A/N: Be sure to read chapter 11 first. I posted two chapters on the same day. This chapter marks the halfway point. I'm aiming for about 24-25 chapters. We'll see.
Chapter 12:
Nick walked beside FBI agent Collins as they headed to the interrogation room. He saw Brass already outside the room waiting on them. Inside the room was an ex-con named Lincoln Fischer; the delivery driver who dropped off the box to the crime lab. They had tracked the delivery truck down but found it abandoned and empty. A body was in the back of the truck that matched the real driver of the truck, Todd Stevens. There had been no sign of Lincoln Fischer, but they had a name and an address.
Over the past couple of hours, he, Warrick, and Agent Collins had combed through the residence of the ex-con as they collected what evidence they could while trying to figure out where Fischer had disappeared to. Then, less than an hour ago, they got a call that Fischer had been found, alive, and was at the precinct awaiting to be interviewed.
"Any thoughts as to why Lecter kept him alive?" he asked Agent Collins as they neared the interrogation room.
Warrick had volunteered to take all the evidence they got from Fischer's apartment to the lab. In fact, Warrick seemed to be distancing himself from this case as much as possible. He'd asked him about that. All Warrick said was "preservation". He felt him on that one. It gave him the heebie-jeebies as well. Thinking back to all the other serial cases they had over the years, Warrick always kept a distance.
Everyone had those cases, whether it was Sara with Domestic Violence or him with Child Sexual Assault, they all had something that got under their skin or that they wanted to stay at arm's length from as much as possible. They had something. Warrick didn't mind working the evidence, he just didn't want to get close. He didn't like being on this case either, but it was the job. And he would always do his job. That was why he was so reliable, he supposed. No matter how dirty it got, he'd be right there in the muck doing it.
Agent Collins was a good-enough guy, but he could tell that the man was holding a lot back. Then again, Collins was FBI. The last time they were working a serial case with the Feds, it had nearly turned into a disaster with Grissom getting kicked off the case. He had to sneak around just to talk to him on the phone. It was weird to think that the reason why Grissom knew so much about these types of cases was because he used to be an FBI profiler. That he was the man who figured out that Hannibal Lecter was a serial killer.
He had always wanted Grissom to be proud of him, and to think he was good at his job. In turn, Grissom basically told him that what he thought didn't matter. This was either what he did because he was good at it, and strived to be better for himself, or it wasn't. The job was something he knew he wanted for a long time. He wanted to be the man, walk under the police tape, and find the evidence that got the bad guy. He wanted to be the best he could be because he wanted that for himself.
He no longer looked to Grissom, or Catherine, or anyone for that approval whether or not he was doing his best. At the end of the day, the only person he had to answer to was himself. And as long as he knew it, then that was all that mattered. The person he had to measure himself up against was who he was the day before. Every day he wanted to get better, to do better, and to be better than he was the day before. Whether that meant learning more about his passions in order to solve a riddle left by a serial killer, than that was what he would do.
Grissom was the bug guy. Well, he knew birds. And his knowledge of birds had helped them find a victim sooner than what Lecter possibly hoped. He had to think because of that they were able to get to Ms. Kessler in time to save her life.
Agent Collin still hadn't answered his question, and they were already at the door where Brass opened it for them to enter along with him. Sitting in the chair across the table was Lincoln Fischer. The ex-con had a rap sheet as long as his arm and was adding to the charges. Accessory, evasion, conspiracy, and aiding and abetting a serial killer. So many charges stacking up against him that he didn't even know.
Brass asked once they were all in the room, "Care for some water—"
"He ain't getting nothing," Agent Collins told Brass, cutting him off, as he stared down at the ex-con.
He glanced at Brass who was taken back by the sudden tone of the FBI Agent. This was no longer their show and they both knew it. Brass took a seat at the table and he sat right next to him. Agent Collins grabbed the chair next to Lincoln Fischer, turned it to face the ex-con, and sat down.
Agent Collins had done his research on Lincoln Fischer, and through the thorough search of his residence, learned a great deal about the ex-con. One of the things they learned was that Fischer had a brother awaiting sentencing for armed robbery. It was a felony knocked down to a misdemeanor due to the fact that the gun wasn't loaded. The lawyer argued that Fischer's brother had no intent to kill anyone during the course of the robbery, and since it was his first offense, they made a plea for a lesser sentence.
Collins knew that there was one person on earth that Fischer cared about, and it was his brother. From out of his pocket, he pulled out a picture of the two brothers. "I found this in your apartment." He handed the picture over to Fischer as he told him, "He's your younger brother—"
"He ain't got nothing to do with this," Fischer said as he glanced at the picture but didn't take it. "Capisce?"
"See, Lincoln, I say he does. I say you're used to watching out for him. Taking care of him. I think that the reason the gun wasn't loaded was because you found out the hard way that armed robbery with a loaded weapon can't be argued down to a misdemeanor. I don't know why you just didn't tell him to stay in school, but…Here we are."
