Where Serpents Lie

Seventeen

Wichita Falls is in north central Texas, way up by the Oklahoma border, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from D/FW International Airport. Those are Texas hours, by the way — quite a bit longer than the ones we have in California. The city lies in the Red River Valley, also the name of a tune that is difficult to get out of your head once you hear it. I heard it on the radio. It didn’t matter, because I’ve always liked it. I clipped along in the rental Olds at the speed limit, which — I remember from the stories of friends once stationed out at Sheppard Air Force Base — is strictly enforced.

The land is green in April, and always flat. You can see oil rigs and water towers far out in the distance against the vast sky, and have little idea of how far away they really are. Oil goes boom and bust out there, and right now, it’s mostly bust. There’s some ranching and farming — cattle and cotton. It was a big cattle center for a while. I always thought the Texans were smart to exploit their land for beef and oil, two staples this country will always need.

The locals are quick to point out two things of interest. First is that Larry McMurtry lives near here, and he is just a regular guy. You see him all the time. Second is that Wichita Falls sits in “Tornado Alley,” as mentioned by a convenience store employee, the Holiday Inn desk clerk and a desk officer at the WFPD, who answered my arrival call to his captain. The desk clerk told me the big one of ’64 flattened her parents’ house and threw a heavy steel mascot steer that once adorned a local butcher shop some eight hundred yards into a cotton field. It was found there, upright, the next day. It also blew blades of straw into a soft-drink bottle that her dad discovered, unopened and perfectly intact, after the twister passed. She said she’s seen the bottle and it’s true — he still has it on his fireplace in the new house they built.

Police Captain Sam Welborn had a friendly, green-eyed face with a smile that seemed half for me and half for himself. He seemed amused. He was tall and big boned, with thinning black hair and an air of congeniality. He was the kind of big friendly cop you wouldn’t want to get riled up. He handed me file 199591, then rolled back on his chair and spit a brown tobacco blast into a plastic cup. I could smell the wintergreen.

“She was a real sweet girl, they say. Good student, minded her parents real good. It was a pretty big deal here, when she went missin’.”

I opened the folder. “We’ve got a guy who’s taken three in less than two months. Hasn’t raped them yet. Hasn’t killed them yet. He dresses them up in old clothes, these lacy robes and hoods, then cuts them loose out in the woods. We think he’s escalating.”

“This one here had a thing about clothes. Trying to get young girls to put them on.”

“That’s what got our attention.”

“FBI?”

“Yeah.”

“Those boys can be pushy sometimes, but they’re pretty sharp, too.”

I scanned through the missing persons’ report on Mary Lou Kidder. She left school a little late after talking to a teacher, never came home. A woman who lived on Mary Lou’s route home from school said she saw a white van parked on her street that she hadn’t seen before and never saw again. She didn’t notice who was driving it, and she didn’t see anybody get in or out. Mary Lou Kidder had been gone now for two years, one month and three days. There was a picture of her from school — a round-faced, happy-looking girl with bangs and a bow in her hair.

“We couldn’t connect the clothes guy with Mary Lou,” said the captain. “But we still think he took her.”

“I’d think that, too.”

In line with that assumption, the WFPD had included in Mary Lou’s file the incident reports, witness and subject interviews on the UNSUB Male who’d been trying to outfit school girls in free clothes that weren’t new. The physical description was somewhat similar to our early Horridus: white male, early thirties, medium build, eyeglasses, beard and mustaches. The cops had even put together a composite sketch of the suspect. I took a copy of our first Horridus attempt from my briefcase and compared the two. He looked not unlike Amanda’s version from Steven Wicks, with the facial hair and glasses. The Texas version was fuller in the face, and his hair was longer. The glasses were shaped differently. Both sketches were frustratingly vague. I handed our sketch, and the file, over the desk to Welborn.

“Hmm. Eyes look the same. He’s got that... intellectual look. Like a guy who went to college, maybe. But these sketches — seems they’re either right there or way off.”

“I know.”

“I’ll tell ya, we passed that picture out to everybody in town, twice. We had it on the TV and all the papers. We thought we’d probably run him out, then the girl went missing. Man, it was bad. Just breaks your heart when something like that happens on your watch.”

