Thomas Harris - The Silence of the Lambs

"This insect was found lodged behind the soft palate of a murder victim. I don't know how it got there. Her body was in the Elk River in West Virginia, and she hadn't been dead more than a few days."

"It's Buffalo Bill, I heard it on the radio," Roden said.

"You didn't hear about the insect on the radio, did you?" Starling said.

"No, but they said Elk River-- are you coming in from that today, is that why you're so late?"

"Yes," Starling said.

"You must be tired, do you want some coffee?" Roden said.

"No, thank you."

"Water?"

"No."

"A Coke?"

"I don't believe so. We want to know where this woman was held captive and where she was killed. We're hoping this bug has some specialized habitat, or it's limited in range, you know, or it only sleeps on some kind of tree-- we want to know where this insect is from. I'm asking for your confidence because-- if the perpetrator put the insect there deliberately--then only he would know that fact and we could use it to eliminate false confessions and save time. He's killed six at least. Time's eating us up."

"Do you think he's holding another woman right this minute, while we're looking at his bug?" Roden asked in her face. His eyes were wide and his mouth open. She could see into his mouth, and she flashed for a second on something else.

"I don't know." A little shrill, that. "I don't know," she said again, to take the edge off it. "He'll do it again as soon as he can."

"So we'll do this as soon as we can," Pilcher said. "Don't worry, we're good at this. You couldn't be in better hands." He removed the brown object from the jar with a slender forceps and placed it on a sheet of white paper beneath the light. He swung a magnifying glass on a flexible arm over it.

The insect was long and it looked like a mummy. It was sheathed in a semitransparent cover that followed its general outlines like a sarcophagus. The appendages were bound so tightly against the body, they might have been carved in low relief. The little face looked wise.

"In the first place, it's not anything that would normally infest a body outdoors, and it wouldn't be in the water except by accident," Pilcher said. "I don't know how familiar you are with insects or how much you want to hear."

"Let's say I don't know diddly. I want you to tell me the whole thing."

"Okay, this is a pupa, an immature insect, in a chrysalis-- that's the cocoon that holds it while it transforms itself from a larva into an adult," Pilcher said.

"Obtect pupa, Pilch?" Roden wrinkled his nose to hold his glasses up.

"Yeah, I think so. You want to pull down Chu on the immature insects? Okay, this is the pupal stage of a large insect. Most of the more advanced insects have a pupal stage. A lot of them spend the winter this way."

"Book or look, Pilch?" Roden said.

"I'll look." Pilcher moved the specimen to the stage of a microscope and hunched over it with a dental probe in his hand. "Here we go: No distinct respiratory organs on the dorsocephalic region, spiracles on the mesothorax and some abdominals, let's start with that."

"Ummhumm," Roden said, turning pages in a small manual. "Functional mandibles?"

"Nope."

"Paired galeae of maxillae on the ventro meson?"

"Yep, yep."

"Where are the antennae?"

"Adjacent to the mesal margin of the wings. Two pairs of wings, the inside pair are completely covered up. Only the bottom three abdominal segments are free. Little pointy cremaster-- I'd say Lepidoptera."

"That's what it says here," Roden said.

"It's the family that includes the butterflies and moths. Covers a lot of territory," Pilcher said.

"It's gonna be tough if the wings are soaked. I'll pull the references," Roden said. "I guess there's no way I can keep you from talking about me while I'm gone."

"I guess not," Pilcher said. "Roden's all right," he told Starling as soon as Roden left the room.

"I'm sure he is."

"Are you now." Pilcher seemed amused. "We were undergraduates together, working and glomming any kind of fellowship we could. He got one where he had to sit down in a coal mine waiting for proton decay. He just stayed in the dark too long. He's all right. Just don't mention proton decay."

"I'll try to talk around it."

Pilcher turned away from the bright light. "It's a big family, Lepidoptera. Maybe thirty thousand butterflies and a hundred thirty thousand moths. I'd like to take it out of the chrysalis-- I'll have to if we're going to narrow it down."

"Okay. Can you do it in one piece?"

"I think so. See, this one had started out on its own power before it died. It had started an irregular fracture in the chrysalis right here. This may take a little while."

Pilcher spread the natural split in the case and eased the insect out. The bunched wings were soaked. Spreading them was like working with a wet, wadded facial tissue. No pattern was visible.

Roden was back with the books.

"Ready?" Pitcher said. "Okay, the prothoracic femur is concealed."

"What about pilifers?"

"No pilifers," Pitcher said. "Would you turn out the light, Officer Starling?"

She waited by the wall switch until Pilcher's penlight came on. He stood back from the table and shined it on the specimen. The insect's eyes glowed in the dark, reflecting the narrow beam.

"Owlet," Roden said.

"Probably, but which one?" Pilcher said. "Give us the lights, please. It's a Noctuid, Officer Starling-- a night moth. How many Noctuids are there, Roden?"

"Twenty-six hundred and… about twenty-six hundred have been described.

"Not many this big, though. Okay, let's see you shine, my man."

Roden's wiry red head covered the microscope.

"We have to go to chaetaxy now-- studying the skin of the insect to narrow it down to one species," Pitcher said. "Roden's the best at it."

Starling had the sense that a kindness had passed in the room.

Roden responded by starting a fierce argument with Pilcher over whether the specimen's larval warts were arranged in circles or not. It raged on through the arrangement of the hairs on the abdomen.

"Erebus odora," Roden said at last.

"Let's go look," Pilcher said.

They took the specimen with them, down in the elevator to the level just above the great stuffed elephant and back into an enormous quad filled with pale green boxes. What was formerly a great hall had been split into two levels with decks to provide more storage for the Smithsonian's insects. They were in Neotropical now, moving into Noctuids. Pilcher consulted his notepad and stopped at a box chest-- high in the great wall stack.

"You have to be careful with these things," he said, sliding the heavy metal door off the box and setting it on the floor. "You drop one on your foot and you hop for weeks."

He ran his finger down the stacked drawers, selected one, and pulled it out.

In the tray Starling saw the tiny preserved eggs, the caterpillar in a tube of alcohol, a cocoon peeled away from a specimen very similar to hers, and the adult-- a big brown-black moth with a wingspan of nearly six inches, a furry body, and slender antennae.

'Erebus odora," Pitcher said. "The Black Witch Moth."

Roden was already turning gages. "'A tropical species sometimes straying up to Canada in the fall," he read. " `The larvae eat acacia, catclaw, and similar plants. Indigenous West Indies, Southern U.S., considered a pest in Hawaii.' "

Fuckola, Starling thought. "Nuts," she said aloud, "They're all over."

"But they're not all over all the time." Pilcher's head was down. He pulled at his chin. "Do they double-brood, Roden?"

"Wait a second… yeah, in extreme south Florida and south Texas."

"When?"

"May and August."

"I was just thinking," Pilcher said. "Your specimen's a little better developed than the one we have, and it's fresh. It had started fracturing its cocoon to come out. In the West Indies or Hawaii, maybe, I could understand it, but it's winter here. In this country it would wait three months to come out. Unless it happened accidentally in a greenhouse, or somebody raised it."