"Screw you," Fischer snapped out at Collins before shaking his head. "He'll do what he wants."
"Too bad he'll be doing what he wants in prison, which ain't much."
"He'll be out—"
"No, see, I said he has something to do with this. You're not listening. He's my bargaining chip. Answer my questions, and he'll keep his plea deal. Don't…And it goes away. No deal. He'll be a felon, like his big brother." As Fischer glared at Collins, he leaned in close and said "Capisce?"
Fischer's jaw flexed in anger as he continued to glare at Collins. Then he turned his head to look directly at him, as if asking for help.
"Don't you look at him," Collins suddenly snapped at Fischer in a tone that left no room for debate. It reminded him of the tone Grissom could get sometimes. Strict, demanding, and yet in complete control. Once Fischer's eyes were back on Agent Collins, he told him, "He can't help you. They're the PD, local police. I'm FBI. You know the difference, don't you? The only person between you and freedom is me." He leaned in so close to Fischer that it caused the man to lean back in the chair just to put distance between the two of them, but Collins never broke eye contact. "You don't help me, you don't give me what I want, you and your brother will never know freedom again."
"I want a lawyer."
Collins shook his head, saying, "Helping serial killers, especially one on the FBI's most wanted list, is an act of terror, Lincoln. Have you ever heard of the Patriot Act? Lawyer can't help you."
Fischer's eyes widened in surprise as real fear suddenly settled in.
Nick shifted in his seat as he cleared his throat to say something when Agent Collins turned his head and gave him a look that dared him to say it. In that moment, Nick swore he saw the hardest eyes he'd seen before.
Collins told him, "You're here as a courtesy Stokes. You don't appreciate that courtesy, there's the door."
He almost got up to leave. He almost let him intimidate him. He felt it in his chest, the 'do right when you see something wrong' ache that was always there. Grissom snapped at him before for interrupting an interrogation, but he had good reason. His only reason there was because he thought that Collins could have been denying the ex-con his rights. But Agent Collins was also right. There was a very fine line, and he just didn't want him to go over it.
Instead of leaving, he gave a nod. However, he wouldn't turn a blind eye if it went too far. So, he watched and listened, and hoped he was doing the right thing.
The moment they left the interrogation room with as much information as they could get, Nick said, "Is that how you always get suspects to talk?"
"Leave it alone—"
"Lie to them and trample over their rights—"
Collins stopped and turned to him, hands on his hips as he told him, "Don't start this with me. Leave it alone—"
"—He asked for a lawyer—"
"This is not on you Stokes. I have jurisdiction—"
"It'll be on me, us, when everything we got gets thrown out—"
"It's not going to matter!" Collins nearly snapped before stepping up to him, saying. "Once we take down Hannibal Lecter, no one is going to give a damn about Lincoln Fischer. He'll get his lawyer. They'll either get the Judge or DA to drop it or a plea or who cares. This is about Lecter. He's the target. Right now, we now know that he's not working alone. That's unusual for him. Lecter never had a partner. It wasn't him in the truck, but a woman—"
"Who did not look like Clarice Starling."
"Doesn't mean it wasn't her. I think it was. I think that's why it took so long for him to come back out of hiding."
"He was waiting for her to be on his side, to help him?"
Collins gave a nod. "He was waiting to trust her. They're in this together, which changes everything." He started back down the hallway and took out his cell phone. "I'll inform Grissom. We have to get back to the lab. Look at all this with a new perspective."
Sara had all the photographic evidence pinned up to the wall in the conference room. Over the table were more photos, sheets of evidence, workups and printouts, and all the files on the case going back to when Grissom caught Lecter. Greg was helping her as he handed her the last photo; the one with the poem.
"So, uh, Sara, you think we can trust Agent Collins?"
"Why shouldn't we?"
"I don't know. The last time the FBI was here—"
"Agent Collins is a far cry from Agent Culpepper, Greg."
"Still. Bringing him into the group? Is that wise?"
"He's the lead on the case, aside from Grissom. We have to trust him."
Greg stared over the pictures and then landed on the poem. "Any luck on finding the origin of the poem?" he asked.
"It's by Lord Byron—"
"The Corsair." They both turned and saw Agent Collins leaning against the doorway. He smiled and she swore if she hadn't known that he wasn't Gil's biological child, she might think he was. It was nearly identical. "It's about a privateer named Conrad. In his youth, he was rejected by society for the things he did, how he was. His war was against humanity, except for women." He pushed off the door and walked further into the room, eyeing the photo on the wall. "Conrad thinks of himself as an anti-hero, the villain, but throughout the epic, the 'man of loneliness and mystery' becomes the hero. Legend has it that Conrad is based on the real life privateer who was a former pirate: Jean Lafitte."
"You read Lord Byron?" Greg asked.
Sara would have asked the same, but she knew who Kevin's dad was.
