The Silence of the Lambs, Page 26

  That fact was recorded, unremarked, in smudged ink beside the location on the map. The body of the second woman abducted was found first, floating in the Wabash River in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, just below Interstate 65.

  The first young woman reported missing was taken from Belvedere, Ohio, near Columbus, and found much later in the Blackwater River in Missouri, outside of Lone Jack. The body was weighted. No others were weighted.

  The body of the first victim was sunk in water in a remote area. The second was dumped in a river upstream from a city, where quick discovery was certain.

  Why?

  The one he started with was well hidden, the second one, not.

  Why?

  What does “desperately random” mean?

  The first, first. What did Dr. Lecter say about “first”? What did anything mean that Dr. Lecter said?

  Starling looked at the notes she had scribbled on the airplane from Memphis.

  Dr. Lecter said there was enough in the file to locate the killer. “Simplicity,” he said. What about “first,” where was first? Here—“First principles” were important. “First principles” sounded like pretentious bullshit when he said it.

  What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

  It was easier to think about Dr. Lecter’s statements when she wasn’t feeling his eyes on her skin. It was easier here in the safe heart of Quantico.

  If we begin to covet by coveting what we see every day, did Buffalo Bill surprise himself when he killed the first one? Did he do someone close around him? Is that why he hid the first body well, and the second one poorly? Did he abduct the second one far from home and dump her where she’d be found quickly because he wanted to establish early the belief that the abduction sites were random?

  When Starling thought of the victims, Kimberly Emberg came first to mind because she had seen Kimberly dead and, in a sense, had taken Kimberly’s part.

  Here was the first one. Fredrica Bimmel, twenty-two, Belvedere, Ohio. There were two photos. In her yearbook picture she looked large and plain, with good thick hair and a good complexion. In the second photo, taken at the Kansas City morgue, she looked like nothing human.

  Starling called Burroughs again. He was sounding a little hoarse by now, but he listened.

  “So what are you saying, Starling?”

  “Maybe he lives in Belvedere, Ohio, where the first victim lived. Maybe he saw her every day, and he killed her sort of spontaneously. Maybe he just meant to … give her a 7-Up and talk about the choir. So he did a good job of hiding the body and then he grabbed another one far from home. He didn’t hide that one very well, so it would be found first and the attention would be directed away from him. You know how much attention a missing-person report gets, it gets zip until the body’s found.”

  “Starling, the return’s better where the trail is fresh, people remember better, witnesses—”

  “That’s what I’m saying. He knows that.”

  “For instance, you won’t be able to sneeze today without spraying a cop in that last one’s hometown—Kimberly Emberg from Detroit. Lot of interest in Kimberly Emberg all of a sudden since little Martin disappeared. All of a sudden they’re working the hell out of it. You never heard me say that.”

  “Will you put it up for Mr. Crawford, about the first town?”

  “Sure. Hell, I’ll put it on the hotline for everybody. I’m not saying it’s bad thinking, Starling, but the town was picked over pretty good as soon as the woman—what’s her name, Bimmel, is it?—as soon as Bimmel was identified. The Columbus office worked Belvedere, and so did a lot of locals. You’ve got it all there. You’re not gonna raise much interest in Belvedere or any other theory of Dr. Lecter’s this morning.”

  “All he—”

  “Starling, we’re sending a gift to UNICEF for Bella. You want in, I’ll put your name on the card.”

  “Sure, thanks Mr. Burroughs.”

  Starling got the clothes out of the dryer. The warm laundry felt good and smelled good. She hugged the warm laundry close to her chest.

  Her mother with an armload of sheets.

  Today is the last day of Catherine’s life.

  The black-and-white crow stole from the cart. She couldn’t be outside to shoo it and in the room too.

  Today is the last day of Catherine’s life.

  Her father used an arm signal instead of the blinkers when he turned his pickup into the driveway. Playing in the yard, she thought with his big arm he showed the pickup where to turn, grandly directed it to turn.

