Where Serpents Lie

Thirty

You stand in a room where a person was murdered hours ago and the room feels different than others. It feels ashamed. It feels violated. It feels guilty. You tell yourself it’s just in your mind, that you’re projecting yourself into the space, but places like that are different, even if you can’t tell why. They scream, but the scream is silent. They offer proof, but the proof is hidden. They wait for you to make things right. So you listen, and you look and you hope.

I’d gotten out of the department building as soon as I could, after reorganizing some of the CAY task force responsibilities and huddling briefly with Wade over the question of the media and my new exonerated status. We decided not to hold a press conference and not to release the story through Public Information just yet, hoping that The Horridus would continue his computer transactions with me. There was only a small chance that he would, we agreed, but it was a chance worth taking. There was still a small chance, too, that Vinson Clay over at PlaNet would do the right thing and finger I. R. Shroud for us — if I could get him back on the line. The Bureau had talked to Vinson, throwing their weight behind our plea. For myself, I would simply remain for a few more days as the accused child molester I had been, with few people outside the department much the wiser. Easy. At my insistence, The Horridus task force room was going to be staffed twenty-four hours a day with investigators and deputies assigned directly to the case. I had the feeling that The Horridus was about to rampage soon: he struck and failed and he wasn’t going to wait another thirty days to try again.

Wade, uneasy at the prospect of what might happen, agreed to keep the force working around the clock.

“The proaction was dangerous,” he said bluntly. “We got a mother killed.”

“We didn’t kill her,” I answered bluntly back.

“But if we’d left things well enough alone, Terry?”

“With The Horridus out there, sir, things will never be well enough.”

He sighed. “All right.”

Then he got up and closed the door to his office. You could see the heads turning again. He didn’t even bother to sit down.

“I’m hearing the rumors. You think somebody here had those photos made up?”

I told him I was sure of it: I. R. Shroud had been the supplier — perhaps the creator — and someone using my Web name, Mal, had made the purchase.

“Who?” he asked.

“Ishmael talked to Shroud thirty-two times in the last seventy-four days. I’ve got that from two different sources, sir, and it’s easy enough to check out.”

“How would he know your Web name?”

“It’s not a secret around here. I’ve written it down a dozen times at least, in my reports. Hell, Frances and Louis have both used Mal to lurk in the chat rooms. Ish could pick it up without working too hard.”

Jim Wade colored deeply. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against his door. “You two bastards,” he said quietly.

“I kept mine within the rules, Jim. He didn’t.”

“This is all an angle to move up the ladder?”

“It’s all ambition, jealousy, pride and suspicion. It’s human nature.”

“Well, I know a lot of human beings, Sheriff deputies among them, who don’t resort to this kind of shit on the playground.”

I shrugged. “It’s about Mel and Penny, too, and Ishmael helping me get on here twenty years ago. I don’t know, sir — ask Ishmael. He made the overtures to Shroud. Ask him what the hell they were talking about, if it wasn’t pictures.”

“I will.”

“And I’ll be curious to know what he says.”

“Maybe it’s about Donna Mason, too.”

It didn’t surprise me that Ishmael had ratted out my living arrangements to Wade.

“She’s one thing I’d like to keep out of this,” I said. “We’re sharing an apartment. On the salary I’ve been entitled to for the last two weeks, it’s about the best I could come up with.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “She’s turned down Ishmael three or four times, on story ideas. She’s covered you like you were the risen Christ. Did you tell her your Web name?”

To tell the truth, it had felt far more natural and innocent to tell Donna my lurker’s name than it did to admit to Wade that I had done so. My stomach shifted a little. “Yes.”

“Who’s the girl in the pictures?”

“I’d rather not say just yet, sir. I’ll get to her when I can.”

Jim Wade looked at me with his cop’s face, not his politician’s face or his public servant’s face. It’s a wise old face when he wants it to be, filled with a remarkable combination of doubt and hope.

“All right. You know, that special Mason did — the Texas connection — there were some things in there that shouldn’t have gotten out. That was our stuff, Terry. And I know she got it from you.”

“Guilty. Sir, I’m in love with her and I trust her. She’s the only one who didn’t drop me when those pictures hit.”

Wade smiled without happiness. “Her and Johnny.”

I said nothing.

“What I’m saying, Naughton, is that you aren’t a CNB employee who happens to have an office here.”

