Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “The Horridus is on-line? You mean we’ve talked to him?”

  “Somebody has.”

  Johnny looked confused more than anything else. “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, man! What the hell are you talking riddles to me for?”

  “I think somebody at the department has, and I don’t think he wants anybody to know. He talked to I. R. Shroud on the Web. They made some arrangements. Maybe he didn’t make the connect to The Horridus. Maybe he did.”

  He continued to eye me, dark and sullen.

  He shook his head and leaned back. “I’m not getting you, man. You’re telling me that one of the CAY people has talked to The Horridus on the Web, but never said anything to you about it?”

  “Somebody at the department. Not necessarily CAY. And they talked to I. R. Shroud. Like I said, it’s possible he didn’t get the joke.”

  “But it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you.”

  “Correct.”

  “Well, why in hell would somebody at the department mail Shroud but not tell CAY? Not tell you?”

  “Pictures.”

  His dark eyebrows rose again, and he groaned. “So, what are you saying?”

  “Whoever framed me had to be inside. They’d have to know me, hate me, have a way into the porn networks, and a reason to burn my ass.”

  “You’re saying it was Ishmael.”

  I nodded.

  Johnny said nothing.

  But he intuited my request, as I knew he would.

  “Oh, man,” he said quietly. “You goddamned Irish pendejo. I’m starting to think CAY’s better off without you. No.”

  I shrugged. “It’s just a matter of checking his log-ons and his IRC receptors. They’re on the printouts—”

  “—No, man. It’s a matter of getting my ass thrown off the department forever, is what it is.”

  “Then don’t do it.”

  “Hey, friend, there’s no way on earth I can do that.”

  “I had to ask.”

  “No. No. No.”

  “Understood.”

  He shook his head and pushed his empty coffee cup away. Johnny hated me in that moment, for forcing him to betray his department or disappoint his friend. Those dark eyes of his flashed across my face with both fury and sadness in them.

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you were stand-up, Terry. I’m with you, man. You know that.”

  “I know.”

  “But don’t bleed me unless you have to.”

  “All right.”

  He picked up the bag and looked down inside.

  “Thing’s still moving in there.”

  “They take forever to die.”

  “Yeah. I cut one’s head off and skinned it out when I was a kid. Tacked the skin to a board and salted it. Left the guts beside it for the hornets to eat. I stood there with my brother and watched the heart beat. It was this little tiny heart. Four hours later we come back out and it was still beating. Wouldn’t quit for nothin’. Just like you.”

  Then the very long, agonizing silence while Escobedo tried to weigh his friendship with me against his loyalty to the department, my power as a pariah against Ishmael’s as a lieutenant in good standing.

  “You been talking to The Horridus on-line, boss?”

  “I’m trying. I used our Ramblers’ chat room to get a line on a good kiddy pornographer. Someone who has the new stuff. Maybe he actually makes the stuff. A producer. Someone who can do a custom.”

  “And you got Shroud?”

  “That’s exactly who I got. I didn’t see the connection until I found Stefanic’s ticket.”

  Silence again.

  “You really think Ishmael ordered up customs of you?”

  “I know he did.”

  Johnny turned and leaned his arm over the back of the booth. He looked back through the window, to the barrio outside. I guessed it was just a little vacation, a break from all the crap that he had to do all day long. He spoke without turning.

  “You know, it’s Frances who spends the most computer time in CAY. She’s got a stable full of freaks on the Web.”

  “Frances isn’t going to sit down over chips and coffee with me.”

  “And then there’s the obvious.” He turned back to me, closing the bag and wrapping the end back into a knot. “You know, Terry, you might have already thought of this, but Melinda’s the one who has all the computer crooks in her machine. We’ve been sharing every CAY computer contact with her for a year now. So does every other section and unit—if there’s a crime and a computer involved, Melinda knows about it. Remember, Wade ordered us all to copy Fraud and Computer Crime if there was a computer involved? You remember that directive from Wade, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I remember it.”

