“Alas, how terrible is wisdom
when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.”
― Oedipus Rex
Jack Crawford was going to save himself. He'd decided this in the interminable days following the probable death of Miriam Lass, in the spaces between the seconds, and the breaths between the crawling hours. And though he had not been entirely certain which hammer would fall first—the brass coming down on him hard for the risk he'd taken with a trainee, or definitive proof of the Chesapeake Ripper's culpability in the girl's disappearance—he knew with bedrock certainty that nothing would ever be the same again.
Crawford had recently gone from seeing the Ripper as an extremely clever criminal with an unoriginal media handle to seeing him as a personal adversary. He'd first noticed the change when, after three days of pacing around Quantico, barking peremptory orders, he'd overheard Zeller, Katz and Price snickering about “Crawford's white whale." You didn't have to actually read Melville's literary classic to know that the comparison to mad captain Ahab was not flattering, though Crawford had in fact read the book. He doubted that the lab geeks had, but the point had still been made.
So it was that Crawford realised with some angry amazement that he had acquired his very own personal nemesis, which lead him to wonder if the Ripper himself was even aware of Crawford's existence as an individual. In bed on the third night after Lass' disappearance, Crawford posed that very question to his wife, and was pleased when she reacted with her usual cool humour and grace.
“Certainly he must be aware of the man-hunt for him,” she pointed out. “He's too careful to be the other kind of crazy. But that's not what you really mean, is it?”
“No, that's not what I mean,” Crawford agreed, attracted as always to this woman's swift intelligence. “I mean, here I've been all but frothing at the mouth since Lass vanished, and this man, whoever he really is, might not even have a name or face to put to the guy leading the manhunt.”
“Why does it bother you?” she asked, watching him with lovely, dark eyes. “You don't have a face or name to put to him either.”
Crawford's chest rumbled with ironic laughter. He shook his head. “You're right.”
“But?” Bella prompted. She knew him so perfectly.
“But nothing. Just wondering which one of us is the head of the BAU and which one is a NATO translator.”
The dark eyes turned wry. “Don't give up your day job, Jack. Your Italian is good, but not that good.”
Crawford had laughed again to signal his agreement, and to drop the conversation. For a moment more after, he regarded his lovely wife--half black, half Italian, all American beauty—and then reached over to the bedside table to turn off the light. Bella snuggled up to him in the dark, affectionate and desirous, and Crawford responded gladly. Still in that moment before their lips met, he felt a chill across the back of his neck, and thought of unseen eyes following him; a face that he'd never seen and a name he'd never heard.
Exotic somehow, he remembered Lass saying, and suddenly hoped it was so. If he was going to have a nemesis, Crawford thought dryly, he could at least be something other than another sad, greasy white American psychopath with a sordid mess in his basement, so easily fit into a well-documented behavioural box.
With a hint of wonderment, Crawford realised that he wanted the Chesapeake Ripper to be beautiful.
The next day came, and the next one after that, and neither hammer fell. Crawford's own superiors seemed to be taking advantage of a lack of material proof to tacitly ignore the matter. As far as the official record was concerned, this was just a trainee going AWOL. If a body turned up, they would have to do something, but so far that hadn't happened. And while Crawford knew with every breath he took that the Ripper had found Lass (or Lass had found the Ripper), the continuing silence from the serial killer was convenient for everyone.
Crawford hated himself just a little for being a part of the culture of indifference, for the corruption, but taking the fall wouldn't help Lass, either. Nothing would help her now. Yet if it was too late for Miriam Lass, it was not, perhaps, too late for Special Agent Jack Crawford. He sensed the urgency of culpability, even if he knew that his unorthodox recruitment of a trainee would probably be applauded in certain quarters, those that admired his ruthless cunning.
It was that cunning that had won him his prestigious position despite the skin colour that was still a professional disadvantage, but while Jack admired his own capacity for ruthlessness when the situation called for it, he felt in this particular instance that he might well have been lazy. Was he losing his edge, Crawford wondered, settling too comfortably into encroaching middle age and letting other people do the hard work for him? "People" like a twenty-seven year old trainee who had had no practical experience with this kind of killer?
Lass's understanding of the danger that Crawford had sent her into could not have been much more than academic, and he'd known it, and still he had looked into that eager, ambitious face and given her the tacit carte-blanche to run into the arms of a murderer. Yet the rookiee had found it, whatever Crawford had missed, and he was ashamed to admit to himself that he was more frustrated by what she'd taken to her grave than that he'd sent her there.
