Red Dragon

  Wendy was packing for him. She had lived out of suitcases and she did a good job.

  Neat in her jeans and plaid shirt, her brown hair gathered in a chipmunk tail on her neck, she might have been a farm girl except for her pallor and her shape. Wendy’s figure was almost a caricature of puberty.

  She looked at Lounds with eyes that had not registered surprise in years. She saw that he was trembling.

  “You’re working too hard, Roscoe.” She liked to call him Roscoe, and it pleased him for some reason. “What are you taking, the six-o’clock shuttle?” She brought him a drink and moved her sequined jump suit and wig case off the bed so he could lie down. “I can take you to the airport. I’m not going to the club ’til six.”

  “Wendy City” was her own topless bar, and she didn’t have to dance anymore. Lounds had cosigned the note.

  “You sounded like Morocco Mole when you called me,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “You know, on television Saturday morning, he’s real mysterious and he helps Secret Squirrel. We watched it when you had the flu. . . . You really pulled one off today, didn’t you? You’re really pleased with yourself.”

  “Damn straight. I took a chance today, baby, and it paid off. I’ve got a chance at something sweet.”

  “You’ve got time for a nap before you go. You’re running yourself in the ground.”

  Lounds lit a cigarette. He already had one burning in the ashtray.

  “You know what?” she said. “I bet if you drink your drink and get it off, you could go to sleep.”

  Lounds’s face, like a fist pressed against her neck, relaxed at last, became mobile as suddenly as a fist becomes a hand. His trembling stopped. He told her all about it, whispering into the buck jut of her augmented breasts; she tracing eights on the back of his neck with a finger.

  “That is some kind of smart, Roscoe,” she said. “You go to sleep now. I’ll get you up for the plane. It’ll be all right, all of it. And then we’ll have a high old time.”

  They whispered about the places they would go. He went to sleep.

  17

  Dr. Alan Bloom and Jack Crawford sat on folding chairs, the only furniture left in Crawford’s office.

  “The cupboard is bare, Doctor.”

  Dr. Bloom studied Crawford’s simian face and wondered what was coming. Behind Crawford’s grousing and his Alka-Seltzers the doctor saw an intelligence as cold as an X-ray table.

  “Where did Will go?”

  “He’ll walk around and cool off,” Crawford said. “He hates Lounds.”

  “Did you think you might lose Will after Lecter published his home address? That he might go back to his family?”

  “For a minute, I did. It shook him.”

  “Understandably,” Dr. Bloom said.

  “Then I realized—he can’t go home, and neither can Molly and Willy, never, until the Tooth Fairy is out of the way.”

  “You’ve met Molly?”

  “Yeah. She’s great, I like her. She’d be glad to see me in hell with my back broken, of course. I’m having to duck her right now.”

  “She thinks you use Will?”

  Crawford looked at Dr. Bloom sharply. “I’ve got some things I have to talk to him about. We’ll need to check with you. When do you have to be at Quantico?”

  “Not until Tuesday morning. I put it off.” Dr. Bloom was a guest lecturer at the behavioral-science section of the FBI Academy.

  “Graham likes you. He doesn’t think you run any mind games on him,” Crawford said. Bloom’s remark about using Graham stuck in his craw.

  “I don’t. I wouldn’t try,” Dr. Bloom said. “I’m as honest with him as I’d be with a patient.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No, I want to be his friend, and I am. Jack, I owe it to my field of study to observe. Remember, though, when you asked me to give you a study on him, I refused.”

  “That was Petersen, upstairs, wanted the study.”

  “You were the one who asked for it. No matter, if I ever did anything on Graham, if there were ever anything that might be of therapeutic benefit to others, I’d abstract it in a form that would be totally unrecognizable. If I ever do anything in a scholarly way, it’ll only be published posthumously.”

  “After you or after Graham?”

  Dr. Bloom didn’t answer.

