The Silence of the Lambs

by Thomas Harris

  At 3:00 A.M. two unmarked vans pulled out of the damp basement garage at the Washington field office, Buzzard’s Point. One van went to the Senate Office Building, where technicians placed monitoring and recording equipment on the telephones in Senator Martin’s office and put a Title 3 wiretap on the pay phones closest to the Senator’s office. The Justice Department woke the most junior member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee to provide the obligatory notice of the tap.

  The other vehicle, an “eyeball van” with one-way glass and surveillance equipment, was parked on Virginia Avenue to cover the front of the Watergate West, Senator Martin’s Washington residence. Two of the van’s occupants went inside to install monitoring equipment on the Senator’s home telephones.

  Bell Atlantic estimated the mean trace time at seventy seconds on any ransom call placed from a domestic digital switching system.

  The Reactive Squad at Buzzard’s Point went to double shifts in the event of a ransom drop in the Washington area. Their radio procedure changed to mandatory encryption to protect any possible ransom drop from intrusion by news helicopters—that kind of irresponsibility on the part of the news business was rare, but it had happened.

  The Hostage Rescue Team went to an alert status one level short of airborne.

  Everyone hoped Catherine Baker Martin’s disappearance was a professional kidnapping for ransom; that possibility offered the best chance for her survival.

  Nobody mentioned the worst possibility of all.

  Then, shortly before dawn in Memphis, a city patrolman investigating a prowler complaint on Winchester Avenue stopped an elderly man collecting aluminum cans and junk along the shoulder of the road. In his cart the patrolman found a woman’s blouse, still buttoned in front. The blouse was slit up the back like a funeral suit. The laundry mark was Catherine Baker Martin’s.

  * * *

  Jack Crawford was driving south from his home in Arlington at 6:30 A.M. when the telephone in his car beeped for the second time in two minutes.

  “Nine twenty-two forty.”

  “Forty stand by for Alpha 4.”

  Crawford spotted a rest area, pulled in, and stopped to give his full attention to the telephone. Alpha 4 is the Director of the FBI.

  “Jack—you up on Catherine Martin?”

  “The night duty officer called me just now.”

  “Then you know about the blouse. Talk to me.”

  “Buzzard Point went to kidnap alert,” Crawford said. “I’d prefer they didn’t stand down yet. When they do stand down I’d like to keep the phone surveillance. Slit blouse or not, we don’t know for sure it’s Bill. If it’s a copycat he might call for ransom. Who’s doing taps and traces in Tennessee, us or them?”

  “Them. The state police. They’re pretty good. Phil Adler called from the White House to tell me about the President’s ‘intense interest.’ We could use a win here, Jack.”

  “That had occurred to me. Where’s the Senator?”

  “En route to Memphis. She got me at home a minute ago. You can imagine.”

  “Yes.” Crawford knew Senator Martin from budget hearings.

  “She’s coming down with all the weight she’s got.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “Neither do I,” the Director said. “I’ve told her we’re going flat-out, just as we’ve done all along. She is … she’s aware of your personal situation and she’s offered you a company Lear. Use it—come home at night if you can.”

  “Good. The Senator’s tough, Tommy. If she tries to run it we’ll butt heads.”

  “I know. Do a set-pick off me if you have to. What have we got at the best—six or seven days, Jack?”

  “I don’t know. If he panics when he finds out who she is—he might just do her and dump her.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Two miles from Quantico.”

  “Will the strip at Quantico take a Lear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Crawford punched numbers into his phone and pulled back into traffic.

  CHAPTER 17

  Sore from a troubled sleep, Clarice Starling stood in her bathrobe and bunny slippers, towel over her shoulder, waiting to get in the bathroom she and Mapp shared with the students next door. The news from Memphis on the radio froze her for half a breath.

  “Oh God,” she said. “Oh boy. ALL RIGHT IN THERE! THIS BATHROOM IS SEIZED. COME OUT WITH YOUR PANTS UP. THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” She climbed into the shower with a startled next-door neighbor. “Ooch over, Gracie, and would you pass me that soap.”

