"No."

"Margot?" She put her hand on the door, braced against a plea.

"Can you still crack a walnut?"

She reached in her pocket and brought out two. The muscles of her forearm bunched and the nuts cracked.

The doctor chuckled. "Excellent. With all that strength, walnuts. You can offer Judy walnuts to help her get past the taste of Mason."

Margot walked back to him, her face set. She spat in his face and jerked out a lock of his hair near the top of his head. It was hard to know how she meant it.

She heard him humming as she left the room.

As Margot walked toward the lighted house, the little divot of scalp stuck to the palm of her hand with blood, the hair hanging from her hand and she did not even need to close her fingers around it.

Cordell passed her in a golf cart loaded with medical equipment to prepare the patient.

Chapter 84

FROM THE expressway overpass northbound at Exit 30, Starling could see a half- mile away the lighted gatehouse, far outpost of Muskrat Farm. Starling had made up her mind on the drive to Maryland: she would go in the back way. If she went to the front gate with no credentials and no warrant she'd get a sheriff's escort out of the county, or to the county jail. By the time she was free again, it would all be done.

Never mind permission. She drove up to Exit 29, well beyond Muskrat Farm, and came back along the service road. The blacktop road seemed very dark after the expressway lights. It was bounded by the expressway on her right, on the left.a ditch and a high chain-link fence separated the roadway from the looming black of the national forest. Starling's map showed a gravel fire road intersecting this blacktop a mile farther along and well out of sight of the gatehouse. It was where she had mistakenly stopped on her first visit. According to her map, the fire road ran through the national forest to Muskrat Farm. She was measuring by her odometer.

The Mustang seemed louder than usual, running just above idle, booming off the trees.

There it was in her headlights, a heavy gate welded of metal pipe and topped with barbed wire. The SERVICE ENTRANCE sign she had seen on her first visit was gone now. Weeds had grown up in front of the gate and over the ditch- crossing with its culvert.

She could see in her headlights that the weeds had recently been pressed down. Where the fine grit and sand had washed off the pavement and made a little sandbar, she could see the tracks of mud-and-snow tires. Were they the same as the van tracks she saw in the parking median at Safeway? She didn't know if they were exactly the same, but they could have been.

A chrome padlock and chain secured the gate. No sweat there. Starling looked up and down the road. Nobody coming. A little illegal entry here. It felt like a crime. She checked the gateposts for sensor wires. None. Working with two picks and holding her little flashlight in her teeth, it took her less than fifteen seconds to open the padlock. She drove through the entrance and continued well into the trees before she walked back to close the gate. She draped the chain back on the gate with the padlock on the outside. From a little distance it looked normal. She left the loose ends inside so she could butt it open more easily with the car if she had to.

Measuring on the map with her thumb, it was about two miles through the forest to the farm. She drove through the dark tunnel of the fire road, the night sky sometimes visible overhead, sometimes not, as the branches closed overhead. She eased along in second gear at little over an idle, with just the parking lights, trying to keep the Mustang as quiet as possible, dead weeds brushing the undercarriage. When the odometer said a mile and eight-tenths, she stopped. With the engine off, she could hear a crow calling in the dark. The crow was pissed at something. She hoped to God it was a crow.

Chapter 85

CORDELL CAME into the tack room brisk as a hangman, intravenous bottles under his arms, tubes dangling from them.

"The Dr Hannibal Lecter!" he said. "I wanted that mask of yours so badly for our club in Baltimore. My girlfriend and I have a dungeony sort of thing, sort of Jay-O and leather."

He put his things down on the anvil stand and put a poker in the fire to heat.

"Good news and bad news," Cordell said in his cheerful nursey voice and faint Swiss accent. "Did Mason tell you the drill? The drill is, in a little while I'll bring Mason down here and the pigs will get to eat your feet. Then you'll wait overnight and tomorrow Carlo and his brothers will feed you through the bars head first, so the pigs can eat your face, just like the dogs ate Mason's. I'll keep you going with IVs and tourniquets until the last. You really are done, you know. That's the bad news."

Cordell glanced at the TV camera to be sure it was off. "The good news is, it.doesn't have to be much worse than a trip to the dentist. Check this out, Doctor."

Cordell held a hypodermic syringe with a long needle in front of Dr Lector's face. "Let's talk like two medical people. I could get behind you and give you a spinal that would keep you from feeling anything down there. You could just close your eyes and try not to listen. You'd just feel some jerking and pulling. And once Mason's got his follies for the evening and gone to the house I could give you something that would just stop your heart. Want to see it?"

Cordell palmed a vial of Pavulon and held it close enough to Dr Lector's open eye, but not close enough to get bitten.

The firelight played on the side of Cordell's avid face, his eyes were hot and happy. "You've got lots of money, Dr Lector. Everybody says so. I know how this stuff works – I put money around in places too. Take it out, move it, fuss with it. I can move mine on the phone and I bet you can too."

Cordell took a cell phone from his pocket. "We'll call your banker, you say him a code, he'll confirm to me and I'll fix you right up."

He held up the spinal syringe. "Squirt, squirt. Talk to me."

Dr Lector mumbled, his head down. "Suitcase" and "locker" were all Cordell could hear.

"Come on, Doctor, and then you can just sleep. Come on."

"Unmarked hundreds," Dr Lector said, and his voice trailed away.

Cordell leaned closer and Dr Lector struck to the length of his neck, caught Cordell's eyebrow in his small sharp teeth and ripped a sizeable piece of it out as Cordell leaped backward. Dr Lector spit the eyebrow like a grape skin into Cordell's face.

Cordell mopped the wound and put a tape butterfly on it that gave him a quizzical expression.

He packed up his syringe. "All that relief, wasted," he said. "You'll look at it differently before daylight. You know I have stimulants to take you quite the other way. And I'll make you wait."

He took the poker from the fire.

"I'm going to hook you up now," Cordell said. "Whenever you resist me I'll burn you. This is what it feels like."

He touched the glowing end of the poker to Dr Lector's chest and crisped his nipple through his shirt. He had to smother the widening circle of fire on the doctor's shirtfront.

Dr Lector did not make a sound.

Carlo backed the forklift into the tack room. With Piero and Carlo lifting together, Tommaso ever ready with the tranquilizer rifle, they moved Dr Lector to the fork and shackled his single tree to the front of the machine. He was seated on the fork, his arms bound to the single tree, with his legs extended, each leg fastened to one tine of the fork…Cordell inserted an IV needle with a butterfly into the back of each of Dr Lector's hands. He had to stand on a bale of hay to hang the plasma bottles on the machine on each side of him. Cordell stood back and admired his work. Odd to see the doctor splayed there with an IV in each hand, like a parody of something Cordell couldn't quite remember. Cordell rigged slip-knot tourniquets just above each knee with cords that could be pulled behind the fence to keep the doctor from bleeding to death. They could not be tightened now. Mason would be furious if Lecter's feet were numb.