A venerable twin-engined Beechcraft stood on the taxiway at the Quantico airstrip with its beacons turning and the door open. One propeller was spinning, riffling the grass beside the tarmac.
“That wouldn’t be the Blue Canoe,” Starling said.
“Yep.”
“It’s little and it’s old.”
“It is old,” Brigham said cheerfully. “Drug Enforcement seized it in Florida a long time ago, when it flopped in the ’Glades. Mechanically sound now, though. I hope Gramm and Rudman don’t find out we’re using it—we’re supposed to ride the bus.” He pulled up beside the airplane and got Starling’s baggage out of the backseat. In some confusion of hands he managed to give her the stuff and shake her hand.
And then, without meaning to, Brigham said, “Bless you, Starling.” The words felt odd in his Marine mouth. He didn’t know where they came from and his face felt hot.
“Thanks … thank you, Mr. Brigham.”
Crawford was in the copilot’s seat, in shirtsleeves and sunglasses. He turned to Starling when he heard the pilot slam the door.
She couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark glasses, and she felt she didn’t know him. Crawford looked pale and tough, like a root a bulldozer pushes up.
“Take a pew and read,” is all he said.
A thick case file lay on the seat behind him. The cover said BUFFALO BILL. Starling hugged it tight as the Blue Canoe blatted and shuddered and began to roll.
CHAPTER 11
The edges of the runway blurred and fell away. To the east, a flash of morning sun off the Chesapeake Bay as the small plane turned out of traffic.
Clarice Starling could see the school down there, and the surrounding Marine base at Quantico. On the assault course, tiny figures of Marines scrambled and ran.
This was how it looked from above.
Once after a night-firing exercise, walking in the dark along the deserted Hogan’s Alley, walking to think, she had heard airplanes roar over and then, in the new silence, voices calling in the black sky above her—airborne troops in a night jump calling to each other as they came down through the darkness. And she wondered how it felt to wait for the jump light at the aircraft door, how it felt to plunge into the bellowing dark.
Maybe it felt like this.
She opened the file.
He had done it five times that they knew of, had Bill. At least five times, and probably more, over the past ten months he had abducted a woman, killed her and skinned her. (Starling’s eye raced down the autopsy protocols to the free histamine tests to confirm that he killed them before he did the rest.)
He dumped each body in running water when he was through with it. Each was found in a diffe
rent river, downstream from an interstate highway crossing, each in a different state. Everyone knew Buffalo Bill was a traveling man. That was all the law knew about him, absolutely all, except that he had at least one gun. It had six lands and grooves, left-hand twist—possibly a Colt revolver or a Colt clone. Skidmarks on recovered bullets indicated he preferred to fire .38 Specials in the longer chambers of a .357.
The rivers left no fingerprints, no trace evidence of hair or fiber.
He was almost certain to be a white male: white because serial murderers usually kill within their own ethnic group and all the victims were white; male because female serial murderers are almost unknown in our time.
Two big-city columnists had found a headline in e.e. cummings’ deadly little poem “Buffalo Bill”: … how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death
Someone, maybe Crawford, had pasted the quotation inside the cover of the file.
There was no clear correlation between where Bill abducted the young women and where he dumped them.
In the cases where the bodies were found soon enough for an accurate determination of time of death, police learned another thing the killer did: Bill kept them for a while, alive. These victims did not die until a week to ten days after they were abducted. That meant he had to have a place to keep them and a place to work in privacy. It meant he wasn’t a drifter. He was more of a trapdoor spider. With his own digs. Somewhere.
That horrified the public more than anything—his holding them for a week or more, knowing he would kill them.
Two were hanged, three shot. There was no evidence of rape or physical abuse prior to death, and the autopsy protocols recorded no evidence of “specifically genital” disfigurement, though pathologists noted it would be almost impossible to determine these things in the more deteriorated bodies.
All were found naked. In two cases, articles of the victims’ outer clothing were found beside the road near their homes, slit up the back like funeral suits.