Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Perfectly.”

  “Well, somebody stole it. And all the others of that morning. The whole series is gone.”

  As would any cop, any doubter, any ex, I studied Ardith’s face for falsehood. There was none.

  “Terry … what did you want that picture for?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “For Melinda?”

  “No. It … I was reminded of it when, well …”

  So I explained it to Ardith. She looked at me a little unbelievingly, at first; then I could see she understood.

  There were other photographs missing, too. We spent the next three hours going through each book. Eight more pages were blank. Gone was a series of pictures of me lying on a towel in the sun, and a series of me hamming it up on the living room carpet one hot summer evening, jeans on, shirt off, doing muscleman poses. As Ardith described the pictures to me, I remembered them. And I remembered that she had used certain filters and had dimmed the living room lights to produce shots that were forthrightly, harmlessly erotic.

  “They were all of you, Terry. They took the ones that showed your body.”

  When we were finished, we stood amid the stacks of boxes and piles of photo albums. I picked my way across to the window and slid it open. The warm breeze wafted in.

  “Ardith, when was the break-in here? The burglary?”

  “February the twenty-eighth. It was a Wednesday. Do you think that’s when … this happened?”

  “It never did make sense, the way you described it. They break into a house that’s unoccupied, and steal some costume jewelry and clock radio? But they leave the TV, VCR, stereo and the pearls sitting out on the dresser? What the hell kind of burglary is that? Any thirteen-year-old kid would have enough sense to take some of the good stuff. It wasn’t burglars looking for loot. It was somebody looking for those photographs. So they could use them.”

  “But who could possibly know that I had them? Know exactly where they were?”

  I looked at her for a moment, then out the window. My old neighborhood stretched out before me, a huge tract of duplicate two-story town homes vanishing over a distant hilltop. Tan stucco. Red tile roofs. Then I turned back and looked at Ardith.

  “Nobody knew, except you and me,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t steal my own pictures, Terry. Get that look off your face.”

  “I know.”

  “But who else knew?”

  I shook my head. “They didn’t know until they found them. They bet on a hunch and the hunch was right. They stole a few trinkets to throw you off the trail. It worked.”

  I was three steps outside Ardith’s front door when the figure in the bushes sped past me, stopped, knelt and hit the autodrive on his 35 millimeter. The lens protruded insultingly. You know how I can get The film was still chattering forward when my toe sent the camera into a quick flight that reversed itself at the end of the strap. The heavy thing slammed back down into the photographer’s head. He yelped. Then he tilted onto his butt. I put my foot on his chest and pushed him the rest of the way over. He spread out his arms and opened his hands, like he was trying to assure me of his innocence.

  I knelt down beside him. “How do you do?”

  “Not so good. I was trying to do my job.”

  “No more hot pix today, friend. I’ve had enough of those to last a lifetime.” I picked up his camera.

  “Dick March, the Journal. That’s a six-hundred-dollar Nikon, Mr. Naughton.”

  “What a time to run out of film.”

  I popped the roll and stripped out the film, dropping it to the lawn. Then I stood up and offered Dick a hand, which he reluctantly took. I yanked him up, then got into my car. Pulling away from the curb, I could see him fumbling to get another canister into his camera, but it was too late: I stood on the pedal and screeched around the bend.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Loren Runnels’s secretary showed me into his rather swank Newport Beach office an hour later. Loren sat behind his desk with his feet up and his arms locked behind his head. Two men sat across from him. One was Rex Wilkers, the PI who had sprung me so anonymously from the jail just days before. I shook bis hand and thanked him again. Next to him, and already standing as I turned to offer my hand, was Will Fortune. We shook and I sat between them. I looked briefly at the card he gave me before sliding it into my pocket:

  Fortune Forensic Sciences

  William L. Fortune

  Examiner of Questioned Documents

  Fortune looked about my age, with a big frame and a big face that reminded me of pictures of young Hemingway. He had a mustache, and a pleasing combination of boyishness and manliness about him. His smile was cheerful and without irony, but his eyes were very direct and acquisitive.

