Red Dragon Page 0,71

top: forty-one. "And what do you have here?" Chilton asked.

"Time," Dr. Lecter said.

* * *

Section Chief Brian Zeller took the courier's case and the wheel-chair wheels into Instrumental Analysis, walking at a rate that made his gabardine pants whistle.

The staff, held over from the day shift, knew that whistling sound very well: Zeller in a hurry.

There had been enough delays. The weary courier, his flight fromChicagodelayed by weather and then diverted toPhiladelphia, had rented a car and driven down to the FBI laboratory inWashington.

TheChicagopolice laboratory is efficient, but there are things it is not equipped to do. Zeller prepared to do them now.

At the mass spectrometer he dropped off the paint flecks from Lounds's car door.

Beverly Katz in Hair and Fiber got the wheels to share with others in the section.

Zeller's last stop was the small hot room whereLizaLakebent over her gas chromatograph. She was testing ashes from aFloridaarson case, watching the stylus trace its spiky line on the moving graph.

"Ace lighter fluid," she said. "That's what he lit it with." She had looked at so many samples that she could distinguish brands without searching through the manual.

Zeller took his eyes offLizaLakeand rebuked himself severely for feeling pleasure in the office. He cleared his throat and held up the two shiny paint cans.

"Chicago?" she said.

Zeller nodded.

She checked the condition of the cans and the seal of the lids. One can contained ashes from the wheelchair; the other, charred material from Lounds.

"How long has it been in the cans?"

"Six hours anyway," Zeller said.

"I'll headspace it."

She pierced the lid with a heavy-duty syringe, extracted air that had been confined with the ashes, and injected the air directly into the gas chromatograph. She made minute adjustments. As the sample moved along the machine's five-hundred-foot column, the stylus jiggled on the wide graph paper.

"Unleaded..." she said. "It's gasohol, unleaded gasohol. Don't see much of that." She flipped quickly through a looseleaf file of sample graphs. "I can't give you a brand yet. Let me do it with pentane and I'll get back to you."

"Good," Zeller said. Pentane would dissolve the fluids in the ashes, then fractionate early in the chromatograph, leaving the fluids for fine analysis.

* * *

By one A.M. Zeller had all he could get.

LizaLakesucceeded in naming the gasohol: Freddy Lounds was burned with a "Servco Supreme" blend.

Patient brushing in the grooves of the wheelchair treads yielded two kinds of carpet fiber - wool and synthetic. Mold in dirt from the treads indicated the chair had been stored in a cool, dark place.

The other results were less satisfactory. The paint flecks were not original factory paint. Blasted in the mass spectrometer and compared with the national automotive paint file, the paint proved to be high-quality Duco enamel manufactured in a lot of 186,000 gallons during the first quarter of 1978 for sale to several auto-paintshop chains.

Zeller had hoped to pinpoint a make of vehicle and the approximate time of manufacture.

He telexed the results toChicago.

TheChicagopolice department wanted its wheels back. The wheels made an awkward package for the courier. Zeller put written lab reports in his pouch along with mail and a package that had come for Graham.

"Federal Express I'm not," the courier said when he was sure Zeller couldn't hear him.

* * *

The Justice Department maintains several small apartments near Seventh District Court inChicagofor the use of jurists and favored expert witnesses when court is in session. Graham stayed in one of these, with Crawford across the hall.

He came in at nine P.M., tired and wet. He had not eaten since breakfast on the plane fromWashingtonand the thought of food repelled him.

Rainy Wednesday was over at last. It was as bad a day as he could remember.

With Lounds dead, it seemed likely that he was next and all dayChesterhad watched his back; while he was in Lounds's garage, while he stood in the rain on the scorched pavement where Lounds was burned. With strobe lights flashing in his face, he told the press he was "grieved at the loss of his friend Frederick Lounds."

He was going to the funeral, too. So were a number of federal agents and police, in the hope that the killer would come to see Graham grieve.

Actually he felt nothing he could name, just cold nausea and an occasional wave of sickly exhilaration that he had not burned to death instead of Lounds.

It seemed to Graham that he had learned nothing in forty years: he had just gotten tired.

He made a big martini and drank it while he undressed.