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“There’s a reason somebody’s monitoring your mail. They got a court order and it’s someplace under seal. We’re not staked out yet—we’d have spotted it,” Ardelia said. “I wouldn’t put it past those sons of bitches to know he’s coming and not tell you. You watch out tomorrow.”

“Mr. Crawford would have told us. They can’t mount much against Lecter without bringing Mr. Crawford in on it.”

“Jack Crawford is history, Starling. You’ve got a blind spot there. What if they mount something against you?. For having a wise mouth, for not letting Krendler get in your pants? What if somebody wants to trash you? Hey, I’m serious about covering my source now.”

“Is there something we can do for your post office buddy? Do we need to do something?”

“Who do you think is coming to dinner?”

“All right Ardelia! … Wait a minute, I thought I was coming to dinner.”

“You can take some home with you.”

“I ’preciate it.”

“No trouble, girl. My pleasure, in fact.”

CHAPTER

47

WHEN STARLING was a child she moved from a clapboard house that groaned in the wind to the solid redbrick of the Lutheran Orphanage.

The most ramshackle family dwelling of her early childhood had had a warm kitchen where she could share an orange with her father. But death knows where the little houses are, where people live who do dangerous work for not much money. Her father rode away from this house in his old pickup truck on the night patrol that killed him.

Starling rode away from her foster home on a slaughter horse while they were killing the lambs, and she found a kind of refuge in the Lutheran Orphanage. Institutional structures, big and solid, made her feel safe ever since. The Lutherans might have been short on warmth and oranges and long on Jesus, but the rules were the rules and if you understood them you were okay.

As long as impersonal competitive testing was the challenge, or doing the job on the street, she knew she could make her place secure. But Starling had no gift for institutional politics.

Now, as she got out of her old Mustang at the beginning of the day, the high façades of Quantico were no more the great brick bosom of her refuge. Through the crazed air over the parking lot, the very entrances looked crooked.

She wanted to see Jack Crawford, but there was no time. Filming at Hogan’s Alley began as soon as the sun was well up.

The investigation of the Feliciana Fish Market Massacre required filmed reenactments made on the Hogan’s Alley shooting range at Quantico, with every shot, eve

ry trajectory, accounted for.

Starling had to perform her part. The undercover van they used was the original one with body putty, unpainted, plugging the latest bullet holes. Again and again they piled out of the old van, over and over the agent playing John Brigham went down on his face and the one playing Burke writhed on the ground. The process, using noisy blank ammunition, left her wrung out.

They finished in midafternoon.

Starling hung up her SWAT gear and found Jack Crawford in his office.

She was back to addressing him as Mr. Crawford now, and he seemed increasingly vague and distant from everyone.

“Want an Alka-Seltzer, Starling?” he said when he saw her in his office door. Crawford took a number of patent medicines in the course of the day. He was also taking Ginkgo Biloba, Saw Palmetto, St. John’s Wort and baby aspirin. He took them in a certain order from his palm, his head going back as though he were taking a shot of liquor.

In recent weeks, he had started hanging up his suit coat in the office and putting on a sweater his late wife, Bella, had knitted for him. He looked much older now than any memory she had of her own father.

“Mr. Crawford, some of my mail is being opened. They’re not very good at it. Looks like they’re steaming the glue with a teapot.”

“You’ve had mail surveillance since Lecter wrote to you.”

“They just fluoroscoped packages. That was fine, but I can read my own personal mail. Nobody’s said anything to me.”

“It’s not our OPR doing it.”

“It’s not Deputy Dawg either, Mr. Crawford—it’s somebody big enough to get a Title Three intercept warrant under seal.”