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“Leave it all strictly to me.”

Pickford dictated the address of the wine store.

“Keep going on the subscriptions,” Krendler instructed. “You can tell Crawford about the subscriptions when he comes back to work. He’ll organize coverage on the mail drops after the tenth.”

Krendler called Mason’s number, and started out running from his Georgetown town house, trotting easily toward Rock Creek Park.

In the gathering gloom only his white Nike headband and his white Nike shoes and the white stripe down the side of his dark Nike running suit were visible, as though there were no man at all among the trademarks.

It was a brisk half-hour run. He heard the blat of helicopter blades just as he came in sight of the landing pad near the zoo. He was able to duck under the turning propeller blades and reach the step without ever breaking stride. The lift of the jet helicopter thrilled him, the city, the lighted monuments falling away as the aircraft took him to the heights he deserved, to Annapolis for the tape and to Mason.

CHAPTER

76

“WILL YOU focus the fucking thing, Cordell?” In Mason’s deep radio voice, with its lipless consonants, “focus” and “fucking” sounded more like “hocus” and “hucking.”

Krendler stood beside Mason in the dark part of the room, the better to see the elevated monitor. In the heat of Mason’s room he had his yuppie running suit pulled down to his waist and the sleeves tied around him, exposing his Princeton T-shirt. His headband and shoes gleamed in the light from the aquarium.

In Margot’s opinion Krendler had the shoulders of a chicken. They had barely acknowledged one another when he arrived.

There was no tape or time counter on the liquor store security camera and Christmas business was brisk. Cordell was pushing fast-forward from customer to customer through a lot of purchases. Mason passed the time by being unpleasant.

“What did you say when you went in the liquor store in your running suit and flashed the tin, Krendler? You say you were in the Special Olympics?” Mason was much less respectful since Krendler had been depositing the checks.

Krendler could not be insulted when his interests were at stake. “I said I was undercover. What kind of coverage have you got on Starling now?”

“Margot, tell him.” Mason seemed to want to save his own scarce breath for insults.

“We brought in twelve men from our security in Chicago. They’re in Washington. Three teams, one member of each is deputized in the state of Illinois. If the police catch them grabbing Dr. Lecter, they say they recognized him and it’s a citizen’s arrest and blah blah. The team that catches turns him over to Carlo. They go back to Chicago and that’s all they know.”

The tape was running.

“Wait a minute—Cordell, back it up thirty seconds,” Mason said. “Look at this.”

The liquor store camera covered the area from the front door to the cash register.

In the silent videotape’s fuzzy image, a man came in wearing a billed cap, a lumber jacket and mittens. He had full whiskers and wore sunglasses. He turned his back to the camera and carefully closed the door behind him.

It took a moment for the shopper to explain to the clerk what he wanted and he followed the man out of sight into the wine racks.

Three minutes dragged by. At last they came back into camera range. The clerk wiped dust off the bottle and wrapped padding around it before he put it into a bag. The customer pulled off only his right mitten and paid in cash. The clerk’s mouth moved as he said “thank you” to the man’s back as he was leaving.

A pause of a few seconds, and the clerk called to someone off camera. A heavyset man came into the picture and hurried out the door.

“That’s the owner, guy who saw the truck,” Krendler said.

“Cordell, can you copy off this tape and enlarge the customer’s head?”

“Take a second, Mr. Verger. It’ll be fuzzy.”

“Do it.”

“He kept the left mitten on,” Mason said. “I may have gotten screwed on that X ray I bought.”

“Pazzi said he got his hand fixed, didn’t he? Had the extra finger off,” Krendler said.

“Pazzi might have had his finger up his butt, I don’t know who to believe. You’ve seen him, Margot, what do you think? Was that Lecter?”