“I was right here, getting some Sweet ‘N Low when I saw him. That’s it. That’s all. Now, if you’re through prying…”
“I think he saw Hoyt Lewis,” Graham said.
“So do I,”Springfieldsaid.
“It was not Hoyt Lewis. It was not.” Parsons’ eyes were watering.
“How do you know?”Springfieldsaid. “It might have been Hoyt Lewis, and you just thought—”
“Lewis is brown from the sun. He’s got old greasy hair and those peckerwood sideburns.” Parsons’ voice had risen and he was talking so fast it was hard to understand him. “That’s how I knew. Of course it wasn’t Lewis. This fellow was paler and his hair was blond. He turned to write on his clipboard and I could see under the back of his hat. Blond. Cut off square on the back of his neck.”
Springfieldstood absolutely still and when he spoke his voice was still skeptical. “What about his face?”
“I don’t know. He may have had a mustache.”
“Like Lewis?”
“Lewis doesn’t have a mustache.”
“Oh,”Springfieldsaid. “Was he at eye level with the meter? Did he have to look up at it?”
“Eye level, I guess.”
“Would you know him if you saw him again?”
“No.”
“What age was he?”
“Not old. I don’t know.”
“Did you see the Leedses’ dog anywhere around him?”
“No.”
“Look, Mr. Parsons, I can see I was wrong,”Springfieldsaid. “You’re a real big help to us. If you don’t mind, I’m going to send our artist out here, and if you’d just let him sit right here at your kitchen table, maybe you could give him an idea of what this fellow looked like. It sure wasn’t Lewis.”
“I don’t want my name in any newspapers.
“It won’t be.”
Parsons followed them outside.
“You’ve done a hell of a fine job on this yard, Mr. Parsons,”Springfieldsaid. “It ought to win some kind of a prize.”
Parsons said nothing. His face was red and working, his eyes wet. He stood there in his baggy shorts and sandals and glared at them. As they left the yard, he grabbed his fork and began to grub furiously in the ground, hacking blindly through the flowers,scattering mulch on the grass.
* * *
Springfieldchecked in on his car radio. None of the utilities or city agencies could account for the man in the alley on the day before the murders.Springfieldreported Parsons’ description and gave instructions for the artist. “Tell him to draw the pole and the meter first and go from there. He’ll have to ease the witness along.
“Our artist doesn’t much like to make house calls,” the chief of detectives told Graham as he slid the stripline Ford through the traffic. “He likes for the secretaries to see him work, with the witness standing on one foot and then the other, looking over his shoulder. A police station is a damn poor place to question anybody that you don’t need to scare. Soon as we get the picture, we’ll door-to-door the neighborhood with it.
“I feel like we just got a whiff, Will. Just faint, but a whiff, don’t you? Look, we did it to the poor old devil and he came through. Now let’s do something with it.”
“If the man in the alley is the one we want, it’s the best news yet,” Graham said. He was sick of himself.
“Right. It means he’s not just getting off a bus and going whichever way his peter points. He’s got a plan. He stayed in town overnight. He knows where he’s going a day or two ahead. He’s got some kind of an idea. Case the place, kill the pet, then the family. What the hell kind of an idea is that?”Springfieldpaused. “That’s kind of your territory, isn’t it?”
“It is, yes. If it’s anybody’s, I suppose it’s mine.”
“I know you’ve seen this kind of thing before. You didn’t like it the other day when I asked you about Lecter, but I need to talk to you about it.”
“All right.”
“He killed nine people, didn’t he, in all?”
“Nine that we know of. Two others didn’t die.”
“What happened to them?”
“One is on a respirator at a hospital inBaltimore. The other is in a private mental hospital inDenver.”
“What made him do it, how was he crazy?”
Graham looked out the car window at the people on the sidewalk. His voice sounded detached, as though he were dictating a letter.
“He did it because he liked it. Still does. Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some hideous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfecfly when he wants to.”
“What did the psychologists call it—what was wrong with him?”
“They say he’s a sociopath, because they don’t know what else to call him. He has some of the characteristics of what they call a sociopath. He has no remorse or guilt at all. And he had the first and worst sign—sadism to animals as a child.”
Springfieldgrunted.
“But he doesn’t have any of the other marks,” Graham said. “He wasn’t a drifter, he had no history of trouble with the law. He wasn’t shallow and exploitive in small things, like most sociopaths are. He’s not insensitive. They don’t know what to call him. His electroencephalograms show some odd patterns, but they haven’t been able to tell much from them.”
“What would you call him?”Springfieldasked.
Graham hesitated.
“Just to yourself, what do you call him?”
“He’s a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don’t put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.”
“A couple of friends of mine in the chiefs’ association are fromBaltimore. I asked them how you spotted Lecter. They said they didn’t know. How did you do it? What was the first indication, the first thing you felt?”
