Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

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

  “Isn’t there one tonight?”

  “No, sir,” I lied.

  “Where are you staying?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Well, yes—it’s possible.”

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

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

  “How, exactly, would they do it?”

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

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

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

  “What’s it eat?”

  “Rabbits, ducks and pigs.”

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

  EIGHTEEN

  I sat in room 21 of the Holiday Inn and stared for a while out the window. The sky had gone deep indigo and the breeze was still up. It was seven. Sam had invited me to the stock car races and I’d accepted, recklessly aware that I was disobeying still another order from my commander in chief. I figured, if they didn’t want me to go out and watch cars go around in circles, tough. Plus I’d had a nip or two from my bottle of tequila—I’d bought the second smallest one at the store, a pint—and its courage had begun to set in.

  I called Donna but she was on assignment. I left a message from Skip on her voice mail. I called Melinda at home, and when Penny answered we talked very briefly. We were just getting past the hello, how are you stuff when Melinda cut in, asked me not to call the house like that and hung up. I still hadn’t thought of a way to tell Penny the truth without confusing and hurting her, so maybe it was just as well that Melinda cut us off. I resented Melinda for taking sides against me, but I respected what she had to do for Penny—maybe I would have done the same. I left another message for Johnny about the Gene Webb/Webster/Vonn/Grantley or Wanda Grantley home—told him to take the title search into Los Angeles and San Diego counties just to be safe. I blathered on about the Grantley house, Welborn, the great flat state of Texas. I was lonely. Johnny’s machine ran out of tape before I finished, so I had to call back to make sure he had it all, and to wish him good luck. I told him again that I thought they should release the drawing based on Brittany Elder’s description—the “sharp mean face” and the short white hair. After seeing the remains of Mary Lou Kidder, I was in favor of all the proaction we could muster: smoke him out, make him flinch, rattle his cage. I knew the risks, but I thought they were worth taking. I left the same information with Louis, just to double-cover. I did all this in the name of Frank. It made me mad to have to slink around the world as different people. It was demeaning and it implied guilt. That was one thing I wasn’t ready to shoulder, not on the scale that I was being asked to by … Ishmael? A Wade-Vega-Woolton cabal? I. R. Shroud?

  Sam picked me up at seven-thirty and we rode out to the track in his sedan.

  We sat in the grandstand and watched the cars go by. Sam waved to a half-dozen people on our way up the steps. We had hot dogs and giant beers and the captain had an extra cup for his dip. He had a friend driving in the third race.

  “These things’ll get up to ninety-five on the straights,” he said, staring straight ahead as the cars spun past. He hadn’t said much on the way here and I knew why: the sight of Mary Lou Kidder had damaged him.

  “You a family man, Terry?”

  “Divorced. Had a son but he died when he was five.”

  Sam turned and looked at me with his wide, quizzical face. “I’m awful sorry to hear that. Don’t mean to be pryin’.”

  “It’s all right.”

  The stock cars roared under the lights. I liked the reverberations in my chest and the whining of rpms in my ears. Three cars almost piled up on turn three but they veered out of it in a chaos of white smoke. The Copenhagen Smokeless Tobacco car—irony noted—came out ahead of the Budweiser and Marlboro cars and banked low and fast into the straight to build a two-length lead.

  “That’s one of the reasons I started up the Crimes Against Youth unit,” I said. “For my son. Kind of like a tribute to him, or a memorial.”

  Sam nodded.

  I don’t know why I say things like that sometimes, usually to friendly strangers, bartenders, people I might like a little but don’t really know. It just comes out. Sometimes I say things just to see if I believe them or not.

  “Was he a victim, your boy?”

  “An embolism while he was swimming,” I lied. “It was an accident.”

  “Shame, Terry.”

  “You keep them alive inside, somehow.”

  “I got three girls, and they’re the best things in my life. Them and their mother. Don’t know what I’d do if something happened to one of them.”

  “I know exactly how you feel.”

  “You see that Ford out there, the blue one? The guy that built those engines is a buddy of mine. Buck. He’s been workin’ on cars since he was about four. Think he could rebuild a Ford motor blindfolded if he had to.”

  The blue Mustang was running fourth now, right up behind the Marlboro Camaro.

  I offered Sam the tequila but he shook his head. “Don’t like the hard stuff anymore.”

  I nipped and tucked.

