PART 10
Will Graham settled into a weathered adirondack chair on his back deck with a tumbler and a half-empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold.
He'd spent the past several hours at his kitchen table with Jack's files and a pile of notes spread out in front of him, and he needed a change of scenery. How many times could he read over that shit anyway?
Those notes aren't going to help you, Will. You already have what you need from them... you just don't have the balls to put it all together.
Graham filled his glass, drained it, and looked out to the horizon.
Clarice Starling.
"I think you feel some kind of sick 'kinship' with Lecter, Ms. Starling. That's what Jack was really afraid of - not that Lecter was holding you against your will, but that he wasn't. And he was right to be afraid, wasn't he?"
But why?
Lecter's inhuman.
Will knew that Dr. Lecter could be disarming when he chose to be. Perhaps...
No. If Lecter was in the market for a companion, he would seek out someone who could accept the full force of his mercurial nature. He would have found her inadequate otherwise.
"What exactly do you see when you look at him, Ms. Starling?"
On that point, Graham still had no workable theory. All he knew for sure was that she didn't see the monster that everyone else saw... or if she did, she saw something else as well, something that overshadowed it.
Hell, maybe he had it all wrong. Dr. Lecter did enjoy his head games.
You know all about those, don't you, my man?
Graham had to concede it was possible that Doemling could have been right about a father fixation, though the thought of Hannibal Lecter as some sort of perverse father figure disturbed him in a way that was difficult to define. He felt a shudder move through him at the mere thought.
Still, it was tempting to chalk it up to something as straightforward as the exploitation of an obvious weakness.
That might let you sleep at night... if you could make yourself believe it.
It just didn't account for her early response to him.
"He didn't frighten you.
Why?
Because we aren't afraid of the familiar. You weren't afraid of him because you saw something familiar in him, didn't you?"
Graham stared into the bottom of his empty glass as though the solution might be there if he could only look hard enough.
"How do you relate to a monster, Ms. Starling?"
Lecter's voice in his head... "Do you really have to ask that question, Will?"
His head thrashed violently, trying to dislodge the thought.
You won't find what you're looking for if we keep going back to Lecter, you know. Are we just going to keep dancing around it, or are we going to get to why we're really here?
Graham took a deep breath, reached for the bottle, and poured several inches of the tequila. He downed half of it in one gulp and studied what remained as he swirled it in the heavy tumbler. Another pass finished it off.
He set the glass down decisively on the arm of his chair.
"Let's see, Ms. Starling...
You lost your father at what? Eight? Mom held onto you for a couple of years but then packed you off to live with her cousin when things got rough. She held onto your younger siblings, but you had to go because you were the oldest. Not a very good explanation for anyone, let alone a ten year old who's lost her father and is about to lose the rest of her family. I bet you didn't know your relatives in Montana so good either, did you? No, probably not much chance to travel for family visits. Your father dead, abandoned by your mother, sent away to live with strangers, and cut off from your brothers and sisters.
You must have been angry, Starling, more than angry. Were you tempted to channel it in a destructive way?"
He let the question hang in the air for a moment, his eyes narrowing intently as he gazed out across the water.
"Probably not, at least not seriously. Given your father's choice of occupation, you would have had a healthy respect for the rules."
What was it that Lecter had said in his letter to her?
"...it was apparent to me that your father, the dead night watchman, figures large in your value system."
"I'll bet you wanted to be worthy of Daddy's approval, especially since you must have thought your mother's was already out of reach.
So you go off to Montana like a good little girl, and you spend the next 7 months there. You have time to get attached to this horse, Hannah.
It's not just the excitement of riding a horse, is it? You feel like you have something in common with her. You've both been cast aside, haven't you? She's in a position to understand.
You know on some level that Hannah is headed for the glue factory, but you manage not to look too closely at the reality until you wake up one night to screaming lambs. That makes it real for you, doesn't it? If those lambs are being slaughtered, then maybe Hannah is next in line. So you decide to take her and run away."
Graham pursed his lips and shook his head slowly from side to side as he imagined this young, frightened girl setting off into the night with a half blind horse, taking her away from a farm where useless animals were sent to live out their lives until it was time for the slaughter. That horse was probably the only friend she had in the world, her only sense of anything she had left that might feel like home. Her determination not to suffer another loss hit him with such urgency that it took his breath. He leaned forward, fingers tightening on the arms of his chair.
