Where Serpents Lie

Sixteen

Darien Aftergood was an old acquaintance of mine from high school. We were both second-string guards for the freshman basketball team, the Laguna Artists, and we went 3-14 that year. I couldn’t really handle the ball and he couldn’t really shoot, but we had the boundless hustle of second stringers everywhere. We were skinny kids who rarely had our heads in the game. We left the hoops after that first year. He started running with the art-theater crowd and I spent my afternoon surfing Brooks Street. Darien must have taken our mascot name literally. Now he’s an artist and gallery owner in Laguna, with a studio/gallery/apartment downtown on Ocean Avenue. Darien is plugged into the art world at a hundred different sockets. He guest-curates for the Orange County Art Museum; he organizes shows at his own space; he is a critic for two national magazines and his work has been collected and shown around the world. He’s a photographer who manipulates his images in the lab. The results are images that sometimes look like photographs, but aren’t photographs at all.

He tried to explain to me, through the painful haze of my hangover, how he manages to create pictures that look so real but aren’t.

“We have to define ‘reality’ if we’re going to get anywhere, Terry. The reality of the image is what you see. It doesn’t exist until the artist creates it. To say it isn’t real misses a large part of the whole point. For instance, how can you say that this image isn’t a reality?”

I looked at the picture on the wall in front of us. We were standing in the main room of his little gallery. The art was done by a New York compatriot of Darien’s, and it depicted a huge can of tuna fish, upright on its side in the middle of an expansive American prairie. Two photographically “real” people stood in the foreground and looked upward at the can. The photographically “real” tuna fish can was about sixty feet tall.

“But that scene never took place,” I said. “It might be a real image, but it’s based on a false event.”

“No, not really, Terry. It’s not based on an event at all. The event is the image. The event doesn’t take place until the artist brings it into being.”

“But there’s no reality there.”

“Literal visual truth — as you’re referring to it — died decades ago. We photographers killed it. Even National Geographic was reworking its photographs for the magazine, I mean taking some pretty big liberties by the standards of journalism. Look at any supermarket tabloid. You can see the splices quite easily. But on a work like this, you can’t. It’s a matter of degree.”

“How did he do it?”

Darien explained the process: a combination of digital imaging and an Iris printer, which uses continual ink-jet technology to apply colored ink to paper or canvas; photographs altered with painted passages, combined with monoprints of video footage of computer-generated images; enlarged Polaroid prints; and images drawn from a digital file. You just scan in an image, he said, then go to work on it with the Adobe Photoshop program on your computer and hurl 129 megabytes of power at it.

“I’ve been working on some traditional, labor-intensive processes too,” he said. “That involves producing photographic prints using pigment transfer and platinum printing. The pigment transfer is suspending the pigment in gelatin or gum Arabic, then building up layers of the color. The interesting thing about the older process is that the color will be stable on the paper for five hundred years. It’s time consuming and expensive.”

I nodded. The price tag for the giant tuna can was $1,400.

“Is it one of a kind?”

“It is now, but we can pull prints. It’s up to the artist, how many copies he wants out there.”

I thought. “What about... what if... what if the artist had certain images to begin with? Say, photographs. Pictures of a background, and pictures of a subject. Could he manipulate those to create an image that looked like this certain person was doing something in this certain place?”

Darien smiled and glanced at the work on the wall. “The guy on the left there, that’s me. And I guarantee you I never stood on a Nebraska prairie and stared up at a monster can of tuna fish.”

“Then it’s easy.”

“No. It’s complicated. There are new tools now. That’s what all this technology is — it’s just tools. They’re powerful tools and you have to know how to use them. They’re expensive. No, it’s not easy, but a lot of things are possible now that used to be impossible. Most of these artists might tell you that making it look easy is part of the art. Others, well, they like to let the technology show. Two different aesthetics, really.”

“If I showed that tuna fish picture to an expert in photography at the FBI, would he be able to tell it’s fake?”

“Wouldn’t take the FBI to see that it’s fake, Terry! In the way you mean ‘fake,’ that is.”

