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“What sort of things did he tell you, if you don’t mind.”

“He said I was an ambitious, hustling little rube and my eyes shined like cheap birthstones. He told me I wore cheap shoes, but I had some taste, a little taste.”

“That struck you as true?”

“Yep. Maybe it still is. I’ve improved my shoes.”

“Do you think, Starling, he might have been interested to see if you’d rat him out when he sent you a letter of encouragement?”

“He knew I’d rat him out, he’d better know it.”

“He killed six after the court committed him,” Crawford said. “He killed Miggs in the asylum for throwing semen in your face, and five in his escape. In the present political climate, if the doctor’s caught he’ll get the needle.” Crawford smiled at the thought. He had pioneered the study of serial murder. Now he was facing mandatory retirement and the monster who had tried him the most remained free. The prospect of death for Dr. Lecter pleased him mightily.

Starling knew Crawford mentioned Miggs’s act to goose her attention, to put her back in those terrible days when she was trying to interrogate Hannibal the Cannibal in the dungeon at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. When Lecter toyed with her while a girl crouched in Jame Gumb’s pit, waiting to die. Usually Crawford heightened your attention when he was coming to the point, as he did now.

“Did you know, Starling, that one of Dr. Lecter’s early victims is still alive?”

“The rich one. The family offered a reward.”

“Yes, Mason Verger. He’s on a respirator in Maryland. His father died this year and left him the meatpacking fortune. Old Verger also left Mason a U.S. congressman and a member of the House Judiciary Oversight Committee who just couldn’t make ends meet without him. Mason says he’s got something that might help us find the doctor. He wants to speak with you.”

“With me.”

“You. That’s what Mason wants and suddenly everyone agrees it’s a really good idea.”

“That’s what Mason wants after you suggested it to him?”

“They were going to throw you away, Starling, clean up with you like you were a rag. You would have been wasted just like John Brigham. Just to save some bureaucrats at BATF. Fear. Pressure. That’s all they understand anymore. I had somebody drop a dime to Mason and tell him how much it would hurt the hunt for Lecter if you got canned. Whatever else happened, who Mason might have called after that, I don’t want to know, probably Representative Vellmore.”

A year ago, Crawford would not have played this way. Starling searched his face for any of the short-timer craziness that sometimes comes over imminent retirees. She didn’t see any, but he did look weary.

“Mason’s not pretty, Starling, and I don’t just mean his face. Find out what he’s got. Bring it here, we’ll work with it. At last.”

Starling knew that for years, ever since she graduated from the FBI Academy, Crawford had tried to get her assigned to Behavioral Science.

Now that she was a veteran of the Bureau, veteran of many lateral assignments, she could see that her early triumph in catching the serial murderer Jame Gumb was part of her undoing in the Bureau. She was a rising star that stuck on the way up. In the process of catching Gumb, she had made at least one powerful enemy and excited the jealousy of a number of her male contemporaries. That, and a certain cross-grainedness, had led to years of jump-out squads, and reactive squads rolling on bank robberies and years of serving warrants, seeing Newark over a shotgun barrel. Finally, deemed too irascible to work with groups, she was a tech agent, bugging the telephones and cars of gangsters and child pornographers, keeping lonesome vigils over Title Three wiretaps. And she was forever on loan, when a sister agency needed a reliable hand in a raid. She had wiry strength and she was fast and careful with the gun.

Crawford saw this as a chance for her. He assumed she had always wanted to chase Lecter. The truth was more complicated than that.

Crawford was studying her now. “You never got that gunpowder out of your cheek.”

Grains of burnt powder from the revolver of the late Jame Gumb marked her cheekbone with a black spot.

“Never had time,” Starling said.

“Do you know what the French call a beauty spot, a mouche like that, high on the cheek? Do you know what it stands for?” Crawford owned a sizeable library on tattoos, body symbology, ritual mutilation.

Starling shook her head.

“They call that one ’courage,’” Crawford said. “You can wear that one. I’d keep it if I were you.”

CHAPTER

9

THERE IS a witchy beauty about Muskrat Farm, the Verger family’s mansion near the Susquehanna River in northern Maryland. The Verger meatpacking dynasty bought it in the 1930s when they moved east from Chicago to be closer to Washington, and they could well afford it. Business and political acumen has enabled the Vergers to batten on U.S. Army meat contracts since the Civil War.

The “embalmed beef” scandal in the Spanish-American War hardly touched the Vergers. When Upton Sinclair and the muckrakers investigated dangerous packing-plant conditions in Chicago, they found that several Verger employees had been rendered into lard inadvertently, canned and sold as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard, a favorite of bakers. The blame did not stick to the Vergers. The matter cost them not a single government contract.