Where Serpents Lie

Thirty-Three

The department mandates a thirty-day home leave for deputies involved in fatal shootings. I spent the first day sitting around the apartment, filling out paperwork brought over by Louis and Frances. Really I spent it thinking about Johnny Escobedo and the family he’d left behind. I called Gloria and all she could do was cry. I cried with her. She asked me if I’d talk about him at the funeral and I felt my heart burst and flutter like a balloon. My chest ached for hours so I went to the emergency room and got checked out. Nothing wrong with my heart, they assured me, just pain from the cut in my side. I knew better.

All day I kept running through those last few minutes in my mind, wondering if I’d made the wrong call, wondering if there was some way we could have shaken The Horridus out of there without costing Johnny his life. The answer is, as it often is in our line of work: yes. Yes, I could have waited for more officers. Yes, I could have held back for daylight. Yes, if I’d known he was lying like a viper in a cramped tunnel we could have called a fire engine to flush him out. Yes, I could have chosen to investigate the runoff lines on the other side of the channel myself. But I didn’t. I did what we thought was best and right, and it had gotten Johnny dead. I paced the little apartment, sometimes picturing him in my mind. Sometimes it was Johnny alive; sometimes it was Johnny with his head in the water. More memories to love and hate, more to protect and abhor. I dread all things that are gone. I always thought my biggest opponent was the future, but it has turned out to be the past.

I talked on the phone, napped fitfully but with vivid, inexplicable dreams. I ate some canned peaches and half a pack of cookies. Every once in a while I ran my fingers over the bandage covering the tight twenty-five stitches in my side, courtesy of the snake tank I’d run through. The cut was long but not deep because of my ribs, which had done their job and sheltered what was inside. They ached profoundly, but nothing like the heart behind them.

Late afternoon on that first day, I called Alton Allen “Chet” Sharpe and told him I was coming by to talk to the girl I’d paid $10,000 to meet. The girl in the pictures. I was ready to go live.

He and his wife, Caryn, were at their main residence — a place I’d never been to. It was evening on a quiet street in Anaheim, one of the thousands of Orange County avenues where just about anyone can live and be left alone to do whatever it is they do, so long as they do it quietly. Such is the blessing and the curse of suburbia. All the notoriety surrounding the selling of their daughter for sex and the suicide of their customer during a police sting had been focused on the Sharpe rental in Orange, miles away. If Chet and Caryn’s Anaheim neighbors even knew who they really were, there was no sign of it. In fact, the door was open when I got there and a cute little girl of about six was standing there, holding a stuffed bear, waving at me.

She watched me come up the walkway and onto the porch.

“Hello, Sergeant Naughton,” she said with a smile.

“Chet home?”

“He’s expecting you.”

She giggled, pleased at remembering her lines. Chet appeared behind her, with his Chet-likes-Chet grin. He set a hand on the girl’s shoulder and shooed her out past me. I noted the little swept-up ends of his freshly manicured fingernails. I noted his pressed shirt and smart necktie, and the pen in his pocket.

“Neighbor girl,” he said. “They always seem to take to Caryn and me.”

I looked to make sure the girl was out of earshot, then turned back to Chet. “You take to her, and I’ll kill you.”

“I know you would. You’re good at killing. Come on in.”

I turned again to watch the girl disappear into the front door of what I truly hoped was her own home.

Chet led me inside. The place was decorated in the past tense — green shag carpet popular twenty years ago, heavy furniture, some busy wallpaper in silvers and greens. Lots of children’s toys lying around for girls like the one who met me at the door. Mirrors everywhere. It smelled like fried food. We stood in the den. There were cartoons playing on the TV. From the open doorway I heard the sounds of someone knocking pans in the kitchen and a rising hiss from the stovetop.

“Made your bail, I see.”

“Always save for a rainy day. I talk to Linda every morning, at Orangewood. Getting a good education, some therapy she likes.”

“You’re pure slime, Chet.”

“We’ll be reunited. She’ll be back someday. You can’t tear apart the American family that easy. Have a seat?”

I looked around the miserable room. I looked at groomed Chet. I looked through the doorway to see Caryn with her back to me, getting something out of the refrigerator. She had on a denim dress too short for her and her big hair was done up big as usual, lacquered into swirls that looked stormswept.

“I thought at first it was your daughter,” I said.

“Thought who was?”

“The girl in the pictures.”

“Well, I never saw those, so I wouldn’t know, would I?”