Looking at the files on his desk, Crawford ground his teeth with the knowledge that he might be staring at the very thing that had lead the dead woman to that fatal encounter. Sitting in his office, staring at crime scene photographs, the FBI man thought of that old cop's superstition, the notion that a murder victim's eye could capture a portrait of the killer, a portrait the investigator might see if only he could look closely enough.
You couldn't, Crawford knew. He'd tried once, secretly, with the lab computer, and suspected he wasn't the only one, but how the thought tantalised: the frustration of what the dead knew, what he never could.
Anyway, he didn't even have a body to look at. These were the kind of morbidly romantic thoughts that Crawford sometimes had but never expressed to anyone outside of his wife, and only then when he was feeling particularly relaxed. He preferred to project an image of sophisticated practicality. It was an image that his bosses found reassuring, but however reliable the bureau might find Jack's worldly persona, such intelligent people had to be aware of its artificial nature. Working at the BAU required more than practicality or drive; it required imagination.
But being as that was a dirty word in the more militant quarters of the FBI, everyone in Crawford's department did their best to pretend to be as grounded in the earth as a SWAT team. Just like a woman cop pretending to be one of the boys. It didn't help much, Crawford thought, with a wry smile tugging on his mouth. Everyone still knew there were tits under that uniform, even if they did their best not to look at them.
But it must be all there in the files; Jack's mind swung back to the case: the paper files spread out on his mahogany desk, the luminous screen of the desk-top computer. All the evidence he needed to track the thing called the Chesapeake Ripper. If a trainee, no matter how driven and clever, had stumbled across him, then surely Crawford could too.
He just needed time.
“I'd know him if I saw him,” Crawford insisted to his wife the morning after their talk. “I'd know him if I looked into his eyes.”
Wrapped in a red robe, sitting at the kitchen table, Bella drank her espresso with an indulgent air.
“Hyperbole, Jack? I thought you were a man of science.”
Crawford smiled mechanically. “Everyone knows psychology isn't real science,” he quipped.
“That must be why you consult with so many psychiatrists.”
“I've found them to be more reliable,” Crawford agreed, allowing himself to be gently distracted.
He knew that Phyllis was probably right, apropos looking into the killer's eyes. There was no such thing as magic; he wouldn't suddenly be struck with a bolt of crime solving inspiration from the heavens. But that hidden, child-like part of him still believed it, and he thought that that was the part of Jack Marcus Crawford that had delivered to him his greatest victories—his advancements in the army; surviving Desert Storm; the posting to Livorno, Italy where he had met his Bella, and finally acceptance to the FBI and his meteoric rise through the ranks.
He supposed most people would call that primal part he relied on “instinct,” or “confidence,” but secretly Crawford did think of it as a kind of magic, a peculiar sorcery that he was able to summon in the hours of his greatest need. So he smiled at his beautiful woman and went to work with an old, creeping determination settling into his bones.
It felt like destiny, and that was when he knew that he was going to scour every inch of his mountain of apparently useless, superfluous and obscure information in the Ripper files. Everything that had already been looked at in triplicate, he was going to look at himself, alone, in every minute of free time that he had at work, and after hours, and before hours, and even at lunch, and he wasn't going to stop until he had harpooned his whale, until it lay dying on the dark sands at his feet.
Because when it came right down to it, Crawford wanted to see the Ripper laid out, and know that he'd done it himself.
As often turns out to the case, the dramatic vow boiled down to a lot of dull door to door and sleepless nights spent pondering all of the hesitant hummings and hawings from people who may have seen something suspicious, may have seen a shadowy and sinister figure lurking at the edges of society, etc. Crawford heard enough “I dunnos” and wild conspiracy theories to remind him ten times over just why he'd passed the buck, and the door-to-door, down the ranks, but he made promises so rarely that he wasn't inclined to break even one made to himself.
Over the course of the next three months, Jack tracked down every stale old lead, every doctor or med student who had
already been vetted and cleared, and re-interviewed all of them. Given the constraints of his schedule, those interviews were all made at strange hours, and Crawford thought that maybe it put these people off their guards just a bit, perhaps made them more honest then they might be in the middle of the day.
So it happened to be at seven-thirty in the morning on a Thursday that he stood in a doctors' break room at Johns Hopkins hospital, interviewing the man who had treated Jeremy Olmstead two-and-a-half years prior. Dr. Garfield Thomas was a big, burly surgeon who had oddly small, feminine looking hands. Or maybe they were just small compared to the rest of him, Crawford thought, feeling unusually small himself in comparison.
