Red Dragon hl-1 Page 24

  There were so many misconceptions about the blind. She wondered if Dolarhyde shared the popular belief that the blind are “purer in spirit” than most people, that they are somehow sanctified by their affliction. She smiled to herself. That one wasn’t true either.

  Chapter 32

  TheChicagopolice worked under a media blitz, a nightly news “countdown” to the next full moon. Eleven days were left.

  Chicagofamilies were frightened.

  At the same time, attendance rose at horror movies that should have died at the drive-ins in a week. Fascination and horror. The entrepreneur who hit the punk-rock market with “Tooth Fairy” T-shirts came out with an alternate line that said “The Red Dragon Is a One-Night Stand.” Sales were divided about equally between the two.

  Jack Crawford himself had to appear at a news conference with police officials after the funeral. He had received orders from Above to make the federal presence more visible; he did not make it more audible, as he said nothing.

  When heavily manned investigations have little to feed on, they tend to turn upon themselves, covering the same ground over and over, beating it flat. They take on the circular shape of a hurricane or a zero.

  Everywhere Graham went he found detectives, cameras, a rush of uniformed men, and the incessant crackle of radios. He needed to be still.

  Crawford, ruffled from his news conference, found Graham at nightfall in the quiet of an unused jury room on the floor above theU.S.prosecutor’s office.

  Good lights hung low over the green felt jury table where Graham spread out his papers and photographs. He had taken off his coat and tie and he was slumped in a chair staring at two photographs.

  The Leedses’ framed picture stood before him and beside it, on a clipboard propped against a carafe, was a picture of the Jacobis.

  Graham’s pictures reminded Crawford of a bullfighter’s folding shrine, ready to be set up in any hotel room. There was no photograph of Lounds. He suspected that Graham had not been thinking about the Lounds case at all. He didn’t need trouble with Graham.

  “Looks like a poolroom in here,” Crawford said.

  “Did you knock ‘em dead?” Graham was pale but sober. He had a quart of orange juice in his fist.

  “Jesus.” Crawford collapsed in a chair. “You try to think out there, it’s like trying to take a piss on the train.”

  “Any news?”

  “The commissioner was popping sweat over a question and scratched his balls on television, that’s the only notable thing I saw. Watch at six and eleven if you don’t believe it.”

  “Want some orange juice?”

  “I’d just as soon swallow barbed wire.”

  “Good. More for me.” Graham’s face was drawn. His eyes were too bright. “How about the gas?”

  “God blessLizaLake. There’re forty-one Servco Supreme franchise stations in greaterChicago. Captain Osborne’s boys swarmed those, checking sales in containers to people driving vans and trucks. Nothing yet, but they haven’t seen all shifts. Servco has 186 other stations—they’re scattered over eight states. We’ve asked for help from the local jurisdictions. It’ll take a while. If God loves me, he used a credit card. There’s a chance.”

  “Not if he can suck a siphon hose, there isn’t.”

  “I asked the commissioner not to say anything about the Tooth Fairy maybe living in this area. These people are spooked enough. If he told them that, this place would sound likeKoreatonight when the drunks come home.”

  “You still think he’s close?”

  “Don’t you? It figures, Will.” Crawford picked up the Lounds autopsy report and peered at it through his half-glasses.

  “The bruise on his head was older than the mouth injuries. Five to eight hours older, they’re not sure. Now, the mouth injuries were hours old when they got Lounds to the hospital. They were burned over too, but inside his mouth they could tell. He retained some chloroform in his… hell, someplace in his wheeze. You think he was unconscious when the Tooth Fairy bit him?”

  “No. He’d want him awake.”

  “That’s what I figure. All right, he takes him out with a lick on the head—that’s in the garage. He has to keep him quiet with chloroform until he gets him someplace where the noise won’t matter. Brings him back and gets here hours after the bite.”

  “He could have done it all in the back of the van, parked way out somewhere,” Graham said.