“But you knew what I. R. Shroud was using them for.”

“I found out later. He just wanted some old stuff that maybe hadn’t been shown around for a while. Something that might look new. If I’d known he was having some fun with you, I’d have had them to him a lot quicker.”

“You make some money off them?”

“Nope. We enthusiasts trade back and forth. It’s fun — not profit, Deputy.”

“It’s a crime.”

“Making art with pictures that old isn’t a crime. The statute of limitations ran out a long time ago. You know that, or you wouldn’t be here without your storm troopers beside you and your six-gun blazing.”

He smiled at me, rather prissily, as if he were genuinely offended by me.

I considered Chet for a moment. Though it rankled my soul to its core, Chet was basically untouchable now. Yes, he had a trial pending on a multitude of charges, ranging from child endangerment to pandering a minor. Yes, the evidence was compelling and Chet was about to take his first hard fall. But it was his first, and that would be a big factor. Caryn’s first, and Linda’s, too. I’d already heard from Loren that Chet and Caryn were going to argue that Linda’s services as a model were being offered to me, not services as a prostitute. Loren said that a legitimate modeling portfolio belonging to Linda was going to help their case measurably. In court, I foresaw the my-word-against-theirs case shaping up, and my job would be to convince a jury that I knew the difference between buying photo time with a girl and buying her body. Chet would try to convince them of roughly the same thing. Of course, Caryn could not be made to testify against him. Linda, as a minor, could. But I knew where her loyalties were and I knew she’d be hostile all the way to the verdicts. It was going to be a long and ugly thing.

And the fact that Chet had trafficked in child pornography for years wouldn’t get him much — such possession was legal in this country until just a decade ago. The fact that he had possessed certain pornographic images and supplied them to I. R. Shroud years later was past the statute of limitations — four years. The girl in those pictures was now a woman close to thirty-five years old. I looked at her again. She was still in the kitchen, cooking his dinner.

“How old was Caryn then?”

“Seven.”

“Who was in the original picture with her?”

“Her old man’s best friend. Her old man. Some other guys. There wasn’t just one.”

“You must have been in heaven when you met her. Daddy’s sex toy, all trained and broken in.”

“She’d retained everything good about the human spirit in her, Deputy.” The Chet-loves-Chet smile again. “She was made for love, and love is all you need. We never hurt Linda, you know. We all made love. We adored each other and we brought pleasure to each other and we respected each other’s bodies. It’s not what guys like you think it is. Guys like you call it a sin because you don’t have a word for anything that good and natural. You’re not honest. You got to be honest, like us, to live outside the law.”

Right there is everything I hate about the child molester. They rationalize the urges, and they look to others just like them for what psychologists call “validation,” whatever in hell that is. Then they spin these theories wherein they are natural and loving and help their young charges develop into wise, tolerant and satisfied adults. Into people like Chet.

It was a dumb question, but I still had to ask him. “How come you told the investigators that you got those pictures of me off the Web? They were the only thing in your whole collection you were actually innocent of.”

“Well, they were in my possession, so why deny ever having seen them? No one would have believed that. Especially when the negatives were found, though I had no idea that would happen. So I told them everything in my collection was taken off the Web. It’s true. More or less.”

“Not the magazines from Holland, or the books from Denmark.”

“Well, that stuff was completely legal to make, you know.”

“It isn’t anymore.”

Chet looked at me. I could see the thin blade of his viciousness, the tiny little sliver of something he would probably call courage. “Really, I figured anything that would hurt you would help me. They found evidence against you at my house — well, good. I’ll take you down with me as far as I can. We hate cops.”

“We hate you.”

He was smiling again. “I thought it was really endearing that you’d fallen for Caryn. And paid up good money to meet her in the flesh. Some of that money is going to our defense. Well, go in and talk to her if you want. Go live, Naughton. You paid for it.”

Maybe Caryn got the psychic waves coming from us, because she turned and looked our way. She must have known I was there. She looked neither surprised nor distressed, neither curious nor concerned. The look on her face was the same look I’d seen on a hundred young victims, and later, on their adult faces. It’s a look not so much of something missing but of something missed.

“See you in court, Deputy,” said Chet.

“I’ll be there.”

I walked across the street to the little girl’s house and rang the doorbell. She answered it and I asked to see her mom or dad. A moment later they were both standing in front of me, two thirty-year-olds still dressed for work, a nice-looking couple, the woman with a dishrag in her hands and the man with his shirt sleeves rolled up and a pair of glasses resting crookedly on his face.

