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Jack Crawford says he doesn’t understand the Chesapeake Ripper.
“I’ve never known anything like him,” he says, to the picture of barbarity before him.
“A taunt.” Will Graham’s voice is cracked. The pendulum is swinging. “We do not see, we do not understand. We are missing something vital.” Parts of himself are unhinging, and clicking back into place--a newer, darker place.
“So is he,” Beverly says, an eyebrow raised at the scene before them. The chest cavity has been ripped open, left empty. Organs stolen like trinkets from a jewellery box. The hideous artistic flair flaying open the sinews.
No, Jack, Hannibal thinks, you’ve never known a man like this. Maroon eyes skim the painting of her own creation from just hours before, before landing on the clenched face of Will. His pain is so exquisite she can taste in the air. It has particular tang, it smells like New Orleans and encephalitis, but there's something beneath that. It is something to be cultivated, teased out, before being devoured.
Will turns away from the bloody tableau, looks at her. Something that once might have been described as a smile passes across her face. It is opportunity, she thinks, and bares her teeth back at him.
When arrested, Freddie Lounds calls her Hannibal the Cannibal, it's all very predictable. The New York Times compares her to Erzsébet Báthory. A response, published a week later, brusquely reminds the editor that the Blood Countess was Hungarian, Hannibal Lecter is from Lithuania. It is signed with a flourish, H. L., written on the back of a recipe.
(The editor has a nervous breakdown.)
A story is eventually eeked out, a few surviving tales of the world’s most infamous serial killer. A family destroyed under the heavy weight of the Iron Curtain. A girl, alone in the world. Gliding through the world, like a ghost, leaving no trail but blood.
(What they don’t talk about: a bloodline ancient enough to trace back to Machiavelli. Never was anything great achieved without danger.)
Her defence lawyer asks her if, perhaps, she was...injured, at some point. There is a way his voice hesitantly catches around that.
Hannibal smiles. People always look for answers, convenient answers, the obvious. A woman, a girl, defiled, striking at the world would certainly be a narrative a defence attorney could utilise--perhaps, she thinks, he will try and fight the death penalty with that most primal desire found within all men: to protect. In their eyes, women are to be defended, to be victimised, always the objects, never the subject. Clean and bleed. Know your place. “It is not the storm that makes the ocean dangerous.” she says, eyes glittering, “Nothing happened to me. I happened. I always was.”
She is found to be insane.
#LadyKiller trends on twitter.
Hannibal Lecter has very sharp teeth.
You probably wouldn’t notice this when you saw her. You’d see a well cut dress, so dark in colour you almost miss the pattern. There are earrings, tasteful, a necklace if the occasion suits. Shoes, not too high, but pointed. Nails sensibly short. Cheekbones like guillotines.
Her picture is sometimes in the Baltimore Sun society section. She makes for a good shot, bone structure straight from European aristocracy, with gowns to match. The airs and graces of a woman well-trained for high society. Some time in Italy before the East Coast, it is gathered, the Uffizi making way for Johns Hopkins, trauma surgery, before her own practice in Baltimore.
You wouldn’t notice how tall she is, unless she wants you to see how she can loom. Nor will you see the strength in her arms, the size of her hands.
Little Red didn’t see the wolf until it was far too late.
What kind of woman is named Hannibal, anyway?
It amuses her, to have a facade of beauty and be the embodiment of brutality. To feed the Baltimore elite themselves is the ultimate cosmic joke and entirely at their expense. Hannibal watches humanity pass her by with detachment, those long fingers tugging on a the delicate strings of so many. Those who interacted with her and lived to tell the tale will talk to the press of a hostess whose larder was always full, they will shudder, there was always something wrong, I could tell, but still they devoured. They adorned her with platitudes and compliments, they will neglect to mention, whilst she slaughtered.
Hannibal is a spider, spinning, spinning, always spinning her web, ensnaring everyone in her path. Her web is one of complicity.
They did, after all, eat the evidence.
“Beautiful boy,” she says, sliding the knife into Will’s guts, ripping through the flesh like it’s nothing (it is nothing to her, Will knows, violence is a zero-sum-game to Hannibal Lecter. This is a cold comfort whilst his innards slide onto the dark wood floor.) “I think I’ll eat your heart.”