Author's note: Susana makes up most religious stuff as she goes along, but in this chapter she paraphrases Acts 9:2, 9:18 and 9:16. Lauralee, here you go – request granted. For you goo fans (ahemcoffSteelcoffcoff): (New York accent) You want goo? I gotcha goo right HEAH! Here we go, Serial Killers in Love. Aren't they just so cuuuuuute?
It was a warm summer day in Virginia, bright and sunny. The park was a picture of paradise. Children played excitedly on the swingsets. Families grilled burgers and hotdogs. Occasionally, the music of a boombox pierced the peaceful scene, but never far enough to disturb anyone else. And seated on a blanket, equipped with a picnic basket and a radio of their own, were Susana Alvarez Lecter and Luke Taylor. Both wore baseball caps and sunglasses. Neither of these stuck out: many people wore them against the bright sun.
These two monsters were at peace, enjoying a picnic to celebrate Susana's return. Watching them eat their lunch and enjoy each others company would only have been odd to someone who knew what they were. Their food was merely roast-beef sandwiches with Dijon mustard, French fries, and wine. It was strictly against Virginia law to bring an alcoholic beverage into a state park, but many rangers winked at the violations, and laws against alcoholic beverages often do not influence the behavior of those who commit murder without compunction.
Luke reached out and touched Susana's arm briefly as she ate. He had not failed her, and she had not failed him. He had been her warrior, her messenger, defeating her enemies for her, and now he was enjoying the due reward of his efforts. She had come back to him. He found himself enjoying everything about her. The sight of her. The smell of her. Her very presence.
For her part, Susana was also enjoying the day and the company. Here, in the very place she had been taken prisoner, she was out, free, enjoying the sunshine. And there was no indication that anyone knew she was here. The drive down from Canada had been uneventful. She'd left the Cadillac in a no-parking zone in New York City, and by now it had been crunched down into a cube of metal somewhere in a Brooklyn scrapyard. Perhaps Roger Patterson's corpse, ensconced in the trunk, had been crushed with it. But she was here, free, in the outdoors, with someone who cared for her. For a woman who had recently been both incarcerated and orphaned, these were not small things. The fact that he was a serial killer did not bother Susana in the least. The fact that he was emotionally disturbed and obsessed with religion as a cover for his killings simply made for an interesting relationship.
"Are you happy to be back?" he asked, smiling gently at her.
"Yes," she smiled back. Luke felt something flip-flop in his chest.
"Did you see the paper?" he continued. "It'll be much harder to get to the rest now. They're on their guard."
Susana shrugged and nodded. "For now," she explained. "They'll get sloppy sooner or later."
Luke nodded. "I don't understand all of your plan," he said solemnly. "You can't go to war with all of the heathens in the FBI."
Ain't that the truth, Susana Alvarez Lecter thought. But Luke had done what she wanted him to, so she would give him another piece of the puzzle.
"I don't need to go to war with all of them," Susana explained. "Just Behavioral Sciences. They're the brains behind the operation." She ruminated for a moment over how to put it into terms that would feed his religious psychosis. It wasn't easy, since she was completely without religion.
"I don't need to strike down all the soldiers of the dark forces," she hedged. "Just take out their…sorcerers. You know, their witches. They'll be blind without them, and the Lord will deliver us from the hands of our enemies." She fought the brief urge to throw her arms in the air and scream Hallelujah. Dealing with Luke and religion was always difficult: the temptation to mock it was part of her nature, but it would offend him deeply.
Their witches. The image of Lisa Starling in a black robe and pointy hat rose up in her mind, mixing crime-scene reports and eye of newt into a black cauldron rose up in her mind and she stifled a giggle. But she did have to find out what sort of witchery Lisa had employed in order to track her. But that would have to wait.
"So when shall we go after the fifth?" Luke asked.
"Not sure yet," Susana said, only half listening.
"I saw her condo before. She wasn't there," Luke offered.
