They had a breakthrough.
Clarice Starling pulled the FBI motor pool Mercury up outside the small house. The neighborhood was a nice middle-class section of Baltimore. The houses were well maintained and the yards kept in good shape. Some of the yards had kid's toys scattered in them. That was fine with Clarice. Kids ought to be allowed to play in their yards. She had, up until she'd been sent to the Lutheran Home.
She killed the ignition and glanced over at Josh. He seemed quiet and thoughtful. She'd been mildly obsessed with Hannibal Lecter ever since her first time meeting him. Alice Pierpont, once she had come on the scene, had decided that Josh was her FBI agent paramour. What was going on in that head behind those blue eyes?
More troublesome for Clarice was the idea that she had spawned that interest herself, somehow. Before Alice had captured her, she had never expressed interest in Josh. Had she, Clarice, put that idea in a mentally unstable woman's head? After Alice's capture, she had racked her brains, trying to think of anything she might have said that gave Alice the idea. She was pretty sure she hadn't. In her report on the incident, she had stated that Alice came up with the idea on her own, and no one had pointed a finger at her and cried Liar! Liar! You gave her the idea, Clarice. It was you. Josh had never said anything accusing her. But the idea still nagged at her.
"Whatcha thinking, Graham?" she asked solicitously.
Josh looked over at her and shrugged. He was normally quiet. It made him hard to read. Over the past two years, he had been part of hunts for a few other serial killers and other crimes that the Behavioral Sciences Unit had been asked to look into. He was good at it, too. Watching him was weird. He would take the case file, take all the reports and stuff out, and scatter them around himself. Then he would pull things out randomly and come up with ties and leaps of logic that nobody else had seen. It was damn spooky.
"Nothing, really," he said. "I'm just…wondering what comes next."
She nodded. "You nervous?" she asked, and realized too late that no matter what the truth was the answer would invariably be no.
"Not for myself," he said. "I don't think she'll come after me. It's just…she's a killer, but part of her wanted me to like her. You, too, I think."
She wants me to like her. She threw me in a cage and tortured me and didn't feed me. Someone needs to buy the chick a copy of 'How to Win Friends and Influence People', if you ask me.
"Well," Clarice said, "let's meet our interviewee."
She observed the house for a moment. It was a simple, white-framed Cape Cod. She strode up to the door and rang the doorbell. A moment later, there was a flash of curtain and the face of an older woman was looking at her. This was Annette Thompson, a staff psychologist at Chelmsford Juvenile Detention Center. She eyed Clarice carefully for a few moments.
Clarice smiled and pulled out her ID. "Hi," she said calmly. "I'm Special Agent Starling. This is Special Agent Graham. We spoke on the phone earlier."
"Oh, yes." The woman opened the door and let them in. She brought them through the house to a living room. Her couch was nothing fancy, but it was soft and comfortable. There were a few inexpensive prints and posters decorating the walls. Clarice sat down and smiled politely. "Come on in."
"Thank you so much for agreeing to talk with us," Clarice added.
"No problem at all," she said. "You do understand, there are things I can't discuss. Confidentiality, you know."
"Of course, Dr. Thompson," Clarice said. ""To start off, how long have you been at Chelmsford?"
The woman tapped a hand on the arm of her chair. "About twenty years," she said.
"And you treated Alice Pierpont when she was there ten years ago."
Dr. Thompson's small hand worried at her collar. Her hair was pure white and shoulder length. She wasn't unattractive, even at her age. Her lips pursed. Hearing the name of one of her most infamous charges seemed to frighten her.
"Ah, yes," Dr. Thompson said. "She was a troubled girl, even then."
Clarice nodded. That's putting it mildly, she thought.
"Did she have any friends while she was there?" Clarice asked. "We're investigating her escape, and we're trying to see who might have helped her. It may be a long shot, and I know it's been a while, but…,"
"Oh, I know exactly who it would have been, Agent Starling," the psychologist said. "Are you looking for a young black woman, about her age? About five foot two, thin build, sort of coffee-with cream skin, short hair cropped close to her head, and glasses?"
Clarice Starling opened her mouth and then closed it. She swallowed. That was the woman who had shot her and freed Alice, down to a tee.
"Well, yes," she said. "That is one of the suspects we're looking for."
Dr. Thompson shuddered. "Chatiqua Miller," she said instantly. "Here." She got up and crossed the room. From a bookcase, she took a stout black photo album.
