If it was tending toward coolness in the D.C. metro area, southern Virginia had yet to catch on that it was autumn.
Will sheds his jacket, wrinkles his nose.
For the first time, Hannibal notes the color and density of the hair on Will's forearms: fine, reddish.
The reek that hangs in the humid air is, indeed, astonishing, but it is nothing Hannibal has not smelled before. Nor Will, for that matter, though he squints and flinches into it as though the stench is a sharp wind in his face.
Jack Crawford stands to one side of the porch, next to some representative or other from local law enforcement. The sour twist to Crawford's mouth could have its origin in the smell, or the circumstance. Hannibal knows both Jack and the type of man that Jack is: driven to pursue and compete by an irritation below his skin, finding no pleasure in resolution. He will not rest, but neither will he flay himself on the flinty edges of a case simply to get at that all-consuming itch. Hannibal finds Crawford's arrogance in presuming himself indispensable in perpetuity extremely distasteful. Most especially when it is Will who bend without complaint to slide along the razor, silent grace in self-evisceration, all for Crawford's benefit.
He hurries in to watch Will at work. Only in these moments, brought on by the first throbbing hammer-blows of raw horror, is Hannibal certain that Will's vision is kaleidoscopic as his own.
Here, in the throes of his talent, is where punctilious stuffed suits like Crawford assume Will is most vulnerable. He must be, yes? To open up and channel murderous intent through his very body?
But no, no. Employing his gift is where Will is strongest; where, if Hannibal could feel anything that approaches fear, that approach would be laid down. Only later, when the torrent has pounded through him like a flood-swollen river and left its strange and sharp debris, does Will become vulnerable. Where he will be taught to depend on Hannibal, to crave the careful lancing of the sores that debris leaves in its wake.
Hannibal shivers with pleasure.
Inside the small rural home, Will squats at the edge of a pool of black blood. It obscures the pattern of a cheap and ugly rug. At its center lies a man, more or less.
His waxen skin is shot through with black veins where the stilled blood lays corrupted. He is beginning to bloat. Eyelids have swollen closed over milky corneas, but the rictus of his open mouth is still apparent. Hannibal passes a few seconds counting the man's fillings.
The corpse's shirt is sliced open, and below it, his paunchy belly. An attempt has been made to close the incision by binding the trunk around with nylon rope. The jaundiced hue of abdominal fat is bright against old blood.
A very long way off, a too-early cricket tries to herald evening.
It does not obscure Will Graham's murmuring.
"It's over quickly, more quickly than I want," Will says. "His suffering is important, but it is not the reason I am here. The reason is the message. The message is inside him. I wrap him like a present and I wait."
A pause. A look that is both stricken and welcoming.
"We are meant to see, meant to discover," Will says. "If the body itself was what we are supposed to see, then he would be left open."
"Bared in every way," is Hannibal's soft rejoinder.
Will's eyes roll, ecstatic. His breath hitches. Hannibal is put in mind of the early Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the bright blade of her epilepsy cleaving her brain and sending music and poetry tumbling forth. She gave the name of God to her affliction.
Will is equally transported. How Hannibal would like to be behind his eyes, to watch the rude rural house fade and the construction of the crime take its place, billowing to life in atomic machinations. He sighs; it is almost too much.
At the shabbily appointed regional medical examiner's office, everyone had jumped backward when the technician's careful severing of the nylon cord revealed what lay hidden in the dead man's belly. Everyone except Will; he knew to expect something, knew it would be terrible, nightmare-inducing.
Utterly perfect for Hannibal's purposes.
He now sits with Will in the equally shabby antechamber of the coroner's office. The very air trembles, a vibrato that washes over Hannibal's calm immunity. Will sighs, and sighs, and sighs again, leaving the local techs to zip up the poor, ruptured body.
Bodies, in fact.
The secret within the man had begun to erupt forth as soon as the first bindings were cut. The technicians in the room-even Jack-fell prey to a startle response, and the concatenation of near-instantaneous ghastly recognition. The organs within the corpse's abdominal cavity had been shifted, compacted, but what sprung out first from the widening incision was no part of a recognizable internal structure. It was, instead, a tiny hand.
"Do you know why you-why our killer-put the infant in the victim's abdomen?" Hannibal asks, keeping his tone light and neutral.
"Fetus," Will says, without looking up. "It wasn't an infant. It was pre-term."
This Hannibal knows, of course. "Ah," he said, "so we are searching for at least one other victim."
"Yes."
"Tell me what else you know, Will."
"It's symbolic. Possibly religious. In fact, more than likely religious. I'll know more when we get the ID back on the vic."
"Could it be personal, as well?" Hannibal asks.
"Of course it's personal." Will spits the words. It comes out of frustration, although not with Hannibal.
Hannibal is his bellwether. The soothing hand on the shoulder of Will's worn jacket-donned against the vicious air conditioning of the coroner's office-says as much. For all that the atmosphere shudders in the wake of discovery, Will's shoulder is solid, rising and falling with slow breaths. He is still struggling to extract shreds of himself from the killer's mind. Later will come the night terrors, the indisputable need for reassurance. Hannibal conveys that promise with his hand as well.
"Sorry," Will says.
"There is no need for apology."