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When he did not meet her eyes, she went on.

“This raid was an ugly mess. It put me in a position where I had a choice of dying or shooting a woman holding a child. I chose, and what I had to do burns me. I shot a female carrying an infant. The lower animals don’t even do that. Mr. Sneed, you might want to check your tape counter again, right there where I admit it. I resent the hell out of being put in that position. I resent the way I feel now.” She flashed on Brigham lying facedown in the road and she went too far. “Watching you all run from it makes me sick at my stomach.”

“Starling—” Pearsall, anguished, looked her in the face for the first time.

“I know you haven’t had a chance to write your 302 yet,” Larkin Wainwright said. “When we review—”

“Yes, sir, I have,” Starling said. “A copy’s on the way to the Office of Professional Responsibility I have a copy with me if you don’t want to wait. I have everything I did and saw in there. See, Mr. Sneed, you had it all the time.”

Starling’s vision was a little too clear, a danger sign she recognized, and she consciously lowered her voice.

“This raid went wrong for a couple of reasons. BATF’s snitch lied about the baby’s location because the snitch was desperate for the raid to go down—before his federal grand jury date in Illinois. And Evelda Drumgo knew we were coming. She came out with the money in one bag and the meth in another. Her beeper still showed the number for WFUL-TV. She got the beep five minutes before we got there. WFUL’s helicopter got there with us. Subpoena WFUL’s phone tapes and see who leaked. It’s somebody whose interests are local, gentlemen. If BATF had leaked, like they did in Waco, or DEA had leaked, they’d have done it to national media, not the local TV.”

Benny Holcomb spoke for the city. “There’s no evidence anybody in city government or the Washington police department leaked anything.”

“Subpoena and see,” Starling said.

“Do you have Drumgo’s beeper?” Pearsall asked.

“It’s under seal in the property room at Quantico.”

Assistant Director Noonan’s own beeper went off. He frowned at the number and excused himself from the room. In a moment, he summoned Pearsall to join him outside.

Wainwright, Eldredge and Holcomb looked out the window at Fort McNair, hands in their pockets. They might have been waiting in an intensive care unit. Paul Krendler caught Sneed’s eye and urged him toward Starling.

Sneed put his hand on the back of Starling’s chair and leaned over her. “If your testimony at a hearing is that, while you were on TDY assignment from the FBI, your weapon killed Evelda Drumgo, BATF is prepared to sign off on a statement that Brigham asked you to pay … special attention to Evelda in order to take her into custody peacefully. Your weapon killed her, that’s where your service has to carry the can. There will be no interagency pissing contest over rules of engagement and we won’t have to bring in any inflammatory or hostile statements you made in the van about what sort of person she was.”

Starling saw Evelda Drumgo for an instant, coming out of the doorway, coming out of the car, saw the carriage of her head and, despite the foolishness and waste of Evelda’s life, saw her decision to take her child and front her tormenters and not run from it.

Starling leaned close to the microphone on Sneed’s tie and said clearly, “I’m perfectly happy to acknowledge the sort of person she was, Mr. Sneed: She was better than you.”

Pearsall came back into the office without Noonan and closed the door. “Assistant Director Noonan has gone back to his office. Gentlemen, I’m going to call a halt to this meeting, and I’ll get back to you individually by telephone,” Pearsall said.

Krendler’s head came up. He was suddenly alert at the scent of politics.

“We’ve got to decide some things,” Sneed began.

“No, we don’t.”

“But—”

“Bob, believe me, we don’t have to decide anything. I’ll get back to you. And, Bob?”

“Yeah?”

Pearsall grabbed the wire behind Sneed’s tie and pulled down hard, popping buttons off Sneed’s shirt and snatching tape loose from his skin. “You come to me with a wire again and I’ll put my foot in your ass.”

None of them looked at Starling as they left, except Krendler.

Moving toward the door, sliding his feet so he would not have to look where he was going, he used the extreme articulation of his long neck to turn his face to her, as a hyena would shuffle at the fringe of a herd, peering in at a candidate. Mixed hungers crossed his face; it was Krendler’s nature to both appreciate Starling’s leg and look for the hamstring.

CHAPTER

8

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE is the FBI section that deals with serial murder. Down in its basement offices, the air is cool and still. Decorators with their color wheels have tried in recent years to brighten the subterranean space. The result is no more successful than funeral home cosmetics.

The section chief’s office remains in the original brown and tan with the checked café curtains on its high windows. There, surrounded by his hellish files, Jack Crawford sat writing at his desk.