“Okay. Say it was just a can of tuna fish on a table. And the tools behind the image were digital processing and the Iris printer. Then, could that expert tell by examining the picture that it was done without a real can of tuna fish?”

“It was done with a real can of tuna fish. The real can of tuna fish was reproduced and stored by the digital file. It’s as ‘real’ a can of tuna fish in the file as it is in a picture. You know?”

“But a photograph is supposed to capture an image.”

“Wrong. A photograph creates an image. That’s the difference now. That’s where it’s all changing. Madison Avenue has been working on it for decades. But right now, the explosion in tools has made things possible that weren’t possible just three years ago. Three years from now... who knows?”

We toured the gallery and looked at other works.

Some were obviously “created” — like the tuna can; others — like a portrait of a woman with her cat — were absolutely convincing as plain old photographs.

“Why’s that one so special?” I asked. “There’s millions of cats like that.”

“The cat’s real. The woman doesn’t exist. She was created on a computer.”

I stepped up close to look at the lines on her face, the singular expression in her eyes, the details of her hands. You could see the wrinkles in her skin, the underlying veins, the blemishes and hairs.

“You can make anything,” I said.

“Almost.”

“What can’t you make?”

Darien crossed his arms and raised a hand to his face. He set his chin into the little cradle of thumb and curled forefinger. “I’m not sure. But why don’t you tell me what you want. And I’ll tell you if it’s makeable.”

“All right. I want five-by-seven photographs of a woman bathing her son. I want the woman to be a real woman, and I’ve got photographs of her face you can work with. The boy is real, and I can give you pictures of his face, also. But he’s never actually been bathed by this woman. They’ve never actually seen each other. And I want the bathroom to be a certain bathroom, and I’ve got pictures of that to give you, too. And when you’ve created an image of this woman bathing a kid she’s never seen in a genuine bathtub, I’m going to send the thing off to the FBI’s best scientists and I don’t want them to be able to say it was staged, retouched, enhanced, created, digitally manufactured or Iris ink-jet printed. I want them to say, yeah, that’s a picture of a woman giving a boy a bath. It’s real. It’s genuine. It happened. It’s evidence.”

“Color or black and white?”

“Color.”

“What’s your budget?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Consider it done. There will be some limitations on it. If the image required visual information that wasn’t in the photographs you supplied, it would have to be generated by computer, by an artist who could extrapolate, who could imagine what was missing. Say he needed the inside of her left hand, but you didn’t have it on film. He’d have to create it.”

“Then the FBI guys would see a fake hand?”

“They’d have to compare it to the real one for that. There’d be no way — just based on the image — for them to know that it was created, if it was created skillfully. And Terry, that document he’d create, that picture you’d finally show the FBI, it would be totally, 100 percent genuine. It would be — or could be — finally, after all the work was done, just a simple, authentic photograph.”

“Even though the event depicted never happened.”

“It didn’t happen until the artist created it.”

“It never happened, Darien. What you see in the picture did not fucking happen. Did it? The woman never gave the kid a bath. Did she?”

“Okay. It never happened.”

“Good Christ, no wonder we could never run a simple pick and roll.”

Silence for a moment, my anger waning.

“We were bad basketball players, weren’t we?” he asked.

“Didn’t you get ten against Newport Harbor?”

“Eight. I never got double digits my whole career.”

“Me neither.”

We sat in his office for a while and talked about the old days, the new days, some of the days in between. Then the conversation got thin.

“What are you working on, Terry? Can I ask?”

I considered my reply for a moment. “Darien, there’s a mudbath pending for a very close friend of mine. We’re talking about somebody getting royally screwed by pictures of something he didn’t do.”

“That’s bad.”

“It’s worse than bad. It’s a career, a life, maybe a prison term. This guy didn’t do what they say he did. What the pictures say he did.”

“They’d have to have more than just pictures, wouldn’t they?”

“For a court of law, maybe. For everything else, the pictures will do quite nicely. They’ll ruin him.”

“Blackmail?”

“No. The cops are sending the pictures to the FBI and the alleged perp is trying to save his ass.”

