فصل سی و ششم

CHAPTER 36

The tape came on Saturday in a small package addressed to Will Graham, c/o FBI Headquarters, Washington. It had been mailed in Chicago on the day Lounds was killed.

The laboratory and Latent Prints found nothing useful on the cassette case or the wrapper.

A copy of the tape went to Chicago in the afternoon pouch. Special Agent Chester brought it to Graham in the jury room at midafternoon. A memo from Lloyd Bowman was attached: Voiceprints verify this is Lounds. Obviously he was repeating dictation. It’s a new tape, manufactured in the last three months and never used before. Behavioral Science is picking at the content. Dr. Bloom should hear it when he’s well enough - you decide about that.

Clearly the killer’s trying to rattle you.

He’ll do that once too often, I think.

A dry vote of confidence, much appreciated.

Graham knew he had to listen to the tape. He waited until Chester left.

He didn’t want to be closed up in the jury room with it. The empty courtroom was better - some sun came in the tall windows. The cleaning women had been in and dust still hung in the sunlight.

The tape recorder was small and gray. Graham put it on a counsel table and pushed the button.

A technician’s monotone: “Case number 426238, item 814, tagged and logged, a tape cassette. This is a rerecording.” A shift in the quality of the sound.

Graham held on to the railing of the jury box with both hands.

Freddy Lounds sounded tired and frightened.

“I have had a great privilege. I have seen . . . I have seen with wonder . . . wonder and awe . . . awe . . . the strength of the Great Red Dragon.” The original recording had been interrupted frequently as it was made. The machine caught the clack of the stop key each time. Graham saw the finger on the key. Dragon finger.

“I lied about Him. All I wrote was lies from Will Graham. He made me write them. I have . . . I have blasphemed against the Dragon. Even so . . . the Dragon is merciful. Now I want to serve Him. He . . . has helped me understand . . . His Splendor and I will praise Him. Newspapers, when you print this, always capitalize the H in ‘Him.’

“He knows you made me lie, Will Graham. Because I was forced to lie, He will be more . . . more merciful to me than to you, Will Graham.

“Reach behind you, Will Graham . . . and feel for the small knobs on the top of your pelvis. Feel your spine between them . . . that is the precise spot . . . where the Dragon will snap your spine.

Graham kept his hands on the railing. Damn if I’ll feel. Did the Dragon not know the nomenclature of the iliac spine, or did he choose not to use it?

“There’s much . . . for you to dread. From . . . from my own lips you’ll learn a little more to dread.”

A pause before the awful screaming. Worse, the blubbering lipless cry, “You goddanned astard you romised.” Graham put his head between his knees until the bright spots stopped dancing in front of his eyes. He opened his mouth and breathed deep.

An hour passed before he could listen to it again.

He took the recorder into the jury room and tried to listen there. Too close. He left the tape recorder turning and went back into the courtroom. He could hear through the open door.

“I have had a great privilege . . .”

Someone was at the courtroom door. Graham recognized the young clerk from the Chicago FBI office and motioned for him to come in.

“A letter came for you,” the clerk said. “Mr. Chester sent me with it. He told me to be sure and say the postal inspector fluoroscoped it.” The clerk pulled the letter out of his breast pocket. Heavy mauve stationery. Graham hoped it was from Molly.

“It’s stamped, see?”

“Thank you.”

“Also it’s payday.” The clerk handed him his check. On the tape, Freddy screamed.

The young man flinched.

“Sorry,” Graham said.

“I don’t see how you stand it,” the young man said.

“Go home,” Graham said.

He sat in the jury box to read his letter. He wanted some relief. The letter was from Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Dear Will,

A brief note of congratulations for the job you did on Mr. Lounds. I admired it enormously. What a cunning boy you are!

Mr. Lounds often offended me with his ignorant drivel, but he did enlighten me on one thing - your confinement in the mental hospital. My inept attorney should have brought that out in court, but never mind.

You know, Will, you worry too much. You’d be so much more comfortable if you relaxed with yourself.

We don’t invent our natures, Will; they’re issued to us along with our lungs and pancreas and everything else. Why fight it?