There was a fondness in Kevin's smile as he said, "My dad reads a lot, but the reason this stuck with me is because he was known as the 'terror of the Gulf'. He's famous in New Orleans and Barataria Bay in Louisiana."
Sara remembered Gil telling her that his mother's family was from Louisiana. "You used to live there?"
"We visited often," Kevin answered before saying, "He's toying with him."
Greg looked between them and said, "Am I missing something?"
"No," Sara answered as she moved away from the wall, picking up the empty cup off the table. "You're not missing anything." She left the room to refill her cup with more hot tea and spotted Nick, Warrick, and Catherine heading down the hallway towards the conference room. "Everything's set up. I need a refresher," she raised the cup.
"Want us to wait?" Catherine asked.
"I'll be quick." She kept walking until she got to the breakroom. While waiting for the hot tea to get done, she pulled out her phone and called Grissom. It rang and rang but there was no answer. Then it went to voicemail. She left a quick message. "Hey, uh, it's me. I was just thinking about you. We're about to start a pow-wow, go over what we have…Love you."
She hung up the phone, grabbed her cup, and headed back to the conference room. The rest of the team, plus Kevin, were going over everything they gathered over the course of the last day.
"It wasn't Hannibal Lecter in the back of the delivery truck?" Catherine was asking Nick.
"Fischer claims it was a woman."
Kevin spoke up saying, "I showed him a photograph of Clarice Starling. He says it wasn't her but doesn't mean it wasn't. Lecter had facial reconstructive surgery—"
"You're thinking so did Starling?"
"Her face is all over the place along with Lecter's, it'd be the smart thing to do."
Catherine gave a nod then asked her, "Prints on the wall in the hotel room?"
Sara picked up the file folder that Mandy had handed her on the way to the conference room and said, "All match Clarice Starling's prints when she joined the bureau."
Catherine took the offered file and looked over the printout. "So, confirmation that Starling is here in Las Vegas as well as Lecter. What's the significance of the poem?"
Kevin glanced at her as she looked at him. Both asking the same unspoken question: should they tell?
"Care to share?" Catherine asked. "Spill it."
"Hell," Kevin said as he leaned back in the chair. "It's going to come out eventually."
"What's going to come out?" Nick asked.
Kevin hesitated a moment before saying, "Grissom's my dad."
The looks of belief she was certain matched her own when Gil had told her that Kevin was his son.
Catherine gapped and said, "He's your…You're his—"
"Son?" Kevin said, cutting her off. "Yeah. It tends to go that way. Now, if I accidentally call him 'Pops', y'all won't be looking at me all weird," he said with a smirk.
Again, she nearly smiled at his sense of humor which reminded her so much of Gil. Instead, she answered the question, saying, "The significance of the poem is because it's based on a pirate—"
"Privateer—"
"Whatever," she shot at Kevin, before saying, "who's a legend in New Orleans, Louisiana. Grissom has family history there."
Catherine had her eyes on her as she asked, "How do you know that?"
"I told her," Kevin said as he glanced her way. "In Charleston. It slipped out. I thought Grissom would have told people about his life since it all came out…I guess he didn't."
It was a lie, but one she'd accept at the moment. No one there needed to know that she and Gil were together. Greg knew and he was keeping his mouth shut. And given Kevin's lie, so would he.
Sara was glad when the conversation returned to the case as Nick asked, "Who's 'M'?"
"Who's Hannah?" Greg echoed his earlier question to her.
Warrick picked up the original case file as he said, "Clarice Starling's middle initial dictated on all the reports is an 'M'. The thing is, I can't find her middle name anywhere."
"Have you checked her birth certificate?" Nick asked.
Warrick shot him a glare as he said, "First thing I did. It doesn't exist. Not anymore. She was born in a backwoods town in West Virginia. It got flooded in '91, before the records were transferred into digital files. Records were either water damaged or lost. Hers was one of them."
"Is there anything that does exist?" Catherine asked.
"She was sent to a Lutheran orphanage in Montana. It shut down in '85. Records were supposed to be sent to the county clerk's office. They said they'll fax it over as soon as it's found, but I'm not holding my breath."
"Why Montana if she was from West Virginia?" Kevin asked in confusion.
"Her relatives lived out there. They had a sheep and horse ranch."
Kevin's eyes narrowed as he leaned forward in the chair and asked, "I didn't see that in the file."
Warrick shook his head. "That's because it wasn't in the file. I had to do some digging. Family trees are easier to track thanks to the internet."
"Can I see the family tree?"
Warrick grabbed the file and handed it over to Kevin who took it and flipped it open. He read over the pages as his hand went to the back of his neck and he started rubbing it. He didn't say a word as he stood and left the room, taking the file with him.
"What'd I say?" Warrick asked as he watched Kevin leave.
