Where Serpents Lie

Eight

Joe Reilly, the director of our Forensic Sciences Lab, had left an e-mail message for me the next morning.

I knew that Joe Reilly was a man who took his time to get things right. So I called Johnny at home and told him to start the search of the Sharpe residence without me. I knew that he and Louis and Frances would do better than just a good job — I trusted them completely.

I passed through the doors of the lab five minutes later and found Joe at his desk. It was six o’clock. Reilly is a soft-spoken and thoughtful man in his late fifties, with a head of minning black hair he combs straight back and a baby’s blue eyes. He’s Irish American, like me, and I’ve tried several times to exploit that connection, but Joe is so thoroughly fair and unbiased that my Irish-kin overtures have never worked. Though he was a San Francisco patrolman early in his law enforcement career, it’s hard to picture him wearing a gun, let alone pointing it at somebody. Through the department grapevine I’ve gathered that Joe’s off hours are spent studying astronomy and collecting rocks. He has the curiosity and the resourceful mind of a scientist, combined with a cop’s shrewdness about the evidence he analyzes.

Our Sheriff’s Forensic Sciences Laboratory is one of the best in the nation and operates free of the dictates of law enforcement. Joe Reilly set it up that way. You can’t get Joe or his people to slant things in a way that will help you make a case. They are meticulous — sometimes maddeningly so — about their procedures and chain of custody assurance. In Los Angeles County, for instance, the crime lab is run at the beck and call of the PD. Reilly testified at the first Simpson trial about proper methods of collecting, storing and analyzing blood evidence. He helped make the LA crime lab people look like amateurs.

He rose and shook my hand and congratulated me on the Sharpe bust. Joe and his people are wonderfully aloof from most department politics and squabbles, so I knew it was a heartfelt compliment. He led me out of his office and down the hallway to the Hair & Fiber Room, holding open the door for me as I stepped in.

“I think we made some faulty assumptions about the van,” he said. “Here.”

He took me over to a comparison microscope — actually two microscopes that let you see two different samples at once — and told me to have a look. What I saw on the right side looked like a piece of rope with strands of string peeling off the main shaft. On the left was another piece of rope, but you could see the stalk was relatively clean — no strands or strings attached.

“Hold on now,” he said.

He magnified the specimens, which enlarged them to the point that their shape was lost. But it revealed the building blocks of each. The one on the right was made up of ovaloid, asymmetrical cells that looked only loosely coordinated. The sample on the left was packed tightly with perfect rectangles, aligned precisely.

“You can’t tell under this magnification and light, but both samples appear red to the naked eye. The one on the left is the acrylic from the van interior. The one on the right looks a lot like it, until you use the scope. We were separating out the fibers collected from Pamela and Courtney, and one of the techs thought she saw a difference. When she ran them through the comparison scope, we found out we were collecting two different red fibers. One was the acrylic from a vehicle interior, but the other isn’t acrylic at all. It’s good old-fashioned lamb’s wool. And there aren’t many vehicle manufacturers right now using wool in their interiors. Not on something relatively inexpensive, like a van. The one on your right came from something else.”

I asked the obvious question.

“We’re not sure. The wool fibers were outnumbered five to one by the vehicle ones. That’s why we weren’t sure what we had, at first. There were six acrylic and one wool on Pamela, and eight acrylic and three wool on Courtney. Most of them were caught in that robe he put them in, that nylon netting.”

“Come on, Joe — cough it. What did the wool come from?”

I straightened up and looked at him. He smiled and nodded patiently. We field cops are always trying to get him to commit to something definitive and absolute, something to answer our many questions. Forensic science, of course, isn’t often that easy.

“Could be a wool blanket. Or sweater. We’ve already got wool/rayon fibers that are probably from some kind of garment — a sport coat. But a red sport coat? Not likely. Plus, the diameter of these are quite a bit thicker than the wool/rayon ones. They’re processed for softness. These would make a plush, flexible material, not something strong and tight like a jacket. So — sweater, blanket, bedspread, stadium wrap — something built to be supple and comforting.”