I told them who I was, showed them my badge and they invited me in. They didn’t have to be told to get the girl into her room before we talked. She still had her stuffed bear. When the mother came back, I told them who Chet and Caryn were and what they were charged with and what had happened over in Orange that day. They’d heard about the case, but hadn’t seen any pictures of Chet or his wife or girl, and had no idea they were living right across the street. The woman’s face was pale and I could sense the physical threat coming off that man, even so mild a man, from across the room.

“Call me immediately if you have any problems,” I said, rising. “And let your neighbors know the score.”

“We’ll handle it,” said Dad. There was actually steam on the inside of his glasses.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I do what I do. Because the devourers of innocence are always around us and always have been. Because when one goes down, another pops up to take his place. Because the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But somehow we have forgotten what vigilance is, or never learned it in the first place. There’s a stream that trickles through all of us. It’s always there. It’s evil and we know this, so we force it to mix with the larger river inside us. We let it be consumed by the greater flow of good. But when the good in the river runs dry and there isn’t enough of it to dilute the stream, then the stream flows faster and harder, uncontrolled, and it finally floods one life, then another, then another. And it’s always the innocent who are easiest to pull down. It’s always the innocent who are standing there on the banks and looking in, curious and trusting and sometimes, maybe, even a little brave. The innocent never know. They need someone with an eye for evil, someone who sees it coming before there is anything at all to see. They need people who know the stream. They need people like me.

I didn’t see Donna until very late. She stayed at the studio to edit what she’d shot that day: 318 Wytton Street and environs, interviews with the mothers of the first three Horridus victims, the dating service employees who’d worked with him; interviews with Frances, Wade, Ishmael and Louis; a brief conversation with Gloria Escobedo; and a long talk with Daniel and Sara Freedman, parents of Ruth. I know this because Donna called me three times that first day, to keep me informed. I missed her and resented her working instead of nursing me, which, in turn, I resented myself for feeling. But I was too exhausted to harbor that sour emotion for long, and by the time I was expecting her to crawl in bed with me — I’d waited up as long as I could — I was longing for her company, her voice and her presence. She arrived, as she often did, just as I was beginning to dream, and her arrival was as close to comfort as I would get for some weeks. I remember her outline as she stood in the doorway in the near dark. I remember smelling her as I fell back into my waiting dreams.

Early on my second day off duty, Louis brought me all that I’d requisitioned from Sheriff Wade, and, surprisingly, been granted. The department phone call-out lists for February, March and April. The Computer Crime and Fraud log-ons and IRC records once collected and organized by Melinda and soon to be taken over by her temporary replacement — Jordan Ishmael. Time cards and expense sheets for the entire CAY unit (a decoy) as well as for Ishmael, Woolton, Vega and Burns (all decoys, too, except for one). It was a lot of material, but there was a lot I wanted to learn. I pored over it and started to piece together the activities of Ishmael for the last three months. I was looking for the smoking gun, the link that would lead from his thirty-something log-ons to I. R. Shroud to the pictures of me in the cave with Caryn Sharpe.

When the tedium got to me, I dozed and dreamed about that muzzle flash in the darkness of the flood control channel and I kept seeing Johnny standing up, arranging his face back into place and looking like he felt sorry for me.

At noon I joined the search team of the home on Wytton Street. What a haul. We pulled eighteen boxes of child porn from a spare bedroom of the main house — photos, books and magazines, 8 millimeter and video, even printed booklets with long ornate faux 19th-century narratives of firsthand sex with children and no pictures at all. A lot of it was stuff I’d never seen before, things he’d created or collected over the years, most of it old, but some of it quite new. There were digital images of all three of his Orange County victims. They all showed him, too, mostly from the back and above, completely disguised in his scaly suit. In the manner of most pedophiles, The Horridus had organized and catalogued the stuff with great care and thoroughness. He’d even cross-referenced the girls and boys according to their physical appearance and whatever names they might be given, in case he wanted to follow a certain “career.” There was a fascinating collection of “photographs” depicting celebrities with various children, in various poses — all of them very convincing. If it wasn’t the president of the United States, you wouldn’t laugh.