  Crawford massaged the sides of his nose with his fingers, giving his voice a megaphone effect. “You’re forgetting about the wheels on the chair. Bev got two kinds of carpet fuzz, wool and synthetic. Synthetic’s from a van, maybe, but when have you ever seen a wool rug in a van? How many wool rugs have you seen in someplace you can rent? Damn few. Wool rug is a house, Will. And the dirt and mold were from a dark place where the chair was stored, a dirt-floored cellar.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Now, look at this.” Crawford pulled a Rand McNally road atlas out of his briefcase. He had drawn a circle on the “United Statesmileage and driving time” map. “Freddy was gone a litfie over fifteen hours, and his injuries are spaced over that time. I’m going to make a couple of assumptions. I don’t like to do that, but here goes… What are you laughing at?”

  “I just remembered when you ran those field exercises atQuanticowhen that trainee told you he assumed something.”

  “I don’t remember that. Here’s-“

  “You made him write ‘assume’ on the blackboard. You took the chalk and started underlining and yelling in his face. ‘When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME both,’ that’s what you told him, as I recall.”

  “He needed a boot in the ass to shape up. Now, look at this. Figure he hadChicagotraffic on Tuesday afternoon, going out of town with Lounds. Allow a couple of hours to fool with Lounds at the location where he took him, and then the time driving back. He couldn’t have gone much farther than six hours’ driving time out ofChicago. Okay, this circle aroundChicagois six hours’ driving time. See, it’s wavy because some roads are faster than others.”

  “Maybe he just stayed here.”

  “Sure, but this is the farthest away he could be.”

  “So you’ve narrowed it down to Chicago, or inside a circle covering Milwaukee, Madison, Dubuque, Peoria, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Detroit, to name a few.”

  “Better than that. We know he got a Tattler very fast Monday night, probably.”

  “He could have done that inChicago.”

  “I know it, but once you get out of town the Tattlers aren’t available on Monday night in a lot of locations. Here’s a list from the Tattler circulation department—places Tattlers are air-freighted or trucked inside the circle on Monday night. See, that leavesMilwaukee,St. Louis,Cincinnati,Indianapolis, andDetroit. They go to the airports and maybe ninety newsstands that stay open all night, not counting the ones inChicago. I’m using the field offices to check them. Some newsie might remember an odd customer on Monday night.”

  “Maybe. That’s a good move, Jack.”

  Clearly Graham’s mind was elsewhere.

  If Graham were a regular agent, Crawford would have threatened him with a lifetime appointment to theAleutians. Instead he said, “My brother called this afternoon. Molly left his house, he said.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someplace safe, I guess?”

  Graham was confident Crawford knew exactly where she went.

  “Willy’s grandparents.”

  “Well, they’ll be glad to see the kid.” Crawford waited.

  No comment from Graham.

  “Everything’s okay, I hope.”

  “I’m working, Jack. Don’t worry about it. No, look, it’s just that she got jumpy over there.”

  Graham pulled a flat package tied with string from beneath a stack of funeral pictures and began to pick at the knot.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s from Byron Metcalf, the Jacobis’ lawyer. Brian Zeller sent it
on. It’s okay.”

  “Wait a minute, let me see.” Crawford turned the package in his hairy fingers until he found the stamp and signature of S. F. “Semper Fidelis” Aynesworth, head of the FBI’s explosives section, certifying that the package had been fluoroscoped.

  “Always check. Always check.”

  “I always check, Jack.”

  “DidChesterbring you this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he show you the stamp before he handed it to you?”

  “He checked it and showed me.”

  Graham cut the string. “It’s copies of all the probate business in the Jacobi estate. I asked Metcalf to send it to me—we can compare with theLeedsstuff when it comes in.”

  “We have a lawyer doing that.”

  “ I need it. I don’t know the Jacobis, Jack. They were new in town. I got toBirminghama month late, and their stuff was scattered to shit and gone. I’ve got a feel for the Leedses. I don’t for the Jacobis. I need to know them. I want to talk to people they knew inDetroit, and I want a couple of days more inBirmingham.”