"I keep pictures of the kids I deal with," she said. "So many of them are really sad, troubled children. If you can get to them young, you can sometimes turn them around. I know it probably sounds silly and you think I'm just a bleeding heart, but it means something to them that someone cares enough to keep their picture."
She opened the book. Yellow post-its sticking off the sides marked the years. She paged through until she reached a section labeled 1994. Then there were pictures of kids in uniforms. Prison uniforms, Clarice realized. These were juvenile felons and criminals. Kids who had raped, beaten, murdered, and stabbed. Yet here they were surprisingly normal: friends with their arms slung over each other's shoulders, basketball teams playing, hunched over schoolbooks and notebooks.
"Here," the psychologist said. "Right there."
1994 Girls Wing, A section read the caption. Clarice found it odd. Most prisons didn't have yearbooks. There was a group picture of girls in navy uniforms facing the camera. Some glared antagonistically out; some favored the camera with con-wise smirks; and some beamed happily.
The girls had self-segregated with a degree that would have made the most old-fashioned Southern bigot proud, Clarice noticed. Black girls on one side, then Hispanic girls, then white. Except for two. Over on the far right side, a black girl stood proudly next to a white girl.
The black girl's skin was coffee with cream. The white girl's hair was dark and straight. Clarice stared at the picture. It was hard to tell, but it sure looked like Alice.
On the next page was a picture of the two girls again, standing next to each other and staring into the camera. Alice's face had not changed that much, Clarice noticed. They seemed far older than twelve in the picture. Alice stared into the camera with a cool smile on her face, as if she was thinking of a private joke only she could appreciate. Chatiqua stood next to her, not even bothering with a smile. She stared at the camera as if it was prey and she was sizing it up.
"That's them," Clarice said. "Dr. Thompson, if it's not too much trouble, could I borrow this picture?"
The woman sighed and nodded. "Yes, I suppose," she said sadly. "Those two…I had such hopes, but I should have known better."
Clarice leaned forward. So did Josh. "How so?" Clarice asked.
"Well," she said. "You have to understand. They were from totally opposite backgrounds. Race, money, social class. Alice was from a wealthy family. Chatiqua was from a poor section of Baltimore. We never would have seen those two as friends. There was one thing they had in common, though. They were both highly intelligent. So, at first we thought that was the attraction. Most of our kids are academically challenged, you know. They always got excellent grades. Unfortunately, that wasn't the only thing they had in common."
Clarice nodded. "What was the other thing, Dr. Thompson?" she asked politely. Internally she knew the answer wasn't going to be good.
The doctor sighed. "The other thing waaaas," she began thoughtfully and then stopped. "A lot of the kids we get are, well, troubled. Many of them have mental or psychological problems. And we do try to make sure all the kids are involved, and that no one is left behind, but…you know…it's hard. We get very little funding from the state."
Clarice sighed. "Alice Pierpont was diagnosed as bipolar," she added.
The psychologist shook her head. "That's privileged. I can't discuss that with you."
Clarice raised her hands. She wanted as much information as she could get. "Of course," she said gracefully. "I understand." Beside her, Josh simply sat watching. She wondered what was grinding away in that head of his.
"Some of our girls are depressed, and usually those are the cases that hurt you the worst," Dr. Thompson began. "Well, all right. During the six months that Alice spent in Chelmsford, we had four suicides on the girls' wing. That's a lot more than normal. We never could prove anything, but…,"
Josh leaned forward now. His voice was calm and relaxing. "Did you think they murdered them?"
Dr. Thompson's face pinched again. "No," she admitted. "Clearly suicide in all four cases. This was something subtler. In each case, each girl was new to the unit. For the first three, it was their first time in a locked juvenile unit. For the fourth, it was her second. Each girl was alone, depressed…unhappy." She took a deep breath. "And in each case, Alice and Chatiqua had sort of taken each girl in. At the time, we thought they were being nice. Reaching out to the girl in need, you know. They would take her aside and talk to her. Then…well, then we'd find the girl hanging from a vent or with her wrists slashed in the shower."
Clarice tensed. "And what did you do about this? I mean, didn't you separate them or something?"
The psychologist shook her head. "We didn't have any proof," she explained. "The first time, no one even thought that a couple of twelve-year-olds would try something like that. Even the second and third times, they were extremely convincing. But something just wasn't right."