  “One thing I’ve noticed—I’m curious about this: You’re never alone in a room with Graham, are you? You’re smooth about it, but you’re never one-on-one with him. Why’s that? Do you think he’s psychic, is that it?”

  “No. He’s an eideteker—he has a remarkable visual memory—but I don’t think he’s psychic. He wouldn’t let Duke test him—that doesn’t mean anything, though. He hates to be prodded and poked. So do I.”

  “But—”

  “Will wants to think of this as purely an intellectual exercise, and in the narrow definition of forensics, that’s what it is. He’s good at that, but there are other people just as good, I imagine.”

  “Not many,” Crawford said.

  “What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine—and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.”

  “Why aren’t you ever alone with him?”

  “Because I have some professional curiosity about him and he’d pick that up in a hurry. He’s fast.”

  “If he caught you peeking, he’d snatch down the shades.”

  “An unpleasant analogy, but accurate, yes. You’ve had sufficient revenge now, Jack. We can get to the point. Let’s make it short. I don’t feel very well.”

  “A psychosomatic manifestation, probably,” Crawford said.

  “Actually it’s my gall bladder. What do you want?”

  “I have a medium where I can speak to the Tooth Fairy.”

  “The Tattler,” Dr. Bloom said.

  “Right. Do you think there’s any way to push him in a self-destructive way by what we say to him?”

  “Push him toward suicide?”

  “Suicide would suit me fine.”

  “I doubt it. In certain kinds of mental illness that might be possible. Here, I doubt it. If he were self-destructive, he wouldn’t be so careful. He wouldn’t protect himself so well. If he were a classic paranoid schizophrenic, you might be able to influence him to blow up and become visible. You might even get him to hurt himself. I wouldn’t help you though.” Suicide was Bloom’s mortal enemy.

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” Crawford said. “Could we enrage him?”

  “Why do you want to know? To what purpose?”

  “Let me ask you this: Could we enrage him and focus his attention?”

  “He’s already fixed on Graham as his adversary, and you know it. Don’t fool around. You’ve decided to stick Graham’s neck out, haven’t you?”

  “I think I have to do it. It’s that or he gets his feet sticky on the twenty-fifth. Help me.”

  “I’m not sure you know what you’re asking.”

  “Advice—that’s what I’m asking.”

  “I don’t mean from me,” Dr. Bloom said. “What you’re asking from Graham. I don’t want you to misinterpret this, and normally I wouldn’t say it, but you ought to know: What do you think one of Will’s strongest drives is?”

  Crawford shook his head.

  “It’s fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.”

  “Because he got hurt?”

  “No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

  Crawford stared at his blunt hands folded on his stomach. He reddened. It was embarrassing to talk about it. “Sure. It’s what you don’t ever mention on the big boys’ side of the playground, right? Don’t worry about telling me he’s afraid. I won’t think he’s not a ‘stand-up guy.’ I’m not a total asshole, Doctor.”

&nb
sp; “I never thought you were, Jack.”

  “I wouldn’t put him out there if I couldn’t cover him. Okay, if I couldn’t cover him eighty percent. He’s not bad himself. Not the best, but he’s quick. Will you help us stir up the Tooth Fairy, Doctor? A lot of people are dead.”

  “Only if Graham knows the entire risk ahead of time and assumes it voluntarily. I have to hear him say that.”

  “I’m like you, Doctor. I never bullshit him. No more than we all bullshit each other.”

  Crawford found Graham in the small workroom near Zeller’s lab which he had commandeered and filled with photographs and personal papers belonging to the victims.

  Crawford waited until Graham put down the Law Enforcement Bulletin he was reading.

  “Let me fill you in on what’s up for the twenty-fifth.” He did not have to tell Graham that the twenty-fifth would bring the next full moon.

  “When he does it again?”

  “Yeah, if we have a problem on the twenty-fifth.”

  “Not if. When.”