Darien sat back, fiddling with a pencil on his desktop. “The anomaly would have to be in the image, then — not in the medium.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, if portions of the image are unique, the way a person is unique, a fingerprint is unique, then anything digitally created could be shown to be inaccurate.”

“But you’d need the real thing to prove it.”

“Right. You’d need the mother, or the boy, or the bathroom.”

I thought about this. Me. The cave. The girl.

Who has pictures of me?

Ardith, the enthused amateur: many. Melinda, an occasional snapshooter: a few. Louis, Johnny and Frances, from our frequent socializing: maybe. Donna, via file footage: some.

And everyone else at the Sheriff’s Department, through my personnel file: left side, right side, straight on.

I got Johnny by phone just before lunch. I shamed him into faxing me a copy of Amanda’s sketch of The Horridus, as described by Brittany Elder. I had to go to a pharmacy in Laguna with a fax service to receive the thing, banished as I was from my home. I asked about the real estate listings and Johnny said they were down to three male sellers of detached-unit homes.

“If the male sellers don’t pan out, try the women,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. It was my first whiff of actual day-to-day banishment, and it weighed my heart like a death in the family. I was putting Johnny Escobedo in an impossible jam.

“Shit, Johnny, I’m sorry,” I said.

“I understand, man. I really do.”

He didn’t rush to hang up on me, for which I loved him dearly.

“The worst part, Johnny, is I’m out. The Horridus is planning number four, we’ve got kids in ditches, infants in file cabinets and pervs all over the place and I’m sitting here with my thumb up my ass.”

“If it didn’t happen it didn’t happen. I know it didn’t happen.”

A desperate heart is a soft one. Mine practically melted. “I love you, man. And I don’t even want your beer. Though I could use one right now.”

“I should go.”

“What’s Reilly got on the Elder scene?”

“Still working. Nothing yet. The news here is the park ranger out at Caspers.”

He told me about a ranger named Bret Stefanic who was found murdered the evening before.

“Way out in the woods off the Ortega,” said Johnny. “Guy cut his throat wide open. Didn’t really grab my interest until the ME said he’d been bitten three times by a venomous snake — probably a rattlesnake.”

I thought a moment.

“It looked like Stefanic stopped somebody out there. His citation book was out, found it in the weeds. The last three tickets were ripped out of the book. We think the perp was written up, surprised him somehow. Reilly said he died from the slashing. The snake bites were premortem. Very strange, uh... Frank.”

Reduced to Frank. It was what I had left.

“Crotalus horridus?”

“We’re sending out some of Stefanic’s blood to a toxicologist over at Irvine and a herpetologist in Chicago. They both told me already there’d be no way to differentiate one rattlesnake venom from another, once it’s in the blood. That’s if the bites even were from a rattler. The ME said venomous snake. There’s lots of those.”

“Well, not around here there aren’t, Johnny.”

“That’s what I mean. The only poisonous ones found here in the wild are the rattlers. But what if it’s a cobra, or a water moccasin or something?”

I was silent for a moment, as I tried to imagine The Horridus out in the far reaches of a wilderness. It fit. He let his victims go in places like that. In fact, he’d let Courtney go in the Caspers Wilderness Park. He liked the outdoors. It made sense, but not a lot.

“Where were the bites?”

“Buttocks, leg, face.”

“Bitten while he was alive.”

“Correct. And the ME said he was bitten just before he died. The venom hadn’t been assimilated very far into the tissue. He died not long after the bites.”

I just couldn’t put it together. “So this inquiring ranger tries to cite a guy for something, gets his throat cut, then falls down and a rattlesnake that just happens to be in the grass bites him once on the ass, once on the leg, then finished with a bite to his face? Johnny, there’s a whole lot of something wrong with that picture.”

“I know. Let me ask you something, Terry. If we strike out on the male sellers, why try the women?”

“Mother. Wife, girlfriend, sister.”

“That’s out of profile, isn’t it?”

“You know me, Johnny — I throw the net wide as I can.”