  Ear cocked to the telephone, she packed for overnight and set her forensic kit by the door. She made sure the switchboard knew she was in her room and gave up breakfast to stick by the phone. At ten minutes to class time, with no word, she hurried down to Behavioral Science with her equipment.

  “Mr. Crawford left for Memphis forty-five minutes ago,” the secretary told her sweetly. “Burroughs went, and Stafford from the lab left from National.”

  “I put a report here for him last night. Did he leave any message for me? I’m Clarice Starling.”

  “Yes, I know who you are. I have three copies of your telephone number right here, and there are several more on his desk, I believe. No, he didn’t leave a thing for you, Clarice.” The woman looked at Starling’s luggage. “Would you like me to tell him something when he calls in?”

  “Did he leave a Memphis phone number on his three-card?”

  “No, he’ll call with it. Don’t you have classes today, Clarice? You’re still in school, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  Starling’s entry, late, into the classroom was not eased by Gracie Pitman, the young woman she had displaced in the shower. Gracie Pitman sat directly behind Starling. It seemed a long way to her seat. Gracie Pitman’s tongue had time to make two full revolutions in her downy cheek before Starling could submerge into the class.

  With no breakfast she sat through two hours of “The Good-Faith Warrant Exception to the Exclusionary Rule in Search and Seizure,” before she could get to the vending machine and chug a Coke.

  She checked her box for a message at noon and there was nothing. It occurred to her then, as it had on a few other occasions in her life, that intense frustration tastes very much like the patent medicine called Fleet’s that she’d had to take as a child.

  Some days you wake up changed. This was one for Starling, she could tell. What she had seen yesterday at the Potter Funeral Home had caused in her a small tectonic shift.

  Starling had studied psychology and criminology in a good school. In her life she had seen some of the hideously offhand ways in which the world breaks things. But she hadn’t really known, and now she knew: sometimes the family of man produces, behind a human face, a mind whose pleasure is what lay on the porcelain table at Potter, West Virginia, in the room with the cabbage roses. Starling’s first apprehension of that mind was worse than anything she could see on the autopsy scales. The knowledge would lie against her skin forever, and she knew she had to form a callus or it would wear her through.

  The school routine didn’t help her. All day she had the feeling that things were going on just over the horizon. She seemed to hear a vast murmur of events, like the sound from a distant stadium. Suggestions of movement unsettled her, groups passing in the hallway, cloud shadows moving over, the sound of an airplane.

  After class Starling ran too many laps and then she swam. She swam until she thought about the floaters and then she didn’t want the water on her anymore.

  She watched the seven o’clock news with Mapp and a dozen other students in the recreation room. The abduction of Senator Martin’s daughter was not the lead item, but it was first after the Geneva arms talks.

  There was film from Memphis, starting with the sign of the Stonehinge Villas, shot across the revolving light of a patrol car. The media were blitzing the story and, with little new to report, repo
rters interviewed each other in the parking lot at Stone-hinge. Memphis and Shelby County authorities ducked their heads to unaccustomed banks of microphones. In a jostling, squealing hell of lens flare and audio feedback, they listed the things they didn’t know. Still-photographers stooped and darted, backpedaling into the TV minicams whenever investigators entered or left Catherine Baker Martin’s apartment.

  A brief, ironic cheer went up in the Academy recreation room when Crawford’s face appeared briefly in the apartment window. Starling smiled on one side of her mouth.

  She wondered if Buffalo Bill was watching. She wondered what he thought of Crawford’s face or if he even knew who Crawford was.

  Others seemed to think Bill might be watching, too.

  There was Senator Martin, on television live with Peter Jennings. She stood alone in her child’s bedroom, a Southwestern University pennant and posters favoring Wile E. Coyote and the Equal Rights Amendment on the wall behind her.

  She was a tall woman with a strong, plain face.

  “I’m speaking now to the person who is holding my daughter,” she said. She walked closer to the camera, causing an unscheduled refocus, and spoke as she never would have spoken to a terrorist.