  “Both times it’s been on Saturday night. Birmingham, June 28, a full moon falling on a Saturday night. It was July 26 in Atlanta, that’s one day short of a full moon, but also Saturday night. This time the full moon falls on Monday, August 25. He likes the weekend, though, so we’re ready from Friday on.”

  “Ready? We’re ready?”

  “Correct. You know how it is in the textbooks—the ideal way to investigate a homicide?”

  “I never saw it done that way,” Graham said. “It never works out like that.”

  “No. Hardly ever. It would be great to be able to do it, though: Send one guy in. Just one. Let him go over the place. He’s wired and dictating all the time. He gets the place absolutely cherry for as long as he needs. Just him . . . just you.”

  A long pause.

  “What are you telling me?”

  “Starting the night of Friday, the twenty-second, we have a Grumman Gulfstream standing by at Andrews Air Force Base. I borrowed it from Interior. The basic lab stuff will be on it. We stand by—me, you, Zeller, Jimmy Price, a photographer, and two people to do interrogations. Soon as the call comes in, we’re on our way. Anywhere in the East or South, we can be there in an hour and fifteen minutes.”

  “What about the locals? They don’t have to cooperate. They won’t wait.”

  “We’re blanketing the chiefs of police and sheriffs’ departments. Every one of them. We’re asking orders to be posted on the dispatchers’ consoles and the duty officers’ desks.”

  Graham shook his head. “Balls. They’d never hold off. They couldn’t.”

  “This is what we’re asking—it’s not so much. We’re asking that when a report comes in, the first officers at the scene go in and look. Medical personnel go in and make sure nobody’s left alive. They come back out. Road-blocks, interrogations, go on any way they like, but the scene, that’s sealed off until we get there. We drive up, you go in. You’re wired. You talk it out to us when you feel like it, don’t say anything when you don’t feel like it. Take as long as you want. Then we’ll come in.”

  “The locals won’t wait.”

  “Of course they won’t. They’ll send in some guys from Homicide. But the request will have some effect. It’ll cut down on traffic in there, and you’ll get it fresh.”

  Fresh. Graham tilted his head back against his chair and stared at the ceiling.

  “Of course,” Crawford said, “we’ve still got thirteen days before that weekend.”

  “Aw, Jack.”

  “‘Jack’ what?” Crawford said.

  “You kill me, you really do.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Yes you do. What you’ve done, you’ve decided to use me for bait because you don’t have anything else. So before you pop the question, you pump me up about how bad next time will be. Not bad psychology. To use on a fucking idiot. What did you think I’d say? You worried I don’t have the onions for it since that with Lecter?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you for wondering. We both know people it happened to. I don’t like walking around in a Kevlar vest with my butt puckered up. But hell, I’m in it now. We can’t go home as long as he’s loose.”

  “I never doubted you’d do it.”

  Graham saw that this was true. “It’s something more then, isn’t it?”

  Crawford said nothing.

  “No Molly. No way.”

  “Jesus, Will, even I wouldn’t ask you that.”

  Graham stared at him for a moment. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jack. You’ve decided to play ball with Freddy Lounds, haven’t you? You and little Freddy have cut a deal.”

  Crawford frowned at a spot on his tie. He looked up at Graham. “You know yourself it’s the best way to bait him. The Tooth Fairy’s gonna watch the Tattler. What else have we got?”

  “It has to be Lounds doing it?”

  “He’s got the corner on the Tattler.”

  “So I really bad-mouth the Tooth Fairy in the Tattler and then we give him a shot. You think it’s better than the mail drop? Don’t answer that, I know it is. Have you talked to Bloom about it?”

  “Just in passing. We’ll both get together with him. And Lounds. We’ll run the mail drop on him at the same time.”

  “What about the setup? I think we’ll have to give him a pretty good shot at it. Something open. Someplace where he can get close. I don’t think he’d snipe. He might fool me, but I can’t see him with a rifle.”

  “We’ll have stillwatches on the high places.”

