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“The government say. Mama has lost her job and her approval as a foster home. The police found a marijuana cigarette in your house. You can’t see Mama anymore after this week. You can’t see Shirley anymore or Kitty Cat after this week.”

“No,” Franklin said.

“Or maybe they just don’t want you anymore, Franklin. Is there something wrong with you? Do you have a sore on you or something nasty? Do you think your skin is too dark for them to love you?”

Franklin pulled up his shirt and looked at his small brown stomach. He shook his head. He was crying.

“Do you know what will happen to Kitty Cat? What is Kitty Cat’s name?”

“She call Kitty Cat, that her name.”

“Do you know what will happen to Kitty Cat? The policemen will take Kitty Cat to the pound and a doctor there will give her a shot. Did you get a shot at day care? Did the nurse give you a shot? With a shiny needle? They’ll give Kitty Cat a shot. She’ll be so scared when she sees the needle. They’ll stick it in and Kitty Cat will hurt and die.”

Franklin caught the tail of his shirt and held it up beside his face. He put his thumb in his mouth, something he had not done for a year after Mama asked him not to.

“Come here,” said the voice from the dark. “Come here and I’ll tell you how you can keep Kitty Cat from getting a shot. Do you want Kitty Cat to have the shot, Franklin? No? Then come here, Franklin.”’

Franklin, eyes streaming, sucking his thumb, walked slowly forward into the dark. When he was within six feet of the bed, Mason blew into his harmonica and the lights came on.

From innate courage, or his wish to help Kitty Cat, or his wretched knowledge that he had no place to run to anymore, Franklin did not flinch. He did not run. He held his ground and looked at Mason’s face.

Mason’s brow would have furrowed if he had a brow, at this disappointing result.

“You can save Kitty Cat from getting the shot if you give Kitty Cat some rat poison yourself,” Mason said. The plosive p was lost, but Franklin understood.

Franklin took his thumb out of his mouth.

“You a mean old doo-doo,” Franklin said. “An you ugly too.” He turned around and walked out of the chamber, through the hall of coiled hoses, back to the playroom.

Mason watched him on video.

The nurse looked at the boy, watched him closely while pretending to read his Vogue.

Franklin did not care about the toys anymore. He went over and sat under the giraffe, facing the wall. It was all he could do not to suck his thumb.

Cordell watched him carefully for tears. When he saw the child’s shoulders shaking, the nurse went to him and wiped the tears away gently with sterile swatches. He put the wet swatches in Mason’s martini glass, chilling in the playroom’s refrigerator beside the orange juice and the Cokes.

CHAPTER

10

FINDING MEDICAL information about Dr. Hannibal Lecter was not easy. When you consider his utter contempt for the medical establishment and for most medical practitioners, it is not surprising that he never had a personal physician.

The Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Dr. Lecter was kept until his disastrous transfer to Memphis, was now defunct, a derelict building awaiting demolition.

The Tennessee State Police were the last custodians of Dr. Lecter before his escape, but they claimed they never received his medical records. The officers who brought him from Baltimore to Memphis, now deceased, had signed for the prisoner, not for any medical records.

Starling spent a day on the telephone and the computer, then physically searched the evidence storage rooms at Quantico and the J. Edgar Hoover Building. She climbed around the dusty and malodorous bulky evidence room of the Baltimore Police Department for an entire morning, and spent a maddening afternoon dealing with the uncatalogued Hannibal Lecter Collection at the Fitzhugh Memorial Law Library, where time stands still while the custodians try to locate the keys.

At the end, she was left with a single sheet of paper— the cursory physical examination Dr. Lecter received when he was first arrested by the Maryland State Police. No medical history was attached.

Inelle Corey had survived the demise of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and gone on to better things at the Maryland State Board of Hospitals. She did not want to be interviewed by Starling in the office, so they met in a ground-floor cafeteria.

Starling’s practice was to arrive early for meetings and observe the specific meeting point from a distance. Corey was punctual to the minute. She was about thirty-five years old, heavy and pale, without makeup or jewelry. Her hair was almost to her waist, as she had worn it in high school, and she wore white sandals with Supp-Hose.

Starling collected sugar packets at the condiment stand and watched Corey seat herself at the agreed table.

You may labor under the misconception that all Protestants look alike. Not so. Just as one Caribbean person can often tell the specific island of another, Starling, raised by the Lutherans, looked at this woman and said to herself, Church of Christ, maybe a Nazarene at the outside.