فصل 58

Chapter 58

THE CLARENDON County Morgue in northern Virginia is attached to the county hospital by a short air lock with an exhaust fan in the ceiling and wide double doors at each end to facilitate access by the dead. A sheriffs deputy stood before these doors to keep out the five reporters and cameramen who crowded around him.

From behind the reporters, Starling stood on her tiptoes and held her badge high.

When the deputy spotted it and nodded, she plunged through. Strobe lights flashed and a sun gun flared behind her.

Quiet in the autopsy room, only the clink of instruments put down in a metal tray.

The county morgue has four stainless-steel autopsy tables, each with its scales and sink. Two of the tables were draped, the sheets oddly tented by the remains they covered. A routine hospital postmortem was in progress at the table nearest the windows. The pathologist and his assistant were doing something delicate and did not look up when Starling came in.

The thin shriek of an electric saw filled the room, and in a moment the pathologist carefully set aside the cap of a skull and lifted in his cupped hands a brain, which he placed on the scales. He whispered the weight into the microphone he wore, examined the organ in the scale pan, poked it with a gloved finger. When he spotted Starling over the shoulder of his assistant, he dumped the brain into the open chest cavity of the corpse, shot his rubber gloves into a bin like a boy shooting rubber bands and came around the table to her.

Starling found shaking his hand a bit crawly.

“Clarice Starling, Special Agent, FBI.”

“I’m Dr Hollingsworth - medical examiner, hospital pathologist, chief cook and bottle washer.”

Hollingsworth has bright blue eyes, shiny as well-peeled eggs. He spoke to his assistant without looking away from Starling. “Marlene, page the sheriff in cardiac ICU, and undrape those remains, please, ma’am.”

In Starling’s experience medical examiners were usually intelligent but often silly and incautious in casual conversation, and they liked to show off. Hollingsworth followed Starling’s eyes. “You’re wondering about that brain?”

She nodded and showed him her open hands.

“We’re not careless here, Special Agent Starling. It’s a favor I do the undertaker, not putting the brain back in the skull. In this case they’ll have an open coffin and a lengthy wake, and you can’t prevent brain material leaking onto the pillow, so we stuff the skull with Huggies or whatever we have and close it back up, and I put a notch in the skull cap over both ears, so it won’t slide. Family gets the whole body back, everybody’s happy.”

“I understand.”

“Tell me if you understand that,” he said. Behind Starling, Dr Hollingsworth’s assistant had removed the covering sheets from the autopsy tables.

Starling turned and saw it all in a single image that would last as long as she lived. Side by side on their stainless-steel tables lay a deer and a man. From the deer projected a yellow arrow. The arrow shaft and the antlers had held up the covering sheet like tent poles.

The man had a shorter, thicker yellow arrow through his head transversely at the tips of his ears. He still wore one garment, a reversed baseball cap, pinned to his head by the arrow.

Looking at him, Starling suffered an absurd burp of laughter, suppressed so fast it might have sounded like dismay. The similar positions of the two bodies, on their sides instead of in the anatomical position, revealed that they had been butchered almost identically, the sirloin and loin removed with neatness and economy along with the small filets that lie beneath the spine.

A deer’s fur on stainless steel. Its head elevated by the antlers on the metal pillow block, the head turned and the eye white as though it tried to look back at the bright shaft that killed it-the creature, lying on its side in its own reflection in this place of obsessive order, seemed wilder, more alien to man than a deer ever seemed in the woods.

The man’s eyes were open, some blood came from his lachrymal ducts like tears.

“Odd to see them together,” Dr Hollingsworth said. “Their hearts weighed exactly the same.”

He looked at Starling and saw that she was all right. “One difference on the man, you can see here where the short ribs were separated from the spine and the lungs pulled out the back. They almost look like wings, don’t they?”

“Bloody Eagle,” Starling muttered, after a moment’s thought.

“I never saw it before.”

“Me either,” Starling said.

“There’s a term for that? What did you call it?”

“The Bloody Eagle. The literature at Quantico has it. It’s a Norse sacrificial custom. Chop through the short ribs and pull the lungs out the back, flatten them out like that to make wings. There was a neo-Viking doing it in Minnesota in the thirties.”

“You see a lot of this, I don’t mean this, but this kind of stuff.”

