Ignis Fatuus
Chapter 2
The breeze surrounding Quantico was cold and sharp; the events of the early morning hours seemed to reflect in the dim shade of grey shadowing the sky. The body found the day before had been moved to the Quantico morgue early in the morning, she lay still and pale, just a couple of buildings away from where Clarice sat in her office. Her office was small and cluttered, but Clarice found it cosy and it was only a few doors away from Crawford's, which was both a blessing and a curse. She had already been there for a couple of hours when he arrived. She didn't notice when he entered the room, she was too busy scribbling on a piece of paper on her desk. From a distance she might have looked like a small child with a colouring book.
"Did you sleep at all last night, Starling?" asked Crawford.
Clarice was startled at the low hum of his voice and dropped her pencil when she heard it. "Not really. I tried but I couldn't. What about you?"
"I managed an hour or two," he said.
Clarice nodded, as if she was actually concerned with his sleeping habits at that time. "Mr Crawford, as we don't have any prints to run through the system, I scanned the missing persons reports filed within the past month. All from around Ashland, Richmond and the surrounding area of course."
"Find anything relevant?" he asked.
Clarice searched for a slightly crumpled piece of paper buried on her desk. "There were two women reported missing in the area in the past month, who are similar to the victim's description."
"And?" asked Crawford, intrigued.
"I looked at their photos and I think the one we're looking for is Grace Heaney," said Clarice, handing Crawford the photos of the missing girl.
Crawford considered the photographs. "And the other girl?" he asked, without breaking his gaze.
Clarice handed him a photograph of the second missing girl. "I'm almost certain that it's the first girl. She disappeared from Belle Haven two weeks ago."
Crawford considered the two sets of photographs, looking back and forth between them in his hands. "I think you're right, Starling... Grace Heaney. We'll need to inform her family and get someone down here to identify her. You think you're up to that, Starling?"
"Yes," she said without thinking. "Will we be receiving anything from Ashland, such as her personal belongings, clothes, things like that?"
"There was nothing on her, remember Starling. No clothes, no nothing," said Crawford. "You did good identifying her, Starling. Now's the hard part."
Clarice found the home telephone number for the Heaney household in Belle Haven, listed under 'Jerry Heaney'. She would have to inform the parents of Grace Heaney that their missing girl was now a dead girl. She would rather have told them in person, it seemed more respectful, but she didn't want to see their faces when they would find out that they had outlived their daughter. She had almost asked Crawford about what she should say, how she should word it, but out of the two of them she considered herself more compassionate. Crawford knew that making such a call would be a challenging experience for Starling but he didn't offer to take her place. Clarice left her office door open; she did not want to be left alone with the voices on the other end of the line. She dialed the numbers and listened to the ringing, hoping that they wouldn't answer. Clarice's heart leapt when she heard a voice at the other end of the line.
"Hello?" asked a woman's voice, quiet and weak like a whisper.
"Good morning. May I speak with either Jerry or Margaret Heaney please?"
There were beats of silence. "This is Margaret Heaney."
"Hello Mrs. Heaney, this is Special Agent Starling from the FBI. I'm calling regarding the missing persons report you filed about your daughter." Clarice heard the sharp formality of her voice and hated herself for it.
"Yes. What is it?... Please tell me," the voice whispered.
"Well ma'am..." Clarice started. She was halted by the quiet whimpering on the other end of the line, Margaret Heaney knew what was coming. "I'm afraid I have some bad news... I'm sorry."
"No. Please, please..." said the woman, her voice becoming breathless and erratic. "Don't say it."
"We have found the body of a young woman matching your daughter's description. We're will need you to come down here and identify her," said Clarice quickly. It felt like tearing the band-aid off an open wound.
She closed her eyes tight. All she could do was listen to the hopeless crying on the other end of the line. The voice of a man sounded in the background, his words muffled with agony and regret. She didn't know whether Mrs. Heaney still held the phone to her ear, or whether she had been left on the side while the grief-stricken mother consoled her husband. She felt compelled to wait for them to come back. She owed them that. Her face felt hot and red, and she realised that tears had covered her cheeks, their saltiness making her itch. Suddenly Crawford was standing in the doorway.
