Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  When I was about sixty yards away, he looked back. The chopper beam grazed him and I could see the bright reflection of his eye, straining around to see me. Then an orange-white jet of flame cracked in the darkness ahead and the booming report of a handgun quaked along the channel and passed. I hit the water with both hands out and slid about ten yards. Then I was up again, quick as a seal, and I saw Stansbury’s light capture him in a bright wide halo, with the water splashing up around his shiny legs as he sped down the center of the culvert.

  Suddenly he angled up the embankment and scrambled over the last ten yards of rocks and soil without a slip. I realized that using the high ground, he could loop back and shoot me like a duck on a pond—quite literally—so I clawed up the concrete side and fought my way up the loose sharp rocks to the top. God bless Stansbury, who now hovered over The Horridus, drenching him in the full beam of his flood. He just stood there in the center of the light, his metallic body heaving, his metallic head bobbing up and down as he labored for breath. I took a knee and drew down on him, but as soon as I got my sights in line he was off. As he loped out of the light I could tell he wouldn’t go much further: his back was bowed, his arms loose before him, his legs heavy. But the big gun was still in his hand. I tracked him down the barrel of my .45, then stood and started after him again.

  Stansbury’s light caught up with him. The Horridus was at the far side of the channel cut, hunched, facing the chain-link fence. I stopped fifty feet short of him and lined up my automatic on his heaving, shimmering back. Just behind the fence was a cinder-block wall, separating someone’s backyard from the flood control easement. He was bent, hands on his knees, looking back over his shoulder at me while he breathed fast and shallow. His breath was an urgent whistle, in-out, in-out, in-out. I could see the revolver still in his right hand and the glint of his eyes behind the fish-scale shine of his hood. He turned his head away slowly, lifted one leg and worked his foot into a toehold in the chain link. He looked back at me again. Then he heaved himself up and reached with his free hand for a grip on the cinder block. He grunted and slipped. Hard. His foot dropped free and his left wrist snagged on the sharp metal X of the fence top. He danced on his tiptoes, writhing around to face me, his left wrist still impaled above him, the big black handgun in his grasp. He brought it up. I shot him once in the face for Johnny and four times in the chest for me. He hung from the fence. Then something gave and his wrist popped loose with a metallic clink and he fell to the dirt.

  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.