Another silence while Johnny vetted my methods. I’ve long been known at the department as the guy who goes the extra mile when he doesn’t have to. Maybe checking the women was just a waste of time. Apparently, Johnny Escobedo thought so.

“Hey, I should go.”

“Johnny, one more thing. I got this fax from Strickley at the Bureau. He found a weird thread that leads back to Texas. I think it’s worth—”

“—I already laid it on Ish. No dice.”

“Ishmael?”

“He’s acting head of CAY.”

“Ah, holy shit—”

“—And he said we’re better off looking here than looking in Texas, considering we don’t work in Texas. I’m trying to get them to send us a file. Slow going — the whole thing’s cool by now.”

My balls frosted with the news of Ishmael as acting head of my unit. It was all I could do to keep my mind halfway on track. “It’s worth it for one of us — one of you — to spend a couple of days back there. Who’d you talk to? Welborn?”

“Yeah. He’s... hey, Frank, I gotta go.”

“Listen, Johnny, there’s one more thing. I know I keep saying that. But we got to try the two dating services again.”

“None of the names matched.”

“But those were members. What about employees, service people who have both accounts, subcontractors and vendors?”

There was a pause. “That’s right, uh, Frank. I hadn’t thought of that. All right, man. Over and out.”

“Check the women sellers if the men—”

Click.

I got the fax and walked down to the beach. I sat on a green bench. The bench had a plaque on it, dedicated to Edward Kilfoy — 1967–73. Six years old. What happened to him? I watched the people walk by. Some kids chased the retreating remnants of a wave, stopped with their skinny legs bent, then screamed and ran back in ahead of the next one. Good, cold, April, Pacific Ocean brine, I thought. I opened the folded fax. There he was: short hair cut in a flattop, swept back, and a tight, narrow face. High cheekbones and a small mouth. Sleepy eyes, brown, according to the description. Medium everything. A sport coat, collared shirt, tan trousers. No glasses. I thought of Brittany telling me how bad his breath was. Should we have put that in the description? I recalled Steven Wicks’s version. They weren’t really close. Similarities, yes, but only general ones. What I wouldn’t give for a picture of him as good as the ones they had of me, to turn into billboards for freeways all over the county. I wondered if this rendition would be good enough to get results. I had to think not. But it was another piece, another tool.

I drove out Laguna Canyon Road to my street — former street — and passed it. What a sad-strange feeling, to pass a place that used to have your home on it. I U-turned, headed back, U-turned again and made a right onto Canyon Edge.

There was no reason for the house to look different than it had less than a day earlier, but it did. The pepper tree outside was bigger, lazier, sadder. The little house seemed to have missed me. I pulled into the driveway and sat there for a while. Moe had missed me, and I saw the proof. He stood on his hind legs with his paws up on the fence, barking and wagging his tail. I rolled down the window. The pepper tree dropped a cluster of dried-out pinkish balls to the hood. The cluster skidded across the paint in the breeze. How on earth, I thought, have you managed to mess everything up so bad? Mel would be at work; Penny at school. I doubted she’d changed the locks this fast. After taking a deep breath I swung open the car door and got out. Moe mugged me inside the gate and I got down on my knees and grabbed the thick fur and skin around his neck. He plopped over and I scratched his yellow soft belly. I knelt there for a moment, petting my dog, trying to look integral. No one would know I wasn’t. Right?

But my heart was thumping as I tried my key. It worked. I let myself in as I’d done a thousand times before, and closed the door behind me. My heart was still pounding. The smell of the place got me: the old wood and varnish of the floors, the faint aroma of food cooked recently, the fresh femininity of Melinda and Penny, all hovering nicely above the scent of Moe’s dogness.

So, having burgled my way onto private property, I went to Melinda’s study. Moe clicked along beside me. I caught Melinda’s smell in here too, but stronger. I tried to ignore it. The drapes were pulled shut and the room was cool. I turned on her computer and booted it up. It’s a fast, strong machine, supplied by the department for Melinda’s Fraud and Computer Crime work at home. I got onto the Web and got myself to a site I’d been to many times before.

