Thomas Harris - Red Dragon

"This won't take a lot of time," Price said. "I need one reasonably intelligent assistant, if you have one. Have you touched the bodies, Mr. Lombard?"

"No."

"Find out who has. I'll have to print them all."

The morning briefing of police detectives on the Leeds case was concerned mostly with teeth.

Atlanta Chief of Detectives R. J. (Buddy) Springfield, a burly man in shirtsleeves, stood by the door with Dr. Dominic Princi as the twenty-three detectives filed in.

"All right, boys, let's have the big grin as you come by," Springfield said. "Show Dr. Princi your teeth. That's right, let's see ' em all. Christ, Sparks, is that your tongue or are you swallowing a squirrel? Keep moving."

A large frontal view of a set of teeth, upper and lower, was tacked to the bulletin board at the front of the squad room. It reminded Graham of the celluloid strip of printed teeth in a dime-store jack-o'lantern. He and Crawford sat down at the back of the room while the detectives took their places at schoolroom desks.

Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner Gilbert Lewis and his public-relations officer sat apart from them in folding chairs. Lewis had to face a news conference in an hour.

Chief of Detectives Springfield took charge.

"All right. Let's cease fire with the bullshit. If you read up this morning, you saw zero progress.

"House-to-house interviews will continue for a radius of four additional blocks around the scene. R amp; I has loaned us two clerks to help cross-matching airline reservations and car rentals in Birmingham and Atlanta.

"Airport and hotel details will make the rounds again today. Yes, again today. Catch every maid and attendant as well as the desk people. He had to clean up somewhere and he may have left a mess. If you find somebody who cleaned up a mess, roust out whoever's in the room, seal it, and get on the horn to the laundry double quick. This time we've got something for you to show around. Dr. Princi?"

Dr. Dominic Princi, chief medical examiner for Fulton County, walked to the front and stood under the drawing of the teeth. He held up a dental cast.

"Gentlemen, this is what the subject's teeth look like. The Smithsonian in Washington reconstructed them from the impressions we took of bite marks on Mrs. Leeds and a clear bite mark in a piece of cheese from the Leedses' reffigerator," Princi said.

"As you can see, he has pegged lateral incisors – the teeth here and here." Princi pointed to the cast in his hand, then to the chart above him. "The teeth are crooked in alignment and a corner is missing from this central incisor. The other incisor is grooved, here. It looks like a 'tailor's notch,' the land of wear you get biting thread."

"Snaggletoothed son of a bitch," somebody mumbled.

"How do you know for sure it was the perpetrator that bit the cheese, Doc?" a tall detective in the front row asked.

Princi disliked being called "Doc," but he swallowed it. "Saliva washes from the cheese and ftom the bite wounds matched for blood type," he said. "The victims' teeth and blood type didn't match."

"Fine, Doctor," Springfield said. "We'll pass out pictures of the teeth to show around."

"What about giving it to the papers?" The public-relations officer, Simpkins, was speaking. "A 'have-you-seen-these-teeth' sort of thing."

"I see no objection to that," Springfield said. "What about it' Commissioner?"

Lewis nodded.

Simpkins was not through. "Dr. Princi, the press is going to ask why it took four days to get this dental representation you have here. And why it all had to be done in Washington."

Special Agent Crawford studied the button on his ball-point pen. Princi reddened but his voice was calm. "Bite marks on flesh are distorted when a body is moved, Mr. Simpson-"

"Simpkins."

"Simpkins, then. We couldn't make this using only the bite marks on the victims. That is the importance of the cheese. Cheese is relatively solid, but tricky to cast. You have to oil it first to keep the moisture out of the casting medium. Usually you get one shot at it. The Smithsonian has done it for the FBI crime lab before. They're better equipped to do a face bow registration and they have an anatomical articulator. They have a consulting forensic odontologist. We don't. Anything else?"

"Would it be fair to say that the delay was caused by the FBI lab and not here?"

Princi turned on him. "What it would be fair to say, Mr. Simpkins, is that a federal investigator, Special Agent Crawford, found the cheese in the refrigerator two days ago – after your people had been through the place. He expedited the lab work at my request. It would be fair to say I'm relieved that it wasn't one of you that bit the goddamned thing."

Commissioner Lewis broke in, his heavy voice booming in the squad room. "Nobody's questioning your judgment, Dr. Princi. Simpkins, the last thing we need is to start a pissing contest with the FBI. Let's get on with it."

"We're all after the same thing," Springfield said. "Jack, do you fellows want to add anything?"

Crawford took the floor. The faces he saw were not entirely friendly. He had to do something about that.

"I just want to clear the air, Chief. Years ago there was a lot of rivalry about who got the collar. Each side, federal and local, held out on the other. It made a gap that crooks slipped through. That's not Bureau policy now, and it's not my policy. I don't give a damn who gets the collar. Neither does Investigator Graham. That's him sitting back there, if some of you are wondering. If the man who did this is run over by a garbage truck, it would suit me just fine as long as it puts him off the street. I think you feel the same way.

Crawford looked over the detectives and hoped they were mollified. He hoped they wouldn't hoard leads. Commissioner Lewis was talking to him.

"Investigator Graham has worked on this kind of thing before."

"Yes, sir."

"Can you add anything, Mr. Graham, suggest anything?"

Crawford raised his eyebrows at Graham.

"Would you come up to the front?" Springfield said.

Graham wished he had been given the chance to talk to Springfield in private. He didn't want to go to the front. He went, though.

Rumpled and sun-blasted, Graham didn't look like a federal investigator. Springfield thought he looked more like a house painter who had put on a suit to appear in court.

The detectives shifted from one buttock to the other.

When Graham turned to face the room, the ice-blue eyes were startling in his brown face.

"Just a couple of things," he said. "We can't assume he's a former mental patient or somebody with a record of sex offenses. There's a high probability that he doesn't have any kind of record. If he does, it's more likely to be breaking and entering than a minor sex offense.

"He may have a history of biting in lesser assaults – bar fights or child abuse. The biggest help we'll have on that will come from emergency-room personnel and the child-welfare people.

"Any bad bite they can remember is worth checking, regardless of who was bitten or how they said it happened. That's all I have."

The tall detective on the front row raised his hand and spoke at the same time.

"But he only bit women so far, right?"

"That's all we know about. He bites a lot, though. Six bad ones in Mrs. Leeds, eight in Mrs. Jacobi. That's way above average.

"What's average?"

"In a sex murder, three. He likes to bite."

"Women."

"Most of the time in sex assaults the bite mark has a livid spot in the center, a suck mark. These don't. Dr. Princi mentioned it in his autopsy report, and I saw it at the morgue. No suck marks. For him biting may be a fighting pattern as much as sexual behavior."

"Pretty thin," the detective said.