“One other thing: an investigation like this is a zoo. It’s spread out over a lot of jurisdictions, and a few are run by losers. We have to get along with them so they won’t hold out on us. We’re going to Potter, West Virginia. I don’t know about these people we’re going to. They may be fine or they may think we’re the revenuers.”
The pilot lifted an earphone away from his head and spoke over his shoulder. “Final approach, Jack. You staying back there?”
“Yeah,” Crawford said. “School’s out, Starling.”
CHAPTER 12
Now here is the Potter Funeral Home, the largest white frame house on Potter Street in Potter, West Virginia, serving as the morgue for Rankin County. The coroner is a family physician named Dr. Akin. If he rules that a death is questionable, the body is sent on to Claxton Regional Medical Center in the neighboring county, where they have a trained pathologist.
Clarice Starling, riding into Potter from the airstrip in the back of a sheriff’s department cruiser, had to lean up close to the prisoner screen to hear the deputy at the wheel as he explained these things to Jack Crawford.
A service was about to get under way at the mortuary. The mourners in their country Sunday best filed up the sidewalk between leggy boxwoods and bunched on the steps, waiting to get in. The freshly painted house and the steps had, each in its own direction, settled slightly out of plumb.
In the private parking lot behind the house, where the hearses waited, two young deputies and one old one stood with two state troopers under a bare elm. It was not cold enough for their breath to steam.
Starling looked at these men as the cruiser pulled into the lot, and at once she knew about them. She knew they came from houses that had chifforobes instead of closets and she knew pretty much what was in the chifforobes. She knew that these men had relatives who hung their clothes in suitbags on the walls of their trailers. She knew that the older deputy had grown up with a pump on the porch and had waded to the road in the muddy spring to catch the school bus with his shoes hanging around his neck by the laces, as her father had done. She knew they had carried their lunches to school in paper sacks with grease spots on them from being used over and over and that after lunch they folded the sacks and slipped them in the back pockets of their jeans.
She wondered how much Crawford knew about them.
There were no handles on the inside of the rear doors in the cruiser, as Starling discovered when the driver and Crawford got out and started toward the back of the funeral home. She had to bat on the glass until one of the deputies beneath the tree saw her, and the driver came back red-faced to let her out.
The deputies watched her sidelong as she passed. One said “ma’am.” She gave them a nod and a smile of the correct dim wattage as she went to join Crawford on the back porch.
When she was far enough away, one of the younger deputies, a newlywed, scratched beneath his jaw and said, “She don’t look half as good as she thinks she does.”
“Well, if she just thinks she looks pretty got-damned good, I’d have to agree with her, myself,” the other young deputy said. “I’d put her on like a Mark Five gas mask.”
“I’d just as soon have a big watermelon, if it was cold,” the older deputy said, half to himself.
Crawford was already talking to the chief deputy, a small, taut man in steel-rimmed glasses and the kind of elastic-sided boots the catalogs call “Romeos.”
They had moved into the funeral home’s dim back corridor, where a Coke machine hummed and random odd objects stood against the wall—a treadle sewing machine, a tricycle, and a roll of artificial grass, a striped canvas awning wrapped around its poles. On the wall was a sepia print of Saint Cecilia at the keyboard. Her hair was braided around her head, and roses tumbled onto the keys out of thin air.
“I appreciate your letting us know so fast, Sheriff,” Crawford said.
The chief deputy wasn’t having any. “It was somebody from the district attorney’s office called you,” he said. “I know the sheriff didn’t call you—Sheriff Perkins is on a guided tour of Hawaii at the present time with Mrs. Perkins. I spoke to him on long distance this morning at eight o’clock, that’s three A.M., Hawaii time. He’ll get back to me later in the day, but he told me Job One is to find out if this is one of our local girls. It could be something that outside elements has just dumped on us. We’ll tend to that before we do anything else. We’ve had ’em haul bodies here all the way from Phenix City, Alabama.”