“I know that, too, Captain.”

He studied me with his clear green eyes. I could see the lump of dip stuck up under his cheek, and smell the wintergreen flavoring.

“My personal belief is that he wasn’t from this town,” Welborn said. “Now, I can’t substantiate that with anything concrete, but I believe it. See, we get to know our people here pretty well. We only got about a hundred thousand in Wichita, and we get to know ’em. You got your black element on the other side of Flood Street, then you got your Mexicans mostly grouped up in the north end, around Scotland Park and the river. This fella was Caucasian. Preying on his own type. And that group is pretty well connected up. They recognize each other, mostly. We recognize them. Know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“I think he lived somewhere close by. Not here, though. It’s just a theory.”

I took back the file and scanned through. “If I wanted to check real estate listings for the time period after Mary Lou Kidder disappeared, who would you recommend?”

“Katie Butler, over at Coldwell Banker. Happy to make a call for you. What’s the idea behind that?”

“If you smoked him out of town and he owned a home, he’d sell. The Bureau has a strong hunch that our guy lives in a place that has a detached second unit. If your guy is our guy, maybe he lived in one here, too.”

“Well, the big mansions in Country Club all have servants’ quarters. Rent them out now, mostly.”

“We wouldn’t anticipate him coming from that kind of wealth. We’re thinking middle class. A house with a granny flat or maybe even a detached garage he could convert.”

Welborn’s green eyes settled on me again. “Convert into what?”

“A place to take them. His victims.”

“You got evidence of that?”

“Some.”

“The Feds do up one of those profiles for you?”

“They did.”

He shook his head. “I always thought that was voodoo, myself. But that’s just me. I hope you catch your guy. I hope he’s our guy, too. We can execute him once in each state.”

“If you’d be willing to call Ms. Butler, I’d much appreciate it.”

He set his dip cup on the desk and dialed out. “Katie, this is Sam. How ya doin’ over there, sweetheart?”

Katie Butler was stout and wide faced, with a swirl of red hair done up stiff. She smiled like she’d known me all her life. She welcomed me to Wichita — the locals all seemed to drop the Falls — and said if I ever wanted to move here, it was a buyers’ market, great deals all over, get three times the house I could have in California, for less money.

“A course, we’ve got our tornadoes here,” she said. “You just have to include acts of God as part of life. But you got your quakes and all, so you know what natural disaster is like. They’re usually not so bad as everybody likes to make out.”

“Most of our earthquakes aren’t so bad, either. You don’t even know they’re happening.”

“Well, we do get champion-sized twisters here, I’ll tell you. In ’72 the steer blew off the butcher and landed in Archer County, standing up in a pasture like the real cows. That’s a five-hundred-pound, decorative steel steer. Funny things like that happen all the time.”

She set me up with the multiple listings for March through June of two years back. My window was kind of big, but that might make it easier to crawl through. She led me to a private little room and brought me a big cup of coffee.

“Sam says you’re looking into the Mary Lou thing?”

“That’s right.”

“My niece went to school with her. They were friends. She was a cute little girl. I remember her smile, because it was so happy looking, and funny, too, because her two front teeth fell out and left a gap. She was a real doll, a real angel.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything. Her warm blue eyes were gray now, and I could not mistake the ferocity in them.

“Think she’s alive?” she asked.

“I really can’t say, Ms. Butler.”

Her face turned accusing, then askance, then judgmental, then resigned. And, finally, for reasons I would never know, forgiving. “Ya’ll let me know what else I can get you. ’Kay?”

An hour later I’d found all the listings for homes with detached units. Four were in a moderate price range, and three of them were sold by men. None of their names matched the sellers in Orange County, the ones that Johnny was just about finished checking out. I got that funny, embarrassing feeling in my guts that told me I’d been following a trail that was about to disappear into nothing.

Katie Butler read each one that I’d marked.

“Now, I knew this fella — Al Jeeter — and he sold because he wanted to move back to Virginia, where he grew up.”

“How old was he?”

“Oh my... late sixties, I’d say.”

“What about the next one?”

