Red Dragon

by Thomas Harris

  Now, watching in the parlor of his grandparents’ house, Dolarhyde was covered with a sheen of sweat. His thick tongue ran out constantly, the scar on his upper lip wet and shiny, and he moaned as he stimulated himself.

  Even at the height of his pleasure he was sorry to see that in the film’s ensuing scene he lost all his grace and elegance of motion, rooting piglike with his bottom turned carelessly to the camera. There were no dramatic pauses, no sense of pace or climax, just brutish frenzy.

  It was wonderful anyway. Watching the film was wonderful. But not as wonderful as the acts themselves.

  Two major flaws, Dolarhyde felt, were that the film did not actually show the deaths of the Leedses and that his own performance was poor toward the end. He seemed to lose all his values. That was not how the Red Dragon would do it.

  Well. He had many films to make and, with experience, he hoped he could maintain some aesthetic distance, even in the most intimate moments.

  He must bear down. This was his life’s work, a magnificent thing. It would live forever.

  He must press on soon. He must select his fellow performers. Already he had copied several films of Fourth of July family outings. The end of summer always brought a rush of business at the film-processing plant as vacation movies came in. Thanksgiving would bring another rush.

  Families were mailing their applications to him every day.

  10

  The plane from Washington to Birmingham was half-empty. Graham took a window seat with no one beside him.

  He declined the tired sandwich the stewardess offered and put his Jacobi file on the tray table. At the front he had listed the similarities between the Jacobis and the Leedses.

  Both couples were in their late thirties, both had children—two boys and a girl. Edward Jacobi had another son, by a previous marriage, who was away at college when the family was killed.

  Both parents in each case had college degrees, and both families lived in two-story houses in pleasant suburbs. Mrs. Jacobi and Mrs. Leeds were attractive women. The families had some of the same credit cards and they subscribed to some of the same popular magazines.

  There the similarities ended. Charles Leeds was a tax attorney, while Edward Jacobi was an engineer and metallurgist. The Atlanta family were Presbyterian; the Jacobis were Catholic. The Leedses were lifelong Atlanta residents, while the Jacobis had lived in Birmingham only three months, transferred there from Detroit.

  The word “random” sounded in Graham’s head like a dripping faucet. “Random selection of victims,” “no apparent motive”—newspapers used those terms, and detectives spat them out in anger and frustration in homicide squad rooms.

  “Random” wasn’t accurate, though. Graham knew that mass murderers and serial murderers do not select their victims at random.

  The man who killed the Jacobis and the Leedses saw something in them that drew him and drove him to do it. He might have known them well—Graham hoped so—or he might not have known them at all. But Graham was sure the killer saw them at some time before he killed them. He chose them because something in them spoke to him, and the women were at the core of it. What was it?

  There were some differences in the crimes.

  Edward Jacobi was shot as he came down the stairs carrying a flashlight—probably he was awakened by a noise.

  Mrs. Jacobi and her children were shot in the head, Mrs. Leeds in the abdomen. The weapon was a nine-millimeter automatic pistol in all the shootings. Traces of steel wool from a homemade silencer were found in the wounds. The cartridge cases bore no fingerprints.

  The knife had been used only on Charles Leeds. Dr. Princi believed it was thin-bladed and very keen, possibly a filleting knife.

  The methods of entry were different too; a patio door pried open at the Jacobis’, the glass cutter at the Leedses’.

  Photographs of the crime in Birmingham did not show the quantity of blood found at the Leedses’, but there were stains on the bedroom walls about two and one-half feet above the floor. So the killer had an audience in Birmingham too. The Birmingham police checked the bodies for fingerprints, including the fingernails, and found nothing. Burial for a summer month in Birmingham would destroy any prints like the one on the Leeds child.

  In both places were the same blond hairs, same spit, same semen.

  Graham propped photographs of the two smiling families against the seat back in front of him and stared at them for a long time in the hanging quiet of the airplane.

  What could have attracted the murderer specifically to them? Graham wanted very much to believe there was a common factor and that he would find it soon.

  Otherwise he would have to enter more houses and see what the Tooth Fairy had left for him.

  Graham got directions from the Birmingham field office and checked in with the police by telephone from the airport. The compact car he rented spit water from the air-conditioner vents onto his hands and arms.

  His first stop was the Geehan Realty office on Dennison Avenue.

  Geehan, tall and bald, made haste across his turquoise shag to greet Graham. His smile faded when Graham showed his identification and asked for the key to the Jacobi house.

  “Will there be some cops in uniform out there today?” he asked, his hand on the top of his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I hope to God not. I’ve got a chance to show it twice this afternoon. It’s a nice house. People see it and they forget this other. Last Thursday I had a couple from Duluth, substantial retired people hot on the Sun Belt. I had them down to the short rows—talking mortgages—I mean that man could have fronted a third, when the squad car rode up and in they came. Couple asked them questions and, boy, did they get some answers. These good officers gave ’em the whole tour—who was laying where. Then it was Good-bye, Geehan, much obliged for your trouble. I try to show ’em how safe we’ve fixed it, but they don’t listen. There they go, jake-legged through the gravel, climbing back in their Sedan de Ville.”