“A scarf or muffler?”

“Possibly.”

“Socks?”

“Not likely. Too short. Too full. They’d process them for length and tightness for footwear. My guess is they don’t come from a garment.”

I bent down and took another look. “The fiber didn’t come from the van.”

“Right.”

“Then we might have been wrong assuming the van is where he does what he does to these kids. It might not be the van at all. His rape kit could be anywhere.”

“Well, his almost-rape kit. That’s right.”

I stood up straight and let my thoughts settle. “It makes sense,” I said. “He holds them for several hours, from what we can tell. A van is safe, but it’s not comfortable and it’s not soundproof. He’s got them bound and held. There’s no bathroom, no space, no way to stand up and move around unless he’s got a van conversion. Courtney’s mom said it was a regular van, not a conversion with the extended roof. So why not just take them somewhere roomier, more like home? A bed with a nice wool bedspread on it. Or a blanket?”

“That thought crossed my mind, too. Any likely places come to mind?”

“The guest house on his property.”

“Oh, the profile.”

I looked at Joe and caught the skepticism in his gentle blue eyes. “No,” he said, sensing my argument before I made it. “I think the profiling is a good tool. Those guys are right a lot of the time. It’s just not physical evidence. This is physical evidence. All I’m saying is, what if The Horridus doesn’t have a detached guest house? Then we’re heading down the wrong path the whole time. Look at all the man-hours wasted on real estate listings. That’s all. That’s why I’m the crime lab guy and Strickley is the profile guy. It all helps. They’re all just pieces of the same puzzle.”

“Well, he’s at least got a bedroom or a living room, with something red, made out of wool, in it. And the girls are getting fibers from it on them. And when we find him, we’ll be able to match what’s in the microscope to something this guy has.”

Reilly nodded. “That’s all I’m prepared to say right now. Unless, of course—”

“—He gets rid of it.”

“Right.”

We looked at each other in a silence that grew dreadful.

“What the hell is he doing to these kids for six hours, Terry?”

I couldn’t answer so I didn’t

“There’s something else you should see.”

I began to speculate on how The Horridus might conveniently rid himself of incriminating items. Say he really was undergoing a profound change in behavior, like Strickley had predicted. Say he was selling, or already had sold, his van. Say he was going to sell his house. Why not have a garage sale, too, and shed — just like a snake — not only the skin of who he used to be, but evidence that might damn him? Why not sell the house furnished? Why not burn it down and collect his homeowner’s insurance?

I followed Joe to the counter on the other side of the room. He stopped and looked into one of the lab’s new scanning electron microscopes, then stood back and nodded to me. The magnified object was flat and triangular, with rounded corners. The two sides were just slightly longer than the base. It looked kind of like a guitar pick. Running lengthwise from the middle of the base to the peak was a thin raised ridge. It appeared rough and dusty.

“I spent some time with the netting yesterday,” he said. “I knew it was nylon, and thought it might retain some body oils when The Horridus handled it, but you know how tough plastics can be on blood — it just smears the carbon dust. Plus, how can you lift a continuous print off a mesh? I hung Courtney’s robe and Super-Glued it, just to see what might show. I was right, the cyanoacrylate hung on the prints. There wasn’t anything continuous enough to be useful, but when I was looking at the prints with the glass, I found what you just looked at in the scope. It was folded over once, along the ridge, and caught in one of the squares of the net, like a magazine folded over and put in a mailbox. I thought it was a fish scale, until I remembered Strickley’s profile. Then I thought — snake scale. So I went over the net one inch at a time, looking for more. Nothing. I did the same on the first one — Pamela’s outfit — and struck out there, too. So I took it over to Gordon Marshall at UCI and he said lizard or snake. It’s not an actual scale, it’s a shed impression. Marshall said it was a dorsal scale, from the back. The ridge is called a keel, and the scale type is called a keeled mucronate. Snakes and lizards all over the world have keeled mucronates. But the only local reptiles big enough to have a scale like that one are rattlesnakes and gopher snakes — the others are smooth — no ridge. He said this is from a big animal — maybe four or five feet long.”

