Hannibal (6 page)

Starling did not reply.

“Agent Starling?”

“I have nothing to do with the news, Mr. Sneed.”

“The woman had the baby in her arms, you can see the problem that creates.”

“Not in her arms, in a sling across her chest and her arms and hands were beneath it, under a blanket, where she had her MAC 10.”

“Have you seen the autopsy protocol?” Sneed asked.

“No.”

“But you’ve never denied being the shooter.”

“Do you think I’d deny it because you haven’t recovered the slug?” She turned to her bureau chief. “Mr. Pearsall, this is a friendly meeting, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then why is Mr. Sneed wearing a wire? Engineering Division quit making those tiepin microphones years ago. He’s got an F-Bird in his breast pocket just recording away. Are we wearing wires to one another’s offices now?”

Pearsall’s face turned red. If Sneed was wired, it was the worst kind of treachery, but nobody wanted to be heard on tape telling Sneed to turn it off.

“We don’t need any attitude from you or accusations,” Sneed said, pale with anger. “We’re all here to help you.”

“To help me do what? Your agency called this office and got me assigned to help
you
on this raid. I gave Evelda Drumgo two chances to surrender. She was holding a MAC l0 under the baby blanket. She had already shot John Brigham. I wish she had given up. She didn’t. She shot me. I shot her. She’s dead. You might want to check your tape counter right there, Mr. Sneed.”

“You had
foreknowledge
Evelda Drumgo would be there?” Eldredge wanted to know.

“Foreknowledge? Agent Brigham told me in the van going over that Evelda Drumgo was cooking in a guarded meth lab. He assigned me to deal with her.”

“Remember, Brigham is dead,” Krendler said, “and so is Burke, damn fine agents, both of them. They’re not here to confirm or deny anything.”

It turned Starling’s stomach to hear Krendler say John Brigham’s name.

“I’m not likely to forget John Brigham is dead, Mr. Krendler, and he
was
a good agent, and a good friend of mine. The fact is he asked me to deal with Evelda.”

“Brigham gave you that assignment even though you and Evelda Drumgo had had a run-in before,” Krendler said.

“Come on, Paul,” Clint Pearsall said.

“What run-in?” Starling said. “A peaceful arrest. She had fought other officers before at arrests. She didn’t fight me when I arrested her before, and we talked a little—she was smart. We were civil to each other. I hoped I could do it again.”

“Did you make the verbal statement that you would ’deal with her’?” Sneed said.

“I acknowledged my instructions.”

Holcomb from the mayor’s office and Sneed put their heads together.

Sneed shot his cuffs. “Ms. Starling, we have information from Officer Bolton of the Washington PD that you made inflammatory statements about Ms. Drumgo in the van on the way to the confrontation. Want to comment on that?”

“On Agent Brigham’s instructions I explained to the other officers that Evelda had a history of violence, she was usually armed and she was HIV positive. I said we
would give her a chance to surrender peacefully. I asked for physical help in subduing her if it came to that. There weren’t many volunteers for the job, I can tell you.”

Clint Pearsall made an effort. “After the Crip shooters’ car crashed and one perp fled, you could see the car rocking and you could hear the baby crying inside the car?”

“Screaming,” Starling said. “I raised my hand for everybody to stop shooting and I came out of cover.”

“That’s against procedure right there,” Eldredge said.

Starling ignored him. “I approached the car in the ready position, weapon out, muzzle depressed. Marquez Burke was dying on the ground between us. Somebody ran out and got a compress on him. Evelda got out with the baby. I asked her to show me her hands, I said something like ‘Evelda, don’t do this.’”

“She shot, you shot. Did she go right down?”

Starling nodded. “Her legs collapsed and she sat down in the road, leaning over the baby. She was dead.”

“You grabbed up the baby and ran to the water. Exhibited concern,” Pearsall said.

“I don’t know what I exhibited. He had blood all over him. I didn’t know if the baby was HIV positive or not, I knew she was.”

“And you thought your bullet might have hit the baby,” Krendler said.

“No. I knew where the bullet went. Can I speak freely, Mr. Pearsall?”

When he did not meet her eyes, she went on.