After the usual delays and waiting, I got myself to the Web site. Fawnskin. Interesting word, isn’t it? For one, it’s the name of a mountain community in Southern California. You think of snow and slopes and cabins. Beyond that, it suggests something sensually engaging, something tactile and pleasant. It suggests youth and the touching of youth. After a few hours on the sex net — and I had spent many there as part of my job — you start to learn the vernacular. The home page was boring enough, with a slow graphic of a snowy mountain with a ski run going up the side, and big letters at the top, announcing LOCAL SNOW! Below the title was the home page synopsis for the site:

I scrolled forward to the list of realtors who handled rentals. Fine. The site had that dull, legitimate face of business. But to me it felt like the jacket for something else entirely, which is how the illegal networkers hide their faces from innocent browsers. The last realtor listed had a different Web site, so I clicked there and waited. It isn’t a realtor’s home page at all — it’s a coded chat room schedule for men whose sexual preference is for children. A chat “room” is comprised of Internet Relay Chat, IRC for short. Providers sell access to private and public IRC as part of their service — anybody can use a room, as long as they can find it. At any rate, I was looking for some men who call themselves the Midnight Ramblers. I know the individual who updates this changing chat room schedule, and he knows me. He was in federal lockup between 1986 and 1989 for distributing child pornography across state lines. I was the one who busted him, long before our CAY unit was established. I allow him to operate here because his roving band of Web perverts are open to my lurking, so long as I don’t shut them down. They don’t know that Mal — my Web name — is Terry Naughton, the same way that I’m not supposed to know who they really are. Some I do; most I don’t. I knew the chat room site, and I was pretty certain the pervs would be talking. But I checked the schedule to make sure. It was just a matter of reading the Farmer’s Almanac quote at the end of the page. It was always followed by a series of random-looking numbers that appear to be a mistake or a code in the posting. They just run them together for the next date and times, backward.

May 2, noon to 3 P.M., and May 3, 1 A.M. to 3 A.M.

Easy. From years of experience I knew that noon was one of their usual times to yak it up through IRC. The Midnight Ramblers were currently in session.

I wound my way through the search engine and found the private room. The name Mal was my admission.

This is sex-net talk. You learn it after a few hours on the computer, networking with sick fucks who don’t have a whole lot better to do, apparently. Sex talk is legal. Even sex talk between pedophiles is legal, to a point. But it’s esoteric, cryptic and circuitous. It’s exclusive. And I was lucky right then, because at least one other twisted soul out there in our strange huge world was lurking the chat room:

There it was. Right off the bat I was remembered. Nice. I hadn’t been on-line with the Ramblers for three or four months.

I sat there for a moment in Melinda’s study, surprised by E-Rection’s assumption that I had already dealt with one I. R. Shroud, the man who “delivers the goods.”

My scalp tightened and my hands felt cold. I had not dealt with I. R. Shroud. So someone else had used my name — Mal — on the kid porn web.

I couldn’t wait too long, or my embarrassment might be inferred.

The Thai holiday, of course, refers to the places in Thailand where children can be bought for sex. It’s every perv’s dream to stay at Pattaya — the country’s leading sex resort — and have intercourse with children to their heart’s content.

Careful, I thought: you can miss a beat here, and the chat room will empty like a theater on fire. What I needed was the approved way to contact Shroud — more than likely his e-mail box — but I couldn’t just ask without blowing the whole ruse. I had to stay cool, state my interest and get off the lot, like working a car salesman for a better deal.

Good enough — O-Ring would pass the word. They were gone and I was alone again in Melinda’s study. It’s such a strange thing to slide into the Web like that, connect down to the underbelly. It feels like you’re geezing into a vein of pure wickedness. And it’s always there, always around and always invisible. It’s like a stream made out of nothing but vapors, evil and endless, and it runs through everything.