Of greater interest to me, and to the FBI people who helped us, was the equipment on which he had created some of the images. There was a studio in one of the main house bedrooms. It was neat and organized, just like his library was, and we guessed he had over eighty thousand dollars invested in a big fast Apple, a good scanner and digital ESP, all the Adobe software you could buy, and good printers — about fifty grand’s worth of machinery — which gave him the ability to reproduce the finished images so accurately. Throw in a film recorder, which would turn the final image from a digitized work of “art” back into a photograph, and you could do whatever your skill, patience and time would allow you to. He had done up some pictures of me with other girls and boys, too. Likely, they were practice runs for the ones he finally printed, photographed and passed along to Ishmael. There were also pictures of the cave interior — without me or anyone else in it. Had he taken those himself? Or had they been supplied to him? Remembering Will Fortune’s lessons on the camera anomalies, I studied the negatives on one of the film editors and made a mental note of the edge marks on the film and the anomalies of the camera that originally captured the image. I also carefully pocketed three of the pictures of myself — two of them with Matthew — that had been stolen from Ardith’s home. I would lift the fingerprints off them myself, and run them against Ishmael’s, on file in personnel.

Of course, Ishmael was there, helping to oversee the search. It took me a while to find the right time, but while he helped load the printers into one of our vans for transport downtown I got a financial ledger out of the box it was already packed in and took it with me to the bathroom. I shut the door and locked it and sat down on the pot seat. It didn’t take me long to crack his bookkeeping, because The Horridus hadn’t done anything much to disguise it. His handwriting was neat and careful:

My translation: Received from Mal $15,000 for five images, half down. This was back in February, on the twelfth. It truly impressed me — although a man sitting on a toilet can be thought of as impressionable by circumstance — that Ish would go to such expense to embarrass me. Had he hoped to get more for his money? Certainly, and he almost had.

The Horridus was a busy craftsman:

I made a careful replication of these entries onto my own small notepad, then wondered if the financial ledger might disappear from the evidence room, just as the pink envelope containing my damnation had disappeared a few weeks ago. I thought the chances were good. So I unbuttoned my shirt and slipped the ledger in, where it could ride up against my stomach for the next few hours and remind me what I was after. I looked in on my bandage and felt the itch of the stitches underneath. Stitched and bandaged human flesh has an indescribable smell. I went back out and helped log and load evidence, carrying the burgled box myself, nodding at Ishmael on my way to the van.

On a bookshelf in the guest house we found an adult human skull. I understood it instantly to be his mother’s, though I wasn’t happy about my wisdom. Some thoughts you just wish you never had. The front mandibles had been lipsticked bright red in a ridicule of womanhood, or perhaps of all life itself. It was perched up high, and aimed down to look at the bed where her son took the girls. Beside the skull was a whole femur, most of a small human foot, and a complete left hand on which a wedding band was affixed. Joe Reilly wandered around the scene without saying much, except to caution the techs about handling the evidence. He looked gray in the face, but so did everyone else. Joe reached down, touched the red wool blanket on the bed and looked at me, nodding.

There were notebooks with descriptions of his encounters with Pamela, Courtney and Brittany, though he referred to them throughout as “Items” “1,” “2,” or “3,” respectively. He had kept a log for his time in Arkansas (two “Items”), Indiana (two more “Items”) and Texas (one “Item” I knew as Mary Lou Kidder). I spent enough time reading them to see that FBI profiler Mike Strickley had been right — he had “scared himself” to California, where he let his first two victims go for unknown reasons and his third escaped rape and death because we interrupted him. There were graphic descriptions of five earlier rapes, and five “transformations” involving his anaconda. In the handwritten narrative there was some evidence of a troubled conscience, though not nearly as much as you might expect. He addressed the damnation of his soul and how his mother had “born and suckled Satan” — meaning himself. I read his self-analysis with some interest because I’m always intrigued by how people get to be the way they are, and because, strangely enough, they usually know. He had one quality I especially admired: he hated himself. He knew what the stream was all about, and he couldn’t beat it so he finally gave up and let it have him.

A small notebook was dedicated to phone numbers and Web sites. The names attached to the numbers and descriptions of the sites were “coded” only by The Horridus’s own shorthand: “494–4698 RS.” During my brief perusal I recognized only one, that of Abby Elder. But because it was small and fit easily in my pocket, and because I desired that it implicate Lieutenant Jordan Ishmael, I took the notebook, too. There was more than enough to convict The Horridus of helping frame me, if he’d been alive to convict. A drop or two to seal the fate of a corrupt cop wouldn’t be missed in the larger bucket of things, and the bucket, of course, would never be missed in the stream.