“This raid was an ugly mess. It put me in a position where I had a choice of dying or shooting a woman holding a child. I chose, and what I had to do burns me. I shot a female carrying an infant. The lower
animals
don’t even do that. Mr. Sneed, you might want to check your
tape counter again, right there where I admit it. I resent the hell out of being put in that position. I resent the way I feel now.” She flashed on Brigham lying facedown in the road and she went too far. “Watching you all run from it makes me sick at my stomach.”

“Starling—” Pearsall, anguished, looked her in the face for the first time.

“I know you haven’t had a chance to write your 302 yet,” Larkin Wainwright said. “When we review—”

“Yes, sir, I have,” Starling said. “A copy’s on the way to the Office of Professional Responsibility I have a copy with me if you don’t want to wait. I have everything I did and saw in there. See, Mr. Sneed, you had it all the time.”

Starling’s vision was a little too clear, a danger sign she recognized, and she consciously lowered her voice.

“This raid went wrong for a couple of reasons. BATF’s snitch lied about the baby’s location because the snitch was desperate for the raid to go down—before his federal grand jury date in Illinois. And Evelda Drumgo knew we were coming. She came out with the money in one bag and the meth in another. Her beeper still showed the number for WFUL-TV. She got the beep five minutes before we got there. WFUL’s helicopter got there with us. Subpoena WFUL’s phone tapes and see who leaked. It’s somebody whose interests are local, gentlemen. If BATF had leaked, like they did in Waco, or DEA had leaked, they’d have done it to national media, not the local TV.”

Benny Holcomb spoke for the city. “There’s no evidence anybody in city government or the Washington police department leaked anything.”

“Subpoena and see,” Starling said.

“Do you have Drumgo’s beeper?” Pearsall asked.

“It’s under seal in the property room at Quantico.”

Assistant Director Noonan’s own beeper went off. He frowned at the number and excused himself from the room. In a moment, he summoned Pearsall to join him outside.

Wainwright, Eldredge and Holcomb looked out the window at Fort McNair, hands in their pockets. They might have been waiting in an intensive care unit. Paul Krendler caught Sneed’s eye and urged him toward Starling.

Sneed put his hand on the back of Starling’s chair and leaned over her. “If your testimony at a hearing is that, while you were on TDY assignment from the FBI, your weapon killed Evelda Drumgo, BATF is prepared to sign off on a statement that Brigham asked you to pay … special attention to Evelda in order to take her into custody peacefully. Your weapon killed her, that’s where your service has to carry the can. There will be no interagency pissing contest over rules of engagement and we won’t have to bring in any inflammatory or hostile statements you made in the van about what sort of person she was.”

Starling saw Evelda Drumgo for an instant, coming out of the doorway, coming out of the car, saw the carriage of her head and, despite the foolishness and waste of Evelda’s life, saw her decision to take her child and front her tormenters and not run from it.

Starling leaned close to the microphone on Sneed’s tie and said clearly, “I’m perfectly happy to acknowledge the sort of person she was, Mr. Sneed: She was better than you.”

Pearsall came back into the office without Noonan and closed the door. “Assistant Director Noonan has
gone back to his office. Gentlemen, I’m going to call a halt to this meeting, and I’ll get back to you individually by telephone,” Pearsall said.

Krendler’s head came up. He was suddenly alert at the scent of politics.

“We’ve got to decide some things,” Sneed began.

“No, we don’t.”

“But—”

“Bob, believe me, we don’t have to decide anything. I’ll get back to you. And, Bob?”

“Yeah?”

Pearsall grabbed the wire behind Sneed’s tie and pulled down hard, popping buttons off Sneed’s shirt and snatching tape loose from his skin. “You come to me with a wire again and I’ll put my foot in your ass.”

None of them looked at Starling as they left, except Krendler.

Moving toward the door, sliding his feet so he would not have to look where he was going, he used the extreme articulation of his long neck to turn his face to her, as a hyena would shuffle at the fringe of a herd, peering in at a candidate. Mixed hungers crossed his face; it was Krendler’s nature to both appreciate Starling’s leg and look for the hamstring.

B
EHAVIORAL
S
CIENCE
is the FBI section that deals with serial murder. Down in its basement offices, the air is cool and still. Decorators with their color wheels have tried in recent years to brighten the subterranean space. The result is no more successful than funeral home cosmetics.

