Chapter Text
Old Case, New Connections.
Letters run down the screen. Melt into a puddle of black ink at the bottom of the tabloid article. Will stares, fascinated, transfixed by dread. She’s tried blinking it away. Pinching herself awake. Hell, she even restarted her laptop a couple of times.
Nothing’s worked. This is what’s left for her. She’ll sit in this dingy seat until she’s rotted into the upholstery. Or, no, she’ll turn to dust, waste into an unrecognizable nothing like the damn words on the pixelated webpage. Eventually the maggots will make a home out of her. Might as well be of use to something if she can’t do what she has a natural instinct for.
(Her dad once asked her what good she was when she was sick and couldn’t help out at the docks, and then didn’t have any food waiting for him when he got home. He was drunk. He didn’t mean it. He didn’t remember the next morning.)
She’s helpless and useless and stupid and small and why can’t she get her shit together to read the words set before her? Can’t even reach out to the person you want. What is it about — She’s adrift on her own.
“Oh, come on, Will!” Abigail Hobbs says bracingly. “You’ve got us.”
Will spares her a glance and immediately wishes she hadn’t. She’s made friends with Atticus, which means she also looks quite dead, skin sloughing off. The gash in her neck stays as vivid as the day she got it, her defining feature, a splash of color on a grey ghoul.
(She’s picturesque, too. Such a doll. Unchangeable, controllable, which she could never be in life. Isn’t that why she had to die?)
“I don’t have you,” Will says flatly. “I never had you .”
Her doe eyes well with tears. She thinks she knows how to manipulate Will. “But you killed me! You — You — I bled out, and you let me! ”
She doesn’t understand. She can’t. She’s only ever been wanted. Wanted so badly by a father that he had to kill girls who were transpositions of her so he wouldn’t take her. That’s what love looks like, isn’t it?
“Because I didn’t want you,” Will admits. It feels good to admit. The first honest-to-god truth she’s told. Maybe she won’t go to hell after all. It’s not too late. “And I don’t want you now. You’re not real.”
Abigail huffs, doesn’t vanish. But she does cross her arms and sulk, every bit the eternal, traumatized eighteen year old. “Yeah, well. Tough shit.”
Tough shit, indeed. They’re tied together, like it or not. Inextricably linked by Hannibal Lecter. Will scowls. She’d known, she’d figured it out, and still she fell for it. She put her faith in her. Stupid, stupid. She can only blame herself for expecting a different outcome. Leopards don’t change their spots. Atticus told her.
Why don’t you listen? Do as you’re told —
Winston woofs. This is a good sign, and the purpose of his presence in her office today. A dog can tell the truth where Will’s brain can’t be trusted to.
Although , she thinks, watching Abigail pace, there’s always the possibility this is all one big hallucination. Maybe Winston isn’t here at all. Maybe she isn’t. Maybe she never made it out of the house, or to her house, or —
No. She’s reasonably certain this is real. She does feel relatively sane at the moment. Comparatively. Will promises herself she’ll know when she crosses that line.
(And, granted, she had felt sane that hot, sweaty night in Crowley, too. She felt, in fact, that nothing could bring her down, seized with the conviction that she’d done the right thing and, quite frankly, a favor to the world.)
Abigail is gone.
In her place is Beverly Katz, hands on her hips, concern lighting her eyes. “Jesus Christ, Will, when was the last time you slept?”
Not last night, that was for sure. Up through the witching hour, hair on the nape of her neck standing, that sensation of being watched. ( The eyes of God were watching.) A convulsive grip on a switchblade, jerking at every creak and groan, at the snuffles of her poor, anxious dogs. Until the sun was rising, and she’d sweat through five t-shirts — a new record — and she was a zombie in the car ride to Quantico, wired by too much caffeine and a near-manic energy.
“I never sleep well,” Will answers evasively, scratching Winston behind the ears. He huffs his contentment. She hopes her other dogs don’t start to feel neglected.
“Yeah, well, you look like you’ve got one foot in the grave,” Beverly presses, stops in front of her desk with a curious, critical sweeping gaze. It’s a mess of hastily written notes and cheap print-out photos. “You sick?”
