Opus Dei: Chapter 5
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Chapter 5: Foil(s)
Two weeks later brought a quarter-long photography class, as well as a history class that didn't care so long as the final by the end of the semester was a passing grade. They kept him busy, helped him get his mind focused on the long work ahead, the structure and necessity of it. Jail had given his mind the time to wander, to roam within the confines of his cell. Now, the openness, the freedom of it was staggering, and he desperately needed to fill it. He had to stay busy. He needed distractions. His was a bait that took its time to cast and be bit.
The news let the death slip under the current of more engaging stories that had a neat bow to tie on the end of them. Will resisted looking up the murder that'd coupled potently with Beverly's thesis and led to his release. What notes had the Chesapeake Ripper trailed along there?
He reasoned one painting was enough. One photo. He didn't look up the first murder.
Insomnia led to studying Jael and Sisera in the darkness of his groaning home. If it was Hannibal--the longer he looked, the more sure of it he was-- it was a fitting sort of painting to have been the victim's last to paint before death. Will should have asked Jack for a picture of it, if nothing else. Had the Ripper placed it there, or had Sebastian truly been painting such a classical recreation? How had he chosen him? What had made him choose the poor man?
School would help with the insomnia. If he kept his hours busy, he would be too tired to stay awake.
It was in that very first class that he met Francis Dolarhyde, and that was only because Will had gotten lost and slipped in right in the middle of roll call, late but undeterred. Francis Dolarhyde sat alone, although he wasn't bothered when Will sat beside him at the table farthest back from the board. Will pulled out his notebook and his homework, raising his hand less than a minute later when his name was called. Dolarhyde's broad shoulders and muscled build took up nearly half of the table, but they'd just have to manage.
"You have a...nice dog," Francis observed, nodding to Will's photograph. It was an introductory aspect to the class: Tell Us About You.
"Thanks." He glanced over to Francis' photograph of a painting, something that'd been purposefully set up on an easel in the middle of the forest. A photo of a painting; the artistic type. "Do you like that painting, or do you like the aesthetic?"
Francis Dolarhyde had a square jaw and short, buzzed brunette hair. He turned to look at his photograph, and the scarring at his lip gave his smile an altogether crooked appearance.He was easily the biggest guy in class, the jock that all the girls wrote home about. "My favorite painting. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun," he said carefully. His voice caught on the hiss of the 's'.
"Your favorite painting?"
He nodded.
"This has been my favorite painting as of late," Will shared, and for reasons he couldn't quite explain he pulled out his phone and showed his table-mate Jael and Sisera.
Maybe it was the fact that it was an absolute stranger, or maybe it was the fact that his painting seemed just as raw beneath the surface of the oil. He had a lot of alone time at the house. Just Will and Winston. Going to school would force him to be sociable. The dragon lay poised just beneath the maiden, prepared to devour her. Jael lay poised just above Sisera, ready to impale him.
Francis gave the painting a long, searching look, and he seemed to see the same. "I wonder if she'd bear his screams the way she bears the dust from the labor of carving her will into stone," he commented, and he looked to Will with a briefly flickering expression of interest. "He lay like marble."
"I think she'd bear them well enough," Will said, and he looked at her. "I don' think this is the first time she's done this."
"Nor the last?"
Will thought of Alana curling up in Hannibal's bed, cozy, and nodded gravely.
"Do you know why he would have been foolish enough to put his head beneath her hammer?"
"He trusted her enough and fell asleep," Will said. "That was his undoing."
"The moral, then, is don't make his mistake," Francis said, and too late Will realized it was a dryly- uttered joke.
"Wish I'd gotten that advice a long time ago," he said with a smile.
Francis Dolarhyde laughed, a soft huff, and it was decided they could work together for the quarter.
Two weeks also took him on a date with Molly Foster, whose returned call was so upbeat and pleasant despite his awkward voicemail that he hadn't had the heart to begin to explain why maybe she shouldn't go on a date with him. Would the Chesapeake Ripper target her, should he get too close? Would he kill her in a fit of rage the way he had Charlie?
He found the nicest restaurant he could expect closeby, and so they enjoyed endless cheesy biscuits at Red Lobster. She didn't know him; he reasoned she wouldn't want to stray too far away from home.There was a killer about, or didn't she know?
