The Silence of the Lambs - Страница 17

"I'll try to talk around it."

Pilcher turned away from the bright light. "It's a big family, Lepidoptera. Maybe thirty thousand butterflies and a hundred thirty thousand moths. I'd like to take it out of the chrysalis-- I'll have to if we're going to narrow it down."

"Okay. Can you do it in one piece?"

"I think so. See, this one had started out on its own power before it died. It had started an irregular fracture in the chrysalis right here. This may take a little while."

Pilcher spread the natural split in the case and eased the insect out. The bunched wings were soaked. Spreading them was like working with a wet, wadded facial tissue. No pattern was visible.

Roden was back with the books.

"Ready?" Pitcher said. "Okay, the prothoracic femur is concealed."

"What about pilifers?"

"No pilifers," Pitcher said. "Would you turn out the light, Officer Starling?"

She waited by the wall switch until Pilcher's penlight came on. He stood back from the table and shined it on the specimen. The insect's eyes glowed in the dark, reflecting the narrow beam.

"Owlet," Roden said.

"Probably, but which one?" Pilcher said. "Give us the lights, please. It's a Noctuid, Officer Starling-- a night moth. How many Noctuids are there, Roden?"

"Twenty-six hundred and… about twenty-six hundred have been described.

"Not many this big, though. Okay, let's see you shine, my man."

Roden's wiry red head covered the microscope.

"We have to go to chaetaxy now-- studying the skin of the insect to narrow it down to one species," Pitcher said. "Roden's the best at it."

Starling had the sense that a kindness had passed in the room.

Roden responded by starting a fierce argument with Pilcher over whether the specimen's larval warts were arranged in circles or not. It raged on through the arrangement of the hairs on the abdomen.

"Erebus odora," Roden said at last.

"Let's go look," Pilcher said.

They took the specimen with them, down in the elevator to the level just above the great stuffed elephant and back into an enormous quad filled with pale green boxes. What was formerly a great hall had been split into two levels with decks to provide more storage for the Smithsonian's insects. They were in Neotropical now, moving into Noctuids. Pilcher consulted his notepad and stopped at a box chest-- high in the great wall stack.

"You have to be careful with these things," he said, sliding the heavy metal door off the box and setting it on the floor. "You drop one on your foot and you hop for weeks."

He ran his finger down the stacked drawers, selected one, and pulled it out.

In the tray Starling saw the tiny preserved eggs, the caterpillar in a tube of alcohol, a cocoon peeled away from a specimen very similar to hers, and the adult-- a big brown-black moth with a wingspan of nearly six inches, a furry body, and slender antennae.

'Erebus odora," Pitcher said. "The Black Witch Moth."

Roden was already turning gages. "'A tropical species sometimes straying up to Canada in the fall," he read. " `The larvae eat acacia, catclaw, and similar plants. Indigenous West Indies, Southern U.S., considered a pest in Hawaii.' "

Fuckola, Starling thought. "Nuts," she said aloud, "They're all over."

"But they're not all over all the time." Pilcher's head was down. He pulled at his chin. "Do they double-brood, Roden?"

"Wait a second… yeah, in extreme south Florida and south Texas."

"When?"

"May and August."

"I was just thinking," Pilcher said. "Your specimen's a little better developed than the one we have, and it's fresh. It had started fracturing its cocoon to come out. In the West Indies or Hawaii, maybe, I could understand it, but it's winter here. In this country it would wait three months to come out. Unless it happened accidentally in a greenhouse, or somebody raised it."

"Raised it how?"

"In a cage, in a warm place, with some acacia leaves for the larvae to eat until they're ready to button up in their cocoons. It's not hard to do."

"Is it a popular hobby? Outside professional study, do a lot of people do it?"

"No, primarily it's entomologists trying to get a perfect specimen, maybe a few collectors. There's the silk industry too, they raise moths, but not this kind."

"Entomologists must have periodicals, professional journals, people that sell equipment," Starling said.

"Sure, and most of the publications come here."

"Let me make you a bundle," Roden said. "A couple of people here subscribe privately to the smaller newsletters--keep 'em locked up and make you give them a quarter just to look at the stupid things. I'll have to get those in the morning."