“That is up for debate,” Will mutters, running a hand through lank curls. She could use a shower. She could use a good night’s sleep. She could use a reset, so she can forget —
Will glances back at the dimmed computer screen, with its abrasive light that hurts her eyes. She feels a flash of triumph. The words have returned to their proper places, form legible words, string together logical sentences in double-spaced, font-size twelve Times New Roman. The cursor blinks at number one on the list, complete with a nasty (striking) crime scene photo.
She’s never been so relieved to see Freddie Lounds’s lewd “journalism” in her life. She suspects — hopes — this will be the first and last time she stoops so low, and blames it on the limited resources.
Beverly’s expression is pinched, the type of look one gets when they’ve tasted something unexpectedly sour. “Does Jack have you working on a new case already? He shouldn’t force —”
Will shakes her head. “Old case. New connections.”
“Shit, your handwriting is worse than Jimmy’s,” she comments mercilessly as she rounds the bend to take a closer look at her research. Will frowns, irritated, glancing at her nearest note. It’s perfectly fine to her, slanted but neat. “ Il Mostro di Firenze? ” she reads haltingly. “Is this a TattleCrime post?”
“Unfortunately.”
In her defense, there aren’t a lot of articles available on the internet or in the FBI database for international cold cases so far back. On top of that, a decent amount of them are in Italian, and the generated translations to English are more or less a garbled mess. Besides, Lounds somehow managed to get her hands on the best photographs still floating around. Seven displays highlighted in a separated article with helpful little descriptions.
“Okay…” Beverly says slowly. “That doesn’t explain why you’re reading an unsolved murders clickbait article for a serial killer who operated in Florence, Italy.”
Will smiles sharply, too many teeth to make it anything except unsettling. She pulls off her glasses, fumbles them onto the desk with uncharacteristic clumsiness, and gestures to the magnified print-outs. “Tell me what you see.”
Beverly flicks through the photos half-heartedly, looks without seeing. She’s had enough death and horror for the day, it seems. “Another seriously sick psycho with a thing for posing his victims?”
She sighs impatiently, rifles through the papers until she finds what she’s looking for. She slaps them down before Beverly expectantly. “And now?”
In one photo, a homage to John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia,’ the fifth suspected victim of Il Mostro di Firenze . A woman set to rest in a shallow pool of water at a park, unaware of her fate, dark hair fanned out in a halo around her, ethereal. A chain of lilies of the valley adorn her neck. Pansies, violets, poppies, and forget-me-nots float around her. Slight changes to the arrangement, purposeful.
In the other photo, the Chesapeake Ripper’s third suspected victim, a man in a suit — crisp, freshly laundered, free of blood — left nailed to abandoned railroad tracks, arms spread and palms impaled by spikes in a mockery of a sinner on the cross. His eyeballs were removed while he was still breathing and placed into a scale left by his side. His transgressions weigh heavy, tip the balance out of his favor. It was a mocking piece on par with the martyrs depicted in Baroque art.
It’s stupidly easy to connect the two. Both show a meticulous appreciation to detail, a keen eye for beauty and aesthetic. A certain cold whimsy. The same sharp, ironic humor in the debasement and elevation of pigs. The same varied methods of torture, leisurely indulgence, the victim alive and aware until their bodies gave out. The shared forced donation of a carefully obscured organ or limb. In Ophelia, it’s her heart. In the sightless sinner, it’s his liver.
One is a recreation as the inspired artist carefully finds their style, emulating what they admire; the other is an original as they step into their preferences in a new frontier under a new moniker. No one should be able to link the two.
“You think this Il Mostro and the Ripper are the same person?” Beverly asks, eyes wide.
Feverishly, Will rattles off all the overlapping traits, leaves out all the insight’s she’s gained from knowing Dr. Lecter. “We theorized the Chesapeake Ripper had to start somewhere, right?” she says, borrowing Beverly’s cadence. “Maybe there were no signs because the Ripper wasn’t in America yet.”
“I don’t know, Will. It’s a tenuous link at best. Without concrete evidence… and given the time gap…”
Will tunes her out, disinterested. She doesn’t need more proof, or Beverly’s validation. She’s got gut instinct, and she’s got the ear of the head of the Behavioral Science Unit. She’s never wrong. The Monster of Florence and the Chesapeake Ripper are one and the same.
