It isn't like with Jamie Gumb. Clarice knows this as she collects her winter gear from around the apartment. But it doesn't hold back the snapping snake of trauma, that visceral feeling of her stomach squeezing all the way to Belvedere knowing every second lost would be a second that could mean coming upon Catherine Martin dead or alive.
Vanessa's next. The last target, Clarice can hope, but Aaron Hollins has already taken enough lives to constitute a legacy that can last centuries. Hat, gloves, scarf, purse, gun. Five people have already lost their lives to this man's vengeance rampage. Even if it was in part Vanessa's own violence that spurred him on, Clarice can't stand the thought of smelling that gasoline on her corpse.
"Clarice, take it easy for a second," Ardelia says. Clarice dodges around her as she collects. She's got all her winter clothes in a bundle by the door. Just purse and gun left. Her purse isn't on the counter and she can't remember where it is.
"He's going to kill Vanessa. I have to intervene before he can get to her," Clarice replies. "He's not like Buffalo Bill. He kills quickly. They can't meet at all."
"So let's call Jack and get backup. Someone will take Vanessa into protected custody and we can go nab Hollins with backup."
Clarice knows Ardelia is right. She knows this isn't like Jamie Gumb, she knows if she'd been given the option to have back up in his basement, she would've taken it in an instant. That maybe the next six months of her life—down to this exact moment fighting against the woman she loved, the woman she betrayed, the woman she didn't know how to honor—would've turned out differently. But she also sees the thick paper stacks and thousands of penal codes and mountains of doubt from everyone around Jack. She can't give anyone an opportunity to stall. Because for someone like Vanessa—she knows they'll stall, they'll dodge, they'll muddle. Just like this case, prosecuting random teenagers when the arson was a case of bigotry and the endless cycle of revenge between folks obscured by an idyllic town in the middle of nowhere.
"I have to go now. I'll page him in the car," Clarice replies.
She grabs her purse off of the dresser, under the photos from that night, still with Hannibal Lecter's fingerprints stained into them where the eye couldn't see.
"You know you can't put enough information in a page."
Clarice instinctually pats her hips for a holster she knows is locked away in a safe in the front room closet. "I know what to do this time," Clarice says, her words pushed down by the exertion through her lungs. "Once I know he's in the house, I'll call for backup."
Her fingers slide and fumble as she inputs the code she's clicked in every day for over six months. Like she's lost the muscle memory.
"You're still going in alone! Clarice, look what's happened to you from playing hero! You can't sleep alone, you form attachments to monsters because they're familiar to a pain no one else can understand, you throw your life on the line for every chance of—"
Clarice messes up the code again. She clenches her fist, barely holding on to resist punching the little metal box until she can't feel her hand anymore. It's an instinct she so rarely feels, the hazy red tinge to her vision as her throat tightens with frustrated tears. "Every chance of what? Saving someone's life? That's my job, Ardelia!"
"And there's a way to do it that isn't putting yourself on the chopping block! Look at what happened to you, and it was the best case scenario!"
But as Ardelia speaks, she drops down to her knees and inputs the code. Clarice doesn't know what it is about the gesture, whether it's resignation or some deep held sense of trust, but the tears do well in her eyes.
Then Ardelia hugs her. It isn't necessarily how tight it is, how long it is. It's something soft and pleading in the way she run her open palm up and down Clarice's shoulder blade, as if it'll give the illusion of more of Ardelia on more of Clarice. "Don't make me worry about losing you again. I can't do another Belvedere."
It's a revelation that happens deep within the ticking seconds. The burst of remembering what the helpless terror of her father going to work every day felt like. It stings in her chest, being so concerned about hurting Ardelia and how close she'd come to doing that again.
"Come with me, then," Clarice says, pulling away. "Back me up, Agent Mapp."
Clarice doesn't know if having Ardelia in Belvedere would've made a difference. It might've cost Ardelia her life. But she has to try something different for this monster of (there are no monsters) man who isn't Jamie Gumb or Hannibal Lecter.
Ardelia stands up. "You know where we're going?"
Clarice's heart thuds as she secures her holster. "And hopefully nowhere else."
#
Clarice debated it on the ride over, if she wanted Jack to answer right away when they did page him. She couldn't quite understand any instinct in her that said no, even if she felt it somewhere unreachable inside her.
But when Jack doesn't page her back when she and Ardelia pull up to Aaron Hollins' house off the main highway in Monkton, she decides the debate didn't matter. Because stepping outside the car and looking at the pristine white little cottage with the black shingle roof and storybook red door with the truck in the driveway, Clarice is caught with a fear that crushes her lungs. She looks around this time—the houses are closer together, reminding her more of her childhood neighbors in West Virginia than of Jamie Gumb's house in Belvedere. She forces herself to take her breaths slowly, keeping herself from hyperventilating. She looks to Ardelia, but doesn't even realize she's clutching onto her jacket until she sees it and lets go.