"Starling," he said, swiftly approaching her.
He took the phone from Clarice's hands and held it to his ear. He listened for a moment to the terrible crying of Grace Heaney's parents, their desperate please to God and muffled whimpering. He then placed the phone facing upwards on the desk. Clarice had quickly wiped the tears away from her cheeks while Crawford wasn't looking, but they were red and blotchy and it was apparent that she had been crying anyway. Crawford placed a hand on her shoulder.
"Let's give them a minute," he said. Clarice nodded and took strange, regretful comfort in his hand placed on her left shoulder.
"Thank you Sir," she said, finally looking up at him with a small smile.
Clarice had planned to go to Ashland and collect Mr and Mrs Heaney herself but Crawford had insisted that she should stay and work on the case. She agreed, but planned meet them when they arrived. They looked grey in colour when Clarice first saw them and they hardly responded to her when she introduced herself. Mrs Heaney was a short, stock woman with fluffy brown hair and brown freckles dotted around her cheeks, and Mr Heaney was slightly taller and losing his dark hair; both of them had swollen, sullen eyes and red noses. Clarice did not go in the room with them, but waited outside at their request. There was a minute of silence when Mr and Mrs Heaney entered the room where their dead child lay on a metal slab. When the Quantico's medical examiner removed the white sheet from the body, Margaret Heaney screamed so terribly that it was difficult to believe such an inhuman noise could come from a person. Mr Heaney simply covered his face and sobbed.
The girl was confirmed as Grace Heaney, twenty-two years old, a student nurse. Clarice was relieved when Mr and Mrs Heaney left to return to their home. She couldn't stop thinking of her own parents; her tall, brave father who had died while trying to protect his community, and her strict and somewhat selfish mother, who she had mixed feelings about. She hated thinking of her parents. It made her feel weak and dumb, like a Freudian cliche.
She pushed thoughts of her parents to the back of her mind and tried to make sense of the mutilation of Grace Heaney's body. The removal of the hands and tongue was postmortem, so had no value in terms of torturing the girl. They were not individual acts of mutilation either, they were meant to be taken together as a message and a signature. Clarice typed 'removal of hands and tongue' into her computer and clicked search. She found hundreds of links to information on the identification and removal of genital warts and hypothyroidism. This was too indirect and irrelevant to be a clue, so Clarice dismissed it. Next she tried 'girl with hands and tongue removed' and again found references to warts and several medical websites. She spotted one website which seemed promising: 'After Philomela: a history of women whose tongues have been ripped out'. Clarice read through many dense pages of information on her computer screen, reading about Philomela of Athens whose tongue was ripped out after she was raped by her brother-in-law, and Lucrece who was also mutilated after sexual assault. Still though, she did not find any references to the removal of both the hands and tongue.
She continued searching and scanning various websites, until she came across a reference to a play called Titus Andronicus, supposedly written by Shakespeare. She read of how a young, female character named Lavinia is tortured and raped, and then has her tongue and hands removed to stop her from reporting her attackers. Clarice frantically searched for more information on the character named Lavinia and her attackers, collecting images of adaptations of the girl, at which point Crawford entered her office and sat on the edge of her desk, considering a hand tucked beneath his chin.
"The boys at the lab have had a thought about the case. I have to admit that it came to my mind when I saw the girl's body, but I didn't have enough reason to believe it."
"What is it, Sir?" asked Clarice.
Crawford gave Clarice a second of dreaded silence. "The removal of the hands and tongue and the precision and accuracy of the cuts have been seen before. You know what I'm talking about, Starling?"
Clarice's stomach churned. "Yes. Dr Lecter, Sir."
"Right," he said. "It's just a thought of course... The first thought that came to me when I saw her."
"Don't you think it's just a little too obvious to be him? I can't imagine that he'd make it so easy for us," said Clarice.