Hannibal had practically told her herself, a disclosure made in the midst of a discussion about her medical school years. I found myself in Italy, she claimed, seized by fond nostalgia that made Will’s lips twitch. She was taken by the city, taken by the art and history and all its aching beauty.
Hell, Il Mostro’s final artwork was a reinterpretation of Botticelli’s ‘Primavera,’ and how long had Will listened to Hannibal wax poetic about that damn painting? Of course she’d bring it to life in the most breathtaking form possible, a farewell to her beloved Florence before she was whisked away to a residency at Johns Hopkins.
This new information doesn’t have to lead anywhere. Il Mostro left as much evidence as the Chesapeake Ripper does. Impeccably clean, likely never to lead to a conviction. But it doesn’t have to. All Will has to do is put out the suggestion, and if she were to make a passing connection to Dr. Lecter… Who is Jack to disregard his best bloodhound? Nagging doubts have a way of taking on a life of their own.
“ — Will, I’m serious, are you doing —”
This is just the ghost of a noose around her neck. If Hannibal wants to lie to her, toy with her, Will will make sure her house of cards topples. She’ll drag her down to the depths of hell with her, she’ll destroy them both, she doesn’t care, so long as Hannibal fucking Lecter learns what it feels like to have the rug pulled out from right beneath her feet, to think she mattered, to think someone could possibly accept her, see what her fucking trust earns her —
Will smells blood.
It clogs her nose, so thick and coppery she could choke on it. Is choking on it.
She gags. Finds no relief. She blinks rapidly, disoriented. This isn’t her office in Quantico. This isn’t her house, isn’t any room she recognizes. God, she shouldn’t be here, and the thrill of foreboding shoots through her, and shit.
Shit .
The blood. There’s so much. On the floor, on her. Beneath her.
She’s sitting atop a body. Straddling a body.
No.
Blood runs down her hands, stains her forearms. Dried and drying. Itchy, flaky. She stops herself from scrubbing at it. A healthy amount has congealed on the floor, seeps through the cracks of old hardwood. None of it is hers. She doesn’t have a scratch on her. It’s from the woman, the body, this stranger.
The body sputters, limbs twitching feebly. Will feels it against her thighs where she’s pinned the woman down. Her beseeching ( whywhywhywhy) gaze holds Will’s as the light of her eyes dims. Vanishes.
More blood burbles down the sides of her chin, comes trickling from the great gash where her mouth used to be. Another glasgow smile to haunt her dreams. Around the edges of the wound, the skin’s pulled and picked, like she tried to peel off a mask.
She didn’t — I didn’t, I didn’t kill her, why would I, what did she do, but there’s a knife slicked with body matter in her hand, held in a white-knuckled grip, and she doesn’t know how it got there. She doesn’t know how she got here.
A hysterical giggle threatens to spill past her lips, followed by a rush of saliva flooding her tongue. Will swallows hard, forces it down. She can’t get sick here. She’ll contaminate the crime scene. Even more. Her fingers twitch. Her prints are on everything, definitely all over the murder weapon. She’s left a giant stain in this room, and she has no idea where else, or where she came from, or why she would kill a woman she doesn’t know, who didn’t deserve it, that’s not who she is —
So you’re a killer, Graham. Big deal. This makes three, right? Or is it four — or, no, five, if you count —
Will scrambles off the cooling body, seeking distance from accusations that sting. The knife remains with her. She can’t forget it, misplace it. That’d be too big of an error in one colossal shit fire. Better to take it with her? Clean it and leave it? She would be opportunistic; she’d make a weapon out of the victim’s possessions. It’s more intimate.
She shudders. Is this real? This can’t be real, she can’t trust herself to know, maybe what she needs to do is — Why would I — Who is she, this can’t —
Will slips, or trips, narrowly avoids falling on her ass and making a bigger mess. She catches herself on a dresser instead, pulls herself onto shaky legs. (It reminds her of the first time she went out on the boat with her dad, how she struggled to gain her bearings. No laughter this time.)
Glass crunches beneath her fingers. Will flinches, palm coming away pockmarked with glittering specks. They could come out bloody if she brushes them off. She leaves them be.
