Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “But a photograph is supposed to capture an image.”

  “Wrong. A photograph creates an image. That’s the difference now. That’s where it’s all changing. Madison Avenue has been working on it for decades. But right now, the explosion in tools has made things possible that weren’t possible just three years ago. Three years from now … who knows?”

  We toured the gallery and looked at other works.

  Some were obviously “created”—like the tuna can; others—like a portrait of a woman with her cat—were absolutely convincing as plain old photographs.

  “Why’s that one so special?” I asked. “There’s millions of cats like that.”

  “The cat’s real. The woman doesn’t exist. She was created on a computer.”

  I stepped up close to look at the lines on her face, the singular expression in her eyes, the details of her hands. You could see the wrinkles in her skin, the underlying veins, the blemishes and hairs.

  “You can make anything,” I said.

  “Almost.”

  “What can’t you make?”

  Darien crossed his arms and raised a hand to his face. He set his chin into the little cradle of thumb and curled forefinger. “I’m not sure. But why don’t you tell me what you want. And I’ll tell you if it’s makeable.”

  “All right. I want five-by-seven photographs of a woman bathing her son. I want the woman to be a real woman, and I’ve got photographs of her face you can work with. The boy is real, and I can give you pictures of his face, also. But he’s never actually been bathed by this woman. They’ve never actually seen each other. And I want the bathroom to be a certain bathroom, and I’ve got pictures of that to give you, too. And when you’ve created an image of this woman bathing a kid she’s never seen in a genuine bathtub, I’m going to send the thing off to the FBI’s best scientists and I don’t want them to be able to say it was staged, retouched, enhanced, created, digitally manufactured or Iris ink-jet printed. I want them to say, yeah, that’s a picture of a woman giving a boy a bath. It’s real. It’s genuine. It happened. It’s evidence.”

  “Color or black and white?”

  “Color.”

  “What’s your budget?”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “Consider it done. There will be some limitations on it. If the image required visual information that wasn’t in the photographs you supplied, it would have to be generated by computer, by an artist who could extrapolate, who could imagine what was missing. Say he needed the inside of her left hand, but you didn’t have it on film. He’d have to create it.”

  “Then the FBI guys would see a fake hand?”

  “They’d have to compare it to the real one for that. There’d be no way—just based on the image—for them to know that it was created, if it was created skillfully. And Terry, that document he’d create, that picture you’d finally show the FBI, it would be totally, 100 percent genuine. It would be—or could be—finally, after all the work was done, just a simple, authentic photograph.”

  “Even though the event depicted never happened.”

  “It didn’t happen until the artist created it.”

  “It never happened, Darien. What you see in the picture did not fucking happen. Did it? The woman never gave the kid a bath. Did she?”

  “Okay. It never happened.”

  “Good Christ, no wonder we could never run a simple pick and roll.”

  Silence for a moment, my anger waning.

  “We were bad basketball players, weren’t we?” he asked.

  “Didn’t you get ten against Newport Harbor?”

  “Eight. I never got double digits my whole career.”

  “Me neither.”

  We sat in his office for a while and talked about the old days, the new days, some of the days in between. Then the conversation got thin.

  “What are you working on, Terry? Can I ask?”

  I considered my reply for a moment. “Darien, there’s a mudbath pending for a very close friend of mine. We’re talking about somebody getting royally screwed by pictures of something he didn’t do.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “It’s worse than bad. It’s a career, a life, maybe a prison term. This guy didn’t do what they say he did. What the pictures say he did.”

  “They’d have to have more than just pictures, wouldn’t they?”

  “For a court of law, maybe. For everything else, the pictures will do quite nicely. They’ll ruin him.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “No. The cops are sending the pictures to the FBI and the alleged perp is trying to save his ass.”

  Darien sat back, fiddling with a pencil on his desktop. “The anomaly would have to be in the image, then—not in the medium.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I mean, if portions of the image are unique, the way a person is unique, a fingerprint is unique, then anything digitally created could be shown to be inaccurate.”