I want to help you, Will, and I’d like to start by asking you this: When you were so depressed after you shot Mr. Ganett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn’t the act that got you down, was it? Really, didn’t you feel so bad because killing him felt so good?

Think about it, but don’t worry about it. Why shouldn’t it feel good? It must feel good to God - He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image?

You may have noticed in the paper yesterday, God dropped a church roof on thirtyfour of His worshipers in Texas Wednesday night - just as they were groveling through a hymn. Don’t you think that felt good?

Thirtyfour. He’d let you have Hobbs.

He got 160 Filipinos in one plane crash last week - He’ll let you have measly Hobbs. He won’t begrudge you one measly murder. Two now. That’s all right.

Watch the papers. God always stays ahead.

Best,

Hannibal Lecter, M.D.

Graham knew that Lecter was dead wrong about Hobbs, but for a halfsecond he wondered if Lecter might be a little bit right in the case of Freddy Lounds. The enemy inside Graham agreed with any accusation.

He had put his hand on Freddy’s shoulder in the Tattler photograph to establish that he really had told Freddy those insulting things about the Dragon. Or had he wanted to put Freddy at risk, just a little? He wondered.

The certain knowledge that he would not knowingly miss a chance at the Dragon reprieved him.

“I’m just about worn out with you crazy sons of bitches,” Graham said aloud.

He wanted a break. He called Molly, but no one answered the telephone at Willy’s grandparents’ house. “Probably out in their damned motorhome,” he mumbled.

He went out for coffee, partly to assure himself that he was not hiding in the jury room.

In the window of a jewelry store he saw a delicate antique gold bracelet. It cost him most of his paycheck. He had it wrapped and stamped for mailing. Only when he was sure he was alone at the mail drop did he address it to Molly in Oregon. Graham did not realize, as Molly did, that he gave presents when he was angry.

He didn’t want to go back to his jury room and work, but he had to. The thought of Valerie Leeds spurred him.

I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone nght now, Valerie Leeds had said.

He wished that he had known her. He wished . . . Useless, childish thought.

Graham was tired, selfish, resentful, fatigued to a childminded state in which his standards of measurement were the first ones he learned; where the direction “north” was Highway 61 and “six feet” was forever the length of his father.

He made himself settle down to the minutely detailed victim profile he was putting together from a fan of reports and his own observations.

Affluence. That was one parallel. Both families were affluent. Odd that Valerie Leeds saved money on panty hose.

Graham wondered if she had been a poor child. He thought so; her own children were a little too well turned out.

Graham had been a poor child, following his father from the boatyards in Biloxi and Greenville to the lake boats on Erie. Always the new boy at school, always the stranger. He had a halfburied grudge against the rich.

Valerie Leeds might have been a poor child. He was tempted to watch his film of her again. He could do it in the courtroom. No. The Leedses were not his immediate problem. He knew the Leedses. He did not know the Jacobis.

His lack of intimate knowledge about the Jacobis plagued him. The house fire in Detroit had taken everything - family albums, probably diaries too.

Graham tried to know them through the objects they wanted, bought and used. That was all he had.

The Jacobi probate file was three inches thick, and a lot of it was lists of possessions -a new household outfitted since the move to Birmingham. Look at all this skit. It was all insured, listed with serial numbers as the insurance companies required. Trust a man who has been burned out to buy plenty of insurance for the next time.

The attorney, Byron Metcalf, had sent him carbons instead of Xerox copies of the insurance declarations. The carbons were fuzzy and hard to read.

Jacobi had a ski boat, Leeds had a ski boat. Jacobi had a threewheeler, Leeds had a trail bike. Graham licked his thumb and turned the page.

The fourth item on the second page was a Chinon Pacific movie projector.

Graham stopped. How had he missed it? He had looked through every crate on every pallet in the Birmingham warehouse, alert for anything that would give him an intimate view of the Jacobis.

Where was the projector? He could crosscheck this insurance declaration against the inventory Byron Metcalf had prepared as executor when he stored the Jacobis’ things. The items had been checked off by the warehouse supervisor who signed the storage contract.