“Lindy Dillard? Don’t know him, but I do know we sold the house. I can get the paperwork if you want. Sometimes, escrow documents have the age of the seller and buyer. Here, let me just get them all for you.”

“Forget Wanda Grantley,” I said.

“Pretty easy to do,” said Katie.

“Why’s that?”

“Not my kind of people, those two. Be right back.”

I waited in the lobby while she went through her files. I could see her hard red hair past the counter when she knelt at a file cabinet. I drank another cup of coffee and thought about Donna and how surprised she was that I was leaving. She was suspicious, but she held her questions. I thought of Melinda and Penny. I thought of the pictures that Wade had of me, and the trail that led to I. R. Shroud. I thought of the ranger, Stefanic, and wondered if our boy had been there. I thought of The Horridus, waiting, watching, planning. Would Johnny work the dating services again, try to find a common point? Or would he let Ishmael run the show now, forget about me and my big ideas? I sighed. Here I was, a million miles away, working a case that was no longer mine, escaping one miserable swamp of problems for another. I suddenly felt tired and stupid, tracking down obscure leads for a department that didn’t want me around in the first place.

“Okay,” said Katie, sitting on a chair beside me. “Jeeter was sixty-eight, about like I guessed. Lindy Dillard was fifty-two. If I remember right, it was a relocation for him. I’m really not sure. This last one, Bevaro, the escrow papers say he was forty-six.”

I wrote down the ages of each seller in my notepad, as my mind drifted off to other times and places: my honeymoon with Ardith on Grand Cayman; Matthew and me chasing blue lizards over white dunes on vacation in New Mexico — don’t worry, Ardith, the sun isn’t going to kill him; Donna Mason astride me just one morning ago and her faintly southern voice filling that little dawn-filled apartment with something I hope is love. It’s amazing how a man — no matter what he’s done — still wants love, and can convince himself that he deserves it.

Nice as Katie Butler was, nice as Sam Welborn and the rest of Wichita Falls seemed to be, I wanted out of there. I wanted to be back home where I could scream.

“Forget Wanda, then?” Katie asked.

“Umm?”

“Wanda Grantley, the other seller. That listing was out in Hopkin, anyway. Two towns over. Widow. Says here late fifties, but she looked eighty.”

I felt eighty. “You said she was married.”

“I most certainly did not, Mr. Naughton.”

“You said ‘those two’ weren’t your kind of people.”

“I know I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.”

“What two people, though, if she was a widow?”

“Her son.”

I did the math. I woke from my reverie, a little excited. Finally, a nibble. “He’d be in his late twenties, early thirties.”

“Full grown, anyway. Probably somewhere that age. Living with her.”

“In the second unit?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Hardly ever saw either of them out and about She had some older daughters, used to come around. Trashy women, if I have to say so. The mother — Wanda — tiny little thing, about as friendly as a rattlesnake. Now I heard, and this might not be true, but I was told she married something like six or seven times. I can’t say for sure, though. They all could have been decent folks, I guess. But you hear things. I just know they were real private people. Didn’t talk to the neighbors, kept to themselves. Had some money, but lived kind of low. Got no idea where they went to. You know, that place of theirs didn’t sell until last year. They were asking too much. Then, the man who bought it, it was for his daughter so she’d be on her own, well she got married anyway and moved out of state. So now it’s for sale again. Slow market. Buyers’ market, like I was saying.”

“So nobody’s lived there since the Grantleys?”

“No, not unless some freeloaders broke in and squatted it. We put a lock box on it, but that happens sometimes.”

“Here, let me take down that address, and the month of sale.”

“You already did, Mr. Naughton. You all right?”

“Yeah. Tell me how to get there, will you? And how about the key to that lock box?”

Hopkin was about twenty miles southwest, off of Highway 277. Birchwood was two turns off the main route, to the north, then west again. It was a long straight road with mailboxes every hundred yards or so. The asphalt was gray and the gravel on the shoulders almost white, and the sumac growing down to the shoulders was dark green in the spring light. The houses sat well back from the street, under canopies of trees and hedges and sagging power lines. The houses had porches and the porches had swings. Nice houses once, I thought, but sliding downhill now, neglected and alone as old people.