  “But you’d need the real thing to prove it.”

  “Right. You’d need the mother, or the boy, or the bathroom.”

  I thought about this. Me. The cave. The girl.

  Who has pictures of me?

  Ardith, the enthused amateur: many. Melinda, an occasional snapshooter: a few. Louis, Johnny and Frances, from our frequent socializing: maybe. Donna, via file footage: some.

  And everyone else at the Sheriff’s Department, through my personnel file: left side, right side, straight on.

  I got Johnny by phone just before lunch. I shamed him into faxing me a copy of Amanda’s sketch of The Horridus, as described by Brittany Elder. I had to go to a pharmacy in Laguna with a fax service to receive the thing, banished as I was from my home. I asked about the real estate listings and Johnny said they were down to three male sellers of detached-unit homes.

  “If the male sellers don’t pan out, try the women,” I said.

  He was quiet for a moment. It was my first whiff of actual day-to-day banishment, and it weighed my heart like a death in the family. I was putting Johnny Escobedo in an impossible jam.

  “Shit, Johnny, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I understand, man. I really do.”

  He didn’t rush to hang up on me, for which I loved him dearly.

  “The worst part, Johnny, is I’m out. The Horridus is planning number four, we’ve got kids in ditches, infants in file cabinets and pervs all over the place and I’m sitting here with my thumb up my ass.”

  “If it didn’t happen it didn’t happen. I know it didn’t happen.”

  A desperate heart is a soft one. Mine practically melted. “I love you, man. And I don’t even want your beer. Though I could use one right now.”

  “I should go.”

  “What’s Reilly got on the Elder scene?”

  “Still working. Nothing yet. The news here is the park ranger out at Caspers.”

  He told me about a ranger named Bret Stefanic who was found murdered the evening before.

  “Way out in the woods off the Ortega,” said Johnny. “Guy cut his throat wide open. Didn’t really grab my interest until the ME said he’d been bitten three times by a venomous snake—probably a rattlesnake.”

  I thought a moment.

  “It looked like Stefanic stopped somebody out there. His citation book was out, found it in the weeds. The last three tickets were ripped out of the book. We think the perp was written up, surprised him somehow. Reilly said he died from the slashing. The snake bites were premortem. Very strange, uh … Frank.”

  Reduced to Frank. It was what I had left.

  “Crotalus horridus?”

  “We’re sending out some of Stefanic’s blood to a toxicologist over at Irvine and a herpetologist in Chicago. They both told me already there’d be no way to differentiate one rattlesnake venom from another, once it’s in the blood. That’s if the bites even were from a rattler. The ME said venomous snake. There’s lots of those.”

  “Well, not around here there aren’t, John
ny.”

  “That’s what I mean. The only poisonous ones found here in the wild are the rattlers. But what if it’s a cobra, or a water moccasin or something?”

  I was silent for a moment, as I tried to imagine The Horridus out in the far reaches of a wilderness. It fit. He let his victims go in places like that. In fact, he’d let Courtney go in the Caspers Wilderness Park. He liked the outdoors. It made sense, but not a lot.

  “Where were the bites?”

  “Buttocks, leg, face.”

  “Bitten while he was alive.”

  “Correct. And the ME said he was bitten just before he died. The venom hadn’t been assimilated very far into the tissue. He died not long after the bites.”

  I just couldn’t put it together. “So this inquiring ranger tries to cite a guy for something, gets his throat cut, then falls down and a rattlesnake that just happens to be in the grass bites him once on the ass, once on the leg, then finished with a bite to his face? Johnny, there’s a whole lot of something wrong with that picture.”

  “I know. Let me ask you something, Terry. If we strike out on the male sellers, why try the women?”

  “Mother. Wife, girlfriend, sister.”

  “That’s out of profile, isn’t it?”

  “You know me, Johnny—I throw the net wide as I can.”

  Another silence while Johnny vetted my methods. I’ve long been known at the department as the guy who goes the extra mile when he doesn’t have to. Maybe checking the women was just a waste of time. Apparently, Johnny Escobedo thought so.

