Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Of greater interest to me, and to the FBI people who helped us, was the equipment on which he had created some of the images. There was a studio in one of the main house bedrooms. It was neat and organized, just like his library was, and we guessed he had over eighty thousand dollars invested in a big fast Apple, a good scanner and digital ESP, all the Adobe software you could buy, and good printers—about fifty grand’s worth of machinery—which gave him the ability to reproduce the finished images so accurately. Throw in a film recorder, which would turn the final image from a digitized work of “art” back into a photograph, and you could do whatever your skill, patience and time would allow you to. He had done up some pictures of me with other girls and boys, too. Likely, they were practice runs for the ones he finally printed, photographed and passed along to Ishmael. There were also pictures of the cave interior—without me or anyone else in it. Had he taken those himself? Or had they been supplied to him? Remembering Will Fortune’s lessons on the camera anomalies, I studied the negatives on one of the film editors and made a mental note of the edge marks on the film and the anomalies of the camera that originally captured the image. I also carefully pocketed three of the pictures of myself—two of them with Matthew—that had been stolen from Ardith’s home. I would lift the fingerprints off them myself, and run them against Ishmael’s, on file in personnel.

  Of course, Ishmael was there, helping to oversee the search. It took me a while to find the right time, but while he helped load the printers into one of our vans for transport downtown I got a financial ledger out of the box it was already packed in and took it with me to the bathroom. I shut the door and locked it and sat down on the pot seat. It didn’t take me long to crack his bookkeeping, because The Horridus hadn’t done anything much to disguise it. His handwriting was neat and careful:

  2/12 RC. M. 15$/5I/DN.5

  My translation: Received from Mal $15,000 for five images, half down. This was back in February, on the twelfth. It truly impressed me—although a man sitting on a toilet can be thought of as impressionable by circumstance—that Ish would go to such expense to embarrass me. Had he hoped to get more for his money? Certainly, and he almost had.

  The Horridus was a busy craftsman:

  2/16 RC. A. 1.5$/3I/DN.5

  2/23 RC. S. .5$/11F

  3/08 RC. F. 2$/5I F

  3/15 RC. D. 12$/6I/DN.5

  I made a careful replication of these entries onto my own small notepad, then wondered if the financial ledger might disappear from the evidence room, just as the pink envelope containing my damnation had disappeared a few weeks ago. I thought the chances were good. So I unbuttoned my shirt and slipped the ledger in, where it could ride up against my stomach for the next few hours and remind me what I was after. I looked in on my bandage and felt the itch of the stitches underneath. Stitched and bandaged human flesh has an indescribable smell. I went back out and helped log and load evidence, carrying the burgled box myself, nodding at Ishmael on my way to the van.

  On a bookshelf in the guest house we found an adult human skull. I understood it instantly to be his mother’s, though I wasn’t happy about my wisdom. Some thoughts you just wish you never had. The front mandibles had been lipsticked bright red in a ridicule of womanhood, or perhaps of all life itself. It was perched up high, and aimed down to look at the bed where her son took the girls. Beside the skull was a whole femur, most of a small human foot, and a complete left hand on which a wedding band was affixed. Joe Reilly wandered around the scene without saying much, except to caution the techs about handling the evidence. He looked gray in the face, but so did everyone else. Joe reached down, touched the red wool blanket on the bed and looked at me, nodding.

  There were notebooks with descriptions of his encounters with Pamela, Courtney and Brittany, though he referred to them throughout as “Items” “1,” “2,” or “3,” respectively. He had kept a log for his time in Arkansas (two “Items”), Indiana (two more “Items”) and Texas (one “Item” I knew as Mary Lou Kidder). I spent enough time reading them to see that FBI profiler Mike Strickley had been right—he had “scared himself” to California, where he let his first two victims go for unknown reasons and his third escaped rape and death because we interrupted him. There were graphic descriptions of five earlier rapes, and five “transformations” involving his anaconda. In the handwritten narrative there was some evidence of a troubled conscience, though not nearly as much as you might expect. He addressed the damnation of his soul and how his mother had “born and suckled Satan”—meaning himself. I read his self-analysis with some interest because I’m always intrigued by how people get to be the way they are, and because, strangely enough, they usually know. He had one quality I especially admired: he hated himself. He knew what the stream was all about, and he couldn’t beat it so he finally gave up and let it have him.

