Red Dragon (17 page)

“The inks on both pieces of the note look like the same standard ballpoint royal blue in natural light, but a slight difference appears under colored filters. He used two pens, changing somewhere in the missing section of the note. You can see where the first one began to skip. The first pen is not used frequently—see the blob it starts with? It might have been stored point-down and uncapped in a pencil jar or canister, which suggests a desk situation. Also the surface the paper lay on was soft enough to be a blotter. A blotter might retain impressions if you find it. I want to add the blotter to Beverly’s advisory.”

Bowman flipped to a photograph of the back of the note. The extreme enlargement made the paper look fuzzy. It was grooved with shadowed impressions. “He folded the note to write the bottom part, including what was later torn out. In this enlargement of the back side, oblique light reveals a few impressions. We can make out ‘666 an.’ Maybe that’s where he had pen trouble and had to bear down and overwrite. I didn’t spot it until I had this high-contrast print. There’s no 666 in any ad so far.

“The sentence structure is orderly, and there’s no rambling. The folds suggest it was delivered in a standard letter-size envelope. These two dark places are printing-ink smudges. The note was probably folded inside some innocuous printed matter in the envelope.

“That’s about it,” Bowman said. “Unless you have questions, Jack, I’d better go to the courthouse. I’ll check in after I testify.”

“Sink ’em deep,” Crawford said.

Graham studied the
Tattler
personals column. (“Attractive queen-size lady, young 52, seeks Christian Leo nonsmoker 40-70. No children please. Artificial limb welcomed. No phonies. Send photo first letter.”)

Lost in the pain and desperation of the ads, he didn’t notice that the others were leaving until Beverly Katz spoke to him.

“I’m sorry, Beverly. What did you say?” He looked at her bright eyes and kindly, well-worn face.

“I just said I’m glad to see you back, Champ. You’re looking good.”

“Thanks, Beverly.”

“Saul’s going to cooking school. He’s still hit-or-miss, but when the dust settles come over and let him practice on you.”

“I’ll do it.”

Zeller went away to prowl his laboratory. Only Crawford and Graham were left, looking at the clock.

“Forty minutes to
Tattler
press time,” Crawford said. “I’m going after their mail. What do you say?”

“I think you have to.”

Crawford passed the word to Chicago on Zeller’s telephone. “Will, we need to be ready with a substitute ad if Chicago bingoes.”

“I’ll work on it.”

“I’ll set up the drop.” Crawford called the Secret Service and talked at some length. Graham was still scribbling when he finished.

“Okay, the mail drop’s a beauty,” Crawford said at last. “It’s an outside message box on a fire-extinguisher-service outfit in Annapolis. That’s Lecter territory. The Tooth Fairy will see that it’s something Lecter could know about. Alphabetical pigeonholes. The service people drive up to it and get assignments and mail. Our boy can check it out from a park across the street. Secret Service swears it looks good. They set it up to catch a counterfeiter, but it turned out they didn’t need it. Here’s the address. What about the message?”

“We have to use two messages in the same edition. The first one warns the Tooth Fairy that his enemies are closer than he thinks. It tells him he made a bad mistake in Atlanta and if he repeats the mistake he’s doomed. It tells him Lecter has mailed ‘secret information’ I showed Lecter about what we’re doing, how close we are, the leads we have. It directs the Tooth Fairy to a second message that begins with ‘your signature.’

“The second message begins ‘Avid Fan . . .’ and contains the address of the mail drop. We have to do it that way. Even in roundabout language, the warning in the first message is going to excite some casual nuts. If they can’t find out the address, they can’t come to the drop and screw things up.”

“Good. Damn good. Want to wait it out in my office?”

“I’d rather be doing something. I need to see Brian Zeller.”

“Go ahead, I can get you in a hurry if I have to.”

Graham found the section chief in Serology.

“Brian, could you show me a couple of things?”

“Sure, what?”

“The samples you used to type the Tooth Fairy.”

