Author's notes:

Whoo-ee, these past few chapters have been nonstop action. So here's a little breather. (In other words, no one gets waxed in this chapter. But if you're one of Susana's more bloodthirsty fans, fear not. There's plenty more accounts to settle up, and I rather think you'll enjoy the plot twists that are upcoming.)

Thanks to everyone who reads and reviews. More chapters coming shortly, unless I start feeling Lecter-ish myself and holding them hostage. Quid pro quo, Clarice. I write things, you read and review things.

--

Back in Washington, Susana took a few days to relax and play tourist. Despite her more violent tendencies, she enjoyed the cultural activities a great deal. In that, she was very much her father's daughter. She visited the Smithsonian Institute for a few days. She had more fun than she expected at the National Zoo. And today, she was visiting the FBI.

Susana thought it quite daring to brazenly walk into the heart of the forces that had been arrayed against her father and were seeking her out now. Besides, while the Chicago crimes were all front-page news, there seemed to be no connection to her. She had made sure to get the Chicago papers. So far, there was nothing indicating the police had any evidence on her. She expected as much. She had made sure to avoid leaving fingerprints at all three scenes.

Even so, she wasn't naïve enough to waltz into FBI headquarters with a visitor's badge clipped to her lapel. No, Susana had a far better idea. The concierge had been most helpful in finding a beauty salon for her where she could get her hair done. She brought the beautician a photograph and told her she wanted her hair cut to resemble that. She had colored it too, taking it a few shades lighter.

Now she sat at the desk in her hotel room with a variety of cosmetics spread out before her. The photograph was prominent where she had taped it to the mirror. The picture showed a young woman much like her. The woman in the photograph had a solemn, composed expression. Her hair was a few shades lighter than Susana's natural color. It was Clarice Starling's college graduation picture.

The first step was to insert a set of colored contact lenses. Susana had twenty-twenty vision, but the contact lenses only changed the color of her eyes to blue. She carefully put them in, blinked, and then stared at her reflection in the mirror. In place of her own maroon eyes, courtesy of her father, a pair of blue eyes stared back at her.

Susana had a strong resemblance to her mother already. She possessed the same high cheekbones and delicate features. With a bit of makeup, she was able to enhance this resemblance. She didn't put on a lot of it, as her mother had rarely indulged in cosmetics during her career with the FBI. She worked carefully, comparing her reflection to the photograph. Occasionally she rubbed her face with a towel and started again.

Finally, she was satisfied. Her reflection in the mirror was a near-perfect duplicate of the photograph. Susana Alvarez Lecter rose and put on a simple, dark suit. It was of much more expensive cut than anything her mother had worn at her age, but her father had taught her about dressing well and his lessons had stayed with her.

She caught a cab to FBI headquarters and walked up the ramp into the building. An armed guard looked up at her as she came in.

"Your name?"

"Susana Alvarez," Susana said. Her surname was so common that tying it to her would be almost impossible in any case.

"Purpose of your visit?"

She smiled. "Um, actually, I read in a guidebook that you could get tours of the FBI."

"There's one starting in half an hour, ma'am," the guard said. His tone was bored and uninterested. "Your ID, please?"

Susana gave him her passport. He glanced at it and handed it back to her. "Argentina, huh?"

"Yes," she said.

"Welcome to America."

"Thank you," Susana said. He handed her a visitor's badge. "You can wait over there, if you like. Please keep the badge on at all times and stay with your tour group."

Susana thanked him very much and sat down to wait. She watched people going to and fro. Her eyes swept across the massive building, and for a moment she wondered it must have been like for her mother, working in this vast labyrinth.

A half-hour later, a perky blond woman came around to round up the visitors. Susana went along peaceably and followed along. She prepared to be bored by presentations about J. Edgar Hoover and the history of the FBI. She was not disappointed. She wondered what would happen if she asked the tour guide if it was true that Hoover had been a maricòn, and decided not to. This wasn't the place to stick out.

…

Section Chief Ardelia Mapp was stressed out. In the years since she had come to head up Behavioral Sciences, she had never had one of her agents get killed. Field agents got killed, and she had seen that. But never before had one of her profilers been killed. But now one had.

It had begun simply enough in Chicago, after two strange murders back-to-back of National Tattler writers. Tony Braxton had gone out to Chicago to interview another employee, the one Chicago PD believed to be next. Then, a bloodbath had taken place.

Agent Braxton had been discovered in a tenth-floor hall closet. Apparently, the killer had known he was coming. Mapp was heartbroken when she discovered he had died. But in the apartment where Thomas Dover had been found – she still shuddered.

Two separate Lecter murders had been duplicated there. The police officers assigned to Dover had been used to re-enact Lecter's escape from Memphis. One had been found tied up with a sheet under him to suggest wings to a beam. The other had his face cut off and had been dumped on top of the elevator car. Thomas Dover himself had been killed in a duplicate of the Pazzi murder in Florence, Italy.

She had taken over the investigation named LECCOPY herself. Braxton's initial profile had suggested an UNSUB who saw themselves as Lecter's protector or guardian. It was quite difficult to manage this case and run her department at the same time – the death of Braxton weighed heavy on her mind.

She'd driven in to FBI headquarters from Quantico for a meeting. Chicago PD had teleconferenced in. They were hot for a suspect, and Ardelia didn't blame them. But she wanted to wait, to build her profile and catch her killer dead-bang. Despite the grief, over thirty years of police work had taught Ardelia that anger was a bad thing for cops. It clouded their minds and prevented them from doing their jobs. Police work done by angry cops was often shoddy police work. Shoddy police work set killers free.

