Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  He nodded and led me out of the island and along the back wall of cages. “The rabbits are for big snakes, probably constrictors,” he said. “I’d guess seven feet and longer. If you keep a retic or a burmese python long enough, they’ll get fifteen, twenty feet long. A snake like that would need a lot of food—say, two rabbits a week, maybe three or four. The rats don’t really reveal that much, reptilewise. Most mid-sized snakes will take them. The mice are for smaller reptiles—most of the California native snakes live on mice. The fact that he was feeding his collection back in March means they weren’t in brumation—”

  “—Brumation?”

  “Hibernation. Or ‘overwintering.’ Basically, just cooling them off. Collectors will do that if they’re breeding reptiles. Sometimes they’ll do it just to replicate nature’s seasons. When the snakes are brumating, they don’t eat. So, this guy’s animals were eating. They were active.”

  “What would adult timber rattlers eat?”

  “Mice and rats. A big adult might take small rabbits but the rats are more economical.”

  We arrived at the pond with the catfish and the turtles in it. Steve took a handful of food pellets from the dispenser and gave them to me. I tossed a few in, and watched the fish bend to take mem. I tossed a few more toward a turtle that was away from the group, over in the corner alone.

  I was thinking. “You’ve only seen this guy once. He’s got a good-sized collection that’s active. He’s got to feed them every week or so. That means he’s getting food somewhere else, right?”

  “Well, it’s possible he’s only got a few snakes and he’s freezing the food when he gets home. For later use. But mostly, a big collection, you either buy fresh once a week or you order frozen by mail—saves money if you buy in bulk. There’s other stores that sell food, too. No telling where he’s getting it.”

  “I didn’t know a snake would eat frozen things.”

  “You thaw them out first.”

  We went back to the counter. I picked up three different reptile magazines and a reptile-show newsletter, but Steve wouldn’t let me pay for them. I handed him my card, with my home phone on the back. “If you see him again, call me. If you talk to anybody who mentions him, call me. If you remember anything about him, no matter how small it is or how certain you are, call me. Amanda will be here a little after five.”

  He gave me one of his cards. It was made of thick yellow card stock and had an embossed green snake across it We shook hands. His grip was strong and his skin was rough. “How come a collector buys live animals for food, if they can kill his snakes?” I asked.

  Steve shrugged. “He probably likes to watch his snakes kill them. Some people enjoy that.”

  From my car I called the name Steven Wicks into Frances, who’d run the CID through Sacramento. Ten minutes later she was back on the line: Wicks was thirty-eight years old, residing in Anaheim, California, with a prior 384a.

  I asked her what in hell a 384a was.

  “Cutting or destroying shrubs. He took some cactus out of Borrego State Park. He was nineteen at the time. Did ten days and paid a $500 fine. Other than that, he’s clean.”

  I checked three other reptile stores, but no one remembered any customer who had asked about horridus. They sold too many rabbits, rats and mice to remember the people who bought them. My physical description wasn’t specific enough to be useful yet, but that would change—I hoped—when Steve Wicks met with Amanda Aguilar.

  I sat a few minutes with Linda Sharpe late that afternoon in the Juvenile Hall visiting area. It’s a hushed and miserable room, where the detainees and visitors—usually parents—have to conduct the sometimes heartbreaking business of familihood with little privacy. There are always deputies present, but the kids and adults aren’t separated by glass, as in a prison. Instead, there’s a long table and folding chairs, where you can sit face to face and try to keep your conversation away from the people next to you. We got seats at a far end.

  She’d been given a pair of loose-fitting jeans, a pair of athletic shoes and a T-shirt. Her pigtails were gone, twisted back into a single ponytail. No makeup, no little girl’s dress, no whore’s costume. Linda Sharpe, age ten, now actually looked like a ten-year-old.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Her expression was dreamy, surrendered. It’s an expression very common to the sexually exploited young. She didn’t answer.

  “Sorry about what happened yesterday,” I said.

  “I knew you were a cop.”

