"Pity you have to pander now and lick a few tears when you can," Starling said. "It's a pity we didn't get to finish what we were talking about. Your idea of the imago, the structure of it, had a kind of… elegance that's hard to get away from. Now it's like a ruin, half an arch standing there."

"Half an arch won't stand. Speaking of arches, will they still let you pound a beat, Clarice? Did they take your badge?"

"No."

"What's that under your jacket, a watchman's clock just like Dad's?"

"No, that's a speedloader."

"So you go around armed?"

"Yes."

"Then you should let your jacket out. Do you sew at all?"

"Yes."

"Did you make that costume?"

"No. Dr. Lecter, you find out everything. You couldn't have talked intimately with this 'Billy Rubin' and come out knowing so little about him."

"You think not?"

"If you met him, you know everything. But today you happened to remember just one detail. He'd had elephant ivory anthrax. You should have seen them jump when Atlanta said it's a disease of knifemakers. They ate it up, just like you knew they would. You should have gotten a suite at the Peabody for that. Dr. Lecter, if you met him you know about him. I think maybe you didn't meet him and Raspail told you about him. Secondhand stuff wouldn't sell as well to Senator Martin, would it?"

Starling took a quick look over her shoulder. One of the officers was showing the other something in Guns amp; Ammo magazine. "You had more to tell me in Baltimore, Dr. Lecter. I believe that stuff was valid. Tell me the rest."

"I've read the cases, Clarice, have you? Everything you need to know to find him is right there, if you're paying attention. Even Inspector Emeritus Crawford should have figured it out. Incidentally, did you read Crawford's stupefying speech last year to the National Police Academy? Spouting Marcus Aurelius on duty and honor and fortitude-- we'll see what kind of a Stoic Crawford is when Bella bites the big one. He copies his philosophy out of Bartlett's Familiar, I think. If he understood Marcus Aurelius, he might solve his case."

"Tell me how."

"When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can't read, Clarice. The Emperor counsels simplicity: First principles Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?"

"That doesn't mean anything to me."

"What does he do, the man you want?"

"He kills--"

"Ah--" he said sharply, averting his face for a moment from her wrongheadedness. "That's incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing?"

"Anger, social resentment, sexual frus--"

"No."

"What, then?"

"He covets. In fact, he covets being the very thing you are. It's his nature to covet. How do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort at an answer."

"No. We just--"

"No. Precisely so. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over you every day, Clarice, in chance encounters? I hardly see how you could not. And don't your eyes move over things?"

"All right, then tell me how--"

"It's your turn to tell me, Clarice. You don't have any beach vacations at the Hoof and Mouth Disease Station to offer me anymore. It's strictly quid pro quo from here on out. I have to be careful doing business with you. Tell me, Clarice."

"Tell you what?"

"The two things you owe me from before. What happened to you and the horse, and what you do with your anger."

"Dr. Lecter, when there's time I'll--"

"We don't reckon time the same way, Clarice. This is all the time you'll ever have."

"Later, listen, I'll--"

"I'll listen now. Two years after your father's death, your mother sent you to live with her cousin and her husband on a ranch in Montana. You were ten years old. You discovered they fed out slaughter horses. You ran away with a horse that couldn't see very well. And?"

"--It was summer and we could sleep out. We got as far as Bozeman by a back road."

"Did the horse have a name?"

"Probably, but they don't-- you don't find that out when you're feeding out slaughter horses. I called her Hannah, that seemed like a good name."

"Were you leading her or riding?"

"Some of both. I had to lead her up beside a fence to climb on."

"You rode and walked to Bozeman."

"There was a livery stable, dude ranch, riding academy sort of thing just outside of town. I tried to see about them keeping her. It was twenty dollars a week in the corral. More for a stall. They could tell right off she couldn't see. I said okay, I'll lead her around. Little kids can sit on her and I'll lead her around while their parents are, you know, regular riding. I can stay right here and muck out stalls. One of them, the man, agreed to everything I said while his wife called the sheriff."

"The sheriff was a policeman, like your father."

"That didn't keep me from being scared of him, at first. He had a big red face. The sheriff finally put up twenty dollars for a week's board while he 'straightened things out.' He said there was no use going for the stall in warm weather. The papers picked it up. There was a flap. My mother's cousin agreed to let me go. I wound up going to the Lutheran Home in Bozeman."

"It's an orphanage?"

"Yes."

"And Hannah?"

"She went too. A big Lutheran rancher put up the hay. They already had a barn at the orphanage. We plowed the garden with her. You had to watch where she was going, though. She'd walk through the butter-bean trellises and step on any kind of plant that was too short for her to feel it against her legs. And we led her around pulling kids in a cart."

"She died though."

"Well, yes."

"Tell me about that."

"It was last year, they wrote me at school. They think she was about twenty-two. Pulled a cart full of kids the last day she lived, and died in her sleep."

Dr. Lecter seemed disappointed. "How heartwarming," he said. "Did your foster father in Montana fuck you, Clarice?"

"No."

"Did he try?"

"No."

"What made you run away with the horse?"'

"They were going to kill her."

"Did you know when?"

"Not exactly. I worried about it all the time. She was getting pretty fat."

"What triggered you then? What set you off on that particular day?"

"I don't know."

"I think you do."

"I had worried about it all the time."

"What set you off, Clarice? You started what time?"

"Early. Still dark."

"Then something woke you. What woke you up? Did you dream? What was it?"

"I woke up and heard the lambs screaming. I woke up in the dark and the lambs were screaming."

"'They were slaughtering the spring lambs?"

"Yes."

"What did you do?"

"I couldn't do anything for them. I was just a--"

"What did you do with the horse?"

"I got dressed without turning on the light and went outside. She was scared. All the horses in the pen were scared and milling around. I blew in her nose and she knew it was me. Finally she'd put her nose in my hand. The lights were on in the barn and in the shed by the sheep pen. Bare bulbs, big shadows. The refrigefator truck had come and it was idling, roaring. I led her away."

"Did you saddle her?"

"No. I didn't take their saddle. Just a rope hackamore was all."

"As you went off in the dark, could you hear the lambs back where the lights were?"

"Not long. There weren't but twelve."

"You still wake up sometimes, don't you? Wake up in the iron dark with the lambs screaming?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you think if you caught Buffalo Bill yourself and if you made Catherine all right, you could make the lambs stop screaming, do you think they'd be all right too and you wouldn't wake up again in the dark and hear the lambs screaming? Clarice?"