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“Stay away from Hannibal Lecter,” Will says, voice low and dire, gravel on cobblestone, and looks her straight in the eye, or as close as he ever gets to direct contact. She wonders if he’s seeing her as she is, or picturing her broken body stretched thin and bear along the threadbare carpet of Hannibal’s too tidy home. The gravity is not lost on her.
“Come on, Will,” she says, cocking her head to the side, dressing her lips in a radiant smile of confidence and good-natured humour. “It’s not like I’m going to run off alone to discover if he has a secret basement lair. I might not be a super detective like some people I know, but give me some credit.”
She reaches for him across the table. She doesn’t touch him, just rests her hand, palm up, beside his on the table, an open invitation of comfort. His hand twitches beside hers, a momentary contemplation of flight, but he stills. He doesn’t take her hand, but he doesn’t flee either; he allows the intrusion of her hand in his bubble, and she thinks that’s something.
“Do you remember what I told you, when you came to me, no longer able to trust that what you saw was real? I told you, ‘Let’s prove it’. We did it then, and we’ll do it now. If Hannibal Lecter is eating people, we’ll find proof. We’ll get him.”
***
When Dr. Lecter takes the role of “the new Will Graham”, there’s a coldness, a callous curiosity, a smugness in the slight upturn of his pursed lips, in the way he moves, like a coiled snake waiting to strike. He stands too close to her in the lab, looming over her shoulder, and his breath on her neck sends her skin crawling. She doesn’t back down. She plants her feet, stands her ground with straight shoulders and a firm glare at him over her shoulder.
It’s not evidence, but it’s definitely creepy.
At least Will always has the decency to look ashamed when he puts the puzzle pieces of a murderer’s mind together. When he looks at a body, at the crime scene, in the morgue, even in photos—there’s an embarrassment and a fear in his wide, downcast eyes that leaks from his pores in pools of perspiration that settle on his skin in a bright sheen. He scrunches his eyes tight and rubs at his face as though he could scrub away the dirt, the pain, the horror.
“I can think like the killers,” he says, “but just as much, I can feel the agony they cause their victims. Normally, the victims are in my head as much as the killers are. Now they all have Hannibal’s voice. I’m fighting to get him out of my head. Pretending to believe him isn’t making it any easier.”
So they talk. They sift through the haze of memory, try to sort fact from fiction, try to see where truth and manipulation meet. She’s not a psychiatrist, but she can be a grounding force, someone who understands and accepts because she knows what it's like to be different. And maybe she can’t let herself believe Will until the evidence is there to definitively prove his innocence, but she can believe that he wants to save lives, and he’s earnest and sincere and genuine in a way that Hannibal isn’t. She holds on to that, and she starts to see what they all missed:
It’s not just a sense of coldness that resonates from Lecter. He deals out half-truths with humour, jokes about being a psychopath, a monster.
(She throws her chair down in front of Will’s cell one day, furious. It hits the floor with a screech and she throws herself heavy into its plastic embrace. “I can’t believe it! Cannibal puns.”
“What?” Will sits up from the cot where he’s been laying with a book across his chest.
“Cannibal puns,” she repeats. “His name literally rhymes with cannibal, and he goes around making cannibal puns. How pretentious is that? More importantly, remind me how none of us saw this sooner?" )
Her mother always told her the best way to keep a secret was to tell the truth and disguise it as a joke.
***
She chooses her allies for the coming war with caution and care. Alana Bloom and Brian Zeller: one who would do anything to believe in Will’s innocence, who will fight for him; the other, a complete skeptic. Alana is grateful, squeezes Bev’s hand gently, and sets her jaw in determination for what’s to come. Zeller is stubborn, of course, wants nothing to do with it. He’d always had a distaste for Will Graham and the way he works, but Bev looks at him with bright, earnest eyes and reminds him that it isn’t about what he likes; they are there to do what’s right, always seek the truth, and if there is even a chance, however slim, that they have the wrong man, then Zeller needs to set his personal feelings for Will aside and do what's right.