“An arrow wound?” Thomas repeated in his slow, ponderous voice. “I remember. Don't see that often enough to forget. Remember the FBI coming the first time around, too.”
“Do you remember anything suspicious? Who brought him in?”
The big surgeon looked pensive for a moment, as if debating with himself. Crawford was already tense when the man finally talked. “Dunno. I wasn't the first to treat him.”
“You weren't?”
“Don't you know?”
“No. There was a data malfunction in the hospital's computer records. That entire month was wiped.”
Crawford thought that was pretty convenient, but that sort of thing did happen independent of serial killers, and the hospital's software had been updated that week.
“Huh. Knew we shouldn't have gone digital,” the big doctor joked weakly. There were huge, dark circles under his eyes. According to the nurse who'd paged him, Thomas had just come out of an 18 hour shift in the ER.
“Do you happen to remember who saw him first?”
“Well, like I said, I wouldn't normally, but it was a memorable injury, and kind of a memorable night. Dr. Lecter saw him; I remember because he brought mini quiches for the staff that night, and he was talking about it when I took over. I remember the patient complaining and Lecter being a bit short about it. That man hated to be interrupted,” Thomas smiled, nodding his head with a sort of exasperated fondness. “But he sure could cook.”
This was all new information to Crawford, and he noticed the past tense with dread. “Is Dr. Lecter still here?”
“Nah. Left surgery a couple of years ago to become a shrink. Damn shame. He had the steadiest hands I've ever seen in an operating room--'cept mine, of course,” the surgeon added with a cheeky grin.
Crawford felt that he could have really liked this man if they had met in other circumstances, but as it was his smile was only politely encouraging. “From surgery to psychiatry? That's a big change. Did he go back to school to re-train?”
“No, sirree. He did a double speciality here at Johns Hopkins right after coming out of med school in France. Far as I know, he'd never practised head-shrinking in an office before, but he had published articles in the field going back twenty years. And a really great study about surgical addiction that draws on both of his specialities,” Thomas added with as much enthusiasm as a
sleepless man might muster.
“Surgical...are we talking about Doctor Hannibal Lecter?” Crawford asked with sudden recognition and amazement.
Garfield Thomas nodded briskly, looking away for a moment to pour himself a coffee from the staff-room pot.
“Yeah. You know him?”
“I know of him, but few who work in the psychological field haven't heard of him. I've never met him. You say
he saw Olmstead?”
Thomas snorted and sipped at his black coffee, which smelled like sludge and probably tasted the same.
“Barely more than a minute. He was head doctor in the ER that night, but everyone was busy, so Hannibal ended up examining the wound. He wasn't with the patient for more than five minutes, if that.”
“Why didn't he treat Olmstead himself?”
“He was still fresh that night, had only been in for an hour. I'm pretty sure I was near the end of eight and a car crash came in. I was supposed to work on it, but he offered to give me the lighter job.”
“Did he often do that sort of thing?”
Thomas chuckled dryly. “Not per se, but Hannibal's an odd bird. You could never really tell what he might do—other than feed everyone, of course.”
“Mm. I've heard he's been published in the culinary periodicals, too.”
“Cooks like a dream. If he'd been a lady, I'd have married him,” Doctor Thomas proclaimed boldly. He had the avid look of a man who had tasted the food of the gods and could never forget it.
Crawford chuckled dutifully, and wondered how much of it was a joke. Not many men remembered that much about a colleague after a few years' absence.
But it seemed the well of information had run dry after all. The burly surgeon couldn't remember much more about that fateful night, and nothing had seemed suspicious to him.
“Do you know where I could find Doctor Lecter now?” Crawford asked politely when they'd finished.
“He has a practice here in Baltimore, but I'm not sure about the address. He'll be in the book. Or on the internet, I suppose. I haven't actually seen a real paper phone book for a few years now.”
“I'm sure I'll find him. Thank you for your time, Doctor Thomas. You've been very helpful.”
“No trouble at all. Tell Hannibal I said 'hi' when you see him.”
The head of the BAU politely took his leave and hurried back to his car, pondering what he'd learned. Thomas had been questioned before, of course, but not extensively. He'd had airtight alibis for most of the Ripper murders, including Olmstead, having been trapped in operating rooms in clear view of about a dozen people all but once. As soon as it had been established that he couldn't possibly be the Ripper himself, he'd only been lightly interrogated about the night Olmstead was brought in.
