"If we have to. You can count on the pathologists to say they didn't miss anything, naturally. The Cincinnati Jane Doe's still in 'the freezer out there. I'll ask them to look at her, but the other four are in the ground. Exhumation orders stir people up. We had to do it with four patients who passed away under Dr. Lecter's care, just to make sure what killed them. Let me tell you, it's a lot of trouble and it upsets the relatives. I'll do it if I have to, but we'll see what you find out at the Smithsonian before I decide."

"Scalping… that's rare, isn't it?"

"Uncommon, yes," Crawford said.

" But Dr. Lecter said Buffalo Bill would do it. How did he know that?"

"He didn't know it."

"He said it, though."

"It's not a big surprise, Starling. I wasn't surprised to see that. I should have said that it was rare until the Mengel case, remember that? Scalped the woman? There were two or three copycats after that. The papers, when they were playing around with the Buffalo Bill tag, they emphasized more than once that this killer doesn't take scalps. It's no surprise after that-- he probably follows his press. Lecter was guessing. He didn't say when it would happen, so he could never be wrong. If we caught Bill and there was no Scalping, Lecter could say we got him just before he did it."

"Dr. Lecter also said Buffalo Bill lives in a two-story house. We never got into that. Why do you suppose he said it?"

"That's not a guess. He's very likely right, and he could have told you why, but he wanted to tease you with it. It's the only weakness I ever saw in him-- he has to look smart, smarter than anybody. He's been doing it for years."

"You said ask if I don't know-- well, I have to ask you to explain that."

"Okay, two of the victims were hanged, right? High ligature marks, cervical displacement, definite hanging. As Dr. Lecter knows from personal experience, Starling, it's very hard for one person to hang another against his will. People hang themselves from doorknobs all the time. They hang themselves sitting down, it's easy. But it's hard to hang somebody else-- even when they're bound up, they manage to get their feet under them, if there's any support to find with their feet. A ladder's threatening. Victims won't climb it blindfolded and they sure won't climb it if they can see the noose. The way it's done is in a stairwell. Stairs are familiar. Tell them you're taking them up to use the bathroom, whatever, walk them up with a hood on, slip the noose on, and boot them off the top step with the rope fastened to the landing railing. It's the only good way in a house. Fellow in California popularized it. If Bill didn't have a stairwell, he'd kill them another way. Now give me those names, the senior deputy from Potter and the state police guy, the ranking officer."

Starling found them in her notepad, reading by a penlight held in her teeth.

"Good," Crawford said. "When you're posting a hotline, Starling, always credit the cops by name. They hear their own names, they get more friendly to the hotline. Fame helps them remember to call us if they get something. What does the burn on her leg say to you?"

"Depends if it's postmortem."

"If it is?"

"Then he's got a closed truck or a van or a station wagon, something long."

"Why?"

"Because the burn's across the back of her calf."

They were at Tenth and Pennsylvania, in front of the new FBI headquarters that nobody ever refers to as the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

"Jeff, you can let me out here," Crawford said. "Right here, don't go underneath. Stay in the car, Jeff, just pop the trunk. Come show me, Starling."

She got out with Crawford while he retrieved his datafax and briefcase from the luggage compartment.

"He hauled the body in something big enough for the body to be stretched out on its back," Starling said. "That's the only way the back of her calf would rest on the floor over the exhaust pipe. In a car trunk like this, she'd be curled up on her side and--"

"Yeah, that's how I see it," Crawford said.

She realized then that he'd gotten her out of the car so he could speak with her privately.

"When I told that deputy he and I shouldn't talk in front of a woman, that burned you, didn't it?"

"Sure."

"It was just smoke. I wanted to get him by himself."

"I know that."

"Okay." Crawford slammed the trunk and turned away.

Starling couldn't let it go.

"It matters, Mr. Crawford."

He was turning back to her, laden with his fax machine and briefcase, and she had his full attention.

"Those cops know who you are," she said. "They look at you to see how to act." She stood steady, shrugged her shoulders, opened her palms. There it was, it was true.

Crawford performed a measurement on his cold scales.

"Duly noted, Starling. Now get on with the bug."

"Yes sir."

She watched him walk away, a middle-aged man laden with cases and rumpled from flying, his cuffs muddy from the riverbank, going home to what he did at home.

She would have killed for him then. That was one of Crawford's great talent

CHAPTER 14

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History had been closed for hours, but Crawford had called ahead and a guard waited to let Clarice Starling in the Constitution Avenue entrance.

The lights were dimmed in the closed museum and the air was still. Only the colossal figure of a South Seas chieftain facing the entrance stood tall enough for the weak ceiling light to shine on his face.

Starling's guide was a big black man in the neat turnout of the Smithsonian guards. She thought he resembled the chieftain as he raised his face to the elevator lights. There was a moment's relief in her idle fancy, like rubbing a cramp.

The second level above the great stuffed elephant, a vast floor closed to the public, is shared by the departments of Anthropology and Entomology. The anthropologists call it the fourth floor. The entomologists contend it is the third. A few scientists from Agriculture say they have proof that it is the sixth. Each faction has a case in the old building with its additions and subdivisions.

Starling followed the guard into a dim maze of corridors walled high with wooden cases of anthropological specimens. Only the small labels revealed their contents.

"Thousands of people in these boxes," the guard said. "Forty thousand specimens."

He found office numbers with his flashlight and trailed the light over the labels as they went along.

Dyak baby carriers and ceremonial skulls gave way to Aphids, and they left Man for the older and more orderly world of Insects. Now the corridor was walled with big metal boxes painted pale green.

"Thirty million insects-- and the spiders on top of that. Don't lump the spiders in with the insects," the guard advised. "Spider people jump all over you about that. There, the office that's lit. Don't try to come out by yourself. If they don't say they'll bring you down, call me at this extension, it's the guard office. I'll come get you." He gave her a card and left her.

She was in the heart of Entomology, on a rotunda gallery high above the great stuffed elephant. There was the office with the lights on and the door open.

"Time, Pilch!" A man's voice, shrill with excitement. "Let's go here. Time!"

Starling stopped in the doorway. Two men sat at a laboratory table playing chess. Both were about thirty, one black-haired and lean, the other pudgy with wiry red hair. They appeared to be engrossed in the chessboard. If they noticed Starling, they gave no sign. If they noticed the enormous rhinoceros beetle slowly making its way across the board, weaving among the chessmen, they gave no sign of that either.