Zeller looked at Graham through the close-range section of his bifocals. “Was there something in the report you didn’t understand?”

“No.”

“Was something unclear?”

“No.”

“Something
incomplete
?” Zeller mouthed the word as if it had an unpleasant taste.

“Your report was fine, couldn’t ask for better. I just want to hold the evidence in my hand.”

“
Ah
, certainly. We can do that.” Zeller believed that all field men retain the superstitions of the hunt. He was glad to humor Graham. “It’s all together down at that end.”

Graham followed him between the long counters of apparatus. “You’re reading Tedeschi.”

“Yes,” Zeller said over his shoulder. “We don’t do any forensic medicine here, as you know, but Tedeschi has a lot of useful things in there. Graham. Will Graham. You wrote the standard monograph on determining time of death by insect activity, didn’t you. Or do I have the right Graham?”

“I did it.” A pause. “You’re right, Mant and Nuorteva in the Tedeschi are better on insects.”

Zeller was surprised to hear his thought spoken. “Well, it does have more pictures and a table of invasion waves. No offense.”

“Of course not. They’re better. I told them so.”

Zeller gathered vials and slides from a cabinet and a refrigerator and set them on the laboratory counter. “If you want to ask me anything, I’ll be where you found me. The stage light on this microscope is on the side here.”

Graham did not want the microscope. He doubted none of Zeller’s findings. He didn’t know what he wanted. He raised the vials and slides to the light, and a glassine envelope with two blond hairs found in Birmingham. A second envelope held three hairs found on Mrs. Leeds.

There were spit and hair and semen on the table in front of Graham and empty air where he tried to see an image, a face, something to replace the shapeless dread he carried.

A woman’s voice came from a speaker in the ceiling. “Graham, Will Graham, to Special Agent Crawford’s office. On Red.”

He found Sarah in her headset typing, with Crawford looking over her shoulder.

“Chicago’s got an ad order with 666 in it,” Crawford said out of the side of his mouth. “They’re dictating it to Sarah now. They said part of it looks like code.”

The lines were climbing out of Sarah’s typewriter.

 

 

 

 

“That’s it. That’s it,” Graham, said. “Lecter called him a pilgrim when he was talking to me.”

 

 

 

 

“Christ,” Crawford said.

 

 

The typing slowed as Sarah read back each pair of numbers to the agent in Chicago. When she had finished, the list of scriptural references covered a quarter of a page. It was signed “Bless you, 666.”

“That’s it,” Sarah said.

Crawford picked up the phone. “Okay, Chester, how did it go down with the ad manager? . . . No, you did right. . . . A complete clam, right. Stand by at that phone, I’ll get back to you.”

“Code,” Graham said.

“Has to be. We’ve got twenty-two minutes to get a message in if we can break it. Shop foreman needs ten minutes’ notice and three hundred dollars to shoehorn one in this edition. Bowman’s in his office, he got a recess. If you’ll get him cracking, I’ll talk to Cryptography at Langley. Sarah, shoot a telex of the ad to CIA cryptography section. I’ll tell ’em it’s coming.”

Bowman put the message on his desk and aligned it precisely with the corners of his blotter. He polished his rimless spectacles for what seemed to Graham a very long time.

Bowman had a reputation for being quick. Even the explosives section forgave him for not being an ex-Marine and granted him that.

“We have twenty minutes,” Graham said.

“I understand. You called Langley?”

“Crawford did.”

Bowman read the message many times, looked at it upside down and sideways, ran down the margins with his finger. He took a Bible from his shelves. For five minutes the only sounds were the two men breathing and the crackle of onionskin pages.

“No,” he said. “We won’t make it in time. Better use what’s left for whatever else you can do.”

Graham showed him an empty hand.

Bowman swiveled around to face Graham and took off his glasses. He had a pink spot on each side of his nose. “Do you feel fairly confident the note to Lecter is the only communication he’s had from your Tooth Fairy?”

“R ight.”