“That’s where we can help you, Sheriff. If—”
“I’ve been on the phone with the field services commander of the state troopers in Charleston. He’s sending some officers from the Criminal Investigation Section—what’s known as the CIS. They’ll give us all the backup we need.” The corridor was filling with deputy sheriffs and troopers; the chief deputy had too much of an audience. “We’ll get around to you just as soon as we can, and extend you ever courtesy, work with you ever way we can, but right now—”
“Sheriff, this kind of a sex crime has some aspects that I’d rather say to you just between us men, you understand what I mean?” Crawford said, indicating Starling’s presence with a small movement of his head. He hustled the smaller man into a cluttered office off the hall and closed the door. Starling was left to mask her umbrage before the gaggle of deputies. Her teeth hard together, she gazed on Saint Cecilia and returned the saint’s ethereal smile while eavesdropping through the door. She could hear raised voices, then scraps of a telephone conversation. They were back out in the hall in less than four minutes.
The chief deputy’s mouth was tight. “Oscar, go out front and get Dr. Akin. He’s kind of obliged to attend those rites, but I don’t think they’ve got started out there yet. Tell him we’ve got Claxton on the phone.”
The coroner, Dr. Akin, came to the little office and stood with his foot on a chair, tapping his front teeth with a Good Shepherd fan while he had a brief telephone conference with the pathologist in Claxton. Then he agreed to everything.
So, in an embalming room with cabbage roses in the wallpaper and a picture molding beneath its high ceiling, in a white frame house of a type she understood, Clarice Starling met with her first direct evidence of Buffalo Bill.
The bright green body bag, tightly zipped, was the only modern object in the room. It lay on an old-fashioned porcelain embalming table, reflected many times in the glass panes of cabinets holding trochars and packages of Rock-Hard Cavity Fluid.
Crawford went to the car for the fingerprint transmitter while Starling unpacked her equipment on the drainboard of a large double sink against the wall.
Too many people were in the room. Several deputies, the chief deputy, all had wandered in with them and showed no inclination to leave. It wasn’t right. Why didn’t Crawford come on and get rid of them?
The wallpaper billowed in a draft, billowed inward as the doctor turned on the big, dusty vent fan.
Clarice Starling, standing at the sink, needed now a prototype of courage more apt and powerful than any Marine parachute jump. The image came to her, and helped her, but it pierced her too:
Her mother, standing at the sink, washing blood out of her father’s hat, running cold water over the hat, saying, “We’ll be all right, Clarice. Tell your brothers and sister to wash up and come to the table. We need to talk and then we’ll fix our supper.”
Starling took off her scarf and tied it over her hair like a mountain midwife. She took a pair of surgical gloves out of her kit. When she opened her mouth for the first time in Potter, her voice had more than its normal twang and the force of it brought Crawford to the door to listen. “Gentlemen. Gentlemen! You officers and gentlemen! Listen here a minute. Please. Now let me take care of her.” She held her hands before their faces as she pulled on the gloves. “There’s things we need to do for her. You brought her this far, and I know her folks would thank you if they could. Now please go on out and let me take care of her.”
Crawford saw them suddenly g
o quiet and respectful and urge each other out in whispers: “Come on, Jess. Let’s go out in the yard.” And Crawford saw that the atmosphere had changed here in the presence of the dead: that wherever this victim came from, whoever she was, the river had carried her into the country, and while she lay helpless in this room in the country, Clarice Starling had a special relationship to her. Crawford saw that in this place Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep the watch and when the watch is over, wash and dress the country dead.
Then there were only Crawford and Starling and the doctor in the room with the victim, Dr. Akin and Starling looking at each other with a kind of recognition. Both of them were oddly pleased, oddly abashed.
Crawford took a jar of Vicks VapoRub out of his pocket and offered it around. Starling watched to see what to do, and when Crawford and the doctor rubbed it around the rims of their nostrils, she did too.
