Jimmy Winfield adjusted his tie and waited. The voice on the phone had promised him access to the FBI's records. She wanted an unbelievably cheap price. If it was true, it would be ridiculously cheap for what he would get. It wasn't like that hadn't happened before, though. He'd heard of the orderlies at the asylum where Hannibal Lecter had once been held. They'd been willing to sell information and reports for such minor prices it was robbery, when you came down to it.
He remembered he had to flip his tie over his shoulder. Annoying, really. He threw the rumpled piece of polyester over his shoulder and waited. To pass the time, he bought a beer and began to nurse it.
He checked his watch. Eight oh two. She was a bit late. Ah well, no biggie.
A woman entered the bar and appeared to be looking for someone. She scanned over the men at the bar. Her manner was pensive and nervous. She wore a gray suit, a white blouse and pumps. Her hair was pulled up in a tight bun atop her head. She wore glasses. In one hand was a cheap briefcase. The American Office Worker, in all her mousy glory.
Winfield grinned. She saw his tie and approached him cautiously. The briefcase remained in her left hand. Up close, she wasn't bad at all. Nice legs from what he could see. Her hair was dark and shiny, seeming almost like a pelt. Her complexion was very fair, almost like those goth chicks who he saw sometimes. Pretty cute, but she didn't seem too interested in her appearance. If she took herself out and made herself up, she could be quite a looker. He wondered about the mousy ones; they always said those were the hellions once you got them alone.
"Hi," he said, grinning at her. That fair skin accented the color of her hair and lips and eyes. It seemed the only color in her face. No, not bad at all, he thought.
"Hello," she said. "Are you Winfield?"
He nodded.
"I have information for you," she said calmly.
"Okay," he said promptly. "How about a drink?"
She nodded her acquiescence. The bartender approached and she asked for a glass of red wine.
"So what do you have for me?" he prompted gently.
She sighed. "I work for the FBI," she said cautiously, as if imparting a great secret. "I'm a secretary. I have access to just about everything. There's a lot about this case that the police aren't saying."
He nodded. This was great. One of the minions of the FBI. She'd be able to get him a lot more. He'd have to be nice to her; she could get him a lot of other stuff. Cultivating sources invariably paid off.
"Can I see it?"
She grinned nervously. "It's not here," she said. "It's in my car. Outside. I…I didn't want to bring it in."
Winfield chuckled. "OK," he said. "You want to tell me a little about yourself?"
She shook her head. "This is…," she began diffidently. "This is my first time doing anything like this."
"That's fine," he said. "You know, you've got real pretty eyes." The line slipped out easily. He knew women like this. They were plain, mousy little things. Give 'em a few compliments and you could have 'em eating out of the palm of your hand.
She smiled nervously and looked down. A big sip of wine fortified her.
"This killer," she said in a hushed tone that would attract the attention of no one, "this killer is doing some really bad things. One victim was hanged, but not with a broken neck. Took fifteen minutes for him to strangle to death. Another was impaled with a sword."
"Nasty," he said. "You got pictures of that?"
She nodded.
When they finished their respective drinks, she stood up.
"We ought to go now," she said.
"If that's what you'd prefer," Winfield said, smiling pleasantly at her.
In the parking lot, she walked up to a dark van. That surprised Winfield; didn't seem like the kind of car she would drive. Her pumps clattered over the asphalt and then echoed as she jumped up in the back of the van. She gestured for him to follow. Once he did, she slammed the doors shut. It amused him; she still thought this had to be so secret. No one in her employer was looking; he could have told her that. She indicated a plastic crate with several thick manila folders packed therein.
Winfield opened one. Written across the first paper inside it was the word Gotcha.
"What the hell?" he asked.
Then the blackjack struck him hard at the base of his skull, and he was falling forward. He caught a confused glance of a grinning pale face, and then another blow to the base of his skull sent him into the black. He didn't feel his hands dragged behind his back or the gag stuffed into his mouth. Nor did he hear the engine start.
When he awoke, it was somewhere dark. He sat up and found he could do that. He stood up and found abruptly that he couldn't. His head struck something heavy and metal and he rubbed at it, cursing.
Looking around the room didn't make him hopeful. He was stripped to his underwear. He was also in a cage. It was about seven feet long, four feet wide, and five feet tall. The bars were thick and the door secured by a thick lock. He seemed to be in a basement; the only light came from a bulb overhead and whatever light escaped the thick curtains over the windows.
He banged on the bars a few times.
"Hey!" he yelled. "Hey, what the hell is going on here?"
He heard footsteps slow and careful on the stairs, and then the secretary chick was standing in front of his cage. She looked different now. The plain-Jane suit had been swapped out for a black dress that reached to her ankles and puffed out around her. Looked Victorian or something. She wore black granny boots.