"We got this," Ardelia says. "Once I give word that I got Jack, we go in. Keep it simple."
But right as Ardelia is about to walk over to the neighbors', Aaron Hollins opens his front door. Clarice swears her blood stops pumping, stuck in the seconds as she wishes that Hollins doesn't know who they are and they can buy the extra seconds.
"Agent Starling?" he calls.
She winces; so much for that. But as the sweat starts to pool under her coat, she adjusts her collar and takes a step forward. "Evening, Mr. Hollins."
"You two working on Janis's case?" he asks. Clarice wonders if he genuinely wants to believe that as much as she wishes it were true.
"Yes, sir."
"If you haven't been back to DC all day, you must be exhausted," he says. "Wanna come in for a cup of coffee? Phone? Anything like that?"
Clarice steals the briefest of glances with Ardelia. If he sees Ardelia go over to the neighbor, it'll raise far more suspicion than calling Jack inside. Ardelia nods. In the seconds they walk over to Hollins's house, Clarice is at peace with her and Ardelia. She feels, however briefly, that same buzz of excitement and connection when they solved Dr. Lecter's riddle together. Farther back, even, when they would ace tests together, grind through physical training together, exchange knowing looks in lecture. They're going to be okay.
She watches as Hollins closes the pretty red door behind them, enclosing them in his home.
She hopes they're okay, anyway.
The inside of the house is a lot less nightmarish than Jamie Gumb's. It's part of Hollins's pathology she would be noting if there were time to be focusing on anything other than survival. No particular mess, no weapons lying around. But—her insides squirm—that doesn't mean there isn't a basement here too.
"May I use your phone, Mr…?" Ardelia says.
"Hollins," he says as he moves into the kitchen and turns on a coffee pot. He has a kitchen that bleeds into the living room, both of which are visible where they stand. No privacy for Ardelia's call. "And you are?"
"Agent Mapp," Ardelia says.
"Go ahead."
He doesn't laugh like Jamie Gumb did.
So Ardelia goes, and Clarice scrambles for some way to protect her.
"If there's anything I can answer about the investigation, might as well ask now," Clarice says. Maybe she can goad him. If she were frustrated with an investigation into her dead family member, she'd be looking for any opportunity to talk.
Hollins chuckles as he clicks on his coffee pot next to Ardelia. Clarice waits in the foyer, mentally wishing him forward. "You're more forthright than your superior, I take it?"
Clarice's insides squirm, but she throws on the charming smile she gives to unthreatening men like the entomologists at the natural history museum. "Sometimes."
Over Hollins's shoulder, Ardelia picks up the phone and dials. Frowns, bouncing foot to foot as she waits for the rings. Clarice's chest tightens like a rubber band wound tighter and tighter by the second.
"Then I have one question for you, Agent Starling," Hollins says.
One question I'll string out over an hour if I have to, Clarice thinks as she runs her fingers along her coat. They fall over the outline of her holster, such a subtle divot that only she can feel it. "Go ahead."
From beyond Hollins, Ardelia hangs up the phone. Turns around.
And nods.
Clarice exhales, dropping her fingers to her side. She and Ardelia discussed this in the car. The formation they'd get in, the signal for both of them to pull out their guns and start arresting Hollins. She just needed to know how long until Jack is here. With the sirens on, it can't be long.
"Two, actually," he says. Clarice's heart twitches. Ardelia steps into the doorway, blocking any exit into the other rooms of the house. Clarice hasn't moved from her place by the front door. But she has to look at Hollins, to seem engaged with whatever she's nudged him to talk about. "Did you know Hannibal Lecter killed my sister?"
Clarice is on her guard, but his words feel like being knocked behind a veil she can only see as she reaches out for the world beyond. Even as she's been connecting all these dots, finding all these connections that shouldn't exist between these criminals, these crimes, these specific feelings in her life, someone has connected yet another one. And in a way she somehow never thought possible. It was Dr. Lecter who said everyone else's names as they solved these deadly puzzles together. Dr. Lecter himself could never be a puzzle piece.
Yet here was this man who poured kerosine down queer folks' throats, whose sister had been killed by Dr. Lecter, who knew exactly what Jack was going to hide from him.
Somehow, it doesn't matter how he knows. But he does.
But he doesn't give her time to think beyond that. Not before he speaks again. "Do you want to see what I did to him, Agent Starling?"