"You know him well," said Crawford, with a strange mixture of consideration and judgement in his voice.
Clarice broke eye-contact with Crawford and laughed. She felt a tinge of anger echo in her head but brushed it off. "I think I've found something which might be relevant to the mutilation of the body."
"What is it, Starling?"
"A reference to a Shakespeare play. The daughter of a Roman soldier is raped and then has her hands and tonge removed, to stop her from talking. It's the only reference I have found where both the hands and tongue are removed together."
"There was no indication of rape or sexual abuse."
"Well maybe it's not about the abuse," said Clarice. "Maybe it's more about the silence, you know, an innocent victim."
Crawford nodded and pinched his eyes. "You might be right, Starling. It still makes me think of Lecter. His victims all had a clever pun around them, or an ironic reference to a classic."
"It all just seems too obvious to be him him," said Clarice. "The reference to Shakespeare, the location, everything. He's making it too easy for us."
"I don't know, Starling. He-"
Crawford stopped speaking at the sudden sound of a scrap outside of Clarice's office door. They both rushed to the scene, where Special Agent John Brigham had tackled a pasty-looking man to the ground, pressing his knee against his back to keep him down as he struggled and objected.
"What's going on?" Crawford shouted.
"I found him standing outside Starling's door listening in on your conversation!" said Brigham, applying greater force to the stocky man beneath him. "A National Tattler boy!"
"Get off me! I know my rights!" the man shouted, his face growing red and sweaty. "Get off!"
Two agents dressed in blue FBI gear appeared from around the corner and grabbed the small man by his arms, lifting him up so that he was facing Crawford and Starling. His face was round and his hair was fine and light. He breathed heavily and avoided eye contact with all those standing around him, instead he stared at his shoes. Crawford looked at him with disgust and ripped a recorder from his hand.
"You won't be needing this," said Crawford. The small, red-faced man did not respond, but instead glared into Crawford's eyes with weak disobedience. Crawford went into the man's pocked and pulled out his wallet, looking over his ID. "Vernon White. National Tattler reporter. Are you aware that trespassing on these grounds is illegal?"
The little man looked up in a quick movement. "Should you really be focusing on me when Hannibal the Cannibal is out there killing again? You people should start doing your job properly!"
"Get him out of here," said Crawford.
Clarice watched the agents drag the reporter away and felt a sudden wave of dread for what was coming. It wouldn't be long until reporter reached the National Tattler headquarters and started coming up with clever headlines about the case and Lecter's supposed involvement, imbedding Clarice's name in every sub-heading. She was suddenly aware that Crawford's attention had returned to her.
"What's your next move, Starling?" he asked.
"I'm gonna go down there and talk to some of her friends, her parents if they'll let me," said Clarice. "What are we going to do about the National Tattler?"
"What we always do, Starling. Don't confirm anything. Deny the comments about Lecter. We don't want national panic on our hands," he said.
Clarice prepared herself for her next task: getting to know the loved ones of Grace Heaney. She was not nervous, she had done exactly the same for Frederika Bimmel two years before and was able to emotionally detach herself from it. She was worried though, for she knew that Crawford couldn't stop the National Tattler and their fuckboys from printing stories of Lecter's supposed return. It wasn't the thought of national panic worrying her, or even the thought of her own name dragged up a hundred times, it was the thought of him finding out that he was being feared and hunted once again. The thrill and smug pleasure he would feel knowing that the world was still hung up on his crimes, still fearing his return. She knew that he would think of her and somehow she felt trapped, as if her presence in his mind was the same as her presence in front of his glass cage. It wouldn't be very long until Clarice would revisit those feelings which consumed her every day during the Buffalo Bill case, when she would have to sit in front of Dr Lecter's cell as he paced up and down in front of her, prying for details about her childhood. It wouldn't be very long at all.
Author's note: Thank you to everyone who has reviewed, followed and favourited this story so far! As you may know, the appearance of Dr Lecter will take place quite soon so keep reading! Things are about to get very interesting. Please consider writing a review. :)