"That's great that you're going to school. I barely finished, but I'm waiting for something to take off. I hear DC's a good place to look, so that's why I moved here." She had an honest, girl-next-door look that made the conversation flow despite the fact he couldn't quite meet her eyes more than twice throughout the main course.
Nerves had, in truth, gotten the best of him. It was the first honest, genuine date he'd ever been on, after all.
"Photography isn't my thing, but it was the only quarterly class they could offer on such short notice. I just wanted to get started. The history professor said that as long as the final had a passing grade, he'd allow it." He focused on her lovely blouse, floral beneath a cozy cardigan. The orange restaurant lights made her skin golden. "What did you study?"
"Business analysis...no, no I know, boring," she laughed, seeing his expression. It made him look up and meet her eyes, warm and inviting. "That's why I'm taking my time. I want to analyze the right business."
"You're careful in choosing," Will said then, looking to her lips, "as an analyst."
"I am," she agreed, and she stared unabashedly back.
Then he walked her to her car, and she stood blinking up at him, the lights burning from the lamp posts illuminating her face in a fuzzy, warm orange. "I had fun tonight, Will Graham."
"I did too, Molly Foster," he mimicked her inflection lightly, and he managed to look away from the collar of her cardigan to meet her eyes. He smiled slightly, although he couldn't keep her gaze.
"I'd want to go on a second date, if you wanted to take me on it."
His mouth turned to cotton, and his smile grew, guilt doing its best to curtail the pleasure that threatened to overtake his voice. "I'd like to take you on a second date."
She gave him a kiss on the cheek, and he waited until she drove off until he turned and went back to his truck. He stood by it for a time, thinking, then kicked the tire angrily and drove away.
He felt guilty, but after the second date, there was a third. The Chesapeake Ripper did not add a third body to his pile, and Molly enjoyed a walk through the national park to witness the sunset over the Wolf Trap trees. He wondered if she'd looked him up yet. He wondered if Hannibal had looked her up yet. He wondered if it was really all that smart to try and enter into a relationship when your bait was set for a different kind of fish that bit harder and left marks.
By the fourth date, he finally had to say something. Molly made it easy to keep busy, from occasional phone calls to daily texts but now their dates had accumulated too quickly. Too many dates. People didn't go on dates like that unless they meant something by it.
"I'll call you," she said warmly, and they were parting at her car after a rousing round of bowling where she'd soundly beaten him. The neon lights of the bowling alley sign cast her in a cotton candy pink.
"Molly," he began, and she paused from leaning in to give him a soft, chaste kiss on the cheek. She'd done it the last three times, and he'd liked it enough he often touched fingers to the place hours later, puzzled over it. Hannibal had never done that to him. He had toyed with asking Alana for comparison. "I really enjoyed tonight."
Her smile remained, but her eyes belied whatever it was she was seeing on his face. "Why are you saying that like you didn't enjoy tonight?
"I...I don't know if I can take you on another date."
Her blue eyes were purple in the pink light. They blinked slowly, wide and doe-like in the neon. "What's wrong?"
He couldn't quite look at her, eyes off towards the dark spaces where the Chesapeake Ripper could always be lurking, watching. He wondered if he'd get another card on his kitchen table. "I..I like you."
"Okay," she said, suddenly uncertain.
"I've just got a lot of...baggage." He nodded. That was one way of putting it. "Things I don't want you to have to get involved in."
"We all have baggage, Will," Molly replied, and something in her tone made him look back to her, her eyes glassy and her mouth quirked into a half-smile that wasn't at all amused. "Life is about people making connections with other people and learning to deal with their tragic back-stories and baggage."
He wondered what baggage she was afraid of showing him, if it was a bad boyfriend or a bad case of body parts under the floorboards. "Mine could endanger your life," he said seriously; then had the misfortune of seeing the exact moment that she questioned his sanity, the moment she realized maybe she shouldn't want to go on another date with him.
How must that sound to a sane person, Hannibal would have said. These people with their mundane lives. You sound unhinged and delusional, Will.
"I...don't know what to say to that," she admitted, and her nose wrinkled. "It sounds like...a gimmick? Yeah, a gimmick." Her head bobbed, much like it had when the poor kid at JT's Bait Shop couldn't understand the concept of a two dollar bill. "If you don't want to continue dating, you can just say so. I won't get mad. I appreciate honesty, though."
