Ignis Fatuus
Chapter 1
It was 3:04 A.M in Virginia and the air was humid and heavy. The dim shine of a shy moon cast a dusky-blue shade over every building, and the roads were almost silent. In a small cul-de-sac in Arlington, with the houses arranged in a circle except for the road entrance, a television shone a flickering light upon the walls of a large, well-ventilated bedroom. The two inhabitants of the house were sleeping silently in their beds, their open windows blowing peaceful breezes over their skin and the lonely cry of a cricket buzzing quietly outside. When the shrieking ring of the telephone disturbed the silence, one of the sleepy-headed inhabitants rose from her bed with one of her socks missing and picked up the receiver.
"Yeah?" she asked.
"It's Jack Crawford, put Clarice on. It's urgent," asked a croaky voice.
"Hold on a sec," she said.
She drifted through the corridor of the duplex and knocked on the opposite door. When there was no answer, she went inside and shook Clarice's shoulder. "Clarice, Clarice, Crawford's on the phone. He said it's urgent."
Clarice sat up, her slightly auburn hair falling in a veil over her face. "Thanks, Dee." Ardelia left the room as Clarice picked up the telephone next to her bed. "Mr Crawford? It's Clarice."
"Starling," he said in a sombre tone. "I need you to get down here right away, there's been a murder. It's bad, Starling."
Clarice pulled herself out of bed and stepped into the skirt she had wore the day before and a plain, white shirt. She quickly ran a hairbrush through her and didn't bother with any makeup. She sped to Quantico with the wheels of her Mustang scraping across the ground and screeching loudly. Her heart was beginning to race. She felt important and exhilarated, but fear and awful dread consumed her at the same time. Since the Buffalo Bill murders two years before, she only had to examine a body twice and neither of those had turned out to be murder cases. She suddenly remembered the cold, pale body of Frederika Bimmel, lying in a decomposing pile on the metal slab of the funeral home, covered in dirt and leaves. She still gagged when she thought of the smell. A deep, painful ache throbbed in her chest, whether it was from rushing or nerves she didn't know. The drive from her home in Arlington to Quantico usually took Clarice just over an hour in her Mustang. That night she made it in forty-five minutes.
Crawford's office door was open when Clarice arrived. "Mr Crawford, where-"
"Starling, let's go. We don't have time to waste," said Crawford.
"Where, Sir?" Clarice asked.
"Ashland. Body was found in an old warehouse, used to be a slaughter house. She's been moved to a morgue."
Slaughter house. Clarice shuddered, she hated sick irony. "Why was she moved?"
"Place was completely clean. She wasn't killed there, just dumped there afterwards."
"Do we have any information on the victim?" asked Clarice.
"Caucasian female in her twenties. That's all we know without identifying her."
Behavioural Science was half buried in the Earth beneath the rest of Quantico, and when the two of them made it up to the ground floor there was a small Douglas 530 was waiting for them, it's blades spinning and swirling the air around them. The breeze was sharp against Clarice's skin and covered her body in goosebumps, she felt the hairs on her arms press against her sleeves. The flight to Ashland was short but started off rocky; the air seemed jagged and Clarice's stomach churned loudly. Clarice turned to Crawford.
"Mr Crawford, on the phone you said that it's bad. Well, I know that no murder is good but what did you mean exactly?" asked Clarice. She pressed her headphones against her ears to hear his response over the noise of the helicopter.
"Apparently there's not much left of her to look at," Crawford shouted.
Clarice thought of the oval-shaped sections of skin removed from Frederika Bimmel's back, her flesh a light shade of blue from the decay. Sickly acid burned the back of Clarice's throat; she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. She did not want to throw up in front of Crawford.
They arrived at a small, peaceful looking morgue on the far side of Ashland. The surroundings were quiet and homely, with lots of small brick houses and greenery. Clarice walked beside Crawford and met the stares of four policemen in the lobby, they were standing in a group and had abandoned their conversation when they walked in. Clarice was not unfamiliar with this welcome. The door behind them opened and a tall man appeared, dressed in a clean, white coat. His hair was short and dark and his glasses looked too big for his face."Jack Crawford?" he asked.
"Yes," said Crawford, shaking the man's hand. "We spoke on the phone."
"That's right," he said. He shook Clarice's hand and gave her a brief smile. "I'm Henry Lane. Would you like to come though?"
"Sure," said Crawford.
The room they entered was small and white; the tiles on the walls looked new and everything was spotless. The body lay on the table in the middle of the room. It was still in the body bag and looked small. Clarice walked to the other side of the room and didn't look at the heap on the table, instead she unpacked her bag and rubbed some Vicks under her nose. She knew that it wouldn't cover the smell entirely. Clarice handed Crawford the small tub of Vicks and he took a large chunk of it and rubbed as much as possible under his nose, wiping the excess on a paper towel. Henry was fumbling with a large, white camera with a wide lens and small guards on the front of it, so that it wouldn't touch the body. He eventually unzipped the body bag and Crawford helped him remove it from the body. It took Clarice a couple of seconds to look at the body. The natural shock of seeing such a thing twisted a knot in her chest and she felt the need to take a deep breath, but didn't.
