawford and the doctor rubbed it around the rims of their nostrils, she did too.

She dug her cameras out of the equipment bag on the drain-board, her back to the room. Behind her she heard the zipper of the body bag go down.

Starling blinked at the cabbage roses on the wall, took a breath and let it out. She turned around and looked at the body on the table.

“They should have put paper bags on her hands,” she said. “I’ll bag them when we’re through.” Carefully, overriding the automatic camera to bracket her exposures, Starling photographed the body.

The victim was a heavy-hipped young woman sixty-seven inches long by Starling’s tape. The water had leached her gray where the skin was gone, but it had been cold water and she clearly hadn’t been in it more than a few days. The body was flayed neatly from a clean line just below the breasts to the knees, about the area that would be covered by a bullfighter’s pants and sash.

Her breasts were small and between them, over the sternum, was the apparent cause of death, a ragged, star-shaped wound a hand’s breadth across.

Her round head was peeled to the skull from just above the eyebrows and ears to the nape.

“Dr. Lecter said he’d start scalping,” Starling said.

Crawford stood with his arms folded while she took the pictures. “Get her ears with the Polaroid,” was all he said.

He went so far as to purse his lips as he walked around the body. Starling peeled off her glove to trail her finger up the calf of the leg. A section of the trotline and treble fishhooks that had entangled and held the body in the moving river was still wrapped around the lower leg.

“What do you see, Starling?”

“Well, she’s not a local—her ears are pierced three times each, and she wore glitter polish. Looks like town to me. She’s got maybe two weeks or so hair growth on her legs. And see how soft it’s grown in? I think she got her legs waxed. Armpits too. Look how she bleached the fuzz on her upper lip. She was pretty careful about herself, but she hasn’t been able to take care of it for a while.”

“What about the wound?”

“I don’t know,” Starling said. “I would have said an exit gunshot wound, except that looks like part of an abrasion collar and a muzzle stamp at the top there.”

“Good, Starling. It’s a contact entrance wound over the sternum. The explosion gases expand between the bone and the skin and blow out the star around the hole.”

On the other side of the wall a pipe organ wheezed as the service got under way in the front of the funeral home.

“Wrongful death,” Dr. Akins contributed, nodding his head. “I’ve got to get in there for at least part of this service. The family always expects me to go the last mile. Lamar will be in here to help you as soon as he finishes playing the musical offering. I take you at your word on preserving evidence for the pathologist at Claxton, Mr. Crawford.”

“She’s got two nails broken off here on the left hand,” Starling said when the doctor was gone. “They’re broken back up in the quick and it looks like dirt or some hard particles driven up under some of the others. Can we take evidence?”

“Take samples of grit, take a couple of flakes of polish,” Crawford said. “We’ll tell ’em after we get the results.”