“It was a coincidence,” Graham said. “The sixth victim was killed in his workshop. He had woodworking equipment and he kept his hunting stuff out there. He was laced to a pegboard where the tools hung, and he was really torn up, cut and stabbed, and he had arrows in him. The wounds reminded me of something. I couldn’t think what it was.”
“And you had to go on to the next ones.”
“Yes. Lecter was very hot—he did the next three in nine days. But this sixth one, he had two old scars on his thigh. The pathologist checked with the local hospital and found he had fallen out of a tree blind five years before while he was bow hunting and stuck an arrow through his leg.
“The doctor of record was a resident surgeon, but Lecter had treated him first—he was on duty in the emergency room. His name was on the admissions log. It had been a long time since the accident, but I thought Lecter might remember if anything had seemed fishy about the arrow wound, so I went to his office to see him. We were grabbing at anything then.
“He was practicing psychiatry by that time. He had a nice office. Antiques. He said he didn’t remember much about the arrow wound, that one of the victim’s hunting buddies had brought him in, and that was it.
“Something bothered me, though. I thought it was something Lecter said, or something in the office. Crawford and I hashed it over. We checked the files, and Lecter had no record. I wanted some time in his office by myself, but we couldn’t get a warrant. We had nothing to show. So I went back to see him.
“It was Sunday, he saw patients on Sunday. The building was empty except for a couple of people in his waiting room. He saw me right away. We were talking and he was making this polite effort to help me and I looked up at some very old medical books on the shelf above his head. And I knew it was him.
“When I looked at him again, maybe my face changed, I don’t know. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I still couldn’t think of the reason, though. I didn’t trust it. I had to figure it out. So I mumbled something and got out of there,
into the hall. There was a pay phone in the hall. I didn’t want to stir him up until I had some help. I was talking to the police switchboard when he came out a service door behind me in his socks. I never heard him coming. I felt his breath was all, and then… there was the rest of it.”
“How did you know, though?”
“I think it was maybe a week later in the hospital I finally figured it out. It was Wound Man— anillustration they used in a lot of the early medical books like the ones Lecter had. It shows different kinds of battle injuries, all in one figure. I had seen it in a survey course a pathologist was teaching at GWU. The sixth victim’s position and his injuries were a close match to Wound Man.”
“Wound Man, you say? That’s all you had?”
“Well, yeah. It was a coincidence that I had seen it. A piece of luck.”
“That’s some luck.”
“If you don’t believe me, what the fuck did you ask me for?”
“I didn’t hear that.”
“Good. I didn’t mean to say it. That’s the way it happened, though.”
“Okay,”Springfieldsaid. “Okay. Thank you for telling me. I need to know things like that.”
* * *
Parsons’ description of the man in the alley and the information on the cat and the dog were possible indications of the killer’s methods: it seemed likely that he scouted as a meter reader and felt compelled to hurt the victims’ pets before he came to kill the family.
The immediate problem the police faced was whether or not to publicize their theory.
With the public aware of the danger signals and watching, police might get advance warning of the killer’s next attack—but the killer probably followed the news too.
He might change his habits.
There was strong feeling in the police department that the slender leads should be kept secret except for a special bulletin to veterinarians and animal shelters throughout the Southeast asking for immediate reports on pet mutilations.
That meant not giving the public the best possible warning. It was a moral question, and the police were not comfortable with it.
They consulted Dr. Alan Bloom inChicago. Dr. Bloom said that if the killer read a warning in the newspapers, he would probably change his method of casing a house. Dr. Bloom doubted that the man could stop attacking the pets, regardless of the risk. The psychiatrist told the police that they should by no means assume they had twenty-five days to work—the period before the next full moon on August 25.
On the morning of July31,three hours after Parsons gave his description, a decision was reached in a telephone conference amongBirminghamandAtlantapolice and Crawford inWashington: they would send the private bulletin to veterinarians, canvass for three days in the neighborhood with the artist’s sketch, then release the information to the news media.
For those three days Graham and theAtlantadetectives pounded the sidewalks showing the sketch to householders in the area of theLeedshome. There was only a suggestion of a face in the sketch, but they hoped to find someone who could improve it.
Graham’s copy of the sketch grew soft around the edges from the sweat of his hands. Often it was difficult to get residents to answer the door. At night he lay in his room with powder on his heat rash, his mind circling the problem as though it were a hologram. He courted the feeling that precedes an idea. It would not come.
Meanwhile, there were four accidental injuries and one fatality inAtlantaas householders shot at relatives coming home late. Prowler calls multiplied and useless tips stacked up in the In baskets at police headquarters. Despair went around like the flu.
Crawford returned fromWashingtonat the end of the third day and dropped in on Graham as he sat peeling off his wet socks.
“Hot work?”
“Grab a sketch in the morning and see,” Graham said.
“No, it’ll all be on the news tonight. Did you walk all day?”
“I can’t drive through their yards.”
“I didn’t think anything would come of this canvass,” Crawford said.
