فصل بیست و چهارم

CHAPTER 24

Dr. Frederick Chilton stood in the corridor outside Hannibal Lecter’s cell. With Chilton were three large orderlies. One carried a straitjacket and leg restraints and another held a can of Mace. The third loaded a tranquilizer dart into his air rifle.

Lecter was reading an actuarial chart at his table and taking notes. He had heard the footsteps coming. He heard the rifle breech close behind him, but he continued to read and gave no sign that he knew Chilton was there.

Chilton had sent him the newspapers at noon and let him wait until night to find out his punishment for helping the Dragon.

“Dr. Lecter,” Chilton said.

Lecter turned around. “Good evening, Dr. Chilton.” He didn’t acknowledge the presence of the guards. He looked only at Chilton.

“I’ve come for your books. All your books.”

“I see. May I ask how long you intend to keep them?”

“That depends on your attitude.”

“Is this your decision?”

“I decide the punitive measures here.”

“Of course you do. It’s not the sort of thing Will Graham would request.”

“Back up to the net and slip these on, Dr. Lecter. I won’t ask you twice.”

“Certainly, Dr. Chilton. I hope that’s a thirtynine - the thirtysevens are snug around the chest.” Dr. Lecter put on the restraints as though they were dinner clothes. An orderly reached through the barrier and fastened them from the back.

“Help him to his cot,” Chilton said.

While the orderlies stripped the bookshelves, Chilton polished his glasses and stirred Lecter’s personal papers with a pen.

Lecter watched from the shadowed corner of his cell. There was a curious grace about him, even in restraints.

“Beneath the yellow folder,” Lecter said quietly, “you’ll find a rejection slip the Archives sent you. It was brought to me by mistake with some of my Archives mail, and I’m afraid I opened it without looking at the envelope. Sorry.” Chilton reddened. He spoke to an orderly. “I think you’d better take the seat off Dr. Lecter’s toilet.” Chilton looked at the actuarial table. Lecter had written his age at the top: fortyone. “And what do you have here?” Chilton asked.

“Time,” Dr. Lecter said.

Section Chief Brian Zeller took the courier’s case and the wheelchair wheels into Instrumental Analysis, walking at a rate that made his gabardine pants whistle.

The staff, held over from the day shift, knew that whistling sound very well: Zeller in a hurry.

There had been enough delays. The weary courier, his flight from Chicago delayed by weather and then diverted to Philadelphia, had rented a car and driven down to the FBI laboratory in Washington.

The Chicago police laboratory is efficient, but there are things it is not equipped to do. Zeller prepared to do them now.

At the mass spectrometer he dropped off the paint flecks from Lounds’s car door.

Beverly Katz in Hair and Fiber got the wheels to share with others in the section.

Zeller’s last stop was the small hot room where Liza Lake bent over her gas chromatograph. She was testing ashes from a Florida arson case, watching the stylus trace its spiky line on the moving graph.

“Ace lighter fluid,” she said. “That’s what he lit it with.” She had looked at so many samples that she could distinguish brands without searching through the manual.

Zeller took his eyes off Liza Lake and rebuked himself severely for feeling pleasure in the office. He cleared his throat and held up the two shiny paint cans.

“Chicago?” she said.

Zeller nodded.

She checked the condition of the cans and the seal of the lids. One can contained ashes from the wheelchair; the other, charred material from Lounds.

“How long has it been in the cans?”

“Six hours anyway,” Zeller said.

“I’ll headspace it.”

She pierced the lid with a heavyduty syringe, extracted air that had been confined with the ashes, and injected the air directly into the gas chromatograph. She made minute adjustments. As the sample moved along the machine’s fivehundredfoot column, the stylus jiggled on the wide graph paper.

“Unleaded . . .” she said. “It’s gasohol, unleaded gasohol. Don’t see much of that.” She flipped quickly through a looseleaf file of sample graphs. “I can’t give you a brand yet. Let me do it with pentane and I’ll get back to you.” “Good,” Zeller said. Pentane would dissolve the fluids in the ashes, then fractionate early in the chromatograph, leaving the fluids for fine analysis.