Susana did not reply at first, simply enjoying the sunshine on her face. Sunshine that wasn't through a tiny window, filtered by thick glass. Then she realized Luke had said she and her. Behavioral Sciences only had two women as profilers, something Susana disapproved of. Luke had killed one on his mission a few days before. That meant there was only one left.
"Um…wait a minute," Susana said primly. Lisa Starling could have told Luke that her prim, schoolmarmish tone indicated she was displeased. "Are you referring to Lisa Starling?"
Luke seemed surprised. "Of course," he said. "She is one of the dark disciples. Actually, she's the one who tracked you down. Surely you'd want her out of the way." He had heard of Lisa Starling when he'd heard of Susana's capture. The media had been unable to resist the story: cousin tracking down and arresting cousin just didn't happen every day.
That bothered Susana. She rather enjoyed the games with Lisa's mind, and she was loath to lose her favorite target.
"Not her," she said vehemently. "Don't you touch her."
Luke's eyes widened behind the sunglasses he wore. "Are you serious?"
She nodded. Then she realized how to phrase it to him and took a breath to compose herself.
"Lisa's going to have an epiphany," Susana said slowly. "She will go unto the judges and ask for warrants and say she'll bring me back to Alexandria in chains if she finds me, but she'll have a vision on the road to Quantico, and the scales will fall from her eyes." Or something like that, she amended. She smiled coldly. "I myself will show her how much she must suffer for the sake of my name."
Luke nodded. "If that is the plan of God," he said simply.
Susana said nothing. Privately, she thought No, the plan is mine, not God's, but you seem incapable of telling the difference.
Just then, a battered Trans Am pulled into the parking lot of the park. A large blue car followed it. The second car was obviously a police cruiser – big blue sedan, with a large antenna waving off the back. Susana's head swiveled to follow them as she had glanced over every car that entered the lot since they had come here.
No. Couldn't be.
Susana had chosen this park because her mother had told her about it. Her mother had been right: it was quite pretty and pleasant. Apparently, it was attractive to more than one Starling. Silently, she watched Lisa Starling pull her Trans Am into a parking space. The prowler pulled in beside it. She got out and helped an old man from the passenger seat of the sports car. The cop car disgorged two people: a tall, dark-haired woman in a T-shirt and black fatigue pants whom Susana had never seen before, and a man in a federal marshal's uniform.
Behind her sunglasses her eyes widened. Luke saw them too and tensed.
"Stay calm," she said urgently. "They're not here for us. There'd be a lot more if they were, and they'd have machine guns."
"So what do we do?" Luke asked, not unreasonably.
Susana rummaged in the picnic basket. Next to the plates and the thermos was a 9mm pistol, two pairs of handcuffs, and a pair of Zeiss binoculars. The handcuffs were for tonight. Susana took the pistol and covered it up with a napkin. She pulled it out of the basket along with the binoculars.
"Here," she said. "Lie down on the blanket."
Luke did, and she snuggled up against him as young lovers might have done. She placed the pistol in between them and brought the binoculars up to her eyes. The magnified image of her cousin appeared in them, and she tilted her head curiously. It was hard to keep the binoculars up over Luke's head and try to be unnoticeable.
Her cousin was guiding the old man to a picnic table, supporting him with one arm and holding a bunch of files and a cooler in her other hand. Susana took a moment to look at the old man. She didn't recognize him. Nor did she recognize the bodyguards – and that was what she knew they were. Her binoculars lingered on the figure of Agent Laura Miehns for a moment or two, but Susana had never actually met Agent Miehns. The HRT commander had been in the van with Lisa at the ill-fated operation to arrest Susana a few years before.
She shifted back to her cousin and the old man. What the hell was Lisa doing? She was a little old to be seeking a Girl Scout merit badge. She seemed quite respectful towards the old man, handing him files to look at, running and getting him a drink out of the cooler. Susana frowned curiously and focused in on the old man. She didn't think they could see her from this distance.