  Loren was his usual self: slender and silver haired, with the air of a man whose purpose in life was to live well and who was accomplishing it.

  Wilkers, a stocky blond who looked like a California surfer and probably was, crossed his legs and snugged his white socks up from his athletic shoes.

  “Will got in from Boise yesterday morning,” said Loren. “He’s seen the photo evidence. Rick Zant and the rest of his office were polite and helpful.”

  He scooted back his chair so we could see each other more comfortably. Will Fortune did not mince words.

  “I couldn’t tell much from those prints. The negatives haven’t been altered—there was no interruption of the silver halide/gelatin structure.”

  I wanted more dramatic exoneration than silver halide/gelatin structure, whatever in hell that was. I was getting worked up, quickly. “Does this reek of a frame or am I just stupid? What do I have to do, Loren, prove I couldn’t have been in the cave at that precise hour before somebody sees how goddamned false and orchestrated this all is?”

  “In fact, that’s one of the things we’ll try to determine,” said Fortune. “There’s just enough light in the cave for me to try a shadow analysis. I say try. It’ll be tough.”

  My anger subsided just enough to wonder what this man—who got $100 of my money per hour just to sit on a plane—was talking about. “Shadow analysis?”

  He nodded. “Shadows move with the sun. So there’s only two days a year when the same object in the same place will cast the same shadow. If you were somewhere else on those days, and can prove it—this evidence falls apart.”

  “Well, I’m liking the sound of that,” I said.

  “It will depend on the light in the cave,” he said. “I need to be there and see it, make some control photographs of my own.”

  I sighed, shook my head and looked at him. “Then I take it you couldn’t tell just by looking at them that they were fake.”

  “Nobody could.”

  The dismal implication hung in the air. For whatever it was worth, in that moment I forgave Joe Reilly, fellow Irishman, for being unable to declare my innocence with his naked eye.

  Fortune again: “And the fact that they come in a sequence on a film roll means that whoever made them didn’t arrange things for one grand-slam image that’s supposed to send you upriver for life. So, the first two things I look for if the images are visually convincing—existence of a negative and the sequential pattern from a film roll—are against us.”

  “Then I’d like to hear about things three through ten you look for,” I said bitterly.

  Will Fortune looked at Loren.

  “Shoot,” said my lawyer.

  “Physical anomalies,” said Fortune. “I’ll need my own photographs of you to find those. Optical anomalies—light source, color, focus and perspective. There wasn’t anything obvious, but that’s what my lab is for. Edge marks on the negatives—you need the camera that took the photos for that. I’ll certainly want to examine yours, and it’s our good fortune that it wasn’t on the evidence list. You’ve got one, I take it?”

  “In some closet somewhere.”

  “Well, it may give us what we’re looking for. I’ll need it as soon as you can get it to me. Next, we ca
n look at the models and do some photogrammetry to see how they fit the setting. The models in this case would be you and/or the girl. Photogrammetry is a way of measuring the size of objects in an image. If the physical parameters of the cave tell us, for instance, that you, Terry Naughton, stand seven feet ten inches in height, we know we have an altered image.”

  “No, I’m about three foot four, right now.”

  Chuckles.

  Loren leaned forward. “We can go into this later, but Rex can try to locate the girl. Expensive and not likely to succeed, to be honest with you. Anyway—back to you, Will.”

  I didn’t mention that I was tracking that delightful little girl on my own, through the Midnight Ramblers chat rooms and one I. R. Shroud. It wasn’t exactly happening quickly. Something told me to keep it to myself.

  “I examined those prints for sharpness irregularities—none I could argue in court because the images are all kind of hazy. Just hazy enough to hide inconsistencies. Same with the matrix of the print grain—it’s smooth enough to suggest credibility of the film. I’ll have a closer look at that later in my lab.”