The section chief’s office remains in the original brown and tan with the checked café curtains on its high windows. There, surrounded by his hellish files, Jack Crawford sat writing at his desk.

A knock, and Crawford looked up to a sight that pleased him—Clarice Starling stood in his doorway.

Crawford smiled and rose from his chair. He and Starling often talked while standing; it was one of the tacit formalities they had come to impose on their relationship. They did not need to shake hands.

“I heard you came to the hospital,” Starling said. “Sorry I missed you.”

“I was just glad they let you go so fast,” he said. “Tell me about your ear, is it okay?”

“It’s fine if you like cauliflower. They tell me it’ll go down, most of it.” Her ear was covered by her hair. She did not offer to show him.

A little silence.

“They had me taking the fall for the raid, Mr. Crawford. For Evelda Drumgo’s death, all of it. They were like hyenas and then suddenly it stopped and they slunk away. Something drove them off.”

“Maybe you have an angel, Starling.”

“Maybe I do. What did it cost you, Mr. Crawford?”

Crawford shook his head. “Close the door, please, Starling.” Crawford found a wadded Kleenex in his pocket and polished his spectacles. “I would have done it if I could. I didn’t have the juice by myself. If Senator Martin was still in office, you’d have had some cover…. They wasted John Brigham on that raid—just threw him away. It would have been a shame if they wasted you like they wasted John. It felt like I was stacking you and John across a Jeep.”

Crawford’s cheeks colored and she remembered his face in the sharp wind above John Brigham’s grave. Crawford had never talked to her about his war.

“You did
something
, Mr. Crawford.”

He nodded. “I did something. I don’t know how glad you’ll be. It’s a job.”

A job.
Job
was a good word in their private lexicon. It meant a specific and immediate task and it cleared the air. They never spoke if they could help it about the troubled central bureaucracy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crawford and Starling were like medical missionaries, with little patience for theology, each concentrating
hard on the one baby before them, knowing and not saying that God wouldn’t do a goddamned thing to help. That for fifty thousand Ibo infant lives, He would not bother to send rain.

“Indirectly, Starling, your benefactor is your recent correspondent.”

“Dr. Lecter.” She had long noted Crawford’s distaste for the spoken name.

“Yes, the very same. For all this time he’d eluded us— he was away clean—and he writes you a letter. Why?”

It had been seven years since Dr. Hannibal Lecter, known murderer of ten, escaped from custody in Memphis, taking five more lives in the process.

It was as though Lecter had dropped off the earth. The case remained open at the FBI and would remain open forever, or until he was caught. The same was true in Tennessee and other jurisdictions, but there was no task force assigned to pursue him anymore, though relatives of his victims had wept angry tears before the Tennessee state legislature and demanded action.

Whole tomes of scholarly conjecture on his mentality were available, most of it authored by psychologists who had never been exposed to the doctor in person. A few works appeared by psychiatrists he had skewered in the professional journals, who apparently felt that it was safe to come out now. Some of them said his aberrations would inevitably drive him to suicide and that it was likely he was already dead.

In cyberspace at least, interest in Dr. Lecter remained very much alive. The damp floor of the Internet sprouted Lecter theories like toadstools and sightings of the doctor rivaled those of Elvis in number. Impostors plagued the chat rooms and in the phosphorescent swamp of the
Web’s dark side, police photographs of his outrages were bootlegged to collectors of hideous arcana. They were second in popularity only to the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li.

One trace of the doctor after seven years—his letter to Clarice Starling when she was being crucified by the tabloids.

The letter bore no fingerprints, but the FBI felt reasonably sure it was genuine. Clarice Starling was certain of it.

“Why did he do it, Starling?” Crawford seemed almost angry at her. “I’ve never pretended to understand him any more than these psychiatric jackasses do. You tell me.”

“He thought what happened to me would … destroy, would
disillusion
me about the Bureau, and he enjoys seeing the destruction of faith, it’s his favorite thing. It’s like the church collapses he used to collect. The pile of rubble in Italy when the church collapsed on all the grandmothers at that special Mass and somebody stuck a Christmas tree in the top of the pile, he loved that. I amuse him, he toys with me. When I was interviewing him he liked to point out holes in my education, he thinks I’m pretty naïve.”