  When Starling decided what she would do, a few tears came. She put her face in the warm laundry.

  CHAPTER 48

  Crawford came out of the funeral home and looked up and down the street for Jeff with the car. Instead he saw Clarice Starling waiting under the awning, dressed in a dark suit, looking real in the light.

  “Send me,” she said.

  Crawford had just picked out his wife’s coffin and he carried in a paper sack a pair of her shoes he had mistakenly brought. He collected himself.

  “Forgive me,” Starling said. “I wouldn’t come now if there were any other time. Send me.”

  Crawford jammed his hands in his pockets, turned his neck in his collar until it popped. His eyes were bright, maybe dangerous. “Send you where?”

  “You sent me to get a feel for Catherine Martin—let me go to the others. All we’ve got left is to find out how he hunts. How he finds them, how he picks them. I’m as good as anybody you’ve got at the cop stuff, better at some things. The victims are all women and there aren’t any women working this. I can walk in a woman’s room and know three times as much about her as a man would know, and you know that’s a fact. Send me.”

  “You ready to accept a recycle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Six months of your life, probably.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  Crawford stubbed at the grass with his toe. He looked up at her, at the prairie distance in her eyes. She had backbone, like Bella. “Who would you start with?”

  “The first one. Fredrica Bimmel, Belvedere, Ohio.”

  “Not Kimberly Emberg, the one you saw.”

  “He didn’t start with her.” Mention Lecter? No. He’d see it on the hotline.

  “Emberg would be the emotional choice, wouldn’t she, Starling? Travel’s by reimbursement. Got any money?” The banks wouldn’t open for an hour.

  “I’ve got some left on my Visa.”

  Crawford dug in his pockets. He gave her three hundred dollars cash and a personal check.

  “Go, Starling. Just to the first one. Post the hotline. Call me.”

  She raised her hand to him. She didn’t touch his face or his hand, there didn’t seem to be any place to touch, and she turned and ran for the Pinto.

  Crawford patted his pockets as she drove away. He had given her the last cent he had with him.

  “Baby needs a new pair of shoes,” he said. “My baby doesn’t need any shoes.” He was crying in the middle of the sidewalk, sheets of tears on his face, a Section Chief of the FBI, silly now.

  Jeff from the car saw his cheeks shine and backed into an alley where Crawford couldn’t see him. Jeff got out of the car. He lit a cigarette and smoked furiously. As his gift to Crawford he would dawdle until Crawford was dried off and pissed off and justified in chewing him out.

  CHAPTER 49

  On the morning of the fourth day, Mr. Gumb was ready to harvest the hide.

  He came in from shopping with the last things he needed, and it was hard to keep from running down the basement stairs. In the studio he unpacked his shopping bags, new bias seam-binding, panels of stretchy Lycra to go under the plackets, a box of kosher salt. He had forgotten nothing.

  In the workroom, he laid out his knives on a clean towel beside the long sinks. The knives were four: a swa
y-backed skinning knife, a delicate drop-point caper that perfectly followed the curve of the index finger in close places, a scalpel for the closest work, and a World War I–era bayonet. The rolled edge of the bayonet is the finest tool for fleshing a hide without tearing it.

  In addition he had a Strycker autopsy saw, which he hardly ever used and regretted buying.

  Now he greased the head of a wig stand, packed coarse salt over the grease and set the stand in a shallow drip pan. Playfully he tweaked the nose on the face of the wig stand and blew it a kiss.

  It was hard to behave in a responsible manner—he wanted to fly about the room like Danny Kaye. He laughed and blew a moth away from his face with a gentle puff of air.

  Time to start the aquarium pumps in his fresh tanks of solution. Oh, was there a nice chrysalis buried in the humus in the cage? He poked with his finger. Yes, there was.

  The pistol, now.

  The problem of killing this one had perplexed Mr. Gumb for days. Hanging her was out because he didn’t want the pectoral mottling, and besides, he couldn’t risk the knot tearing her behind the ear.