“What about Crotalus horridus?”

“Marshall said it could be. There’s no way he can identify the species without more of the shed.”

“Did The Horridus put that scale in the net?”

“Maybe. Or it could have just wedged itself in when he was making the robe. There’s just no way to say.”

I thought for a moment.

“When a snake sheds, it comes off in a long, inverted tube, doesn’t it? I used to find them in the hills, when I was a kid. It’s thin and dry, like paper.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Then how did one scale get removed?”

Joe’s peaceful blue eyes scanned my face and he nodded. “We need to run it through the ALS.”

“I think we do.”

I could feel the thrill of the hunt as Joe prepared the scale for Alternative Light Source. First, he held it with a pair of fine tweezers and ran an open tube of Super Glue near one side. Super Glue emits cyanoacrylate gas, which reacts to body oils and turns white — a process for finding latent prints that was discovered by accident in a U.S. Army crime lab in Japan. Because the scale was relatively small — about the size of the end of a pencil eraser — we’d need to hit it with the ALS to isolate the print, if there was one. Joe held the scale upright in the tweezers and applied the ALS, adjusting the light wavelengths.

“Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”

I stuck my head right beside his for a view of the scale. And there, illuminated in the ALS, I could see the white outlines of the friction ridges — part of a fingerprint.

“We’ve got a bifurcating ridge ending and two minutiae points,” he said, his voice hardly more than a whisper now. “The minutiae points are the gold. This is good, Terry. It will help us in court.”

“But what about now?”

He shook his head slowly. “We can try CAL–ID. But Sacramento won’t give us priority because it isn’t a homicide. And it’s too small to let us do any elimination work with class characteristics. We don’t know if we’re looking for loop, arch, whorl — just the basic Galton classifiers. Maybe they’ll give us a run. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Don’t count on either. But if we get a suspect, we can match him to these ridge endings.”

I looked at the small translucent triangle in Joe Reilly’s tweezer tips.

“He cut it off the main shed, didn’t he? He put it in the mesh. Stuck it in there like a little postcard.”

“He touched it. Somebody touched it. That’s all we can say.”

“Can you eliminate the staff here, and Courtney, and the people who found her, and the cop who responded, and anybody else who handled that netting for us?”

“We’ll have to, or CAL–ID won’t even talk to me.”

“Can you rush it?”

“Just as soon as you rush out of my lab.”

Johnny, Louis and Frances were already at work when I walked into the Sharpe residence at 7:15 A.M. The warrant gave us wide latitude for search, even though the crimes had been committed at a rented house in another part of town. Rick Zant, from the DA’s office, was there, building his case against Chet, Caryn, Marlon and, possibly, Linda. They were all working in separate areas, with Zant buzzing from room to room, hovering over my people like a fly.

We scored.

In the master bedroom, Louis found a handwritten ledger that included Marlon, Danny, Arthur Means and ten other names — undoubtedly fictitious — who appeared to be paying customers. The amounts ranged from $750 to $2,000, though Chet had tried to disguise his bookkeeping by calling them “acres.”

In the “family room,” Johnny found two video cameras on tripods and a collection of tapes featuring Chet’s daughter with various partners over the last three years. The earliest footage was of Linda, about age four, and Chet. Johnny said the San Clemente van was a bust — it had a tan/gold interior and the seller was a family man with black hair, no glasses and no record. So much for the advertising saleswoman, he said — it was a wonder she got his phone number right for the ad.