Who was he? Her memory palace contained files in the Hall of Enemies on every agent assigned to Behavioral Sciences, courtesy of all the articles she could glean on the Internet and Freedom of Information act requests that she was able to get anonymously through lawyers like Roger Patterson. There were old men in the department, sure. But no one as old as this walking zombie.
She studied the old man's face through the lenses of the binoculars. With the magnification, she could see every unlovely wrinkle and wattle. Honestly, Botox had been legal for years. The man could take advantage of modern medicine. She saw an ancient, long-healed scar in a triangle around his eye. Must've been years ago, the flesh was barely discolored.
In her memory palace, her father's voice echoed. A conversation from long ago, from when she had been a teenager and he had sat her down and told her that he had not always been Alonso Alvarez, and that he had not always been an Argentine medical school professor.
Has there ever been someone else like me, Susana? There was, once. I haven't seen him in years. But we were just alike…and then he showed her a picture from his trial. There he had sat, proud and unbowed, at the defense table. And on the witness stand, uncomfortable in his bandages….
"Graham," she said under her breath.
"Hmm?" Luke asked against her. He was trying to shift around so that her elbow did not dig into him.
"Graham," she repeated. "That's the old man there. My, that's surprising. I never thought he'd still be alive."
For a moment, great anger rose up in her. How dare Will Graham live when her father was years in his grave? When her mother was buried next to him? Susana had never had the same urge as her father, to create a place in the world for the deceased by taking the place of a living person. But if it were possible, she would have taken Will Graham in a second and given his place to her father.
But she couldn't do that, and was realistic enough to know that. She could, however, touch something her father had touched, and walk in his footsteps the way that pleased her the most. This would be far better than simply arranging murders in the manner that he had. Here, she could do what he had done, and succeed where he had failed. It would have made him proud. She lowered the binoculars and grinned a grin one might expect to see on the jowls of a hungry wolf.
"You're grinning," Luke Taylor said, and his own smile was so open and so happy you never would have thought he had bludgeoned and stabbed five people to death a few days ago.
Susana's grin widened and she dropped her lips to his. She lingered on them for a long, lazy moment. "I'm very happy," she said. He seemed to be more comfortable with physical affection now. Good thing, training all the Christianity out of him would be so tiresome.
"Are we still on for tonight?" he asked. "Or have plans changed?"
"For tonight? I'm still game for it," she said. Dinner in a nice place in the city. She'd taken him shopping the day before and gotten him something presentable to wear out at the best restaurants. Then a movie. Then…a little live entertainment.
…
"Starling, I don't see why you couldn't have done this back at Quantico," Laura Miehns said, grinning.
"It's a beautiful day," Lisa said. "And we can go over things here perfectly well."
Laura Miehns crossed her arms at the smaller woman. "Quantico's more secure." She scanned the landscape of the park.
"Here has picnic tables," Lisa riposted.
"How nice," Agent Miehns said. "Susana Lecter might be in the treeline with a sniper rifle too. But hey, you'd die with a picnic table."
Lisa Starling rolled her eyes. Agent Miehns had volunteered to guard her while Behavioral Sciences was under siege. She was good at her job – almost too good. Occasionally, Lisa thought that given her druthers the taller woman would have stashed her down in Susana's old cell.
"She's never used a sniper rifle," Lisa said. "And the…attacks were all with hand-to-hand weapons. Sniping isn't her style anyway. She's up close and personal."
"Quit it, the two of you," Will Graham said. His tone was surprisingly strong considering his age. He adjusted the baseball cap on his head and stared them down each in turn. "You're acting like a couple of kids brawling in the back seat."
Very few people could have said that to the commander of the HRT, but Laura Miehns did not have it in her to get angry at an old man, particularly an old man who had been on the job before either of them were born. "Mr. Graham, I'm not paranoid. My job is to keep both of you safe. And this isn't the best tactical situation here."
