Would she have to watch out for that fucking Krendler for the rest of her life?
In the presence of the Senator, he had wanted to wash his hands of her. Every time Starling thought about it, it stung. He wasn’t positive that he would find evidence in the envelope. That was shocking. Picturing Krendler now in her mind, she saw him wearing Navy oxfords on his feet like the mayor, her father’s boss, coming to collect the watchman’s clock.
Worse, Jack Crawford in her mind seemed diminished. The man was under more strain than anyone should have to bear. He had sent her in to check out Raspail’s car with no support or evidence of authority. Okay, she had asked to go under those terms—the trouble was a fluke. But Crawford had to know there’d be trouble when Senator Martin saw her in Memphis; there would have been trouble even if she hadn’t found the fuck pictures.
Catherine Baker Martin lay in this same darkness that held her now. Starling had forgotten it for a moment while she thought about her own best interests.
Pictures of the past few days punished Starling for the lapse, flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.
It was Kimberly that haunted her now. Fat dead Kimberly who had her ears pierced trying to look pretty and saved to have her legs waxed. Kimberly with her hair gone. Kimberly her sister. Starling did not think Catherine Baker Martin would have much time for Kimberly. Now they were sisters under the skin. Kimberly lying in a funeral home full of state trooper buckaroos.
Starling couldn’t look at it anymore. She tried to turn her face away as a swimmer turns to breathe.
All of Buffalo Bill’s victims were women, his obsession was women, he lived to hunt women. Not one woman was hunting him full time. Not one woman investigator had looked at every one of his crimes.
Starling wondered if Crawford would have the nerve to use her as a technician when he had to go look at Catherine Martin. Bill would “do her tomorrow,” Crawford predicted. Do her. Do her Do her.
“Fuck this,” Starling said aloud and put her feet on the floor.
“You’re over there corrupting a moron, aren’t you, Starling?” Ardelia Mapp said. “Sneaked him in here while I was asleep and now you’re giving him instructions—don’t think I don’t hear you.”
“Sorry, Ardelia, I didn’t—”
“You’ve got to be a lot more specific with ’em than that, Starling. You can’t just say what you said. Corrupting morons is just like journalism, you’ve got to tell ’em What, When, Where, and How. I think Why gets self-explanatory as you go along.”
“Have you got any laundry?”
“I thought you said did I have any laundry.”
“Yep, I think I’ll run a load. Whatcha got?”
“Just those sweats on the back of the door.”
“Okay. Shut your eyes, I’m gonna turn on the light for just a second.”
It was not the Fourth Amendment notes for her upcoming exam that she piled on top of the clothes basket and lugged down the hall to the laundry room.
She took the Buffalo Bill file, a four-inch-thick pile of hell and pain in a buff cover printed with ink the color of blood. With it was a hotline printout of her report on the Death’s-head Moth.
She’d have to give the file back tomorrow and, if she wanted this copy to be complete, sooner or later she had to insert her report. In the warm laundry room, in the washing machine’s comforting chug, she took off the rubber bands that held the file together. She laid out the papers on the clothes-folding shelf and tried to do the insert without seeing any of the pictures, without thinking of what pictures might be added soon. The map was on top, that was fine. But there was handwriting on the map.
Dr. Lecter’s elegant script ran across the Great Lakes, and it said:
Clarice, does this random scattering of sites seem overdone to you? Doesn’t it seem desperately random? Random past all possible convenience? Does it suggest to you the elaborations of a bad liar?
Ta,
Hannibal Lecter
P.S. Don’t bother to flip through, there isn’t anything else.
It took twenty minutes of page-turning to be sure there wasn’t anything else.
Starling called the hotline from the pay phone in the hall and read the message to Burroughs. She wondered when Burroughs slept.
“I have to tell you, Starling, the market in Lecter information is way down,” Burroughs said. “Did Jack call you about Billy Rubin?”
“No.”