Title: Back in Baltimore – Chapter 5
Author: Pseudo-Morals (Axl of LL and the Studiolo)
Genre: Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal
Category: Drama
Rating: PG-13
Feedback: stardustsavant@hotmail.com
Archive?: Sure.
Summary: Clarice Starling is sent to Baltimore, to work with the Homicide detectives in finding Dr. Lecter.
Author's Notes: Ten chapters planned, only eight up as of 3/10/04.
BACK IN BALTIMORE – CHAPTER FIVE
Against her own better judgment, Clarice Starling does not tell a soul about the scrap of paper she found atop Dr. Lecter's dresser. Instead, she keeps it tucked away in her coat pocket, drawing it out spontaneously: in the bathroom of the precinct, in the backseat of the taxicab that takes her to her hotel room. In that very room, sitting on the edge of her bed, fighting the same hot tears that plagued her in the apartment they'd entered the previous afternoon.
She cannot stop looking at it.
You are closer than you know, Clarice.
The words seem alternately mocking and soothing, depending on her mood.
Starling leaves the squad room of Baltimore homicide late in the evening, after a shared dinner of cheap Chinese food. They had sat around John Munch's desk, twirling sesame noodles around the broad girth of plastic sporks, talking about anything and everything save for the man they pursue.
We've exhausted our leads, Clarice thinks as she hurries down the flight of stone steps and turn the corner. We've got nothing to go on…but we might, if I turned in the note.
Even so, the paper remains in her pocket, folded twice, the ink slightly smudged from the oil on her fingertips. She reaches in for it now, just to reassure herself that it has not fallen from her coat. For some bizarre, unexplainable reason, she feels safer with it on her person at all times.
She sees an unoccupied cab idling outside the deli, and considers a return to her hotel, but decides against it after a moment or two. Starling feels a sudden urge to return to Lecter's abandoned apartment.
Reasoning that it is safe, because they had searched it the day before, she turns on her heel abruptly and begins the journey. The walk is not an excessively long one, and she welcomes the exercise, slight as it is. Since her arrival in Baltimore, she has been forced to forfeit her morning jogs.
The building itself, when she reaches the base of its stoop, looks cold and forbidding. A light shines from a fourth floor window, and a cat's comfortable mew is heard from further up. She sees the animal, a dark shadow perched on the fire escape.
Starling climbs the short flight to the front door, then another series of steps to the second floor. It is silent, almost heavily so, the quiet pressing down hard on her ringing ears. In a flash, she realizes how foolish she was to come here without returning to the hotel to retrieve her gun.
Feeling childish beyond words, she makes the shape of the weapon with the fingers of her left hand, extending it into the path of the dim, flickering overhead light. She is faintly relieved when her shadow appears to be armed.
The apartment door is slightly ajar; the detectives had apparently neglected to close it fully upon their departure. She creeps across the narrow corridor, and shoulders her way inside. It is dark, and as soundless as the outside hallway had been. Starling's shoulders slump a bit in visible relaxation.
The heels of her boots click lightly against the hardwood floors as she makes her path through the room serving as a foyer, heading instinctively towards the bedroom that had affected her so unexpectedly during the police's forced entry. Although there is no reason for her to be apprehensive, her heart continues to thud dully, but loudly, in her ears.
It is almost enough to block out the music.
As the resounding piano notes filter across her subconscious, she is struck suddenly with the recollection of reading the report from a few years previous. Glenn Gould's exquisite performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations, was playing cheerfully when the shots had been fired. When a cop was strewn atop an elevator cab, bleeding steadily. When Dr. Hannibal Lecter had lay a few feet from his barred cell, wearing another man's face.
Starling's small frame only begins to pivot, to run, when a rough, damp cloth is clasped over her nose and mouth. She chokes, her head spinning, senses quickly absorbing the scent of ether, and her limbs weaken suddenly. She falls.