Gil's mind was drifting as he stared at the white floor of the hospital room. He'd received four phone calls: two from Kevin and two from Sara. He had to leave the hospital room and clear the hallway before checking his calls. Sara sounded worried but all that seemed to go away as he heard her say that she loved him. Her second message was a rundown of all the newly recovered evidence about the poem and Clarice. Kevin's messages were more worrisome. The first was that a woman was in the delivery truck, not Lecter. They believed it was Clarice Starling and she had facial reconstructive surgery as well. The second message from Kevin got his mind racing as to why Clarice Starling became so important to Hannibal Lecter.
"You're not going to believe what I just learned," Kevin's words replayed in his head. "After the death of Clarice Starling's father, she was sent to live with her Aunt and Uncle at a ranch in Montana…Grandad, my grandparents, were her aunt and uncle. How could Lecter have known that? How did…How could we miss that?! I'm going to your place. I need a shower and quick nap. You need to call me."
The beeping of the heart rate machine and ticking of the clock on the wall were the only sounds in the room. Heather's heartbeat was steady as she slept. His heartbeat was steady as he listened and let his mind drift as the ticking grew louder, drawing him into the darkness like a lure from a siren. It was nearly hypnotizing, the tick…tick…tick, as he felt himself fall into the dark.
In the darkness the ticking echoed until it faded away and he was left in silence. He wasn't seeing the darkness, but himself inside of it. He appeared exactly as he did now. Watching and waiting until he moved. Following, he stalked behind himself through the silent void.
He had no idea where he was going but something was there in the dark, pulling them both along. A thought, a dream, a sound, whatever it was it was waiting in the dark to be found. That's what he was doing. He was searching for a memory. He had no doors to open, no paintings that captured a moment in time, and no drawers to open. His memory palace was a dark empty void like a mind drifting off to sleep. His memories weren't snapshots of life, but of dreams. His own and all the others.
The further into the void they got, a noise in the silence grew. It kept getting louder until it became clear in his mind what it was that he was hearing. Piano notes. Softly it drifted into the dark until he saw the piano appear before him. Seated on the bench was a young boy with black hair. He sat next to him and watched.
"Do you play?" the boy asked as he kept his focus on the piano keys.
He shook his head. "No."
The metronome on top of the piano was keeping time. Tick…tick…tick…As he sat and listened, he counted the beats.
"It's discipline. He's listening. I can't make a mistake."
In the dark, circling the piano, he felt the presence that lingered in the air. The authoritarian that watched and listened for a mistake to be made. It sucked the very life out of the room. The boy didn't play for the joy or entertainment of playing the piano, but he did it because he had to. Discipline. To both learn it and receive it.
He saw the boy's fingers, his knuckles, already red and swollen from the discipline.
The wrong key was played. It sounded flat, and intrusive among the other notes. Out of the darkness a ruler whipped through the air and smacked the boy across the knuckle, busting the skin open.
The boy barely flinched but he saw the pain in his eyes, felt the tension and anger rise up in his own chest, before it was pushed down. He relaxed and went back to playing as if it hadn't even happened. But it did and he wouldn't forget that pain. How his knuckles and hands hurt and swelled, the cuts and warm blood that would drip to the floor.
Inside, among the pain and hate, he felt amused. Closing his eyes, he let himself enjoy the pain, enjoy the hate and anger, as he imagined what he could do with it. The music swirled around his head, with it a waltz of his very own. He danced in the blood that dripped to the floor. It felt so warm against the numb, coldness, of his hands.
In the air he smelt snow and smoke. It was winter, there was a fire. He heard the sirens in the distance. Air raid. They were at war.
Opening his eyes, he saw the white flakes of snow falling all around him. They were falling out of the dark void above him. Landing on his hand, he felt the cold before the snow melted into nothing. The boy next to him was no longer a boy but a man. His hands were covered in the blood of his victims. Blood was smeared on his face, his shirt, and his eyes were closed as he played Goldberg Variations.
Without opening his eyes, he said, "Will."
"Hannibal."
"Dreaming my dreams again, are we?"
He smelt the smoke of the fire that started to surround them but saw no flames. Instead, he only saw snow. "Did she die in the war?"
"Did who die?"
"Your sister."
Hannibal stopped playing, but the music kept going. "How did you catch me, Will?"
"I already told you—"
"Time is a funny thing, isn't it? We can exist within it and out of it at once. We can exist in the past, the now, and dream our futures all within the same space. All of it, in our minds. How did you catch me—"
"You have flaws—"
"I'm insane," Hannibal stood as he circled the piano much like the strict authoritarian that had once occupied the air. "That's what you said, but it wasn't an answer. How did you—"
"I'm smarter than you," he said with deep anger and conviction.
Hannibal smiled. "There it is. Your ego."
"I have to be smarter than the criminals I'm after in order to catch them."
"Therefore, you do think you're smarter than me."
"No. We're the same," he said as his eyes circled the piano along with Hannibal's movements until he was behind him.
"Ah. Finally, an admission!"