By one A.M. Zeller had all he could get.

Liza Lake succeeded in naming the gasohol: Freddy Lounds was burned with a “Servco Supreme” blend.

Patient brushing in the grooves of the wheelchair treads yielded two kinds of carpet fiber - wool and synthetic. Mold in dirt from the treads indicated the chair had been stored in a cool, dark place.

The other results were less satisfactory. The paint flecks were not original factory paint. Blasted in the mass spectrometer and compared with the national automotive paint file, the paint proved to be highquality Duco enamel manufactured in a lot of 186,000 gallons during the first quarter of 1978 for sale to several autopaintshop chains.

Zeller had hoped to pinpoint a make of vehicle and the approximate time of manufacture.

He telexed the results to Chicago.

The Chicago police department wanted its wheels back. The wheels made an awkward package for the courier. Zeller put written lab reports in his pouch along with mail and a package that had come for Graham.

“Federal Express I’m not,” the courier said when he was sure Zeller couldn’t hear him.

The Justice Department maintains several small apartments near Seventh District Court in Chicago for the use of jurists and favored expert witnesses when court is in session. Graham stayed in one of these, with Crawford across the hall.

He came in at nine P.M., tired and wet. He had not eaten since breakfast on the plane from Washington and the thought of food repelled him.

Rainy Wednesday was over at last. It was as bad a day as he could remember.

With Lounds dead, it seemed likely that he was next and all day Chester had watched his back; while he was in Lounds’s garage, while he stood in the rain on the scorched pavement where Lounds was burned. With strobe lights flashing in his face, he told the press he was “grieved at the loss of his friend Frederick Lounds.” He was going to the funeral, too. So were a number of federal agents and police, in the hope that the killer would come to see Graham grieve.

Actually he felt nothing he could name, just cold nausea and an occasional wave of sickly exhilaration that he had not burned to death instead of Lounds.

It seemed to Graham that he had learned nothing in forty years: he had just gotten tired.

He made a big martini and drank it while he undressed. He had another after his shower while he watched the news.

(“An FBI trap to catch the Tooth Fairy backfires and a veteran reporter is dead. We’ll be back with details on Eyewitness News after this.”) They were referring to the killer as “the Dragon” before the newscast was over. The Tattler had spilled it all to the networks. Grahain wasn’t surprised. Thursday’s edition should sell well.

He made a third martini and called Molly.

She had seen the television news at six and ten o’clock and she had seen a Tattler. She knew that Graham had been the bait in a trap.

“You should have told me, Will.”

“Maybe. I don’t think so.”

“Will he try to kill you now?”

“Sooner or later. It would be hard for him now, since I’m moving around. I’m covered all the time, Molly, and he knows it. I’ll be okay.” “You sound a little slurry, have you been to see your friend in the fridge?”

“I had a couple.”

“How do you feel?”

“Fairly rotten.”

“The news said the FBI didn’t have any protection for the reporter.”

“He was supposed to be with Crawford by the time the Tooth Fairy got the paper.”

“The news is calling him the Dragon now.”

“That’s what he calls himself.”

“Will, there’s something . . . I want to take Willy and leave here.”

“And go where?”

“His grandparents’. They haven’t seen him in a while, they’d like to see him.”

“Oh, umhmm.”

Willy’s father’s parents had a ranch on the Oregon coast.

“It’s creepy here. I know it’s supposed to be safe - but we’re not sleeping a whole lot. Maybe the shooting lessons spooked me, I don’t know.” “I’m sorry, Molly.” I wish I could tell you how sorry.

“I’ll miss you. We both will.”

So she had made up her mind.

“When are you going?”

“In the morning.”

“What about the shop?”

“Evelyn wants to take it. I’ll underwrite the fall stuff with the wholesalers, just for the interest, and she can keep what she makes.” “The dogs?”