Clarice found her stomach beginning to sink. Had they been picking victims at age twelve? That was frightening. She thought of the juvenile detention center. A cellblock full of bad girls, locked up at young ages for whatever crimes they had committed. And right in their midst, two middle-school predators seeking vulnerable prey. She could see it all too well, drawing on her own experience in the orphanage.
"What wasn't right?" Clarice asked.
Dr. Thompson's throat worked. "The way they acted," she said. "I probably shouldn't show you this…but…," she shook her head. "I didn't realize what it was they were doing," she said in a strangled tone. "If I show you this…promise me you won't tell anyone."
What did she have to show? Clarice swallowed. "Certainly," she said. "I give you my word."
The white-haired psychiatrist glanced over at Josh. "Him too?"
Josh nodded wordlessly. When he spoke his voice was a bit gravelly, as he had deferred to Clarice. "Of course, Dr. Thompson," he said. Curiosity had lit lamps in his eyes.
The woman got up and walked to a drawer. She rummaged through it and came up with a videocassette. Labeled on the spine were the words Pierpont/Miller. Slotting it into her VCR, she eyed the FBI agents nervously, as if she was guilty of some crime.
"We videotaped them and interviewed them," she said. "We did that for all the girls on a particular unit whenever there's a suicide. It helps show what their state of mind was. It helps, really it does. I put this together once I realized what was happening."
The TV sprang to life. The screen fuzzed and then resolved into Alice Pierpont, looking younger and staring into the camera with wide eyes. Tears had tracked down her cheeks. She was rubbing at her eyes with a tissue. She was sitting at a desk across from the woman whose living room Clarice now occupied. The room was concrete and industrial. In the bottom of the screen were the numbers 5/16/1994 06:36 PM.
"Could you state your name?" Dr. Thompson asked on the tape.
"Alice Pierpont," Alice said, and sniffled. Her shoulders racked as she burst into tears.
"Now what can you tell us about what happened?" the psychologist asked.
"It was…so sudden," Alice said, and a fresh burst of sobs escaped her. "Carolina had seemed kind of down in the dumps, so Teek and I started talking to her. We kept trying to cheer her up, you know, include her. She said some of the other girls were picking on her."
The doctor patted the girl's back and smiled comfortingly. "I'm sure you helped her as much as you could," she said soothingly. The real doctor, ten years later, frowned at the TV and shuddered.
"Anyways, they sent us down to eat, and she was really quiet at dinner," Alice continued, still sobbing. "Teek and I ate with her. She barely ate anything, and we asked her what was up. She was sort of quiet and didn't say anything. If only we'd known what she was going to do, we would've told somebody. I thought she was just sort of down. I never knew. I feel so bad." She pillowed her head on her arms and cried on the desk. Her fist pounded in grief and she shook. It was more emotion than Clarice had ever seen her display a decade later, and Clarice thought it was phony.
Then the scene crackled and dissolved in a poorly done cut. Now it was a younger version of Chatiqua Miller sitting in the chair. According to the timestamp it was now 7:13 PM. Chatiqua was calmer than Alice had been. She stared blankly forward, reminding Clarice of someone heavily sedated.
"Wow," she said, and worked her jaw. "Holy crap…I can't believe it. Alice and me, we just talked to her like half an hour before she did it." She turned and looked at the doctor. "We didn't know. I mean…damn, I don't know what to say. This is just…" She turned her hands so that her lighter-skinned palms showed. "She was at dinner, and she was being really quiet. So Alice and me sat with her, and she didn't eat. Then up we went for rec and then headcount and bedtime, and I saw her go in the bathroom."
"What did you think?" the doctor asked.
Chatiqua trembled and shrugged. "At the time, I didn't think nothing," she said. "I just thought she was going to the bathroom. Why would I think anything different? Then she didn't come out, but I fell asleep." Her face was blank and shocked, but she spoke with little emotion. "It wasn't my fault, doc," she said plaintively. "I didn't know."
Then there was another clumsy cut, back into Alice Pierpont in the same chair in the same office. The date on the tape read 7/02/1994. Alice stared glassily at the psychologist again. The psychologist was dressed differently; Alice's clothing looked largely the same.
