Red Dragon Read online

  Crawford spotted Beverly Katz through the window of an examining room as he wove his way between the boxes. She had a pair of child’s coveralls suspended from a hanger over a table covered with white paper. Working under bright lights in the draft-free room, she brushed the coveralls with a metal spatula, carefully working with the wale and across it, with the nap and against it. A sprinkle of dirt and sand fell to the paper. With it, falling through the still air more slowly than sand but faster than lint, came a tightly coiled hair. She cocked her head and looked at it with her bright robin’s eye.

  Crawford could see her lips moving. He knew what she was saying.

  “Gotcha.”

  That’s what she always said.

  Crawford pecked on the glass and she came out fast, stripping off her white gloves.

  “It hasn’t been printed yet, right?”

  “No.”

  “I’m set up in the next examining room.” She put on a fresh pair of gloves while Crawford opened the document case.

  The note, in two pieces, was contained gently between two sheets of plastic film. Beverly Katz saw the tooth impressions and glanced up at Crawford, not wasting time with the question.

  He nodded: The impressions matched the clear overlay of the killer’s bite he had carried with him to Chesapeake.

  Crawford watched through the window as she lifted the note on a slender dowel and hung it over white paper. She looked it over with a powerful glass, then fanned it gently. She tapped the dowel with the edge of a spatula and went over the paper beneath it with the magnifying glass.

  Crawford looked at his watch.

  Katz flipped the note over another dowel to get the reverse side up. She removed one tiny object from its surface with tweezers almost as fine as a hair.

  She photographed the torn ends of the note under high magnification and returned it to its case. She put a clean pair of white gloves in the case with it. The white gloves—the signal not to touch—would always be beside the evidence until it was checked for fingerprints.

  “That’s it,” she said, handing the case back to Crawford. “One hair, maybe a thirty-second of an inch. A couple of blue grains. I’ll work it up. What else have you got?”

  Crawford gave her three marked envelopes. “Hair from Lecter’s comb. Whiskers from the electric razor they let him use. This is hair from the cleaning man. Gotta go.”

  “See you later,” Katz said. “Love your hair.”

  Jimmy Price in Latent Fingerprints winced at the sight of the porous toilet paper. He squinted fiercely over the shoulder of his technician operating the helium-cadmium laser as they tried to find a fingerprint and make it fluoresce. Glowing smudges appeared on the paper, perspiration stains, nothing.

  Crawford started to ask him a question, thought better of it, waited with the blue light reflecting off his glasses.

  “We know three guys handled this without gloves, right?” Price said.

  “Yeah, the cleanup man, Lecter, and Chilton.”

  “The fellow scrubbing sinks probably had washed the oil off his fingers. But the others—this stuff is terrible.” Price held the paper to the light, forceps steady in his mottled old hand. “I could fume it, Jack, but I couldn’t guarantee the iodine stains would fade out in the time you’ve got.”

  “Ninhydrin? Boost it with heat?” Ordinarily, Crawford would not have ventured a technical suggestion to Price, but he was floundering for anything. He expected a huffy reply, but the old man sounded rueful and sad.

  “No. We couldn’t wash it after. I can’t get you a print off this, Jack. There isn’t one.”

  “Fuck,” Crawford said.

  The old man turned away. Crawford put his hand on Price’s bony shoulder. “Hell, Jimmy. If there was one, you’d have found it.”

  Price didn’t answer. He was unpacking a pair of hands that had arrived in another matter. Dry ice smoked in his wastebasket. Crawford dropped the white gloves into the smoke.

  Disappointment growling in his stomach, Crawford hurried on to Documents where Lloyd Bowman was waiting. Bowman had been called out of court and the abrupt shear in his concentration left him blinking like a man just wakened.

  “I congratulate you on your hairstyle. A brave departure,” Bowman said, his hands quick and careful as he transferred the note to his work surface. “How long do I have?”

  “Twenty minutes max.”

  The two pieces of the note seemed to glow under Bowman’s lights. His blotter showed dark green through a jagged oblong hole in the upper piece.