The problem with FBI agents, Crawford thought, was that either they were completely desensitised, or they weren't desensitised enough. He knew the slack Thomas had been given the first time around had probably been a kind of apology for exposing him to the brutality of the case after he'd been ruled out as a suspect, but Crawford wondered why Hannibal Lecter's name had never come up before. Doctor Thomas not wanting to risk getting his little crush in trouble, but not thinking much of it now after so much time had passed? It seemed likely enough.
Jack Crawford put on his driving gloves and started the engine of his car. He itched to look up Lecter's practice immediately, as if the famous psychiatrist might vanish from the earth if he waited only one day more, but it was already eight-thirty in the morning, and Crawford would end up late for work if he tried to squeeze in another interview.
Tomorrow would do just as well as today.
That night, Jack Crawford dreamed.
In the dream he was sitting at his desk in Quantico, writing on a creamy white pad of paper with a Montblanc pen. The Jack in the dream knew what he was writing, but the Jack observing the dream did not, and so he was left with the fractured sensation of near-lucidity, a state that almost, but not quite, achieved autonomous awareness.
The door to the office was open, and Jack looked up every few seconds, waiting for someone to materialise in the never-ending darkness of the hallway. No one ever did, and Jack began to feel afraid that not all was as it should be. This fear was not distant or vague, but had the sharp immediacy of a nightmare.
The telephone rang, but it was not the efficient chirp of his pocket cellular. The sonorous, grating tone bloomed at an insane volume, and Jack recognised the almost-forgotten sound of a heavy rotary telephone. Although the sound had been a near-constant accompaniment to the first twenty-five years or so of his life, he'd forgotten just how piercing the it could be, how impossible it was to ignore.
Jack looked for the phone, but there wasn't one. He searched the desk drawers and his pockets like he would when looking for his cell, until he realised that, in the way of dreams, the phone was suddenly on the little table in the back corner of the office. Distressed, Jack noticed that he wouldn't be able to sit and talk at the same time unless he moved his chair. He felt reluctant to do so for reasons that were vaguely attached to the open office door and the protection the desk afforded against it, but the only other option was to hunch in the corner and stand.
While Jack waged his internal debate, the sound of the telephone grew steadily louder and angrier, until he finally broke,
left the desk, and ran over to the little table.
“Hello?” Jack asked in a small voice that he barely recognised as his own.
Dead air. Jack swallowed heavily. He watched the blackness outside of the open door with unease, and shifted on his feet, like a little boy who desperately needed to pee and knew that he would not make it to the bathroom in time.
Still he held the receiver in his hand. Someone would answer, he knew.
A crack of static peeled across his ears, and then, like a hollow god, came the voice:
“Hello, Jack.”
Special Agent Jack Crawford woke up gasping for breath, his heart trembling in the bone cage of his chest. His back and sides dripped with sweat, and his navy blue pyjama top stuck to his skin even after he rolled out of bed and stumbled into the ensuite. There he leaned over the porcelain bowl of the toilet, staring into its implacable eye for a long time until he was sure he wouldn't vomit.
Crawford remembered almost the entire dream. He wasn't sure why it had been so terrible, why his hand was shaking as he opened the tap to the bathroom sink. That voice on the other end of the line... he didn't know the tone of it, the timbre, age or accent. He longed to recall it, and thought irrationally that if he could that he would truly know the voice of the
Chesapeake Ripper.
“Hyperbole, Jack?” Bella's voice echoed archly in memory.
The logical part of Crawford's mind informed him that it didn't matter, that whatever the voice had sounded like, it was only what his sleeping brain had invented, that it had nothing at all to do with the reality of the killer. Yet knowing such a truth didn't help much; Crawford still felt the ache of want, perhaps more terribly desired for its very irrationality.
Head soaked with cool water, he stumbled back to bed, where he lay a heavy arm across the side of the mattress usually occupied by his wife. His Bella was away, working, and Crawford felt her absence like a missing tooth; something he couldn't help poking at. Not for the first time he wondered if they should have had children. But they had both always been so busy. Two
professional people with so many heavy responsibilities—there was never enough time...
Dwelling on that, Crawford fell back to sleep. If there had been another person in the room to observe him, they would have seen sadness written in the clench of his jaw and eyelids, and time in the lines on his face.