The glass is from shattered picture frames. The photographs are ripped up, faces scratched out so all that’s left are unrecognizable, broken smiles. Will groans lowly, glances at the body. Is that the same woman? She can’t tell. Why can’t she tell?
Will shakes her head harshly. She can figure it out later. This scene is sloppy. So, so sloppy, the work of an amateur, and she never considered herself sloppy, but that was before the headaches and sleepwalking and hallucinations and losing time, so —
Fuck. Her best bet is to turn herself in. She can’t cover her tracks if she doesn’t know what tracks there are to cover. Try to stay ahead of little fires and end up getting bit in the ass by something she can’t remember. I don’t know what I did is already a poor defense, regardless of how sick she looks. It won’t look any better if she’s caught trying to get away with murder. Best to take control of the narrative now.
They’ll send her to prison either way. She’s trapped, this is the end, all because she killed someone who didn’t deserve it, what protections are left for her, she doesn’t deserve them she did a bad thing and it doesn’t feel good, it feels like a death sentence, how could she —
Will knocks her head back against the wall, hard enough to set her ears ringing. Stupid, you knew you were losing it, you knew you knew, you fucking idiot, worthless, now you’ve done it, you’ve —
I would support you.
Her spiraling thoughts grind to a halt. Hannibal. Hannibal. Yes, she can call Dr. Lecter. She’ll help. She could make this crime scene spotless, make it like it never happened, and this nightmare could be over, she’d wake up. The Chesapeake Ripper will help, all Will has to do is ask, all she has to do is beg, Hannibal loves vulnerability.
Does she have her phone? That could be a prob —
There’s a knock on the bedroom door. Will freezes. She wasn’t alone? Had she — whose goddamn house is this? Will glances down at the bloody knife.
“Will? Everything good?”
Beverly. That was Beverly. And if Beverly is here…
Will drags her eyes back to the dead woman, the smeared puddle of blood, looks at it in a new light. Congealed. Because it’s old. The body, she sees now, is stiff and cool, skin waxen. She’s been dead for a while. Will hadn’t… couldn’t have…
This is a crime scene, but it isn’t hers. This is a case for her to solve, another killer for her to unravel. And she’d royally muddied the waters.
The doorknob is turning.
Will does the only reasonable thing she can think to do.
She crumples to the floor near the body, near the blood. The knife clatters across the floor, but she barely registers it over the overwhelming buzz of relief.
I got dizzy. I fell.
It does not, to a pack of seasoned forensic scientists, quite explain how all that blood ended up on her arms, her clothes. Her face. It certainly does not explain why her fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. Will says she must’ve landed on it when she fell, or was going to, and grabbed it to avoid injury, but she can’t remember, she’s so sorry for contaminating the crime scene.
Beverly, Price, and Zeller don’t question her too much. It helps that she looks like hell, like roadkill, that this makes it entirely plausible she fainted. That Zeller, with a streak of chivalry despite his dislike of her, rushed to her rescue and guided her up onto legs she didn’t have to pretend were wobbly. That he proclaimed she was warm to the touch, and shot Jack an accusing why is she here look, which usually she’d be offended by coming from him but this time it was a sign of support.
It’s Beverly who guides her into the bathroom and turns on the sink faucet. Sets the temperature to a soothing lukewarm and tests it before allowing Will to clean herself. Then she marches back to Price and Zeller, and says something like a hiss to Jack. It’s sweet. Beverly’s siblings are lucky to have her.
Will scrubs her skin raw, picks the flakes from her nail. Her arms and hands remain stained pink, and she can’t tell if it’s because of her, or if the blood seeped into her pores and won’t be eradicated so easily. She won’t ask if it’s real or not. She feels dirty, in a soul-weary way.
The grimy clothes don’t help, chaff with the slightest movements. Her skin is ablaze, head foggy. Maybe she’ll burn these clothes. Have a little bonfire with the dogs. Roast some marshmallows.
(She did that with her dad. Christmas tradition — s’mores, as many as she wanted, a rare treat, and whatever holiday movies were playing on cable on the occasional instances they had it.)
She jerks the faucet off. She doesn’t know how long it's been on, how long she’s been standing here. Long enough for the tap to run cold.
She doesn’t know what day it is, either.
