Page 23

“All right.”

“He killed nine people, didn’t he, in all?”

“Nine that we know of. Two others didn’t die.”

“What happened to them?”

“One is on a respirator at a hospital in Baltimore. The other is in a private mental hospital in Denver.”

“What made him do it, how was he crazy?”

Graham looked out the car window at the people on the sidewalk. His voice sounded detached, as though he were dictating a letter.

“He did it because he liked it. Still does. Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some hideous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfectly when he wants to.”

“What did the psychologists call it—what was wrong with him?”

“They say he’s a sociopath, because they don’t know what else to call him. He has some of the characteristics of what they call a sociopath. He has no remorse or guilt at all. And he had the first and worst sign—sadism to animals as a child.”

Springfield grunted.

“But he doesn’t have any of the other marks,” Graham said. “He wasn’t a drifter, he had no history of trouble with the law. He wasn’t shallow and exploitive in small things, like most sociopaths are. He’s not insensitive. They don’t know what to call him. His electroencephalograms show some odd patterns, but they haven’t been able to tell much from them.”

“What would you call him?” Springfield asked.

Graham hesitated.

“Just to yourself, what do you call him

?”

“He’s a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don’t put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.”

“A couple of friends of mine in the chiefs’ association are from Baltimore. I asked them how you spotted Lecter. They said they didn’t know. How did you do it? What was the first indication, the first thing you felt?”

“It was a coincidence,” Graham said. “The sixth victim was killed in his workshop. He had woodworking equipment and he kept his hunting stuff out there. He was laced to a pegboard where the tools hung, and he was really torn up, cut and stabbed, and he had arrows in him. The wounds reminded me of something. I couldn’t think what it was.”

“And you had to go on to the next ones.”

“Yes. Lecter was very hot—he did the next three in nine days. But this sixth one, he had two old scars on his thigh. The pathologist checked with the local hospital and found he had fallen out of a tree blind five years before while he was bow hunting and stuck an arrow through his leg.

“The doctor of record was a resident surgeon, but Lecter had treated him first—he was on duty in the emergency room. His name was on the admissions log. It had been a long time since the accident, but I thought Lecter might remember if anything had seemed fishy about the arrow wound, so I went to his office to see him. We were grabbing at anything then.

“He was practicing psychiatry by that time. He had a nice office. Antiques. He said he didn’t remember much about the arrow wound, that one of the victim’s hunting buddies had brought him in, and that was it.

“Something bothered me, though. I thought it was something Lecter said, or something in the office. Crawford and I hashed it over. We checked the files, and Lecter had no record. I wanted some time in his office by myself, but we couldn’t get a warrant. We had nothing to show. So I went back to see him.

“It was Sunday, he saw patients on Sunday. The building was empty except for a couple of people in his waiting room. He saw me right away. We were talking and he was making this polite effort to help me and I looked up at some very old medical books on the shelf above his head. And I knew it was him.

“When I looked at him again, maybe my face changed, I don’t know. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I still couldn’t think of the reason, though. I didn’t trust it. I had to figure it out. So I mumbled something and got out of there, into the hall. There was a pay phone in the hall. I didn’t want to stir him up until I had some help. I was talking to the police switchboard when he came out a service door behind me in his socks. I never heard him coming. I felt his breath was all, and then . . . there was the rest of it.”

“How did you know, though?”

“I think it was maybe a week later in the hospital I finally figured it out. It was Wound Man—an illustration they used in a lot of the early medical books like the ones Lecter had. It shows different kinds of battle injuries, all in one figure. I had seen it in a survey course a pathologist was teaching at GWU. This sixth victim’s position and his injuries were a close match to Wound Man.”

“Wound Man, you say? That’s all you had?”

“Well, yeah. It was a coincidence that I had seen it. A piece of luck.”