“The code is something simple then. They only needed cover against casual readers. Measuring by the perforations in the note to Lecter only about three inches is missing. That’s not much room for instructions. The numbers aren’t right for a jailhouse alphabet grid—the tap code. I’m guessing it’s a book code.”

Crawford joined them. “Book code?”

“Looks like it. The first numeral, that ‘100 prayers,’ could be the page number. The paired numbers in the scriptural references could be line and letter. But what book?”

“Not the Bible?” Crawford said.

“No, not the Bible. I thought it might be at first. Galatians 6:11 threw me off. ‘Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand.’ That’s appropriate, but it’s coincidence because next he has Galatians 15:2. Galatians has only six chapters. Same with Jonah 6:8—Jonah has four chapters. He wasn’t using a Bible.”

“Maybe the book title could be concealed in the clear part of Lecter’s message,” Crawford said.

Bowman shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Then the Tooth Fairy named the book to use. He specified it in his note to Lecter,” Graham said.

“It would appear so,” Bowman said. “What about sweating Lecter? In a mental hospital I would think drugs—”

“They tried sodium amytal on him three years ago trying to find out where he buried a Princeton student,” Graham said. “He gave them a recipe for dip. Besides, if we sweat him we lose the connection. If the Tooth Fairy picked the book, it’s something he knew Lecter would have in his cell.”

“I know for sure he didn’t order one or borrow one from Chilton,” Crawford said.

“What have the papers carried about that, Jack? About Lecter’s books.”

“That he has medical books, psychology books, cook-books.”

“Then it could be one of the standards in those areas, something so basic the Tooth Fairy knew Lecter would definitely have it,” Bowman said. “We need a list of Lecter’s books. Do you have one?”

“No.” Graham stared at his shoes. “I could get Chilton . . . Wait. Rankin and Willingham, when they tossed his cell, they took Polaroids so they could get everything back in place.”

“Would you ask them to meet me with the pictures of the books?” Bowman said, packing his briefcase.

“Where?”

“The Library of Congress.”

Crawford checked with the CIA cryptography section one last time. The computer at Langley was trying consistent and progressive number-letter substitutions and a staggering variety of alphabet grids. No progress. The cryptographer agreed with Bowman that it was probably a book code.

Crawford looked at his watch. “Will, we’re left with three choices and we’ve got to decide right now. We can pull Lecter’s message out of the paper and run nothing. We can substitute our messages in plain language, inviting the Tooth Fairy to the mail drop. Or we can let Lecter’s ad run as is.”

“Are you sure we can still get Lecter’s message out of the
Tattler
?”

“Chester thinks the shop foreman would chisel it for about five hundred dollars.”

“I hate to put in a plain-language message, Jack. Lecter would probably never hear from him again.”

“Yeah, but I’m leery of letting Lecter’s message run without knowing what it says,” Crawford said. “What could Lecter tell him that he doesn’t know already? If he found out we have a partial thumbprint and his prints aren’t on file anywhere, he could whittle his thumb and pull his teeth and give us a big gummy laugh in court.”

“The thumbprint wasn’t in the case summary Lecter saw. We better let Lecter’s message run. At least it’ll encourage the Tooth Fairy to contact him again.”

“What if it encourages him to do something besides write?”

“We’ll feel sick for a long time,” Graham said. “We have to do it.”

 

 

 

Fifteen minutes later in Chicago the
Tattler
’s big presses rolled, gathering speed until their thunder raised the dust in the pressroom. The FBI agent waiting in the smell of ink and hot newsprint took one of the first ones.

The cover lines included “Head Transplant!” and “Astronomers Glimpse God!”

The agent checked to see that Lecter’s personal ad was in place and slipped the paper into an express pouch for Washington. He would see that paper again and remember his thumb smudge on the front page, but it would be years later, when he took his children through the special exhibits on a tour of FBI headquarters.

In the hour before dawn Crawford woke from a deep sleep. He saw the room dark, felt his wife’s ample bottom comfortably settled against the small of his back. He did not know why he had awakened until the telephone rang a second time. He found it with no fumbling.