“I understand. I’ve been trying to help us.”

“You’ve been trying to help yourself. Just in case you didn’t know, the woman you lived with until a week ago gave me her notice today. She’s had enough of all this.”

The Gayley crime scene was bloodless, but grim in its own matter-of-fact way. John Escobedo and I let ourselves in at 6:05 P.M. that Friday night, some fourteen hours after the death of Margo and the attempted abduction of seven-year-old Chloe. It was like the other scenes in the telltale ways: suburban, middle-class, ground-floor residence, no man in the house, single working mother and young daughter. And when we walked into Chloe’s bedroom, there it was, the silent scream.

Johnny walked me through, though there wasn’t much question about the sequence.

“He came in through the window, used a glass cutter and a bathroom plunger to hold the glass. Reilly couldn’t get anything off the plunger, so far. Anyway, he moved the latch up to unlock it, then slid the window back and climbed in.”

I could see the carbon powder on the windowpane and the rectangular shapes where the acetate lifting tape had been applied, then removed.

“The window was crawling,” said Johnny. “Frances is running them through CAL–ID and WIN with all our parameters on The Horridus.”

I looked glumly at the dust and glass, knowing The Horridus was wearing gloves when he came through.

“Gotta try, boss,” he said.

I turned and looked at the closet. It was easy to know where Margo had been standing when she surprised him because the room was small — not much space between the door and the closet. There was a chalk outline on the carpet in the shape of human legs, continuing into the closet, then the outline of a head against the far wall inside. Some of Chloe’s little-girl clothes were piled to either side of the silhouette. Beneath and beside the clothes were Chloe’s shoes. Mixed in with the shoes were those things you might expect in a seven-year-old’s closet that hadn’t been organized lately: dolls and drawing tablets, books and markers, stuffed animals, plastic horses, balls. Obviously, the sliding closet door had been open and Margo had reeled backward with The Horridus on top of her, probably with both hands locked on her throat. I knelt down and looked in.

“What did you take?”

“The pepper spray container, two books for prints — even though it’s a long shot — and a couple of shiny leather shoes that he might have touched. It was hit and miss, boss. There wasn’t anything that looked too good. The CSI’s really combed through for hair and fiber, though. There’s a lot for the lab.”

“No dust. Did you ALS the wall here inside?”

“We did. Nothing.”

“Coins, keys, pens, nail clipper, Chapstick — anything he might have lost from his pockets?”

“Not unless he carries Little Miss Makeup.”

“Loose button, thread?”

“Come on, boss. We’d be all over something like that.”

“Yeah, I know that...”

My voice trailed off, like it was consumed by the closet in which Margo had fought and died.

“The blood and skin’s our payoff,” said Escobedo. “If we get a suspect we can make him all the way.”

I turned and wondered what Chloe was doing while her mother fought for her life in the closet. Escobedo read my thoughts.

“The girl used a little Indian bead belt on him, she said. We’ve got the belt for fiber. She said when the guy was done with her mother, he stood up and she ran for it. Out the door, down the hallway, around the corner and out the door. She said he never touched her.”

“But no description?”

“Black hair, average, average. She only saw him from the back, half covered with the clothes that had fallen down. When he chased her through the house it was dark. She left the lights off as she ran, thinking ahead. Bright little girl. Outside she saw him when he gave up the chase. Dark too — couldn’t see much at all. No help there, boss, except the dye job on his hair. Black, she said. Not dark brown — black.”

“What was he wearing?”

“She was too scared to notice.”

I thought for a moment. “Latex might tear in a struggle.”

“That’s why we dusted the living shit out of this place.”

I knelt again and picked up one of Chloe Gayley’s shoes. It was a white canvas tennis shoe with some purple cartoon characters on it. I lifted it, turned it over and shook it: just a few grains of sand, and that was all. I couldn’t help but wonder at the tragedy of it. Just a day earlier, Margo and Chloe Gayley were a struggling little family unit, trying to pay the bills, get the grades, have some fun, do things right. Nice little apartment. Churchgoers. Good people trying hard to scratch out a life from a marriage that didn’t work. Now, Chloe was without a mother she had seen murdered, Margo was dead forever and their life was destroyed. Would some good come out of it? Maybe someday. But was that good anything like the good that might have come if this had never happened? No. This was just a loss, pure and simple, all caused by a monster’s appetite. An appetite as yet unsatisfied.