The Grantley place had a rusted mailbox with the metal flag up to signal outgoing parcels. The weeds had grown up around the stanchion and the house was hardly visible through the trees. I passed it once, then doubled back and eased into the driveway. I lowered the window, killed the engine and sat there. The house was clearly vacant. I could see through the glass of one of the windows, straight to a blank interior wall. The other front window had a shade drawn down most of the way. Nothing on the patio. The “For Sale” sign leaned back like an outfielder watching a home run. The lawn was dead except for the green on the sides, where a fresh crop of weeds had grown. The weeds climbed over a pink crenelated divider and spilled onto the walkway. The house was painted gray and the paint was starting to peel. Cicadas trilled from the black recesses of a huge elm tree and a mockingbird sang an insane melody to himself.

I got the house key from the lock box on the garage door. Through a chain-link fence I could see the second unit in the back, overhung by a big walnut tree. Back on the porch, the screen door creaked as I held it open and worked a rusty key into a rusty lock.

The first thing I smelled inside was bacon. Then dust, mildew and old carpet. The living room was the first thing you walked into. It was small and square, with a doorway leading to the kitchen and another to a hall. The fireplace was brick, with a mantelpiece of painted wood. There were three bedrooms, all small and dark in the eternal shade of the big trees outside. The wall-to-wall carpet was a pale blue. The kitchen had a little cheer to it — yellow tiles on the counter and yellow linoleum with white flecks in it. The wallpaper was yellow and white. The flooring was dark and warped up where the refrigerator had stood. The only furnishing in the whole place was a small end table with a phone on it. I picked up the earpiece and got nothing but silence and the muted cicadas and mockingbird, still at it in the trees outside.

When you stood in the backyard you couldn’t see the neighbors or the street. Just the back side of the house and the front of the second unit, which was a small, rectangular version of the main house. It had a little porch and a screen door. I stood there in the middle of the dead lawn and kicked the hulls of the walnuts, which lay thick and cracked over the tan grass. There was a birdbath tilted and empty, the dish stained black. When I looked up, it was all foliage and power lines with a swatch of light blue sky in the middle. The day was warm but the yard was cool, and I had the feeling that I could have done just about anything I wanted here, and nobody would see.

I went through the lock-box routine for the second unit and let myself in. The feeling inside was altogether different. The first smell I got was faint and fecal, but it wasn’t a human smell, or a canine one. Different. The floor was hardwood and dusty. The walls were paneled in dark wood, there were still shelves up everywhere, the kind you attached with L brackets to set the planks on. There was a fireplace, but it was just a facade painted black in the middle to give it the illusion of depth. The kitchenette was off to the left. Nothing much remained: two cardboard salt-and-pepper shakers, a filthy tumbler, an empty plastic half gallon of generic tequila on the floor in the corner. Beside it was a brown pasteboard box, with partitions inside to protect bottles in shipping. I pulled up the empty bottles one at a time: more generic tequila. A fellow cactus addict, I thought. Something beside the box caught my eye, though, so I picked it up: a little triangle of white net material, just a scrap, no bigger than a stamp. Like the girls were made to wear. Robes. Nets. Wings. Webs.

My heart jumped.

You got to the back room through the kitchen. I opened a door with a loose glass knob and pushed through.

The fecal smell was stronger, but I still couldn’t identify it. Maybe it wasn’t fecal after all, but it had a meaty, digested, though not foul aroma. A smell like you might think coyote shit would have, all that fur and bone processed by the body for the little muscle it contained. It was almost rodentlike, maybe. Old.

But there in this back room, you could actually see. Muted rays came in through a skylight panel on the roof. There was a bathroom off to the right. To my left was another wall filled with empty shelves. The far wall, though, that was the weird thing — one long pane of glass from floor to ceiling. Behind the glass I could see what looked like a place for tropical plants, or an animal, or birds perhaps. The floor was built up a couple of feet with rough cement that was shaped to look like rock. There was an empty pool at one end. It looked like the deceased version of one of those vivarium displays you might see in a store — a store that carried tropical plants, or birds, or fish... or snakes. I felt the hair on my neck quiver and a cold little tingle break out on the skin of my back.