  There was a silence then, during which all my hope and optimism tunneled down to the person of William L. Fortune, examiner of questioned documents.

  “Look,” he said with that full-cheeked boy’s grin. “We can sit here at one-fifty an hour, or you can take me to the cave and we can get on it.”

  I drove. We parked on Canyon Edge, a few houses up from my former home. I got Moe out of the yard and let him come with us up the trail.

  Big as Will Fortune was, he made the uphill climb easily. Moe flushed a brace of valley quail from a cactus patch near the path, and Will stopped to watch the birds zoom off low across the brush tops and vanish with a quick braking of wings.

  “You hunt him?”

  “No. I quit shooting things when my son died.”

  Will said nothing.

  “Long story,” I said.

  “I’ve got a couple of German shorthairs back home. We spend about every spare second we have after pheasant and chukar and quail.”

  “It’s a good thing to be doing,” I said earnestly, if absently.

  We made the cave in good time. Moe plopped into the shade of a lemonadeberry tree while Will set down his bag of equipment, looked at the cave mouth, then up at the sun.

  “They used a secondary light source for the shoot,” he said. “But there’s enough natural sunlight in those images to work a shadow analysis. I hope whoever made those things didn’t rearrange the cave walls just to throw us off.”

  “Will, nothing would much surprise me.”

  “That was supposed to be a joke.”

  “I don’t get jokes.”

  “I understand.”

  He brought out a tape recorder and announced the date and time and location. Inside, he stood in the middle of the little rock room, turning slowly, saying nothing. He looked at the walls up close, knelt and felt the bottom. “All right,” he said, with something of the coach sending his team onto the field of play.

  For the next hour he photographed the cave from every possible angle: outside, inside, with the camera at ground level and the camera raised on a telescoping tripod to just under seven feet. He shot black and white and color, prints and slides. He used six different cameras, including an ESP camera, which he explained stood for electronic still photography.

  “The finished images were photographic in nature,” he said. “Taken on film with a standard 35 millimeter camera. But that doesn’t mean they started out that way. You can begin with a digitized image, like this camera takes, and turn it back into an analogue, filmic one. All you need is a film recorder. It’s important for two reasons. First, you can manipulate digital images quite easily on a good computer with Adobe software and the right Photoshop programs. If those shots of you were created from scratch—well, almost scratch—that’s how it was done. Second, DA Zant has edge marks on those negatives, and he doesn’t know it yet, but edge marks on film are like tool marks on bullets. Every gun leaves a different pattern. Well, every camera does, too. I don’t know what those edge marks tell us yet, and I won’t until I get back to my lab. But he let me see some magnifications of the negs, and I got photographic copies of the blowups. All right, it’s time for some shots of you in here, Terry. We can do a few with clothes, but after that I want you naked as Moe. Fair enough?”

  “Naked?”

  “Naked.”

  “This is a sad moment. But shoot away, William L. What do I have to lose?”

  I can’t accurately describe what it’s like to be photographed naked in a cave by an examiner of questioned documents who reminds you of Hemingway. Humiliating. Infuriating. Mystifying. Dreamlike. Hilarious. Demeaning. Chilly. At one point he asked me to hold out my penis for various angles, and I realized from that moment on, my life would simply have to improve. The penis in the evidence pictures was partially obscured by shadow, but who was I to say what a picture of a dick proved or didn’t prove? Finally I put my clothes on and stepped out to the afternoon sunshine feeling no emotion that I had ever felt before in my life.

  Fortune already had his bag packed. He was squatting down, petting Moe.

  “I’ll need those photographs of your wife’s that you told me about on the way here,” he said.

  “They were stolen, like I told you.”

  “I’ll need the others.”

  “I’ll send them to you.”

  “Immediately if not sooner?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I want your camera, too.”

