Starling got through the photographs all right. Floaters are the worst kind of dead to deal with, physically. There is an absolute pathos about them, too, as there often is about homicide victims out of doors. The indignities the victim suffers, the exposure to the elements and to casual eyes, anger you if your job permits you anger.
Often, at indoor homicides, evidences of a victim’s unpleasant personal practices, and the victim’s own victims—beaten spouses, abused children—crowd around to whisper that the dead one had it coming, and many times he did.
But nobody had this coming. Here they had not even their skins as they lay on littered riverbanks amid the outboard-oil bottles and sandwich bags that are our common squalor. The cold-weather ones largely retained their faces. Starling reminded herself that their teeth were not bared in pain, that turtles and fish in the course of feeding had created that expression. Bill peeled the torsos and mostly left the limbs alone.
They wouldn’t have been so hard to look at, Starling thought, if this airplane cabin wasn’t so warm and if the damned plane didn’t have this crawly yaw as one prop caught the air better than the other, and if the God damned sun didn’t splinter so on the scratched windows and jab like a headache.
It’s possible to catch him. Starling squeezed on that thought to help herself sit in this ever-smaller airplane cabin with her lap full of awful information. She could help stop him cold. Then they could put this slightly sticky, smooth-covered file back in the drawer and turn the key on it.
She stared at the back of Crawford’s head. If she wanted to stop Buffalo Bill she was in the right crowd. Crawford had organized successful hunts for three serial murderers. But not without casualties. Will Graham, the keenest hound ever to run in Crawford’s pack, was a legend at the Academy; he was also a drunk in Florida now with a face that was hard to look at, they said.
Maybe Crawford felt her staring at the back of his head. He climbed out of the copilot’s seat. The pilot touched the trim wheel as Crawford came back to her and buckled in beside her. When he folded his sunglasses and put on his bifocals, she felt she knew him again.
When he looked from her face to the report and back again, something passed behind his face and was quickly gone. A more animated mug than Crawford’s would have shown regret.
“I’m hot, are you hot?” he said. “Bobby, it’s too damned hot in here,” he called to the pilot. Bobby adjusted something and cold air came in. A few snowflakes formed in the moist cabin air and settled in Starling’s hair.
Then it was Jack Crawford hunting, his eyes like a bright winter day.
He opened the file to a map of the Central and Eastern United States. Locations where bodies had been found were marked on the map—a scattering of dots as mute and crooked as Orion.
Crawford took a pen from his pocket and marked the newest location, their objective.
“Elk River, about six miles below U.S. 79,” he said. “We’re lucky on this one. The body was snagged on a trotline—a fishing line set out in the river. They don’t think she’s been in the water all that long. They’re bringing her to Potter, the county seat. I want to know who she is in a hurry so we can sweep for witnesses to the abduction. We’ll send the prints back on a land line as soon as we get ’em.” Crawford tilted his head to look at Starling through the bottoms of his glasses. “Jimmy Price says you can do a floater.”
“Actually, I never had an entire floater,” Starling said. “I fingerprinted the hands Mr. Price got in his mail every day. A good many of them were from floaters, though.”
Those who have never been under Jimmy Price’s supervision believe him to be a lovable curmudgeon. Like most curmudgeons, he is really a mean old man. Jimmy Price is a supervisor in Latent Prints at the Washington lab. Starling did time with him as a Forensic Fellow.
“That Jimmy,” Crawford said fondly. “What is it they call that job…”
“The position is called ‘lab wretch,’ or some people prefer ‘Igor’—that’s what’s printed on the rubber apron they give you.”
“That’s it.”
“They tell you to pretend you’re dissecting a frog.”
“I see—”
“Then they bring you a package from UPS. They’re all watching—some of them hurry back from coffee, hoping you’ll barf. I can print a floater very well. In fact—”
“Good, now look at this. His first victim that we know of was found in the Blackwater River in Missouri, outside of Lone Jack, last June. The Bimmel girl, she’d been reported missing in Belvedere, Ohio, on April 15, two months before. We couldn’t tell a lot about it—it took another three months just to get her identified. The next one he grabbed in Chicago the third week in April. She was found in the Wabash in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, just ten days after she was taken, so we could tell what had happened to her. Next we’ve got a white female, early twenties, dumped in the Rolling Fork near I-65, about thirty-eight miles south of Louisville, Kentucky. She’s never been identified. And the Varner woman, grabbed in Evansville, Indiana, and dropped in the Embarras just below Interstate 70 in eastern Illinois.
“Then he moved south and dumped one in the Conasauga below Damascus, Georgia, down from Interstate 75, that was this Kittridge girl from Pittsburgh—here’s her graduation picture. His luck’s ungodly—nobody’s ever seen him make a snatch. Except for the dumps being near an Interstate, we haven’t seen any pattern.”
“If you trace heaviest-traffic routes backward from the dump sites, do they converge at all?”
“No.”
“What if you … postulate … that he’s making a dropoff and a new abduction on the same trip?” Starling asked, carefully avoiding the forbidden word assume. “He’d drop off the body first, wouldn’t he, in case he got in trouble grabbing the next one? Then, if he was caught grabbing somebody, he might get off for assault, plead it down to zip if he didn’t have a body in his car. So how about drawing vectors backward from each abduction site through the previous dump site? You’ve tried it.”
&
nbsp; “That’s a good idea, but he had it too. If he is doing both things in one trip, he’s zigging around. We’ve run computer simulations, first with him westbound on the Interstates, then eastbound, then various combinations with the best dates we can put on the dumps and abductions. You put it in the computer and smoke comes out. He lives in the East, it tells us. He’s not in a moon cycle, it tells us. No convention dates in the cities correlate. Nothing but feathers. No, he’s seen us coming, Starling.”
“You think he’s too careful to be a suicide.”
Crawford nodded. “Definitely too careful. He’s found out how to have a meaningful relationship now, and he wants to do it a lot. I’m not getting my hopes up for a suicide.”