I got behind the glass through a full-sized door at the right end. There were four heavy-duty slide locks on it — top, bottom and two on the side. I wondered what kind of wildlife required four locks to keep in. Not canaries, bromeliads or chameleons.

I stood within the cage and looked out. The room became oddly interesting when viewed from inside the glass, like it might be a representative model of Homo sapiens-environment, late twentieth century. I felt covert. It was the same feeling I got behind the one-way mirror of one of our interview rooms at the station. The ceiling above me was plywood, and I could tell from the spacing of the screws — about one inch — that it was built to last. The outlines of fixtures were visible every four feet or so, but the fixtures were gone and only the screw holes remained. Lights? Heating or cooling elements? The sides were not glass at all, but a continuation of the rock-look concrete. It must have been molded over a wire-and-wood mold. Same with the back. The old rodent smell was stronger inside. I walked over to the pool and saw the drain at the bottom. Kneeling, I swept my fingertips over the drain grate and brought up a dry smear of what looked like sand. In the far corner of the tank, behind the pool, was a gray football-sized mound of what looked like dried tar laced with milk, or some kind of industrial glue, or, perhaps, some kind of excrement. I leaned into the corner and took a tentative whiff. The smell was stronger. Looking down on the thing, I could see tufts of fur and the outline of a thin bone. It looked like something you’d see in the La Brea tar pits, but dehydrated, like a snack food. Crap. Eagle crap? Maybe, if the eagle was the size of a Shetland pony. Snake shit? Maybe, if the snake was as long as a football field.

Grantley was starting to amuse me.

I went back outside and stood on the dead grass. I walked around the back of the guest unit. The lot was a big one, with a grapestake fence running along each side and all but vanishing in a thick berry patch. Over the berries I could see the back fence erect in the shade. The neighbor’s trees rose up around the property, deepening the sense of permanent dusk. Against the left fence sat an old lawn mower, a bike with flat tires and a barbecue. On the right side, garden tools hung by nails. Beyond the tools was a hutch built off the ground. It was made of wire mesh and two-bys, the kind of thing you could raise chickens in, or rabbits. The ground, up to the tangled patch of berries, was tan and dry and littered with broken, overripe walnuts. And there were more of the black mounds like I’d found in the corner of the cage. More fur, more bones, a pair of curved, side-by-side incisor teeth that either came from a big rat or a small rabbit. I could see that still more of the stuff had been thrown into the berry bushes. A shovel lying against the fence by the patch suggested how it got there. The smell was all around me in the spring warmth — old, rodentine, dank. I stood on my toes to see over the berries, but they were high and thick, and all I could make out was the back fence. I squeezed past the thorny patch by climbing along the bottom support beam of the fence. The area behind the berries was damp and cool. Weeds. Big piles of the black-furry-bony stuff, like they were built up over time. The smell. There were flies and meat bees everywhere, lazy and sated. Against the back fence the shit was knee high. I picked my way through the grim obstacles and climbed up on the support beam again, to see over. It was the back end of another lot, covered with leaves and a junked car up on cinder blocks.

I was looking down to find a clear place for my foot when I saw the pale thing protruding — just slightly — from the heap of dung against the fence. I jumped onto a decent spot. With my pen in hand, I leaned over the pile and touched what appeared to be a white plate. It was hard, locked solid in the dung. I scraped around it, and the black mulch came off easily, but the white thing didn’t pop out, it just got bigger. Finally, I hooked an opening and lifted. There was a muffled crack and the thing got lighter. It dangled there before me, unbalanced, rocking on my pen. More or less round. Bigger than a softball, smaller than a soccer ball. The bigger, rounded end canted down and to my left, the smaller one settled upward and to the right. My pen was through the upper of two large holes. I lowered my head to see clearly around my hand and the extended pen. There were fragments of blackened material still attached in places, but basically, it was stripped clean. The teeth were still there, except for the front two. I studied it, a child’s death head with a gap-toothed grin. I lowered it to the top of the pile, adjusted it for balance, then moved away and knelt down.