“He’ll move again soon,” I said. “He’s moving now.”

“What if he lies low, licks his wounds, figures he’s on a cold streak?”

“Pray for that one, Johnny. Pray for Margo Gayley to stand up and walk again too, while you’re at it.”

I lifted Chloe’s clothes off the closet floor and set them aside. Then I went through every one of her shoes, turning them over or feeling inside.

“Terry, what exactly are you looking for?”

“A miracle.”

There were no miracles in Chloe Gayley’s shoes, except that she would walk in them again. Survival as miracle.

My cell phone rang against my hip. I’d forgotten what a pleasure it was to feel a call coming through and know it was probably from my people at the department. It was Frances, who, alone among my CAY brethren, had neither welcomed me back to the fold nor acknowledged that she had been wrong about me. Frances too, I thought, who had found the pink envelope in Alton “Chet” Sharpe’s den and hand-delivered it to Jim Wade.

It was strange to recall my words to Wade, just an hour earlier, with which I had admitted that Frances, too, was well aware of the Mal handle, and the terrible access that name was granted in certain private chat rooms.

“Terry,” she said in a flat, businesslike voice, “we might have something useful here. We just got a call from an animal control officer up in Orange. Says The Horridus was at the animal shelter about two hours ago. She thought he looked familiar when she talked to him, but couldn’t place the face. Then she drove past the billboard on her way home.”

“Describe.”

“Black hair. Facial hair too — mustaches and those little sharp beards the kids are wearing, a completely revised edition. But she says it was him. She said his breath was bad — and she hadn’t seen Ish say so on TV.”

A current of joy buzzed into my heart. I thought about The Horridus at the animal shelter.

“What’s his name?”

“Warren Witt, a Santa Ana address, deputies on the way.”

I could see it. I could see him. And the logic behind his visit to the animal shelter came clear. “Did he take a puppy?” I asked.

“Yes. For his daughter.”

“He’s using it for bait, Frances.”

“I know he is, Terry. The officer made the van for us, because the guy was so weird — white, late-model Dodge, Cal plates 2JKF869. Plates stolen off an ’89 Toyota three weeks ago in Irvine — a little side street off of Von Karman, a business area.”

“Give me his residence address.”

Frances did.

“We’ll be there in twenty,” I said. “Before you leave, get Amanda Aguilar and the animal control—”

“—I already did. They’re on their way here.”

I was still holding one of Chloe’s shoes in my hand, a little suede hiking boot with a red flannel lining. When I turned it over, nothing whatsoever came out.

We got there in less than twenty minutes, and just as I had suspected, it was not a residence at all. Instead there was a tortilla factory that had been in business, the owner told us, for forty years. No Witt. No Warren. He gave us each a sack of fresh tortillas, the nolard, low-fat kind the gringos like. He was just about to lock the door for the day.

We stood in the twilight outside the shop. You could hear the mariachis a few doors down, and taped music coming from a record shop up the street. Friday night in the barrio: good music, good food, goodwill toward men. It sort of made you want to stay there and forget about the world outside.

“Frances,” I said, “get started on the body shops, will you? Get a couple of the new deputies to help you. Somebody painted that van in the last two weeks and we need to know whose it is.”

“Goddamned Witt, probably,” she said. “And every one of them will be closed by now on Friday. He’s driving around out there, Terry. He’s got that damned little dog and he’s going to get a girl with it.”

“Try anyway. While you’re at it, we’ll plaster this bastard’s new face all over Christendom.”

“That’ll take time.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Terry, I just wanted to say how glad I am to have been wrong about you. I... wasn’t sure what to do with what I found. I’m glad to have you back and I’m glad to call you boss. I don’t know what happened, but I... I hope we can find out. I know the last few weeks must have been hell for you.”

High as I was on the adrenaline of closing in on The Horridus, my heart still warmed at Frances’s words. I had always liked her and thought her judgment sound, and the fact that she had so quickly taken sides against me was not the least of the thousand arrows I had felt.

I nodded and gently touched her arm. She pulled it away and hugged me.

“It means a lot,” I said.

“I’ll help you get to the bottom of it,” she said. “That’s the least I can do.”

Johnny drove. And I called Donna Mason at CNB, then all three networks. Then I called two local L.A. stations, and both the big papers in Orange County. I told them all we’d have a new face for them in about an hour.