In the den was a collection of pornography that surprised me by its size. I walked in and found Frances with a profoundly sickened expression on her fair face as she listed the confiscated glossies on her evidence log, then slipped the pictures into a cardboard box.

She was sitting at a desk littered with magazines and loose stills. She looked at me when I walked in, then slid some pictures back into a big bright pink envelope and closed the flap. She seemed unsure of what to do with it, then set it carefully on the stack of photographs in front of her. I can honestly say that I’d never seen such an odd expression on her face before. Sure, there was the disgust you would anticipate, and the revulsion, and plenty of anger. Frances is a tough cop. But along with those predictable emotions there was something else that didn’t seem to fit — shock, disbelief, confusion. She looked at me, shook her head as if trying to clear it, then stared at me some more.

“What,” I said.

“Nothing,” she answered, and her gaze fell to the stacks of obscene pictures before her. “Well, that’s obviously not true, is it? Everything, Terry. Everything vulgar and wrong with humanity is what.”

I took a stack of glossies and looked at them briefly. Chet’s collection went far beyond his own daughter, but his tastes ran to the juvenile, the innocent, the helpless. A lot of it was the old European stuff that used to be legal to make and sell in Holland, Denmark, Germany. When you work sex crimes against youth, you get to know the players. But a lot of it was recent and some of it was even new.

“Swine,” I muttered.

“Pigs wouldn’t do that,” she said sharply.

“Then you think of a word for it.”

“There is no word for it, Naughton.”

When I dropped the photos back to the desk, Frances was looking at me again with the same baffling expression on her handsome, intelligent face.

“Well, I didn’t take these damned pictures,” I said. “You all right?”

“No,” she said, smiling an utterly false smile. “I mean, no. You didn’t take them. I’m sorry. I just... shit... maybe I should just walk these out to the car, get some fresh air. This is hard stuff to take.”

I offered her a hand but she tossed the pink envelope in her evidence box and carried it past me. There were tears in her eyes. The tough thing about crimes against youth — especially sex crimes — is that it’s difficult to employ the gallows humor that cops use as a way to keep things from getting to you. You just can’t say much about a picture of a nine-year-old girl being entered by an adult male. There’s nothing humorous in it; there’s nothing pathetic in it; there’s nothing just or fair in it. There’s only damage and sickness and more damage, and there’s not much you can say to deflect that sickness and damage away from you. You take it straight, head on, like you would a punch with your arms tied behind your back. Try as you might not to, when you look at pictures of things like that, you become part of the continuing story. You become part conspirator, part victim. It stains your soul. If it doesn’t, you are in trouble.

I moved a curtain and looked through the window at Frances as she jammed the box into the trunk of her car, slammed the door shut, then wiped the sleeve of her coat under her eyes. She stood there for a moment, looking at the house — looking back at me, in fact — with a furious confusion on her face. Frances is the mother of two teenage daughters. It was easy to wonder if she might have had enough of crimes against youth. There were plenty of other places in the department that could use a cop like Frances. I let the curtain fall back into place.

I decided to let her work alone with her disgust. Sometimes things are worse when someone else is right there to witness it.

So I helped Johnny go through the garage and tried to keep Zant satisfied that we were getting everything he needed. He’s a good prosecutor, but I’d rather he didn’t hang around my crime scenes and searches. He’s never contaminated anything I know of, but there’s a first time for everything. Zant is a young go-getter, and like a lot of young go-getters, he’s gotten more crime scene training from movies than from the district attorney’s office.

Two hours later we were finished. Frances took me aside while the others walked down the driveway toward their cars.

She still hadn’t lost that look of disbelief.

“Frances, are you all right?”

“I’m all right, Terry. Are you?”

She waited, staring at me.

“I believe so.”

“Well, good then. I’m going to drop this stuff off in evidence, and take a half day off. You mind?”

“Not at all.”

She set her briefcase on the hood of her department sedan and opened it She handed me a list of names and addresses, computer generated, double spaced, two sheets.