  “The main thing, the first thing, is how Lecter was to reply,” Crawford said when Bowman had finished reading.

  “Instructions for answering were probably in the part torn out.” Bowman worked steadily with his lights and filters and copy camera as he talked. “Here in the top piece he says ‘I hope we can correspond . . .’ and then the hole begins. Lecter scratched over that with a felt-tip pen and then folded it and pinched most of it out.”

  “He doesn’t have anything to cut with.”

  Bowman photographed the tooth impressions and the back of the note under extremely oblique light, his shadow leaping from wall to wall as he moved the light through 360 degrees around the paper and his hands made phantom folding motions in the air.

  “Now we can mash just a little.” Bowman put the note between two panes of glass to flatten the jagged edges of the hole. The tatters were smeared with vermilion ink. He was chanting under his breath. On the third repetition Crawford made out what he was saying. “You’re so sly, but so am I.”

  Bowman switched filters on his small television camera and focused it on the note. He darkened the room until there was only the dull red glow of a lamp and the blue-green of his monitor screen.

  The words “I hope we can correspond” and the jagged hole appeared enlarged on the screen. The ink smear was gone, and on the tattered edges appeared fragments of writing.

  “Aniline dyes in colored inks are transparent to infrared,” Bowman said. “These could be the tips of T’s here and here. On the end is the tail of what could be an M or N, or possibly an R.” Bowman took a photograph and turned the lights on. “Jack, there are just two common ways of carrying on a communication that’s one-way blind—the phone and publication. Could Lecter take a fast phone call?”

  “He can take calls, but it’s slow and they have to come in through the hospital switchboard.”

  “Publication is the only safe way, then.”

  “We know this sweetheart reads the Tattler. The stuff about Graham and Lecter was in the Tattler. I don’t know of any other paper that carried it.”

  “Three T’s and an R in Tattler. Personal column, you think? It’s a place to look.”

  Crawford checked with the FBI library, then telephoned instructions to the Chicago field office.

  Bowman handed him the case as he finished.

  “The Tattler comes out this evening,” Crawford said. “It’s printed in Chicago on Mondays and Thursdays. We’ll get proofs of the classified pages.”

  “I’ll have some more stuff—minor, I think,” Bowman said.

  “Anything useful, fire it straight to Chicago. Fill me in when I get back from the asylum,” Crawford said on his way out the door.

  14

  The turnstile at Washington’s Metro Central spit Graham’s fare card back to him and he came out into the hot afternoon carrying his flight bag.

  The J. Edgar Hoover Building looked like a great concrete cage above the heat shimmer on Tenth Street. The FBI’s move to the new headquarters had been under way when Graham left Washington. He had never worked there.

  Crawford met him at the escort desk off the underground driveway to augment Graham’s hastily issued credentials with his own. Graham looked tired and he was impatient with the signing-in. Crawford wondered how he felt, knowing that the killer was thinking about him.

  Graham was issued a magnetically encoded tag like the one on Crawford’s vest. He plugged it into the gate
and passed into the long white corridors. Crawford carried his flight bag.

  “I forgot to tell Sarah to send a car for you.”

  “Probably quicker this way. Did you get the note back to Lecter all right?”

  “Yeah,” Crawford said. “I just got back. We poured water on the hall floor. Faked a broken pipe and electrical short. We had Simmons—he’s the assistant SAC Baltimore now—we had him mopping when Lecter was brought back to his cell. Simmons thinks he bought it.”

  “I kept wondering on the plane if Lecter wrote it himself.”

  “That bothered me too until I looked at it. Bite mark in the paper matches the ones on the women. Also it’s ballpoint, which Lecter doesn’t have. The person who wrote it had read the Tattler, and Lecter hasn’t had a Tattler. Rankin and Willingham tossed the cell. Beautiful job, but they didn’t find diddly. They took Polaroids first to get everything back just right. Then the cleaning man went in and did what he always does.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “As far as physical evidence toward an ID, the note is pretty much dreck,” Crawford said. “Some way we’ve got to make the contact work for us, but damn if I know how yet. We’ll get the rest of the lab results in a few minutes.”