I’ve never seen a group of men and women work as hard and as fast as we did for that next hour. Joe Reilly and his lab techs were still there, three of them working the hair and fiber for matches with evidence from the three earlier abductions; two were lasering the objects collected from Chloe’s closet for prints; one still making the Hae HI enzyme cuts on the flesh and blood DNA from under Margo’s nails; while Reilly himself was hybridizing the first of the high-weight nucleotides, which he’d cut and blotted earlier in the day. Joe looked at me briefly as I passed through, his thin black hair flying like a man in a wind. We had yet to broach the topic of Joe being on a witness list against me in a case that was dropped. I wondered if we ever would, and what good it would do.

“Get me a body, Naughton. We’re solid state at this end.”

“Coming up, Joe. What about the latent on the snake scale and prints from Gayley’s—”

“—We’ve got a match. We know it’s The Horridus. Now do your job and bring him in.”

In the task force room — it was christened Room Horrible — we had a deputy on each of the three 800 lines; Louis double-checking the statement from the neighbors to whom Chloe had fled; Frances briefing Amanda Aguilar and the animal control officer before they were sequestered in a conference room to do the sketch; one FBI volunteer on a CAY computer lurking the chat rooms for any gossip about I. R. Shroud; the other Fed in conference with an L.A. Sheriff sergeant who was part of the joint-agency SAFE group working child sex out of the Federal Building in L.A.; three deputies collecting paint-and-body-shop numbers from a stack of phone books a yard high; Rick Zant from the DA’s office trying to convince the corporate lawyers for Bright Tomorrows that a release of their employee and subcontractor list might save a life; Woolton on the phone to half the police departments in the county; Burns on the line to the other half; two young deputies trying their best to track property ownership, DMV records and credit information on the ten remaining Eugene Webbs and the eight remaining Eugene Websters in three huge Southern California counties; a young deputy checking out-of-state phone companies for one Collette Loach; and Jordan Ishmael hovering over the room like some kind of mute god, seeing all and saying nothing.

And that was just in Room Horrible. We had twelve more deputies in the field, assigned specific tasks: two who were reinterviewing fabric store and pet shop employees, in case The Horridus had made another purchase in the last week; another pair dispatched to the home of the regional manager of the county’s largest auto paint chain, which, we had learned, kept computerized records of work they had done; one deputy assigned to each of the three release sites The Horridus had used; one staked out at each of the residences he’d already hit, to make sure he didn’t try to take a good thing twice. We even had a team following my footsteps at the behest of I. R. Shroud, moving from Moulton Creek to Main Beach to the Norwalk Green Line station in hope — slim at best — of encountering one of The Horridus’s allies. Besides those, there were ten units cruising the obvious places where The Horridus might hunt that night — amusement parks, malls, theaters showing kids’ movies, entertainment complexes — and two helicopter teams shadowing them from above, strafing the same haunts with searchlights and glassing the world below for a white van. We’d already pulled over nine vehicles by then, with another few thousand to go.

Jordan Ishmael stood in the conference room. We were both getting ready for the press. He was checking the mike at the podium when I walked in. We looked at each other across the empty chairs.

“Congratulations, Naughton. You beat the rap.”

“Thanks.”

He turned the mike on and spoke into it, his voice amplified into the room: “YOU’VE MESSED UP A LOT OF LIVES, FRIEND. YOU DESERVED WHAT HAPPENED, WHETHER YOU DID THOSE GIRLS OR NOT.”

“It was a nice try, Ishmael. But you left a big fat trail, and I’m not the only one on it. See, the way it works when you mess with me is you get messed with back.”

“NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.”

“Next time you invite yourself over to my apartment, make sure I’m home.”

“WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO THAT?”

“So I can kick your ass back out the door.”

“NOT LIKELY, LITTLE FELLA.”

“Going to be a long ride down, Ish. Bring Drama-mine. I’ve got you.”

“WHAT YOU’VE GOT IS MAGGOTS IN YOUR SOUL. I CAN SMELL THEM FROM HERE. ONE GOOD THING ABOUT MEL AND PENNY LEAVING IS THEY WON’T HAVE TO SMELL THEM ANYMORE.”

“I think the volume’s about right.”

I heard the mike click off and looked at Ishmael studying me from behind the podium.