  I shrugged. “I mean I’m sorry about what Danny did. There was no reason you had to see that.”

  “It didn’t really bother me. I didn’t like him.”

  “Well, at least you say what’s on your mind.”

  “Are we done?”

  “Is there anything I can get you?”

  She shook her head and looked around the room with wide, gathering eyes.

  “Out of here would be nice.”

  I studied her. I’d read through her folder and knew she was at a crossroads now—either an institution or a relocation to be with her nearest relatives, who were way up by Spokane. We had, by Welfare and Institution Code, twenty-one days to keep her until she was placed. A lot of what happened depended on whether we charged her or not. If she went to a Youth Authority facility, her life would be one thing. If she went to live with her mother’s sister and husband in Washington, that was another. There’s no way to tell which one is going to work out better, or work out at all. The system can’t see the future, but it never stops trying.

  “I hear you have an aunt up in Washington.”

  She slouched down low in the chair and glared.

  “I hate Washington.”

  “Been there?”

  She looked at me with the mock exasperation young people think is convincing.

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s the first thing everybody tries to make you believe. How much they care. There’s a word for that, and the word is bullshit.”

  “I meant it.”

  “Look, Mr. Cop—”

  “—Terry.”

  “—Cop Terry, I don’t have to go to Washington and I don’t have to go to jail. I’m a minor. I’m ten and I got all sorts of rights. I got a lawyer and he’s twice as smart as you’ll ever be. I’m not going to say anything about my mom or my dad. They love me. I do what I want to do and that’s the way it is. So, you want to know what you can get me? Get me out of here, get me my house key back and my clothes and the money that was in my purse at home. I want my CDs and my makeup and my friends and my swimming pool. The rest, you can take and shove up your butt.”

  I nodded and waved over the matron.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll shove it. And I’ll talk to you sometime when you’re acting like a human and not a whore. By the way, thanks for the bite. It took six stitches to close it and it hurts like hell. If you test positive, we’re both going to die.”

  She looked at me cheerfully. “Good.”

  SIX

  Tonello’s is an expensive Italian restaurant in the metro district of Orange County. It’s a warm and clubby place, with excellent food and service just formal enough to let you know you’re important. It’s close to the Performing Arts Center and the South Coast Repertory Theater, two cultural jewels in the county’s modest crown. It’s a smoky back room without the smoke, given our brutal but sanctimonious times. If you’re powerful or ambitious, you want to be known there.

  For years it’s been the watering hole for the politicians and businesspeople who command their fiefdoms within the county—the supervisors and city pols, the judges and the assemblymen, the developers and real estate magnates, the publishers and editors and media executives, the many lobbyists who represent Wall Street brokerage firms and banks, the philanthropists and the social elite. If your status isn’t as high as your ambition, you can still go, so long as you’re dressed well, submiss
ive and don’t expect a table. Jim Wade is a regular there, along with his heir apparent, Jordan Ishmael. Few others in our Sheriff-Coroner Department have much reason to patronize the place. We like cop hangouts. But for the last six months or so I’ve been showing up at Tonello’s myself, an unknown in the smiling, boozy world of the Orange County elite. Jim suggested that I might profit from a proximity to these people, though he’s never said exactly how. Ishmael, of course, detests my presence. Melinda joins me occasionally. With Linda Sharpe’s bitter words still ringing in my ears, I pulled up to the valet line and left my car and a five with Rodrigo. He parked it out of sight, back with the other Fords.

  I walked in with a truculent glow, due to my good fortune at Prehistoric Pets. Ishmael was at the bar, and for once I was glad to see him. I delivered to him the line I’d been dying to deliver for the last few hours:

  “Where’s Wade? I got a sketch of a Horridus suspect coming through in less than an hour.”

  Ishmael looked at me hard, his green eyes openly suspicious. He motioned behind him with a turn of his head. “With your personal publicist from CNB.”

  “Perfect,” I said, smiling. “Talk to you later, Ish.”

  I paid, then overtipped the bartender.

  “My daughter says she’s starting to really like you.”

