Senator Martin's eyes cut away from the camera as the picture switched to a home movie of a toddler helping herself walk by hanging on to the mane of a large collie.

The Senator's voice went on: "The film you're seeing now is Catherine as a little child. Release Catherine. Release her unharmed anywhere in this country and you'll have my help and my friendship."

Now a series of still photographs-- Catherine Martin at eight, holding the tiller of a sailboat. The boat was up on blocks and her father was painting the hull. Two recent photographs of the young woman, a full shot and a close-up of her face.,

Now back to the Senator in close-up: "I promise you in front of this entire country, you'll have my unstinting aid whenever you need it. I'm well equipped to help you. I am a United States Senator. I serve on the Armed Services Committee. I am deeply involved in the Strategic Defense Initiative, the space weapons systems which everyone calls 'Star Wars.' If you have enemies, I will fight them. If anyone interferes with you, I can stop them. You can call me at any time, day or night. Catherine is my daughter's name. Please, show us your strength," Senator Martin said in closing, "release Catherine unharmed."

"Boy, is that smart," Starling said. She was trembling like a terrier. "Jesus, that's smart."

"What, the Star Wars?" Mapp said. "If the aliens are trying to control Buffalo Bill's thoughts from another planet, Senator Martin can protect him-- is that the pitch?"

Starling nodded. "A lot of paranoid schizophrenics have that specific hallucination-- alien control. If that's the way Bill's wired, maybe this approach could bring him out. It's a damn good shot, though, and she stood up there and fired it, didn't she? At the least it might buy Catherine a few more days. They may have time to work on Bill a little. Or they may not; Crawford thinks his period may be getting shorter. They can try this, they can try other things."

"Nothing I wouldn't try if he had one of mine. Why did she keep saying 'Catherine,' why the name all the time?"

"She's trying to make Buffalo Bill see Catherine as a person. They're thinking he'll have to depersonalize her, he'll have to see her as an object before he can tear her up. Serial murderers talk about that in prison interviews, some of them. They say it's like working on a doll."

"Do you see Crawford behind Senator Martin's statement?"

"Maybe, or maybe Dr. Bloom-- there he is," Starling said. On the screen was an interview taped several weeks earlier with Dr. Alan Bloom of the University of Chicago on the subject of serial murder.

Dr. Bloom refused to compare Buffalo Bill with Francis Dolarhyde or Garrett Hobbs, or any of the others in his experience. He refused to use the term "Buffalo Bill." In fact he didn't say much at all, but he was known to be an expert, probably the expert on the subject, and the network wanted to show his face.

They used his final statement for the snapper at the end of the report: "There's nothing we can threaten him with that's more terrible than what he faces every day. What we can do is ask him to come to us. We can promise him kind treatment and relief, and we can mean it absolutely and sincerely."

"Couldn't we all use some relief," Mapp said. "Damn if I couldn't use some relief myself. Slick obfuscation and facile bullshit, I love it. He didn't tell them anything, but then he probably didn't stir Bill up much either."

"I can stop thinking about that kid in West Virginia for a while," Starling said, "it goes away for, say, a half an hour at a time, and then it pokes me in the throat. Glitter polish on her nails-- let me not get into it."

Mapp, rummaging among her many enthusiasms, lightened Starling's gloom at dinner and fascinated eavesdroppers by comparing slant-rhymes in the works of Stevie Wonder and Emily Dickinson.

On the way back to the room, Starling snatched a message out of her box and read this: Please call Albert Roden, and a telephone number.

"That just proves my theory," she told Mapp as they flopped on their beds with their books.

"What's that?"

"You meet two guys, right? The wrong one'll call you every God damned time."

"I been knowing that."

The telephone rang.

Mapp touched the end of her nose with her pencil. "If that's Hot Bobby Lowrance, would you tell him I'm in the library?" Mapp said. "I'll call him tomorrow, tell him."

It was Crawford calling from an airplane, his voice scratchy on the phone. "Starling, pack for two nights and meet me in an hour."

She thought he was gone, there was only a hollow humming on the telephone, then the voice came back abruptly:" --won't need the kit, just clothes."

"Meet you where?"

"The Smithsonian." He started talking to someone else before he punched off.

"Jack Crawford," Starling said, flipping her bag on the bed.

Mapp appeared over the top of her Federal Code of Criminal Procedure. She watched Starling pack, an eyelid drooping over one of her great dark eyes.

"I don't want to put anything on your mind," she said.

"Yes you do," Starling said. She knew what was coming.

Mapp had made the Law Review at the University of Maryland while working at night. Her academic standing at the academy was number two in the class, her attitude toward the books was pure banzai.

"You're supposed to take the Criminal Code exam tomorrow and the PE test in two days. You make sure Supremo Crawford knows you could get recycled if he's not careful. Soon as he says, 'Good work, Trainee Starling,' don't you say, 'The pleasure was mine.' You get right in his old Easter Island face and say, 'I'm counting on you to see to it yourself that I'm not recycled for missing school.' Understand what I'm saying?"

"I can get a makeup on the Code," Starling said, opening a barrette with her teeth.

"Right, and you fail it with no time to study, you think they won't recycle you? Are you kidding me? Girl, they'll sail you off the back steps like a dead Easter chick. Gratitude's got a short half-life, Clarice. Make him say no recycle. You've got good grades-- make him say it. I never would find another roommate that can iron as fast as you can at one minute to class."

Starling had her old Pinto moving up the four-lane at a steady lope, one mile an hour below the speed where the shimmy sets in. The smells of hot oil and mildew, the rattles underneath, the transmission's whine resonated faintly with memories of her father's pickup truck, her memories of riding beside him with her squirming brothers and sister.

She was doing the driving now, driving at night, the white dashes passing under blip blip blip. She had time to think. Her fears breathed on her from close behind her neck; other, recent memories squirmed beside her.

Starling was very much afraid Catherine Baker Martin's body had been found. When Buffalo Bill found out who she was, he might have panicked. He might have killed her and dumped her body with a bug in the throat.

Maybe Crawford was bringing the bug to be identified. Why else would he want her at the Smithsonian? But any agent could carry a bug into the Smithsonian, an FBI messenger could do it for that matter. And he told her to pack for two days.

She could understand Crawford not explaining it to her over an unsecured radio link, but it was maddening to wonder.

She found an all-news station on the radio and waited through the weather report. When the news came, it was no help. The story from Memphis was a rehash of the seven o'clock news. Senator Martin's daughter was missing. Her blouse had been found slit up the back in the style of Buffalo Bill. No witnesses. The victim found in West Virginia remained unidentified.