  “Have any single men asked to look at it?”

  “They haven’t asked me. It’s a multiple listing. I don’t think so, though. Police wouldn’t let us start painting until, I don’t know, we just got finished inside last Tuesday. Took two coats of interior latex, three in places. We’re still working outside. It’ll be a genuine show-place.”

  “How can you sell it before the estate’s probated?”

  “I can’t close until probate, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be ready. People could move in on a memorandum of understanding. I need to do something. A business associate of mine is holding the paper, and that interest just works all day and all night while you’re asleep.”

  “Who is Mr. Jacobi’s executor?”

  “Byron Metcalf, firm of Metcalf and Barnes. How long you figure on being out there?”

  “I don’t know. Until I’ve finished.”

  “You can drop that key in the mail. You don’t have to come back by.”

  Graham had the flat feeling of a cold trail as he drove out to the Jacobi house. It was barely within the city limits in an area newly annexed. He stopped beside the highway once to check his map before he found the turnoff onto an asphalt secondary road.

  More than a month had passed since they were killed. What had he been doing then? Putting a pair of diesels in a sixty-five foot Rybovich hull, signaling to Ariaga in the crane to come down another half-inch. Molly came over in the late afternoon and he and Molly and Ariaga sat under an awning in the cockpit of the half-finished boat and ate the big prawns Molly brought and drank cold Dos Equis beer. Ariaga explained the best way to clean crayfish, drawing the tail fan in sawdust on the deck, and the sunlight, broken on the water, played on the undersides of the wheeling gulls.

  Water from the air conditioner squirted on the front of Graham’s shirt and he was in Birmingham now and there were no prawns or gulls. He was driving, and pastures and wooded lots were on his right with goats and horses in them, and on his left was Stonebridge, a l
ong-established residential area with a few elegant homes and a number of rich people’s houses.

  He saw the Realtor’s sign a hundred yards before he reached it. The Jacobi house was the only one on the right side of the road. Sap from the pecan trees beside the drive had made the gravel sticky, and it rattled inside the fenders of the car. A carpenter on a ladder was installing window guards. The workman raised a hand to Graham as he walked around the house.

  A flagged patio at the side was shaded by a large oak tree. At night the tree would block out the floodlight in the side yard as well. This was where the Tooth Fairy had entered, through sliding glass doors. The doors had been replaced with new ones, the aluminum frames still bright and bearing the manufacturer’s sticker. Covering the sliding doors was a new wrought-iron security gate. The basement door was new too—flush steel and secured by deadbolts. The components of a hot tub stood in crates on the flagstones.

  Graham went inside. Bare floors and dead air. His footsteps echoed in the empty house.

  The new mirrors in the bathrooms had never reflected the Jacobis’ faces or the killer’s. On each was a fuzzy white spot where the price had been torn off. A folded dropcloth lay in a corner of the master bedroom. Graham sat on it long enough for the sunlight through the bare windows to move one board-width across the floor.

  There was nothing here. Nothing anymore.

  If he had come here immediately after the Jacobis were killed, would the Leedses still be alive? Graham wondered. He tested the weight of that burden.

  It did not lift when he was out of the house and under the sky again.

  Graham stood in the shade of a pecan tree, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, and looked down the long drive to the road that passed in front of the Jacobi house.

  How had the Tooth Fairy come to the Jacobi house? He had to drive. Where did he park? The gravel driveway was too noisy for a midnight visit, Graham thought. The Birmingham police did not agree.

  He walked down the drive to the roadside. The asphalt road was bordered with ditches as far as he could see. It might be possible to pull across the ditch and hide a vehicle in the brush on the Jacobis’ side of the road if the ground were hard and dry.

  Facing the Jacobi house across the road was the single entrance to Stonebridge. The sign said that Stonebridge had a private patrol service. A strange vehicle would be noticed there. So would a man walking late at night. Scratch parking in Stonebridge.

  Graham went back into the house and was surprised to find the telephone working. He called the Weather Bureau and learned that three inches of rain fell on the day before the Jacobis were killed. The ditches were full, then. The Tooth Fairy did not hide his vehicle beside the asphalt road.

  A horse in the pasture beside the yard kept pace with Graham as he walked along the whitewashed fence toward the rear of the property. He gave the horse a Life-Saver and left him at the corner as he turned along the back fence behind the outbuildings.

  He stopped when he saw the depression in the ground where the Jacobi children had buried their cat. Thinking about it in the Atlanta police station with Springfield, he had pictured the outbuildings as white. Actually they were dark green.

  The children had wrapped the cat in a dish towel and buried it in a shoebox with a flower between its paws.

  Graham rested his forearm on top of the fence and leaned his forehead against it.

  A pet funeral, solemn rite of childhood. Parents going back into the house, ashamed to pray. The children looking at one another, discovering new nerves in the place loss pierces. One bows her head, then they all do, the shovel taller than any of them. Afterward a discussion of whether or not the cat is in heaven with God and Jesus, and the children don’t shout for a while.

  A certainty came to Graham as he stood, sun hot on the back of his neck: As surely as the Tooth Fairy killed the cat, he had watched the children bury it. He had to see that if he possibly could.