But her entire manner was different now, and that was scarier. Her eyes gleamed at him. A wide, open grin crossed her face, as if she was absolutely delighted with how things were going. In the bar, she'd acted like a nervous, repressed little woman. Now, her hands were on her hips. She took big strides. The goth-girl getup aside, she was confident as all hell and not afraid of him in the least.
She was crazier than a shithouse rat. And she had him right where she wanted him.
"Hello, Jimmy," she said.
"Hey," he said nervously. "Look…what…what are you gonna do with me?"
Her head tilted at him and that wide, moony grin got wider, displaying her teeth.
"What am I going to do with you?" she asked, as if the question was quite unreasonable. "Well, I want you to tell me a few things. Then I have a few other things I want you to do for me, and then…then I'll let you go."
He eyed her nervously for a moment or two.
"What did you want to know?" he said.
She pulled a chair up by his cage and sat down companionably.
"Tell me about…Clarice Starling," she said eagerly. "And Josh Graham."
He could feel sweat on his naked skin. His heart began to race. What the hell did she think, that he was an expert on Starling or something?
"I…I don't have much information I can give you," he said.
Alice Pierpont looked down and made a moue of disappointment. "Then I'll be upset with you," she informed him. "And when I get upset with someone, I tend to do things that I end up regretting later. Things with pliers…blowtorches…that sort of thing. I tell you, I just get carried away so easily sometimes." Her face hardened into a crueler, less amused expression. Next to her chair was a box, and she removed a set of pliers and a blowtorch from it and held them in her lap, as if to indicate she could make good on her threat. "So think of something, buddy."
"She's…she's an FBI agent," Winfield whispered. The acidic scent of his own fear-sweat rose in his nostrils.
Alice rolled her eyes and she clacked the metal jaws of the pliers together. "Tell me something I don't know."
"She's working the killings in Baltimore," he continued.
"Who's her partner there?" Alice asked.
"The young guy? Graham, I guess. He didn't introduce himself."
"The young man you wrote an article about." Alice observed.
"Yeah, that's him," Winfield whispered.
"He's sort of cute," Alice said thoughtfully. "Do you think so?"
James Winfield grasped the bars and stared out at her with wide eyes. "I…I don't know, I'm a guy."
"Back to Starling," Alice said. "What's she doing?"
"Investigating," he said. "She won't talk to me." A look of sick inventiveness crossed his face. "But you know…she promised me an exclusive interview. If you let me go, I could find out more stuff and tell you. Listen…anything I could tell you about Starling is stuff you could find out yourself. I don't know her. Maybe you thought I did from the Tattler article. But, I don't."
"Hmmm," Alice Pierpont said thoughtfully. "Then what use are you to me?"
"Money!" he said. "The Tattler would pay to get me back. A lot. And I could tell your story, if you wanted."
"My story." Alice sounded sourly amused. "I don't think you have the time. Now, then, if you can't give me information about Clarice I want you to give me your hands."
He pulled his arms in against his bare stomach and trembled. "Why?" he asked.
Alice pondered. "Because," she said delicately, "if you don't, then I'll assume you're more interested in playing Blowtorch Tag." So saying, she took out a book of matches. Winfield shuddered and stuck his hands out through the bars. Quite calmly, Alice put the matches down and locked a pair of handcuffs on his wrists through the bars.
"Okay," Alice said, and clapped her hands like a schoolteacher. "Was that so bad?"
Winfield shook his head nervously, a sick look of dread on his face.
"This will be," Alice promised. Her left hand clamped down on his right with amazing strength. He tried to pull his hands back, but the cuffs stopped him. Her right hand grabbed something by her feet and came up with it.
When Winfield saw the hacksaw, he began to scream. Still, it was all over in a few minutes. The saw cut through flesh quite easily, and even the bone yielded to the toothed blade. Alice was much stronger than she looked, and there was a certain pleasure she took in feeling her blade force through the bones of his wrist. Blood and small white flecks of bone sprayed up as she worked. Once she'd severed his hand just above the wrist, he managed to get the cuffs off, but he let her put a tourniquet on it. He stared back at her in terror and pain. Small dots of blood spotted her face and clothes.
"I'll just take out the trash," she said, and dropped his hand in a nearby bucket as if it were a dead tarantula. She was saving it for later. Alice decided to show the guy some mercy and tossed him a couple of Vicodin tablets from when she'd had shoulder surgery a year ago. He took them, whimpering, and dropped them in his mouth with his remaining hand.
Alice rose and walked over to another bucket. It reeked strongly of gasoline. Next to it was a large bottle of laundry detergent. While Winfield got back to himself, whimpering and crying and holding his stump, she poured the detergent carefully into the bucket and began to stir it with a wooden spoon. In the black dress, she looked like nothing so much as a latter-day witch bent over her cauldron.
"Now," Alice said, and handed him a sheet of paper. From behind her she produced a tape recorder. "I have some dictating for you to do. After that…I'll let you go."