We had more trouble with the big snake than with any other piece of evidence on the property. Apparently the monster had been undead after my three shots, and when the last deputies had left the guest house the night before it had moved out of its cage, through the broken glass and into the house. Deputies sealing off the scene the next morning found it stretched across the floor. But when we entered the guest house for the formal search a day later, it wasn’t there. We assumed it had been taken away. I found it in the bathtub, layered upon itself high up past the rim, with one huge section of body pressed against the bathroom wall and its tail trailing across the room where it stopped, just barely out of the doorway. Its defeated head was poked between two coils. Six men and three women spent the next hour (1) determining that it was dead, (2) unwinding it out to the living room, (3) holding it as straight as possible (not very) while Joe Reilly himself used a twenty-foot tape to measure it. Even with the death curves still in the body — no amount of manual weight, strength or force could get them out — I was surprised how long it was. Every time someone lost his hold the snake would move slowly as its muscles tried to reclaim their final shape, and we’d jump like fleas. Our screams and curses would flood into the air and nervous laughter would crackle through the room like electricity and we’d have to start again, pulling on the thing and trying to hold its powerful — even though dead — body still again. It seemed like the damned thing would never stop moving, and so far as I saw, it never actually did.

Joe finally looked up, using the second twenty-foot length of tape, his thumb on the inch mark, and said, “Thirty-one feet, seven inches, not including postmortem rigor.” I learned later in the week that it weighed in at 545 pounds. A local mortuary did us a favor and cremated the animal, all five sections, no charge. It was rumored that one of the crematorium workers skinned it before it was cut up, and rolled the skin up like a carpet and took it home. I wouldn’t have done that myself. I wouldn’t want that skin within a thousand miles of me. I don’t know where the ashes were disposed of, and I don’t care. But I know they’ll end up back in the stream.

Surprisingly, the hardest task I had was to find out who The Horridus really was. I found six complete sets of identification, which included CDLs, birth certificates and Social Security cards: Gene Vonn, David Webb, Warren Witt, Mark Yost, David Lumsden and Michael Hypok. He worked for the dating services as David Lumsden. He dealt with PlaNet as Mark Yost. He dealt with utilities and the phone company as David Webb. I found Gene Vonn on three bank accounts; David Webb on four more; and Warren Witt on three others. Two for Lumsden right here in Orange County. A total of twelve accounts at different banks in four states.

But it was only when I read his notebooks further that I learned who he was, at least to himself: Michael Hypok. I first came across the name in his notebooks, in third-person references. I thought at first he was writing about a friend, and I thought, oh shit — here we go again. He used the name only occasionally. It was suddenly, casually interspersed with the simple first-person “I,” so it took me a while to catch on. But after a while it was clear that he himself was Michael Hypok — at least sometimes — and those times were when he was at his most grandiose. When he wrote of “transcendence” or “transformation,” or got on a tirade about how stupid the police were, his voice shifted to a third-person narrative starring Hypok. Hypok knew that the authorities, stupid though they were, were getting close. I found no evidence that he’d used it as an alias. In fact, I couldn’t prove that he’d ever uttered the name out loud to anyone but himself. I wondered if it was just a name he liked. Then, at the bottom of a kitchen drawer in The Horridus’s home, I found a limp, stained envelope containing a Texas driver’s license and a Social Security card belonging to a Michael Hypok some twenty years older than The Horridus.

Over the next few days I checked that name a thousand different ways. There were Michael Hypoks in forty-seven of our fifty states — but I couldn’t find a single hard fact that linked any one of them to Michael Hypok of 318 Wytton. The closest I got — thanks to Sam Welborn’s tireless combing of north Texas — was an oil rig worker who’d worked up around Wichita Falls back in the mid-seventies. After that he’d dropped from sight, vanishing from the area like a played note of music. A fingerprint comparison between The Horridus and the Michael Hypok whose Social Security card and license I found in the kitchen showed them to be altogether different men. But I wondered. Had Gene Vonn taken his name? Or that of another Michael Hypok altogether? Why? Had he known him and admired him? A buddy’s dad? A mentor? A character from a show or book? A name he had dreamed? There was no telling. No one knew and no one cared. After a while, neither did I.