  He did not make two trips out here, one to kill the cat and the second for the Jacobis. He came and killed the cat and waited for the children to find it.

  There was no way to determine exactly where the children found the cat. The police had located no one who spoke to the Jacobis after noon, ten hours or so before they died.

  How had the Tooth Fairy come, and where had he waited?

  Behind the back fence the brush began, running head-high for thirty yards to the trees. Graham dug his wrinkled map out of his back pocket and spread it on the fence. It showed an unbroken strip of woods a quarter-mile deep running across the back of the Jacobi property and continuing in both directions. Beyond the woods, bounding them on the south, was a section line road that paralleled the one in front of the Jacobi house.

  Graham drove from the house back to the highway, measuring the distance on his odometer. He went south on the highway and turned onto the section line road he had seen on the map. Measuring again, he drove slowly along it until the odometer showed him he was behind the Jacobi house on the other side of the woods.

  Here the pavement ended at a low-income housing project so new it did not show on his map. He pulled into the parking lot. Most of the cars were old and sagging on their springs. Two were up on blocks.

  Black children played basketball on the bare earth around a single netless goal. Graham sat on his fender to watch the game for a moment.

  He wanted to take off his jacket, but he knew the .44 Special and the flat camera on his belt would attract attention. He always felt a curious embarrassment when people looked at his pistol.

  There were eight players on the team wearing shirts. The skins had eleven, all playing at once. Refereeing was by acclamation.

  A small skin, shoved down in the rebounding, stalked home mad. He came back fortified with a cookie and dived into the pack again.

  The yelling and the thump of the ball lifted Graham’s spirits.

  One goal, one basketball. It struck him again how many things the Leedses had. The Jacobis too, according to the Birmingham police when they ruled out burglary. Boats and sporting equipment, camping equipment, cameras and guns and rods. It was another thing the families had in common.

  And with the thought of the Leedses and the Jacobis alive came the thought of how they were afterward, and Graham couldn’t watch basketball anymore. He took a deep breath and headed for the dark woods across the road.

  The underbrush, heavy at the edge of the pine woods, thinned when Graham reached the deep shade and he had easy going over the pine needles. The air was warm and still. Blue jays in the trees ahead announced his coming.

  The ground sloped gently to a dry streambed where a few cypresses grew and the tracks of raccoons and field mice were pressed into the red clay. A number of human footprints marked the streambed, some of them left by children. All were caved in and rounded, left several rains ago.

  Past the streambed the land rose again, changing to sandy loam that supported ferns beneath the pines. Graham worked his way uphill in the heat until he saw the light beneath the trees at the edge of the woods.

  Between the trunks he could see the upper story of the Jacobi house.

  Undergrowth again, head-high from the edge of the woods to the Jacobis’ back fence. Graham worked his way through it and stood at the fence looking into the yard.

  The Tooth Fairy could have parked at the housing development and come through the woods to the brush behind the house. He could have lured the cat into the brush and choked it, the body limp in one hand as he crawled on his knees and other hand to the fence. Graham could see the cat in the air, never twisting to land on its feet, but hitting on its back with a thump in the yard.

  The Tooth Fairy did that in daylight—the children would not have found or buried the cat at night.

  And he waited to see them find it. Did he wait for the rest of the day in the heat of the underbrush? At the fence he would be visible through the rails. In order to see the yard from farther back in the brush, he would have to stand and face the wind
ows of the house with the sun beating on him. Clearly he would go back to the trees. So did Graham.

  The Birmingham police were not stupid. He could see where they had pushed through the brush, searching the area as a matter of course. But that was before the cat was found. They were looking for clues, dropped objects, tracks—not for a vantage point.

  He went a few yards into the forest behind the Jacobi house and worked back and forth in the dappled shade. First he took the high ground that afforded a partial view of the yard and then worked his way down the tree line.

  He had searched for more than an hour when a wink of light from the ground caught his eye. He lost it, found it again. It was the ring-pull tab from a soft-drink can half-buried in the leaves beneath an elm tree, one of the few elms among the pines.

  He spotted it from eight feet away and went no closer for five minutes while he scanned the ground around the tree. He squatted and brushed the leaves away ahead of him as he approached the tree, duck-walking in the path he made to avoid ruining any impressions. Working slowly, he cleared the leaves all around the trunk. No footprints had pressed through the mat of last year’s leaves.

  Near the aluminum tab he found a dried apple core eaten thin by ants. Birds had pecked out the seeds. He studied the ground for ten more minutes. Finally he sat on the ground, stretched out his aching legs, and leaned back against the tree.

  A cone of gnats swarmed in a column of sunlight. A caterpillar rippled along the underside of a leaf.

  There was a wedge of red creek mud from the instep of a boot on the limb above his head.

  Graham hung his coat on a branch and began to climb carefully on the opposite side of the tree, peering around the trunk at the limbs above the wedge of mud. At thirty feet he looked around the trunk, and there was the Jacobi house 175 yards away. It looked different from this height, the roof color dominant. He could see the backyard and the ground behind the outbuildings very well. A decent pair of field glasses would pick up the expression on a face easily at this distance.