“These people listed houses for sale over the last two months in Orange County. They’ve all got detached buildings on the lots — granny flats, maid’s quarters, studios. I skipped anything over half a million, on the strength of Strickley’s profile. We’re looking for a working guy, middle class, maybe. Anyhow, there are eighteen of them, but six of the listing parties are women. That leaves twelve. They’re the ones with the stars by them. I haven’t had time to get ages, or anything else on the owners. The listing agents aren’t too keen on giving up that kind of information. Maybe you should give this to Johnny.”

I glanced down the list: Alberhill... Chavez... Fitzgerald... Evans... Johnson... Nguyen... Scalfia... Tuvell.

“Thanks, Frances.”

That damned look again.

“Is there anything I can—”

“—I just need some time to think, Terry.”

“Take all you need, Frances. We’ll hold the fort for you.”

When I got back to the Sheriff building, one of my underclass friends was loitering outside, near the steps. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks and had thought of him more than once. His name is Charlie Carter, but a lot of the county employees call him Shopping Carter, because he pushes around a supermarket cart that contains his livelihood. The city of Santa Ana runs off the homeless every once in a while, due to a no-camping ordinance passed not long ago by the city council. They disappear for a few days, then reemerge again, only to be run off again.

Charlie Carter is small and black and worked as a janitor years ago here in Santa Ana until he was shot in the head by a student robber. He’s never been “right” since, and though he gets disability pay, no one knows what he does with it. I’ve wondered if he was pushing his janitor’s cart when he got hit, but I’ve never asked him. I wonder if it might help explain the way he lives now. Charlie pushes his cart in the streets of Santa Ana, weathering storms in whatever shelter or church will have him, plying his trade around the county and city hall buildings downtown. He’s always on the move. He vanishes, then he reappears.

His trade is information. There’s a tattered pasteboard sign that hangs off one side of his cart, announcing “KNOWLEDGE $1 ($4 Deposit).” Neatly arranged in the cart is a clip file of fairly astonishing depth. Charlie gets most of it from the papers and magazines, which he picks up for free when they’re thrown out. He makes the file dividers from cardboard boxes. The last time I talked to him he was saving up for a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica so he could add history to his store of Knowledge. Of course, he’d need a separate cart just for those. We once talked about the difficulty of managing two carts instead of one. But he was adamant at the time. “Without history,” he said, “information’s meaningless.”

I shook his dirty hand and studied his dirty face.

“You’re looking fit, Charlie.”

“I don’ fit. Don’ want to.”

“Still want some encyclopedias?”

“Got a set picked out over at the thrift store on Fourth. Nineteen-eighty-fours, black vinyl, good shape. Comes with the Great Ideas books, all fifty-four volumes. Plato to Freud. Hundred bucks.”

“You’re going to need a double-decker cart for all that.”

“I applied for a vendor’s license from the city. They denied it.”

“Why?”

“They don’ tell you why. Maybe ’cause they think I stole this cart”

“Didn’t you?”

“Found it abandoned, Naughton. I don’ steal things. I’m an educator. How about some knowledge today?”

“I need knowledge today,” I said, which was true. I often buy knowledge from Shopping Carter. Some of it, I’ve actually used.

“What’s the topic?” he asked.

I thought for a second. Charlie doesn’t handle biography, opinion, entertainment reviews or editorials, because he thinks they’re all “meaningless.” Meaningless is one of Shopping Carter’s favorite words. And he doesn’t handle technology because it changes too fast and his cart’s too small to handle it. For some reason, I couldn’t get Frances’s expression out of my mind, or the image of that bright pink envelope that seemed to disturb her so much.

“I want to know about... um... burnout. Occupational burnout.”

“Law enforcement or other?”

“Law enforcement.”

Charlie nodded as he always does, then looked down at his neatly packed cart. “Time had a decent piece on that just a few months back.”