  “You mind telling me how a guy could feed
a six-year-old girl to a snake? I just don’t get it, Terry.”

  “I don’t either. Criminal scientists would say that he’s living out his fantasies.”

  “Who’s got a fantasy like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s that really mean, though? Living out a fantasy?”

  “In basic terms—it means getting off.”

  He turned and looked at me again, then shook his head. “Sex?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ah, man. Does he have sex with them first?”

  “We’ll probably never know on Mary Lou, but I’d guess he did. In Orange County, he isn’t. He isn’t killing them, either. He takes them for a few hours, then lets them go out where there’s no people. He dresses them in old clothes, girls’ clothes—that’s what led us to Wichita Falls in the first place. And he puts these … well, these lacy kind of… robes on them. And he puts hoods on them. I suspect he photographs or tape-records them. Then he lets them go. And they wander around until someone finds them.”

  He looked at me again. It isn’t often you see a look of such affronted disgust on a peace officer. “Doesn’t rape them?”

  “Not yet. I think he has before. I think he’ll start again.”

  “Now why do you think that, Terry?”

  “It’s about sex. Sex in his head. Sex in his memory, in bis past. You know how strong it can be. We think about it. Talk about it. Dream about it. Sooner or later, we try our damnedest to make it real. That’s what he’s doing—making it real. And once you start, well, you can call yourself off if you’ve got enough willpower, maybe. But not forever. Not once you know you can get what you need. He’s working himself up to the act again. That’s my take on it.”

  “Little lacy robes, like they were angels?”

  I thought about that. I hadn’t really figured out the robes—if they even were figurable. I had assumed they were some kind of symbolic skin. Something akin to the shed he’d left in Brittany Elder’s bed. A way of saying that he was about to … change the girls, hatch them into something else. But Sam’s word connected to something I’d thought before, namely, that The Horridus wasn’t—in his mind—taking the girls as captives, he was freeing them. So, maybe they were angels’ robes, or angels’ wings. He was taking them as mortals and releasing them as angels. After what I’d seen today in Wanda Grantley’s backyard, I would have believed almost anything about him.

  “Angels, hatchlings—I don’t know.”

  “Hatchlings?”

  “It’s just a … notion, Sam. Tied in with his snake totem and his fantasy. He calls himself The Horridus. Horridus is Latin for a kind of rattlesnake.”

  “If I saw him, I’d shoot him like a rattlesnake. And that’s about how bad I’d feel after. I got no tolerance for people like that. None a’ tall.”

  “Get me all of Wanda Grantley’s married names, if you can.”

  He looked at me but said nothing.

  After the second race we went down to the pits and found his friend, Buck. He was a wiry little guy with a red jumpsuit on and an STP cap tilted way up on his head. Big smile, a drawl. The hood of his Ford was up and Sam leaned in with him for a look at the works. They talked for a minute about the supercharger and how to cool it. I stood back and looked at them, wishing I knew something about cars, wishing I had a friend I’d known for thirty years who I could just be with. Like Sam was just being with Buck—casually interested in the same things, tacitly pulling for each other, relaxed, undefended, whole. The big dark Texas sky seemed to make everybody look smaller to me, to reduce them to a heavenly perspective. It made me feel real small, like I was just one guy out of many millions, walking on feet, breathing through lungs, seeing through eyes and doing the best he can with his seventy years, or whatever I’d get And that’s a good thing, I think: people behave better when they know they’re not the center of the universe. Where I’m from, in California, a lot of them never realize that.

  We walked through the pits, Sam spitting into his cup, his free hand jammed into his windbreaker.

  “Be a good thing for you to leave in the morning,” he said. He didn’t look at me, but I noted the hard-pressed expression of his face as he looked over the lip of the cup. It was the face of the Sam Welborn you wouldn’t want to mess with.

  “You met my team,” I noted quietly.

  “I don’t know what you’re into back there, Terry. Don’t want to know. But I’m not supposed to discuss this case with you anymore. I told them you’d be back on that plane first thing tomorrow, and I don’t want you makin’ a liar outta me.”

  “Who called you?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “I was planning to go, anyway.”

  “Puts me in a tough position, you know, because I got nothin’ against you. Fact, I like ya. You helped me out with Mary Lou. You solved a crime I’d been working on for two years and getting nowhere.”

  “There’s some politics going on back home. That’s all it is.”