"Just because we are intellectually equal doesn't mean we're the same in every capacity—"
"Then why do you fear yourself so much? Why is it so hard for you—"
"I have empathy," he said once Hannibal circled back around to his line of sight. "And you don't."
Hannibal stopped walking as he leaned on the piano. "You honestly think my lack of empathy is what separates us? You think it takes none to be a killer? You think you're smarter, Will, with your God and coincidences, and your empathy? I'm right in front of you, dear boy, and you can't even see me, can you? Her heart blinds you. Empathy confines what should be free. It restricts your ability to be who you are. Love can mend minds and break hearts but can also break minds and mend hearts. Or, it can do both at the same time. You will kill for it."
He wrinkled his head in confusion.
"Come find me, Will. All you have to do—"
"Gil?"
He opened his eyes and saw Sara standing into the doorway of the hospital room. The beating of the monitor drew him to the woman in the bed. Heather was still asleep. The clock ticked and he saw only thirty seconds had gone by. Standing, he followed Sara out into the hallway and shut the door behind him. Glancing around the hallway, he felt eyes on him still. He was being watched. That same uneasy feeling he had in the hallway of the hotel in Charleston.
"What're you doing here?"
Sara was just as tense as his words. He hadn't meant for that to come out as demanding as it sounded. "Greg."
That caught him off guard. "Greg?"
"He, uh, left his jacket, along with his wallet and keys in the backseat of the SUV."
Peeking around the corner at the end of the hallway was Greg Sanders. He pulled out the keys to the SUV and asked, "Is he hiding from me?"
"I told him to wait for me, so we could…talk privately."
That was better than Greg being afraid of him, which he kind-of still was. Greg told him once that he made him nervous. He was used to making people nervous, so he never thought too much about it. "Greg," he called out before tossing him the keys.
Greg caught them and then headed down the hallway, leaving them alone.
Talking about the case was his go-to when he didn't know what else to say. So, he said, "Mischa."
"What?"
"Mischa is Lecter's sister's name. Run it. See what you find."
"Okay."
"As soon as you get something, let me know. Anything else?"
Sara had a lot she wanted to talk to him about, he could tell. There was that look in her eyes, so many questions yet hesitation. "One question."
He gave a nod and waited.
"I asked you once if I hurt you when I said you didn't feel anything. You didn't give me an answer. I judged you unfairly—"
"Sara…" he said as he stopped her. That wasn't the question he thought she was going to ask, especially not in a hospital hallway.
"I want to know if I hurt you. The truth."
He always told the truth, no matter how hard it was. If he didn't want to say something he didn't, or he deflected. Sara wasn't going to take his silence or a deflection. He had to give her his answer. "Yeah," he said. "You did." He remembered Catherine saying that he'd been burned. It felt that way. Her words burned him.
The sadness that settled over her caused him to want to reach out to her, but he held back. He put his hands in his pockets instead. Sara shook her head. She wasn't understanding or refusing to think her opinion mattered. He wasn't the only one with self-worth issues. He knew of hers long before she told him that she feared a murder gene.
"Greg was right."
He wanted to laugh. "He was?"
"I'm sorry. I never thought—You know yourself better than anyone. That's part of who you are. You're so self-assured—"
"Am I?" he asked in near surprise that seemed to startle her. "Look, Sara…I…" he tried to put everything together in his head in order to make sense of what he wanted to say. It didn't make any sense, because he never could understand why. "It's uh, important to everyone how people see them, especially those we care about. I don't care what others think, only what you think. I trust you. So, what you say…how you see me, it's like a reflection in a mirror. What you see, I see, because someone whose opinion I trust and value sees that in me, when I can't." Glancing down the hallway, he saw that Greg was back and he was on his cell phone.
"I don't want to judge you. I don't want to ever hurt you—"
"I know you don't. And…now, you won't."
That probably wasn't the best thing to say. Most people would say something like 'there's no reason to be sorry' or, 'it's no big deal'. Or, something to that extent. They would dismiss the apology. Try to absolve the other people so they wouldn't feel so bad. He guessed he wasn't like most people. Sara had hurt him. She had rushed to judgment and said something that hurt him. And she was sorry for it. He wasn't going to dismiss it or absolve anything. What he wanted was to forgive her, for her to learn from it, and to move on.
He realized he should probably say that. "I forgive you."
She gave a nod and almost reached out for him but stopped herself. She also ached to touch him.
Greg walked over and tossed him his keys back to him. As he pocketed them, he told Sara, "I, uh, I need to follow-up with Heather. See what she remembers. Why don't you—"
"I'm going back to the lab, finishing up there, and then going home."
He wanted to join her, but he couldn't. "I don't know how long I'll be, so…don't wait up. Get some sleep."
Those words weren't what she wanted to hear. It was in her eyes, the way she frowned, and the change in her posture. He watched her leave before turning and going back into the hospital room.
"Are you Grissom?"