She dug her cameras out of the equipment bag on the drain-board, her back to the room. Behind her she heard the zipper of the body bag go down.
Starling blinked at the cabbage roses on the wall, took a breath and let it out. She turned around and looked at the body on the table.
“They should have put paper bags on her hands,” she said. “I’ll bag them when we’re through.” Carefully, overriding the automatic camera to bracket her exposures, Starling photographed the body.
The victim was a heavy-hipped young woman sixty-seven inches long by Starling’s tape. The water had leached her gray where the skin was gone, but it had been cold water and she clearly hadn’t been in it more than a few days. The body was flayed neatly from a clean line just below the breasts to the knees, about the area that would be covered by a bullfighter’s pants and sash.
Her breasts were small and between them, over the sternum, was the apparent cause of death, a ragged, star-shaped wound a hand’s breadth across.
Her round head was peeled to the skull from just above the eyebrows and ears to the nape.
“Dr. Lecter said he’d start scalping,” Starling said.
Crawford stood with his arms folded while she took the pictures. “Get her ears with the Polaroid,” was all he said.
He went so far as to purse his lips as he walked around the body. Starling peeled off her glove to trail her finger up the calf of the leg. A section of the trotline and treble fishhooks that had entangled and held the body in the moving river was still wrapped around the lower leg.
“What do you see, Starling?”
“Well, she’s not a local—her ears are pierced three times each, and she wore glitter polish. Looks like town to me. She’s got maybe two weeks or so hair growth on her legs. And see how soft it’s grown in? I think she got her legs waxed. Armpits too. Look how she bleached the fuzz on her upper lip. She was pretty careful about herself, but she hasn’t been able to take care of it for a while.”
“What about the wound?”
“I don’t know,” Starling said. “I would have said an exit gunshot wound, except that looks like part of an abrasion collar and a muzzle stamp at the top there.”
“Good, Starling. It’s a contact entrance wound over the sternum. The explosion gases expand between the bone and the skin and blow out the star around the hole.”
On the other side of the wall a pipe organ wheezed as the service got under way in the front of the funeral home.
“Wrongful death,” Dr. Akins contributed, nodding his head. “I’ve got to get in there for at least part of this service. The family always expects me to go the last mile. Lamar will be in here to help you as soon as he finishes playing the musical offering. I take you at your word on preserving evidence for the pathologist at Claxton, Mr. Crawford.”
“She’s got two nails broken off here on the left hand,” Starling said when the doctor was gone. “They’re broken back up in the quick and it looks like dirt or some hard particles driven up under some of the others. Can we take evidence?”
“Take samples of grit, take a couple of flakes of polish,” Crawford said. “We’ll tell ’em after we get the results.”
Lamar, a lean funeral home assistant with a whiskey bloom in the middle of his face, came in while she was doing it. “You must of been a manicurist one time,” he said.
They were glad to see the young woman had no fingernail marks in her palms—an indication that, like the others, she had died before anything else was done to her.
“You want to print her facedown, Starling?” Crawford said.
“Be easier.”
“Let’s do teeth first, and then Lamar can help us turn her over.”
“Just pictures, or a chart?” Starling attached the dental kit to the front of the fingerprint camera, privately relieved that all the parts were in the bag.
“Just pictures,” Crawford said. “A chart can throw you off without X rays. We can eliminate a couple of missing women with the pictures.”
Lamar was very gentle with his organist’s hands, opening the young woman’s mouth at Starling’s direction and retracting her lips while Starling placed the one-to-one Polaroid against the face to get details of the front teeth. That part was easy, but she had to shoot the molars with a palatal reflector, watching from the side for the glow through the cheek to be sure the strobe around the lens was lighting the inside of the mouth. She had only seen it done in a forensics class.
Starling watched the first Polaroid print of the molars develop, adjusted the lightness control and tried again. This print was better. This one was very good.
“She’s got something in her throat,” Starling said.