"Did you look me up when you first met me?" he asked bluntly. Maybe a little too harsh? He managed to stare at the edge of her denim jacket, purposefully baggy and rumpled.
She paused for a long time, and he couldn't quite look to her face to see why. "...No. Did you look me up?"
"No," he replied quickly. "I respect people's privacy."
"Liar," Jared Freeman jeered behind her. "You don't respect Hannibal Lecter's privacy."
"I guess I was going to until I saw you make the look on your face that you're making right now," she said, and her voice softened. She pitied whatever it was she was seeing in him. Fear? Maybe. Maybe a bit of self-disgust. Maybe some resignation in the lines by his mouth. "Made me think maybe you didn't feel comfortable with the idea of it."
"Statistically speaking, that means you could have gone on a date with a rapist," he pointed out, although he couldn't say why. He didn't want to frighten her, for God's sake. Did he have to be so nervous? He'd survived a psychopath twice over, and yet the idea of seeing the look on her face made his knees weak?
"I have mace," she assured him. "And you didn't give me that impression. Kinda...more like you were running from something."
"Someone," he said, much softer. He sighed, something more resigned than angry. "It's okay to look me up, but I'd ask you reserve judgement until you also ask me whatever questions you have. I'll try and be as honest as I can...I promise I'm not what they thought I was."
"Okay, Will Graham," she said, and she swooped up and pressed a firm, warm kiss on his open mouth. He inhaled it, and his breath caught. "Like I said, I'll call you."
"Okay," he replied, much too late. She was already getting into her car and starting it, the darkness of the cab casting her in shadows.
He had assignments due, otherwise he would have puzzled over that kiss for most of the night. As it was, he passed his fingers over it and thought of how he'd once drunkenly kissed Alana Bloom so boldly, with nothing to lose and a mind melting from the fire. He felt charmed, but then again; he'd been charmed by Hannibal, too. He took photos of Winston walking through the tall grass that had burst from an early morning rain with a camera he'd snagged from the nearby Wal-Mart. Photography wasn't his thing, but he was going to try. If he could pass these, they'd allow him to enter a full-time status for the summer program.
-
Then, the second letter came.
My Dear Will Graham,
When I saw your release from prison, I thought: Dare I? Of course I do. I would not have risked corresponding with you while you were incarcerated, in case it was used against you. I who have looked up to your work, who has ascended from it on a level that I know you would understand.
That is what it is you do, is it not? Understand?
I believe we have much in common, you and I. They're calling you innocent now, but they will only do their best to find other ways of locking you up again. You can't have taken her lungs so clean and they not try to find means again of caging you.
I have something to show you. I think you'd appreciate it; maybe see what it is I aim to ascend to and Become. Until then, I remain your,
-Avid Fan
This one Will found laying propped against his screen door. It felt like pills souring in his stomach to read it, and he sat out on the porch steps for a long time, thinking. Just in front of him, he imagined Jared Freeman pacing back and forth, back and forth.
"Call someone," he suggested, and his gaze darted about. "Can't trust the cops, but that Crawford guy..."
"Don't call Molly Foster," Garrett Jacob Hobbs advised. Will agreed.
He needed to call her at some point to now definitely cut things off. If the Chesapeake Ripper was calling himself an Avid Fan now, that was one alias too many to make sure he'd be able to keep her safe, should Hannibal decide to lash out. Had he witnessed their kiss? Had he crept, lurking and careful in the bushes and witnessed that there was someone else in the world that thought Will capable of receiving affection?
Problem was, it didn't feel like the Chesapeake Ripper baiting him, all cruel words hidden behind kind veneers of pleasant professionalism. It felt different, foreign. Rather than mocking, biting, the way the Chesapeake Ripper surely would be after finally allowing Will to be released, the words felt...awed. The person that wrote this thought that Will circumvented the law. They thought he was a killer.
They wanted to show him something, too.
It took a long time for him to realize the tapping noise in the static of his thoughts was his fingers on the deck, but that didn't stop it. They tapped, his heart stuttered, and Will Graham wondered just who in the hell he was supposed to tell about this, or if he'd been crying wolf for so long that no one could bother to care.