“Sometimes I do, yes.”

“It’s out of my line a little. We get mostly straightforward murders - people shot and knifed, but do you want to know what I think?”

“I’d like very much to know, Doctor.”

“I think the man, his ID says Donnie Barber, killed the deer illegally yesterday, the day before the season started - I know that’s when it died. That arrow’s consistent with the rest of his archery equipment. He was butchering it in a hurry. I haven’t done the antigens on that blood on his hands, but it’s deer blood. He was just going to take what deer hunters call the backstrap, and he started a sloppy job, this short ragged cut here. Then he got a big surprise, like this arrow through his head. Same color, but a different kind of arrow. No notch in the butt. Do you recognize it?”

“It looks like a crossbow quarrel,” Starling said.

“A second person, maybe the one with the crossbow, finished dressing the deer, doing a much better job, and then, by God, he did the man too. Look how precisely the hide is reflected here, how decisive the incisions are. Nothing spoiled or wasted.

Michael DeBakey couldn’t do it better. There’s no sign of any kind of sexual interference with either of them. They were simply butchered for meat.”

Starling touched her lips with her knuckle. For a second the pathologist thought she was kissing an amulet.

“Dr Hollingsworth, were the livers missing?”

A beat of time before he replied, peering at her over his glasses. “The deer’s liver is missing. Mr. Barber’s liver apparently wasn’t up to standard. It was partly excised and examined, there’s an incision just along the portal vein. His liver is cirrhotic and discolored. It remains in the body, would you like to see?”

“No, thank you. What about the thymus?”

“The sweetbreads, yes, missing in both cases. Agent Starling, nobody’s said the name yet, have they?”

“No,” Starling said. “Not yet.”

A puff from the air lock and a lean, weathered man in a tweed sports jacket and khaki pants stood in the doorway.

“Sheriff, how’s Carleton?”

Hollingsworth said. “Agent Starling, this is Sheriff Dumas. The sheriff’s brother is upstairs in cardiac ICU.”

“He’s holding his own. They say he’s stable, he’s “guarded,’ whatever that means,” the sheriff said. He called outside, “Come on in here, Wilburn.”

The sheriff shook Starling’s hand and introduced the other man. “This is Officer Wilburn Moody, he’s a game warden.”

“Sheriff. If you want to stay close to your brother we could go back upstairs,”

Starling said.

Sheriff Dumas shook his head. “They won’t let me in to see him again for another hour and a half. No offense, Miss, but I called for Jack Crawford. Is he coming?”

“He’s stuck in court-he was on the stand when your call came. I expect we’ll hear from him very shortly. We really appreciate you calling us so fast.”

“Old Crawford taught my National Police Academy Class at Quantico umpteen years ago. Damndest fellow. If he sent you, you must know what you’re doing - want to go ahead?”

“Please, Sheriff.”

The sheriff took a notebook out of his coat pocket. “The individual here with the arrow through his head is Donnie Leo Barber, WM thirty-two, resides in a trailer at Trail’s End Park at Cameron. No employment I can find. General discharge with prejudice from the Air Force four years ago. He’s got an air frame and power plant ticket from the FAA. Sometime airplane mechanic. Paid a misdemeanor fine for discharging a firearm in the city limits, paid a fine for criminal trespass last hunting season. Pled guilty to poaching deer in Summit County, when was that, Wilburn?”

“Two seasons ago, he just got his license back. He’s known to the department. He don’t bother to track nothing after he shoots it. If it don’t fall, just wait on another’n . one time-“

“Tell what you found today, Wilburn.”

“Well, I was coming along on county road forty-seven, about a mile west of the bridge there around seven o’clock this morning when Old Man Peckman flagged me down. He was breathing hard and holding his chest. All he could do was open and shut his mouth and point off in the woods there. I went maybe, oh, not more than a hundred and fifty yards in the thick woods and there was this Barber here sprawled up against a tree with an arrow through his head and that deer there with an arrow in it. They was stiff from yesterday at least.”

“Yesterday morning early, I’d say, cool as it was,” Dr Hollingsworth said.