But there was no one there.
No one liked to be “dropped in on” by the FBI on a Friday night, but then Crawford didn't much like doing the dropping. In an ideal world, he'd much prefer to be at home catching up on academic journals or watching Law and Order re-runs (he liked the original better than the spin-offs, although SVU wasn't bad), so he figured that he and Lecter were just about even.
The Baltimore psychiatrist had rented the entirety of a downtown office complex. The building looked 19th century, was located next to a Catholic church of the same period, and sported an elaborate front facade. Crawford immediately wondered how much Lecter must be pulling in to afford it, but knew it wasn't his business until someone made it his business. So he turned off all but the most apropos sliver of his curiosity and went inside. As he passed through the door, Jack felt the warmth of the late summer sun setting at his back, setting the gold-brick building on fire.
He almost stumbled back out again as his forward trajectory intercepted a tall, strikingly well-dressed man. Like a well-oiled machine, Crawford automatically sized him up: white but tanned, blond, slim, about 6'1, mid-forties, with a finely drawn, very European sort of face. This was not the sort of man who would be easily confused with another or lost in a line-up, especially if he dressed so characteristically on a daily basis.
“Sorry. I'm looking for Doctor Lecter. Do you know if he's still in?”
“Not as such. I was just leaving for the night.” The doctor's accent was just as memorable, even if Crawford couldn't quite place it. The voice itself was musically raspy, a smoker's tenor. A quick glance at capable-looking hands revealed no tell-tale yellow stains.
“Ah, Doctor Lecter. I'm Jack Crawford, with the FBI. I was wondering if I might have a quick word.”
A certain stillness had come over Lecter when he named the FBI, or perhaps before, when he said his name, a wariness that wasn't entirely surprising. Even generally law-abiding people turned careful when the Feds knocked on their doors. It was a wariness that Crawford had often used to his advantage.
“What's this regarding?” Lecter asked. His eyes flicked for just a moment to the door, still open behind Crawford, and then back to the agent's face.
“A few questions regarding an incident that took place when you were still a practising surgeon.”
“Oh?” A smooth-as-silk rasp to the voice. “What incident is that?”
“You briefly treated a man for an arrow wound. His name was Jeremy Olmstead. I need to know what you might remember about that night.”
Lecter frowned. "Was this man involved in some crime?”
“Yes, as a victim. He was murdered some time ago by the serial killer known as the Chesapeake Ripper.”
Lecter's almost invisibly blond eyebrows lifted with restrained surprise.
“I'm sorry to hear that. I don't imagine it was an easy way to go.”
Crawford heard his own voice dry out with subdued irony. “No, probably not. Do you mind if I step in, Doctor Lecter?”
The psychiatrist hesitated, throwing another glance at the open door, and then inside, towards the darkened stairwell that presumably lead to his workplace. “In fact, Agent Crawford, I have a better idea. I don't recall much, but I kept detailed journals during my time as a surgeon. They might reveal something useful, but I store them at my home. Why don't you follow me there and I'll see what I can dig up?”
It was an unexpectedly generous offer considering the initial hesitation, but then Lecter was a professional, not to mention a former trauma surgeon. Crawford assumed he'd recover quickly from most shocks.
Assuming makes an ass of you and me. Like a Pavlovian response, he couldn't help remembering the asinine aphorism so righteously quoted by his forensics professor during his academy years. Crawford wasn't quite middle-aged enough to start quoting it at people himself, thank God, but suspected it was only a matter of time.
“After you, Doctor.”
Crawford accepted with a wave of his hand towards the door, and Lecter smiled with near-palpable charm. The tiny wrinkles around his eyes impossibly enhanced the kind of good looks that Crawford could only dream about having, if only on those long nights when his guard slipped and he was forced to admit to himself that he had yet to conquer his vanity.
Lecter also drove a Bentley, a sleek and elegant echo of himself, but car envy was not a disease that Crawford suffered from (he could have afforded one if he wanted, which he didn't), and so the special agent was able to follow without further internal complaint.
The doctor lead with a kind of effortless precision that suggested an always-efficient driver, rather than one just putting on a show for the law-man. It fit perfectly with what Crawford had seen of the psychiatrist, and already his mind was drawing up a profile of this memorable individual. Lecter was precise, cautious, efficient and self-disciplined, but there were hints of eccentricity there, too. A flamboyant dresser within the bounds of professionalism, with a taste for the finer things in life, he was also a foreigner, with an immigrant's habits, more difficult to categorise than the transparent natural-born citizen.