  “I need you here.”

  “Listen, Lounds was a straight snuff. We made him mad at Lounds. The only connection to Lounds is one we made. There’s a little hard evidence with Lounds, and the police are handling it. Lounds was just an annoyance to him, but the Leedses and the Jacobis are what he needs. We’ve got to have the connection between them. If we ever get him, that’s how we’ll do it.”

  “So you have the Jacobi paper to use here,” Crawford said. “What are you looking for? What kind of thing?”

  “Any damn thing, Jack. Right now, a medical deduction.” Graham pulled the IRS estate-tax form from the package. “Lounds was in a wheelchair. Medical. Valerie Leeds had surgery about six weeks before she died—remember in her diary? A small cyst in her breast. Medical again. I was wondering if Mrs. Jacobi had surgery too.”

  “I don’t remember anything about surgery in the autopsy report.”

  “No, but it might have been something that didn’t show. Her medical history was split betweenDetroitandBirmingham. Something might have gotten lost there. If she had anything done, there’ll be a deduction claimed and maybe an insurance claim.”

  “Some itinerant orderly, you’re thinking? Worked both places—DetroitorBirminghamandAtlanta?”

  “If you spend time in a mental hospital you pick up the drill. You could pass as an orderly, get a job doing it when you got out,” Graham said.

  “Want some dinner?”

  “I’ll wait till later. I get dumb after I eat.”

  Leaving, Crawford looked back at Graham from the gloom of the doorway. He didn’t care for what he saw. The hanging lights deepened the hollows in Graham’s face as he studied with the victims staring at him from the photographs. The room smelled of desperation.

  Would it be better for the case to put Graham back on the street? Crawford couldn’t afford to let him burn himself out in here for nothing. But for something?

  Crawford’s excellent administrative instincts were not tempered by mercy. They told him to leave Graham alone.

  Chapter 33

  By ten P.M. Dolarhyde had worked out to near-exhaustion with the weights, had watched his films and tried to satisfy himself. Still he was restless.

  Excitement bumped his chest like a cold medallion when he thought of Reba McClane. He should not think of Reba McClane.

  Stretched out in his recliner, his torso pumped up and reddened by the workout, he watched the television news to see how the police were coming along with Freddy Lounds.

  There was Will Graham standing near the casket with the choir howling away. Graham was slender. It would be easy to break his back. Better than killing him. Break his back and twist it just to be sure. They could roll him to the next investigation.

  There was no hurry. Let Graham dread it.

  Dolarhyde felt a quiet sense of power all the time now.

  TheChicagopolice department made some noise at a news conference. Behind the racket about how hardthey were working, the essence was: no progress on Freddy. Jack Crawford was in the group behind the microphones. Dolarhyde recognized him from a Tattler picture.

  A spokesman from the Tattler , flanked by two bodyguards, said, “This savage and senseless actwill only make the Tattler ’s voice ring louder.”

  Dolarhyde snorted. Maybe so. It had certainly shut Freddy up.

  The news readers were calling him “The Dragon” now. His acts were “what the police had termed the ‘Tooth Fairy murders.’”

  Definite progress.

  Nothing but local news left. Some prognathous lout was reporting from the zoo. Clearly they’d send him anywhere to keep him out of the office.

  Dolarhyde had reached for his remote control when he saw on the screen someone he had talked with only hours ago on the telephone: Zoo Director Dr. Frank Warfield, who had been so pleased to have the film Dolarhyde offered.

  Dr. Warfield and a dentist were working on a tiger with a broken tooth. Dolarhyde wanted to see the tiger, but the reporter was in the way. Finally the newsman moved.

  Rocked back in his recliner, looking along his own powerful torso at the screen, Dolarhyde saw the great tiger stretched unconscious on a heavy work table.

  Today they were preparing the tooth. In a few days they would cap it, the oaf reported.