“Well, what the hell did you expect me to do?”
“The best you can, that’s all.” Crawford rose to leave. “Busywork’s been a narcotic for me sometimes, especially after I quit the booze. For you too, I think.”
Graham was angry. Crawford was right, of course.
Graham was a natural procrastinator, and he knew it. Long ago in school he had made up for it with speed. He was not in school now.
There was something else he could do, and he had known it for days. He could wait until he was driven to it by desperation in the last days before the full moon. Or he could do it now, while it might be of some use.
There was an opinion he wanted. A very strange view he needed to share; a mindset he had to recover after his warm round years in the Keys.
The reasons elacked like roller-coaster cogs pulling up to the first long plunge, and at the top, unaware that he clutched his belly, Graham said it aloud.
“I have to see Lecter.”
Chapter 7
Dr. Frederick Chilton, chief of staff at theChesapeakeStateHospitalfor the Criminally Insane, came around his desk to shake Will Graham’s hand.
“Dr. Bloom called me yesterday, Mr. Graham—or should I call you Dr. Graham?”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“I was delighted to hear from Dr. Bloom, we’ve known each other for years. Take that chair.”
“We appreciate your help, Dr. Chilton.”
“Frankly, I sometimes feel like Lecter’s secretary rather than his keeper,” Chilton said. “The volume of his mail alone is a nuisance. I think among some researchers it’s considered chic to correspond with him—I’ve seen his letters framed in psychology departments—and for a while it seemed that every Ph.D. candidate in the field wanted to interview him. Glad to cooperate with you, of course, and Dr. Bloom.”
“I need to see Dr. Lecter in as much privacy as possible,” Graham said. “I may need to see him again or telephone him after today.”
Chilton nodded. “To begin with, Dr. Lecter will stay in his room. That is absolutely the only place where he is not put in restraints. One wall of his room is a double barrier which opens on the hall. I’ll have a chair put there, and screens if you like.
“I must ask you not to pass him any objects whatever, other than paper free of clips or staples. No ring binders, pencils, or pens. He has his own felt-tipped pens.”
“I might have to show him some material that could stimulate him,” Graham said.
“You can show him what you like as long as it’s on soft paper. Pass him documents through the sliding food tray. Don’t hand anything through the barrier and do not accept anything he might extend through the barrier. He can return papers in the food tray. I insist on that. Dr. Bloom and Mr. Crawford assured me that you would cooperate on procedure.”
“I will,” Graham said. He started to rise.
“I know you’re anxious to get on with it, Mr. Graham, but I want to tell you something first. This will interest you.
“It may seem gratuitous to warn you, of all people, about Lecter. But he’s very disarming. For a year after he was brought here, he behaved perfectly and gave the appearance of cooperating with attempts at therapy. As a result—this was under the previous administrator—security around him was slightly relaxed.
“On the afternoon of July 8, 1976, he complained of chest pain. His restraints were removed in the examining room to make it easier to give him an electrocardiogram. One of his attendants left the room to smoke, and the other turned away for a second. The nurse was very quick and strong. She managed to save one of her eyes.
“You may find this curious.” Chilton took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. “Here, he’s resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse’s head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn’t resist, by the way,
though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing? His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue.”
Chilton could read nothing in Graham’s face. He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers under his chin. His hands were dry and shiny.
“You know, when Lecter was first captured we thought he might provide us with a singular opportunity to study a pure sociopath,” Chilton said. “It’s so rare to get one alive. Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he’s trained in psychiatry… and he’s a mass murderer. He seemed cooperative, and we thought that he could be a window on this kind of aberration. We thought we’d be likeBeaumontstudying digestion through the opening inSt. Martin’s stomach.
“As it turned out, I don’t think we’re any closer to understanding him now than the day he came in. Have you ever talked with Lecter for any length of time?”
“No. I just saw him when… I saw him mainly in court. Dr. Bloom showed me his articles in the journals,” Graham said.
“He’s very familiar with you. He’s given you a lot of thought.”
“You had some sessions with him?”
“Yes. Twelve. He’s impenetrable. Too sophisticated about the tests for them to register anything. Edwards, Fabré, even Dr. Bloom himself had a crack at him. I have their notes. He was an enigma to them too. It’s impossible, of course, to tell what he’s holding back or whether he understands more than he’ll say. Oh, since his commitment he’s done some brilliant pieces for The American Journal of Psychiatry and The General Archives. But they’re always about problems he doesn’t have. I think he’s afraid that if we ‘solve’ him, nobody will be interested in him anymore and he’ll be stuck in a back ward somewhere for the rest of his life.”
Chilton paused. He had practiced using his peripheral vision to watch his subject in interviews. He believed that he could watch Graham this way undetected.
“The consensus around here is that the only person who has demonstrated any practical understanding of Hannibal Lecter is you, Mr. Graham. Can you tell me anything about him?”
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