He ran his dirty hands along the tops of the files, bending them back to read his labels. The late April sunshine bore down on us and I noted his heavy sweaters and filthy pants; his shoes that looked so large; his Angels cap jammed down close to his eyes, touching his sunglasses. I could see the dirt in his hair and smell the odor coming off his clothes. His few personal items were arranged on the bottom level of the cart, where you’d put your case of beer or your economy-size detergent.

He produced the article. It was a photocopied one, which meant that he had sold the original and received in return a clean copy. He likes the copies because they’re uniform in size and arrange easier. They don’t tear as readily. That’s what the $4 deposit is for — when you bring back a fresh copy of your piece, you get your money back, and Charlie gets the good replica. If you don’t come back with a copy, you rob Charlie of some Knowledge and yourself of $4. The title was:

“This looks good,” I said.

“It is good.” He studied me through his dark, smudged glasses. I got out my wallet, found a five and gave it to him.

“You gettin’ close to that Horridus yet?”

I considered before I spoke. “Closer.”

“He’ll be on the Web, you know. Pedophiles love talking to each other on the Web.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Help each other out. Trade pictures and stories. Get moral support from other people like themselves. Kind of like a self-esteem workshop.”

“I’d think that was funny if it wasn’t so sick,” I said.

“Fetishes.”

“What’s that, Charlie?”

“Fetishes is where it starts for the pervs. In childhood. They get attached to whatever they’re lookin’ at when their penises feel funny. Then later in life, they’re still attached. That’s why men dig women’s shoes and underwear — see a lot of their mother’s shoes and underwear. Because they’re small and down low when they’re babies, so those things are right in their sight line. Scientific fact, that is. Great piece in Esquire a couple of years back.”

“I’ll take it.”

It was an original, tattered and limp with the years of storage in Shopping Carter’s portable knowledge bin. I got out my wallet for another five, but Charlie waived the deposit.

“You’re good for it,” he said.

“Thanks.”

I read the callout, blocked out in red in the middle of the page:

I felt my breath catch and my eyes get sharp. I thought: a little girl enrobed in white netting. A serpent’s scale inserted into the web of the net. The girl. The snake. The web. The net. What is the story here? What is the narrative behind these objects?

I shook Charlie’s hand again and started up the stairs with my new knowledge.

At my work station I checked messages on the phone and computer and called Joe Reilly to see how the clearance was going. He said he had three more sets of prints to compare with the print on the snake scale, and still had to print the woman who had originally found Courtney wandering in the wilderness of Caspers Wilderness Park.

I got out Frances’s list of home sellers and looked it over. For starters, I’d need ages on all twelve of the male sellers. That meant twelve real estate agents to call and convince to release such information to me. Going in person would up my chances of success, but it would take days instead of hours. I called the agents for the first two listings that Frances had starred — Alberhill and Chavez — but the first agent was out of the office, and the second said she couldn’t give out that kind of thing on the phone. Who really would? I thought. Two of the listing agents were from offices close to our building. They were both in, and I made appointments to see them, right away.

But before I left the building I wanted to know what was inside the pink envelope that Frances had set in her box just before she barged by me and stashed it in the trunk of her car. I wanted to know what had made her look at me that way through the window of the Sharpe house, what had forced her to leave her job for the rest of the day.

I went down to the evidence room and asked the deputy for the case no. 98-1145 boxes, just logged in. I signed for it, then looked through Frances’s heavy box of smut, but the pink envelope wasn’t there. It wasn’t in any of the other boxes we took, either.

I went back upstairs to see if Frances might still be around. She was. I saw her sitting in Sheriff Jim Wade’s office, intently leaning toward him as she talked. There was no sense in interrupting. Whatever was eating at Frances wasn’t mine to know. There would be some rational explanation for the missing envelope. Besides, I had two listing agents waiting for me, and ten more to go after that.

Shopping Carter was gone when I came down the steps a few minutes later.