  “You’ve got the mail and phone covered at the hospital?”

  “Standing trace-and-tape order for any time Lecter’s on the phone. He made a call Saturday afternoon. He told Chilton he was calling his lawyer. It’s a damn WATS line, and I can’t be sure.”

  “What did his lawyer say?”

  “Nothing. We got a leased line to the hospital switchboard for Lecter’s convenience in the future, so that won’t get by us again. We’ll fiddle with his mail both ways, starting next delivery. No problem with warrants, thank God.”

  Crawford bellied up to a door and stuck the tag on his vest into the lock slot. “My new office. Come on in. Decorator had some paint left over from a battleship he was doing. Here’s the note. This print is exactly the size.”

  Graham read it twice. Seeing the spidery lines spell his name started a high tone ringing in his head.

  “The library confirms the Tattler is the only paper that carried a story about Lecter and you,” Crawford said, fixing himself an Alka-Seltzer. “Want one of these? Good for you. It was published Monday night a week ago. It was on the stands Tuesday nationwide—some areas not till Wednesday—Alaska and Maine and places. The Tooth Fairy got one—couldn’t have done it before Tuesday. He reads it, writes to Lecter. Rankin and Willingham are still sifting the hospital trash for the envelope. Bad job. They don’t separate the papers from the diapers at Chesapeake.

  “All right, Lecter gets the note from the Tooth Fairy no sooner than Wednesday. He tears out the part about how to reply and scratches over and pokes out one earlier reference—I don’t know why he didn’t tear that out too.”

  “It was in the middle of a paragraph full of compliments,” Graham said. “He couldn’t stand to ruin them. That’s why he didn’t throw the whole thing away.” He rubbed his temples with his knuckles.

  “Bowman thinks Lecter will use the Tattler to answer the Tooth Fairy. He says that’s probably the setup. You think he’d answer this thing?”

  “Sure. He’s a great correspondent. Pen pals all over.”

  “If they’re using the Tattler, Lecter would barely have time to get his answer in the issue they’ll print tonight, even if he sent it special delivery to the paper the same day he got the Tooth Fairy’s note. Chester from the Chicago office is down at the Tattler checking the ads. The printers are putting the paper together right now.”

  “Please God don’t stir the Tattler up,” Graham said.

  “The shop foreman thinks Chester’s a Realtor trying to get a jump on the ads. He’s selling him the proof sheets under the table, one by one as they come off. We’re getting everything, all the classifieds, just to blow some smoke. All right, say we find out how Lecter was to answer and we can duplicate the method. Then we can fake a message to the Tooth Fairy—but what do we say? How do we use it?”

  “The obvious thing is to try to get him to come to a mail drop,” Graham said. “Bait him with something he’d like to see. ‘Important evidence’ that Lecter knows about from talking to me. Some mistake he made that we’re waiting for him to repeat.”

  “He’d be an idiot to go for it.”

  “I know. Want to hear what the best bait would be?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Lecter would be the best bait,” Graham said.

  “Set up how?”

  “It would be hell to do, I know that. We’d take Lecter into federal custody—Chilton would never sit still for this at Chesapeake—and we stash him in maximum security at a VA psychiatric hospital. We fake an escape.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “We send the Tooth Fairy a message in next week’s Tattler, after the big ‘escape.’ It would be Lecter asking him for a rendezvous.”

  “Why in God’s name would anybody want to meet Lecter? I mean, even the Tooth Fairy?”

  “To kill him, Jack.” Graham got up. There was no window to look out of as he talked. He stood in front of the “Ten Most Wanted,” Crawford’s only wall decoration. “See, the Tooth Fairy could absorb him that way, engulf him, become more than he is.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “I’m not sure. Who’s sure? What he said in the note was ‘I have some things I’d love to show you. Someday, perhaps, if circumstances permit.’ Maybe it was a serious invitation. I don’t think he was just being polite.”

  “Wonder what he’s got to show? The victims were intact. Nothing missing but a little skin and hair, and that was probably . . . How did Bloom put it?”