  “Everybody in your family likes me, except for you.”

  “Pride goes before the fall, Naughton.”

  “I always land on my feet.”

  “When you’re not passed out on your face.”

  “Those days are gone.”

  “A drunk’s a drunk.”

  I took my Herradura rocks and eased through the crowd to where Sheriff Wade, Donna Mason and a couple of the new county supervisors—Dom Ingardia and Lucille Watrous—were holding down one corner of the lounge. I nodded to my boss and to Donna, clicked glasses with the supervisors.

  “Nice work yesterday, Terry,” said Lucille. She’s an older woman, savvy and tough, who often looks at me with a twinkle in her eyes that makes me feel like a hero, or her son, or perhaps a fatted lamb. “One more offender off the streets. Two more, I guess.”

  “One more kid in juvie, too,” I said.

  “Beats turning tricks for Daddy,” said Ingardia, who was recently appointed supervisor—the most powerful office in the county—by the governor. He’s a real estate salesman, and I don’t see how he’s going to help guide this county out of the shitswamp of development it’s fallen into, but that’s another matter.

  “Ten years old …,” I said.

  I turned my attention to Donna Mason. I always feel all alone with her, even in a crowded room. I kind of have to screw up my courage to talk to her in a situation like this. “That was a good segment you did on us,” I said.

  “You probably don’t realize how good,” she said. “The phones have been ringing all day. That bite looks bad, Sergeant.”

  I nodded and smiled at her, rather stupidly, I think. I ran my fingers over the bandage on my face. She looks different than she does on TV, her face is thinner and her smile is quirkier and she seems lighter, less permanent. She’s from one of the hollows of West Virginia, born poor but naturally advantaged: she’s quite beautiful, extremely smart and knows what she wants. She works long hours, keeps up a demanding social life and still manages to read two or three books a week. I’ve gathered that much. She was married at twenty-two and divorced two years ago, at twenty-eight. No kids. Her hair is wavy and black and cut short, kind of curls forward around the sides of her face. Her skin is pale and her eyes are brown. She’s small, perfectly proportioned, unathletic. The first seconds I spent with her were six months ago in an elevator at a press conference, where we were headed from the briefing room to the seafood buffet. I looked at her, introduced myself and shook her hand. I’ve been thinking about her ever since, off and on, no matter how hard I try not to.

  “It’s nice to work together,” I said lamely. “You know, law enforcement and the … media.”

  “Oh, can’t you just call me the news? Or the press, or a reporter, or even a hyena, vulture, jackal or bloodsucker? I can’t get used to being a medium of any kind. It makes me feel so … vaporous.”

  Vaporous, with just a hint of the hollows in the lengthened vowels and the gentle lilt of the “r.” You won’t hear her talk like that on CNB.

  Sheriff Wade smiled down with an avuncular grin. He’s labored hard for good press over the years, and I’ve helped him land an ally in CNB. More accurately, the children I work to protect have helped him into the good graces of the news sellers. Children are hot now. Children—namely the children of the baby boomers, and the bad things that happen to them—sell. CNB is a local news network, but extremely popular here, and getting more so every month. Like other businesses defined by place, CNB’s fortunes and the future of Orange County are intertwined.

  So, what I did next no cop should do, but I had my reasons.

  “Sir,” I said to Sheriff Wade, “we’re going to be getting an artist’s sketch of a Horridus suspect in the next hour. Can I have it sent through to the fax in your car?”

  He put his lips together as if to whistle, leveled his gray eyes on me through his glasses and took me by the arm, away from the group.

  “Easy, media hound. What’s this about?”

  We worked our way toward the bar and I told him about the reptile collection angle and my visit to Steve Wicks. Jordan Ishmael eased in our direction, but Wade warned him off in that silent way the powerful have. I glanced over at Donna and the supervisors, then back to the sheriff.

  “I thought we were going to let this guy operate,” he said.

  “For now.”

  “Comments like that have a way of hitting the news.”

  “She’ll clear it with me. She always has.”