"Wow," she said. "I…I don't know what to say." Unlike before, she was calm. Too calm, as a matter of fact. Clarice found herself thinking of how she had been under the influence of the Stelazine. On the tape, young Alice shook her head back and forth slowly. "Teek and I talked to her maybe forty-five minutes before she did it, towards the end of rec. Then we came back to our unit, and I saw her sneaking over to the vent. I…I didn't know what she was doing." She gave the doctor on the other side of the desk a look that said she was really, truly innocent in this matter. "I thought she was maybe trying to hide something in the vent. Some girls do that, you know. They think people don't look. Or sometimes you can talk to other units if you yell loud enough. I saw her doing it, but I never…never…had any idea she was going to hang herself."
Cut back to Chatiqua, who was in noisy tears. "I didn't want her to do it," she wept. "Alice and me, we tried to talk to Valerie. Really, we did. After Carolina we wanted to try and help. We didn't want it to happen again." She bawled like a toddler and the doctor attempted to comfort her.
Clarice thought this was a particularly sick game of ping-pong. White girl, black girl. Alice and Chatiqua. On the third go-round, they both cried a little bit, and on the fourth they cried a bit more. The dates changed, and the name of the girl who'd killed herself changed, but that was it. In each case, Alice and Teek admitted getting close to a girl who then took herself out of the equation.
The doctor was shaking as she turned the tape off. "Do you see?"
Clarice sighed.
"Do you see?" the doctor stressed.
"Yes," Clarice said, hoping the psychologist was going to remain calm.
"What do you see?" she demanded.
"They are…they are swapping roles back and forth," Clarice said calmly. "The first time around, Alice plays the grieving hard and overwrought role. Chatiqua acts like she's in shock. The second time around, they switch roles."
The doctor nodded. "It took me years to realize that," she said. "By the fourth time, Alice Pierpont was due for release in a few weeks, and her mother took her back and shipped her out of the country to boarding school. Chatiqua Miller got a transfer to a group home. At the time it was easier to see them go. We couldn't prove anything."
Josh leaned forward. "And they were refining," he muttered.
Both women looked over at him. Clarice found her curiosity piqued. "What did you say, Josh?" she asked.
He leaned forward and pointed. "They're refining," he said. "They're both sociopathic personalities. They don't feel grief like they're showing. So they fake it. Look." He asked for the remote and rewound the tape.
"The first time," Josh explained, "Alice is all overwrought and Chatiqua is in shock. But it's fake. Alice doesn't know how much grief she should show; it's overdone. Now in the next one, Chatiqua does the same thing and Alice plays in shock. In both cases, acting in shock is more believable because it's more understated. All they have to do is look blank."
Clarice nodded. He was good, she thought. Wet behind the ears, but good. Then she made herself stop; she'd hated that so much when she was new.
"But you can tell that it's staged," Josh continued. "Listen to what they say. When you account for differences in their upbringing, they're saying the same thing. This was planned and rehearsed. In the third and fourth ones, though, they're synced. They cry a few times in the third, and in the fourth they show a little more emotion. They're refining their reactions, making themselves more and more passable each time."
The doctor let out a shuddering sigh. "You two ought to come and work for us, if you ever get tired of the FBI," she said. "It took me years of going over that tape to realize that. I can't tell you how that makes me feel…knowing that those two treated our center as a hunting ground."
Clarice smiled uncomfortably. "Well, thank you for speaking with us, Dr. Thompson," she said. "We'll do everything in our power to make sure they're both back where they belong." She stood up and shook hands with the psychologist.
"It'll all be OK," she said. "I promise."
The doctor nodded. But four girls were dead; that could never be made OK. Clarice and Josh left the house and piled back into the car.
"Good catch on them refining their methods," Clarice said absently.
Josh nodded. "I saw it," he explained. "That psychologist is a nice lady, but she's too…she sees the world through rose-colored glasses. She had no idea. She sees them all as poor, poor little things." He shook his head. "For a couple of female sociopaths, she'd have been putty in their hands." He exhaled. "That's not what weirds me out about this, though. A lot of killers are like that. They have psychologists and such eating out of the palms of their hands. They're very convincing."
Clarice nodded. "So what does weird you out?"
Josh smiled tightly. "Think about it," he said. "That's what they were doing when they were twelve. What are they up to now that they're adults?"
The answer proved to be sooner than they thought. On the ride back to Quantico, Josh's cell phone rang. He picked it up and held it to his ear while Clarice drove.
"Graham," he said calmly.
"Graham, it's Crawford. Are you and Starling heading back?"
"Yes, sir," Josh said. "We're on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway now. Maybe forty-five minutes out."
"Good," Crawford said. "Come see me when you get here. We just got another videotape."