The guys were probably happy to have Mal back, another p-phile out there, another pedofreak, a man like themselves, a guy who considers himself a gourmet, an artist, an aesthetician of the world’s daintiest delicacies. They love to riddle and pun. They love anagrams, symbols, innuendo, code. What the hell kind of name is I. R. Shroud, anyway, besides fabricated? IRS? Internal Revenue Cover? I Am Death? It goes on and on. They love word games that make them look bright. They’ll tell you the art and practice of “loving children” goes back to ancient Greece, or the Romans, or to the Egyptians or the Bible. They’ve even got an organization — the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which has a newsletter and a lobby in Washington. Really, that’s no lie. Everything they do — from the children to the verbiage to the little games — is a way of trying to mask their inadequacies. And they’re about as inadequate as men can get. That’s why they’re despised, even in prison — the cons will turn them into bleeding punchcards in no time at all. The cons hate child molesters even more than they hate cops. A child-molester cop? He wouldn’t last long in the big house. I didn’t want to try, though the idea crossed my mind that I might have to.

This guy, I. R. Shroud, had porn for sale. Maybe he was a buyer, too. Maybe a collector. He might even create it himself. Which was an interesting thought, considering my circumstances.

I always get off the kid porn Web feeling like I should take a long bath in acid, or have my skin peeled and replaced. You touch your finger to that invisible stream, and it’ll try to suck you in. It goes right for your soul.

I shut down the computer and wandered the house for a while. I stood for a moment in Melinda’s bedroom — my bedroom until last night — and registered its presence. The furniture was all hers, as was most of the furniture in the house. I’d left “ours” with Ardith; Jordan had left “theirs” with Mel. I’d never fully acclimated to putting my ass onto the same couch that had cushioned Jordan Ishmael’s. It was odd, though. With me gone, the room didn’t seem very different than it did with me in it. The whole house didn’t seem very different. I remembered our brief contentions over what came into the new home and what stayed in storage (mostly my stuff), how things were to be arranged, how the household would be organized. She was particular about what went where — furnishings, electronics, pictures, knickknacks. Melinda had her way on almost every point, and to be truthful, that was fine with me. I’ve got no eye for design. But it was strange to see how little I’d influenced my own home. Take out Terry, his clothes, personal effects and dog, and there wasn’t much left to prove he’d ever lived here. I felt leased.

I drove to the nearest computer store and got a slick new machine set up with a fast modem and plenty of memory to get me into the Net. It was a portable one and quite expensive, about the price of my first new car, a 1975 VW. I paid cash. I considered it a sound investment in reclaiming my life from whoever was trying to take it. I might have bought a powerful automatic handgun too, and learned how to use it, but I already had one and already did.

I really wanted to get to know this I. R. Shroud. Though the other kid-rapers on the Net thought we had dealt with each other before, we hadn’t. I’d know, wouldn’t I? Even during my months of blackout drinking, I’d remember purchasing pornography from one I. R. Shroud. Correct? But somebody on the Web had used my name to get to the Ramblers, and that person had gotten product from Shroud. E-Rection had told me so.

I was walking out of the computer store when an idea hit me. Just one of those little blips of thought that race in from nowhere and slide away forever if you don’t slow them down and make them feel welcome. I wondered if this pretending Mal might have requested images of a certain guy. They’re called customs, where the customer wants his own body in the image. Naturally, the ultimate pornography features yourself. But in this case, Mal had ordered images of someone else — me. Interesting. I locked the new machine in the trunk with a corollary thought: no one except a few of my cohorts at the department knew that I was Mal, or that the name would get him into the Ramblers’ chat room. In fact, I couldn’t think of anyone I worked with outside of CAY who knew my handle. Johnny, Louis and Frances. Oh, and of course, supervising lieutenant Jordan Ishmael.

I got my stitches removed at a walk-in clinic in Laguna — not the one where I took my son, because that one has since gone out of business. Fun. The puncture wounds were ugly and the scars would be small but definite.

Then I stopped by a travel agency and booked a little two-day vacation. I needed it. American Airlines to Dallas/Ft. Worth, Alamo Rental Car. Holiday Inn in Wichita Falls. Just the kind of place where there’s enough to keep you busy, and the rest of the time you can forget the world you left behind, and hope it forgets you.