  He looked across the room at Donna Mason. Wade is over six-three, with the weathered skin and dry pale eyes of a rancher. Then he looked down at me. “What do we know about your guy, besides he likes snakes and knows a little Latin?”

  “He matches the physical description on the profile.”

  “Besides that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Go easy, Terry. We don’t need to be seen swinging at bad pitches. That’s best done off-camera.”

  “I understand.”

  He nodded. “You and Melinda going to come to the ranch Saturday?”

  Sheriff Jim Wade’s annual equestrian show and benefit for County Youth Services was set for the weekend. If you’re somebody, you go. I’d never been invited until this year, though I know that Jordan and Melinda Ishmael used to attend together.

  “Much looking forward to it.”

  “Go ahead. Call Amanda and use the fax in the Lincoln. Here’s the key.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re in charge of CAY, Terry. But I wouldn’t go public with that sketch yet, if I were you.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  The fax transmission came through the machine in Wade’s gold Lincoln about twenty minutes later. It was clear and specific, taunting in its ordinariness. I smoothed it against my lap and studied it. Slender face, wavy hair, the glasses. A high forehead. Mustaches and beard. Smallish ears and a mouth that looked neither cruel nor kind. A look of intelligence, perhaps. I’ve seen enough artist’s sketches derived from witnesses to know how much they can seem to tell you and how little they often do. The next page had him without the facial hair. Same guy, but he looked more ordinary, less individual. Without the glasses he could have been an artist’s conception of Everyman. I folded the sheets neatly and put them in the inside pocket of my sport coat.

  Back inside I got another drink and made the rounds. I put in a good word for our part of the sheriff’s budget with Lucille and Ingardia; they control our purse strings, sort of. I suggested to one of the Disneyland executives that some kind of abused kids’ night might be a nice PR stunt for the theme park and the Sheriffs. I felt good. I introduced Ishmael to a Times editor I
know, with the idea the editor might want to hear about the new Sheriff Department Web site that Ishmael and some of his cohorts are working overtime to establish. Ish silently fumed at my farming out a media source to him, which pleased me. I bought another drink for myself, and one for Peter Stowe, who works for the Irvine Company, which is the county’s largest landowner. We talked about this new “developer/environmentalist” agreement that would set aside certain county acreage to preserve endangered species, while opening up other parts of it for houses, industrial parks and what have you. The Times and the Register—Orange County’s two major dailies—had both recently gushed about the sexy way the builders and the environmentalists had jumped into the same bed. Basically, the Orange County press is for developing the county until the last blade of grass is gone, though they publish photo-heavy, love-the-land features that suggest otherwise. To me the new land agreement looked like a good deal for the Irvine Company, and I said so, and Peter Stowe said, smoothly, “Of course it is, or we wouldn’t have made it.”

  I smiled and clicked his glass in a fit of bonhomie I immediately regretted. Truth be told, I kind of hate the Irvine Company and all the development interests who’ve had carte blanche in this county since the beginning of time. It really was a beautiful, logical, functional place once, and I sorely miss that era. I grew up here and I feel vested in this place: my family is here, my blood and history, my dreams and disappointment, my co-mortgage—shared with Melinda. So I’m a little dour about people like Peter Stowe, and his easy confidence, and the way that people like him and companies like his always, always get what they want here.

  Orange County has a rural, agrarian history, but it has become a tightly packed grid of suburbs that even now—and I’m not sure why this is—continues to be an in-demand place to live. The traffic is as bad as Los Angeles County, our neighbor to the north, and the air is every bit as contaminated. Crime rates are high. Property is expensive, though not as expensive as it used to be. The developers and county politicians are trying to jam a new international airport—fifth largest in the nation—down the throats of about a million people in south Orange County who voted against it. A few people will make a lot of money from it, though there is a perfectly good airport—just recently opened—about five miles away. More customers, is what it all boils down to. County “business leaders” brought us to this saturation point with earnest vigor, and they have not stopped yet. They’re not really leaders; they’re opportunists with an eye, always, on the bottom line.