“I won’t do this for Will Graham,” Zeller says, in the end. “But I’ll do it for you.”
Bev settles between her allies, the middle ground, the balancing act: wanting to believe, but maintaining her skepticism. After all, it’s skepticism that’s kept her safe all these years. She’ll collect the facts, catalogue the evidence, and use them to fight for justice and truth, regardless of Will Graham’s innocence.
***
Will has doubts; he doesn’t communicate them through his mouthparts, but they’re there, painted across his pale, sheen face in the grey gloom of his cell. He screams his fears through his body, his movements, the way his fingers twitch at his sides, head bent, neck to his chest, lips pursed; the way he rubs his hands hard against the cold, rough brick of his cell. He wears his doubts on his sleeves, keeps his guilt in his pockets.
Some days, he leaves the world entirely, curls up on his cot and everything shuts down. He can’t hear her there, can't speak, and she understands that his brain is overwhelmed and needs the rest. She doesn't try to force her way through to his fishing grounds, doesn't make him speak or move or listen, but she stays with him when she can, silent, but present, for whenever he is ready and whatever he may need.
She is surprised how quickly she learns to read his language, how natural it feels to understand his moods through the tapping of his fingers or the tilt of his head. Sometimes, she watches him, his fingers dancing, and she stirs; her body tries to rise to meet him, to imitate him, to match him move for move. They sit face to face, and her hand mirrors his in a subtle twitch.
(Something inside her reaches out to still her hand. It hisses in her face with her mother’s voice, harsh and fast, and she can’t quite fathom what it means; it’s a wisp of indiscernible silver memory across the landscape, but it’s strong and it pulls her hand taut.)
She steadies, clenches her fingers around her pen, and writes a note to keep herself still and busy.
***
"My little sister got away with murder. She had everyone fooled,” she tells the lab one day, Will Graham included—and two days later, her sister calls and asks her to come over.
"I'm autistic, Bev,” Andrea says, straight to the point. "I've spent two years researching, and I finally feel confident enough to say it. You're the first I’ve told, besides Savannah. I know we were never close when we were kids, but I trust you to understand. You were always straight with me, Bev, and I appreciated that directness, and you were never cruel. Sometimes, I think we were too alike to get along.”
Bev has seen too much of the world to believe in fate. She does not, cannot, believe that everything happens for a reason: to do so would be a grievous betrayal of every woman and girl she's seen murdered, all the bodies that come under the knife of her careful scrutiny in the lab. To believe in fate, or destiny, would be to say that they were always meant to die, that there was no way to prevent what happened to them. Their deaths are wrapped in misogyny, in cruelty and hate and power, in a world where white men are taught the right to own women’s bodies.
But sometimes, there are things she can’t explain, moments and connections too perfect to be mere coincidence. She believes in meaning and nebulas and stars and memories, and the connection between them all. The connection is always there in the evidence, if you look.
Will is autistic, too, she knows; his traits present vastly different from Andrea’s, but still. She and her sister had always clashed, they were never close, (and maybe Andrea is right, that they were always too alike to get along). Working with Will day in, day out, helps her understand, helps her see her sister in a better light, raises her empathy and compassion for the sister she’d cared for, but never really been able to understand. As she fights to keep her composure and keep Lector from realizing she is on to him, Bev has to believe that means something; she has to believe that her friendship with Will Graham means something, that the timing allows her to connect, love, and accept her sister. (And maybe, she admits, herself; they are none of them broken or wrong. Just different).
Building a new relationship with Andrea makes it all worthwhile.
***
“It’s gotta be sensory hell in here,” Bev says one evening, when Will seems to be having a better day, when his movements seems more relaxed, less erratic, less like he's trying to shake a vile beast out of his bones. He’s humming softly as he reads.
There are papers in Bev’s lap and piled high around her on the floor, hair disheveled and chair close to the cell door. Chilton refused her request for an interrogation room this evening. It’s fine—they’re at something of a standstill in their investigation at the moment, anyway.
