Thomas Harris - Red Dragon

Crawford gripped Graham's arm. "Get away, Lounds. Go on. Will, let's get some breakfast. Come on, Will." They rounded the corner, walking swiftly.

"I'm sorry,Jack. I can't stand that bastard. When I was in the hospital, he came in and-"

"I know it," Crawford said. "I reamed him out, much good it did." Crawford remembered the picture in The National Tattler at the end of the Lecter case. Lounds had come into the hospital room while Graham was asleep. He flipped back the sheet and shot a picture of Graham's temporary colostomy. The paper ran it retouched with a black square covering Graham's groin. The caption said "Crazy Guts Cop."

The diner was bright and clean. Graham's hands trembled and he slopped coffee in his saucer.

He saw Crawford's cigarette smoke bothering a couple in the next booth. The couple ate in a peptic silence, their resentment hanging in the smoke.

Two women, apparently mother and daughter, argued at a table near the door. They spoke in low voices, anger ugly in their faces. Graham could feel their anger on his face and neck.

Crawford was griping about having to testify at a trial in Washington in the morning. He was afraid the trial could tie him up for several days. As he lit another cigarette, he peered across the flame at Graham's hands and his color.

" Atlanta and Birmingham can run the thumbprint against their known sex offenders," Crawford said. "So can we. And Price has dug a single print out of the files before. He'll program the FINDER with it – we've come a long way with that just since you left."

FINDER, the FBI's automated fingerprint reader and processor, might recognize the thumbprint on an incoming fingerprint card from some unrelated case.

"When we get him, that print and his teeth will put him away,' Crawford said. "What we have to do, we have to figure on what he could be. We have to swing a wide loop. Indulge me, now. Say we've arrested a good suspect. You walk in and see him. What is there about him that doesn't surprise you?"

"I don't know, Jack. Goddammit, he's got no face for me. We could spend a lot of time looking for people we've invented. Have you talked to Bloom?"

"On the phone last night. Bloom doubts he's suicidal, and so does Heimlich. Bloom was only here a couple of hours the first day, but he and Heimlich have the whole file. Bloom's examining Ph.D. candidates this week. He said tell you hello. Do you have his number in Chicago?"

"I have it."

Graham liked Dr. Alan Bloom, a small round man with sad eyes, a good forensic psychiatrist – maybe the best. Graham appreciated the fact that Dr. Bloom had never displayed professional interest in him. That was not always the case with psychiatrists.

"Bloom says he wouldn't be surprised if we heard from the Tooth Fairy. He might write us a note," Crawford said.

"On a bedroom wall."

"Bloom thinks he might be disfigured or he may believe he's disfigured. He told me not to give that a lot of weight. 'I won't set up a straw man to chase, Jack,' is what he told me. 'That would be a distraction and would diffuse the effort.' Said they taught him to talk like that in graduate school."

"He's right" Graham said.

"You could tell something about him or you wouldn't have found that fingerprint," Crawford said.

"That was the evidence on the damn wall, Jack. Don't put this on me. Look, don't expect too much from me, all right?"

"Oh, we'll get him. You know we'll get him, don't you?"

"I know it. One way or the other."

"What's one way?"

"We'll find evidence we've overlooked."

"What's the other?"

"He'll do it and do it until one night he makes too much noise going in and the husband gets to a gun in time."

"No other possibilities?"

"You think I'm going to spot him across a crowded room? No, that's Ezio Pinza you're thinking about, does that. The Tooth Fairy will go on and on until we get smart or get lucky. He won't stop."

"Why?"

"Because he's got a genuine taste for it."

"See, you do know something about him," Crawford said.

Graham did not speak again until they were on the sidewalk. "Wait until the next full moon," he told Crawford. "Then tell me how much I know about him."

Graham went back to his hotel and slept for two and a half hours. He woke at noon, showered, and ordered a pot of coffee and a sandwich. It was time to make a close study of the Jacobi file from Birmingham. He scrubbed his reading glasses with hotel soap and settled in by the window with the file. For the first few minutes he looked up at every sound, footsteps in the hall, the distant thud of the elevator door. Then he knew nothing but the file.

The waiter with the tray knocked and waited, knocked and waited. Finally he left the lunch on the floor outside the door and signed the bill himself.

Hoyt Lewis, meter reader for Georgia Power Company, parked his truck under a big tree in the alley and settled back with his lunch box. It was no fun opening his lunch now that he packed it himself. No little notes in there anymore, no Surprise Twinkie.

He was halfway through his sandwich when a loud voice at his ear made him jump.

"I guess I used a thousand dollars' worth of electricity this month, is that right?"

Lewis turned and saw at the truck window the red face of H. G. Parsons. Parsons wore Bermuda shorts and carried a yard broom.

"I didn't understand what you said."

"I guess you'll say I used a thousand dollars' worth of electricity this month. Did you hear me that time?"

"I don't know what you've used because I haven't read your meter yet, Mr. Parsons. When I do read it, I'll put it down on this piece of paper right here."

Parsons was bitter about the size of the bill. He had complained to the power company that he was being prorated.

"I'm keeping up with what I use," Parsons said. "I'm going to the Public Service Commission with it, too."

"You want to read your meter with me? Let's go over there right now and-"

"I know how to read a meter. I guess you could read one too if it wasn't so much trouble."

"Just be quiet a minute, Parsons." Lewis got out of his truck. "Just be quiet a minute now, dammit. Last year you put a magnet on your meter. Your wife said you was in the hospital, so I just took it off and didn't say anything. When you poured molasses in it last winter, I reported it. I notice you paid up when we charged you for it.

"Your bill went up after you did all that wiring yourself. I've told you until I'm blue in the face: something in that house is draining off current. Do you hire an electrician to find it? No, you call down to the office and bitch about me. I've about got a bait of you." Lewis was pale with anger.

"I'll get to the bottom of this," Parsons said, retreating down the alley toward his yard. "They're checking up on you, Mr. Lewis. I saw somebody reading your route ahead of you," he said across the fence. "Pretty soon you'll have to go to work like everybody else."

Lewis cranked his truck and drove on down the alley. Now he would have to find another place to finish his lunch. He was sorry. The big shade tree had been a good lunch place for years.

It was directly behind Charles Leeds's house.

At five-thirty P.M. Hoyt Lewis drove in his own automobile to the Cloud Nine Lounge, where he had several boilermakers to ease his mind.

When he called his estranged wife, all he could think of to say was "I wish you was still fixing my lunch."

"You ought to have thought about that, Mr. Smarty," she said, and hung up.

He played a gloomy game of shuffleboard with some linemen and a dispatcher from Georgia Power and looked over the crowd. Goddamned airline clerks had started coming in the Cloud Nine. All had the same little mustache and pinkie ring. Pretty soon they'd be fixing the Cloud Nine English with a damned dart board. You can't depend on nothing.