Where Serpents Lie

Two

I watched us on County News Bureau that night with Melinda. CNB gave us the good spin, playing the suicide like an incident that tarnished an otherwise heroic op. I was warm with pride, though my cheek was throbbing from Lauren’s teeth and the six stitches it took to close the two punctures. Bites hurt. CNB was careful not to show my face on camera, but not because of the blood. Our arrangement is that I am not to be revealed. That’s how I can continue to get away with things like today.

The reporter was Donna Mason, and she was her usual lovely self, calm and somehow dignified in her role as a digger of dirt. For the last two months, since The Horridus started his campaign here in the county, the media’s been eager for anything with kids and sex. That old taboo has been broken, or at least suspended for a while. So Donna Mason really let the Sharpes and Marlon have it. Her cameras ambushed them being led from the house, and of course, you can’t cover your face when your hands are cuffed behind your back. The CNB shooters tracked the miserable trio all the way to the Sheriff van. Got an angle on Marlon crying like a child. I had told Donna not to tape Lauren, and she had been good to her word. She always has been. So far.

Melinda brought me another tequila on ice. My drink of choice. She curled onto the sofa a few feet away from me, and gently brushed my cheek with her fingertips.

“That’s good work, Terry,” she said.

“Well... thanks.”

“How close was Marlon to shooting you?”

“I don’t think he would have.”

“The girl going to be okay?”

I looked at her and sighed. “No.”

CNB started in with a sidebar on Danny — Dr. Christopher Muhlberger, professor of mathematics — and the shocking secret life he might have led. I thought of his family and felt bad. I thought of him taking his own life in the backyard of a rented house and felt bad about that, too. I am long on compassion for the innocent, but there is always a little left for the guilty, too. Maybe this is a flaw in my character. But it’s not to say I wouldn’t tear the lungs out of any criminal who harms a child. I have and I will again. It’s my reason for being. But after the death of Matthew two years ago, everyone and everything became, to me, somehow forgivable. I can’t tell you why.

“That didn’t have to happen to him,” I said. “I could have disarmed the fat guy and it wouldn’t have gone down that way. The prof didn’t even have the guts to bring his own piece. Drunk. Scared. I could have seen it coming.”

“You did what needed doing. He blew out his own brains, Terry. You didn’t.”

“I still think there was something I could have done.”

“Precious little, Naughton.”

As an investigator — Fraud and Computer Crime — Melinda’s judgment of me can cut deeply. She knows my world and its limitations, and she can flatten me not only as a woman but as a professional equal. In fact, she is not my equal: she’s a sergeant 4, one grade above mine of sergeant 3. She’s two years older and at least ten wiser. More to the point, Melinda feels no compassion whatsoever for the wicked or the inept. I believe this comes from her own sense of victimhood. Her mother died when she was young and her father abandoned her when she was six. She feels the pain of the innocent. And she feels the fury of the wronged. In fact, in our year of domestic life together I have seen her almost consumed by that pain and fury. Maybe the fact that she can feel so much for the innocent reduces her pity for the guilty. I can be touchy about her comments on me and my work. Melinda is a hard woman to please in most ways, so success with her is all the sweeter.

“Thanks, Mel.”

“Don’t beat yourself up.”

“Am I a liberal?”

“A real do-gooder.”

“A pinko?”

“A commie.”

“A poet?”

“A queen.”

“You pour a mean drink, Melinda.”

“Got to keep you up with me.”

“You keep me up.”

“I’ll bet she could, too.”

Donna was on-screen again for her wrap. I looked at Melinda, then back to the tube. I will mention now, then forever hold my peace, that Melinda is a jealous companion. In some ways this pleases me. And she can joke about it now. Like this crack about a TV reporter. But it never hurts to set things straight.

“Not my type.”

“Too young and beautiful?”

“It’s not the youth and beauty. She’s just not you.”

“You’re a world-class liar, Terry.”

“I know.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“Look at Louis and Johnny there, see how long they...”

On-screen, Johnny and Louis stood at the curb until they realized the camera was pointed their way, then hustled off-screen. Frances did most of the talking for us — she’s well spoken, credible and unabashedly ambitious to rise in the ranks. Truth be told, though, it was hard not to look at Donna Mason. Maybe that’s why they gave her the job.

“Freshen up that drink, Terry?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

Penny, Melinda’s daughter, came out of her room around nine. She’d been doing homework. She’s a natural student, very much like her mother in the long, silent intensities she can bring to things. She’s nine, chunky and pretty like her mom, with straight blond hair and placid gray eyes. Penelope Anne. A year ago we began the hesitant dance of getting to know each other closer than friends, but not as father and daughter. She has a continuing relationship with her real father, and I would never try to compete or interfere with that. He’s a loving, if self-serving soul, and she needs him. My son, Matthew, would have been seven. Well, in August.