Will’s humming stops and he looks up from the page he’s reading. “I’m sorry?”
“This place,” she says, gesturing at the mold on the walls, the musk, dank air, the dark stains on the floor. “Even I can hardly stand it, and I’ve got a strong stomach. I’m guessing you’ve got some sensory sensitivities. It must be ten times worse for you.”
Will smiles; it’s rare she sees him smile these days. He taps his pointer finger against his leg. “At least it’s quiet. Limited social obligations.”
“I didn’t realize you wanted me gone so bad.”
“No, I—“ he spurts.
“I’m kidding.”
“Still, I… I appreciate your help, and your companionship, Beverly. You are one of the few people whose company I find calming.”
“Well, I’ve certainly gotta be better company than Hannibal Lecter. Anyway, is there anything I can bring you? Something to help with the sensory overload, give you some way to deal? A stim toy of some sort, maybe?”
He starts, looks up at her with wide eyes.
“Yes,” she says. “I know. My sister’s autistic, and...” (and it’s a slip, one she wouldn’t usually make. The rest catches in her lungs because she doesn’t know, because her survival depends on her ability to ground herself in things she knows, in objective fact, and there’s more to this story than she can say). She clears the leftover phlegm from her throat, shifts her confidence back into place with a smile. “My sister’s autistic,” she amends.
Will moves past her foul without comment, for which she is grateful. “A nose plug, if you can get it past Chilton, would be most welcome. The smell here is positively repugnant.”
She smiles. “Nose plug it is.”
***
None of us can possibly be OK, doing what we do.
She lied her way through her psych evaluation. She always figured she couldn’t be the only one; there’s no way all the people she works with regularly are entirely ‘stable’.
When she meets Will Graham, he jumps at her intrusion and she figures he’s just not as good at covering it as the rest of them—as good as her. (Yet the strategy, she’ll admit to him later, is equally sound; maybe even more so.)
“You unstable?” she asks.
(“Me too,” she wants to add, but the words refuse the passage from her brain to her lips, stick floating like so much debris in the expansive nebula of all the things she leaves unsaid. There’s a broken connection somewhere along the passageway between brain and mouth, all the lost words a mountain of thought and idea, lost in translation. And it’s strange, because normally speech comes so easily to her; she can speak her mind, as long as she doesn’t reveal too much of the soft woman beneath. She’s too used to keeping her heart to herself, to shielding her chest with crossed arms, to hiding and secrets; she knows well the ins and outs of white neurotypical heteronormative respectability. She knows them because she’s spent her life studying them. She moves and passes in their circles, but she’ll never be one of them (she doesn’t want to be)).
***
Science and music make sense to her in a way people do not. She wonders about the nature of her own difference, all the ways she’s not quite right, about light stinging in her eyes, feeling like pinpricks and grains of sand trapped behind her eyelids, scratching holes in her retinas.
She thinks of infodumping on Alice Walker in third grade about the adventures of Nancy Drew, of her own dreams of being a detective, of Alice stabbing her in the hand with a number two pencil after an hour of chatting, because Bev was always just a little too loud, too bright, too vivacious.
She thinks of the violin, how she started playing to distract her hands with busy work, to keep herself out of trouble, because she liked the warm comfortable weight of the instrument on her shoulder, the cool, smooth oak beneath her chin, one hand around the bow and swimming, swimming, swimming, fingers of the other hand moving over taut strings, growing callous and hard. Somehow, it was never about the music, but the tactile sensations and vibrations that moved through her, spoke to her, as she stood alone on that stage and played away all the tightness in her bones, the lingering aches in her crevices. She thinks of picking at the blisters on her hand when the world became too much.
Maybe she’s not a genius like Will, but she doesn’t need to be; she’s clever enough on her own, and always has been.
“You have a number of traits,” Andrea tells her in an e-mail one evening. “You always have. It's certainly possible. You’d have been missed for a lot of the same reasons I was. Did you know the diagnostic criteria for autism is still based on white boys? What a surprise, right?”