"Well, you can't keep us cooped up in the basement forever," Lisa said. She sat down across from Graham at the picnic table and handed him a file. He opened it and stared at the mugshot of Susana Alvarez Lecter. His throat wavered.
Will Graham had not known Clarice Starling terribly well. He had met her at a few functions – some dinner that Molly had called "Behavioral Sciences' Greatest Hits" – and the most he had ever traded with her was a simple hello. Susana's face strongly resembled her mother's. Conveniently, there was a copy of Clarice's first FBI photo ID in Susana's file. He stared at it for a moment and back to her daughter's mugshot. Yes, Susana looked more like her mother. But the eyes.
Will closed his own eyes and remembered. Those maroon eyes of Dr. Lecter's, rare and merciless. Staring at him, seemingly through him, in Lecter's office. Nodding and smiling. Why no, I don't recall much about the man…just an arrow wound through the thigh, Investigator, it was five years ago. One of his friends brought him in. Hunting buddies, perhaps. He had chuckled. Then Lecter in the cell. That's the same dreadful cologne you wore in court…Do you know how you caught me? The reason you caught me is that we're just alike…
He shuddered away memories. Hard to believe that had been a quarter century or so before the woman in the mugshot was born. Dr. Lecter was dead: so the file noted, so Susana had said at her first arrest. That was no small comfort to Will Graham. But he was alive in the maroon eyes that stared out of the mugshot at him. She looked like Starling, but her expressions were pure Lecter. Even in the mugshot, she had the same little half-smirk that Lecter had adopted with anyone he thought less intelligent than him. Which was only the entire planet.
Dr. Lecter's daughter, Dr. Lecter herself. That was who she was all right for him. It made it easier for him to think of her that way. It was a tie between his encounter with the first Dr. Lecter over half a century before and now. And no one could deny her the title of 'doctor'. Harvard Medical School, attending under the pseudonym Alina Lektor. Graham recognized the almost-anagram of Hannibal in the first name and wondered if she'd had a middle name that contained the H, B, and the other L. He thought she had. A surgeon instead of a psychiatrist, but that simply helped her do her unspeakable work more efficiently. As he reviewed her crime-scene photos, he was put ill at ease by the sight that she had gutted an FBI agent – DeGraff, his name was, Graham had to squint to read it. The autopsy photo hit close to home. But he had lived, and it looked like DeGraff hadn't. He read a few words of the 302 Agent Lisa Starling had filed about the DeGraff incident and wished he hadn't. She seemed quite sweet for someone who had eaten another agent's intestines.
He tried to concentrate on other things. Like Lisa Starling, Graham saw through the tan and the black hair dye almost immediately. She wasn't Hispanic in looks normally. He had her mother's picture right there to compare with, and her father's face would always reside in the back of his mind.
He flipped open another file and began to peruse the results of the Toronto murders. The murder of Shawn Irons was definitely Susana's. The murder of the younger women, however, gave him pause. Not Susana's style at all, as Lisa had told him before. In some ways it reminded him of the murders Hannibal Lecter had committed. Medieval in style. No, wait. Not medieval…well, sort of.
He'd seen those somewhere. Where was it? GWU? No, he was thinking of Wound Man. How he'd caught the first Dr. Lecter. The memory of being on the phone with the police switchboard rose up in his mind then. All he'd felt was that hot breath on the back of his neck.
He gritted his teeth and forced it away. Think about it, now, he told himself. It wasn't GWU. It had been after the Lecter case. He'd been delivering a talk to some local PD boys who wanted Profiling 101. Most of them had just been interested in hearing it, but one fellow showed up and had some promise. He'd talked with Graham after his speech and had really, really seemed interested in it. Some local-yokel boy, who hadn't yet realized that his police career would start and end in a patrol car writing tickets and arresting drunks.
