Thomas Harris - The Silence of the Lambs

He pulled her collar back and, with a flashlight, read the size tag on her blouse.

"Good," he said.

He slit the blouse up the back with a pair of bandage scissors, pulled the blouse off, and handcuffed her hands behind her. Spreading a mover's pad on the floor of the truck, he rolled her onto her back.

She was not wearing a brassiere. He prodded her big breasts with his fingers and felt their weight and resilience.

"Good," he said.

There was a pink suck mark on her left breast. He licked his finger to rub it as he had done the chintz and nodded when the lividity went away with light pressure. He rolled her onto her face and checked her scalp, parting her thick hair with his fingers. The padded cast hadn't cut her.

He checked her pulse with two fingers on the side of her neck and found it strong.

"Gooood, " he said. He had a long way to drive to his two-story house and he'd rather not field-dress her here.

Catherine Baker Martin's cat watched out the window as the truck pulled away, the taillights getting closer and closer together.

Behind the cat the telephone was ringing. The machine in the bedroom answered, its red light blinking in the dark.

The caller was Catherine's mother, the junior U.S. Senator from Tennessee.

In the 1980s, the Golden Age of Terrorism, procedures were in place to deal with a kidnapping affecting a member of Congress:

At 2:45 A.M. the special agent in charge of the Memphis FBI office reported to headquarters in Washington that Senator Ruth Martin's only daughter had disappeared.

At 3:00 A.M. two unmarked vans pulled out of the damp basement garage at the Washington field office, Buzzard's Point. One van went to the Senate Office Building, where technicians placed monitoring and recording equipment on the telephones in Senator Martin's office and put a Title 3 wiretap on the pay phones closest to the Senator's office. The Justice Department woke the most junior member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee to provide the obligatory notice of the tap.

The other vehicle, an "eyeball van" with one-way glass and surveillance equipment, was parked on Virginia Avenue to cover the front of the Watergate West, Senator Martin's Washington residence. Two of the van's occupants went inside to install monitoring equipment on the Senator's home telephones.

Bell Atlantic estimated the mean trace time at seventy seconds on any ransom call placed from a domestic digital switching system.

The Reactive Squad at Buzzard's Point went to double shifts in the event of a ransom drop in the Washington area. Their radio procedure changed to mandatory encryption to protect any possible ransom drop from intrusion by news helicopters-- that kind of irresponsibility on the part of the news business was rare, but it had happened.

The Hostage Rescue Team went to an alert status one level short of airborne.

Everyone hoped Catherine Baker Martin's disappearance was a professional kidnapping for ransom; that possibility offered the best chance for her survival.

Nobody mentioned the worst possibility of all.

Then, shortly before dawn in Memphis, a city patrolman investigating a prowler complaint on Winchester Avenue stopped an elderly man collecting aluminum cans and junk along the shoulder of the road. In his cart the patrolman found a woman's blouse, still buttoned in front. The blouse was slit up the back like a funeral suit. The laundry mark was Catherine Baker Martin's.

Jack Crawford was driving south from his home in Arlington at 6:30 A.M. when the telephone in his car beeped for the second time in two minutes.

"Nine twenty-two forty."

"Forty stand by for Alpha 4."

Crawford spotted a rest area, pulled in, and stopped to give his full attention to the telephone. Alpha 4 is the Director of the FBI.

"Jack-- you up on Catherine Martin?"

"The night duty officer called me just now."

"Then you know about the blouse. Talk to me."

"Buzzard Point went to kidnap alert," Crawford said. "I'd prefer they didn't stand down yet. When they do stand down I'd like to keep the phone surveillance. Slit blouse or not, we don't know for sure it's Bill. If it's a copycat he might call for ransom. Who's doing taps and traces in Tennessee, us or them?"

"Them. The state police. They're pretty good. Phil Adler called from the White House to tell me about the President's 'intense interest.' We could use a win here, Jack."

"That had occurred to me. Where's the Senator?"

"En route to Memphis. She got me at home a minute ago. You can imagine."

"Yes." Crawford knew Senator Martin from budget hearings.

"She's coming down with all the weight she's got."

"I don't blame her."

"Neither do I," the Director said. "I've told her we're going flat-out, just as we've done all along. She is… she's aware of your personal situation and she's offered you a company Lear. Use it-- come home at night if you can."

"Good. The Senator's tough, Tommy. If she tries to run it we'll butt heads."

"I know. Do a set-pick off me if you have to. What have we got at the best-- six or seven days, Jack?"

"I don't know. If he panics when he finds out who she is-- he might just do her and dump her."

"Where are you?"

"Two miles from Quantico."

"Will the strip at Quantico take a Lear?"

"Yes."

"Twenty minutes."

"Yes sir."

Crawford punched numbers into his phone and pulled back into traffic.

Sore from a troubled sleep, Clarice Starling stood in her bathrobe and bunny slippers, towel over her shoulder, waiting to get in the bathroom she and Mapp shared with the students next door. The news from Memphis on the radio froze her for half a breath.

"Oh God," she said. "Oh boy. ALL RIGHT IN THERE! THIS BATHROOM IS SEIZED. COME OUT WITH YOUR PANTS UP. THIS IS NOT A DRILL!" She climbed into the shower with a startled next-door neighbor. "Ooch over, Gracie, and would you pass me that soap."

Ear cocked to the telephone, she packed for overnight and set her forensic kit by the door. She made sure the switchboard knew she was in her room and gave up breakfast to stick by the phone. At ten minutes to class time, with no word, she hurried down to Behavioral Science with her equipment.

"Mr. Crawford left for Memphis forty-five minutes ago," the secretary told her sweetly. "Burroughs went, and Stafford from the lab left from National."

"I put a report here for him last night. Did he leave any message for me? I'm Clarice Starling."

"Yes, I know who you are. I have three copies of your telephone number right here, and there are several more on his desk, l believe. No, he didn't leave a thing for you, Clarice." The woman looked at Starling's luggage. "Would you like me to tell him something when he calls in?"

"Did he leave a Memphis phone number on his three-card?"

"No, he'll call with it. Don't you have classes today, Clarice? You're still in school, aren't you?"

"Yes. Yes, I am."

Starling's entry, late, into the classroom was not eased by Gracie Pitman, the young woman she had displaced in the shower. Gracie Pitman sat directly behind Starling. It seemed a long way to her seat. Gracie Pitmans tongue had time to make two full-revolutions in her downy cheek before Starling could submerge into the class.

With no breakfast she sat through two hours of "The Good-Faith Warrant Exception to the Exclusionary Rule in Search and Seizure," before she could get to the vending machine and chug a Coke.

She checked her box for a message at noon and there was nothing. It occurred to her then, as it had on a few other occasions in her life, that intense frustration tastes very much like the patent medicine called Fleet's that she'd had to take as a child.