  A small notebook was dedicated to phone numbers and Web sites. The names attached to the numbers and descriptions of the sites were “coded” only by The Horridus’s own shorthand: “494–4698 RS.” During my brief perusal I recognized only one, that of Abby Elder. But because it was small and fit easily in my pocket, and because I desired that it implicate Lieutenant Jordan Ishmael, I took the notebook, too. There was more than enough to convict The Horridus of helping frame me, if he’d been alive to convict. A drop or two to seal the fate of a corrupt cop wouldn’t be missed in the larger bucket of things, and the bucket, of course, would never be missed in the stream.

  We had more trouble with the big snake than with any other piece of evidence on the property. Apparently the monster had been undead after my three shots, and when the last deputies had left the guest house the night before it had moved out of its cage, through the broken glass and into the house. Deputies sealing off the scene the next morning found it stretched across the floor. But when we entered the guest house for the formal search a day later, it wasn’t there. We assumed it had been taken away. I found it in the bathtub, layered upon itself high up past the rim, with one huge section of body pressed against the bathroom wall and its tail trailing across the room where it stopped, just barely out of the doorway. Its defeated head was poked between two coils. Six men and three women spent the next hour (1) determining that it was dead, (2) unwinding it out to the living room, (3) holding it as straight as possible (not very) while Joe Reilly himself used a twenty-foot tape to measure it. Even with the death curves still in the body—no amount of manual weight, strength or force could get them out—I was surprised how long it was. Every time someone lost his hold the snake would move slowly as its muscles tried to reclaim their final shape, and we’d jump like fleas. Our screams and curses would flood into the air and nervous laughter would crackle through the room like electricity and we’d have to start again, pulling on the thing and trying to hold its powerful—even though dead—body still again. It seemed like the damned thing would never stop moving, and so far as I saw, it never actually did.

  Joe finally looked up, using the second twenty-foot length of tape, his thumb on the inch mark, and said, “Thirty-one feet, seven inches, not including postmortem rigor.” I learned later in the week that it weighed in at 545 pounds. A local mortuary did us a favor and cremated the animal, all five sections, no charge. It was rumored that one of the crematorium workers skinned it before it was cut up, and rolled the skin up like a carpet and took it home. I wouldn’t have done that myself. I wouldn’t want that skin within a thousand miles of me. I don’t know where the ashes were disposed of, and I don’t care. But I know they’ll end up back in the stream.

  Surprisingly, the hardest task I had was to find out who The Horridus really was. I found six complete sets of identification, which included CDLs, birth certificates and Social Security cards: Gene Vonn, David Webb, Warren Witt, Mark Yost, David Lumsden and Michael Hypok. He worked for the dating services as David Lumsden. He dealt with PlaNet as Mark Yost. He dealt with utilities and the phone company as David Webb. I found Gene Vonn on three bank accounts; David We
bb on four more; and Warren Witt on three others. Two for Lumsden right here in Orange County. A total of twelve accounts at different banks in four states.

  But it was only when I read his notebooks further that I learned who he was, at least to himself: Michael Hypok. I first came across the name in his notebooks, in third-person references. I thought at first he was writing about a friend, and I thought, oh shit—here we go again. He used the name only occasionally. It was suddenly, casually interspersed with the simple first-person “I,” so it took me a while to catch on. But after a while it was clear that he himself was Michael Hypok—at least sometimes—and those times were when he was at his most grandiose. When he wrote of “transcendence” or “transformation,” or got on a tirade about how stupid the police were, his voice shifted to a third-person narrative starring Hypok. Hypok knew that the authorities, stupid though they were, were getting close. I found no evidence that he’d used it as an alias. In fact, I couldn’t prove that he’d ever uttered the name out loud to anyone but himself. I wondered if it was just a name he liked. Then, at the bottom of a kitchen drawer in The Horridus’s home, I found a limp, stained envelope containing a Texas driver’s license and a Social Security card belonging to a Michael Hypok some twenty years older than The Horridus.

