فصل 80

Chapter 80

FREE AT last from the police, Starling changed her tire and drove home to her own phones and computer. She sorely missed her FBI cell phone and had not yet replaced it.

There was a message from Mapp on the answering machine: “Starling, season the pot roast and put it in the slow cooker. Do not put the vegetables in yet. Remember what happened last time. I’ll be in a damn exclusion hearing until about five.”

Starling fired up her laptop and tried to call up the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program file on Lecter, but was denied admission not only to VICAP, but the entire FBI computer net. She did not have as much access as the most rural constable in America.

The telephone rang.

It was Clint Pearsall. “Starling, have you harassed Mason Verger on the phone?”

“Never, I swear.”

“He claims you have. He’s invited the sheriff up there to tour his property, actually requested him to come do it, and they’re on the way to look around now. So there’s no warrant and no warrant forthcoming. We haven’t been able to find any other witnesses to the kidnapping. Only you.”

“There was a white Lincoln with an old couple in it. Mr. Pearsall, how about checking the credit card purchases at Safeway just before it happened. Those sales have a time stamp.”

“We’ll get to that, but it’ll .”

”. it’ll take time,” Starling finished.

“Starling?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Between us, I’ll keep you posted on the big stuff. But you stay out of it. You’re not a law officer while you’re on suspension, and you’re not supposed to have information. You’re Joe Blow.”

“Yes, sir, I know.”

What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do not raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.

Starling, seeking something, anything, walked through the kitchen into the quiet and order of Mapp’s side of the duplex. She looked at the photograph of Mapp’s fierce little grandmother, brewer of the tea. She looked at Grandmother Mapp’s insurance policy framed on the wall. Mapp’s side looked like Mapp lived there.

Starling went back to her side. It looked to her like nobody lived there. What did she have framed? Her diploma from the FBI Academy. No photograph of her parents survived. She had been without them for a long time and she had them only in her mind. Sometimes, in the flavors of breakfast or in a scent, a scrap of conversation, a homely expression overheard, she felt their hands on her: She felt it strongest in her sense of right and wrong.

Who the hell was she? Who had ever recognized her? You are a warrior, Clarice.

You can be as strong as you wish to be.

Starling could understand Mason wanting to kill Hannibal Lecter. If he had done it himself or had hired it done, she could have stood it; Mason had a grievance.

But she could not abide the thought of Dr Lecter tortured to death; she shied from it as she had from the slaughter of the lambs and the horses so long ago.

You are a warrior, Clarice.

Almost as ugly as the act itself was the fact that Mason would do this with the tacit agreement of men sworn to uphold the law. It is the way of the world.

With this thought, she made a simple decision: The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.

She found herself in her closet, on a stool, reaching high.

She brought down the box John Brigham’s attorney had delivered to her in the fall. It seemed forever ago.

There is much tradition and mystique in the bequest of personal weapons to a surviving comrade in arms. It has to do with a continuation of values past individual mortality.

People living in a time made safe for them by others may find this difficult to understand.

The box John Brigham’s guns came in was a gift in itself. He must have bought it in the Orient when he was a Marine. A mahogany box with the lid inlaid in mother of pearl. The weapons were pure Brigham, well worn, well maintained and immaculately clean. An M1911A1 Colt .45 pistol, and a Safari Arms cut-down version of the .45 for concealed carry, a boot dagger with one serrated edge. Starling had her own leather. John Brigham’s old FBI badge was mounted on a mahogany plaque.

His DEA badge was in the box loose.

Starling pried the FBI badge off the plaque and put it in her pocket. The .45 went in her Yaqui slide behind her hip, covered by her jacket.

The short .45 went on one ankle, the knife on the other, inside her boots. She took her diploma out of the frame and folded it for her pocket. In the dark somebody might mistake it for a warrant. As she creased the heavy paper, she knew she was not quite herself, and she was glad.

Another three minutes at her laptop. From the Mapquest Web site she printed out a large-scale map of the Muskrat Farm and the national forest around it. For a moment she looked at Mason’s meat kingdom, traced its boundaries with her finger.

The Mustang’s big pipes blew the dead grass flat as she pulled out of her driveway to call on Mason Verger.