Red Dragon

  “Now we’ve got our own Tooth Fairy murder right here in Chicago. That’s great. ‘Tooth Fairy in Chicago,’ boy. Before midnight we’ll have six accidental domestic shootings, guy trying to sneak in his own house drunk, wife hears him, bang. The Tooth Fairy may like Chicago, decide to stick around, have some fun.”

  “We can do like this,” Crawford said. “Butt heads, get the police commissioner and the U.S. attorney all stirred up, get all the assholes stirred up, yours and mine. Or we can settle down and try to catch the bastard. This was my operation and it went to shit, I know that. You ever have that happen right here in Chicago? I don’t want to fight you, Captain. We want to catch him and go home. What do you want?”

  Osborne moved a couple of items on his desk, a pen-holder, a picture of a fox-faced child in band uniform. He leaned back in his chair, pursed his lips and blew out some air.

  “Right now I want some coffee. You guys want some?”

  “I’d like some,” Crawford said.

  “So would I,” Graham said.

  Osborne passed around the foam cups. He pointed to some chairs.

  “The Tooth Fairy had to have a van or a panel truck to move Lounds around in that wheelchair,” Graham said.

  Osborne nodded. “The license plate Lounds saw was stolen off a TV repair truck in Oak Park. He took a commercial plate, so he was getting it for a truck or a van. He replaced the plate on the TV truck with another stolen plate so it wouldn’t be noticed so fast. Very sly, this boy. One thing we do know—he got the plate off the TV truck sometime after eight-thirty yesterday morning. The TV repair guy bought gas first thing yesterday and he used a credit card. The attendant copied the correct license number on the slip, so the plate was stolen after that.”

  “Nobody saw any kind of truck or van?” Crawford said.

  “Nothing. The guard at the Tattler saw zip. He could referee wrestling he sees so little. The fire department responded first to the Tattler. They were just looking for fire. We’re canvassing the overnight workers in the Tattler neighborhood and the neighborhoods where the TV guy worked Tuesday morning. We hope somebody saw him cop the plate.”

  “I’d like to see the chair again,” Graham said.

  “It’s in our lab. I’ll call them for you.” Osborne paused. “Lounds was a ballsy little guy, you have to give him that. Remembering the license number and spitting it out, the shape he was in. You listened to what Lounds said at the hospital?”

  Graham nodded.

  “I don’t mean to rub this in, but I want to know if we heard it the same way. What does it sound like to you?”

  Graham quoted in a monotone: “ ‘Tooth Fairy. Graham set me up. The cunt knew it. Graham set me up. Cunt put his hand on me in the picture like a fucking pet.’”

  Osborne could not tell how Graham felt about it. He asked another question.

  “He was talking about the picture of you and him in the Tattler?”

  “Had to be.”

  “Where would he get that idea?”

  “Lounds and I had a few run-ins.”

  “But you looked friendly toward Lounds in the picture. The Tooth Fairy kills the pet first, is that it?”

  “That’s it.” The stone fox was pretty fast, Graham thought.

  “Too bad you didn’t stake him out.”

  Graham said nothing.

  “Lounds was supposed to be with us by the time the Tooth Fairy saw the Tattler,” Crawford said.

  “Does what he said mean anything else to you, anything we can use?”

  Graham came back from somewhere and had to repeat Osborne’s question in his mind before he answered. “We know from what Lounds said that the Tooth Fairy saw the Tattler before he hit Lounds, right?”

  “R ight.”

  “If you start with the idea that the Tattler set him off, does it strike you that he set this up in a hell of a hurry? The thing came off the press Monday night, he’s in Chicago stealing license plates sometime Tuesday, probably Tuesday morning, and he’s on top of Lounds Tuesday afternoon. What does that say to you?”

  “That he saw it early or he didn’t have far to come,” Crawford said. “Either he saw it here in Chicago or he saw it someplace else Monday night. Bear in mind, he’d be watching for it to get the personal column.”

  “Either he was already here, or he came from driving distance,” Graham said. “He was on top of Lounds too fast with a big old wheelchair you couldn’t carry on a plane—it doesn’t even fold. And he didn’t fly here, steal a van, steal plates for it, and go around looking for an antique wheelchair to use. He had to have an old wheelchair—a new one wouldn’t work for what he did.” Graham was up, fiddling with the cord on the venetian blinds, staring at the brick wall across the air-shaft. “He already had the wheelchair or he saw it all the time.”

  Osborne started to ask a question, but Crawford’s expression cautioned him to wait.

  Graham was tying knots in the blind cord. His hands were not steady.

  “He saw it all the time . . .” Crawford prompted.

  “Um-hmm,” Graham said. “You can see how . . . the idea starts with the wheelchair. From the sight and thought of the wheelchair. That’s where the idea would come from when he’s thinking what he’ll do to those fuckers. Freddy rolling down the street on fire, it must have been quite a sight.”

  “Do you think he watched it?”

  “Maybe. He certainly saw it before he did it, when he was making up his mind what he’d do.”

  Osborne watched Crawford. Crawford was solid. Osborne knew Crawford was solid, and Crawford was going along with this.

  “If he had the chair, or he saw it all the time . . . we can check around the nursing homes, the VA,” Osborne said.

  “It was perfect to hold Freddy still,” Graham said.

  “For a long time. He was gone fifteen hours and twenty-five minutes, more or less,” Osborne said.

  “If he had just wanted to snuff Freddy, he could have done that in the garage,” Graham said. “He could have burned him in his car. He wanted to talk to Freddy, or hurt him for a while.”

  “Either he did it in the back of the van or he took him somewhere,” Crawford said. “That length of time, I’d say he took him somewhere.”

  “It had to be somewhere safe. If he bundled him up good, he wouldn’t attract much notice around a nursing home, going in and out,” Osborne said.

  “He’d have the racket, though,” Crawford said. “A certain amount of cleaning up to do. Assume he had the chair, and he had access to the van, and he had a safe place to take him to work on him. Does that sound like . . . home?”

  Osborne’s telephone rang. He growled into it.

  “What? . . . No, I don’t want to talk to the Tattler . . . Well, it better not be bullshit. Put her on. . . . Captain Osborne, yes . . . What time? Who answered the phone initially—at the switchboard? Take her off the switchboard, please. Tell me again what he said. . . . I’ll have an officer there in five minutes.”

  Osborne looked at his telephone thoughtfully after he hung up.

  “Lounds’s secretary got a call about five minutes ago,” he said. “She swears it was Lounds’s voice. He said something, something she didn’t get, ‘. . . strength of the Great Red Dragon.’ That’s what she thought he said.”

  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. Chil
ton.” 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 thirty-nine—the thirty-sevens 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: forty-one. “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 heavy-duty 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 five-hundred-foot 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 high-quality 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. Graham 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, um-hmm.”

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

  “I
t’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?”

  “Nine-forty. American 118.”

  “Okay, eight-thirty . . . behind the Smithsonian. There’s a Park-Rite. 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.”