He turned and faced the woman in the lab coat. Her hair was a tint of red, blue eyes, and freckles over her stern face. "Can I help you, Doctor...?"
She handed out a cell phone and told him, "I was told to give this to you."
He glanced around the hallway and asked, "Who told you?"
"Just take it," she said as she went to shove it into his hand.
Grabbing the phone, he went to stop her when she darted off down the hallway. The phone rang. It rang again as he headed to the nurse's station to get security. On the third ring, he answered.
"Hello, Will, are we having fun yet?"
Just as he suspected, it was Lecter. Different tone of voice but still that metallic ring. "Only you would consider this fun."
"But don't you do the same thing I do because it's fun? Being both the hunter and the hunted."
Lecter only held a job that could give him the things he wanted access to. Being a surgeon taught him anatomy, organs, and medical procedures. It also gave him unfettered access to potential victims. He got to play God. Life and death, all in his hands. The same with psychiatry. A pool of victims to choose from and the means to manipulate people's minds. This was what Lecter wanted to do. Killing was his work. His real work. His only reason to live was for this and only this. All this God-like power that he welded over others.
He saw the nurses' station empty.
"They're busy. Code blue down in Room 545."
Searching the hallway, he turned and saw, back the way he came, a man. The photo composite was nearly identical to the face of the man he was staring at. Lecter was in front of Heather's hospital room door, and he was about fifty feet away from it. Fifty feet away from Hannibal Lecter.
"Good to see you, Will. You look...older." As he stood, staring at Lecter and wondering how to handle this, Lecter kept talking. "But still clueless."
"Flaying," he said, "is what you do to fish. Fishermen flay small fish, cuts off pieces of them, to use as bait for bigger fish. Heather was bait."
Lecter smiled. "You knew I set this up, and yet you sent the police away. Do you want me to get away?"
"I didn't want you to have to kill anyone else to get to me."
"Very admirable of you. Offering yourself up to me without so much as a fight. You're not wearing your gun."
He wasn't, but not because he'd planned it that way. It was in his field kit, which was in the back of the SUV. He'd forgotten to clip it on his belt before entering the hospital.
"You understand me, but do you understand yourself? I had someone say to me long ago to turn my high-powered perception inward and take a good look at who I was."
That someone was Clarice Starling. He heard her voice in his head, the same voice on the tapes he'd listened to. "Did you? Or, like Starling asked, were you afraid to?"
Silence. A moment of silence as Hannibal realized that he'd heard the tapes of their private conversations. "Nothing scares me, Will. You know this."
"She does," he said as he took a glance back down the hallway where Sara had left. A part of him wanted her to come back, another part of him wanted her to stay as far away as possible.
"Ah, yes. You've decided to let her in, now, haven't you? This goes back to what I was saying about understanding yourself. Do you know why you hide from people, Will? The world around you is suffocating at times, isn't it? You notice everything, everyone, but even worse, you feel all of them all the time. You go to crime scenes, and you see yourself as both the victim and the killer. You feel your life being strangled out of you. At the same time, you feel your own hands tightening around your neck."
He took a step and started down the hallway. He'd remembered many times standing in the spot where a victim died and imagining the death while he felt it happening inside his own body. Then, the times he sat where the killer sat and imagined what they saw during their victims final, terrified moments. Then he would go home and look in the mirror. His own reflection was blurred, unclear, as his eyes searched for something he recognized. Eyeing the man standing in front of him now, he saw something he recognized. Like butterfly wings, both sides were the same.
Paul Millander's 'Good versus Evil' sculpture came to mind. One person, two sides. One lacking empathy completely, and one feeling empathy completely to the point of pain. Mental pain of it all. Everyone was capable of anything. There was no humanity left. He had humanity. That was all he did have. And it made him different from everyone else. It made him alone. Uniquely him, as Sara put it.
"You know what your problem is, Will? You're too human. You're so inflicted by the external world around you, that it's made you into a man who prefers to live alone. Being too human drives you to extreme introversion. You can't trust people and you fear them because you know all too well what being human means. You stopped letting people in as a way of self-preservation." Hannibal had to do the same for similar reasons. Self-preservation. "Then she came along. Did it hurt, Will?"
"Did, what, hurt?"
"Falling in love? Does understanding human beings in all their love, hate, and madness hurt?"
"Is that why you're quoting King Lear? Love has a way of doing that, if you let it, except you were already insane. Love can't drive you to it."
"It can with you."
He didn't say anything to that. He couldn't. He'd been driven to madness once, and it wasn't due to love. "You fear her, Hannibal. She terrifies you. She is so much like you that you fear what she could do to you, but you fear losing her even more. I think it took you so long, five years, to come out of hiding because that's how long it took for you to trust her with the very thing that can kill you: your heart."
"Speaking from experience?" Lecter said as he glanced to the closed hospital door where Heather slept before turning to walk away.