It was easy enough to find Collette Loach. Her number was written down in several places because she was his sister. I got her by phone at her home in New Hampshire. She was genuinely surprised that her brother had been the number-one suspect in a series of violent sexual acts against children. She sounded concerned that he was now dead, but not bereft. She told me she never really understood why Gene wanted her to buy a house using his money — but she would have been a fool to turn down that kind of offer. She figured Gene was just shy, as always, just a little to himself, a little secretive, but a real sweet boy. She’d never heard of anybody named Hypok. She asked me if I’d be interested in cleaning out the house and renting it for her — she’d make it worm my while.

I spent most of my downtime studying the log-ons and phone activities of Ishmael, comparing them to what I had learned about I. R. Shroud. Shroud had been on the Net during all the times Ishmael, as Mal, had been. Mal, of course, was a name usable by anyone, but I used our log-on and IRC records to trace each call to the specific origin terminal. In every instance that corresponded to Shroud’s activity on-line, the Internet provider linkup was made from Ishmael’s computer, located behind the heavy doors of his office. Most of his chats with Shroud were early morning — 5 to 6 A.M. — or late evening, between seven and nine. Some were as long as eight minutes; others as short as thirty seconds. As might befit any complex business transaction, the longer ones came first, followed by the shorter nuts and bolts of delivery, approval, payment.

So far as money went, Ish spent $30,000 to commission ten images of me and seven-year-old Caryn Sharpe (nee Little). I was almost unbelieving that he could hate me that much. Thirty grand will buy you a lot of good things, and you can enjoy hatred in private for as long as you want. It’s free. I wondered if Shroud had put him through the paces at Moulton Creek, Main Beach and the Green Line Metro Rail, as he had to me. I thought not. He’d only tested me because he suspected me of impersonating the original Mal. He had smelled a cop, so he had wanted cash, and my picture taken as insurance.

It seemed to me that some kind of bank wire transfer of funds would be easier, so long as customer and provider trusted each other. I confirmed this idea through Gene Vonn’s bank statements, which showed two deposits of $15,000 wired direct. The bank manager gave me the name on the payer account, though my heart gave a little jump when she first said it. The account belonged to Melinda and Jordan Ishmael. It surprised me that Ish had left it joint so long after the divorce. Then I wondered if he’d used it at other times for other purposes: a safe, forgotten slush fund always at least half attributable to an unsuspecting ex-wife. Why not? And to have it surface in the financial records of The Horridus was a fate that Ish, even in his deepest, most prescient nightmares, could not have foreseen. You get not only what you pay for, but who you pay for it.

It took over a week to finally nail down my tormentor with something absolutely convicting: fingerprints on the pictures stolen from Ardith’s collection. Reilly took his sweet time in processing those latents because I told him quite frankly they weren’t part of any active case, and because I was quite casual about my request. I didn’t want to bring attention to myself or to a lieutenant who was my superior. So Joe put it low priority and I had to call him twice a day to see if he’d ID’d the prints.

It was late on a Friday — two weeks after the death of The Horridus — that I went to the lab to shake loose my final piece of evidence against Ishmael. I still wasn’t quite certain, even then, exactly what I was going to do with it.

Joe looked at me over his glasses and pretended not to know why I was there. When I told him he changed the subject to the new ultraviolet/infrared analyzer that he had created to examine various materials, mostly inks. It was a funny-looking contraption with two different light sources and an ingenious system of adjustable wooden eyeshades to protect the examiner from ambient light. It sat on a corner bench with two stools in front of it. Joe’s people had nicknamed it Ugly Box and he assumed I’d want to give it a whirl.

“Joe, all I need is your make on the fingerprints, if you’ve come up with one.”

“We’ll get to that.”

Then a long pause.

I didn’t have to acknowledge that I’d put him in a tough position — helping condemn a fellow deputy against whom he had no personal or professional grudge. Also hanging in the air of his lab at that moment was the fact that Joe had been ready to testify against me on the mocked-up images. I’d decided to say nothing to him about it, and I didn’t. He was only doing his job, saying what he thought was true about the photographs he’d examined.

“I’ll run them through myself, if you’d like,” I offered, meaning I’d make the calls to the various print banks — CAL–ID, FBI and WIN — though I am not a fingerprint expert and wouldn’t really know what to tell them to look for. At least it would take the onus off Joe and his people.

He looked at me rather sadly with those cool blue eyes and said no, he’d done the work once so there was no sense in me doing it again. He shrugged. The expression he gave me was that of a doctor about to reveal a rare disease. Or a father whose son has brought some inadvertent disaster upon his family and friends.

“They’re Melinda’s,” he said.