  Mr. Gumb had learned from each of his previous efforts, sometimes painfully. He was determined to avoid some of the nightmares he’d gone through before. One cardinal principle: no matter how weak from hunger or faint with fright, they always fought you when they saw the apparatus.

  He had in the past hunted young women through the blacked-out basement using his infrared goggles and light, and it was wonderful to do, watching them feel their way around, seeing them try to scrunch into corners. He liked to hunt them with the pistol. He liked to use the pistol. Always they became disoriented, lost their balance, ran into things. He could stand in absolute darkness with his goggles on, wait until they took their hands down from their faces, and shoot them right in the head. Or in the legs first, below the knee so they could still crawl.

  That was childish and a waste. They were useless afterward and he had quit doing it altogether.

  In his current project, he had offered showers upstairs to the first three, before he booted them down the staircase with a noose around their necks—no problem. But the fourth had been a disaster. He’d had to use the pistol in the bathroom and it had taken an hour to clean up. He thought about the girl, wet, goosebumps on her, and how she shivered when he cocked the pistol. He liked to cock it, snick snick, one big bang and no more racket.

  He liked his pistol, and well he should, because it was a very handsome piece, a stainless steel Colt Python with a six-inch barrel. All Python actions are tuned at the Colt custom shop, and this one was a pleasure to feel. He cocked it now and squeezed it off, catching the hammer with his thumb. He loaded the Python and put it on the workroom counter.

  Mr. Gumb wanted very much to offer this one a shampoo, because he wanted to watch it comb out the hair. He could learn much for his own grooming about how the hair lay on the head. But this one was tall and probably strong. This one was too rare to risk having to waste the whole thing with gunshot wounds.

  No, he’d get his hoisting tackle from the bathroom, offer her a bath, and when she had put herself securely in the hoisting sling he’d bring her halfway up the shaft of the oubliette and shoot her several times low in the spine. When she lost consciousness he could do the rest with chloroform.

  That’s it. He’d go upstairs now and get out of his clothes. He’d wake up Precious and watch his video with her and then go to work, naked in the warm basement, naked as the day he was born.

  He felt almost giddy going up the stairs. Quickly out of his clothes and into his robe. He plugged in his videocassette.

  “Precious, come on Precious. Busybusy day. Come on, Sweetheart.” He’d have to shut her up here in the upstairs bedroom while he got through with the noisy part in the basement—she hated the noise and got terribly upset. To keep her occupied, he’d gotten her a whole box of Chew-eez while he was out shopping.

  “Precious.” When she didn’t come, he called in the hall, “Precious!” and then in the kitchen, and in the basement, “Precious!” When he called at the door of the oubliette room, he got an answer:

  “She’s down here you son of a bitch,” Catherine Martin said.

  Mr. Gumb sickened all over in a plunge of fear for Precious. Then rage tightened him again and, fists against the sides of his head, he pressed his forehead into the doorframe and tried to get hold of himself. One sound between a retch and a groan escaped him and the little dog answered with a yip.

  He went to the workroom and got his pistol.

  The string to the sanitation bucket was broken. He still wasn’t sure how she’d done it. Last time the string was broken, he’d assumed she’d broken it in an absurd attempt to climb. They had tried to climb it before—they had done every fool thing imaginable.

  He leaned over the opening, his voice carefully controlled.

  “Precious, are you all right? Answer me.”

  Catherine pinched the dog’s plump behind. It yipped and paid her back with a nip on the arm.

  “How’s that?” Catherine said.

  It seemed very unnatural to Mr. Gumb to speak to Catherine in this way, but he overcame his distaste.

  “I’ll lower a basket. You’ll put her in it.”

  “You’ll lower a telephone or I’ll have to break her neck. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to hurt this little dog. Just give me the telephone.”

  Mr. Gumb brought the pistol up. Catherine saw the muzzle extending past the light. She crouched, holding the dog above her, weaving it between her and the gun. She heard him cock the pistol.