It took fifteen minutes to go down the list of stored items. No projector, no camera, no film.

Graham leaned back in his chair and stared at the Jacobis smiling from the picture propped before him.

What the hell did you do with it?

Was it stolen?

Did the killer steal it?

If the killer stole it, did he fence it?

Dear God, give me a traceable fence.

Graham wasn’t tired anymore. He wanted to know if anything else was missing. He looked for an hour, comparing the warehouse storage inventory with the insurance declarations. Everything was accounted for except the small precious items. They should all be on Byron Metcalf’s own lockbox list of things he had put in the bank vault in Birmingham.

All of them were on the list. Except two.

“Crystal oddment box, 4” X 3“, sterling silver lid” appeared on the insurance declaration, but was not in the lockbox. “Sterling picture frame, 9 x 11 inches, worked with vines and flowers” wasn’t in the vault either.

Stolen? Mislaid? They were small items, easily concealed. Usually fenced silver is melted down immediately. It would be hard to trace. But movie equipment had serial numbers inside and out. It could be traced.

Was the killer the thief?

As he stared at his stained photograph of the Jacobis, Graham felt the sweet jolt of a new connection. But when he saw the answer whole it was seedy and disappointing and small.

There was a telephone in the jury room. Graham called Birmingham Homicide. He got the threetoeleven watch commander.

“In the Jacobi case I noticed you kept an inandout log at the house after it was sealed off, right?”

“Let me get somebody to look,” the watch commander said.

Graham knew they kept one. It was good procedure to record every person entering or leaving a murder scene, and Graham had been pleased to see that Birmingham did it. He waited five minutes before a clerk picked up the telephone.

“Okay, inandout, what do you want to know?”

“Is Niles Jacobi, son of the deceased - is he on it?”

“Ummhmmm, yep. July 2, seven P.M. He had permission to get personal items.”

“Did he have a suitcase, does it say?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

Byron Metcalf’s voice was husky and his breathing heavy when he answered the telephone. Graham wondered what he was doing.

“Hope I didn’t disturb you.”

“What can I do for you, Will?”

“I need a little help with Niles Jacobi.”

“What’s he done now?”

“I think he lifted a few things out of the Jacobi house after they were killed.”

“Urnmm.”

“There’s a sterling picture frame missing from your lockbox inventory. When I was in Birmingham I picked up a loose photograph of the family in Niles’s dormitory room. It used to be in a frame - I can see the impression the mat left on it.” “The little bastard. I gave permission for him to get his clothes and some books he needed,” Metcalf said.

“Niles has expensive friendships. This is mainly what I’m after, though - a movie projector and a movie camera are missing too. I want to know if he got them. Probably he did, but if he didn’t, maybe the killer got them. In that case we need to get the serial numbers out to the hock shops. We need to put ‘em on the national hot sheet. The frame’s probably melted down by now.” “He’ll think ‘frame’ when I get through with him.”

“One thing - if Niles took the projector, he might have kept the film. He couldn’t get anything for it. I want the film. I need to see it. If you come at him from the front, he’ll deny everything and flush the film if he has any.” “Okay,” Metcalf said. “His car title reverted to the estate. I’m executor, so I can search it without a warrant. My friend the judge won’t mind papering his room for me. I’ll call you.” Graham went back to work.

Affluence. Put affluence in the profile the police would use.

Graham wondered if Mrs. Leeds and Mrs. Jacobi ever did their marketing in tennis clothes. That was a fashionable thing to do in some areas. It was a dumb thing to do in some areas because it was doubly provocative - arousing class resentment and lust at the same time.

Graham imagined them pushing grocery carts, short pleated skirts brushing the brown thighs, the little balls on their sweat socks winking - passing the husky man with the barracuda eyes who was buying cold lunch meat to gnaw in his car.

How many families were there with three children and a pet, and only common locks between them and the Dragon as they slept?

When Graham pictured possible victims, he saw clever, successful people in graceful houses.

But the next person to confront the Dragon did not have children or a pet, and there was no grace in his house. The next person to confront the Dragon was Francis Dolarhyde.