She sat down between us with her laptop computer and shook her head. “Microsoft Word sucks.”

“Don’t use that word,” I said.

“But it’s called word.”

“You know what I mean, young lady.”

Her mother pulled the little machine onto her own lap and looked at the flip-up screen. She tapped in a few commands and tilted the screen toward Penny. “It’s the Windows that’s throwing you, not the word processing program. See, you’ve got too much open, the thing just got clogged. You’ve got to go through and close them, one at a time, or, you can use this.”

She showed Penny the right command and set the computer back on her daughter’s lap. Frankly, I’m amazed that any nine-year-old can learn to operate a computer at all, not to mention two word processing programs, three data operating systems and God knows how many different keyboards, printers, CD readers and floppy backups. I wonder if they stock the classrooms with these things to educate kids or just to sell them similar gadgets when they’re adults. I asked Penny what subject she was on.

“Science,” she answered. “I’m learning the planets. Before that, I finished my report on slavery.”

Computers. Planets. Slavery. The world of a healthy, somewhat privileged American nine-year-old.

“Your face looks sore, Terry,” she said, looking up from the screen. “It’s turning blue, like a bruise.”

“It is a bruise.”

“Did they arrest the girl who bit you?”

“They’ll put her in protective custody. Later, depending on what happens to her parents, she’ll go with relatives, or maybe to an institution.”

“What did she do wrong?”

I thought about that a second. “Nothing, really.”

Melinda looked over, her eyes condemning me over the tops of her reading glasses.

“Then you try,” I said to her.

She shifted her body and reached out to touch Penny’s hair.

“Don’t, Mom. What did the girl who bit Terry do wrong, to get put institution?”

“Put in an institution,” Melinda corrected.

“Okay. In an. What did she do?”

“She became a prostitute. That’s when you sell your body for money, or other consideration.”

“To do what with?”

“It depends.”

“Why did she become that?”

“Her father and mother forced her to. So they’ll go to jail. She was lucky that Terry was there, to arrest her parents.”

Penny looked at me, understandably concerned that cops taking parents away from their children was good luck. I shrugged. Melinda will sail Penny into moral oceans that no nine-year-old can be expected to navigate. Mel believes in treating children as the adults they will become. I believe in treating them like the children they will never be again. This difference of opinion is occasionally hard for us to live with. But because Penelope is not my daughter, I almost always defer to Melinda. Though I still didn’t think a nine-year-old needed to be an expert in the California Penal Code.

My ex-wife believes I never protected my own beautiful son from the “real” world enough, and I agree. I admit that I allowed him to do some of the things he wanted to, foreseeing the hurt he might suffer in the trying. Those tears of his still move me. He was a timid boy in most ways, and I wanted to encourage his confidence. I’ve changed now, far too late to do him any good. If I had it to do all over again, I would have handled it differently. I truly wish that the living, seven-year-old Matt Naughton was here right now to prove that I had been a good father. Or a bad one; I don’t care. Just here.

We watched TV for another hour. A little after ten, Melinda told Penny it was time for bed. Penny protested but not very hard, because Melinda is inflexible on household rules, and Penny knows it.

“I want Terry to tuck me in,” she said.

“Then ask Terry to tuck you in,” said Mel, and she walked out of the living room and into the kitchen.

An hour later I found Mel in her study. She does a lot of work at home. Since being assigned to the Fraud and Computer Crime detail two years ago, she’s gone from being computer illiterate to computer devoted. I keep waiting to catch her playing solitaire, or watching a CD, or browsing consumer products on the Net, but I’ve never found her doing anything but work on her machine, or sometimes writing letters. For Melinda, work is peace. She is not a person who enjoys many things, but work is one of them. No surprise that in two years she’s worked her way to second in command of Fraud and Computer Crime — a twelve-person section.

She looked up at me when I went in, and let her reading glasses dangle on the chain around her neck.

“Tired?” she asked.

“Not really. I’m going to take Moe up the hill. Want to come?”

“I’ve got work.”

She studied me for a moment. She has a clear-eyed, analytical gaze that gathers much more than it gives away. I’d hate to be one of her suspects in an interrogation. In fact, I’ve seen her work — through the one-way mirrors — and she is extremely effective. But her stare melted into a smile and she nodded her head slightly.

“Nice work today, Terry. Four months to nail that creep. And you ended up doing something decent for the girl. You should feel good about you.”

“Thanks, Mel. I do. But I think about the life Chet took away from her.”