  “Well, anyway, she’s got all the computer creeps, somewhere in her files. Maybe she could line out Ishmael’s logs for you.”

  “In order to help me.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh. In order to help you.”

  It seemed like the first time in days I’d actually laughed. It just jumped out of me—the idea of Melinda helping me—and I had to choke down a little coffee to keep it from coming out. I just broke down and laughed, like you do when you’re a kid and rarely do later.

  Escobedo looked at me and laughed, too. It was one of those desperate, semiwicked connections between people willing to admit that something ugly is also very funny. Johnny looked like a gleeful devil for a second there, with his goatee and his hair slicked back from the widow’s peak and his straight white teeth and shrunken skulls.

  So, we had our comic relief.

  “She’s a good person,” I said.

  “Yeah, she’s all of that. She also gets the monthly log-ons because she’s a section head. She knows who’s been talking to who on those damned computers.”

  “That’s true, too.”

  “I mean, well … I don’t know what it means.”

  “I don’t, either, Johnny.”

  Johnny stood and reached for his wallet, but I already had it covered.

  “One more thing, Terry,” he said. “We’re going public with the Brittany drawing. Press conference this afternoon at five. We’ll be handing out copies to everybody who wants them.”

  “It’s about time,” I said. “Ishmael gave in?”

  “Naw. He acted like it was his idea—ordered us to go ahead with it. He’s Mr. Proaction now. He’s also taking your idea about the freeway billboard. We’re having the thing blown up to thirty feet across and hanging it all over the county.”

  I had to smile. “John, I’ll get those log-ons some other way. Forget it.”

  “What log-ons?”

  “Would you sit back down for just a second and talk to me, friend?”

  He sat back down and he let it out. “Terry, if someone inside the department has been talking to The Horridus, and not said anything? That’s not done, man. That’s the kind of thing nobody’s going to condone. You prove Ishmael’s been cutting deals with that scum, deals to set you up for a fall like the one you took? Ishmael’s head is going to roll right alongside yours, real quick. It’s gonna be a bloodbath for us.”

  “I know.”

  “You better be goddamned careful what you do.”

  I nodded. “Johnny, I got to ask you something.”

  “Then ask it, man.”

  “What do I do? You were me, what would you do? Can I trust Wade with this?”

  He looked at the tabletop for a long moment: yellow Formica with brown flecks and plenty of scratches from the flatware, old circular stains from warming beer glasses stacked up onto each other; cigarette burns; dings.

  “I don’t think you can say anything. Until you know for sure, you know it all, and you know you can prove it. Until then, I think it’s your solemn duty to keep your mouth shut. It’s also what’s best for you. What if you’re wrong?”

  I nodded and watched the clock hand move for exactly twenty-three sec
onds.

  “Thanks.”

  “Can you get him, through the Net?”

  “I’m trying. I’d love to lure him out, but he’s real shy.”

  “What about the other way?”

  “Vinson? You know where he stands on helping us.”

  He patted my hand, then gently slapped my face. “Know something, boss?”

  “You’ll have to tell me.”

  “I don’t ever want to be you. I want to be a regular guy with no big problems, raise a family, do thirty with the Sheriffs and retire up in Havasu. Fish all day, maybe get a boat. Speed over to Laughlin once a week to gamble and drink. Teach a grandson how to play blackjack, kick a football. Doesn’t that sound better than being you?”

  “Quite a goddamned bit!”

  He slapped my shoulder on his way out.

  Vinson Clay is a lean, tanned, curly-haired man, quick to smile, slow to act. He’s like a dam, all roaring activity on one side, while behind him piles up a large tonnage of silent power. He was with the Sheriffs for twenty years, and all that time we wondered if he was slow or just congenial and content When he left us five years ago to attend law school we began to see the arc of his ambition, and when he signed on with PlaNet legal department as corporate security director—for a rumored salary of $200,000—we sort of gulped and rewrote our opinions of him. At the Sheriffs he’d worked computer crime and PR, so our paths didn’t directly cross all that much. I remembered him as cheerful but kind of remote, too, never the type to fraternize after work or drink with the other deputies. You got his hours and you got his easy good humor, then he was gone, vanished to a home life that no one knew about, and to a career path that no one was aware of. You had to respect him.