“I. R. Shroud spells Horridus, Ish. How could you be so goddamned thick you didn’t see that?”

“Why would I?”

“Because you talked to him thirty times the last two months, while he was out there taking girls. That’s why.”

“You’re one mixed-up little leprechaun, Naughton. Donna suck all your brains out, too?”

“I’m saving you for another day, Ish. It’s going to be a good one for me. Count on it.”

I heard the door open behind me and Frances stood there with a sheet of flimsy fax paper in her hand. On top was a shot of the rear end of a white van. The bottom shot was from the side, and showed a blur of a driver, a dark-haired male with facial hair was about all you could say for sure.

“Motion-activated cameras shoot toll lane violators and they get tickets in the mail,” she said. “They got this at 2:19 this morning. White Dodge, plates 2JKF869, eastbound on the 91 toward Yorba Linda. One of the FasTrak people saw our press conference, knew about the van, thought we might use this. It’s our van.”

“Can Reilly’s people enhance the driver?”

“The prints are being messengered over right now.”

“Talk to Joe. Tell him what’s coming in and we need a rush on it. If we can get an enhancement for Aguilar and the girl to work from, it might make things a whole lot more convincing.”

“Can do.”

In the doorway I literally ran into Rick Zant.

“I finally got the Bright Tomorrows attorney to come around,” he said. “They ID’d him from the press conference composite. He was there, shooting video for members. David Lumsden — home address in Capistrano. Dawn Christie was kind enough to follow suit if we’d offer a specific name. Bingo — he shot videos for them, too. Same name and address. Woolton has four men out of the Capo substation on the house.”

“There won’t be a house.”

The old fury surged through me as I stood there, realizing that cracking an alias hadn’t helped us much at all. He was still out there — The Horridus, I. R. Shroud, Gene Vonn, David Lumsden, Warren Witt, David Webb, John Q. Public, what did it goddamned matter — and we were still in here, waiting for him to make the next move. I felt like a fly caught in a web, trapped by the silk and knowing that the spider was moving in.

So I kicked the wall of the hallway. My foot went through the plasterboard. When I brought out my shoe it was covered in white dust.

“That hurts,” I said.

“I can see that it might, Terry. Maybe if you smash up your other foot too, it will help us catch this guy. You can’t expect him to go around town using his real name, can you?”

I kicked another hole in the wall.

“Nice to have you back, Terry!” someone piped from Room Horrible.

“Get to work!” I yelled back, already dialing the home number for Sam Welborn on my cell phone. I told him I was back in the hunt. He said he was happy to hear that, and I told him we had two more aka’s and bad addresses, a botched abduction and a murder. What I needed now was anything he could give me on Collette Loach.

He was silent. Then, “Who in hell’s that, Terry?”

“One of Wanda’s daughters or sisters, I’m hoping.”

“Well, I’ve already got the sisters checked out and Collette ain’t one of them. But her daughters, those girls were grown and gone by the time Wanda bought that place in Hopkin. All’s they did was visit sometimes.”

“Ask around, Sam.”

“I have been. That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Maybe someone out in Hopkin remembers her. Forget the phone company — we’ve already struck out with them.”

“What is it you want to know about her?”

“If she’s related to Wanda. And if so, exactly where she is. I need a phone number and an address and I need it soon.”

“I’m on it.”

Within the next fifteen minutes, CNB, all three networks and two L.A. stations had reporters and camera crews set up in the conference room, along with writers and photographers from the Times and the Register. Amanda Aguilar and the animal control officer had completed their collaboration and a blown-up version of the sketch now sat on an easel beside the podium. He looked like one of those hot new actors — a smartass with a Vandyke and a wispy mustache. I stood at the back of the room with hope in my heart, a hard glance at Ishmael and a secret smile for Donna, who didn’t notice me as she stood on the dais and completed a sound check with her shooter.

Everybody else noticed me, however. Their heads turned as if my name had been announced when I came in. They stared hard, disbelieving that the accused perv was back on Sheriff Department soil. Then they started toward me.

I held out my hands toward them, palms up, shaking my head.

“Talk to him,” I said, nodding over at Jordan Ishmael. “He’ll have the story for you. Part of it, anyway.”

With that, I retreated to Room Horrible.

Louis stood and faced me as I walked in. “The deputies just made the Capistrano address for Lumsden,” he said. “It’s the public library.”