Thomas Harris - Red Dragon

"There's a piece missing here, Mr. Crawford. I'll read the bottom part:

If I hear from you, next time I might send you something wet. Until then I remain your

Avid Fan

Silence after Chilton finished reading. “Are you there?”

“Yes. Does Lecter know you have the note?”

“Not yet. This morning he was moved to a holding cell while his quarters were cleaned. Instead of using a proper rag, the cleaning man was pulling handfuls of toilet paper off the roll to wipe down the sink. He found the note wound up in the roll and brought it to me. They bring me anything they find hidden.”

“Where’s Lecter now?”

“Still in the holding cell.”

“Can he see his quarters at all from there.”

“Let me think… No, no, he can’t.”

“Wait a second, Doctor.” Crawford put Chilton on hold. He stared at the two winking buttons on his telephone for several seconds without seeing them. Crawford, fisher of men, was watching his cork move against the current. He got Graham again.

“Will… a note, maybe from the Tooth Fairy, hidden in Lecter’s cell at Chesapeake. Sounds like a fan letter. He wants Lecter’s approval, he’s curious about you. He’s asking questions.”

“How was Lecter supposed to answer?”

“Don’t know yet. Part’s torn out, part’s scratched out. Looks like there’s a chance of correspondence as long as Lecter’s not aware that we know. I want the note for the lab and I want to toss his cell, but it’ll be risky. If Lecter gets wise, who knows how he could warn the bastard? We need the link but we need the note too.”

Crawford told Graham where Lecter was held, how the note was found. “It’s eighty miles over to Chesapeake. I can’t wait for you, buddy. What do you think?”

“Ten people dead in a month – we can’t play a long mail game. I say go for it.”

“I am,” Crawford said.

“See you in two hours.”

Crawford hailed his secretary. “Sarah, order a helicopter. I want the next thing smoking and I don’t care whose it is – ours, DCPD or Marines. I’ll be on the roof in five minutes. Call Documents, tell them to have a document case up there. Tell Herbert to scramble a search team. On the roof. Five minutes.”

He picked up Chilton’s line.

“Dr. Chilton, we have to search Lecter’s cell without his knowledge and we need your help. Have you mentioned this to anybody else?”

“No.”

“Where’s the cleaning man who found the note?”

“He’s here in my office.”

“Keep him there, please, and tell him to keep quiet. How long has Lecter been out of his cell?”

“About half an hour.”

“Is that unusually long?”

“No, not yet. But it takes only about a half-hour to clean it. Soon he’ll begin to wonder what’s wrong.”

“Okay, do this for me: Call your building superintendent or engineer, whoever’s in charge. Tell him to shut off the water in the building and to pull the circuit breakers on Lecter’s hall. Have the super walk down the hall past the holding cell carrying tools. He’ll be in a hurry, pissed off, too busy to answer any questions – got it? Tell him he’ll get an explanation from me. Have the garbage pickup canceled for today if they haven’t already come. Don’t touch the note, okay? We’re coming.”

Crawford called the section chief, Scientific Analysis. “Brian, I have a note coming in on the fly, possibly from the Tooth Fairy. Number-one priority. It has to go back where it came from within the hour and unmarked. It’ll go to Hair and Fiber, Latent Prints, and Documents, then to you, so coordinate with them, will you?… Yes. I’ll walk it through. I’ll deliver it to you myself.”

It was warm – the federally mandated eighty degrees – in the elevator when Crawford came down from the roof with the note, his hair blown silly by the helicopter blast. He was mopping his face by the time he reached the Hair and Fiber section of the laboratory.

Hair and Fiber is a small section, calm and busy. The common room is stacked with boxes of evidence sent by police departments all over the country; swatches of tape that have sealed mouths and bound wrists, torn and stained clothing, deathbed sheets.

Crawford spotted Beverly Katz through the window of an examining room as he wove his way between the boxes. She had a pair of child's coveralls suspended from a hanger over a table covered with white paper. Working under bright lights in the draft-free room, she brushed the coveralls with a metal spatula, carefully working with the wale and across it, with the nap and against it. A sprinkle of dirt and sand fell to the paper. With it, falling through the still air more slowly than sand but faster than lint, came a tightly coiled hair. She cocked her head and looked at it with her bright robin's eye.

Crawford could see her lips moving. He knew what she was saying.

"Gotcha."

That's what she always said.

Crawford pecked on the glass and she came out fast, stripping off her white gloves.

"It hasn't been printed yet, right?"

"No."

"I'm set up in the next examining room." She put on a fresh pair of gloves while Crawford opened the document case.

The note, in two pieces, was contained gently between two sheets of plastic film. Beverly Katz saw the tooth impressions and glanced up at Crawford, not wasting time with the question.

He nodded: the impressions matched the clear overlay of the killer's bite he had carried with him to Chesapeake.

Crawford watched through the window as she lifted the note on a slender dowel and hung it over white paper. She looked it over with a powerful glass, then fanned it gently. She tapped the dowel with the edge of a spatula and went over the paper beneath it with the magnifying glass.

Crawford looked at his watch.

Katz flipped the note over another dowel to get the reverse side up. She removed one tiny object from its surface with tweezers almost as fine as a hair.

She photographed the torn ends of the note under high magnification and returned it to its case. She put a clean pair of white gloves in the case with it. The white gloves – the signal not to touch – would always be beside the evidence until it was checked for fingerprints.

"That's it," she said, handing the case back to Crawford. "One hair, maybe a thirty-second of an inch. A couple of blue grains. I'll work it up. What else have you got?"

Crawford gave her three marked envelopes. "Hair from Lecter's comb. Whiskers from the electric razor they let him use. This is hair from the cleaning man. Gotta go."

"See you later," Katz said. "Love your hair."

Jimmy Price in Latent Fingerprints winced at the sight of the porous toilet paper. He squinted fiercely over the shoulder of his technician operating the helium-cadmium laser as they tried to find a fingerprint and make it fluoresce. Glowing smudges appeared on the paper, perspiration stains, nothing.

Crawford started to ask him a question, thought better of it, waited with the blue light reflecting off his glasses.

"We know three guys handled this without gloves, right?" Price said.

"Yeah, the cleanup man, Lecter, and Chilton."

"The fellow scrubbing sinks probably had washed the oil off his fingers. But the others -this stuff is terrible." Price held the paper to the light, forceps steady in his mottled old hand. "I could fume it, Jack, but I couldn't guarantee the iodine stains would fade out in the time you've got."

"Ninhydrin? Boost it with heat?" Ordinarily, Crawford would not have ventured a technical suggestion to Price, but he was floundering for anything. He expected a huffy reply, but the old man sounded rueful and sad.

"No. We couldn't wash it after. I can't get you a print off this, Jack. There isn't one."