“You can’t be everywhere at once.”

I stepped forward and kissed her lips. I didn’t hold it long because I knew she had work to do. Those lips are sweet as sugar when she wants them to be. Just six months ago we were to the point of going weeks or more without anything more intimate than a peck on the cheek — if that. Mel was a wreck. Her father had died. And though he had avoided her in childhood like some guilty secret, she had tracked him down and stayed in touch with him in a remote but regular way the last few years of his miserable life. His death hit her hard. And I realized that the end of someone you desperately want to love you but never did can hurt as much as that of someone who treasures you. Maybe it’s just one last confirmation of your own unlovability. But Melinda’s inner darkness gradually broke, and something of her old self has emerged from the long, black night.

“See you soon,” I said.

Our house is on Canyon Edge, the fifth one in from Laguna Canyon Road. It’s a ramshackle little place, built in three stages, over three decades, in three “styles” — none of which I can really define. But it was affordable for Mel and me as co-buyers, and the money is worth the quiet canyon life and the beautiful Pacific, which is just a couple of miles away. In the big fire of ’93, it was one of only eight houses on Canyon Edge that didn’t burn down. Thirty-seven were reduced to nothing but fireplaces and chimneys that day in October.

I let Moe out of the backyard and we headed down Canyon Edge, away from Laguna Canyon Road. The road is crooked and uneven, without streetlights and sidewalks, but it also has almost no traffic because it dead-ends a half mile into the canyon. Once we were past the last rebuilt house I stood for a moment on the scorched foundation of Scotty Barris’s place. Scotty didn’t rebuild because he wasn’t insured. It was an old place, the oldest on the street, built by Scotty’s father and uncles back in the early twenties. Now it’s just a rectangle of black cement with weeds growing up through it and some twisted rods of rebar bent at odd angles. For sale.

Past the black foundation you pick up a trail in the high weeds and climb a steep embankment. The trail levels off, then meanders back down to the canyon floor and follows a creek bed that is dry except after a rain. Moe led the way. He’s a real dog’s dog when it comes to the outdoors, always in the brush after birds or critters — true to his Labrador instincts. I’ve never hunted him. I quit shooting things for sport when Matthew died, just another one of those things I used to love to do and then didn’t love anymore. I miss the taste of quail and dove and pheasant. I miss those evenings when I’d take the birds out of the marinade and Ardith would make the salad and rice and Matthew would blunder around in the kitchen with his plastic swords or superhero gear.

We headed up the creek bottom. In the black sky a sliver of moon rocked on its back. The stars looked close. The hills rose up and away in the distance, and their shapes were black like the sky but without stars in them.

Around the first big bend the trail starts uphill again, rimming around the sandstone hill, winding up. It’s steep and narrow. It passes through a canopy of scrub oak and lemonadeberry that you have to duck through and walk with your hands in front of you so your face doesn’t get scratched. I could feel Lauren’s gift on my cheek, and it pulsed hard when I bent my head toward the ground. Then, on the far side of the trees, the trail opens into a nice flat outcropping of sandstone where you can look out to the city to your left, Laguna Canyon Road straight in front, and the dark hills on the right. Below is a long drop. Behind you is a hill face pocked with big and little caves that far-flung families of the Juaneño Indians lived in centuries ago. You wonder if they chose this steep abode for safety or beauty, or both.

The smallest cave on the left holds my hiking provisions — a quart bottle of good Herradura, a coffee cup and a wooden box of Dominican cigars. I keep them in a pillowcase, which is stuffed way back, behind a sleeping bag I bought just for this place. Some months ago, when I first found the caves, I liked to smoke and drink in the big one, way back inside where the Juaneños used to be. I’d listen for their souls brushing against the rock. It was a mess when I found it — all beer cans and trash, an old mattress, skin mags — the usual things adolescents would drag into their den. But after I cleaned it out, no one ever seemed to go there again. Maybe that generation of kids had outgrown the caves and gone on to serious things like colleges or jobs. At any rate, I finally got tired of being inside it, and moved my recreations to the flat outcropping in front, unless it’s raining hard.