“I asked her to call the county, Will. I’m sorry, but maybe somebody will take some of them.”

“Molly, I-”

“If staying here I could keep something bad from happening to you, I’d stay. But you can’t save anybody, Will, I’m not helping you here. With us up there, you can just think about taking care of yourself. I’m not carrying this damned pistol the rest of my life, Will.” “Maybe you can get down to Oakland and watch the A’s.” Didn’t mean to say that. Oh boy, this silence is getting pretty long.

“Well, look, I’ll call you,” she said, “or I guess you’ll have to call me up there.”

Graham felt something tearing. He felt short of breath. “Let me get the office to make the arrangements. Have you made a reservation already?” “I didn’t use my name. I thought maybe the newspapers . . .”

“Good. Good. Let me get somebody to see you off. You wouldn’t have to board through the gate, and you’d get out of Washington absolutely clean. Can I do that? Let me do that. What time does the plane go?” “Nineforty. American 118.”

“Okay, eightthirty . . . behind the Smithsonian. There’s a ParkRite. Leave the car there. Somebody’ll meet you. He’ll listen to his watch, put it to his ear when he gets out of his car, okay?” “That’s fine.”

“Say, do you change at O’Hare? I could come out-”

“No. Change in Minneapolis.”

“Oh, Molly. Maybe I could come up there and get you when it’s over?”

“That would be very nice.”

Very nice.

“Do you have enough money?”

“The bank’s wiring me some.”

“What?”

“To Barclay’s at the airport. Don’t worry.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“Me too, but that’ll be the same as now. Same distance by phone. Willy says hi.”

“Hi to Willy.”

“Be careful, darling.”

She had never called him darling before. He didn’t care for it. He didn’t care for new names; darling, Red Dragon.

The nightduty officer in Washington was glad to make the arrangements for Molly. Graham pressed his face to the cool window and watched sheets of rain whip over the muffled traffic below him, the street leaping from gray to sudden color in the lightning flashes. His face left a print of forehead, nose, lips, and chin on the glass.

Molly was gone.

The day was over and there was only the night to face, and the lipless voice accusing him.

Lounds’s woman held what was left of his hand until it was over.

“Hello, this is Valerie Leeds. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now . . .”

“I’m sorry too,” Graham said.

Graham filled his glass again and sat at the table by the window, staring at the empty chair across from him. He stared until the space in the opposite chair assumed a manshape filled with dark and swarming motes, a presence like a shadow on suspended dust. He tried to make the image coalesce, to see a face. It would not move, had no countenance but, faceless, faced him with palpable attention.

“I know it’s tough,” Graham said. He was intensely drunk. “You’ve got to try to stop, just hold off until we find you. If you’ve got to do something, fuck, come after me. I don’t give a shit. It’ll be better after that. They’ve got some things now to help you make it stop. To help you stop wanting to so bad. Help me. Help me a little. Molly’s gone, old Freddy’s dead. It’s you and me now, sport.” He leaned across the table, his hand extended to touch, and the presence was gone.

Graham put his head down on the table, his cheek on his arm. He could see the print of his forehead, nose, mouth, and chin on the window as the lightning flashed behind it; a face with drops crawling through it down the glass. Eyeless. A face full of rain.

Graham had tried hard to understand the Dragon.

At times, in the breathing silence of the victims’ houses, the very spaces the Dragon had moved through tried to speak.

Sometimes Graham felt close to him. A feeling he remembered from other investigations had settled over him in recent days: the taunting sense that he and the Dragon were doing the same things at various times of the day, that there were parallels in the quotidian details of their lives. Somewhere the Dragon was eating, or showering, or sleeping at the same time he did.

Graham tried hard to know him. He tried to see him past the blinding glint of slides and vials, beneath the lines of police reports, tried to see his face through the louvers of print. He tried as hard as he knew how.

But to begin to understand the dragon, to hear the cold drips in his darkness, to watch the world through his red haze, Graham would have had to see things he could never see, and he would have had to fly through time . . .