"I'll see they're picked up, thank you, Mr. Roden."

Pilcher photocopied the references on Erebus odora and gave them to her, along with the insect. "I'll take you down," he said.

They waited for the elevator. "Most people love butterflies and hate moths," he said. "But moths are more-- interesting, engaging."

"They're destructive."

"Some are, a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do." Silence for one floor. "There's a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears," he offered. "That's all they eat or drink."

"What kind of tears? Whose tears?"

"The tears of large land mammals, about our size. The old definition of moth was 'anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.' It was a verb for destruction too… Is this what you do all the time-- hunt Buffalo Bill?"

"I do it all I can."

Pilcher polished his teeth, his tongue moving behind his lips like a cat beneath the covers. "Do you ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer or the amusing house wine?"

"Not lately."

"Will you go for some with me now? It's not far."

"No, but I'll treat when this is over-- and Mr. Roden can go too, naturally."

"There's nothing natural about that," Pilcher said. And at the door, "I hope you're through with this soon, Officer Starling."

She hurried to the waiting car.

Ardelia Mapp had left Starling's mail and half a Mounds candy bar on her bed. Mapp was asleep.

Starling carried her portable typewriter down to the laundry room, put it on the clothes-folding shelf and cranked in a carbon set. She had organized her notes on Erebus odora in her head on the ride back to Quantico and she covered that quickly.

Then she ate the Mounds and wrote a memo to Crawford suggesting they cross-check the entomology publications' computerized mailing lists against the FBI's known offender files and the files in the cities closest to the abductions, plus felon and sex-offender files of Metro Dade, San Antonio, and Houston, the areas where the moths were most plentiful.

There was another thing, too, that she had to bring up for a second time: Lets ask Dr. Lecter why he thought the perpetrator would start taking scalps.

She delivered the paper to the night duty officer and fell into her grateful bed, the voices of the day still whispering, softer than Mapp's breathing across the room. On the swarming dark she saw the moth's wise little face. Those glowing eyes had looked at Buffalo Bill.

Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

CHAPTER 15

In East Memphis, Tennessee, Catherine Baker Martin and her best boyfriend were watching a late movie on television in his apartment and having a few hits off a bong pipe loaded with hashish. The commercial breaks grew longer and more frequent.

"I've got the munchies, want some popcorn?" she said.

"I'll go get it, give me your keys."

"Sit still. I need to see if Mom called, anyway."

She got up from the couch, a tall young woman, big-boned and well fleshed, nearly heavy, with a handsome face and a lot of clean hair. She found her shoes under the coffee table and went outside.

The February evening was more raw than cold. A light fog off the Mississippi River hung breast-high over the big parking area. Directly overhead she could see the dying moon, pale and thin as a bone fishhook. Looking up made her a little dizzy. She started across the parking field, navigating steadily toward her own front door a hundred yards away.

The brown panel truck was parked near her apartment, among some motor homes and boats on trailers.

She noticed it because it resembled the parcel delivery trucks which often brought presents from her mother.

As she passed near the truck, a lamp came on in the fog. It was a floor lamp with a shade, standing on the asphalt behind the truck. Beneath the lamp was an overstuffed armchair in red-flowered chintz, the big red flowers blooming in the fog. The two items were like a furniture grouping in a showroom.

Catherine Baker Martin blinked several times and kept going. She thought the word surreal and blamed the bong. She was all right. Somebody was moving in or moving out. In. Out. Somebody was always moving at the Stonehinge Villas. The curtain stirred in her apartment and she saw her cat on the sill, arching and pressing his side against the glass.

She had her key ready, and before she used it she looked back. A man climbed out of the back of the truck. She could see by the lamplight that he had a cast on his hand and his arm was in a sling. She went inside and locked the door behind her.

Catherine Baker Martin peeped around the curtain and saw the man trying to put the chair into the back of the truck. He gripped it with his good hand and tried to boost it with his knee. The chair fell over. He righted it, licked his finger and rubbed at a spot of parking-lot grime on the chintz.