He followed as he tried not to think too much about Sara. The last five years of his own life the moment she came to Las Vegas, and all his fear. Fear of her, of her judgements and scrutiny. Thinking about all of his self-doubts about why their relationship just couldn't work. And then sitting in her apartment, empathizing as he felt all her pain as she told him who her parents were. How—
"That's what the conversation was about in Tennessee," Gil spoke into the phone as he saw Lecter round the corner. "Starling told you her deepest pain. The one thing that drives her. Her father, the ranch...That's how you found out about her family lineage. Then you used that against her, didn't you? Just like you used it against me—"
"All I ever did was try to help you—"
"Help me? You manipulated me—"
"I gave you exactly what you wanted. The waiting alone in the darkness stopped."
He shook his head as it started to hurt. Nearing the corner of the hallway, he peered around and saw Lecter still walking, but this time there were other people in the hallway. People Lecter could kill if he tried to advance on him. He didn't want anyone to die. He didn't want Lecter to take a hostage either. He kept a distance as he continued to follow him down the hallway.
"The darkness reached out and touched you back. The Red Dragon. You became the monster you always feared you were—"
"I don't want to become the monster in order to be it, but to stop it."
"To stop monsters, dear Will, you have to become one. I gave you the Dragon, and how did you return the favor? You killed it. Drowned it to death with whiskey instead of embracing it. I've given you a head start in stopping me, but you still can't see, can you? Still refusing to sniff your own air. The thing about empaths, Will, is that they have a hard time seeing themselves. Do you even know who you are? You're too busy feeling everyone else around you that you don't know what you feel. What's real and what isn't. Does she really love you? Do you really love her? Is it a reflection of truth or a lie?"
"I know the truth. That's one thing I've always been able to find out."
"Then tell me, what's our truth?"
He rubbed at his head as the answer formed in his aching head. He knew it all along. The same truth he knew as to why he had to kill Garrett Jacob Hobbs and Francis Dolarhyde. It was the same with him and Lecter. One couldn't exist as long as the other was alive. "One of us has to die. It's the only way for either one of us to be free. We can't exist as long as the other one breathes."
"I ask you again, Will, do you understand yourself? Do you know who you are, right now? Are you Gil Grissom? Or are you Will Graham?"
"I'm me. It doesn't matter what my name is."
"Then who are you?"
"I'm the man that's going to put you down." He stopped walking as he realized the words that came out of his mouth.
For years he'd feared killing, even in self-defense or the defense of others, because what he felt afterwards was only evidence that he was what he feared the most: a killer. If he felt what killers felt enough times…would he become one?
"Truth hurts. If you succeed, it'll mark the third time you've killed someone. How many times will it take for you to admit the truth of what you are? It's in your nature."
"I'm not you, Hannibal. I'm not a killer."
"Then why do you fear it so much? Why does it eat away at your conscience? If you were any other man, you would be able to reason it out using science."
"It felt good because of the adrenaline. The release of dopamine."
"Very good. So why the guilt? You saved lives, including your own, but riddled with guilt. Make an effort to answer now," Lecter said as he stopped at the end of the hallway and turned to face him.
He felt his jaw ache as he stared at the killer in front of him. If one does what God does enough times…"A feeling of power."
"I've warned you about that power before," Lecter spoke into his ear like he was some devil on his shoulder. "I told you what would happen. You went off and blasted that poor Dolarhyde fellow away anyway. Then your excessive self-doubt of who you really are tore you apart. Again, self-criticizing yourself, doubt, plagues you like locusts."
Now Lecter was getting biblical. Locust plague was the eighth plague out of ten that inflicted Egypt. Water turning to blood was the first. What came after the locust was darkness and then the tenth and final plague: killing of the first-born children. He shook his head as he started walking again. Lecter turned the corner and kept talking. And he kept on listening. Empaths were good at that too.
The more he listened, the more he learned. The more he learned, the more he understood. And the more he understood the closer he was to catching the killer and uncovering the truth. The truth was this was it. Lecter's final act. His legacy. Legacy. That word vibrated throughout his head. The journal from the Capponi Library flashed in front of him. Mischa. Lecter had been tracing his family history. Legacy. Heir? Hannibal Lecter came from royalty with no heirs. The name, everything, stopped with him. He would want an heir. Someone to pick up the mantle. Not the Lecter name, but…his work. His work wasn't as a psychiatrist. His work was as a serial killer who ate his victims.
Mischa…M.
"They were just the start. I plan to keep going. But when? I could go into hibernation; let you anticipate my next kill. All the questions. When, where, and who, for years. Watching and waiting as you fall apart before I strike again."
As Lecter kept talking, he worked through his mind as the letters formed in his head. M-I-S-C-H-A. Anagrams were Lecter's specialty. What spelt out the name. He'd seen it before, hadn't he? Names and places started flipping through his mind until they appeared on a sheet of paper in his notebook. His handwritten notes he'd jotted down in the hotel room as he read over the casefile.
Argentina: Barney Matthews.