"You felt just as abandoned as those doomed animals, didn't you? It wasn't just Hannah you were trying to save that night."
He registered his posture and forced himself to relax his grip and settle back into the chair.
"You stayed in Bozeman with Hannah. You left your new home, your last connection to family, and chose the Lutheran orphanage... and they let you go.
Nobody fought to keep you.
Your mother didn't try hard enough. Her cousin didn't really bother to try at all.
Your father would have kept you with him, wouldn't he? Things would have been different if he hadn't been taken away.
But he was gone. And you were alone."
No problems at the Lutheran Home. In fact, Starling fared very well there. She learned the rules, settled into a routine, and did well. Probably afraid of being sent away again if she didn't.
"I'll bet you didn't make any friends, did you, Starling? Attachments would only leave you open to more loss. Better to focus on what you could control.
Focus and discipline. That's what defined you, wasn't it?
That, and the memory of your dead father.
You've had a lonely life, haven't you, Ms. Starling?"
Graham sat for some time, staring ahead at nothing in particular and brooding over a crippling sense of isolation.
Hers, Will... or yours?
He decided it was probably both. And both ultimately self-imposed.
"He got in, didn't he?"
The sound of his own whisper seemed to surprise him. He stood and paced nervously back and forth on the small deck.
Starling. No more detours.
UVA next. Double major in psychology and criminology. Graduated with honors. Licensed counselor. Forensic Fellow. Then Quantico. Smart, maybe too smart... and ambitious.
Still pacing.
"You would have wanted to make your daddy proud.
The psychology was for you, wasn't it? You would have had questions you wanted answers to. I suspect you didn't get them, but you went looking regardless.
Law enforcement would have been for Daddy. Were you trying to follow in his footsteps? Maybe do him one better and become real law enforcement. You can't get much more real than the FBI."
I think your success in putting an end to Jame Gumb's career as a couturier pleased you most because you could imagine your father doing it.
"Maybe you were looking for revenge. Maybe you wanted to go after the bad guys because it was the bad guys that took your daddy away from you."
"... how do you manage your rage?"
"Or maybe you just wanted an excuse to play with guns."
The lady was definitely proficient with a gun. Interservice combat pistol champion three years running. Probably would have been more if she hadn't withdrawn from competition.
Not a woman to fuck with.
"Whatever your reasons for joining up, you got off to a promising start with the Bureau, Agent Starling. You had Jack's attention, stopped Buffalo Bill..."
Killed Buffalo Bill, you mean.
"But you weren't so good with the politics, were you? No, you would have counted on getting ahead simply by proving yourself. It must have been a shock to be left spinning your wheels."
There was no doubt the FBI had been a disappointment for her. Years of shit details for a bright, ambitious agent. She'd probably long since given up any hope of getting the assignment she'd most wanted.
"You knew it was a dead end for you, didn't you?"
Dr. Lecter would have noted that legitimate law enforcement had been no kinder to her than her father's night watchman job.
Lecter.
He was the only reason she was spared after the Drumgo shooting. If he hadn't sent her that letter, there would have been nothing Jack could do to stop it.
The thought came unbidden, stopping his restless movement over the boards of the deck.
Quiet for seven years... but there when she needed someone.
Suddenly, he felt completely drained. He moved back to his chair and sat with a thud.
"Jesus Christ! Can that be true?"
"You can't waste a man that's crazy enough to tell the truth."
The truth...
An image of Clarice Starling brandishing a jack handle.
"... but she would eventually get too big to play with."
"Too dangerous is more like it, maybe."
Hadn't he read something in one of those pieces from the Tattler about the Guiness Book of Records claiming that Agent Clarice Starling of the FBI had killed more alleged criminals than any other female law enforcement officer in US history?
"...how do you manage your rage?"
The truth.
"Dr. Lecter recognized you, didn't he, Ms. Starling?"
If the potential was there, Lecter would have smelled it on her like a musk.
"That's what he was attracted to, Dr. Doemling. You think he looked at her and saw another victim, but you couldn't be more wrong. He looked at her and saw a consort."
And she saw what?
Something she hadn't had in over two decades... a constant.