Page 79

“I see. May I ask how long you intend to keep them?”

“That depends on your attitude.”

“Is this your decision?”

“I decide the punitive measures here.”

“Of course you do. It’s not the sort of thing Will Graham would request.”

“Back up to the net and slip these on, Dr. Lecter. I won’t ask you twice.”

“Certainly, Dr. Chilton. I hope that’s a thirty-nine—the thirty-sevens are snug around the chest.”

Dr. Lecter put on the restraints as though they were dinner clothes. An orderly reached through the barrier and fastened them from the back.

“Help him to his cot,” Chilton said.

While the orderlies stripped the bookshelves, Chilton polished his glasses and stirred Lecter’s personal papers with a pen.

Lecter watched from the shadowed corner of his cell. There was a curious grace about him, even in restraints.

“Beneath the yellow folder,” Lecter said quietly, “you’ll find a rejection slip the Archives sent you. It was brought to me by mistake with some of my Archives mail, and I’m afraid I opened it without looking at the envelope. Sorry.”

Chilton reddened. He spoke to an orderly. “I think you’d better take the seat off Dr. Lecter’s toilet.”

Chilton looked at the actuarial table. Lecter had written his age at the top: forty-one. “And what do you have here?” Chilton asked.

“Time,” Dr. Lecter said.

Section Chief Brian Zeller took the courier’s case and the wheelchair wheels into Instrumental Analysis, walking at a rate that made his gabardine pants whistle.

The staff, held over from the day shift, knew that whistling sound very well: Zeller in a hurry.

There had been enough delays. The weary courier, his flight from Chicago delayed by weather and then diverted to Philadelphia, had rented a car and driven down to the FBI laboratory in Washington.

The Chicago police laboratory is efficient, but there are things it is not equipped to do. Zeller prepared to do them now.

At the mass spectrometer he dropped off the paint flecks from Lounds’s car door.

Beverly Katz in Hair and Fiber got the wheels to share with others in the section.

Zeller’s last stop was the small hot room where Liza Lake bent over her gas chromatograph. She was testing ashes from a Florida arson case, watching the stylus trace its spiky line on the moving graph.

“Ace lighter fluid,” she said. “That’s what he lit it with.” She had looked at so many samples that she could distinguish brands without searching through the manual.

Zeller took his eyes off Liza Lake and rebuked himself severely for feeling pleasure in the office. He cleared his throat and held up the two shiny paint cans.

“Chicago?” she said.

Zeller nodded.

She checked the condition of the cans and the seal of the lids. One can contained ashes from the wheelchair; the other, charred material from Lounds.

“How long has it been in the cans?”

“Six hours anyway,” Zeller said.

“I’ll headspace it.”