Crawford looked at the picture. It showed a dark cylindrical object just behind the soft palate. “Give me the flashlight.”
“When a body comes out of the water, a lot of times there’s like leaves and things in the mouth,” Lamar said, helping Crawford to look.
Starling took some forceps out of her bag. She looked at Crawford across the body. He nodded. It only took her a second to get it.
“What is it, some kind of seed pod?” Crawford said.
“Nawsir, that’s a bug cocoon,” Lamar said. He was right.
Starling put it in a jar.
“You might want the county agent to look at that,” Lamar said.
Facedown, the body was easy to fingerprint. Starling had been prepared for the worst—but none of the tedious and delicate injection methods or finger stalls were necessary. She took the prints on thin card stock held in a device shaped like a shoehorn. She did a set of plantar prints as well, in case they had only baby footprints from a hospital for reference.
Two triangular pieces of skin were missing from high on the shoulders. Starling took pictures.
“Measure too,” Crawford said. “He cut the girl from Akron when he slit her clothes off, not much more than a scratch, but it matched the cut up the back of her blouse when they found it beside the road. This is something new, though. I haven’t seen this.”
“Looks like a burn across the back of her calf,” Starling said.
“Old people gets those a lot,” Lamar said.
“What?” Crawford said.
“I SAID OLD PEOPLE GETS THOSE A LOT.”
“I heard you fine, I want you to explain it. What about old people?”
“Old people pass away with a heating pad on them, and when they’re dead it burns them, even when it’s not all that hot. You burn under a heating pad when you’re dead. No circulation under it.”
“We’ll ask the pathologist at Claxton to test it, and see if it’s postmortem,” Crawford said to Starling.
“Car muffler, most likely,” Lamar said.
“What?”
“CAR MUFFL—car muffler. One time Billy Petrie got shot to death and they dumped him in the trunk of his car? His wife drove the car around two or three days looking for him. When they brought him in here, the muffler had got hot under the car trunk and burned him just like that,
only across his hip,” Lamar said. “I can’t put groceries in the trunk of my car for it melting the ice cream.”
“That’s a good thought, Lamar, I wish you worked for me,” Crawford said. “Do you know the fellows that found her in the river?”
“Jabbo Franklin and his brother, Bubba.”
“What do they do?”
“Fight at the Moose, make fun of people that’s not bothering them—someone just comes in the Moose after a simple drink, worn out from looking at the bereaved all day, and it’s ‘Set down there, Lamar, and play “Filipino Baby.”’ Make a person play ‘Filipino Baby’ over and over on that sticky old bar piano. That’s what Jabbo likes. ‘Well, make up some damn words if you don’t know it,’ he says, ‘and make the damn thing rhyme this time.’ He gets a check from the Veterans and goes to dry out at the VA around Christmas. I been looking for him on this table for fifteen years.”
“We’ll need serotonin tests on the fishhook punctures,” Crawford said. “I’m sending the pathologist a note.”
“Them hooks are too close together,” Lamar said.
“What did you say?”
“The Franklins was running a trotline with the hooks too close together. It’s a violation. That’s prob’ly why they didn’t call it in until this morning.”
“The sheriff said they were duck hunters.”
“I expect they did tell him that,” Lamar said. “They’ll tell you they wrestled Duke Keomuka in Honolulu one time too, tag team with Satellite Monroe. You can believe that too, if you feel like it. Grab a croaker sack and they’ll take you on a snipe hunt too, if you favor snipe. Give you a glass of billiards with it.”
“What do you think happened, Lamar?”
“The Franklins was running this trotline, it’s their trotline with these unlawful hooks, and they was pulling it up to see if they had any fish.”
“Why do you think so?”
“This lady’s not near ready to float.”
“No.”
“Then if they hadna been pulling up on the trotline they never would have found her. They prob’ly went off scared and finally called in. I expect you’ll want the game warden in on this.”
The Silence of the Lambs Page 8