And those careful manners, the restraint apparent in every gesture, so different. Exotic, almost, like the man's name. Crawford frowned. There was something nagging at him, something strange, but the setting sun was a distracting, bloody splash across the sky and his windshield. He squinted against the glare and followed as best he could when Lecter slowed down to pull into a very upper-class neighbourhood. The house he stopped at was just as aesthetically well-appointed as the office, and there was no front parking to disturb its flawless facade. The driveway lead to the side and a bit in back, skillfully concealed from the view of passers-by.
Lecter smiled demurely at Crawford when he stepped out of his car. Keys in hand, the doctor lead the FBI man to the side-door, unlocking with that same precision, a firm near-delicacy. He waved Crawford in before him.
“Please come in.”
There was always a thrill of uncertainty upon stepping into someone else's house, into their private sanctuary where they knew all the rules, where all the false steps might be made; where all the knives were found. The homes Crawford most often penetrated belonged to largely harmless citizens—no training; easily overcome even in the heart of their lairs. But it still paid to be cautious, and Jack kept an eye on his host in the glass of the sidedoor. Strangely, he met Lecter's eyes there, saw the doctor seeing himself being watched, and felt, for the first time, a true flash of unease.
The door closed behind him with a soft click, and Crawford wheeled about just in time to see the psychiatrist toeing off his
shoes.
Lecter curled his feet into the thick rug next to the door with frank enjoyment. “Can I take your coat, Agent?”
“Of course,” Crawford answered. He was uncertain why his instincts had come online so strongly in that moment, and thought it a little odd. He resolved to be careful, but saw no real reason to be worried. Lecter had so far been beyond civil.
“Do you care for a drink, or maybe a coffee? Of course I'd invite you to dinner, but I'm not sure you're allowed to. It's against protocol, yes?”
The last word was an absent minded particle, a foreign addition that would have seemed pretentious with that perfectly mastered English, if it weren't for the accent that Crawford still couldn't pinpoint. There was something eastern in the consonants, and almost French in the vowels, though that was perhaps only assumption, because Crawford knew the doctor had naturalised French before settling in America. It was in Lecter's paper trail, easy enough to find, but his country of origin was strangely missing. Bad bureaucracy, perhaps, but even without the paperwork it was easy enough to hear learned American syntax in the pacing. The largely casual speech was a surprise coming from a man with such formal presentation.
Crawford had done his best to absorb the surprise without betraying it, knowing all too well the incredulity he'd so often encountered himself. People always blinked and only then tried to hide that they hadn't been expecting unaccented,
Standard American English from a black man. Foolish to assume, of course; Jack Crawford hadn't grown up in any kind of ghetto, and nobody made it to the upper echelons of Quantico sounding like Will Smith circa 1991.
He still wished Lecter hadn't mentioned food, and couldn't keep that particular regret off his face.
“I'm sorry to say that you're right—and I really am sorry. I've heard all kinds of wonderful things about your cooking.”
“Oh?” The doctor was already heading to the kitchen. Crawford followed him into a stainless steel fortress, ultra-modern fixtures gleaming everywhere. It reminded him keenly of an operating theatre. Some habits die hard.
“Mostly in your bios, of course, but most recently from an old colleague of yours, a Doctor Garfield Thomas. I talked to him yesterday. He sends his regards—to you and to your cooking,” Crawford added, testing the waters of conviviality with a small joke.
It took, and Lecter chuckled. His hands were moving deftly on some kind of elaborate glass and chrome mechanism that Crawford thought might be a distant cousin to the coffee machine.
“Yes, of course. I remember him. Not many would forget,” he said, looking up to catch the FBI man's eyes mischievously. He seemed to be inviting Crawford to continue the joke, which the profiler did with an obliging chuckle.
“You really don't have to make coffee, Doctor,” Crawford added sincerely. He had no real desire to put the man to any more trouble than procedure already demanded.
“It's no trouble at all, Agent Crawford. I'll get you a cup, and go look for that journal.”
The doctor did just as he said, setting coffee in a tall, glass mug down in front of Crawford. The glossy liquid inside smelled amazing, and Crawford didn't bother with the cream and sugar sitting on the small silver service tray next to it.
“Mmm,” he murmured after taking a sip. “Black as night. Perfect.”
