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“This is what he is, this is all of him now. This is what time has reduced him to.”

Starling looked at the bones. She turned and quickly left the room. It was not a retreat and Lecter did not follow her. He waited in the semidark. He was not afraid, but he heard her coming back, with ears as keen as those of a staked-out goat. Something bright metal in her hand. A badge, John Brigham’s shield. She put it on the sheet.

“What could a badge mean to you, Clarice? You shot a hole through one in the barn.”

“It meant everything to him. That’s how much he knewww.” The last word distorted and her mouth turned down. She picked up her father’s skull and sat on the other bed, hot tears springing in her eyes and pouring down her cheeks.

Like a toddler she caught up the tail of her pullover and held it to her cheek and sobbed, bitter tears falling with a hollow tap tap on the dome of her father’s skull resting in her lap, its capped tooth gleaming. “I love my daddy, he was as good to me as he knew how to be. It was the best time I ever had.” And it was true, and no less true than before she let the anger out.

When Dr. Lecter gave her a tissue she simply gripped it in her fist and he cleaned her face himself.

“Clarice, I’m going to leave you here with these remains. Remains, Clarice. Scream your plight into his eyeholes and no reply will come.” He put his hands on the sides of her head. “What you need of your father is here, in your head, and subject to your judgment, not his. I’ll leave you now. Do you want the candles?”

“Yes, please.”

“When you come out, bring only what you need.”

He waited in the drawing room, before the fire. He passed the time playing his theremin, moving his empty hands in its electronic field to create the music, moving the hands he had placed on Clarice Starling’s head as though he now directed the music. He was aware of Starling standing behind him for some time before he finished his piece.

When he turned to her, her smile was soft and sad and her hands were empty.

Ever, Dr. Lecter sought pattern.

He knew that, like every sentient being, Starling formed from her early experience matrices, frameworks by which later perceptions were understood.

Speaking to her through the asylum bars so many years ago, he had found an important one for Starling, the slaughter of lambs and horses on the ranch that was her foster home. She was imprinted by their plight.

Her obsessive and successful hunt for Jame Gumb was driven by the plight of his captive.

She had saved him from torture for the same reason.

Fine. Patterned behavior.

Ever looking for situational sets, Dr. Lecter believed that Starling saw in John Brigham her father’s good qualities—and with her father’s virtues the unfortunate Brigham was also assigned the incestual taboo. Brigham, and probably Crawford, had her father’s good qualities. Where were the bad?

Dr. Lecter searched for the rest of this split matrix. Using hypnotic drugs and hypnotic techniques much modified from cameral therapy, he was finding in Clarice Starling’s personality hard and stubborn nodes, like knots in wood, and old resentments still flammable as resin.

He came upon tableaux of pitiless brightness, years old but well tended and detailed, that sent limbic anger flashing through Starling’s brain like lightning in a thunder-head.

Most of them involved Paul Krendler. Her resentment of the very real injustices she had suffered at Krendler’s hands was charged with the anger at her father that she could never, never acknowledge. She could not forgive her father for dying. He had left the family, he had stopped peeling oranges in the kitchen. He had doomed her mother to the commode brush and the pail. He had stopped holding Starling close, his great heart booming like Hannah’s heart as they rode into the night.

Krendler was the icon of failure and frustration. He could be blamed. But could he be defied? Or was Krendler, and every other authority and taboo, empowered to box Starling into what was, in Dr. Lecter’s view, her little low-ceiling life?

To him one hopeful sign: Though she was imprinted with the badge, she could still shoot a hole through one and kill the wearer. Why? Because she had committed to action, identified the wearer as a criminal and made the judgment ahead of time, overruling the imprinted icon of the star. Potential flexibility. The cerebral cortex rules. Did that mean room for Mischa within Starling? Or was it simply another good quality of the place Starling must vacate?

CHAPTER

96

BARNEY, BACK in his apartment in Baltimore, back in the round of working at Misericordia, had the three to eleven shift. He stopped for a bowl of soup at the coffee shop on his way home and it was nearly midnight when he let himself into his apartment and turned on the light.

Ardelia Mapp sat at his kitchen table. She was pointing a black semiautomatic pistol at the center of his face. From the size of the hole in th

e muzzle, Barney judged it was a .40 caliber.

“Sit down, Nursey,” Mapp said. Her voice was hoarse and around her dark pupils her eyes were orange. “Pull your chair over there and tip back against the wall.”

What scared him more than the big stopper in her hand was the other pistol on the place mat before her. It was a Colt Woodsman .22 with a plastic pop bottle taped to the muzzle as a silencer.