"We're getting desperate, Matteo," Santiago told him despairingly as they stood together in the cramped office they had converted into command central for the investigation into the murder of the Bishop. "We have no leads."

"None at all?" Matteo pressed him. It was his first day on the investigation; he'd been on holiday with his wife when the Bishop was murdered, and had only come home at the urging of his boss, insisting that every detective in the department would be needed on such a high profile case.

"Well," Santiago shifted uneasily on his feet, running his hands over his dark, curly hair. He had hair any woman would envy, but PFA regulations required him to keep it short; a tragedy, Matteo thought. "There have always been rumors about the Bishop. Maybe it's a family member of a victim, or one of his victims grew up and decided to take revenge."

Matteo sighed and heaved himself up from behind the desk where he'd been pouring over reports and made his way over to the wall they'd covered in photographs from the Bishop's autopsy. It made for unpleasant viewing.

"I don't really want to spend the next month interviewing orphans who were abused by a priest. Do you?"

It was the worst-kept secret in Buenos Aires, the Bishop's predilection for preying on the weak and vulnerable. Most of the victims were too young to understand what had happened to them at the time, and too ashamed to admit to it when they grew up, and so the Bishop's sins never amounted to more than whispers, and the Church held him tight to its bosom, allowing not hint of reprisal to visit him there. Until now.

"I don't think that's the right place to start looking, anyway," Matteo added.

Matteo had given up smoking six weeks before, and so he did not reach for a cigarette, as he dearly longed to do. Instead he plucked a toothpick from the breast pocket of his shirt, and caught it between his teeth as he studied the photographs. There, the Bishop in situ, just as he had been found by the police and his driver on Valentine's Day. There, carefully framed snaps of each of his wounds, accompanied by words written in Santiago's own scrawling hand, explaining the nature and possible causes of said wounds. There, the image of the blood stained cross the Bishop had been lashed to.

"Whoever he is, he's done this before," Matteo mused, mostly to himself.

"We've never seen anything like this in Buenos Aires," Santiago protested. Such objection was vital to their work; every suggestion must be met with opposition, so that it could be examined from all sides. They would take nothing for granted.

"He must have been very quick, to catch the Bishop off guard without anyone seeing. He must also be immensely strong, to lash the Bishop to the cross and then raise it. The Bishop was not a small man."

The Bishop had in fact been a fat man, grown lazy and satisfied on the charity of others. Matteo would not miss him; he doubted anyone in Buenos Aires would.

"And look at this," Matteo continued, stepping closer to the photographs. "If this is one of his victims, someone who sought to kill the Bishop specifically, he would not have killed before - why would he, if the Bishop is his goal? - and if he has not killed before we would expect the killer to be anxious. It is not an easy thing, to slice the flesh of a man, to feel his blood spray across your face. The carotid was severed, but look here - see how clean that cut is? How smooth? He did not have time to drug his victim, and there are no injuries to the head that suggest the victim was rendered unconscious. To do this swiftly, neatly, with a steady hand, I think this requires practice. The Bishop may have screamed, before he was cut, and he almost certainly would have struggled. But this cut is...precise."

"And here," Matteo mused, moving on to the other photographs. "He took trophies, you see? But why these? The tongue, the liver, the heart…"

"And the penis," Santiago pointed out.

Matteo waved him away. "That I think was done for show, more than anything else. An outrage, as the staging of the body was designed to cause outrage. Our killer wanted to make a scene. He must have been very confident that this would not be traced back to him."

"Considering we have no witnesses and no physical evidence, I'd say he was right about that," Santiago grumbled.

It was a little unnerving, actually. The skill, the planning, the cold, implacable disposition this murder must have required was unlike anything else Matteo had ever seen before.

"The tongue, the liver, the heart," Matteo murmured under his breath. The killer would not have had much time to commit his atrocities; no more than a half hour after the mass had ended the Bishop's driver had begun to search for him, and the police had been called an hour after that. Not long at all, to kill a man, string him up, clean up all traces of himself, and then vanish. Why take the time to carve out trophies, to carry the evidence of his transgressions on his person? What sort of man could do such a thing in a church, and walk out with his pockets stuffed full of organs, and feel no fear?

That was one thing Matteo knew for a certainty; this killer, whoever he might have been, was not afraid. No God-fearing man could have done such a thing on holy ground, and no man who feared the police would have taken so great a risk. This killer knew what he was capable of, and carried off his plan with almost beautiful precision.

"Precision," Matteo murmured to himself.

"The heart, the liver, they can be sold on the black market," Santiago offered, but his tone was not optimistic; he did not believe that himself. There was not a booming market for human tongues.

"If they wanted the organs they wouldn't have wasted their time with the rest of this display."

Precision. Who else cuts so precisely? A tailor, or a doctor. The tongue, the liver, the heart. Not for sale. Neatly removed. Carotid severed in one long, smooth stroke. Who would be capable of such a thing?

"A doctor," Matteo said.

Hannibal had retreated to his mind palace. He sat alone on the balcony in the warmth of the afternoon sun, his face upturned to that bright blaze, his eyes closed, his thoughts far away. Today he was not walking through the old world elegance of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, nor was he strolling among the galleries of the Louvre. Instead today he lingered on the grounds of his ancestral home, watching Mischa in a copper tub beneath a sun that was not quite so warm as the one that currently shone down upon his face in Buenos Aires. He could see it, smell it, feel it, as strongly now as he had done on that day, the dog beside him, the cabbages, the aubergines that seemed to bleed their own color into the pale blue eyes of that little girl who so loved to see them beneath the brilliant light of the sun. Her star-shaped hands, gentle upon his face.

