The orderlies march him into what Dr. Chilton calls the Coffee Room. No beverages in here; the room is named for the oppressive color of paint on its walls. The Coffee Room is Dr. Chilton's interrogation chamber. There are no windows. The furniture consists of one long table and two heavy chairs. Will's has cloth straps that the orderlies fit with practiced hands across his wrists and ankles.
"Let's get this out of the way," Will says. "I'm not the Chesapeake Ripper."
Chilton, predictably, misses the joke. "I never said you were."
"Well, as long as I'm on trial for crimes I didn't commit, you might as well blame me for an extra dozen."
Chilton lowers himself with difficulty into the chair opposite Will. After his injury the hospital director doesn't often see his patients privately—but for Will he braves the pain.
"How can you be sure you didn't commit these murders?" he says, as he checks something in Will's file. "You were experiencing blackouts, periods of lost time."
"I know who I am," says Will, bored of Chilton already.
"I thought that was precisely your problem. You see into the minds of other people. You adopt their thinking, their neuroses. Sometimes without meaning to, am I right? Even without bringing the encephalitis into this, how can you ever be certain who you really are?"
Will shuts his eyes, wishing he could pinch at the bridge of his nose, where a slow pressure is building. But his hands are strapped down. "I didn't kill those people, Dr. Chilton."
"Then may I ask who did?"
Obviously Dr. Chilton is setting him up, but Will doesn't care. He answers:
"Hannibal Lecter."
"Dr. Lecter is a respected psychiatrist," Chilton says, as if this precludes him from murder.
Will nods. "More respected than you are."
Oh, Chilton doesn't like this. He drops his voice in an attempt to sound dangerous. "What do you see in my mind?" he asks Will. "What do you perceive about me?"
Will looks down at his knees, at his bound ankles, at the linoleum floor. "I am not a trick pony," he mutters.
"You saw into your previous psychiatrist and decided he was a murderer."
"I didn't decide—" Will shakes his head. He knows it's pointless. "You want to know what I see in your head, Doctor? I'll tell you. Out there—" he gestures, vaguely, towards freedom—"you're nobody. This is the only place where you get to matter. In here, you can be a hollow king of your own insipid little kingdom. And that's fine with me, Dr. Chilton. Reign on. But whatever you do, stay out of my head."
For a second, Chilton lets himself get scared. Then a look of petty satisfaction spreads across his face. He has provoked Will. He has scored a point. He folds his hands on top of Will's file as he says: "I'm curious what you have against psychotherapy, Mr. Graham."
Will begins to laugh. "Where to start?"
"I think you're afraid that one day we may be able to understand you," purrs Chilton, "with the same unforgiving verisimilitude with which you thinkyou understand others. You fear the day when I, after a long period of study, have a better grasp on the inner workings of your mind than you do. That's what I think."
Will looks him straight in the eye. "Dream. On."
After this session, Dr. Chilton ups his dosage of Risperdal.
He is Hannibal Lecter and he is a murderer. He is too accomplished a murderer to have begun his killing career with Cassie Boyle, and he has no plans to retire after Abigail Hobbs. He kills like a man who has killed many times before. He has absorbed and perfected the conveyance of death. His design is beautiful, but alien—the pendulum stutters—
Will tries and tries, but he can't get close enough to Hannibal, not from within this damned cell. Reconstructing his killing methods won't bring Will the answers he needs, so he becomes Hannibal Lecter in all areas of his life. He sits at Hannibal Lecter's desk. He converses with Hannibal Lecter's patients. He prepares Hannibal Lecter's lavish dinner parties. There is something that he's missing. There are gaps. Hannibal Lecter is telling the world a joke, and even Will Graham has yet to guess the punch line.
It is an existence so far removed from Will's bars and bricks and bed and pills that it is almost a comfort. He likes being Hannibal Lecter, likes living in Hannibal Lecter's kingdom. He likes how comfortable Hannibal Lecter feels under his skin. Hannibal Lecter knows who he is. He has an unshakeable confidence. It is his weakness. That, and he's insane.
"Will? Will?"
Will comes out of it to find Alana Bloom right up by the bars, staring at him with wide eyes. "Are you all right?" she asks him. "You looked…"
"What?" He slurs the word; he feels only half-awake. "What did I look like?"
"Like someone else," she says.
Will rubs his face. "Dr. Chilton has me on what I think are elephant tranquilizers."
"I've been trying to get him to scale back your medication, but he's resistant. He says you're a difficult patient."
"I am. Can you blame me?"
She shakes her head. "Will, if you're this brittle all the time, eventually you'll break. You need something to do. I can bring you books, or…"
"I want the copycat's case file," Will says immediately. "Crime scene photos, autopsy reports, witness statements, I want everything."
"Jack isn't going to let you see your own file."
"It's not my file. It's the copycat's. It was my case to solve, once."
"It's Jack's case now," Alana says, a hint of bitterness in her voice. She looks down at her dark red nails, and Will can tell she is debating whether or not to tell him something. She opts for the truth. "You should know, Jack sent Beverly Katz to interview Hannibal Lecter, and Price and Zeller are investigating his alibis."
Will leans so far forward he is in danger of falling off the bed. "What did they find?"
Alana can't make it any clearer how much she hates this conversation. "Nothing. They've found nothing. Hannibal is airtight."
"He is meticulous, Alana. He does everything—everything—with painstaking care. He thinks of himself as a grand Chessmaster, always ten steps ahead."
"That's not Hannibal," she says, very quietly, as she shakes her head.
"He has had months to get rid of evidence, to work out every detail. He knows every question they're going to ask him. Oh," Will shudders, overcome with the awe of it, "does he do his homework."
"Or he could just be innocent," she suggests.
He ignores this. "Jack will never catch him if he plays by the book."
And suddenly Alana is on her feet, pointing at him. "The only reason Jack is investigating Hannibal is because you asked him to. You haven't burned all your bridges at the Bureau. I hope you can see that. Jack wants to do right by you. And in return, you should at least try—try—to do right by him. You need to get better, Will. And this obsession with Hannibal is preventing you from recovering."
By the end of this speech her voice is ringing off the walls. The other prisoners hoot and howl, laugh and catcall. The orderly rushes down the hall to calm them. Alana looks abashed, and pushes her hair off her forehead with one trembling hand.
"That was loud," Will whispers to her, smiling.
"I'm sorry," she says, "but I mean every word."
"I'm sorry, too." He wishes she could see inside his mind and understand. "But he did this to me, Alana. I know it in my gut and I'm never going to drop it. Never. I don't care if it makes Chilton and the rest think I'm crazy. I don't care if it affects my case in court. None of that will matter once I catch him. And I can catch him. I know I can. If you bring me that file."
But she doesn't bring him the file. Will has now been in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane for a solid month. His neurologist declares his brain officially un-inflamed. He's still on a lot of medication, some prescribed by the medical doctors, some by Chilton. He sleeps badly and doesn't eat much. Sometimes the walls of his cell shift before his eyes, like curtains rolling back. The creature that was once the black-feathered stag squats on the other side of the bars, making faces at him. In spite of all this, he feels unquestionably, unbreakably sane. He lies on his bed with his arms folded beneath his head and listens to the sounds of one of his fellow inmates crying. His sobs are great, wracking, never-ending, the sobs of an infant abandoned by its parents and rejected by the world. The inmate's grief curls up in Will's throat, the inmate's tears slide down Will's cheeks. He can't help it.