  We walked back down to my ex-home and I put Moe back in the yard. I let myself into the house and tried to act like it was still my home, like I was still welcome there. Curiosity got the better of me and I stole briefly into my old room to see if my suede chukka boots had been confiscated, per the search warrant. They had. I came out a moment later feeling invaded, assaulted, raped. What had Mel felt, as they pillaged her home? If Will Fortune suspected my feelings he didn’t show it. I found my old Yashica 35 millimeter in the hallway closet, its case covered with dust, and I put it in a paper grocery bag and gave it to him.

  Outside I patted Moe’s head and dug my fingers into his thick neck fur. I knew my hand would smell like him until I washed it—something I’ve always found sort of pleasant. He whimpered as I walked away. I drove Fortune back to his car at Loren’s office and we watched the dark blue Pacific churning away below Coast Highway.

  “You live in a real nice place,” said Will.

  “I feel lucky sometimes.”

  “You weren’t lucky with those photos. They’re good, Terry. They’re damned good.”

  “I didn’t hire you to tell me how good they are.”

  “I contracted with you to deliver the truth and nothing more. There are examiners out there more eager to please their clients. They’re even cheaper than me. Loren could have got you one if he thought you needed it. If you’re that worried, hire one. I don’t think you are.”

  I watched a bicycler labor up the PCH grade. His feet rotated on the pedals at about one rpm and the bike was wobbling so bad it looked ready to fall over. I wondered why people did things that were difficult simply because they were difficult.

  “The thing is, Will, I already know the truth you promised me. I’m waiting for you to catch up. And the world is looking at me like I’m something stuck to the bottom of a shoe. I’m already sick of it and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  “Then let me tell you something. The images are good. But good, and good enough to fool me, are two different things. I’m a modest man, more or less. I like to hunt birds and spend time with my family and do my work. I quit the Bureau pretty young in life, because I didn’t like working for someone else. Not that I didn’t like the Bureau, or my bosses there. It just wasn’t what I wanted. But the FBI will still tell you I’m the best examiner in the country. The American Academy of Forensic Sciences will tell you the same thing. T
he American Board of Forensic Document Examiners will tell you that, too. Same with the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and the Association of Federal Photographers. Last of all, I’ll tell you that. I’m the best. There isn’t an artist, craftsman, creep or criminal out there who can fool me. And I’ll tell you just as soon as I can whether or not those pictures will stand in a court of law.”

  I drove awhile, thinking.

  “Thanks, Will.”

  “I look forward to helping. Get me those pictures your wife took as soon as you can. Get some rest. Maybe get that dog of yours out for some birds someday. He’s just crying to hunt.”

  “Yes, he is. How long is it going to take—your examination?”

  “Three days, tops.”

  “That’s a long wait.”

  “Hang in there. Do something good for yourself.”

  “Listen, Will. There’s a thing calling itself The Horridus out here. He’s going to do some awful things to some young people if we don’t stop him. That’s the worst of it. I’m getting my dick photographed in a cave while this animal is out there planning his massacre.”

  “I didn’t realize he’s killing.”

  “He will. And you can massacre a person without killing them. You ruin a life or you take it—they’re both first-degree mortal sins if you ask me.”

  Will was quiet for a while.

  “Stay on him, Terry. Just because your badge is gone doesn’t mean you can’t stay on him.”

  I thought about that and I realized—strange how it can take you so long to see the obvious—that Will Fortune was right.

  TWENTY-THREE

  That afternoon I stood in the meadow at Caspers Wilderness Park, where Ranger Bret Stefanic had met his bloody end just five days before. I could see a grassy swale, a ring of big oak trees and the bed of a stream that flowed only in winter. There was still a long fragment of crime scene ribbon tape staked up, lilting in the breeze like a yellow kite tail. I had a copy of the arriving deputy’s report, which I’d filed in my briefcase before my arrest so I could work at home. I was doing something good for myself, as ordered by the best examiner of questioned documents in the world.