“Now the season just opened this morning,” the game warden said. “This Donnie Barber had a climbing tree stand with him that he hadn’t set up yet. Looked like he went out there yesterday to get ready for today, or else he went to poach. I don’t know why else he’d take his bow, if he was just setting up the stand. Here come this nice deer and he just couldn’t help himself. I’ve saw people do this a lots. This kinds behavior’s got common as pig tracks. And then this other ‘un come up on him while he was butchering. I couldn’t tell nothing from the tracks, a rain come down out there so hard, the bottom just fell out right then-“

“That’s why we took a couple of pictures and pulled out the bodies,” Sheriff Dumas said. “Old Man Peckman owns the woods. This Donnie had on him a legitimate two-day lease to hunt starting today, with Peckman’s signature on it.

Peckman always sold one lease a year, and he advertised it and had it farmed out with some brokers. Donnie also had a letter in his back pocket saying Congratulations you have won a deer lease. The papers are wet, Miss Starling.

Nothing against our fellows, but I’m wondering if you ought to do the fingerprinting at your lab. The arrows too, the whole thing was wet when we got there. We tried not to touch them.”

“You want to take these arrows with you, Agent Starling? How would you like me to take ‘em out?” Dr Hollingsworth asked.

“If you’d hold them with retractors and saw them in two at the skin line on the feather side and push the rest through, I’ll wire them to my board with some twist ties,” Starling said, opening her case.

“I don’t think he was in a fight, but do you want fingernail scrapings?”

“I’d rather clip them to do DNA. I don’t need them ID’d by finger, but separate them hand from hand, if you would, Doctor.”

“Can you run PCR-STR?”

“They can in the main lab. We’ll have something for you, Sheriff, in three to four days.”

“Can you do that deer blood yourself?” Warden Moody asked.

“No, we can just tell it’s animal blood,” Starling said.

“What if you was to just find the deer meat in somebody’s Frigidaire,” Warden Moody offered. “You’d want to know whether it come out of that deer, wouldn’t you?

Sometimes we have to be able to tell deer from deer by blood to make a poaching case. Every individual deer is different. You wouldn’t think that, would you? We have to send blood off to Portland, Oregon, to the Oregon Game and Fish, they can tell you if you wait long enough. They come back with ‘This is Deer No. One,’ they’ll say, or just call it ‘Deer A,’ with a long case number since, you know, a deer don’t have any name. That we know of.”

Starling liked Moody’s old weather-beaten face. “We’ll call this one ‘John Doe,’

Warden Moody. That’s useful to know about Oregon, we might have to do some business with them, thank you,” she said and smiled at him until he blushed and fumbled with his cap.

As she bent her head to rummage in her bag, Dr Hollingsworth considered her for the pleasure it gave him. Her face had lit up for a moment, talking with old Moody.

That beauty spot in her cheek looked very much like burnt gunpowder. He wanted to ask, but thought better of it.

“What did you put the papers in, not plastic?” she asked the sheriff.

“Brown paper sacks. A brown paper sack never hurt much of anything.”

The sheriff rubbed the back of his neck with his hand, and looked up at Starling.

“You know why I called your outfit, why I wanted Jack Crawford over here. I’m glad you came, now that I recollect who you are. Nobody’s said ‘cannibal’ outside this room because the press will tromp the woods flat as soon as it’s out. All they know is it could be a hunting accident. They heard maybe a body was mutilated. They don’t know Donnie Barber was cut for meat. There’s not that many cannibals, Agent Starling.”

“No, Sheriff. Not that many.”

“It’s awful neat work.”

“Yessir, it is.”

“I may be thinking about him because he’s been in the paper so much - does this look like that Hannibal Lecter to you?”

Starling watched a daddy longlegs hide in the drain of the vacant autopsy table.

“Dr Lecter’s sixth victim was a bow hunter,” Starling said.

“Did he eat him?”

“That one, no. He left him hanging from a peg board wall with all sorts of wounds in him. He left him looking like a medieval medical illustration called Wound Man.

He’s interested in medieval things.”

The pathologist pointed to the lungs spread across Donnie Barber’s back. “You were saying this was an old ritual.”

“I think so,” Starling said. “I don’t know if Dr Lecter did this. If he did it, the mutilation’s not a fetish - this arrangement’s not a compulsive thing with him.”

“What is it then?”

“It’s whimsy,” she said, looking to see if she put them off with the exact word.

“It’s whimsy, and it’s what got him caught last time.”