Silence can mock.

"The best thing, the remarkable thing: one week a year, you will leave the hospital and go here." She put a map in the food carrier. Dr. Letter did not pull it through.

" Plum Island," she continued. "Every afternoon of that week you can walk on the beach or swim in the ocean with no surveillance closer than seventy-five yards, but it'll be SWAT surveillance. That's it."

"If I decline?"

"Maybe you could hang some café curtains in there. It might help. We don't have anything to threaten you with, Dr. Lecter. What I've got is a way for you to see the daylight."

She didn't look at him. She -didn't want to match stares now. This was not a confrontation.

"Will Catherine Martin come and talk to me-- only about her captor-- if I decide to publish? Talk exclusively to me?"

"Yes. You can take that as a given."

"How do you know? Given by whom?"

"I'll bring her myself."

"If she'll come."

"We'll have to ask her first, won't we?"

He pulled the carrier through. " Plum Island."

"Look off the tip of Long Island, the north finger there."

" Plum Island. 'The Plum Island Animal Disease Center. (Federal, hoof and mouth disease research),' it says. Sounds charming."

"That's just part of the island. It has a nice beach and good quarters. The terns nest there in the spring."

"Terns." Dr. Letter sighed. He cocked his head slightly and touched the center of his red lip with his red tongue. "If we talk about this, Clarice, I have to have something on account. Quid pro quo. I tell you things, and you tell me."

"Go," Starling said.

She had to wait a full minute before he said, "A caterpillar becomes a pupa in a chrysalis. Then it emerges; comes out of its secret changing room as the beautiful imago. Do you know what an imago is, Clarice?"

"An adult winged insect."

"But what else?"

She shook her head.

"It's a term from the dead religion of psychoanalysis. An imago is an image of the parent buried in the unconscious from infancy and bound with infantile affect. The word comes from the wax portrait busts of their ancestors the ancient Romans carried in funeral processions… Even the phlegmatic Crawford must see some significance in the insect chrysalis."

"Nothing to jump on except checking the entomology journals' subscription lists against known sex offenders in the descriptor index."

"First, let's drop Buffalo Bill. It's a misleading term and has nothing to do with the person you want. For convenience we'll call him Billy. I'll give you a precis of what I think. Ready?"

"Ready."

"The significance of the chrysalis is change. Worm into butterfly, or moth. Billy thinks he wants to change. He's making himself a girl suit out of real girls. Hence the large victims-- he has to have things that fit. The number of victims suggests he may see it as a series of molts. He's doing this in a two-story house, did you find out why two stories?"

"For a while he was hanging them on the stairs."

"Correct."

"Dr. Lecter, there's no correlation that I ever saw between transsexualism and violence-- transsexuals are passive types, usually."

"That's true, Clarice. Sometimes you see a tendency to surgical addiction-- cosmetically, transsexuals are hard to satisfy-- but that's about all. Billy's not a real transsexual. You're very close, Clarice, to the way you re going to catch him, do you realize that?"

"No, Dr. Lecter."

"Good. Then you won't mind telling me what happened to you after your father's death."

Starling looked at the scarred top of the school desk.

"I don't imagine the answer's in your papers, Clarice."

"My mother kept us together for more than two years."

"Doing what?"

"Working as a motel maid in the daytime, cooking at a café at night."

"And then?"

"I went to my mother's cousin and her husband in Montana."

"Just you?"

"I was the oldest."

"The town did nothing for your family?"

"A check for five hundred dollars."

"Curious there was no insurance. Clarice, you said your father hit the shotgun slide on the door of his pickup."

"Yes."

"He didn't have a patrol car?"

"No."

"It happened at night."

"Yes."

"Didn't he have a pistol?"

"No."

"It happened at night."

"Yes."

"Didn't he have a pistol?"

"No."

"Clarice, he was working at night, in a pickup truck, armed only with a shotgun… Tell me, did he wear a time clock on his belt by any chance? One of those things where they have keys screwed to posts all over town and you have to drive to them and stick them in your clock? So the town fathers know you weren't asleep. Tell me if he wore one, Clarice."

"Yes."

"He was a night watchman, wasn't he, Clarice, he wasn't a marshal at all. I'll know if you lie."

"The job description said night marshal."

"What happened to it?"

"What happened to what?"

"The time clock. What happened to it after your father was shot?"

"I don't remember."

"If you do remember, will you tell me?"

"Yes. Wait-- the mayor came to the hospital and asked my mother for the clock and the badge." She hadn't known she knew that. The mayor in his leisure suit and Navy surplus shoes. The cocksucker. "Quid pro quo, Dr. Lecter."

"Did you think for a second you'd made that up? No, if you'd made it up, it wouldn't sting. We were talking about transsexuals. You said violence and destructive aberrant behavior are not statistical correlatives of transsexualism. True. Do you remember what we said about anger expressed as lust, and lupus presenting as hives? Billy's not a transsexual, Clarice, but he thinks he is, he tries to be. He's tried to be a lot of things, I expect."

"You said that was close to the way we'd catch him."

"There are three major centers for transsexual surgery: Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota, and Columbus Medical Center. I wouldn't be surprised if he's applied for sex reassignment at one or all of them and been denied."

"On what basis would they reject him, what would show up?"

"You're very quick, Clarice. The first reason would be criminal record. That disqualifies an applicant, unless the crime is relatively harmless and related to the gender-identity problem. Cross-dressing in public, something like that. If he lied successfully about a serious criminal record, then the personality inventories would get him."

"How?"

"You have to know how in order to sieve them, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Why don't you ask Dr. Bloom?"

"I'd rather ask you."

"What will you get out of this, Clarice, a promotion and a raise? What are you, a G-9? What do little G-9's get nowadays?"

"A key to the front door, for one thing. How would he show up on the diagnostics?"

"How did you like Montana, Clarice?"

" Montana 's fine."

"How did you like your mother's cousin's husband?"

"We were different."

"How were they?"

"Worn out from work."

"Were there other children?'."

"No."

"Where did you live?"

"On a ranch."

"A sheep ranch?"

"Sheep and horses."

"How long were you there?"

"Seven months."

"How old were you?"

"Ten."

"Where did you go from there?"

"The Lutheran Home in Bozeman."

"Tell me the truth."

"I am telling you the truth."

"You're hopping around the truth. If you're tired, we could talk toward the end of the week. I'm rather bored myself. Or had you rather talk now?"

"Now, Dr. Lecter."

"All right. A child is sent away from her mother to a ranch in Montana. A sheep and horse ranch. Missing the mother, excited by the animals…" Dr. Lecter invited Starling with his open hands.

"It was great. I had my own room with an Indian rug on the floor. They let me ride a horse-- they led me around on this horse-- she couldn't see very well. There was something wrong with all the horses. Lame or sick. Some of them had been raised with children and they would, you know, nicker at me in the mornings when I went out to the school bus."