-
Will took a walk and found himself sitting with Peter Bernadone, just outside of the barn where he nursed birds back to health and set them free when possible. He spoke lovingly of a parakeet that had an attachment to him, one whose wing wouldn't unfold quite right. It eased at the ragged bite of the morning to think of things once broken made new. Peter was kind, and he desperately needed to think on kind things.
"I'm glad you came," Peter said, and they shared root beers Will had picked up on the way. He wasn't sure what it was he was hoping to find, sitting there beside him. He couldn't burden someone like Peter with something so horrific as the things he knew, the way he often woke up feeling the ghosts creeping just down the hall from where he once slept.
Was this Hannibal? Or was this someone new? If it was Hannibal, just what did that mean for him? Just what did he want to show to Will, and what was Will going to do to stop it?
If it wasn't Hannibal, just how in the hell was he going to detangle himself from it before he woke up with another killer strangling him to death? God, he was getting tired of drowning on the blood of so many innocent.
"Thanks for making time to talk," Will replied, and they sat on the bales and watched the horses.
"A-are you okay?" Peter asked, and he peered over at Will gravely. "You look...awful sorrowful about somethin'." He was keener than he seemed. Being around animals, he saw the small expressions most didn't notice.
"Have you ever had a secret that you tried to share, but no one would believe you?" Will asked. "Something that was really important, but no one thought you were telling the truth?"
Peter stilled, and the finches in the cage at their feet entertained the air around them before he found the words he was looking for, jaw working furiously. "I...yeah, I know about that."
"You do?" Will asked, surprised.
"I b-been thinkin' about tellin' people the truth...maybe they believe me, maybe not, but I gotta say somethin'. You said something, I heard. You told the truth, even when no one believed you."
Will couldn't meet his gaze, embarrassed. Everyone knew who the infamous Will Graham was, even Peter. He couldn't go anywhere without someone knowing his fucking name.
"I feel like right now I have to keep it a secret to get what I want in the end," said Will, and he swung his legs, kicking the hay bale beneath them. He timed the swings with his heartbeat.
"What do you want in the end?"
"Justice." Kind of.
Peter nodded. "That's not so bad. You...should do what gets justice."
Will nodded resolutely. He still wasn't sure what to do about the letter. Not for the first time, the sound of Jack Crawford filled his mind, angry and haggard: What if wasn't Hannibal Lecter? What if the Chesapeake Ripper is someone they didn't know or understand in any capacity, and Will was taunting an innocent man as well as a killer?
"You should too," he said. He wasn't sure if he should ask what it was Peter felt that no one would believe. It felt private, grave. "I don't regret it. Maybe I'd have done it a little different, but I'd have still done it."
"Oh, I...I will." Peter's brow furrowed, and he looked down to the finches and cooed to them, gentle. "I think if...i-if we don't stand up for somethin', no one will."
-
The time between a morning shift and a mid-afternoon class was staggeringly short. Will managed a bag of dollar burgers from McDonalds, and he'd gotten two of them shoved down his throat before he was driven to a stop by the large crowd of people that buffeted the sidewalks beside the dorms.
"So fucking scary, oh my god..."
"--couldn't believe they got in there, how'd they--"
"You know they keep the back door open, sick fuck probably strolled right in..."
"I need to call my dad."
"Back up, back up!" This from a police officer that was busy sectioning off part of the walkway towards the dorms. "I understand that some of you live here, but you'll need to give us a minute, please."
"What's going on?" Will asked, only for the cop to brush by him with the police tape in hand. He didn't spare Will a second glance, and there was something ironic to it, that at eighteen he'd had more access to that sort of information than he does now.
"Someone got killed," a student next to him replied, eyes across the quad. "In the Tower Dorms."
"What?"
"Yeah," they said with a nod. There was a thumb print on their left glasses lens, likely adjusted during a particularly rousing round of note-taking. "Someone says the mirrors in the bathroom are broken, and it's bad."
Will first thought of Hannibal, and how maybe he'd pushed the Chesapeake Ripper a little too far. But then he thought of the letter in his pocket, how it hadn't sounded so much arrogant as it was admiring, and a strange cold seemed to settle into his feet and make it hard to walk away.
"Who did they kill?" he asked, hoarse.
"Dunno yet, but it was the first floor and..." they grimaced, their thin lips puzzling over whatever was on their mind. "She was naked," they finally added.