…
Clarice Starling sat in the living room of her side of the duplex and sighed. 'Delia was curled up on her couch. A few months ago, Clarice had splurged on a big-screen TV, and so after-dinner TV often occurred on her side. 'Delia liked to follow her college's football team.
"Man," Clarice said. "I'm hoping this isn't the same killer who did both of my Baltimore cases."
'Delia, quite content from her place on the sofa, glanced over. "Huh?"
"These two Baltimore cases," Clarice grumbled. "There's a lot of similarity. But if the killer's going from this," she held up the photos from the Baker scene, "to this," holding up the photos of the Hale scene, "in one killing…then we're gonna have a bloodbath on our hands. This killer's pretty ballsy, coming right back to the scene." She shivered. "This is gonna be a big one, I think."
"What did Graham's kid think?" Ardelia asked.
"Josh? He thought it was one killer."
"What did you think of him?"
"Nice kid," Clarice said. "Kind of shy. He's sort of permanently embarrassed because of his dad and all."
"Is he cute?" Ardelia's tone became a bit more lascivious.
Clarice's mouth opened in an O of surprise. "Ar-delia!"
Ardelia was unrepentant. "What?"
"He's a kid."
"No, he's not," Ardelia said. "He's an adult."
"I was a high school sophomore when he was born," Clarice said.
Still unrepentant, Ardelia grinned. "So? He's a big boy now."
"I am not cradle-robbing like that." Enough of Clarice's Lutheran upbringing remained to be shocked at the idea.
"They say those young guys can last a long, long time," Ardelia observed pointedly, a saucy smile coming to her lips. She enjoyed getting Clarice's goat once in a while, and she seemed to enjoy doing it now. "They're fun when you get to be our age. They can go all night."
"I cannot believe you," Clarice accused. "You filthy-minded--,"
A metallic slam interrupted her. She stood up suddenly, looking around. For some reason, she had the idea that something was wrong.
"What was that?"
"Probably a neighbor," Ardelia said.
Clarice wasn't sure. She began to walk towards the front of the house. Then she saw the orange glow of leaping flames and began to run. Her big .45 was comforting in her hand; she'd drawn it without thinking. She opened up her front door and then stopped cold, her jaw dropped in sheer horror.
A flaming lump lay on Clarice Starling's front porch. It had the form of a man, covered by leaping flames. It was screaming. In the midst of the flames, she could make out a screaming, blackening face. But it was alive. Its eyes were filmed over with flames and smoke. It didn't seem to know she was there. But it was alive, humping and writhing and screaming on her porch.
After a moment, Clarice's paralysis broke. She put down the gun and ran out a few steps into her yard. It had snowed recently, and Clarice grabbed up double handfuls of snow and threw them on the figure, trying in vain to put out the fire. There were footprints leading from her porch down to the sidewalk, but she paid them no heed.
The figure stopped moving, but Clarice carried on. 'Delia had followed her in and stood there in horror for a moment.
"Call 911!" Clarice screamed. "Then get the fire extinguisher from the kitchen!"
Ardelia nodded and sprinted for the phone. A few minutes later she was back, a small red cylinder in her hands. She pulled the pin and squeezed the trigger. A white cloud came out of the end of the cylinder and enveloped the figure.
Clarice stopped trying to pile snow on the unfortunate on her porch and stood there for a moment, panting. Adrenaline raised her heart rate and made her limbs thrum with energy.
"911 is on its way," Ardelia said in a toneless voice. "Jesus Christ, who would do something like this?"
Clarice stared into the corner of her porch. She didn't answer Ardelia at first. She pointed at the object in the corner. Both women stared at it.
A severed hand lay in the corner of the porch. It was unburned and pristine. A glance at the figure indicated that it was probably part of the victim on the porch. It held a few objects out as if offering them to Clarice. A few gobbets of flesh trailed back from where it had been severed above the wrist.
One was a cassette tape. The other was a rectangular white object. A business card. Clarice squatted down and stared at it in horror. A business card.
One side read JAMES WINFIELD, NATIONAL TATTLER. She had an identical one in her jacket pocket. On the other, she could see handwriting.
The lab would be mad at her. The lab could damn well deal. Some psycho had just made reporter flambé on her front porch. She plucked the business card from the severed hand's grip and turned it over. In a half-feminine angular script, it read:
Hello, Clarice.
I thought I'd save you some time and drop this one right off on your doorstep. Besides, you're on to my use of factories as killing grounds. Less travel time that way. Besides, it's cold outside – this might keep you warm.
I'll see you…very soon.
Clarice put the card back in the severed hand as if declining the invitation. She drew her .45 and held it in her shaking hand. She sat down, her back against the side of the house, and waited. The figure next to her let out a choked groan.
In the distance, sirens blared and red lights began to bloom against the darkness.