Lecter offered him a pleased smile and used the dish-towel in his right hand to wipe away some imaginary grains on his left. Afterwards, he folded the patterned material into thirds that looked as careful as his smile.
“I'll go look for that journal now. You can take your coffee into the den while you're waiting.”
The psychiatrist lead him out before Crawford could refuse, through the enormous dining room with its long formal table, and into the living room. Lecter ushered Crawford and his coffee over to the elegant sofa and put a brown leather coaster down onto a gleaming, glass-and-chrome coffee table.
When he left Jack alone there, Lecter's retreating footsteps were utterly silent.
Once the psychiatrist left the living room, Crawford fell to examining the decor. It was overwhelmingly masculine and undeniably elegant, all dark shades and rich colours, interspersed with the occasional oddity like a deer statue or a fragile little string of animal skulls. The authentic-looking samurai sword hanging on the wall was quite striking, too.
There wasn't much room for ornamentation beyond that, because three of the four walls were filled with massive bookshelves made from obscene quantities of rich cherry wood. The shelves reached almost to the ceiling and seemed to groan under the weight of their contents. Crawford wondered if the man might have switched from surgery to psychiatry just so that he'd have more time to read.
The lure of insight was too seductive, and Crawford took his coffee over to the shelves. He was eager to take a peek into the mind of the intriguing doctor through his boldly displayed collection of interests. You could tell a great deal about a man from what he read.
There were professional journals, of course, and a good number of titles in languages Crawford wasn't too familiar with, including what looked to be Russian. He'd entered the Bureau after '91, and his superiors hadn't required him to demonstrate more than a cursory smattering of the lingua franca of the former Soviet Union, all of which he'd since forgotten.
These days, of course, emphasis was placed on knowing Arabic, and Crawford had taken an intensive course for federal workers and armed forces. He could muddle his way through most mid-level texts, although the lack of written vowels still threw him off. But there was plenty of French and Italian on Lecter's handsome shelves, and Crawford knew both well—army souvenirs, of course, and plenty of practice with Bella in Italian even now.
Dante featured prominently in Lecter's esteem by the look of it, with the original texts in mediaeval Florentine, and a whole shelf of related historical annotation and literary analysis next to them. Lots of arts history, and music, too, some in German, and then there was a whole section of books written with a version of the Latin alphabet that was heavily loaded with diacritics. It looked very Eastern European, but Crawford couldn't narrow it down beyond that. Lecter's native language?
Pensively, Crawford's eyes flickered downwards, and were drawn to the closest English-language title. The agent's thick, weathered fingers drew out the slim yellow trade paperback. Only the editor's name and the publisher marked the spine. Crawford flipped it over. Anonymous Elizabethan Verse, the cover read in a large, Gothic font.
The pages fell open to a well-worn crease in the binding, and Crawford automatically read the revealed poetry, his eyes operating on autopilot to deliver the book's message to his brain.
Fragment, c.1600
This certaine vision hostages my sleepe:
I stirr not in my bed, but in the earth,
There weep to hear the voice of God: dread mirth,
Slow melodie, black rumble in the deepe.
Now when I begg it ceasse, I am alone,
Save wet societie of breathless thyngs
Whose names were never breath'd by any tongue,
Welle they consume the meat of lip and lung
To render mute all fleshe that speaks and sings,
And make within their bones a hollow home.
The verse went on in the same vein for another two, identically arranged stanzas, and then abruptly stopped two lines into the third stanza, as though the anonymous poet had simply put down their pen and passed into an anonymous eternity. When Crawford finished reading, he firmly closed the book and and leaned down to shove it back into the treacherous little slot that had yielded it.
He felt discontented, annoyed, having unconsciously expected lighter fare. As if he weren't already working unpaid overtime, now he was left with the nagging sensation of having opened someone else's case file.
Straightening back up, Crawford saw the briefest flash in the polished, dark wood of the bookshelf. He turned instinctively to look and felt something pinch his throat. Instantly disoriented, Crawford stumbled and fumbled at his neck, trying to dislodge the needle. He was already too weak to manage; Lecter's strong, steady hand firmly clasped Crawford's and stopped it.
The head of Behavioural Sciences saw the doctor's eerily curious expression fixed raptly on him in the last moment before Crawford fell to the ground.
The first thing that Section Chief Jack Crawford noticed upon waking was the sound of his own sleep-talking, mumbling his response to a forgotten nightmare. The second was that opening his eyes didn't make it any less dark. The third thing, a second later, was the bitter return of memory.