  “You have the power to let my daughter go unharmed. Her name is Catherine. She’s very gentle and understanding. Please let my daughter go, please release her unharmed. You have control of this situation. You have the power. You are in charge. I know you can feel love and compassion. You can protect her against anything that might want to harm her. You now have a wonderful chance to show the whole world that you are capable of great kindness, that you are big enough to treat others better than the world has treated you. Her name is Catherine.”

  Senator Martin’s eyes cut away from the camera as the picture switched to a home movie of a toddler helping herself walk by hanging on to the mane of a large collie.

  The Senator’s voice went on: “The film you’re seeing now is Catherine as a little child. Release Catherine. Release her unharmed anywhere in this country and you’ll have my help and my friendship.”

  Now a series of still photographs—Catherine Martin at eight, holding the tiller of a sailboat. The boat was up on blocks and her father was painting the hull. Two recent photographs of the young woman, a full shot and a close-up of her face.

  Now back to the Senator in close-up: “I promise you in front of this entire country, you’ll have my unstinting aid whenever you need it. I’m well equipped to help you. I am a United States Senator. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. I am deeply involved in the Strategic Defense Initiative, the space weapons systems which everyone calls ‘Star Wars.’ If you have enemies, I will fight them. If anyone interferes with you, I can stop them. You can call me at any time, day or night. Catherine is my daughter’s name. Please, show us your strength,” Senator Martin said in closing, “release Catherine unharmed.”

  “Boy, is that smart,” Starling said. She was trembling like a terrier. “Jesus, that’s smart.”

  “What, the Star Wars?” Mapp said. “If the aliens are trying to control Buffalo Bill’s thoughts from another planet, Senator Martin can protect him—is that the pitch?”

  Starling nodded. “A lot of paranoid schizophrenics have that specific hallucination—alien control. If that’s the way Bill’s wired, maybe this approach could bring him out. It’s a damn good shot, though, and she stood up there and fired it, didn’t she? At the least it might buy Catherine a few more days. They may have time to work on Bill a little. Or they may not; Crawford thinks his period may be getting shorter. They can try this, they can try other things.”

  “Nothing I wouldn’t try if he had one of mine. Why did she keep saying ‘Catherine,’ why the name all the time?”

  “She’s trying to make Buffalo Bill see Catherine as a person. They’re thinking he’ll have to depersonalize her, he’ll have to see her as an object before he can tear her up. Serial murderers talk about that in prison interviews, some of them. They say it’s like working on a doll.”

  “Do you see Crawford behind Senator Martin’s statement?”

  “Maybe, or maybe Dr. Bloom—there he is,” Starling said. On the screen was an interview taped several weeks earlier with Dr. Alan Bloom of the University of Chicago on the subject of serial murder.

  Dr. Bloom refused to compare Buffalo Bill with Francis Dolarhyde or Garrett Hobbs, or any of the others in his experience. He refused to use the term “Buffalo Bill.” In fact he didn’t say much at all, but he was known to be an expert, probably the expert on the subject, and the network wanted to show his face.

  They used his final statement for the snapper at the end of the report: “There’s nothing we can threaten him with that’s more terrible than what he faces every day. What we can do is ask him to come to us. We can promise him kind treatment and relief, and we can mean it absolutely and sincerely.”

  “Couldn’t we all use some relief,” Mapp said. “Damn if I couldn’t use some relief myself. Slick obfuscation and facile bullshit, I love it. He didn’t tell them anything, but then he probably didn’t stir Bill up much either.”

  “I can stop thinking about that kid in West Virginia for a while,” Starling said, “it goes away for, say, a half an hour at a time, and then it pokes me in the throat. Glitter polish on her nails—let me not get into it.”

  Mapp, rummaging among her many enthusiasms, lightened Starling’s gloom at dinner and fascinated eavesdroppers by comparing slant-rhymes in the works of Stevie Wonder and Emily Dickinson.

  On the way back to the room, Starling snatched a message out of her box and read this: Please call Albert Roden, and a telephone number.

