“I’d planned to wear a bigger hat.” Bigger and more expensive. Freddie frowned at the four-corners of the witchlike headpiece worthy of an anime villain.
On second thought, considering her readers, maybe looking like an anime villain was perfect for the occasion.
“Go with the frock coat and the gloves.” Wendy towered over her, a majestic figure impeccably attired in a long coat over a sleek pant-suit which hugged her wiry frame. “The Murder Husbands' fans will love it.”
Freddie never argued with Wendy about fashion. She slid from the coat onto her shoulder while the taller woman fussed over her, making certain it hung right.
She’d met Wendy before her operation, struggling to earn enough money to pay for it. She'd been forced to dance at a sleazy bar for a pittance of what she was worth, something which irritated Freddie. A lot.
Freddie Lounds's moments of compassion weren't frequent, but they were memorable.
An article in Tattlecrime led to the bar’s owner being investigated for a few felonies and many a misdemeanor. He’d chosen to disappear while Wendy took possession of the bar.
Now it was a fashionable joint where all the dancers were transgender, making decent wages at time when too many places didn't pay them. Many a young bride came to the bar for her bachelorette party.
Wendy had become the closest thing Freddie Lounds had to a friend as well as a fashion designer. Most of Freddie’s outfits were Wendy’s creations.
Freddie smoothed the lapels of her coat. “Got to look my best for my fans. Even though technically they’re Will and Hannibal’s fans.”
“Our missing Murder Husbands.” Wendy let out a snort which might be amusement, contempt, or both. “I hear they’re called Hannigram fans.”
“For Hannibal and Graham?” Freddie pulled on a glove and raised an eyebrow. “Cute in a sick, twisted way. Kind of like our boys.”
“You call it sick.” Wendy made a sweeping, dramatic gesture to the curtain. On the other side a forum packed with people waited. “Yet you’re hosting a convention for them. For people who are in love with their sick, twisted cuteness.”
“Whatever they might be, they have made me rich.” Freddie pulled on her other glove. “They’ve even made me popular.”
“Is that all there is to it?” Wendy crossed her arms, studying Freddie.
Freddie smiled a little at this. “Of course. After all I’ve given them attention I’ve bestowed upon no other killer. Especially Will Graham.
***
2014 Wolf Trap, Virginia
She screamed like she’d never screamed, tried to hold onto anything, felt the phone dropping.
Freddie Lounds was dragged out of the broken window as if she weighed nothing.
Impossible that such a slight, skinny man could pull with such ease.
“Monster!” she screamed, kicking and clawing across the snow, aware of how slight and skinny she was.
If only she’d been fat, if only she’d weighed him down, slowed him down a little! “You’re no better than the Chesapeake Ripper!”
“That’s what I have to convince him of,” Will Graham hissed against her cheek.
He held her as close to his chest in a ridiculous parody of intimacy. An intimacy she sensed was directed at someone else. “I need him to think I’m turning into him, that his therapy is working. I need him to think I’m becoming the perfect companion for him. If I can convince you, Freddie, I can convince him.”
Convinced?
No, she wasn’t convinced, but the admission of duplicity relaxed her, caused her entire body to ease up.
Faced with such deceitfulness, Freddie felt her confidence return.
Violence made her panic, but lies and deception, this was her terrritory. Plus, there was genuine anguish in Will Graham’s confession, anguish she sensed was as real as his admission about Abigail.
Whatever he was up to, there was a story mixed into it. A far more interesting story than Freddie Lounds almost got too close to a killer and was refridgerated for her trouble.
Unstable profiler undergoes twisted parody of therapeutical romance with his cannibalist psychiatrist?
Now this had much more potential.
“I was right.” She drew a shuddering breath. “You’re trying to join Hannibal Lecter. You failed to beat him, so you’re trying to join him just as I warned Dr. Bloom.”
“Alana is very close to Hannibal, too close to see his true face, but she’s starting to see me.” Will released Freddie, took a step back, giving her space in the snow. “If I start to change, perhaps she’ll see the truth. Perhaps she’ll see through Hannibal’s mask. Abigail never did, but she had secrets of her own.”