But Bev deals in evidence and facts, not supposition. She wants to know, but she can’t afford to let herself give the thought the attention it deserves, not in her line of work, not when every fiber of her being needs to focus on finding the evidence they need to bring Hannibal down, not with the danger of Hannibal looming over her shoulder with his silvery smile and silky words. Maybe one day, she thinks, but not now. Now, she has a job to do, and she will not let anything stop her endeavours to bring the Chesapeake Ripper, whether he’s friend (Will) or foe (Hannibal) to justice.
***
With daylight streaming through windows, it's easy to maintain the facade of calm: she hides behind her lab coat, her goggles, her hair; she smiles with ease, makes snide remarks, and her coworkers laugh with her, enjoy what they call her sass. Her crossed arms and her jokes become her trade, iron armour that keeps the work from getting too close.
It's not so easy at night, with only the breeze and the traffic and the streetlamps to keep her company. With no one to keep her steady, without the laughter of Price and Zeller beside her, without Jack's unwavering strength and calm, without Alana's warm smile, she crumbles. She dreams of dead bodies, and wakes sweating, tears in her eyes.
In the morning, she dresses for work, brushes her hair, puts on her make-up and smooths plaster over the cracks.
***
Jack is somber and quiet when he calls them into his office to tell them Zeller’s been murdered. “One of our own,” he says.
Her heart leaps. The evidence to back it isn’t there (yet), but she knows straight away who killed him, and any remaining skepticism falls to the wayside.
She supposes it must have been his conviction that Will Graham was guilty that got him. He went to Lecter’s home looking for evidence alone and unafraid, certain he’d find nothing.
That night, she goes home and curses Zeller for being so foolish, curses herself in equal measure for not being there to back him up. This wasn’t the plan. (Alana doesn’t try to convince her it isn’t her fault, they both feel the weight of his death on their shoulders, but she stays with Bev, holds her close through the night, and they find what solace they can in each other’s arms).
***
They can’t bury him, not yet, not when they still need to scour his desecrated body for evidence, not until the culprit is brought to justice, so they hold a memorial service two days after his death. Price stands beside her, quiet sobs going up cerulean against the cool grey walls. On her other side, Alana is still, both hands tucked in her pockets, eyes forward. Bev’s own eyes are red-rimmed and puffy, but she doesn’t cry, not here; her grief is private.
The photographs of Zeller’s body burn in her jacket pocket. She clenches her fist around them, her other arm linked through Alana’s. The moment the service ends, she drives to Baltimore alone and shoves the photos under Will’s nose.
“Like pizza slices,” Will says, and swallows hard. Bev watches his Adam’s apple bob and feels the sound scrape against her spine. She shudders.
“I’m sorry,” he says, shifts his gaze up to her nose. “I understand you were close.”
She shakes her head. “Keep going. Give it to me straight. You always do; this isn’t any different.” (It is, of course it is, but they’re on to something, she can feel it as acutely as she can feel the cotton of her black funeral dress scratching rough lines across her back.)
“Slices of deli meat,” Will says. His voice is distant, like a bad connection over the airwaves, intermingled with static, like he’s speaking from behind a waterfall. “Fine stock, but unworthy of discovering me, when I have so much left to do. I cut with surgical precision, and put the slices on display, a picture perfect homage, a warning to those who pursue me. This is my design.”
A warning? Bev thinks of Andrea, her brothers, her parents; Abigail, the girl they failed; Alana’s warmth and unwavering belief, Zeller’s doubt. She thinks about how they all doubted Will, even her, and how he never backed down. Bev counts her losses and all the things (people) she has left. A lump forms in her throat. She bites it back. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you sooner,” she says. “I won’t let him take anyone else from us. We’ll be careful, we’ll be sure, and we’ll find the evidence we need to take him down.”
She smiles softly, a thin, firm line, and looks at him with determination set in her bright robin’s eye. “Let’s catch this bastard.”