Lecter.
Goddammit, I don't know what hole I'm in, but I know I deserve to be here, Crawford conceded to himself. He was at least strong enough to face the ugly logic, the rational consequence of ignoring the instincts that had always served him so well.
Crawford knew that he wasn't any sort of Will Graham, but you didn't need to be a psychiatrist's wet dream to know when something was off. Lecter had plucked at him from the start, but Crawford had been star-struck; had ignored even the most basic recognition of a predator watching him in the treacherous glass of the side door.
So let's finally apply some logic here, Crawford thought grimly. He shifted around in the damp, limited confines of the dark. I came asking questions about Olmstead, about a Ripper victim, and Lecter contrived to get me into his home straight off. He even manages to conceal most of my car so that he can easily drive it off after dark, and no one could say if it was me or him. Now if Lecter was your garden variety weirdo, looking to get his jollies abducting strangers, he could have picked a far less visible target.
And to be honest, his behaviour had been just slightly of from the get-go. Not too much, and not too obviously, but there had been little things. Things I would have noticed in most people. He watched the outside door to his office so closely...
It had been open the whole time, and Crawford knew with sudden, ice cold certainty that if he'd come inside, shut the door from the first, he never would have walked out. But instead Lecter had invited him home. For whatever reason, he'd decided not to do it at the office, had not killed him there.
Why?
Too obvious? Too hard to clean up in the centre of town? Whatever it was, Jack had followed the same trail that Miriam Lass had, and with the same result. He'd found the Chesapeake Ripper, and Doctor Hannibal Lecter had not disappointed Crawford's darkest dreams. Not for him the too-typical practices of the demented, working class predator, holed up with their violent pornography and filthy bolt-holes.
The drifters and the con artists were too good for me, Crawford sneered at himself.
Certainly Lecter was everything a tired lawman might hope for in a real-life criminal mastermind: elegant, aristocratic and absurdly accomplished, with the brilliant Machiavellian mind of a Renaissance prince.
And there in the dark, groping at the rough, circular walls of what was almost certainly a deep well, Crawford thought of the Monster of Florence. The BAU had consulted with the Italian police in the seventies and eighties, at the height of the Italian serial killer's reign of terror. Long before Crawford's own time, of course, but he'd read all about it in the archives; heard about it from the old-timers. The history of Il Mostro was a classic case of bureaucratic corruption paired with a wildly unrealistic, home-grown profile predicated almost entirely on wishful thinking.
Il Mostro had killed lovers, callously shooting young couples while they made out in parked cars. After he'd gunned them down, the killer had taken surgical trophies, carving out the external female genitalia. Eventually the local and military Italian police had taken the step of contacting the famed American Behavioural Analysis Unit, hoping for a miracle as the killer's reign of terror had stretched on.
Experts at the BAU had provided a grim and unromantic picture of the killer: average intelligence, working class, misogynist, certainly suffering from impotence issues, and almost certainly uneducated. The profile was solid, and coupled with the existing pool of suspects may well have lead to a swift arrest. Yet to the amazement of the American authorities, their work had been almost entirely ignored, even willfully buried by their Italian counterparts. What the FBI had not entirely understood was that the harried Italian police had been bowing to the expectations of a passionate Florentine public.
Somehow, the people had got it into their collective heads that Monster of Florence, their gruesome homegrown serial killer, was some kind of gentleman Death—a refined man; a man of danger and mystery; even, perhaps, a prince! Eventually the public had more or less settled on the killer being a doctor, if for no particular reason other than the surgical imagery evoked by the removal of organs, and the dark, delicious irony of a trained healer so wantonly destroying life.
Professional examination of the women had revealed that the serial killer was certainly no kind of surgeon, and yet hysteria had swept the Florentine medical community all the same, with almost every male medical professional in the city and surrounding countryside having been questioned at one point or another. Meanwhile, even with compelling circumstantial evidence suggesting a connection to low-class Sardinian criminals, the public and the police had clung tenaciously to the almost Byronic, aristocratic fantasy, as if, by sheer force of wanting, they might make it true.
And now here he was, Crawford thought. He slumped back in the bottom of the well, exhausted by his brief and disorienting effort to scale it. Wanting so much to believe in Lecter's charm, he had found himself caught in the clutches of a true Gentleman Death, a sadist and killer who could surpass even the most impossible literary fantasy.
Jack Crawford had found his Ripper, and now he would have to live with him.