Chapter 3: Messages
Jack Crawford soon realized what a horrible idea it was to upload Will's profile on International Love. His initial supposition was that he would have to reply to at best two or three messages per day. After the death of his beloved wife, he spent all his free time alone, and he had guessed that he would have more than enough time after work, in the evening, to compose shrewd replies to any kind of mails Will might receive. He was wrong.
Right from the first hour after the registration, an avalanche of messages started to flood the mailbox he had created for Will on the site, and with time, the amount even worsened.
And since he didn't want to miss a chance to find Hannibal's possible message, he had to read and reply to all mails with due diligence, even to the shortest and dumbest ones. Although he found it very unlikely that Doctor Lecter would try to get in touch with Will in a brief message full of grammatical errors and childish emoticons, calling Will 'cutie' and making some strong sexual suggestions in the most vulgar ways possible, Jack felt determined not to let anything escape his attention. Therefore, he gave some neutral reply to all kinds of mails until it became perfectly clear that the sender was truly not interested in anything else but the things she had first implied. In such case, Crawford quickly deleted the sender from Will's contact list, adding her to a file he was compiling on his palmtop about the uninteresting users.
There were some women who seemed very promising at first. For example, instantly calling him 'Will' despite the fact that Jack indicated his name as William in the profile, without mentioning how he preferred to be called. And some were asking remarkable questions about his past. But they also turned out to be irrelevant after a short while.
After three weeks of spending all his nights online, replying either to the most boring or to the most outrageous messages he had ever seen in his whole life, no wonder Crawford started to give up hope.
Will dreamt about Hannibal again.
They were having a session in the doctor's office, talking about a hypothetical question of the afterlife maybe, though after waking up, Will couldn't clearly recall the details of the conversation. The only thing he could remember was the familiar shadows of the bookcases falling on him. For a few seconds after opening his eyes, he still felt Hannibal's presence, and it surrounded him with the numb fear of something terrible happening, abhorrence... and then with strangely calm, familiar warmth.
This was one of the reasons Will didn't stop taking his painkillers after the three months his doctors had suggested, and that he even started heavy drinking.
The psychoactive effect took away his ability to shape clear thoughts about his past and about his present situation, or to figure out any future plans. This way, he didn't need to concentrate on anything, to consider any rational ideas or to understand in depth what had happened to him. This dragged him into a constant, wobbling haze, and gave him a few hours during the night that he could spend with Doctor Lecter.
Hannibal woke up to the shaky, pale light of Bedelia's iPad dancing on his eyelids. She was typing another message online, lying next to him in a violet silk robe on their comfortable double bed.
He normally didn't mind her writing, but this time he had just had a dream about Will and his former office. His friend was upset about an unusually gruesome murder scene he had witnessed, and came to visit him during working hours. Hannibal tried to comfort him with some soothing, composed replies. The doctor was close to talk away the tormented frown from Will's forehead, and the atmosphere of the dream had just started to soften... And right in this moment, the light of the iPad woke him up.
He threw a bad-tempered glimpse at the screen of the device, but the photo he accidentally caught sight of there, made his heart miss a beat. He instantly forgot about the displeasure he felt over waking up... as he saw Will's picture. The so-familiar, bluish, sad eyes managed to make reality completely fade away, and the only thing that filled Hannibal's head was the wish to keep looking into them as long as possible.
But the next moment, Bedelia clicked the window away, and an empty white message box took the picture's place.
It seemed to Hannibal as if a spell which had been cast on him was just alleviated. Seeing Will for a second was both painful like a knife stab and pleasant like a gulp of cold water to a thirsty traveler lost in the desert.
He felt a bit irritated by the intense sudden effect the photo had on him, and tried to explain it with the unexpectedness of it after the dream he had just had. These two together must have been enough to make his brain react in such a dazed manner, with a miserably enthralled gaze at a simple picture.
Hannibal had a look at the electronic display of the hotel's alarm clock standing on his night stand. It was later than midnight. And it seemed simply nonsensical why Doctor Du Maurier would watch Will Graham's photo in the middle of the night, especially in a frame design which reminded Hannibal of the dating site she used lately. No. He must have imagined it. It was just a part of his dream.
But the wish to see the photo again was stronger than any rational deliberation, so he risked the question quietly, "I don't mean to pry into your private conversations, but can you please show me the picture you were looking at a short while ago?"
Bedelia's swiftly typing, beautifully manicured fingers froze on the virtual keyboard. "I didn't realize you were awake," she gave an evasive reply.
"Yes, I am."
There was silence in the room for a while.
"The picture, please." Hannibal repeated.
"Oh, yes, the picture," she echoed with a constrained, faint ghost of a smile on her lips.
She switched windows, and showed the doctor a profile of a young man from the dating site. The man on the photo must have been about 35 years old, with short, maroon hair, and a broad smile on his lips. His bluish green eyes might have shown some similarity to Will's light-colored ones, but nothing else...
Hannibal felt an empty, aching vacancy open in his heart. The photo didn't mean a thing to him. It was not Will. It had never been.
"Thank you," he murmured in a low voice. "Excuse me for interrupting you."
And he turned away, closing his eyes. It must have been just a dream then, he told himself. Certainly, just a vague dream...
But it strangely hurt, and it didn't go away.
Jack started to discover the growing symptoms of edginess on himself in the past few days whenever he opened a new message Will received from the site called International Love. He became bored with the usual replies he gave, he had enough of reading the disgraceful sexual implications, or answering stupid questions, or listening to the self-told overt lies about some users' age or looks, and particularly of the total lack of hints suggesting that Doctor Lecter would try to get in touch with Graham under an alias.
He was close to believing that the whole idea was just a pointless waste of time. Why would Hannibal browse an online dating site? And even if he did, he wouldn't check men's profiles, only women. With an encrypting program Crawford had stolen from the FBI tech-lab, he had lifted every security from Will's profile which could have hidden it from any kind of online searching throughout the site, but he still found it less and less probable that Hannibal would ever find Will's page.
The whole plan was worthless. It was pure luck Jack didn't bother Graham with the details. He would have just made a fool out of himself with his idea of catching a serial killer with the help of an online dating site. Laughable.
But the end of the day of complete resignation was the time when Caroline123 sent her first message.
"Hello, Will."
It was the only thing she wrote, but it was enough to instantly alert Crawford. He always deemed the use of the name 'Will' a good sign, and the brief, half-friendly-half-distant greeting which accompanied it also seemed noteworthy. And there was something about the user in general that made Jack become interested in her in the blink of an eye.
Her picture was very obscure. A woman sitting at a round café table, turning a bit away from the camera. Even if Crawford had met her several times before, he would have been unable to recognize her from a photo like that. And there was no obvious reason for her not to show her identity. She seemed pretty and elegant as far as Jack could guess from the small-size, blurred picture. Long, blonde and well-groomed hair... White skirt suit with a nipped-in burgundy blouse... That was all Crawford could make out from the ill-lit photo.
She used the name Caroline123, and claimed to be forty years old according to her profile. Since Jack designated the upper age level at forty-two for women who might be potential love interest for Will, he saw that Caroline met the criteria.
There was something about her secretive picture that clearly caught his attention. She wrote very little information about herself on her profile, and didn't even specify her hobbies or her interests.
Jack started with the usual, short, neutral reply, asking Caroline to tell him something about herself.