  “Ingested,” Graham said. “God knows what he’s got. Tremont, remember Tremont’s costumes in Spokane? While he was strapped to a stretcher he was pointing with his chin, still trying to show them to the Spokane PD. I’m not sure Lecter would draw the Tooth Fairy, Jack. I say it’s the best shot.”

  “We’d have a goddamned stampede if people thought Lecter was out. Papers all over us screaming. Best shot, maybe, but we’ll save it for last.”

  “He probably wouldn’t come near a mail drop, but he might be curious enough to look at a mail drop to see if Lecter had sold him. If he could do it from a distance. We could pick a drop that could be watched from only a few places a long way off and stake out the observation points.” It sounded weak to Graham even as he said it.

  “Secret Service has a setup they’ve never used. They’d let us have it. But if we don’t put an ad in today, we’ll have to wait until Monday before the next issue comes out. Presses roll at five our time. That gives Chicago another hour and fifteen minutes to come up with Lecter’s ad, if there is one.”

  “What about Lecter’s ad order, the letter he’d have sent the Tattler ordering the ad—could we get to that quicker?”

  “Chicago put out some general feelers to the shop foreman,” Crawford said. “The mail stays in the classified advertising manager’s office. They sell the names and return addresses to mailing lists—outfits that sell products for lonely people, love charms, rooster pills, squack dealers, ‘meet beautiful Asian girls,’ personality courses, that sort of stuff.

  “We might appeal to the ad manager’s citizenship and all and get a look, request him to be quiet, but I don’t want to chance it and risk the Tattler slobbering all over us. It would take a warrant to go in there and Bogart the mail. I’m thinking about it.”

  “If Chicago turns up nothing, we could put an ad in anyway. If we’re wrong about the Tattler, we wouldn’t lose anything,” Graham said.

  “And if we’re right that the Tattler is the medium and we make up a reply based on what we have in this note and screw it up—if it doesn’t look right to him—we’re down the tubes. I didn’t ask you about Birmingham. Anything?”

  “Birmingham’s shut down and over with. The Jacobi house has been painted and redecorated and it’s
on the market. Their stuff is in storage waiting for probate. I went through the crates. The people I talked to didn’t know the Jacobis very well. The one thing they always mentioned was how affectionate the Jacobis were to each other. Always patting. Nothing left of them now but five pallet loads of stuff in a warehouse. I wish I had—”

  “Quit wishing, you’re on it now.”

  “What about the mark on the tree?”

  “‘You hit it on the head’? Means nothing to me,” Crawford said. “The Red Dragon either. Beverly knows Mah-Jongg. She’s sharp, and she can’t see it. We know from his hair he’s not Chinese.”

  “He cut the limb with a bolt cutter. I don’t see—”

  Crawford’s telephone rang. He spoke into it briefly.

  “Lab’s ready on the note, Will. Let’s go up to Zeller’s office. It’s bigger and not so gray.”

  Lloyd Bowman, dry as a document in spite of the heat, caught up with them in the corridor. He was flapping damp photographs in each hand and held a sheaf of Datafax sheets under his arm. “Jack, I have to be in court at four-fifteen,” he said as he flapped ahead. “It’s that paper hanger Nilton Eskew and his sweetheart, Nan. She could draw a Treasury note freehand. They’ve been driving me crazy for two years making their own traveler’s checks on a color Xerox. Won’t leave home without them. Will I make it in time, or should I call the prosecutor?”

  “You’ll make it,” Crawford said. “Here we are.”

  Beverly Katz smiled at Graham from the couch in Zeller’s office, making up for the scowl of Price beside her.

  Scientific Analysis Section Chief Brian Zeller was young for his job, but already his hair was thinning and he wore bifocals. On the shelf behind Zeller’s desk Graham saw H. J. Walls’s forensic science text, Tedeschi’s great Forensic Medicine in three volumes, and an antique edition of Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland.

  “Will, we met once at GWU I think,” he said. “Do you know everybody? . . . Fine.”