Hannibal Page 0,33
Barney shooed it with his hands. "Go on," he said to the bird. "That's long enough to grieve. You'll walk around until the cat gets you." The dove flew away whistling. They could not see where it lit. Barney picked up the dead bird. The smooth-feathered body slid easily into his pocket.
"You know, Dr Lecter talked about you a little, once. Maybe the last time I talked to him, one of the last times. The bird reminds me. You want to know what he said?"
"Sure," Starling said. Her breakfast crawled a little, and she was determined not to flinch.
"We were talking about inherited, hardwired behavior. He was using genetics in roller pigeons as an example. They go way up in the air and roll over and over backwards in a display, falling toward the ground. There are shallow rollers and deep rollers. You can't breed two deep rollers or the offspring will roll all the way down, crash and die. What he said was `Officer Starling is a deep roller, Barney. We'll hope one of her parents was not."
Starling had to chew on that. "What'll you do with the bird?" she asked.
"Pluck it and eat it," Barney said. "Come on to the house and I'll give you the X ray and the books.".Carrying the long package back toward the hospital and her car, Starling heard the surviving mourning dove call once from the trees.
Part I Washington D.C. Chapter 13-15
Chapter 13
THANKS To the consideration of one madman and the obsession of another, Starling now had for the moment what she always wanted, an office in the storied subterranean corridor at Behavioral Science. It was bitter to get the office this way.
Starling never expected to go straight to the elite Behavioral Science section when she graduated from the FBI Academy, but she had believed that she could earn a place there. She knew she would spend several years in field offices first.
Starling was good at the job, but not good at office politics, and it took her years to see that she would never go to Behavioral Science, despite the wishes of its chief, Jack Crawford.
A major reason was invisible to her until, like an astronomer locating a black hole, she found Deputy Assistant Inspector General Paul Krendler by his influence on the bodies around him. He had never forgiven her for finding the serial killer Jame Gumb ahead of him, and he could not bear the press attention it brought her.
Once Krendler called her at home on a rainy winter night. She answered the telephone in a robe and bunny slippers with her hair up in a towel. She would always remember the date exactly because it was the first week of Desert Storm. Starling was a tech agent then and she had just returned from New York, where she had replaced the radio in the Iraqi U.N. Mission's limousine. The new radio was just like the old one, except it broadcast conversations in the car to a Defense Department satellite overhead. It had been a dicey maneuver in a private garage and she was still edgy.
For a wild second, she thought Krendler had called to say she'd done a good job.
She remembered the rain against the windows and Krendler's voice on the phone, speech a little slurred, bar noises in the background.
He asked her out. He said he could come by in half an hour. He was married.
"I think not, Mr. Krendler," she said and pushed the record button on her answering machine, it making the requisite legal beep, and the line went dead.
Now, years later in the office she had wanted to earn, Starling penciled her name on a piece of scrap paper and Scotch-taped it to the door. That wasn't funny and she tore it off again and threw it in the trash.
There was one piece of mail in her in-tray. It was a questionnaire from The Guinness Book of World Records, which prepared to list her as having killed more criminals than any other female law enforcement officer in United States history. The term criminals was being used advisedly, the publisher explained, as all of the deceased had multiple felony convictions and three had outstanding warrants. The questionnaire went into the trash along with her name.
She was in her second hour of pecking away at the computer workstation, blowing stray strands of hair out of her face, when Crawford knocked on the.door and stuck his head inside.
"Brian called from the lab, Starling. Mason's X-ray and the one