  “Hey, I should go.”

  “Johnny, one more thing. I got this fax from Strickley at the Bureau. He found a weird thread that leads back to Texas. I think it’s worth—”

  “—I already laid it on Ish. No dice.”

  “Ishmael?”

  “He’s acting head of CAY.”

  “Ah, holy shit—”

  “—And he said we’re better off looking here than looking in Texas, considering we don’t work in Texas. I’m trying to get them to send us a file. Slow going—the whole thing’s cool by now.”

  My balls frosted with the news of Ishmael as acting head of my unit. It was all I could do to keep my mind halfway on track. “It’s worth it for one of us—one of you—to spend a couple of days back there. Who’d you talk to? Welborn?”

  “Yeah. He’s … hey, Frank, I gotta go.”

  “Listen, Johnny, there’s one more thing. I know I keep saying that. But we got to try the two dating services again.”

  “None of the names matched.”

  “But those were members. What about employees, service people who have both accounts, subcontractors and vendors?”

  There was a pause. “That’s right, uh, Frank. I hadn’t thought of that. All right, man. Over and out.”

  “Check the women sellers if the men—”

  Click.

  I got the fax and walked down to the beach. I sat on a green bench. The bench had a plaque on it, dedicated to Edward Kilfoy—1967–73. Six years old. What happened to him? I watched the people walk by. Some kids chased the retreating remnants of a wave,, stopped with their skinny legs bent, then screamed and ran back in ahead of the next one. Good, cold, April, Pacific Ocean brine, I thought. I opened the folded fax. There he was: short hair cut in a flattop, swept back, and a tight, narrow face. High cheekbones and a small mouth. Sleepy eyes, brown, according to the description. Medium everything. A sport coat, collared shirt, tan trousers. No glasses. I thought of Brittany telling me how bad his breath was. Should we have put that in the description? I recalled Steven Wicks’s version. They weren’t really close. Similarities, yes, but only general ones. What I wouldn’t give for a picture of him as good as the ones they had of me, to turn into billboards for freeways all over the county. I wondered if this rendition would be good enough to get results. I had to think not. But it was another piece, another tool.

  I drove out Laguna Canyon Road to my street—former street—and passed it. What a sad-strange feeling, to pass a place that used to have your home on it. I U-turned, headed back, U-turned again and made a right onto Canyon Edge.

  There was no reason for the house to look different than it had less than a day earlier, but it did. The pepper tree outside was bigger, lazier, sadder. The little house seemed to have missed me. I pulled into the driveway and sat there for a while. Moe had missed me, and I saw the proof. He stood on his hind legs with his paws up on the fence, barking and wagging his tail. I rolled down the window. The pepper tree dropped a cluster of dried-out pinkish balls to the hood. The cluster skidded across the paint in the breeze. How on earth, I thought, have you managed to mess everything up so bad? Mel would be at work; Penny at school. I doubted she’d changed the locks this fast. After taking a deep breath I swung open the car door and got out. Moe mugged me inside the gate and I got down on my knees and grabbed the thick fur and skin around his neck. He plopped over and I scratched his yellow soft belly. I knelt there for a moment, petting my dog, trying to look integral. No one would know I wasn’t. Right?

  But my heart was thumping as I tried my key. It worked. I let myself in as I’d done a thousand times before, and closed the door behind me. My heart was still pounding. The smell of the place got me: the old wood and varnish of the floors, the faint aroma of food cooked recently, the fresh femininity of Melinda and Penny, all hovering nicely above the scent of Moe’s dogness.