  Dolarhyde watched them calmly working between the jaws of the tiger’s terrible striped face.

  “May I touch your face?” said Miss Reba McClane.

  He wanted to tell Reba McClane something. He wished she had one inkling of what she had almost done. He wished she had one flash of his Glory. But she could not have that and live. She must live: he had been seen with her and she was too close to home.

  He had tried to share with Lecter, and Lecter had betrayed him. Still, he would like to share. He would like to share with her a little, in a way she could survive.

  Chapter 34

  “I know it’s political, you know it’s political, but it’s pretty much what you’re doing anyway,” Crawford told Graham. They were walking down the State Street Mall toward the federal office building in the late afternoon. “Do what you’re doing, just write out the parallels and I’ll do the rest.”

  TheChicagopolice department had asked the FBI’s Behavioral Science section for a detailed victim profile. Police officials said they would use it in planning disposition of extra patrols during the period of the full moon.

  “Covering their ass is what they’re doing,” Crawford said, waving his bag of Tater Tots. “The victims have been affluent people, they need to stack the patrols in affluent neighborhoods. They know there’ll be a squawk about that—the ward bosses have been fighting over the extra manpower ever since Freddy lit off. If they patrol the upper-middle-class neighborhoods and he hits the South Side, God help the city fathers. But if it happens, they can point at the damned feds. I can hear it now—‘They told us to do it that way. That’s what they said do.”‘

  “I don’t think he’s any more likely to hitChicagothan anywhere else,” Graham said. “There’s no reason to think so. It’s a jerkoff. Why can’t Bloom do the profile? He’s a consultant to Behavioral Science.”

  “They don’t want it from Bloom, they want it from us. It wouldn’t do them any good to blame Bloom. Besides, he’s still in the hospital. I’m instructed to do this. Somebody on the Hill has been on the phone with Justice. Above says do it. Will you just do it?”

  “I’ll do it. It’s what I’m doing anyway.”

  “That’s what I know,” Crawford said. “Just keep doing it.”

  “I’d rather go back toBirmingham.”

  “No,” Crawford said. “Stay with me on this.”

  The last of Friday burned down the west.

  Ten days to go.

  Chapter 35

  “Ready to tell me what kind of an ‘outing’ this is?” Reba McClane asked Dolarhyde on Saturday morning when they had ridden in silence for ten minutes. S
he hoped it was a picnic.

  The van stopped. She heard Dolarhyde roll down his window.

  “Dolarhyde,” he said. “Dr Warfield left my name.”

  “Yes, sir. Would you put this under your wiper when you leave the vehicle?”

  They moved forward slowly. Reba felt a gentle curve in the road. Strange and heavy odors on the wind. An elephant trumpeted.

  “The zoo,” she said. “Terrific.” She would have preferred a picnic. What the hell, this was okay. “Who’s Dr. Warfield?”

  “The zoo director.”

  “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “No. We did the zoo a favor with the film. They’re paying back.”

  “How?”

  “You get to touch the tiger.”

  “Don’t surprise me too much!”

  “Did you ever look at a tiger?”

  She was glad he could ask the question. “No. I remember a puma when I was little. That’s all they had at the zoo inRed Deer. I think we better talk about this.”

  “They’re working on the tiger’s tooth. They have to put him to sleep. If you want to, you can touch him.”

  “Will there be a crowd, people waiting?”

  “No. No audience. Warfield, me, a couple of people. TV’s coming in after we leave. Want to do it?” An odd urgency in the question.

  “Hell fuzzy yes, I do! Thank you… that’s a fine surprise.”

  The van stopped.

  “Uh, how do I know he’s sound asleep?”

  “Tickle him. If he laughs, run for it.”

  The floor of the treatment room felt like linoleum under Reba’s shoes. The room was cool with large echoes. Radiant heat was coming from the far side.

  A rhythmic shuffling of burdened feet and Dolarhyde guided her to one side until she felt the forked pressure of a corner.