  “You shoot motherfucker you better kill me quick or I’ll break her fucking neck. I swear to God.”

  She put the dog under her arm, put her hand around its muzzle, raised its head. “Back off, you son of a bitch.” The little dog whined. The gun withdrew.

  Catherine brushed the hair back from her wet forehead with her free hand. “I didn’t mean to insult you,” she said. “Just lower me a phone. I want a live phone. You can go away, I don’t care about you, I never saw you. I’ll take good care of Precious.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll see she has everything. Think about her welfare, not just yourself. You shoot in here, she’ll be deaf whatever happens. All I want’s a live telephone. Get a long extension, get five or six and clip them together—they come with the connections on the ends—and lower it down here. I’d air-freight you the dog anywhere. My family has dogs. My mother loves dogs. You can run, I don’t care what you do.”

  “You won’t get any more water, you’ve had your last water.”

  “She won’t get any either, and I won’t give her any from my water bottle. I’m sorry to tell you, I think her leg’s broken.” This was a lie—the little dog, along with the baited bucket, had fallen onto Catherine and it was Catherine who suffered a scratched cheek from the dog’s scrabbling claws. She couldn’t put it down or he’d see it didn’t limp. “She’s in pain. Her leg’s all crooked and she’s trying to lick it. It just makes me sick,” Catherine lied. “I’ve got to get her to a vet.”

  Mr. Gumb’s groan of rage and anguish made the little dog cry. “You think she’s in pain,” Mr. Gumb said. “You don’t know what pain is. You hurt her and I’ll scald you.”

  When she heard him pounding up the stairs Catherine Martin sat down, shaken by gross jerks in her arms and legs. She couldn’t hold the dog, she couldn’t hold her water, she couldn’t hold anything.

  When the little dog climbed into her lap she hugged it, grateful for the warmth.

  CHAPTER 50

  Feathers rode on the thick brown water, curled feathers blown from the coops, carried on breaths of air that shivered the skin of the river.

  The houses on Fell Street, Fredrica Bimmel’s street, were termed waterfront on the weathered realtors’ signs because their backyards ended at a slough, a backwater of the Licking River in Belvedere, Ohio, a Rust Belt town of 112,000, east of Columbus.

  It was
a shabby neighborhood of big, old houses. A few of them had been bought cheap by young couples and renovated with Sears Best enamel, making the rest of the houses look worse. The Bimmel house had not been renovated.

  Clarice Starling stood for a moment in Frederica’s backyard looking at the feathers on the water, her hands deep in the pockets of her trenchcoat. There was some rotten snow in the reeds, blue beneath the blue sky on this mild winter day.

  Behind her Starling could hear Fredrica’s father hammering in the city of pigeon coops, the Orvieto of pigeon coops rising from the water’s edge and reaching almost to the house. She hadn’t seen Mr. Bimmel yet. The neighbors said he was there. Their faces were closed when they said it.

  Starling was having some trouble with herself. At that moment in the night when she knew she had to leave the Academy to hunt Buffalo Bill, a lot of extraneous noises had stopped. She felt a pure new silence in the center of her mind, and a calm there. In a different place, down the front of her, she felt in flashes that she was a truant and a fool.

  The petty annoyances of the morning hadn’t touched her—not the gymnasium stink of the airplane to Columbus, not the confusion and ineptitude at the rental-car counter. She’d snapped at the car clerk to make him move, but she hadn’t felt anything.

  Starling had paid a high price for this time and she meant to use it as she thought best. Her time could be up at any moment, if Crawford was overruled and they pulled her credentials.

  She should hurry, but to think about why, to dwell on Catherine’s plight on this final day, would be to waste the day entirely. To think of her in real time, being processed at this moment as Kimberly Emberg and Fredrica Bimmel had been processed, would jam all other thought.

  The breeze fell off, the water still as death. Near her feet a curled feather spun on the surface tension. Hang on, Catherine.

  Starling caught her lip between her teeth. If he shot her, she hoped he’d do a competent job of it.