Italy: Bedelia Du Maurier.
Havana: Dr. Raymond Kubrick.
Maryland: Sidney Bloom.
South Carolina: Jack Crawford.
The places where the killings took place rearranged in his head as he spelt out the name using the first initial of each location. Maryland: M. Italy: I. South Carolina: SC. Havana: H. Argentina: A.
"There is another option to end all of this," Lecter said, interrupting his thoughts. "Prove yourself a coward, Will. Run away. I promise I won't kill anyone else if you do."
His eyes landed on Lecter as the thought fully formed in his head. It'd been spelt it out with their deaths. Lecter's obsession with his sister. This was about family. Legacy. An heir. What Lecter saw in Starling was his sister. She was 'M'. And she was fighting back. Why else the message behind the painting?
"That's why there was no joy in killing Crawford. You didn't kill Jack, you had her do it. Was it a test?"
Lecter sounded annoyed. "Didn't you hear me, Will? I said I promise I won't kill anyone else—"
He felt the guilt creep up into his chest, making it hard to breathe. "Don't put this on me, you sick son-of-a-bitch. If I stay, and you murder someone, that's on you. I'm not making you kill anyone. You do it for the thrill. The entertainment it brings to your otherwise dull existence. If you didn't murder people, no one would care about you. No one would know who you are. And you can't have that, can you?"
"You think I want the attention—"
"Why else put your kills on display? Cats bring their kills to their owners to show affection and to demonstrate how good they are at hunting. You do the same thing. You want to show off how good you are, and you kill to show affection. That's why you killed Miggs for her."
Lecter stopped walking and turned to face him again. His eyes never blinked, but he was thinking. "Are you giving me permission to kill as many as I have to in order for you to see?"
He stilled as that question ran through his head. It had to stop, one way or the other. This was an impossible situation. "Are—are you saying you won't kill anyone else if I turn my high-powered perception around and take a good long hard look at myself?"
"Or are you afraid to?"
He nearly laughed, but then realized that Hannibal Lecter was serious. He'd been questioning the 'why' ever since this started. Why now and why him and why here. This was the answer. Lecter was always five steps ahead. Everything he'd been investigating has led him to believing, or rather seeing, what Lecter has been saying to him since they first met.
"You see now, don't you? How very alike we are, even in our taste of a woman."
Taste of a woman instead of 'taste in women'. "You don't love Starling. You want to control her, like everyone else—"
"How does she taste, Will?"
He closed his eyes as he knew Lecter said it that way on purpose. He loved the taste of many things, and Sara tasted so sweet. He could devour her. He almost went to answer before he pulled the phone away and let out a deep breath. Lecter's words went through his head as he wondered if that thought had been his, or Lecter's. He had no way of knowing the truth. God, he ached for a drink, a cigarette, anything to settle the sudden panic that sparked in his chest making it harder to breathe.
Putting the phone back to his ear, he heard Lecter ask, "Either way, if you stay or if you go, can you leave her? Abandon her like you abandoned your son the way your father abandoned you—"
"He died—"
"You killed yourself, but you're still breathing. What's worse do you think? Being dead, or still breathing but being dead all the same? Your son forgave you, but would she?" Lecter was standing in front of an open elevator full of people as he turned around to face him and said, "If you stay and dare to brave these waters, dear Will, remember these words: hic sunt dracones."
Here be dragons.
The line went dead as the elevator's doors shut. He flipped the cell phone shut and darted towards the stairwell. He hurried down them and entered the first-floor hallway as the elevator was emptied out. He didn't see Lecter anywhere. Pulling out his CSI ID, he started asking the people in the hallway, "The man in the lab coat that got on at the fifth floor, where is he?"
"He got off on the second floor," a man in a hoodie told him.
Gil cursed under his breath as he realized he'd lost him. Going to the nurses' station, he asked them to notify security. Flipping the phone open again, he made a phone call to the lab. It was now Day shift, so he called Catherine.
"Willows—"
"Hannibal Lecter was at the hospital, he called me on a disposable cell that's not mine. Give me a second," he said before finding the cell's number from the phone's directory. He told it to Catherine and said, "I want a trace on that number as soon as possible."
"What did he say?"
He didn't want to tell her what Lecter said. "It doesn't matter, get the trace. I'm going with security to try to—"
"I'm at the A/V lab now. Phelps is working on it."
He felt some sense of relief that maybe they could—
"Gil, this doesn't make sense. What Phelps...Okay, Lecter used a proxy, mobile remote proxy to bounce the call. It originated from a residence in Henderson—Gil," Catherine said as her voice changed. She was worried and confused. She should be. He lived in Henderson. "Is anyone at your house?"
His thoughts from earlier while talking to Lecter came to mind: locust plague was the eighth plague out of ten that inflicted Egypt. Water turning to blood was the first. What came after the locust was darkness and then the tenth and final plague: killing of the first-born child. "Kevin. Kevin's there."
TBC…