(She’ll find out later: Tuesday. One long, neverending Tuesday. The same day Beverly stopped by her office and found her digging up the skeletons in Dr. Lecter’s closet, none the wiser.)
Will catches her reflection in the smudged mirror. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself. She raises a finger, poking and prodding at ashen skin. The person in the mirror obediently mimics her. Scratches away specks of blood she missed before, nearly possessed with the urgent need to keep digging, to get to what lies beneath, certain it will provide clarity.
By all accounts, that’s her. Will Graham, in the flesh. But goosebumps break along her skin. That’s not me , she thinks. That’s an imposter. Will leans in, searches for the tell. There’s always a tell.
Jack is watching her from the front door. Will looks down, away, discomfited. The screen door snaps shut behind him. She sighs. Follows him outside like she’s expected to, a kid preparing for a scolding from a parent (and Jack claimed not to be her father).
It’s snowing here, wherever here is, light and flaky and sure to melt within the day. Fleeting. She adjusts her scarf and pulls at her sleeves at the sudden cold that sweeps through her. Beverly had handed the garment off to her along with her forgotten glasses with a knowing glance. She’s glad to know the version of her left behind when she can’t remember had the foresight to preserve her scarf. She needs its protection, the comfort it still affords her.
Jack points to one of the second floor windows. The victim’s room, Will presumes. “What happened in there?”
Will frowns at him, hesitating in confusion. “I told you. I just needed a minute, and some aspirin. I’m good now. I can go back —”
“Do not bullshit me, Will,” Jack says, voice rising to loud. She squints through the spike in her headache; such a special skill he has, that lack of restraint that he can easily get away with. How nice for him. “I want the whole truth, and if I think for a second that you’re withholding, I’m benching you.”
She works her jaw, expression mulish. It wouldn’t be wise, she decides, to call his bluff. But she hasn’t exactly been making the wisest decisions lately. If she were, she’d listen to Beverly and Zeller and go home and get some rest. And she has no desire to mention her fugue state to Jack, or her instinct to cover up her assumed misdeeds.
“Zeller thinks I’m running a fever,” she says, playing dumb. “I must be getting sick again. I’m sorry, I didn’t think anything of it. I should’ve been more aware —”
“Clearly it was more than a fainting spell, Will. I want to know what led up to it,” Jack commands. “I want to know what got you so… afraid that you could barely look at that body afterwards.”
If there’s one thing Will Graham has known from a young age, it’s that she bears fear with all the grace a cornered animal does. Feral, unpredictable. With fangs bared, anxious to bite (and she has lived in fear all her life). Her fear is unmistakable.
For all his faults, Jack is shrewd. There’s a reason he ended up in the position he’s in. Her reaction might’ve been missed by the others, but he clocked it, he knows what her fear looks like, and he won’t let up until he’s satisfied. She’ll have to make a concession or two.
“... I was disoriented,” she confesses impassively to the porch railing. “For a second, a blink.”
“Disoriented,” Jack repeats flatly, dubiously, and Will resents him for his doubts and disappointment and worry. “Will, you contaminated the crime scene. You’ve never done that before.”
The sudden gentleness of his voice rubs salt in already stinging wounds. She flinches. “Yeah, Jack. I think I’ve learned my lesson.”
He grunts, limited patience fraying. “Did you become disoriented before or after you decided to pick up the murder weapon?”
Will fiddles with her glasses, ventures cautiously. “I don’t know. It’s all… hazy. I forgot where I was, what I was doing. Why.”
Jack stares at her with growing consternation. Will wishes he’d stop, put her out of her misery. “Will, are you saying you thought you killed that woman in there?”
Why shouldn’t I have? Me and a corpse. One plus one equals two, right?
“I got lost in the reconstruction,” she says, neither an admission nor a refutation.
“ Lost in the reconstruction! You reconstruct the thinking of a killer, you don’t think of yourself as the killer—” Jack deflates, hot air billowing out of him in one long sigh, and he really doesn’t understand what she does, the shoes she steps into with the familiarity of an old friend, why she started refusing certain cases, he doesn’t get it .
( Hannibal does, her mind whispers unhelpfully.)
“I know you don’t like to be the cause for concern, but I am officially concerned about you.”
Will clucks her tongue. Fainting wasn’t enough for you?
