Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter 3) - Page 96
“Careful,” Mr. Greenlea said. “That wasn’t much of a coffin to start with. Nothing like what he’s getting now.”
The cheap pressboard coffin had indeed collapsed on its occupant. Greenlea had his diggers clear the dirt around it and slide a canvas under the bottom of the box, which was still intact. The coffin was raised in this canvas sling and swung into the back of a truck.
On a trestle table in the Hubbard Funeral Home garage, the pieces of the sunken lid were lifted away to reveal a sizeable skeleton.
Dr. Lecter examined it quickly. A bullet had notched the short rib over the liver and there was a depressed fracture and bullet hole high on the left forehead. The skull, mossy and clogged and only partly exposed, had good, high cheekbones he had seen before.
“The ground don’t leave much,” Mr. Greenlea said.
The rotted remains of trousers and the rags of a cowboy shirt draped the bones. The pearl snaps from the shirt had fallen through the ribs. A cowboy hat, a triple-X beaver with a Fort Worth crease, rested over the chest. There was a notch in the brim and a hole in the crown.
“Did you know the deceased?” Dr. Lecter asked.
“We just bought this mortuary and took over this cemetery as an addition to our group in l989,” Mr. Greenlea said. “I live locally now, but our firm’s headquarters is in St. Louis. Do you want to try to preserve the clothing? Or I could let you have a suit, but I don’t think—”
“No,” Dr. Lecter said. “Brush the bones, no clothing except the hat and the buckle and the boots, bag the small bones of the hands and feet, and bundle them in your best silk shroud with the skull and the long bones. You don’t have to lay them out, just get them all. Will keeping the stone compensate you for reclosing?”
“Yes, if you’ll just sign here, and I’ll give you copies of those others,” Mr. Greenlea said, vastly pleased at the coffin he had sold. Most funeral directors coming for a body would have shipped the bones in a carton and sold the family a coffin of his own.
Dr. Lecter’s disinterment papers were in perfect accord with the Texas Health and Safety Code Sec. 711.004, as he knew they would be, having made them himself, downloading the requirements and facsimile forms from the Texas Association of Counties Quick Reference Law Library.
The two workmen, grateful for the power tailgate on Dr. Lecter’s rental truck, rolled the new coffin into place and lashed it down on its dolly beside the only other item in the truck, a cardboard hanging wardrobe.
“That’s such a good idea, carrying your own closet. Saves wrinkling your ceremonial attire in a suitcase, doesn’t it?” Mr. Greenlea said.
In Dallas, the doctor removed from the wardrobe a viola case and put in it his silk-bound bundle of bones, the hat fitting nicely into the lower section, the skull cushioned in it.
He shoved the coffin out the back at the Fish Trap Cemetery and turned in his rental at Dallas–Fort Worth Airport, where he checked the viola case straight through to Philadelphia.
IV
NOTABLE
OCCASIONS
ON THE
CALENDAR OF
DREAD
CHAPTER
69
ON MONDAY, Clarice Starling had the weekend exotic purchases to check, and there were glitches in her system that required the help of her computer technician from Engineering. Even with severely pruned lists of two or three of the most special vintages from five vintners, the reduction to two sources for American foie gras, and five specialty grocers, the numbers of purchases were formidable. Call-ins from individual liquor stores using the telephone number on the bulletin had to be entered by hand.
Based on the identification of Dr. Lecter in the murder of the deer hunter in Virginia, Starling cut the list to East Coast purchases except for Sonoma foie gras. Fauchon in Paris refused to cooperate. Starling could make no sense of what Vera dal l926 in Florence said on the telephone, and faxed the Questura for help in case Dr. Lecter ordered white truffles.
At the end of the workday on Monday, December l7, Starling had twelve possibilities to follow up. They were combinations of purchases on credit cards. One man had bought a case of Pétrus and a supercharged Jaguar, both on the same American Express.
Another placed an order for a case of Bâtard-Montrachet and a case of green Gironde oysters.
Starling passed each possibility along to the local line bureau for follow-up.
Starling and Eric Pickford worked separate but overlapping shifts in order to have the office manned during store retail hours.
It was Pickford’s fourth day on the job and he spent part of it programming his auto-dial telephone. He did not label the buttons.
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