Soon, a voice whispered through the vaults of his mind palace, a voice that was not his own, but belonged instead to Clarice. It was her voice he heard when he closed his eyes, now and always.

Soon. A word like a heartbeat, pulsing beneath his skin, a word that drove him ever onward, closer and closer to his ultimate goal. It had been his dearest wish, his only wish, for so very long, to return Mischa to the world, and it was only the miraculous intervention of Clarice Starling and her unbendable will that convinced him to set it aside. Clarice's life, her experiences, her beliefs, were too deeply ingrained upon her mind to so easily be wiped away, and he had found that he did not want to, in any case, that she was herself too fascinating to be removed from the world. Now, though, now it seemed he was to be rewarded for his willingness to preserve her singularity by a new opportunity for Mischa's resurgence. This child, now, unformed as yet, not blessed with consciousness, not yet forged by the crucible of birth; this child was a tabula rasa, unmarked, her fate undecided, and it would be, he thought, far easier to bring Mischa forth from this babe than to overwrite Clarice's mind. It seemed to him especially fitting that this child would share his blood, as Mischa had done. It seemed, he thought, as if everything had fallen into place.

She will be the key, Clarice's voice whispered in his mind.

"Hannibal?" her voice called, not tinged with the sweetness of memory but bright and sharp and present. He lowered his chin and slowly opened his eyes, and found her framed within the open doorway leading from the upper parlor out on to the balcony. In deference to the heat she wore a light-weigh sundress, gathered tightly round her breasts and flowing out from there to cover the gentle roundness of her belly. When she moved the fabric swayed, the lines and curves of her ever-shifting, hiding their mysteries from him now, though they would not hide for long. He would see her, touch her, every inch, every pore, when they lay down together for the evening, and he would chart the changes in her physical form with reverent appreciation.

Now he held his hand out to her, Apollo entreating Daphne; would she accept him, whose form was the antithesis of all that she had previously held dear, or would she spurn him, having grown weary of the chase, and turn her heart against him for sake of the crimes he had committed?

She came; he had not doubted, not truly. She always did.

Slowly Clarice crossed the balcony, and took the hand he offered her, winding their fingers together.

"What are you thinking?" she asked him softly, and it did not escape his notice that there was worry in her gaze. It was a question she asked him often, and which he always answered honestly. Trust was a cornerstone of their relationship; if he did not trust her, how then could he love her? And if she did not love him, how then could he expect her to stay? And if she left him now she would take their child and his dreams of Mischa with her; no, she must stay. To keep her he would continue to woo her as he had done from the moment that they met, to offer her the truth of his heart, the most vulnerable pieces of himself, for her to consume in her own brilliant light, to receive her in turn. An ouroboros of the strangest, most magnificent sort.

"I'm thinking of many things," he told her. "Sunlight, and aubergines."

"Mischa," she said. A clever bird, his starling. She always had been. A deep roller, too.

"Yes," he conceded.

He had not told her his plan, as yet. That was not to say he meant to keep his aims a secret from her forever; he would need her assistance, once the child entered the world, for the fierce, determined love of a mother was the only force he could imagine capable of waylaying his plans, and Clarice, he knew, would be fiercer than most. If approached in the right way, he was confident she could come to accept his proposal. But not now, not yet; the trials of her own youth, the lessons of the ranch and the Lutherans, her work with the FBI and the subsequent conflagration of her career had instilled in her a ferocious sort of independence, and if not given time to slowly adjust to the idea he was certain she would balk, believing that the child's nature was its own, extant from the moment it first began to take shape within her womb, and she would not hear of erasing the new spirit they had created between themselves. In time, her mind would change - it often did, when presented with morsels of reasonable evidence, a trail of breadcrumbs leading her, carefully, round to his way of thinking - but he would not begin that work now.

"I think of her often, when it's warm," he explained, and Clarice relaxed, infinitesimally.

"Your love of her is a tender thing," she said, and he looked at her strangely, surprised by the sentiment. It had always seemed to him that his love of Mischa was sharp, knives against his skin, shaving away the pieces of the boy he could have been and sculpting the man he had become, but now he considered her words, and found some truth in them. It was tender, as a wound is tender, painful to the touch but something enticing about the pain, calling one's fingers back to a bruise again and again, memorizing its shape and sensation.

"It makes me love you more," she added, and then she leaned down to brush a kiss against his brow, affording him the pleasant view of her cleavage in the process.

She loved him, and loved him more for his having loved, and never forgotten it. A wonderful, terrible thing, he thought then, the heart of a woman. It was not enough for him to love her; she required it of him that he love another, as well, as if she needed proof that his heart was capable of love, that his feelings for her were true, and not some farce he played at for his own selfish reasons.

"Jack Crawford would never have believed it," she told him then, "but you will be a wonderful father. The way you cared for Mischa, the way you tried to protect her, the way you've never forgotten her...it will be the same for this little one, won't it?"

Her words troubled him a very great deal for a variety of reasons. Firstly, that Jack Crawford's name had left her lips; she'd not spoken of him in over a year. And why should she, speak of him, think of him at all, when Clarice Starling was no more, when that chapter of their lives was closed, never again to be reopened? And then there was the question she had asked of him, and the doubt that lingered in her eyes. You will be a wonderful father, she'd said, a statement of fact, and yet she had undermined it with her own uncertainty. Did she fear she had made an error, consenting to raise a child with such a man as him? Did she fear what he might do in the future?

"It will," he told her firmly, for it was the truth. It would be the same with this child as it was with Mischa, his love of her, his care for her; it would be the same because she would be the same, Mischa come again.

Clarice smiled at him, her teeth flashing white in the sunlight, and then settled into the chair beside him, content.