  “That just proves my theory,” she told Mapp as they flopped on their beds with their books.

  “What’s that?”

  “You meet two guys, right? The wrong one’ll call you every God damned time.”

  “I been knowing that.”

  The telephone rang.

  Mapp touched the end of her nose with her pencil. “If that’s Hot Bobby Lowrance, would you tell him I’m in the library?” Mapp said. “I’ll call him tomorrow, tell him.”

  It was Crawford calling from an airplane, his voice scratchy on the phone. “Starling, pack for two nights and meet me in an hour.”

  She thought he was gone, there was only a hollow humming on the telephone, then the voice came back abruptly “—won’t need the kit, just clothes.”

  “Meet you where?”

  “The Smithsonian.” He started talking to someone else before he punched off.

  “Jack Crawford,” Starling said, flipping her bag on the bed.

  Mapp appeared over the top of her Federal Code of Criminal Procedure. She watched Starling pack, an eyelid drooping over one of her great dark eyes.

  “I don’t want to put anything on your mind,” she said.

  “Yes you do,” Starling said. She knew what was coming.

  Mapp had made the Law Review at the University of Maryland while working at night. Her academic standing at the academy was number two in the class, her attitude toward the books was pure banzai.

  “You’re supposed to take the Criminal Code exam tomorrow and the PE test in two days. You make sure Supremo Crawford knows you could get recycled if he’s not careful. Soon as he says, ‘Good work, Trainee Starling,’ don’t you say, ‘The pleasure was mine.’ You get right in his old Easter Island face and say, ‘I’m counting on you to see to it yourself that I’m not recycled for missing school.’ Understand what I’m saying?”

  “I can get a makeup on the Code,” Starling said, opening a barrette with her teeth.

  “Right, and you fail it with no time to study, you think they won’t recycle you? Are you kidding me? Girl, they’ll sail you off the back steps like a dead Easter chick. Gratitude’s got a short half-life, Clarice. Make him say no recycle. You’ve got good grades—make him say it. I never would find another roommate that can iron as fast as you can at one minute to class.”
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  * * *

  Starling had her old Pinto moving up the four-lane at a steady lope, one mile an hour below the speed where the shimmy sets in. The smells of hot oil and mildew, the rattles underneath, the transmission’s whine resonated faintly with memories of her father’s pickup truck, her memories of riding beside him with her squirming brothers and sister.

  She was doing the driving now, driving at night, the white dashes passing under blip blip blip. She had time to think. Her fears breathed on her from close behind her neck; other, recent memories squirmed beside her.

  Starling was very much afraid Catherine Baker Martin’s body had been found. When Buffalo Bill found out who she was, he might have panicked. He might have killed her and dumped her body with a bug in the throat.

  Maybe Crawford was bringing the bug to be identified. Why else would he want her at the Smithsonian? But any agent could carry a bug into the Smithsonian, an FBI messenger could do it for that matter. And he told her to pack for two days.

  She could understand Crawford not explaining it to her over an unsecured radio link, but it was maddening to wonder.

  She found an all-news station on the radio and waited through the weather report. When the news came, it was no help. The story from Memphis was a rehash of the seven o’clock news. Senator Martin’s daughter was missing. Her blouse had been found slit up the back in the style of Buffalo Bill. No witnesses. The victim found in West Virginia remained unidentified.

  West Virginia. Among Clarice Starling’s memories of the Potter Funeral Home was something hard and valuable. Something durable, shining apart from the dark revelations. Something to keep. She deliberately recalled it now and found that she could squeeze it like a talisman. In the Potter Funeral Home, standing at the sink, she had found strength from a source that surprised and pleased her—the memory of her mother. Starling was a seasoned survivor on hand-me-down grace from her late father through her brothers; she was surprised and moved by this bounty she had found.

  She parked the Pinto beneath FBI headquarters at Tenth and Pennsylvania. Two television crews were set up on the sidewalk, reporters looking over-groomed in the lights. They were intoning standup reports with the J. Edgar Hoover Building in the background. Starling skirted the lights and walked the two blocks to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.