  Over the next few days I checked that name a thousand different ways. There were Michael Hypoks in forty-seven of our fifty states—but I couldn’t find a single hard fact that linked any one of them to Michael Hypok of 318 Wytton. The closest I got—thanks to Sam Welborn’s tireless combing of north Texas—was an oil rig worker who’d worked up around Wichita Falls back in the mid-seventies. After that he’d dropped from sight, vanishing from the area like a played note of music. A fingerprint comparison between The Horridus and the Michael Hypok whose Social Security card and license I found in the kitchen showed them to be altogether different men. But I wondered. Had Gene Vonn taken his name? Or that of another Michael Hypok altogether? Why? Had he known him and admired him? A buddy’s dad? A mentor? A character from a show or book? A name he had dreamed? There was no telling. No one knew and no one cared. After a while, neither did I.

  It was easy enough to find Collette Loach. Her number was written down in several places because she was his sister. I got her by phone at her home in New Hampshire. She was genuinely surprised that her brother had been the number-one suspect in a series of violent sexual acts against children. She sounded concerned that he was now dead, but not bereft. She told me she never really understood why Gene wanted her to buy a house using his money—but she would have been a fool to turn down that kind of offer. She figured Gene was just shy, as always, just a little to himself, a little secretive, but a real sweet boy. She’d never heard of anybody named Hypok. She asked me if I’d be interested in cleaning out the house and renting it for her—she’d make it worm my while.

  I spent most of my downtime studying the log-ons and phone activities of Ishmael, comparing them to what I had learned about I. R. Shroud. Shroud had been on the Net during all the times Ishmael, as Mal, had been. Mal, of course, was a name usable by anyone, but I used our log-on and IRC records to trace each call to the specific origin terminal. In every instance that corresponded to Shroud’s activity on-line, the Internet provider linkup was made from Ishmael’s computer, located behind the heavy doors of his office. Most of his chats with Shroud were early morning—5 to 6 A.M.—or late evening, between seven and nine. Some were as long as eight minutes; others as short as thirty seconds. As might befit any complex business transaction, the longer ones came first, followed by the shorter nuts and bolts of delivery, approval, payment.

  So far as money went, Ish spent $30,000 to commission ten images of me and seven-year-old Caryn Sharpe (nee Little). I was almost unbelieving that he could hate me that much. Thirty grand will buy you a lot of good things, and you can enjoy hatred in private for as long as you want. It’s free. I wondered if Shroud had put him through the paces at Moulton Creek, Main Beach and the Green Line Metro Rail, as he had to me. I thought not. He’d only tested me because he suspected me of impersonating the original Mal. He had smelled a cop, so he had wanted cash, and my picture taken as insurance.

  It seemed to me that some kind of bank wire transfer of funds would be easier, so long as customer and provider trusted each other. I confirmed this idea through Gene Vonn’s bank statements, which showed two deposits of $15,000 wired direct. The bank manager gave me the name on the payer account, though my heart gave a little jump when she first said it. The account belonged to Melinda and Jordan Ishmael. It surprised me that Ish had left it joint so long after the divorce. Then I wondered if he’d used it at other times for other purposes: a safe, forgotten slush fund always at least half attributable to an unsuspecting ex-wife. Why not? And to have it surface in the financial records of The Horridus was a fate that Ish, even in his deepest, most prescient nightmares, could not have foreseen. You get not only what you pay for, but who you pay for it.

  It took over a week to finally nail down my tormentor with something absolutely convicting: fingerprints on the pictures stolen from Ardith’s collection. Reilly took his sweet time in processing those latents because I told him quite frankly they weren’t part of any active case, and because I was quite casual about my request. I didn’t want to bring attention to myself or to a lieutenant who was my superior. So Joe put it low priority and I had to call him twice a day to see if he’d ID’d the prints.

