Will Graham stared bleakly at the tiny stack of papers concerning Clarice Starling.  There were as many warnings as commendations.  Will sighed.  Finding Clarice Starling was just as difficult, if not more difficult than, finding Hannibal Lecter.  No one, not even the roommate who had seen Starling pull out of their driveway at 3:00 a.m., knew anything about Starling, about her habits, her diet, her hobbies, not a thing.  There was no family for her to visit, that was for sure.  No friends either.  She went straight from an orphanage to training at the Academy.  But why was Will, a freelance detective more attuned to finding serial killers than anything else, trying to find a woman who had committed no crime he could prove?

"If you find Starling, you'll find Lecter," Jack Crawford had said.

"Yeah, right, Jack," Will said aloud to himself.  "But she's even more difficult to find than he is."

Will looked again at the pictures taken from Lake Tohee, somewhere north of Philadelphia.  Three months after she disappeared, a local fisherman snagged upon something in the water there.  It turned out to be Starling's car, but there was no sign of Starling.  The wear on the car suggested it had been in the water for the better part of those three months.  They dredged the lake.  They didn't find a body.

Will pieced it together in his mind again.  She gets up at 3:00 a.m., she drives over two hundred miles, a little over four hours, and then dumps her car.  Will never even considered the thought of suicide, even before the divers came back.  From the small town nearest the lake, it was about equidistant to Newark Airport, in Northern New Jersey, or to Philadelphia Airport, both featuring International flights.  Not much longer from Newark to any of the airports in and around New York City.  So Will went to Philadelphia, Newark, Le Guardia, and JFK Internationals.  Three months after the event, no one could remember if they had seen any one resembling Starling, and Will just asked for a list of all the places that had flights leaving around the time that Starling would have arrived at the airport.

All told, there were more than three dozen places she could have hit, and that was just on the first ticket.  She could be anywhere by now.  Her bank accounts emptied, and nothing taken from her house except a few burnable computer discs. Will had a feeling that whatever was on those computer discs held a clue to where she had gone, but when he tried to turn the computer on, he found it no longer worked.  The lab said that she had fried it, destroyed all its components and there was no way of knowing what she burned before she did it.  All the tech told him was that whatever Starling had wanted to hide, she had really wanted to hide it.  The computer was burnt out three ways.

And now, two years later, there were still no further clues, no sightings, no miraculous lab technician's discovery.  Two years later, and all that existed of Clarice Starling was a stack of papers barely thicker than a copy of Vanity Fair.  Will leaned back in his little folding chair and stared around Hannibal's House.  Friends from Behavioral Science had joked with him, "You've inherited the kingdom".   He rubbed his eyes, smiling ruefully, and stared at the clock.  Three minutes until noon.  Will stared bleary-eyed at the clock for the next three minutes, and then grabbed his lunch and the TV remote control the second the little hand joined its partner on the 12.

He flipped through the channels with agitation, wondering at how anyone could stand to watch this trash.  He stopped on the AMC movie channel so he could take a bite of his sandwich, and then continued to click with animosity.  Lunch was the only part of the day Will enjoyed anymore.  He didn't have to think.  Didn't have to consider retrying an old lead.  Didn't have to be.  Will paused again on the E! Network to take a bite.  Some sort of fashion show was going on.  It was amazing how the less these women wore, the more it was deemed "fashion".  Will was considering switching the channel.  After all, he didn't want anyone wandering in here and seeing him watching these scantily-clad women like some sort of looser who hadn't got laid in twelve years.

Will was bringing his cola to his lips when he saw her.  For just a split second, he swore he saw a woman with a gray beauty mark high on her right cheek.  He stared at the television with his mouth open, his soda pouring down his chest and onto his pants.  He learned forward ina panic.  Am I imagining things?  He grabbed the phone and dialed.

"Hey Sue.  Sue?  Could you get me someone from the E! Network on the phone?  It's really important…. Yeah, put me through."

There was a small pause, then Will continued.  "Hello?  Hello, My name is Will Graham from the FBI Behavioral Science Department.  This program that you have on now, a fashion show.  Is it a recording…. Yes… okay… um… where was it recorded, and when?"  Will made furious scribbling on a tablet.  "Where are your headquarters?  Oh… oh… well, could you overnight me a copy of that video?  Yes, thank you…. I really appreciate this… thank you… alright… bye".

Will sat back and took a deep breath.  He decided it would be better not to tell Crawford until he was sure what he saw.  People already thought that he was loosing his mind from spending too much time down in the basement. He looked at his crooked writing on the yellow tablet:

Paris                 15 March

Then he slowly began to put Xs on the days he had forgotten to mark off.  All the way from September 23rd, right up until March 28th.