"FBI," Will observed, and he chewed on his bottom lip. If Jack Crawford was there, he was going to be most decidedly not.
"You think a serial killer?" a young woman asked the student next to him. "FBI doesn't just show up to a homicide."
"I think whatever it is, it's bad enough the FBI showed up," the kid next to him said, somber. "Guys probably just strolled in and said they'd take it from here."
And that felt like Will's queue to leave. He waited for the space behind him to shift just slightly, and he made a break for it, slipping along the side leading away from the crime scene. If it was a serial killer, it was Jack Crawford's department. If it was psychological, it was Jack Crawford's department.
If it had anything to do with the note in Will's pocket, it was Jack Crawford's department.
"Jason just texted and said it was the girl that was in the room next to his friend Hayley," a girl said, thumbs frantically working prose across the keyboard.
"Oh my god, she knew her?"
"What if he's not done?"
Will skirted around them and tucked his hands into his pockets, tense.
"We don't even know what he did. How could we know if he's done?"
He'd just rounded the corner to safety when he had the misfortune of walking right into the very man he was trying to avoid.
"Will," Jack greeted, falsely cheerful.
"Jack," Will said warily, taking a step back. He was half a breath away from running. Prey was flight, fight, or freeze, and Will wasn't going to fight a battle like this.
"Will! We were just talking about you," his photography teacher exclaimed. She was a pleasant, upbeat woman with a habit of gesturing wildly when caught up in the middle of her lectures. Her passion was photography of animals, as she'd confided in Will on the first day. Today, that was deflated in the wake of the ripple of rumor, the sudden sense that all was not well and good within the walls of learning. There were stress lines near her forehead and eyes.
"Why?" he asked, looking at Jack Crawford.
"Well--because--" she fumbled at that, and she looked to Jack beside her.
Jack had been waiting for his moment. "Because unfortunately, Will, you are a person of interest considering the nature of your own history."
Unfortunately, like Jack didn't love the opening this was going to give him to wheedle back into Will's life and make himself at home. One unpleasant house visit wasn't enough. The letter burned in his pocket. "Murders aren't common on campus until I show up," he said to his teacher.
"Now, really what we want is to establish a base of support," Ms. Newman explained quickly. Her eyes cut to Jack, then back. They were red despite her brave face. "You being here has nothing to do with what's just happened, but because of your past Agent Crawford wanted to make sure that you're in a safe place mentally and physically."
"Oh I'm as safe as he wants me to be," Will assured her.
Jack's eyes narrowed. Will hadn't specified which 'he'. "Will you come with me?"
Will did a congenial u-turn and waited expectantly. "Do I have a choice?"
"You always have a choice! Agent Crawford, really I must--"
"Ms. Newman, it looks like one of your students needs you," Jack redirected, and Will looked up at the sky that threatened to be a positively beautiful day.
"You've always had a choice," Jack said, after Ms. Newman was well enough on her way to support Will from a distance.
"Sure didn't feel that way, Agent Crawford," said Will, not unkind. Not quite kind, either. The sky was the sort of blue one could get lost in.
He was glad the crowd prevented any further discussion, and they worked their way to the now thoroughly strung-up police tape. Will got to enjoy being the spectacle of walking under the rope with an FBI agent after just talking about it with someone in the crowd, and there was a tight feeling in his chest that had nothing to do with the note in his pocket or the thought of Hannibal's next move.
"I thought you were done being his dog," Jared said, and he circled Jack as they walked across the dewy grass and cut dark swathes of ribbon towards the crime scene.
"It's not really the Chesapeake Ripper's style, but it is right on campus," Jack said. Will's chest constricted in response. "I don't know if you want to know about the victim, or--"
"I don't want to know about the victim," he said, voice tinny. "I don't even want to be here right now."
Something about that kept Jack from answering, and they walked into the maw of the dorm hall with trepidation and steps that echoed too loud on the marble tile.
The room is 213, and Will stared at it for a long time. It's a dorm room on the first floor, and it occurred to him after about first five seconds of staring that it's an odd number for a first floor. Not 113, 213. That stuck, even after the door opened. It hit the wall, and 213 seemed to hit a little harder, and he thought of the first time he'd ever felt someone's hands wrapped tight around his throat, squeezing.
"Will?"
Will blinked, and he followed Jack into the dorm room, sweat collecting on the back of his neck.