Chapter Text
Once, Clarice went to the office of Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
It had been years since the last time she had seen him, time in which he and Will Graham had simply vanished. There had been no sightings and no leads, and the case remained open yet stagnant.
She went to the office solely because she was curious.
Crawford had given her a set of keys. She was certain he wasn’t supposed to have them. Before her time, the FBI had gotten access to Dr. Lecter’s office after the Tooth Fairy had broken in. Crawford had kept the keys in his own desk, where they’d been long forgotten by anyone else at the FBI. He had turned them over to Clarice during a conversation about his possible retirement, surprising her in both that he had them and that he thought they should be kept.
She was the obvious choice for obvious reasons. Clarice had taken them without comment, and had even considered simply disposing of them. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Dr. Lecter rarely entered her thoughts these days, though it was inevitable that she now found herself thinking of him. In the end, she simply decided to use the keys for their intended purpose. She could open a door, and then close it again.
Clarice drove to Baltimore on a sunny day. She parked on the street and walked up the sidewalk to the gate, which she had to unlock. A set of steps brought her to stand at the building’s imposing door. She stared at it before she entered, like she imagined so many others before her had done. She put the key in the lock, entering the building as Dr. Lecter had done.
There was no electricity, of course, as utilities had been shut off long ago. The waiting room was lit by one dim window, muted light shining in between the blinds. The chairs were draped in plastic, as were the pictures that still hung on the walls. She felt like she was walking through a crime scene, one that had been long abandoned.
The office proper was much the same—everything swathed in plastic, a visible layer of dust on the floor. Clarice went to the windows first, pulling the curtains back as slowly as she could in order to stir up the least amount of dust. The high windows let in what seemed like a world of light, even with the semi-sheer blinds still closed. The office was massive, and she could easily envision how elegant it would have been when it was set up. It was still set up, in a way, as nothing had been moved, but merely covered.
Her footsteps echoed on the wooden floor.
There was a chaise that drew her attention, mainly because she couldn’t imagine Dr. Lecter actually doing therapy while his patient stared at the ceiling. Perhaps he’d only had it because it was a thing that amused him to possess, a thing others would expect to see in a psychiatrist’s office. It was an ornament that filled the empty space.
No, a session would have happened between the two leather chairs. Dr. Lecter would want the ability to study the person across from him, to analyze their every word and movement. Clarice circled the chairs, drawing back the covers of each one. She wondered which one Dr. Lecter would have favored. She sat down in one, testing the feel of it. This, she decided after a moment, would have been the patient’s chair. It faced the door, allowing the patient a sense of security, the ability to see the entrance to the room. The other chair would have been Dr. Lecter’s, then. Clarice moved to it, sitting down and staring at the chair across from her.
She wondered how many times Dr. Lecter had sat here and conversed with Will Graham. The echoes of conversations long past seemed as suspended in the air as the dust that caught the light.
After another moment, Clarice stood, carefully covering both chairs again. She walked the perimeter of the room. Bookcases and covered art, side tables and ornamental chairs stood shrouded, placed just as Dr. Lecter had left them. Towards the back of the room were two separate sitting areas, one in front of a fireplace, another in a corner with a table to work at. In the center of the space sat Dr. Lecter’s desk. Clarice ran her fingers over the plastic as she walked around it, but she didn’t uncover it.
She stood behind the chair and appraised the room. She was again struck by the feeling of something both preserved and forgotten. There was something haunting in walking rooms so little changed, rooms so defined by their owner.
Clarice left the desk and made her way over to the ladder that led to the second level. Her hands left prints in the dust as she ascended, and the bookcases that lined the walls above were also covered in plastic. Clarice slowly walked the length of the balcony, and then back to the center. Her position commanded an impressive view of the room. She personally would have found the ladder inconvenient for daily use of the library, but she imagined that Dr. Lecter would have liked the aesthetic of the balcony so much that it wouldn’t have bothered him.
The banister was covered in dust, and she resisted the childish urge to write her name in it. But common sense overruled her amusement, as she was technically trespassing in the building.
After making her way back to the main level, Clarice stood for a moment more, lingering in what she had come to see. Finally, she closed the curtains and crossed the room to leave. The waiting room door shut quietly as she pulled it to; the solid wood front door clanked as it closed.
Clarice locked the building and then the gate, and got into her car. She started it and began to drive, not back to Quantico, but to another address she’d never been to.
Dr. Lecter’s home sat on a road full of grand structures, all of them dignified and imposing. None more so than his house, which seemed to cast a pall over the area, despite not appearing outwardly much different from its neighbors.