  We rounded the pits and stood up by the entryway fence to watch Buck’s Ford rumble past. On the ground like this, the cars were even more impressive—you could feel their power rattling your guts and bones when they were just idling. Buck, lost in a red helmet, waved at us from behind his meshed side window.

  There wasn’t much more Sam and I could say to each other. His suspicion, and my implied guilt, hung over us like a black, oppressive sky. I was furious, but had no target for my anger, no vent for my bile.

  Buck won and we clapped. After that Sam gave me a ride back to the Holiday Inn.

  Twelve hours later I got off the plane at John Wayne Airport, greeted by Jordan Ishmael and two deputies I barely knew.

  “Guys,” I said.

  “Terry.”

  “Nice to see some friendly faces.”

  I thought of running for it, but I know a dumb idea when I get one. Most of the time.

  They fell in around me and we headed away from the crowd of people awaiting the passengers. Ishmael leaned in close, like he was telling me a secret.

  “You’re under arrest, Terry. Unlawful sexual intercourse, lewd act on a child, oral cop. I can waive the cuffs for now but not the Miranda. Let’s head over to that corner there, get it taken care of without causing some big hairy scene, okay? Unless you want me to call Donna Mason for the story.”

  Ishmael’s powerful, controlling grip on my arm was the single greatest insult I have ever known.

  NINETEEN

  If you’re a regular guy, they march you to the Intake-Release Center, which sits next to the jail. Then they take away everything you’ve got, search you, take off your cuffs, make you sign some forms, try to figure how much of a hazard you are to others and yourself, fingerprint you, photograph you, spray your body for lice—making you bend over naked to get a solid dose between your cheeks—let you rinse in a cold shower, then give you an orange jumpsuit with Orange County Jail stenciled on the back. Then they let you make your calls. Then you go to your tank and the fun really starts.

  If you’re a cop accused of sex with children, it’s all the same, but they put you in a small cell alone instead of a general population tank because general population inmates are known to murder men like you. It’s called protective custody, and it’s reserved, generally, for child molesters, those accused of heinous crimes, cops and celebrities. I felt like I was the first three, with a good shot at becoming the fourth.

  I made my two phone calls from the Intake-Release Center, from a phone bank built into the dreary wall. It was a little room with a smoke-stained acoustic ceiling and a table with a bunch of phone books strewn across it. Other accused were making calls, some whispering, some whimpering, some shouting, some just standing silent with the receivers to their ears, as if being pumped with some numbing drug through the cord. I hunkered up close to the wall and called Donna. I was surprised and crestfallen that she answered. I didn’t even try to ease into the subject—it can’t be done—and just blurted out that I’
d been arrested, and why. I said I was innocent. I said I was being framed. I said there were photographs that had been altered or tampered with and that the FBI would establish this to be true. My heart sank even lower as I said this, realizing that the FBI had likely done just the opposite, and my arrest had been the result.

  All I heard for the longest time was the in and out of Donna’s breath, followed by the silence during which I could see her clearly: slender face and sad brown southern eyes, her dark hair curling forward over her pale skin, the swatches of blush on her cheeks, her red and knowing lips. I told her I was innocent. I told her I wanted her to learn about this from me, first. I told her I was innocent again. I told her I wasn’t sure what I’d do—try to make bail and lie low until my defense experts could disqualify the evidence. I told her, matter-of-factly, that I loved her, and, again, that I was innocent.

  Finally she spoke. “You want me to cover this for CNB, or let someone else?”

  “It’s yours if you want it.”

  “That would be, ah … extremely perilous.”

  “I’m a good story. Think of it as another exclusive. Stick with me. You’ll get all the firsts.”

  “Terry,” she whispered. “Terry. I can’t stick with you very far. You may be innocent, but we’ll crucify you first and cut you down later. It’s the way we do it.”

  I took a deep breath and felt the walls moving closer around me, felt the acoustic ceiling—stained by years of whispered alibis and desperate lies—lowering onto my head like a lid onto a coffin.

  “I love you, Donna.”

  I hung up and called the law office of Loren Runnels, an old friend of mine, a deputy DA turned to private practice. Luckily, he was listed in one of the phone books.

  When I explained to Loren what had happened, I got one of those surprises you should see coming but never do. I discovered that in spite of being the star of my personal, purgatorial pageant, I would have to wait.