“Is it a popular hobby? Outside professional study, do a lot of people do it?”
“No, primarily it’s entomologists trying to get a perfect specimen, maybe a few collectors. There’s the silk industry too, they raise moths, but not this kind.”
“Entomologists must have periodicals, professional journals, people that sell equipment,” Starling said.
“Sure, and most of the publications come here.”
“Let me make you a bundle,” Roden said. “A couple of people here subscribe privately to the smaller newsletters—keep ’em locked up and make you give them a quarter just to look at the stupid things. I’ll have to get those in the morning.”
“I’ll see they’re picked up, thank you, Mr. Roden.”
Pilcher photocopied the references on Erebus odora and gave them to her, along with the insect. “I’ll take you down,” he said.
They waited for the elevator. “Most people love butterflies and hate moths,” he said. “But moths are more—interesting, engaging.”
“They’re destructive.”
“Some are, a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do.” Silence for one floor. “There’s a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears,” he offered. “That’s all they eat or drink.”
“What kind of tears? Whose tears?”
“The tears of large land mammals, about our size. The old definition of moth was ‘anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too.… Is this what you do all the time—hunt Buffalo Bill?”
“I do it all I can.”
Pilcher polished his teeth, his tongue moving behind his lips like a cat beneath the covers. “Do you ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer or the amusing house wine?”
“Not lately.”
“Will you go for some with me now? It’s not far.”
“No, but I’ll treat when this is over—and Mr. Roden can go too, naturally.”
“There’s nothing natural about that,” Pilcher said. And at the door, “I hope you’re through with this soon, Officer Starling.”
She hurried to the waiting car.
Ardelia Mapp had left Starling’s mail and half a Mounds candy bar on her bed. Mapp was asleep.
Starling carried her portable typewriter down to the laundry room, put it on the clothes-folding shelf and cranked in a carbon set. She had organized her notes on Erebus odora in her head on the ride back to Quantico, and she covered that quickly.
Then she ate the Mounds and wrote a memo to Crawford suggesting they cross-check the entomology publications’ computerized mailing lists against the FBI’s known offender files and the files in the cities closest to the abductions, plus felon and sex-offender files of Metro Dade, San Antonio, and Houston, the areas where the moths were most plentiful.
There was another thing, too, that she had to bring up for a second time: Let’s ask Dr. Lecter why he thought the perpetrator would start taking scalps.
She delivered the paper to the night duty officer and fell into her grateful bed, the voices of the day still whispering, softer than Mapp’s breathing across the room. On the swarming dark she saw the moth’s wise little face. Those glowing eyes had looked at Buffalo Bill.
Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half the world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.
CHAPTER 15
In East Memphis, Tennessee, Catherine Baker Martin and her best boyfriend were watching a late movie on television in his apartment and having a few hits off a bong pipe loaded with hashish. The commercial breaks grew longer and more frequent.
“I’ve got the munchies, want some popcorn?” she said.
“I’ll go get it, give me your keys.”
“Sit still. I need to see if Mom called, anyway.”