“Yes, she did.” Freddie gazed at Will with dawning awareness. “Hannibal helped Abigail keep those secrets, didn’t he?”
“Hannibal kept Abigail very close.” Will avoided her eyes, gazed at a snowdrift instead. “He kept her until she found herself willing to expose the truth. The truth became more important than her secrets.”
“At which point he killed her and framed you for the murders.” Freddie studied Will’s jutting her lower lip, the curve of his cheek, the shadowed eyes. “Only he cleared you of the murder charges. Why? What changed?”
“I’m not sure if anything changed.” Will glanced at the snow drifts. “Other than myself.”
“All part of the process of turning you into the companion Abigail wasn’t willing to be?” Once again Freddie examined her would-be killer.
Yes, he was beautiful, but it was a dangerous beauty. Too much about Will Graham was dangerous. The way he’d dragged her through the window was proof of this.
Perhaps this was why Hannibal Lecter wanted Will Graham so badly. And Dr. Lecter did want this unstable, dangerous young man.
Freddie sensed this with the same sharp instinct for story that she’d sensed the menace in Will Graham as he stood like a changeling creature from another world, so at peace around corpses sprouting mushrooms.
“You need a secret big enough you can’t reveal it,” Freddie mused out loud. “One that will convince Hannibal Lecter you’re completely his.”
Will still wouldn’t look at her, he simply nodded, pressing his lips tightly together.
“Seduce him with this secret, Will.” She locked her eyes onto his. “Let him think you’ve killed me. Let Alana think you’ve killed me. Let her believe this secret until she’s ready to open her eyes.”
Will raised his head, green eyes bleak, but once more he nodded.
Back at the Murder Husbands Convention
“I suggested all of this to him, but it’s entirely possible he thought of all of this before I did.” Freddie couldn’t help allowing a measure of respect to trickle through her voice.
She disliked violence, but she respected manipulation. “He may have allowed me to suggest it myself, manipulate him as part of his own manipulation. It’s very much the sort of thing Hannibal Lecter would have done.”
“You speak of Will Graham as if you were in love with him.” There was a little hurt, a little accusation, and a lot of amusement in Wendy’s voice.
One of the great things about her almost friend was her sense of humor.
“If I close my eyes, I can still see him as I did for the first time. Standing in a circle surrounded by autumn leaves. Mushrooms blooming from the nearby corpses.” Freddie took a deep breath.
Such a disturbing tableux, yet it had an eerie beauty. Will Graham had an eerie beauty. Otherworldly.
“I knew he wasn’t like anyone else. Dangerous.” Freddie exhaled, aware of her breath catching. “For a moment I couldn’t move. Just stare at him.”
It could have been different. Freddie could have given in to this beauty, a beauty which reminded her of a time when she’d written poetry, drawn sketches, and scribbled fanfiction in secret.
None of those options would have made the kind of money being a tabloid reporter did.
“Whatever I felt in that moment, I stayed true to myself. To my obnoxious brand of journalism, to quote Will Graham himself.” Freddie smiled a little, oddly nostalgic at the memory of Will’s boyish face twisted in disgust. How he’d detested her. “This doesn’t mean that moment wasn’t special.”
Wendy gazed at her, slightly slackjawed. “That wasn’t exactly a yes or a no.”
“There isn’t exactly a yes or no answer, but I didn’t want to say something like ‘it’s complicated.’” Freddie turned in the direction of the curtain. “Perhaps my readers can love him in a way I never could.”
Perhaps she’d communicated a little of that wonder she felt in that afternoon into Murder Husbands. A feeling like she’d entered a fairy tale, monstrous yet beautiful.
Freddie Lounds had chosen to hunt the monsters down. To expose them in her writing. She wouldn’t be swayed from her path by a monster’s beauty.
Even so, she offered Wendy a secretive little wink before pulling back the curtain to greet the cheers of the Hannigram fans waiting for her. Waiting for her to talk about her book. The romance between monsters which was as true as any romance was.
As Will Graham himself might have said, this was her design.