“Officially,” she repeats.
“Yes, that’s right.”
An incredulous, patronizing smile works its way onto her face before she can stop it. Or she doesn’t try to. She’s lost track.
She hums and steps down the porch steps. They creak beneath her weight, bow slightly. Would’ve needed to be replaced soon. She glances around the stretch of land, the hearty trees that have clung to their greenery in the deep of winter. The snow twirls down in undisturbed spirals.
No neighbors within sight. That woman, the victim, lived in relative isolation, too, subject to the cold and quiet. Maybe, if Will had sought her out, that would’ve been why. A shared loneliness. A kinship. Maybe that’s why her real killer found her, too, but then Will remembers the photographs with their scratched out faces.
She glances back at Jack. She sees him clearly. “Remind me again why you have me seeing Dr. Lecter instead of an FBI psychiatrist?”
He looks at WIll like she’s struck him. It’s never pleasant, facing an unwanted truth. Will’s had plenty of experience.
“I just wanna be careful with you, Will. We don’t wanna break you here. Is that what this is? Have I broken you?”
For a moment, she sees him gasping for air, hands clawing at his face trying to hold the shredded flaps of skin together. The blood flows, bright against the icy patches of lingering snow.
Will blinks again, and he’s staring at her, perfectly fine and immensely guilt-ridden. Chipped old mug. “Of course not,” she says, and it’s not to be kind. “But if you have, and I still bring better results than anyone else, would it matter?”
Jack’s expression hardens. “Fear makes you rude, Will.”
Yeah, well. What else is new?
Greenwood, Delaware is only about a two hour drive from Wolf Trap. Not a horrible trek, and this time Will remembers it. And she knows the victim’s name, too. Beth LeBeau. She won’t forget, have that oily slick left on the surface of her mind.
Will eases out of her car, flicks on the flashlight. It’s dark at night here, so far from the city lights and noise. Like Wolf Trap. Had it made Beth LeBeau feel safe? Like she was the only person in the world who existed, to have ever existed? Will hopes it brought her some solace.
She’s a ghost moving through the house. She doesn’t exactly believe in the supernatural, but you don’t grow up in the South without picking up on a bit of superstition. Her dad bought into it. Never left a chair rocking, porch ceilings painted haint blue, never opened a curtain after dusk, and Will wondered what unsettled spirits he hoped to ward off. She wishes she’d had the courage to ask.
She feels haunted tonight. Seen. Her skin crawls from the sensation, there are eyes trained on her. The air’s frigid, disturbed. A violent death makes for restless spirits, everyone knows that. Has Beth LeBeau already made her way back home?
She’s got a score to settle, and who better to face her than Will? She might not have actually killed her, but she vividly remembers doing so. The hot gush of her blood. The struggle as it leaked out of her. The fading awareness of the living. It’s stamped into her brain in the blank space of reality, fueled by a dangerously hyperactive imagination.
What if Beth LeBeau’s ghost can sense the guilt on her? The queasy, jumpy anxiousness radiates off of Will like a furnace. She’d subjected her to a second death, in a way. Defiled her body again. It’d be more than enough to rile up a ruined soul seeking retribution. Will would have it coming. She’d deserve it.
(It’s important that the victim deserves it.)
Will makes it to the master bedroom without incident. Light switch doesn’t work. Electric was cut off. She’s stuck with the shaky flashlight and stretching shadows.
It smells. She hadn’t noticed during her first visit, too caught up in all the blood and what she might’ve done, but it’s impossible to miss now. A fetid, putrid stench that makes her eyes water. Rotting meat.
She frowns uncertainly at the discolored smears across the floor where Beth LeBeau fought for her life. The body’s gone, taken to the morgue upon the forensic team’s departure. It shouldn’t smell so strongly. Is it real? Or is she hallucinating again?
Will drops her hand from her face, and there, beneath the bed, unblinking, are a pair of bloodshot, yellowed eyes. The same place Beth LeBeau was dragged. A shock goes through her. Ghost. Her ghost.
(What’s one more haunting?)
Will squeezes her eyes shut until she sees stars. “It’s 10:36 pm,” she whispers, feeling utterly foolish. “I’m in Greenwood, Delaware. My name is Will Graham.”
