Thomas Harris - The Silence of the Lambs

"Raised it how?"

"In a cage, in a warm place, with some acacia leaves for the larvae to eat until they're ready to button up in their cocoons. It's not hard to do."

"Is it a popular hobby? Outside professional study, do a lot of people do it?"

"No, primarily it's entomologists trying to get a perfect specimen, maybe a few collectors. There's the silk industry too, they raise moths, but not this kind."

"Entomologists must have periodicals, professional journals, people that sell equipment," Starling said.

"Sure, and most of the publications come here."

"Let me make you a bundle," Roden said. "A couple of people here subscribe privately to the smaller newsletters--keep 'em locked up and make you give them a quarter just to look at the stupid things. I'll have to get those in the morning."

"I'll see they're picked up, thank you, Mr. Roden."

Pilcher photocopied the references on Erebus odora and gave them to her, along with the insect. "I'll take you down," he said.

They waited for the elevator. "Most people love butterflies and hate moths," he said. "But moths are more-- interesting, engaging."

"They're destructive."

"Some are, a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do." Silence for one floor. "There's a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears," he offered. "That's all they eat or drink."

"What kind of tears? Whose tears?"

"The tears of large land mammals, about our size. The old definition of moth was 'anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.' It was a verb for destruction too… Is this what you do all the time-- hunt Buffalo Bill?"

"I do it all I can."

Pilcher polished his teeth, his tongue moving behind his lips like a cat beneath the covers. "Do you ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer or the amusing house wine?"

"Not lately."

"Will you go for some with me now? It's not far."

"No, but I'll treat when this is over-- and Mr. Roden can go too, naturally."

"There's nothing natural about that," Pilcher said. And at the door, "I hope you're through with this soon, Officer Starling."

She hurried to the waiting car.

Ardelia Mapp had left Starling's mail and half a Mounds candy bar on her bed. Mapp was asleep.

Starling carried her portable typewriter down to the laundry room, put it on the clothes-folding shelf and cranked in a carbon set. She had organized her notes on Erebus odora in her head on the ride back to Quantico and she covered that quickly.

Then she ate the Mounds and wrote a memo to Crawford suggesting they cross-check the entomology publications' computerized mailing lists against the FBI's known offender files and the files in the cities closest to the abductions, plus felon and sex-offender files of Metro Dade, San Antonio, and Houston, the areas where the moths were most plentiful.

There was another thing, too, that she had to bring up for a second time: Lets ask Dr. Lecter why he thought the perpetrator would start taking scalps.

She delivered the paper to the night duty officer and fell into her grateful bed, the voices of the day still whispering, softer than Mapp's breathing across the room. On the swarming dark she saw the moth's wise little face. Those glowing eyes had looked at Buffalo Bill.

Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

In East Memphis, Tennessee, Catherine Baker Martin and her best boyfriend were watching a late movie on television in his apartment and having a few hits off a bong pipe loaded with hashish. The commercial breaks grew longer and more frequent.

"I've got the munchies, want some popcorn?" she said.

"I'll go get it, give me your keys."

"Sit still. I need to see if Mom called, anyway."

She got up from the couch, a tall young woman, big-boned and well fleshed, nearly heavy, with a handsome face and a lot of clean hair. She found her shoes under the coffee table and went outside.

The February evening was more raw than cold. A light fog off the Mississippi River hung breast-high over the big parking area. Directly overhead she could see the dying moon, pale and thin as a bone fishhook. Looking up made her a little dizzy. She started across the parking field, navigating steadily toward her own front door a hundred yards away.

The brown panel truck was parked near her apartment, among some motor homes and boats on trailers.

She noticed it because it resembled the parcel delivery trucks which often brought presents from her mother.

As she passed near the truck, a lamp came on in the fog. It was a floor lamp with a shade, standing on the asphalt behind the truck. Beneath the lamp was an overstuffed armchair in red-flowered chintz, the big red flowers blooming in the fog. The two items were like a furniture grouping in a showroom.

Catherine Baker Martin blinked several times and kept going. She thought the word surreal and blamed the bong. She was all right. Somebody was moving in or moving out. In. Out. Somebody was always moving at the Stonehinge Villas. The curtain stirred in her apartment and she saw her cat on the sill, arching and pressing his side against the glass.

She had her key ready, and before she used it she looked back. A man climbed out of the back of the truck. She could see by the lamplight that he had a cast on his hand and his arm was in a sling. She went inside and locked the door behind her.

Catherine Baker Martin peeped around the curtain and saw the man trying to put the chair into the back of the truck. He gripped it with his good hand and tried to boost it with his knee. The chair fell over. He righted it, licked his finger and rubbed at a spot of parking-lot grime on the chintz.

She went outside.

"Help you with that." She got the tone just right-- helpful and that's all.

"Would you? Thanks." An odd, strained voice. Not a local accent.

The floor lamp lit his face from below, distorting his features, but she-could see his body plainly. He had on pressed khaki trousers and some kind of chamois shirt, unbuttoned over a freckled chest. His chin and cheeks were hairless, as smooth as a woman's, and his eyes only pinpoint gleams above his cheekbones in the shadows of the lamp.

He looked at her too, and she was sensitive to that. Men were often surprised at her size when she got close to them and some concealed it better than others.

"Good," he said.

There was an unpleasant odor about the man, and she noticed with distaste that his chamois shirt still had hairs on it, curly ones across the shoulders and beneath the arms.

It was easy lifting the chair onto the low floor of the truck.

"Let's slide it to the front, do you mind?" He climbed inside and moved some clutter, the big flat pans you can slide under a vehicle to drain the oil, and a small hand winch called a coffin hoist.

They pushed the chair forward until it was just behind the seats.

"Are you about a fourteen?" he said.

"What?"

"Would you hand me that rope? It's just at your feet."

When she bent to look, he brought the plaster cast down on the back of her head. She thought she'd bumped her head and she raised her hand to it as the cast came down again, smashing her fingers against her skull, and down again, this time behind her ear, a succession of blows, none of them too hard, as she slumped over the chair. She slid to the floor of the truck and lay on her side.

The man watched her for a second, then pulled off his cast and the arm sling. Quickly, he brought the lamp into the truck and closed the rear doors.