  It was late on a Friday—two weeks after the death of The Horridus—that I went to the lab to shake loose my final piece of evidence against Ishmael. I still wasn’t quite certain, even then, exactly what I was going to do with it.

  Joe looked at me over his glasses and pretended not to know why I was there. When I told him he changed the subject to the new ultraviolet/infrared analyzer that he had created to examine various materials, mostly inks. It was a funny-looking contraption with two different light sources and an ingenious system of adjustable wooden eyeshades to protect the examiner from ambient light. It sat on a corner bench with two stools in front of it. Joe’s people had nicknamed it Ugly Box and he assumed I’d want to give it a whirl.

  “Joe, all I need is your make on the fingerprints, if you’ve come up with one.”

  “We’ll get to that.”

  Then a long pause.

  I didn’t have to acknowledge that I’d put him in a tough position—helping condemn a fellow deputy against whom he had no personal or professional grudge. Also hanging in the air of his lab at that moment was the fact that Joe had been ready to testify against me on the mocked-up images. I’d decided to say nothing to him about it, and I didn’t. He was only doing his job, saying what he thought was true about the photographs he’d examined.

  “I’ll run them through myself, if you’d like,” I offered, meaning I’d make the calls to the various print banks—CAL-ID, FBI and WIN—though I am not a fingerprint expert and wouldn’t really know what to tell them to look for. At least it would take the onus off Joe and his people.

  He looked at me rather sadly with those cool blue eyes and said no, he’d done the work once so there was no sense in me doing it again. He shrugged. The expression he gave me was that of a doctor about to reveal a rare disease. Or a father whose son has brought some inadvertent disaster upon his family and friends.

  “They’re Melinda’s,” he said.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Melinda and Penny were home when I got there, packing for the move. The doors and windows were all open and so was the garage, stacked with boxes. I stood on the front porch and looked in through the open door. Moe jumped all over me, then flopped to his back and wiggled for attention. Melinda stopped in the middle of the living room with a stack of old 33’s in her arms, offering me a challenging look that tightened to hostility when she saw the expression on my face. She was dressed, as often, in her old sweats, and her hair was up inside a Dodgers cap. Penny came from the kitchen carrying a produce box. When she saw me she smiled, blu
shed and looked down, then came alongside her mother.

  “Hi, Terry.”

  “Hi, Pen.”

  “Come to say good-bye to us?” asked Mel.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Do it anyway. It’s the last chance you’ll get. Penny, go to your room and get those posters off the wall. We’ve waited long enough on them.”

  “—I—”

  “—Now. Put the kitchen stuff down.”

  Penny looked over her shoulder at me as she exiled herself to her room. Her face was flushed—embarrassment, I believed—but she still gave me the right-in-the-eye look that she had begun to offer me, just before my fall. Our Look. I returned it. I heard her door shut loudly.

  Melinda carried the albums past me and I followed her out to the garage, petting Moe as he wagged along beside. I stood at the entrance, just under the door, and looked out at the canyon. Our “June gloom” had arrived early, as it often does, leaving the afternoon sky a humid, eye-squinting white, and muting the colors of the hills and houses. The eucalyptus trees, which always seemed to me to be perfectly suited to Laguna (they’re actually Australian), were languid and somnolent in the warm spring haze. I heard Mel set down the box of records somewhere behind me.

  “So,” she said. “What’s the news?”

  “I knew it was Ish,” I said, still facing the little street and the hills beyond.

  “What was Ish?”

  “Who set me up with the pictures.”

  She said nothing.

  “Did you count on that?” I asked.

  “What on the face of the globe are you talking about?”

  “Why? I mean the whole thing. Why?”

  Her voice came, flat and not a little angry. “Have you spun out again? Like the good old days with the booze and your grimy little cave? Life’s pressures made you nuts again? I can’t be there for the rescue this time. Tell me what you’re talking about because I can’t read an addled mind.”