I’m not exactly sure why I come here. Melinda doesn’t mind my tequila, or even cigars, so long as I smoke them outside, which is where I like to smoke them anyway. She’s never expressed worry about Penny seeing me do such things, though I have my own concerns about that. In fact, Melinda has come out here with me a few times and matched me drink for drink. No, the reason I come here has more to do with solitude and liberty — the same things that the teenagers used to come here to enjoy. And it has a lot to do with the memory of Matt, which is always more alive up here, more specific and present. When I spend the night here, which I did a lot last summer, I unroll the sleeping bag in the deepest part of the cave and, with Moe curled up beside me, sleep deeply. Often, when I wake up, I won’t remember where I am or how I got here or why I didn’t just walk home to my companion and bed. I’ve awakened other places than the cave and had no memory of how I got there either. This is due to somewhat massive tequila intake. Luckily, I have an iron constitution and always wake up before dawn, whether I can see the sun or not, whether I’ve slept eight hours or forty minutes. And not once in the year I’ve been doing this has a neighbor seen me stealing back to my home in the accusing dark before sunrise. So far as I know. I drink because it makes me happy and peaceful. Most of the time. God created booze to keep us Irish from taking over the world.

Frankly, I don’t sleep out here much anymore. The worst of it was six months back, when Mel was in her own darkness about her dad and I was culminating a year and a half of ardent self-destruction. I have more to live for now. Mel is better. Ardith is going to be all right. Matt won’t come back no matter how bad I feel. My work is more important to me than ever. Beginning six months ago, at my lowest point, I began to find a way to love this world again. I’m fine now.

So I sat and smoked and drank a little. Not a lot. I thought of my last day with Matthew, how bright and hot it was, how the water was so blue and calm. The kind of day that seemed like it could last a hundred years and nothing would ever go wrong. I thought about how limp and cool he felt, then how rigid and strong, then how terrifyingly relaxed. You can play things over in your mind a million times, even put different endings on them, but in the long run it won’t do you any good. They tell us to imagine the world we want to see, but how can you unimagine something you’ve already looked at? Matthew was my first real loss in life. My parents are still alive, still married. Up until Matt went away, I still had the vague, youthful notion that nothing bad would happen to me and the people I loved, for a long, long time. In the last two years I’ve tried to accommodate the facts and the givens. I haven’t been very good at it, but I’m getting better.

I thought of Danny’s surprise ending and wondered if I should have seen it coming. I tried to weigh the heaviness in my heart for him, but there really wasn’t much there. With all the good people in the world who suffer, it’s hard to bleed much for the creeps who suffer along with them. Still, you don’t see an act like that and not feel something for the suffering animal that carried it out. But feel what?

I looked to the west and imagined The Horridus, out there, waiting, planning. White male, with wavy, “reddish blond” hair. For his second abduction he drove a red van that was seen by the girl’s disbelieving mother. He takes them late night or early morning, knows the bedroom, cuts out the screen and a hand-sized hole to unlock the window. Opens it, climbs through and grabs the girl. Then out the door. His first time — the first time we know about, anyway — he was gone with the girl for six hours before her mother even knew what had happened. On the second, the mother heard something, woke up and found her daughter gone, saw a guy get into a red van then pull away from the curb. Both mothers have been single, but we don’t know how he knows this ahead of time. I suspect he’s ditched the van by now, traded it in on another one. Just a feeling. Both girls have had identical vehicle fibers on them. Late-model Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge, according to the second mother. The van is where he does what he does, we believe. The clothes he puts on them are thirty years old and in very good condition. We know this from some lengthy product research and the fine work of our crime lab. In addition to the “vintage” clothing, each girl has been outfitted in a white gauzy tunic attached at the neck with a safety pin. It’s made out of that netting you’d see in a ballerina’s tutu, or a Halloween costume, or a wedding gown. It extends from neck to ankles and gives the victims a floating, angelic look. Each has been found wearing a black velvet hood without eyeholes. The hoods are made by hand, and there are two small holes way down toward the mouth area, probably to help supply air. The first girl, Pamela, was five, and the second, Courtney, six years old. He took them twenty-six days apart. He let them go within five hours of their capture, in remote state park or U.S. forest lands. He seems to know his way around. Other than that we don’t have much. We’ll get an FBI profile early tomorrow, but profiles, good as they are, are still speculation. When I think of The Horridus my heart beats hard and fast and I feel like all my senses have been stripped back to bare, efficient essentials. I feel like I’m growing fangs. He hasn’t raped yet. And he hasn’t killed yet, but I suspect that he’ll graduate to both. What he hasn’t done scares me more than what he has. Criminologists call it an escalating fantasy, though it is not a fantasy for anyone but the dreamer. I’ve read case histories where the fantasy is played out in different ways, different terms. It always gets worse. Now I’m actually seeing it happen, right here on my watch. I know he won’t stop until he gets what he wants. And he won’t stop after that, because he’ll want it again. And again. And again.

Moe sat beside me for a while, alert, then groaned and lay down and fell asleep. When I started back the moon was gone and there was a damp breeze coming from the west with the smell of the ocean in it. As I picked my way down the trail I wondered what it would be like to tell Melinda I was going to leave her, and if I could do it.