The body freezes at a time like this, but the spirit soars because it wants to get away. He was all around me. His ground, his air, his smell, his shade. I’d never been this close to the essence of him — not even in Brittany Elder’s bedroom — and I wasn’t prepared for it. He wasn’t like anything. I had nothing to compare him to. But I could feel all the power of his need, and all the secret, cunning efficiency of his will.

He wasn’t escalating. He’d already been where he was going. At least once. Right here.

Grantley had moved half a continent away, and found The Horridus waiting.

An hour later, I was pretty sure I had the Grantley son’s first name: Gene. The neighbors weren’t positive. And they were even less sure of his last name because Wanda had married “a bunch.” Some said Webb, or Webster, one of those. Some said Vonn. Some said Grantley. Most said they had no idea. But none of the surnames matched my lists from Bright Tomorrows or Dawn Christie; none had listed homes with detached units for sale in Orange County; none of them connected with any names we’d come up with in the Horridus investigation so far.

But the Hopkin neighbors agreed in their assessment of him: late twenties, maybe early thirties; long hair and beard, but neatly trimmed; a well-groomed fella; very quiet; didn’t seem to have a steady job; kept to himself. Ever notice how neighbors always say the same thing about these shitbaskets? They said his mother, Wanda, was small, tense and unfriendly. The young man had a van. Wanda had an older model Lincoln Town Car and the neighbors had often seen her peering under the curve of the steering wheel as she made her occasional low-speed runs through town.

One of them said the sketch from Steven Wicks’s memory was “kinda like him, all right.” The one from Brittany Elder “ain’t him.”

I found a pay phone outside a liquor store and called Johnny. Just his message tape. I tried Louis — same thing. But I got Frances at her desk.

“Frances, this is Terry.”

Her catch of breath reminded me of all the hideous suspicion now clinging to my own name, in my own department.

“I need you to listen to me for a minute—”

“—I—”

“Goddamnit Frances, listen to me!”

I told her to track the names Gene Vonn, Webb, Webster and Grantley through all our sources — county and state criminal files, DMV, TRW, the assessor’s office, tax rolls, voters’ lists, even the phone books if she had to. Triple-check it against the treasurer’s property tax rolls and the realtors’ multiple listings. I wanted his ass covered and I wanted it covered now.

“This guy killed a girl in Texas,” I said. “And I’m betting my badge he’s our man.”

There was a moment of hesitation as the ludicrousness of my statement hit us both.

“You know what I mean, Frances.”

She was silent for a moment. “You’re not where you’re supposed to be.”

“I couldn’t watch soaps all day, Frances. Look... go ahead and think what you have to think. Believe what you have to believe. But also know that those pictures were doctored, and I didn’t do what they show. You can hate me or fear me or loathe me, Frances, but I want you to know the truth. Don’t hate me so much we can’t work together when I get back in there where I belong. We’re still going to need you on the team. I guess I’m sounding, at this point, fairly ridiculous, aren’t I?”

“You went to Wichita Falls.”

“I shouldn’t say, Frances. You don’t need to know that. But you do need to know that this Gene creep abducted a six-year-old girl and killed her. Amanda’s first sketch, with the beard and glasses, got positive reviews from the neighbors. I think he’s our guy. Go find him, will you? Arrest The Horridus, will you?”

She was silent for a moment. “Johnny finished the multiple listings yesterday. None of them worked out. There wasn’t a Gene on it, either.”

“Then get on the women.”

“Oh, for Chrissakes, Terry. There’s no Webb, Vonn or Grantley on the list, I can tell you that right now.”

“What about Webster?”

“No”

I thought of Gene’s older “trashy” sisters.

“What if he’s living in a house owned by—”

“—Terry? Terry? You are not my boss right now. And, just for the record, I want you to know how absolutely disgusted I am by what I saw. Disgusted, betrayed. And basically really goddamned pissed off at you.”

“Fine. Now, what’s the latest on Stefanic, he’s the park ranger who—”

“—Goddamn you, Naughton, get a lawyer!” she whispered, and hung up.

I tried Louis and Johnny again, but they were still gone. I left Johnny the names Gene Vonn, Webb, Webster and Grantley. I left them for Louis, too.

Then I called Jim Wade and told his secretary who I was. A moment later he was on the line.