  It wasn’t easy to get my call through that afternoon. I had to plead with his secretary just to get him on the line, and when I finally did I begged even harder for twenty minutes of his time. I felt like Moe. But it worked.

  “I surmise this has to do with you and the charges against you,” he said.

  “Vinson,” I said, “it’s got to do with The Horridus.”

  “And I’m talking to you as a deputy or a citizen?”

  “Just a citizen.”

  “Twenty minutes is about all I’ve got, Terry.”

  The PlaNet offices were located on a shady Pasadena street, halfway between downtown and the Jet Propulsion Lab. Pasadena is where the money used to live, back when Los Angeles was a young town. The building was on the outskirts of a neighborhood of tree-shaded, million-dollar homes. I was ten minutes early. His secretary escorted me in ten minutes late. Vinson and I shook hands and sat across from each other, with his prodigious curving acrylic desk between us like some kind of crystal clear river.

  He was still all smiles, his crooked teeth giving him a hick, friendly look. But Vinson’s suit was of the two-thousand-dollar variety and his nails were either professionally manicured or he spent more time on them than any man I know. I started out by asking how he liked L.A., and he said the best thing was the Dodgers being close by. “I catch all the home games I can,” he said with a smile. “Well, Terry, how are you holding up?”

  “I’ve been framed. Framed by someone very good at manipulating images. The FBI has the alleged evidence against me, and I’m certain they’ll find out that it was created.”

  His grin was half there now, like something he’d forgotten to close all the way.

  “This is the deal, Vinson: I think it was an inside job—inside the Sheriffs, I mean. I’ve been using the Net to talk with the pedophiles and pornographers. That’s my area anyway, and I’ve made good progress. I’ve got the guy who either procured those pictures of me, or maybe even produced them. He goes by I. R. Shroud in the Fawnskin chat room.”

  “That’s just a handle, right, not his user name?”

  “He wouldn’t be dumb enough to put his user name or his e-mail address out there.”

  “So, you’re buying from this guy?”

  I nodded.

  “You said something about The Horridus.”

  “The Horridus is I. R. Shroud. It’s an anagram.”

  He ran a hand through his curly golden hair and stared down.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “Definitely not. The FBI profile says The Horridus will be a networker, a porn collector. Why not a supplier, too? There’s money in it. Thrills.”

  “What browser are you using to talk to him?”

  I told him.

  He nodded and looked down at the paper again. “Is he talking business?”

  “Not yet. I hope he will be, and soon.”

  “No monitor interruptions from us?”

  “Not one. I’ve been lurking these guys for a year and a half, Vinson.”

  Monitoring computer conversations, of course, is the way the software industry tries to keep crime off the Web. They always talk a hard game about listening in on transactions, making sure no one is breaking the law. The trouble is, talking about anything is basically legal—short of conspiring to commit a crime—and talking about sex is legal, too. There’s a fine line between talking about sex and conducting business around sex, and the pervs have come up with their own language to sound less suspicious. Guys like Vinson—and me—are always a step behind them. And guys like Vinson don’t want their networks to get reputations as being insecure or risky in any way. They say it’s a matter of First Amendment rights, and it partially is. But the bottom line in business is business, and no Net supplier wants to be known as the one with the big ears. So, tough monitoring is bad for business. Vinson knew this, and so did I.

  “Have you completed a business transaction with him, using PlaNet?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t exchanged any kind of payment or goods for any product or service, as of this date?”

  “Not yet.”

  He looked at me now, his smile gone, his suit throwing off a swank reflection of the recessed lights above the desk. “I can shut him down, Terry. I can shut down anybody I want to.”

  “That would kill me, Vinson. I need him working. I need him.”

  “Then you’re in a peck of trouble.”