  They were both thinking the same thing. Kevlar body armor would stop the Tooth Fairy’s nine-millimeter and his knife unless Graham got hit in the face. There was no way to protect him against a head shot if a hidden rifleman got the chance to fire.

  “You talk to Lounds. I don’t have to do that.”

  “He needs to interview you, Will,” Crawford said gently. “He has to take your picture.”

  Bloom had warned Crawford he’d have trouble on that point.

  18

  When the time came, Graham surprised both Crawford and Bloom. He seemed willing to meet Lounds halfway and his expression was affable beneath the cold blue eyes.

  Being inside FBI headquarters had a salutary effect on Lounds’s manners. He was polite when he remembered to be, and he was quick and quiet with his equipment.

  Graham balked only once: He flatly refused to let Lounds see Mrs. Leeds’s diary or any of the families’ private correspondence.

  When the interview began, he answered Lounds’s questions in a civil tone. Both men consulted notes taken in conference with Dr. Bloom. The questions and answers were often rephrased.

  Alan Bloom had found it difficult to scheme toward hurt. In the end, he simply laid out his theories about the Tooth Fairy. The others listened like karate students at an anatomy lecture.

  Dr. Bloom said the Tooth Fairy’s acts and his letter indicated a projective delusional scheme which compensated for intolerable feelings of inadequacy. Smashing the mirrors tied these feelings to his appearance.

  The killer’s objection to the name “Tooth Fairy” was grounded in the homosexual implications of the word “fairy.” Bloom believed he had an unconscious homosexual conflict, a terrible fear of being gay. Dr. Bloom’s opinion was reinforced by one curious observation at the Leeds house: Fold marks and covered bloodstains indicated the Tooth Fairy put a pair of shorts on Charles Leeds after he was dead. Dr. Bloom believed he did this to emphasize his lack of interest in Leeds.

  The psychiatrist talked about the strong bonding of aggressive and sexual drives that occurs in sadists at a very early age.

  The savage attacks aimed primarily at the women and performed in the presence of their families were clearly strikes at a maternal figure. Bloom, pacing, talking half to himself, called his subject “the child of a nightmare.” Crawford’s eyelids drooped at the compassion in his voice.

  In the interview with Lounds, Grah
am made statements no investigator would make and no straight newspaper would credit.

  He speculated that the Tooth Fairy was ugly, impotent with persons of the opposite sex, and he claimed falsely that the killer had sexually molested his male victims. Graham said that the Tooth Fairy doubtless was the laughingstock of his acquaintances and the product of an incestuous home.

  He emphasized that the Tooth Fairy obviously was not as intelligent as Hannibal Lecter. He promised to provide the Tattler with more observations and insights about the killer as they occurred to him. Many law-enforcement people disagreed with him, he said, but as long as he was heading the investigation, the Tattler could count on getting the straight stuff from him.

  Lounds took a lot of pictures.

  The key shot was taken in Graham’s “Washington hideaway,” an apartment he had “borrowed to use until he squashed the Fairy.” It was the only place where he could “find solitude” in the “carnival atmosphere” of the investigation.

  The photograph showed Graham in a bathrobe at a desk, studying late into the night. He was poring over a grotesque “artist’s conception” of “the Fairy.”

  Behind him a slice of the floodlit Capitol dome could be seen through the window. Most importantly, in the lower-left corner of the window, blurred but readable, was the sign of a popular motel across the street.

  The Tooth Fairy could find the apartment if he wanted to.

  At FBI headquarters, Graham was photographed in front of a mass spectrometer. It had nothing to do with the case, but Lounds thought it looked impressive.

  Graham even consented to have his picture taken with Lounds interviewing him. They did it in front of the vast gun racks in Firearms and Toolmarks. Lounds held a nine-millimeter automatic of the same type as the Tooth Fairy’s weapon. Graham pointed to the homemade silencer, fashioned from a length of television-antenna mast.

  Dr. Bloom was surprised to see Graham put a comradely hand on Lounds’s shoulder just before Crawford clicked the shutter.