Chapter Seven: Reconnaissance

            Starling climbed the tall stairs in a daze, her hand running up the smooth banister, her tears running unheeded down her pale face.  So this is what it’s like to get what you want.  Highly overrated.

            But honesty forced her to reevaluate that thought as she turned into the bedroom and began to undress.  Isn’t there a little something else here, once you’ve wiped your eyes?  What is that warm feeling in your gut, that quivering around the edges of your mouth?

            She stopped trying to control it and just let it bloom.  It turned out to be a smile.           She had done what no psychiatrist, no agent, no one else in the world had been able to do.  She had gotten in.  A surge of pride straightened her spine as she walked naked to the wardrobe and rifled through the stuff he’d left for her.

            She pulled out a pile of folded darkness and held it up.  Long black silk nightgown, backless and clingy.  She sighed.  Did men ever think about what it would be like to try to sleep in something like that?  She envisioned herself asphyxiating, the slender spaghetti straps wrapped around her throat, and sighed again.  She put it on for now, but resolved to find something more conducive to rest.

            Her skin crackled with static electricity as she drew the gown over her head and she needed to do something.  She was itchy, restless, and full of… desire.  Wanting.  The knowledge she had so recklessly extracted was just the faintest little taste, tickling her tongue with the promise of more.  She bowed her head, let out a long, low, very controlled breath, and allowed her years of experience and her new-found trust in intuition work their alchemy upon her willing mind.  Her hunger would not be denied, and she did not care to try.

            She looked around the room, her hands spread open at her waist.  She spied a candleholder on the dresser and took it.  Rummaging through her purse, she found some matches and lit the candle.  The flame’s light flickered on the wall as she went out into the dark hallway.

            There were three doors that had always been shut, the one past her bedroom and the two on the opposite side of the hall.  She checked out the far door on the left first.  Turning the knob slowly, she found it to be unlocked, and pushed the door open.  A bedroom, larger than hers, with a massive bed, huge armoires, and its own fireplace.  There were drapes and bits of cloth strewn all around, over walls and tables, and she concluded that Dr. Lecter really wasn’t at all fond of the owner’s taste.

            A small wooden box on the dresser attracted her attention and she went over to it, setting down the candle and lifting it in her hands.  Smooth and polished, a light wood with a dark fleur-de-lis repeating inlay, and a little latch at the top.  She flipped it open, finding cufflinks and the like inside.  She automatically searched for a hidden drawer or compartment, and flinched a little as she found herself standing in Catherine Martin’s bedroom, in Frederica Bimmel’s house, in a green-tiled morgue with stainless steel carts.  She shook herself, and the visions receded.  She set the box back down on the dresser and took up her candle once more.

            There was one frame over the bed that was not draped, and she brought her candle closer, kneeling on the soft mattress.  It was a charcoal sketch, done on good-quality paper, and she felt she should recognize the view.  A wide plaza, a statue… she knew she’d seen this exact perspective before.  She closed her eyes, fanned the spark of memory.

            She opened them again and looked at the sketch with a mix of fascination and horror.  She had indeed seen it, on grainy video sent over by a young man from the Questura, during their investigation of Rinaldo Pazzi’s murder.  It was the view from a window in the Salon of Lilies of the Palazzo Vecchio.

            “Always back to Florence,” she murmured, clicking her tongue behind her teeth, pushing aside questions that would wait for a better time.  She looked around her again, sheeted figures on the table near the door casting odd, monstrous shadows in the eddying light.  She set the candle down on the nightstand next to the crystal pitcher and dropped to all fours on the bed.  He slept on the left, she could tell, and she sank to her elbows, pressing her face into the pillow, inhaling a concentrated essence of him.

            She came up for air, rocked to her knees, and sat back onto her heels.  Behind the pitcher were piled stacks of books… Dante, Plato, Nietzsche, Aristophanes… poetry from Virgil to Christina Rossetti, prose from Seneca to Irving.  The nightstand had a drawer, she noticed.  Tugging at the handle, she slid it open.  What have we here?  A pen and some paper.  Reading glasses.  A very, very old book in Latin.  Too bad that wasn’t on the list of languages at Bozeman High.  Something folded stuck out from the pages.  She lifted out the book, careful of its crumbling, flaking cover, and opened it.

            She unfolded the paper target and held it in her lap for a long while, tracing the bullet holes with her finger.  She remembered the day, bright and sparkling, when she had fired those shots, earning herself a championship badge and a beer from John Brigham.   Didn’t even know it was gone, she thought.  So he’s done this too, walked through the closed doors of my life like a ghost.  Did he sit on my bed?  Breathe in my pillow?  The gravity of her location suddenly came crashing down on her shoulders, and she flopped back, lying crosswise on the covers.  The most terrifying thing of all was her lack of fear.  She should be so scared, petrified in fact.  But she knew the tingle in her fingers was far from fright, though she wasn’t sure how much longer she should think about that.  Didn’t think she needed to know what that meant.  She sat up, giving the cover one last caress, and folded up the target, placing it back between the pages.  Closing the book, she returned it to its place, shutting the drawer.

            She slid off the high bed and crossed to the other side.  She pushed open the door she found there… ah, a master suite.  His bathroom was a place of sparkling order.  She poked around the countertop, finding a bottle of cologne.  She lifted it to her nose.  Mmmm.  Yes.  She put some on her fingers, rubbing it on her wrists, her neck, her hair.  Looking around, she found a hamper in the corner.  She opened it.  She pulled out shirts, undershirts, silk boxers, handkerchiefs, all before she found what she wanted.  A pyjama top, similar in cut to the one she’d worn last night, but this time in a deep emerald green.   She shucked off the black nightgown and pulled this around her instead.  Much, much better.

            Making her way back through the bedroom, she decided to try the door across the hall.  This, too, was unlocked, and she swung it open on noiseless hinges.  All at once, she was confronted with images leaping out of the shadows, ghosts on parchment.  She folded her arms tight around her chest and walked further into the room.

            There were easels all around, works large and small.  The one in the center caught her eye… a small child with dark hair kneeling in a garden, one chubby arm outstretched, with a butterfly perched on her tiny hand.  The girl’s eyes were wide with wonder, and a smile curved her lips.  Starling stepped closer to the easel, lifted her candle to examine it more closely.  The butterfly was not a butterfly at all, she saw with a chill and a catch in her breath.  It was a moth, and a kind of moth she knew very, very well.  Acherontia styx.

            “You’ve killed her all over again.”  The words, uttered in a slow, soft rasp, so very like the voice she had first heard from him, sounded in her head, and she knelt down on the floor, her hands trembling, sending wild light careening around the room.  She saw glimpses of anatomical studies, sketches of places she did not know, and her own face, over and over again, lining the walls of the room.

            Holding a lamb, holding a gun.  Running.  Many of her running, some of her driving… he’d captured the aggressive stance of her car so well.  Sleeping, stretching, and… one, tucked away behind the others, she could just see the top of her head, her eyes peering out from above.  She got to her feet and pulled it out.

            She was in a garden, maybe the same garden, naked in a tub of water, and a peace she’d never known was on her face.  A swarm of moths surrounded her like clouds of steam.  One of them was on her skin, right in the center of her chest.

            She dropped the sketch and it slithered with a whisper to the floor.  Her ears, attuned for a footfall in the hall outside, began to respond to a new sound, a familiar sound…

            It was a moment before it became clear enough to register in her awareness.  And soon after that, the wail of the sirens was lost in the rapid hammering of her heart.