Return Of The Cannibal(Hannibal x Reader)(Book 2)

Chapter 49

The stacks of paper and files and diskettes in your cubicle reached critical mass. Your request for more space went unanswered. Enough. With the recklessness of the damned you commandeered a spacious room in the basement at Quantico. The room was supposed to become Behavioral Science's private darkroom as soon as Congress appropriated some money. It had now windows, but plenty of shelves and, being built for a darkroom, it had double blackout curtains instead of a door.

Some anonymous office neighbors printed a sign in Gothic letters that read HANNIBAL'S HOUSE and printed it on your curtained entrance. Fearful of losing the room, you moved the sign inside.

Almost at once you found a trove of useful personal material at the Columbia College of Criminal Justice Library, where they maintained a Hannibal Lecter room. The College had original papers from his medical and psychiatric practices and transcripts of his trial and the civil actions against him. On your first visit to the Library you waited forty-five minutes while custodians hunted for the keys to the Lecter room without success. On the second occasion, you found an indifferent graduate student in charge, and the material un-catalogued.

Your patience was not improving in your fourth decade. With Section Chief Jack Crawford backing you up at the U.S. Attorney's office, you got a court order to move the entire college collection to your basement room at Quantico. Federal marshals accomplished the move in a single van.

The court order created waves, as you feared it would. Eventually, the waves brought Krendler.

At the end of along two weeks, you had most of the library material organized in your makeshift Lecter center. Late on a Friday afternoon you washed your face and hands of the book dust and grime, turned down the lights and sat on the floor in the corner, looking at the many shelf-feet of books and papers. It is possible that you nodded off for a moment.

A smell awoken you, and you were aware that you were not alone. It was the smell of shoe polish.

The room was semi-dark, and Deputy Assistant Inspector General Paul Krendler moved along the shelves slowly, peering at the books and pictures. He hadn't bothered to knock - there was no place to knock on the curtains and Krendler was not inclined to knocking anyway, especially at subordinate agencies. Here, in this basement at Quantico, he was definitely slumming.

One wall of the room was devoted to Dr. Lecter in Italy, with a large photograph posted of Rinaldo Pazzi hanging with his bowels out from the window at Palazzo Vecchio. The opposite wall was concerned with crimes in the United States and was dominated by a police photograph of the bow hunter Dr. Lecter had killed years ago. The body was hanging on a peg board and bore all the wounds of the medieval Wound Man illustrations. Many case files were stacked on the shelves along with civil records of wrongful death lawsuits filed against Dr. Lecter by families of the victims.

Dr. Lecter's personal books from his medical practice were here in an order identical to their arrangment in his old psychiatric office. You had arranged them by examining police photos of the office with a magnifying glass. Much of the light in the dim room came through an X-ray of the Doctor's head and neck which glowed on a light bow on the wall. The other light came from a computer work station at a corner desk. The screen theme was "Dangerous Creatures."

Now and then the computer growled.

Piled beside the machine were the results of your gleaning. The painfully gathered scraps of paper receipts, itemized bills that revealed how Dr. Lecter had lived his private life in Italy, and in America before he was sent to the asylum. It was a makeshift catalog of his tastes.