Clarice parked across the street and simply looked. She understood that the interior of the house was much like the office, draped and closed up, but more or less just as he’d left it. She didn’t have a key, nor did she want one. Walking the halls of his office was one thing; being in his home would be quite another.
The house itself had become something of an urban legend. In the beginning, after Dr. Lecter’s arrests, it had attracted the curious and the crime junkies. But regular patrols down the street, plus neighbors ready to call the police on anyone loitering, had seen things more or less taper off. However, he was always a topic of interest to the public, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to still wander by.
The city had initially put up a chain link fence, which at least kept people to the sidewalk. Most of the time, anyway.
More recently, the house had drawn the attention of people young enough to not even remember when Dr. Lecter was first caught. Adventurous and impulsive, they were attracted to it partly for the shock value and partly because it was an abandoned mansion. After three of them died, the word ‘cursed’ began to appear in conjunction with mentions of the property.
Two young men had been spray painting the front door one night when someone called the police on them. They had bolted when they’d seen the police car’s lights, hopped the fence, and jumped into the car they’d been driving. Apparently afraid of pursuit, they had floored it and sped away, right through an intersection where a delivery truck struck their car and killed them both instantly.
Another man had died on the property only a few months later. He had been planning a break in, based on the tools found on his person. He had jumped the fence, landed on an unexpected patch of ice, cracked his head and broken his neck. A neighbor had seen his body the next morning.
Both were freak accidents with nothing to blame but stupidity and bad luck. But it had been years since anyone had seen Dr. Lecter, and the more outlandish corners of the Internet began to talk about the house being cursed or even haunted.
The idea was obviously ridiculous. Clarice didn’t believe in curses or ghosts, for one thing.
The other thing, of course, was that she still got Christmas cards from him.
The cards had started coming to her house, which perhaps should have worried her, but didn’t. Home addresses were easier to find than ever these days, and the change had actually coincided with a promotion she’d gotten. It had almost seemed a courtesy, that she no longer received mail from a serial killer care of the FBI.
But anyone who bothered to actually look at activity related to the house would know that he was still very much alive.
The chain link fence put up by the city had soon been replaced by a tall wrought iron one. The front door had been repainted. The yard had always been kept mowed, and tree trimmers were seen every few years. Taxes were paid annually. Dr. Lecter’s properties were maintained at the precise minimum to keep them from being seized due to fines or liens. So they stood, monuments to silent horrors, the buildings like tombstones over their streets.
Clarice imagined he kept them because his own memories there were pleasant ones. They were places that he had occupied at the height of his career and his killings, not to mention the beginning of his time with Will Graham. He would have disliked someone moving into spaces that were his and altering them, let alone making a spectacle of them. More practically, he had the financial means to keep them, no matter what his reasons.
The FBI had been able to monitor his bank account for a while. There were large payments to an attorney, who in turn was the one taking care of the property management on Dr. Lecter’s behalf, and who was on retainer if Dr. Lecter was ever apprehended again. Nothing else came in or out of the account. A significant amount had been transferred in from an offshore account years ago, seemingly for the sole purpose of conducting any business on U.S. soil Dr. Lecter needed to conduct. Offshore accounts being what they were, that was where the FBI’s attempts at tracing him had ended.
Over time, Clarice had become extremely realistic about the chances of finding Will Graham when he didn’t want to be found. Both Will and Dr. Lecter were capable of evading authorities, but something told her that Will was the one who ensured they never truly attracted attention. It had been years since she’d seriously looked for traces of either of them because she had come to the conclusion that it was a waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
Clarice had been informally proactive after Crawford had given her the case, keeping an eye out for anomalies or for crimes overseas, but had seen nothing that made her suspect their involvement. She hadn’t made the mistake of pouring herself into the project like she had before; she was simply alert for anything odd. As her caseload had increased, she’d found herself with less time to devote to a case that had no movement, but it didn’t bother her the way it would have years earlier.
She had accepted the fact that nothing would happen unless it happened. She would know it when she saw it, and if it was strange enough, she would see it.
There was certainly nothing to see at the house, just as there hadn’t been at the office, but curiosity had driven her to come anyway.
After another moment, Clarice started her car and pulled away from the curb, beginning her drive back and leaving Dr. Lecter’s house behind her.
It probably would have amused him to know that she had been there, that he had occupied her thoughts so thoroughly, even if just for a short period of time. She briefly wished she could have discussed her visit with him, related her observations and seen what he would say in return. It was the first time in years she had actually wondered what it would be like to talk to him.
She and Dr. Lecter had a personal connection, but she had never been contemplative about it. After their last meeting, her understanding of herself and of him had faded to background noise in her life—always present, but not something that needed to be re-examined or dwelt on.
In truth, Clarice never expected to see him again.