“You’ve violated our agreement,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir. But I’ve got the gold.”

I told him what I’d found and where I’d found it. I begged him to assign some more deputies to CAY and scour the county for Gene Vonn/Webb/Webster/Grantley and Wanda Grantley. He actually listened to what I was saying, and I heard his pencil scratching on paper.

“Is that actually possible? For a snake to eat a human?”

“I’ll be talking to—”

“—No, you won’t, Terry. This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to board the first plane back to Orange County that you can get. And you’re going to be in my office thirty minutes after that plane lands. Clear?”

“Sir — there’s so much work to—”

“—I can have an arrest warrant issued by phone in about ten minutes. I’ll do it.”

I watched the treetops swaying and thought of Mary Lou Kidder’s end in a heap of dung in Gene Somebody’s backyard. I couldn’t help but see those pictures of myself again; they were following me wherever I went, unshakable and determined as bloodhounds. I wanted a drink quite badly. And I realized something about myself in that moment: I was willing to sacrifice almost anything to get The Horridus. At least, that’s what I was doing. I felt so close. But how could Frances and Wade feel it? They hadn’t seen what I’d seen. They hadn’t smelled the smell and felt the feel.

“Let me work the rest of the day here,” I said. “I’ll take the first flight out tomorrow morning.”

“Isn’t there one tonight?”

“No, sir,” I lied.

“Where are you staying?”

“I’d rather not, uh... well... the Holiday Inn in Wichita Falls.”

“Call me when you get back there. And stay there until you leave in the morning. Those are direct orders.”

I told him I believed it was time to go public with the Brittany Elder description and the drawing by Amanda. I thought we should bring the water under him up to a boil. But Sheriff Wade must have had bigger things to think about, because he hung up.

Next I called Sam Welborn. I told him to get out to the old Grantley place in Hopkin, and gave him the address. “You’re going to need someone for prints and photos and video,” I said. “You’re going to need the coroner, sooner or later. I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Be damned,” he said quietly. “ ’Mon my way.”

It was easy to get the reptile expert at the Fort Worth Zoo. The zoo receptionist was quite pleasant and she put me right through. His name was Joseph Dee and I identified myself as an Orange County Sheriff investigator working a kidnapping and sexual assault case that had led me to Texas. I asked him if it was possible for a very large snake to eat a small person. He said nothing for a moment, then:

“Well, yes — it’s possible.”

He went on to explain that folklore and anecdotal literature were filled with unsubstantiated reports of snakes taking humans for food. But some of them were “reasonably authenticated” enough to be considered true. Three snakes — the anaconda of South America, the reticulated python and the African rock python — were the three most popular culprits. One report, he said, from Borneo, was documented well enough by local authorities to qualify as factual. There, a twenty-two-foot reticulated python had eaten a thirteen-year-old boy down by a stream. He said that the many reports of the African rock python predating humans were unlikely but possible, and usually involved children. He said that most of the incidents took place in remote villages and were all but impossible to authenticate. He added that lots of things happen in small villages that we in our cities rarely hear about, let alone believe.

“I examined an African python — dead, unfortunately — that contained a small leopard,” he said. “The specimen was thirteen feet long. If you doubled that length, which is possible in an older adult, you could conceive of it eating a small human. Entirely possible. But you have to understand that such instances would be aberrant. Humans are not their usual prey.”

“How, exactly, would they do it?”

“Like they eat anything else,” said Dee. “Surprise the prey. The teeth of big snakes can be quite long — maybe half an inch, and they hook backward, like some fish teeth. They’re quite sharp and they hold well. Their jaws are fairly strong. They kill by constriction — not by crushing bones, as people believe. Constrictors are immensely strong. The coils tighten and the victim can’t draw breath. It can happen quickly. Even the twelve-to-eighteen foot specimens we have here can require two or three men to handle them safely.”

“How big is the biggest snake you’ve got?”

“We have a twenty-two-foot retic from Indonesia. It takes four of us to handle it, if we have to.”

“What’s it eat?”

“Rabbits, ducks and pigs.”

I drove back to the Grantley house to wait for Sam Welborn.