Crawford passed the pilot a cup of water from a thermos. He gave one to Starling and mixed himself an Alka-Seltzer.
Her stomach lifted as the airplane started down.
“Couple of things, Starling. I look for first-rate forensics from you, but I need more than that. You don’t say much, and that’s okay, neither do I. But don’t ever feel you’ve got to have a new fact to tell me before you can bring something up. There aren’t any silly questions. You’ll see things that I won’t, and I want to know what they are. Maybe you’ve got a knack for this. All of a sudden we’ve got this chance to see if you do.”
Listening to him, her stomach lifting and her expression properly rapt, Starling wondered how long Crawford had known he’d use her on this case, how hungry for a chance he had wanted her to be. He was a leader, with a leader’s frank-and-open bullshit, all right.
“You think about him enough, you see where he’s been, you get a feel for him,” Crawford went on. “You don’t even dislike him all the time, hard as that is to believe. Then, if you’re lucky, out of all the stuff you know, part of it plucks at you, tries to get your attention. Always tell me when something plucks, Starling.
“Listen to me, a crime is confusing enough without the investigation mixing it up. Don’t let a herd of policemen confuse you. Live right behind your eyes. Listen to yourself. Keep the crime separate from what’s going on around you now. Don’t try to impose any pattern or symmetry on this guy. Stay open and let him show you.
“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.