Did Buffalo Bill watch fat stores, select a customer and follow her?
Did he go into oversize shops in drag and look around? Every oversize shop in a city gets both transvestites and drag queens as customers.
The idea of Buffalo Bill trying to cross over sexually had just been applied to the investigation very recently, since Dr. Lecter gave Starling his theory. What about his clothes?
All of the victims must have shopped in fat stores—Catherine Martin would wear a twelve, but the others couldn’t, and Catherine must have shopped in an oversize store to buy the big Juno sweats.
Catherine Martin could wear a twelve. She was the smallest of the victims. Fredrica, the first victim, was largest. How was Buffalo Bill managing to down-size with the choice of Catherine Martin? Catherine was plenty buxom, but she wasn’t that big around. Had he lost weight himself? Might he have joined a diet group lately? Kimberly Emberg was sort of in-between, big, but with a good waist indention.…
Starling had specifically avoided thinking about Kimberly Emberg, but now the memory swamped her for a second. Starling saw Kimberly on the slab in Potter. Buffalo Bill hadn’t cared about her waxed legs, her carefully glittered fingernails: he looked at Kimberly’s flat bosom and it wasn’t good enough and he took his pistol and blew a starfish in her chest.
The door to the room pushed open a few inches. Starling felt the movement in her heart before she knew what it was. A cat came in, a large tortoiseshell cat with one eye gold, the other blue. It hopped up on the bed and rubbed against her. Looking for Fredrica.
Loneliness. Big lonesome girls trying to satisfy somebody.
The police had eliminated lonely-hearts clubs early. Did Buffalo Bill have another way to take advantage of loneliness? Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.
Loneliness might have permitted Buffalo Bill an opening with Fredrica, but not with Catherine. Catherine wasn’t lonesome.
Kimberly was lonesome. Don’t start this. Kimberly, obedient and limp, past rigor mortis, being rolled over on the mortician’s table so Starling could fingerprint her. Stop it. Can’t stop it. Kimberly lonesome, anxious to please, had Kimberly ever rolled over obediently for someone, just to feel his heart beat against her back? She wondered if Kimberly had felt whiskers grating between her shoulder blades.
Staring into the lighted closet, Starling remembered Kimberly’s plump back, the triangular patches of skin missing from her shoulders.
Staring into the lighted closet, Starling saw the triangles on Kimberly’s shoulders outlined in the blue dashes of a dressmaking pattern. The idea swam away and circled and came again, came close enough for her to grab it this time and she did with a fierce pulse of joy: THEY’RE DARTS—HE TOOK THOSE TRIANGLES TO MAKE DARTS SO HE COULD LET OUT HER WAIST. MOTHER FUCKER CAN SEW. BUFFALO BILL’S TRAINED TO SERIOUSLY SEW—HE’S NOT JUST PICKING OUT READY-TO-WEAR.
What did Dr. Lecter say? “He’s making himself a girl suit out of real girls.” What did he say to me? “Do you sew, Clarice?” Damn straight I do.
Starling put her head back, closed her eyes for one second. Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.
She’d seen a telephone in the parlor. She started downstairs to use it, but Mrs. Bimmel’s reedy voice was calling up to her already, calling her to the phone.
CHAPTER 53
Mrs. Bimmel gave Starling the telephone and picked up the fretting baby. She didn’t leave the parlor.
“Clarice Starling.”
“Jerry Burroughs, Starling—”
“Good, Jerry, listen I think Buffalo Bill can sew. He cut the triangles—just a sec—Mrs. Bimmel, could I ask you to take the baby in the kitchen? I need to talk here. Thank you.… Jerry, he can sew. He took—”
“Starling—”
“He took those triangles off of Kimberly Emberg to make darts, dressmaking darts, do you know what I’m saying? He’s skilled, he’s not just making caveman stuff. ID Section can search Known Offenders for tailors, sailmakers, drapers, upholsterers—run a scan on the Distinguishing Marks field for a tailor’s notch in his teeth—”
“Right, right, right, I’m punching up a line now to ID. Now listen up—I may have to get off the phone here. Jack wanted me to brief you. We got a name and a place that looks not bad. The Hostage Rescue Team’s airborne from Andrews. Jack’s briefing them on the scrambler.”
“Going where?”
“Calumet City, edge of Chicago. Subject’s Jame, like ‘Name’ with a J, last name Gumb, a.k.a. John Grant, WM, thirty-four, one-ninety, brown and blue. Jack got a beep from Johns Hopkins. Your thing—your profile on how he’d be different from a transsexual—it rang the cherries at Johns Hopkins. Guy applied for sex reassignment three years ago. Roughed up a doctor after they turned him down. Hopkins had the Grant alias and a flop address in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The cops had a gas receipt with his tag number and we went from there. Big jacket in California as a juvenile—he killed his grandparents when he was twelve and did six years in Tulare Psychiatric. The state let him out sixteen years ago when they shut down the asylum. He disappeared a long time. He’s a fag-basher. Had a couple of scrapes in Harrisburg and faded out again.”
“Chicago, you said. How do you know Chicago?”
“Customs. They had some paper on the John Grant alias. Customs stopped a suitcase at LAX a couple of years ago shipped from Surinam with live ‘pupae’—is that how you say it?—insects anyway, moths, in it. The addressee was John Grant, care of a business in Calumet called—get this—called `Mr. Hide.’ Leather goods. Maybe the sewing fits with that; I’m relaying the sewing to Chicago and Calumet. No home address yet on Grant, or Gumb—the business is closed, but we’re close.”
“Any pictures?”
“Just the juveniles from Sacramento PD so far. They’re not much use—he was twelve. Looked like Beaver Cleaver. The wire room’s faxing them around anyway.”