"Ever seen anything like this?" he asked. "I saw this in the library. Real horrible if you ask me. You were saying Dr. Lecter liked medieval things, did he ever do a murder like this?"
The book had been covered over in plastic, the way library books were. What was the title? He couldn't remember. But he remembered the smell of the old pages and the frankly horrible images copied in there. And those two girls…wait…hanging like that. Yes. He knew what they were supposed to be. Yes.
"Martyrs," Will Graham said, staring down at the picture
Lisa Starling glanced at him. "Huh?"
"They're martyrs," Will repeated, and stabbed a blunt finger at the picture. "There's a book about it but I can't remember the title." He tapped it with a thick fingernail three times, tap tap tap on the wooden picnic table. "Hanging like that. One beaten with a hammer, the other with the weights. But I think Dr. Lecter may have updated the choking part."
Lisa seemed interested but hadn't put it into place yet. To Will, this was very frustrating. The limitations old age had placed on his body he could deal with. He could cope with being unable to run, with not being able to carry heavy things. But his mind had always been sharp. He could recall events seventy years in the past without difficulty. Death did not frighten Will Graham. That might seem surprising to those who had not lived for nine decades, but it didn't. He had seen death before. Almost known it himself before. He knew his time would come eventually. It was nature's way, and he would be back with his Molly. But what did frighten him was losing his mental faculties. He'd seen plenty of people who needed refreshing on their kids' names, and later their own. That frightened him. For the title to escape him was maddening.
Trying to remember that meeting in the early eighties – had it really been so long? Yes, amazingly. The title was…dammit! It wouldn't come.
Will Graham bunched his blocky hand into a fist and pounded it on the table. Lisa started.
"Hey, it's OK," she said. "It'll come to you."
"Don't worry about it, Mr. Graham," Agent Miehns said, scanning the park patrons. Kids, families, young lovers. It seemed safe, but she remained watchful. You never knew when the enemy might strike. Susana Alvarez Lecter had reminded her of that when she'd killed off almost the entire HRT at one fell swoop. "You know, you'll probably remember it tonight."
Graham nodded and adjusted his ballcap over his closely cut white hair. There was something else here. What had Lisa told him?
"You said you thought she was copycatting someone else's pattern," he said.
Lisa nodded. "That's the only thing I can think," she concurred. "She's never done this before, and neither did her father. But it's weird. She's never copycatted someone before. That would be…beneath her."
Will Graham's head bobbed up and down slowly and seriously.
"You know what? You're right," he said, and watched Lisa preen. "She was copying someone. Why we don't know. Look for victims with a lot of torture on the bodies. He might be just dumping the bodies, so it won't be immediately obvious. But you've seen this guy before, and I think she has too. I don't know if it's connected to Black Wednesday." The term was becoming ghoulishly popular to refer to the four deaths Behavioral Science had suffered.
His eyes swept over the park. They lingered for a moment on a young couple snuggled up together on a blanket. He had to smile despite himself. Probably just a happy couple living happy suburban lives, completely innocent of the evil and torture the human mind could devise. Here, in this place of peace on this perfect day, he knew what they had to do.
"Did she write anyone while she was in jail?" Graham asked.
Lisa had already thought of this. After Susana's escape, she had gotten copies of any letters Susana had sent or received during her incarceration. She consulted the file and flipped through them now.
"She wrote her attorneys," Lisa said thoughtfully. "There's a letter to Argentina we suspected was going to her mother. She got tons of mail, fan mail, interview requests, marriage proposals. Some people." She shook her head. "She didn't answer any of that, though. I've gone over it already."
Graham nodded and chewed on his lower lip thoughtfully. "Someone got in contact with her somehow. This murder was committed for a reason. Martyr-style murders don't just happen, and Susana's never done them before. I'm thinking she was sending a signal of some kind to someone."
"Look for the heretic, Starling. Look for someone murdering martyr-style. Find them, and you'll find Dr. Lecter."