  “I know. If you shut him down, I might not ever hear from him again. You have to remember, he’s not just making dirty pictures of guys like me. He’s abducting children and doing things unimaginable to them. Let me give you an example. This hasn’t gone outside my department, Vinson, so it’s just your ears, all right?”

  The way to win a confidence is to offer one. So I told him about Mary Lou Kidder in Wichita Falls, Texas, and what The Horridus had done to her. I speculated that before she died, young Mary Lou was probably subjected to a massive sexual assault. I took pains to describe the pile of reptile feces in which I found the skull of a once vibrant, much loved and beautiful little human girl.

  “What if Shroud is punning on Horridus? Different guys all along?”

  “Shroud called himself that before Horridus was even known. They’re the same man, Vinson. If I doubted that, I wouldn’t be here. I know you’ve got everybody’s constitutional rights to protect here, and I don’t mean to demean that. But you’ve got a monster loose on your Net, and I’m asking you to give him to me.”

  Vinson sat back and crossed his hands on his lap. I could see them under the acrylic table, clear as trout in a mountain stream.

  “You are an accused sexual predator, Terry.”

  “I need Shroud, Vinson.”

  He nodded and continued to look at me.

  I did my best to close him: “Look, Vinson. I know the drill here. You take the information to the law department, you balance the risks and the gains, you go to committee. It takes time. Maybe you land on a user, maybe you don’t. I’m asking you to go off road with this one. Give him to me. You don’t talk to the law department. You don’t talk to the sheriff. You don’t talk to law enforcement. You just listen in when I tell you we’re going to be on, and you trace his number in your user directory. You give me his name a
nd address and I’m never heard from again. You pop an animal and I get my record cleared up. It’s just us and it’s right.”

  He waved in irritation and sat forward.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  I ignored my obvious cue to get up and leave. I looked across the clear sweeping desk to him. “Let me just say one more thing, Vinson. I’d still be sitting here talking to you if none of this had happened to me. It’s not about me. It’s not about the Constitution. It’s about The Horridus.”

  “You make a good case, Counselor.”

  It was pure Vinson Clay—friendly and vague, affirming and noncommittal. The crooked smile was back as he stood to offer his manicured hand across the desk.

  I rose and shook it and walked out. And I knew I’d never hear from him.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  On my way home I stopped by the first four female-owned homes that were listed for sale on the MLS. Time is cheap to the unemployed. More than that, though, it was either follow through or desperation—take your pick. The Nicols residence in Anaheim, not far from the stadium, had closed escrow two weeks earlier and the old owner gone to Hawaii. The Parlett home in the Fullerton hills was a horse property owned by an elderly woman who lived alone—no tenants in the guest cottage down by the stable. She looked at me with gray lonely eyes as we talked. The Haun residence in Orange had a for sale sign and a lock box on the front door. The sheet told me it was built in 1976, with a nonconforming “second unit” bootlegged in the back in 1980. It was in a decent neighborhood, one of those streets with lots of nice flat lawns but not a lot of trees. The block felt kind of open and exposed. The fact that the home was empty would have deterred some investigators, but I slipped into the backyard and approached the second unit for a first-hand look. It was locked, too. I peered through a side window at the hardwood floors, the freshly painted walls, the little kitchen with chipper pink tile around a white sink.

  Next was Tustin, roughly on the way to my place in the metro district, Collette Loach’s house had been listed for $225,000. It was a three bedroom with a detached guest unit and “mature landscaping.” It was built in 1948 and it was small—1,300 square feet for the main and another 600 for the guest house. I vaguely remembered the street—Wytton—for two reasons. First, I had played in the nearby Tustin Tiller gymnasium just a few blocks away as a guard on the Laguna freshman basketball team (Darien Aftergood was on that team, and it was one of the few games we won that year, I believe). Second, I’d once arrested a terrified kid who had played a Fourth of July prank on his best friend and set three Wytton Street houses on fire with a smoke bomb. It was a nice old block, not far from the high school, small on crime and big on quiet.