Clarice stepped towards the dead girl lying on the metal slab in front of her, it felt easiest to look at her face first. She couldn't have been older than twenty-three and her skin was pale and dry, a blotchy mixture of blue and grey. She must have been lying in the warehouse for at lease forty-eight hours before being found. Her hair was long and dark and tangled in chunks which surrounded her pale face, and she had light brown freckles dotted below her eyes, just reaching up over her cheekbones. Clarice could see that she had been wearing red lipstick the night she died. She clicked a button on her recorder and held it to her mouth. "There are noticeable strangulation marks around the victim's neck. They are dark in colour, suggesting that this occurred prior to death."
Thick, dried blood was smeared across the victim's face and over her neck, as if it had been dripping down from her mouth. Clarice turned to the counter with her equipment laid out on it and picked up two small, thin pieces of sterilised plastic. She approached the body and used the plastic to open the girl's mouth. Clarice closed her eyes for a moment when she saw it. "The victim's tongue has been removed and two of her teeth are missing. This suggests that this occurred prior to her death... There was a struggle and her teeth were knocked out during."
Both Crawford and Henry approached the victim's head to look inside her mouth, which looked like a hollow cave; dark with old, thick blood which gave off an awful smell of rot. Clarice's eyes stung, she categorised the smell as pure death. The whole tongue had been removed, in what looked like one single, precise cut with a newly-sharpened blade. Clarice noticed the precision of the mutilation and suddenly had a horrible feeling. Crawford began making notes for the case-file, while Henry moved around the table taking photographs. Clarice started to move down the table, speaking into her recorder with as much detail as possible. She came to the part she was dreading the most. "The victims..." Clarice stopped speaking, silenced by the sight before her. Crawford looked up at her and waited until she was ready again, then she took a breath and continued. "The victim's hands have been removed, just above the wrist. It looks like several attempts were made to cut through the bone... There is significant bruising on the forearms and calves of the victim, she was probably tied up for a few hours before her death."
The examination of the body took over an hour and the sky was a touch lighter when they left the morgue. Their surroundings seemed too peaceful to witness what had just happened. Clarice felt focused and determined in her mind, but her body was depleted and aching, she felt a deep emptiness in her chest and her eyes felt dry.
"I know what you're thinking, Starling," said Crawford.
"And what is that?" asked Clarice.
"You think you're going over to that slaughter house right now to look at the crime scene, only to come into work in a couple more hours."
"Well, Sir I-"
"The answer is no. You need to go and get some rest. Besides, the place is clean. There's nothing there, Starling," said Crawford.
Well fuck you too thought Clarice. She felt hot anger at the fact that Crawford had stopped her from going to the crime scene. There had to be something there, a crime scene is never completely clean. One fingerprint or one hair could give them a lead straight away. She had to silence her anger during the flight back to Quantico and didn't speak one word to Crawford. When they landed at Quantico, Clarice said a quick goodbye to Crawford and drove back to Arlington.
The events of the past two and a half hours swam around Clarice's head in circles. She made the journey back to her home by force of habit, without thinking about the route at all. Clarice had been considering something, something disturbing and sickening which made her heart fall into her stomach. She had tried to force it to the back of her mind, but it kept creeping its way back, just like the memory of that raspy voice. She couldn't ignore it. She remembered reading through a case file that she had dug out from one of the file-cabinets full of hell in the basement of behavioural science. She remembered reading how he had broken the jaw of a nurse after being incarcerated in Baltimore for a year, ripping out and eating her tongue as well as seriously disfiguring the rest of her face. She remembered seeing the photos. She thought about him every day, to her distaste, but she never would have predicted that he would come back. It seemed terribly pointless and obviously dangerous for him to do. He would consider it beneath him, she thought.
Clarice tossed and turned in her bed. The thought of Hannibal Lecter being so close to her set her mind alight and she couldn't put it out. She was restless and alive, her mind racing around the details she had spoken into the recorder that night and comparing them to Dr Lecter's case file. The victim was young and female, just like one of Lecter's victims who was missing flesh from her back, or "oysters". Her tongue was removed too, and Lecter once ate a nurse's tongue. The precision of the cut was so precise and symmetrical, the work of an expert. But why would he remove her hands? Surely he wouldn't have thought of eating her hands. It could have been a reference to something, something ironic and clever. Still, the whole thing seemed to obvious and to easy to be him. Dr Lecter would have liked to scare Jack Crawford, and he wouldn't just drop the body in his hands. That was too easy.
Clarice drifted in and out of sleep that night, frequently waking in a panic thinking that she had heard a familiar voice whispering beside her. When she slept long enough to dream, she dreamed of her father. She saw him standing in their small back yard with a hand on her older brother's shoulder, saying 'Clarice, if you can't play without squawking then go on inside the house'. His accent was prominent in her dream, stronger than her own, and she felt like a stranger to herself and her roots. Somehow she knew that the next day would bring new horrors, that it could only get worse from that moment on. She felt like a a student again, waking terrified during those panic-filled nights of the Buffalo Bill case, to loud screaming and endless anxiety. She was right in her prediction; the next few weeks would bring Clarice nothing but more disturbed nights and louder screaming, more blood and more bodies, though thankfully, she would not have to face the terror alone.