89
CLARICE STARLING lies unconsciou
s in a large bed beneath a linen sheet and a comforter. Her arms, covered by the sleeves of silk pajamas, are on top of the covers and they are restrained with silk scarves, only enough to keep her hands away from her face and to protect the IV butterfly in the back of her hand.
There are three points of light in the room, the low shaded lamp and the red pinpoints in the center of Dr. Lecter’s pupils as he watches her.
He is sitting in an armchair, his fingers steepled under his chin. After a time he rises and takes her blood pressure. With a small flashlight he examines her pupils. He reaches beneath the covers and finds her foot, brings it out from under the covers and, watching her closely, stimulates the sole with the tip of a key. He stands for a moment, apparently lost in thought, holding her foot gently as though it were a small animal in his hand.
From the manufacturer of the tranquilizer dart, he has learned its content. Because the second dart that struck Starling hit bone in her shin, he believes she did not get a full double dose. He is administering stimulant counter-measures with infinite care.
Between ministrations to Starling, he sits in his armchair with a big pad of butcher paper doing calculations. The pages are filled with the symbols both of astrophysics and particle physics. There are repeated efforts with the symbols of string theory. The few mathematicians who could follow him might say his equations begin brilliantly and then decline, doomed by wishful thinking: Dr. Lecter wants time to reverse—no longer should increasing entropy mark the direction of time. He wants increasing order to point the way. He wants Mischa’s baby teeth back out of the stool pit. Behind his fevered calculations is the desperate wish to make a place for Mischa in the world, perhaps the place now occupied by Clarice Starling.
CHAPTER
90
MORNING AND yellow sunlight in the playroom at Muskrat Farm. The great stuffed animals with their button eyes regard the body of Cordell, covered now.
Even in the middle of winter, a bluebottle fly has found the body and is walking over the covering sheet where blood has soaked through.
Had Margot Verger known the raw ablative tension suffered by the principals in a media-ridden homicide, she might never have stuffed the eel down her brother’s throat.
Her decision not to try to clean up the mess at Muskrat Farm and to simply duck until the storm was over was a wise one. No one living saw her at Muskrat when Mason and the others were killed.
Her story was that the first frantic call from the midnight relief nurse wakened her in the house she shared with Judy. She came to the scene and arrived shortly after the first sheriff’s officers.
The lead investigator for the sheriff’s department, Detective Clarence Franks, was a youngish man with eyes a bit too close together, but he was not stupid as Margot had hoped he would be.
“Can’t just anybody come up here in that elevator, it takes a key to get in, right?” Franks asked her. The detective and Margot sat awkwardly side by side on the love seat.
“I suppose so, if that’s the way they came.”
“‘They,’ Ms. Verger? Do you think there might be more than one?”
“I have no idea, Mr. Franks.”
She had seen her brother’s body still joined to the eel and covered by a sheet. Someone had unplugged the respirator. The criminalists were taking samples of aquarium water and taking swipes of blood from the floor. She could see in Mason’s hand the piece of Dr. Lecter’s scalp. They hadn’t found it yet. The criminologists looked to Margot like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Detective Franks was busy scribbling in his notebook.
“Do they know who those other poor people are?” Margot said. “Did they have families?”
“We’re working it out,” Franks said. “There were three weapons we can trace.”
In fact, the sheriff’s department was not sure how many persons had died in the barn, as the pigs had disappeared into the deep woods dragging with them the depleted remains for later.
“In the course of this investigation, we might have to ask you and your—your longtime companion—to undergo a polygraph examination, that’s a lie detector, would you consent to that, Ms. Verger?”
“Mr. Franks, I’ll do anything to catch these people. To specifically answer your question, ask me and Judy when you need us. Should I talk to the family lawyer?”
“Not if you don’t have anything to hide, Ms. Verger.”
“Hide?” Margot managed tears.
“Please, I have to do this, Ms. Verger.” Franks started to put his hand on her massive shoulder and thought better of it.
CHAPTER