The eyes of the corpse are still staring at her, as wide and disturbed as Will’s own. Frozen. Will crouches, arms raised automatically in a soothing gesture she uses on the stray dogs she picks up. The contorted phantom scuttles back, cornered.
“Are you—”
The dead person kicks up at the mattress with a frenzied desperation, flips it into the air. Will scrambles out of the way, grabs out blindly for the ghost darting past her. She thinks she catches an arm, but then the skin sloughs off in her hand.
“Wait!—”
I’m sorry, Will thinks with a crazed remorse, because now she’s gone and taken something else from the dead girl, and she can’t give it back.
She stumbles after the corpse, and comes to a stop in the woods. Will spins, blinking rapidly as she regains her bearings. The flashlight bobs wildly, swallowed by the trees. The sleeve of flesh has vanished.
What the hell?
Her watch informs her that it’s hours later. Once again booted from the driver’s seat. It’ll never be less jarring.
“It’s 1:17 am!” she announces shakily, not sure the ghost remains with her. If anything remains with her. She’d welcome them. Even a Wendigo, if it offers proof she isn’t alone. “W—we’re in Greenwood, Delaware. And my name is Will Graham. And you’re alive! We’re both alive. I promise.”
She waits, panting, the ground shifting beneath her feet, hoping for a return to balance, a sign she hasn’t completely lost it. She thinks she hears a branch snap, but when she turns to investigation, there’s no one there.
Ten minutes crawl by. Then twenty. The dead woman doesn’t reappear. Will glances around. Had she been there in the first place?
“I’m alive,” she vows to herself, and struggles to find her way back to Beth LeBeau’s home.
She calls Beverly for help. Jack is… not an option. Hannibal is out of the question. Will hasn’t reached out to her and she needs an objective second opinion from someone who’s never lied to her, wouldn’t think to. Beverly values evidence. Beverly will find out the truth.
All the same, she’d half-hoped Beverly wouldn’t pick up. But she’s too well-trained by Jack to not wake up to phone calls at strange hours. By the time she arrives in Greenwood, it’s pushing 4:00 am, and the lack of sleep is pulling her out of shape. She’s loose, malleable. Impressionable.
Is this how you want me, Dr. Lecter?
Beverly eyes her warily, lips pursed, but it isn’t pity or worry, so Will appreciates that. It’s more of a ‘why are we, especially you, here and not sleeping’ look.
“Thanks for coming,” Will says. Her muscles ache when she clambers up from the porch steps. She sat for too long, unmoving.
“What are you doing here, Will?”
She’d asked on the phone, too. Will hadn’t answered then. She turns, leads Beverly back to the scene of the crime. “I needed a second look.”
“What, because you were too close and personal to properly see the first time?” she gently ribs.
“I needed a second look with a clear head,” Will elaborates. “And I think our killer did, too.”
Beverly shrugs. “What does a clear head look like for someone who would mistake a face for a mask?”
Oh. Of course. The torn skin, the picked edges from trying to figure out what laid beneath. “She can’t see faces.” Will’s surprised by the tightness in her throat. “She — she might not realize she killed Beth LeBeau.”
“So she came to check…” Beverly looks around. “You said you saw her?”
Will nods. “She was deranged. Malnourished, jaundiced. Her liver’s shutting down. I thought — I grabbed her arm and an entire layer of dead skin separated from the underlying tissue. Like peeling off a glove.”
“Huh,” Beverly says, taking Will at her word. “So that’s why she doesn’t bleed.”
Another head bob. “No circulation. Nothing alive in the tissue to bind it.”
She looks at Will curiously. “What did you do with it?”
“... I don’t know,” she admits in a mutter.
She tried to find it. She’d searched the woods on her way back the best she could. Searched the house top to bottom. Hell, she even checked the trash bins. The skin was just gone, and with it the sure sign of the ghost’s presence.
“You don’t remember?” Beverly gaps, brow knitting together. “Is this why you called me instead of Jack, or the police?”
“I called you because I trust you to interpret the evidence,” Will answers truthfully, “and tell me whether or not what I saw was real.”
A somber shadow flickers across her face, but whatever she planned to say never comes. “Then let’s prove it.”
Will’s smiling grimace becomes more genuine.