  So, having burgled my way onto private property, I went to Melinda’s study. Moe clicked along beside me. I caught Melinda’s smell in here too, but stronger. I tried to ignore it. The drapes were pulled shut and the room was cool. I turned on her computer and booted it up. It’s a fast, strong machine, supplied by the department for Melinda’s Fraud and Computer Crime work at home. I got onto the Web and got myself to a site I’d been to many times before.

  http:\www.fawnskin.com

  After the usual delays and waiting, I got myself to the Web site. Fawnskin. Interesting word, isn’t it? For one, it’s the name of a mountain community in Southern California. You think of snow and slopes and cabins. Beyond that, it suggests something sensually engaging, something tactile and pleasant. It suggests youth and the touching of youth. After a few hours on the sex net—and I had spent many there as part of my job—you start to learn the vernacular. The home page was boring enough, with a slow graphic of a snowy mountain with a ski run going up the side, and big letters at the top, announcing LOCAL SNOW! Below the title was the home page synopsis for the site:

  http:\www.fawnskin.com—Nothing beats the local mountains for quick and fun skiing, camping, fishing and hiking. Find your trail through us.

  I scrolled forward to the list of realtors who handled rentals. Fine. The site had that dull, legitimate face of business. But to me it felt like the jacket for something else entirely, which is how the illegal networkers hide their faces from innocent browsers. The last realtor listed had a different Web site, so I clicked there and waited. It isn’t a realtor’s home page at all—it’s a coded chat room schedule for men whose sexual preference is for children. A chat “room” is comprised of Internet Relay Chat, IRC for short. Providers sell access to private and public IRC as part of their service—anybody can use a room, as long as they can find it. At any rate, I was looking for some men who call themselves the Midnight Ramblers. I know the individual who updates this changing chat room schedule, and he knows me. He was in federal lockup between 1986 and 1989 for distributing child pornography across state lines. I was the one who busted him, long before our CAY unit was established. I allow him to operate here because his roving band of Web perverts are open to my lurking, so long as I don’t shut them down. They don’t know that Mal—my Web name—is Terry Naughton, the same way that I’m not supposed to know who they really are. Some I do; most I don’t. I knew the chat room site, and I was pretty certain the pervs would be talking. But I checked the schedule to make sure. It was just a matter of reading the Farmer’s Almanac quote at the end of
the page. It was always followed by a series of random-looking numbers that appear to be a mistake or a code in the posting. They just run them together for the next date and times, backward.

  005100313050005100212050

  May 2, noon to 3 P.M., and May 3, 1 A.M. to 3 A.M.

  Easy. From years of experience I knew that noon was one of their usual times to yak it up through IRC. The Midnight Ramblers were currently in session.

  I wound my way through the search engine and found the private room. The name Mal was my admission.

  Mal: contented with day-to-day. Seeks counsel of like brethren in soul chit-chat and bets on the come line . . . seeks info only sexperts might possess.

  This is sex-net talk. You learn it after a few hours on the computer, networking with sick fucks who don’t have a whole lot better to do, apparently. Sex talk is legal. Even sex talk between pedophiles is legal, to a point. But it’s esoteric, cryptic and circuitous. It’s exclusive. And I was lucky right then, because at least one other twisted soul out there in our strange huge world was lurking the chat room:

  Lancer: I remember you, Mal-content, Mal-adjusted, Mal-ady.

  There it was. Right off the bat I was remembered. Nice. I hadn’t been on-line with the Ramblers for three or four months.

  Mal: Nice to be back. I’m searching.

  Lancer: Praytell for what, Mal-approp?

  Mal: Image is everything.

  O-Ring: Amen to that. Praise the lewd. New or used?

  Mal: Newly minted.

  Lancer: Semen-proof and very pricey.

  O-Ring: See I. R. Shroud.

  E-Rection: Go see Shroud! He’s your mail-man, male-man—delivers the goods. Why not go again?

  I sat there for a moment in Melinda’s study, surprised by E-Rection’s assumption that I had already dealt with one I. R. Shroud, the man who “delivers the goods.”

  My scalp tightened and my hands felt cold. I had not dealt with I. R. Shroud. So someone else had used my name—Mal—on the kid porn web.

  I couldn’t wait too long, or my embarrassment might be inferred.

  Mal: I’m fully intending to, but can’t find my old friend. Have you seen him? Did he take an extended Thai holiday?