Chicago felt they had a cop-killer on their hands. Ardelia didn't agree. She believed that the UNSUB killed police officers only as a means to an end. The end had been the murders of Smithfield, Jameson, and Dover. All three were Tattler employees; all three had written articles blaming Hannibal Lecter for various murders.

As she left her meeting, she shook her head. Agent Witt, one of her long-time profilers, accompanied her to the elevator.

"I can't believe this," she muttered.

"Can't believe what?" he asked. "We need some time, chief. That's all. We'll get the bastard."

"Whoever they are, they're good," she warned. "No fingerprints, no hair, no nothing. Must be strong, too – Rodell weighed two hundred pounds."

"You think it might be Lecter himself?"

Ardelia shook her head. "No way. Even if Lecter's still alive, I doubt a man his age could stick a two-hundred-pound man on the wall and drop a three-hundred-pound one down an elevator shaft."

"So it's a copycat."

"Not quite. The Jameson murder didn't match up to any Lecter murder."

"Any known Lecter murder," Witt pointed out.

The elevator binged open on the ground floor. Mapp stepped out.

…

"This is the Hall of the Fallen," the perky tour guide said. "Begun in 2008, we have here the photographs of all FBI agents who have fallen in the line of duty since the founding of the Bureau. These brave law enforcement agents are remembered here." Her face cast down in an expression of practiced grief. The tourists shuffled and felt the token wave of guilt that was exactly what they were supposed to feel.

Susana didn't. She scanned the wall of 8x10 pictures to see if her mother's might be on it. She located the picture of a man named John Brigham. She studied it momentarily, wondering what was so special about the man. Her mother had told her of him when she was young. Clarice missed him a great deal, even still. He had been so wrongly wasted. Here, on this wall, he was just another dead hero. Susana wondered why her mother still got teary when his name came up.

To her surprise, her mother's picture was here. Printed under it was her name, her dates of service, and the words "MISSING 1998, PRESUMED DEAD". Susana pondered on that for a moment, as the date was six years before her own birth. She was rather glad the presumption of the FBI was in error. Her mother was not smiling in the picture. She looked serious, tired, and pale. Susana supposed that the picture must have been taken shortly before her mother left the country with her father, when she was disenchanted and disheartened with the FBI. Wandering the halls as her mother's doppelganger, she had seen no trace of her mother save this; no psychic scrap of the years her mother had spent in this agency were here for her to pick up on. All there was were offices and computers and people looking for her father and herself.

A black woman and white man passed by. The black woman glanced in and stared at the grid of pictures. Her face was a study in tenderness, nostalgia, and grief. Susana paid them no attention, playing the role of the tourist. The tour guide called her charges to follow her into another room, and Susana complied. She turned her head and glanced at the pair in the hall, then followed her guide dutifully. She didn't see the black woman turn pale and gasp.

…

As Ardelia and Witt continued to discuss the LECCOPY case, they passed by the Hall of the Fallen. She glanced in because it was her habit to do so. When the Hall had been formed, she had argued for Clarice, then ten years missing, to be included. More to satisfy her than anything else, the agents in charge of the Hall had agreed, and Clarice's picture went up with the others. Whenever Mapp passed it, she glanced in to pay her friend a small, silent respect.

But this time…Clarice was in there.

Right under Clarice's picture was Clarice in the flesh. A young Clarice, perhaps when they had been in the Academy together. She wore a simple, attractive suit and pumps. Her hair was in the same style it had been when she and Ardelia had reviewed the Buffalo Bill case file. The night that she and Clarice had worked out Dr. Lecter's last clue.

"Clarice?" she said, still unbelieving. She felt time warping in on her, as if hoping that Clarice would turn and say What does this guy do? He covets.

Clarice turned. Ardelia's heart did cartwheels in her chest. Clarice's blue eyes focused on Ardelia, raked across her, and evidenced no recognition. Then she followed the tour guide on.

Ardelia gasped. Her face lost color. Ardelia was black, and did not turn pale in the manner of her Caucasian co-workers. Instead, all the color fell out of her face, leaving it a grayish color similar to cigarette ash. It served to signal distress as easily as turning pale did.

Ardelia's heart slowed as it dawned on her. Tour guide. Just some tourist here from East Lompoc, Idaho. Not Clarice. Couldn't be Clarice. Yet the resemblance was astonishing. She could have sworn young Clarice had stepped through a tesseract from 1990 to 2025.

Witt had seen her distress. "Something wrong, chief? You look like you just saw a ghost."

"Thought I had," Ardelia responded.

Witt's look became a bit more concerned. "You sure you're OK, boss?"

"Yeah," she said, and gave him an empty smile. "It's just…oh heck. One of the tourists in that tour group they run just looked like someone."

"Starling?"

"How'd you know?"

Witt grinned. "That's what you pay me for, isn't it?"

"Could've been her twin," Ardelia averred. "That was just…really random."

Words from the past echoed in her mind as those words escaped her lips.

A much younger version of herself: Doesn't this random pattern seem desperately random?

Her roommate and best friend, Clarice Starling: In other words, not random at all.

For some reason, Ardelia Mapp was convinced that her sighting of the ghost Clarice was not random at all.

Time would prove her right, too.