Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “If you read the certificate of death it refers you to the coroner’s report. I wanted an autopsy because I really wanted to know what happened. On Matt’s, the immediate cause says ‘respiratory arrest.’ The next line says ‘due to’ and the examiner wrote in ‘drowning.’ The third line says ‘due to’ and the examiner left it blank.”

  Donna listened and studied me. “So?”

  “So, I know him because we both work for the Sheriff-Coroner department. He likes me. He … well.”

  Donna nodded and waited.

  “When Matt and I were at Shaw’s Cove, it was a lot warmer than this,” I said. “It was late September, with the Santa Anas blowing hot, and I took him out of school because the weather was so good and you could see underwater about fifty feet. No divers there, except us. I remember the sand stinging my ankles while I was putting on my wet suit. I remember real clearly zipping Matt’s up from the back, with that black piece of cord they put on. Matt’s suit was black and yellow, made him look like a bumblebee. I was real proud of him for taking to the water so well—he was just five and not at all fearless—but he knew what he could do and couldn’t. There were so many other things he was afraid of. The dark. Closets. Under his bed. Car washes, the way the vacuum hoses make all that noise and coil up on the racks like big snakes—that scared him out of his wits. Scared of dogs and bugs and buses. But not the ocean. We spent a lot of time together down at Shaw’s Cove, it was kind of my thing with him. His mother, she wouldn’t go out past her knees, and I used to worry that would ruin it for him. Ardith was afraid of anything she couldn’t see under the water, which is a lot. But that fear never got into Matt. We sat on the beach and put our boots and fins on, got our masks ready. I let him go in first like I always did. But I was only a few steps behind him, like I always was. The waves were short and crisp and it was just beautiful, Donna, the way the Santa Anas held up the faces and blew spray off the tops. You looked through the silver mist and then you saw blue sky and then a long low bank of orange brown way out there, which was Catalina with all the smog blown up against it. I remember thinking how great the sunset was going to be that evening. It was cold when I first went under. The water gets down into the suit and your body heat warms it up, that’s how a wet suit works, but that first dive under always gets you. I came up and put my mask on and dove back under and I couldn’t believe how clear it was. Matt was out ahead maybe all of ten yards. That yellow wet suit really showed up good, and his fins were blue and I remember thinking what a perfect little human he was. So we just swam along the rocks on the north, that’s where you see a lot of stuff, right up close to shore like that, octopus and skates and rays, all the surf fish and the little bass that aren’t safe out with the big boys. And up close to the rocks you get the grass, which is green and sometimes straw colored, swaying all together, and all the purple urchins and the green-gray anemones big as dinner plates, and schools of baitfish that look like stainless steel in the sunlight, because there’s plenty of light up by the rocks there—you’re only in, say, three or four feet of water, Donna, at the most You can see the sun slanting in past the surface, looks like raindrops slowed down and stretched out This big school of baitfish came up from behind us and we were there in the middle of them, thousands of fish hauling ass past us in perfect unison. Then this dark shape after them, really fast, and it’s this little black cormorant just swimming his heart out under three feet of water, chasing down his food. When I came up for some breath he was sitting there on the water about ten feet away like he’d been there his whole life. Matt was on the other side of him looking back and smiling, and I remember that smile real clear because when you smile with a mask and snorkel on, your mouth looks distorted and Matt looked funny to start with because the mask was so big for his face. You know? Then we followed the edge of the rocks out to where it’s deeper, maybe ten feet, then twenty, about. Matt came over and he said he wanted to show me how deep he could go and I said go right ahead, I’ll watch. So he dove down and came up, then I dove down a little deeper and came up, and he went deeper than me, and like that. We maybe dove five or six times each. I wasn’t straining or anything. I didn’t think Matt was either, because I kept watching his breathing and how he was doing. It was a contest, but it was a friendly one. Then, I went down the last time and gave a kick or two extra, and when I looked up at Matt he was floating up there looking down at me real peaceful and I drifted back up and broke the surface with a big spit of breath and drank some more air in. And Matt was still floating there, looking down. So I said hey, what’s to see down there, young man, but he didn’t answer. So I swam over and poked his shoulder and he didn’t notice me and I knew it was a shallow-water blackout. So I grabbed his wet-suit collar and lifted it out of the water and his head dangled down on his chest and I slapped him across the face, not hard, but hard enough. That didn’t do anything. So I got his head out of the water and tried to tell if he was breathing, but that’s hard when you’re treading water for two and everything’s wet and moving around, plus the wind blowing you in the face. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing so I got his head locked up between my hands and breathed for him and kicked harder than I’d ever kicked in my life to get him in. You can really move out with those big fins on. Next thing I knew we were on the beach past the waterline and I had his wet-suit stripped down to his waist and I could see he wasn’t breathing so I did CPR. Every cop knows CPR. And you know what happened? He coughed and spit up a bunch of water and started breathing. He was just barely awake, though. There was a flock of seagulls right over us and I thought they were mocking me. Matt’s eyes kind of opened and he was looking at me and the pupils were dilated so big his eyes looked black. He was terrified. But he was breathing. So I got that wet suit the rest of the way off and mine, too, and I took him in both arms and started running. I knew there was a walk-in clinic up Coast Highway and I was going to make it there faster than humanly possible. You know, the way I remember that run isn’t always the same. Sometimes I think it took a long time because all these details come at me, and the details are always standing still when I see them, like this pink hibiscus blossom hanging over a fence by the sidewalk along Coast Highway. I mean, when I think back I can still see that thing, the white stamen in the middle and the yellow pollen stuck to it. Or I can remember the coldness of Matthew’s body against mine, the exact smell of his hair, which was salt water, like you’d figure, but with boy and a little shampoo still in it. I remember holding him tight—I’ll never forget that. Then, other times all I remember is a blur of cars and people and lowering my shoulder into the door of the clinic. I do remember knocking into the examination room where the doctor was, with the nurse talking loud at me, and the look on the face of the lady the doctor was with. I remember it was kind of a struggle giving Matt up. It was like the doctor was pulling away part of me. And I remember lying Matt out on the table and thinking how hopeless he looked. And I remember yelling and the doctor ordering me firmly to get a blanket out of the other exam room, then locking me out. And, of course, the nurse leaving Matt’s room a few minutes later, walking away from me down the hallway, crying. It was five days before we found out what happened to him. We thought the truth would make us feel better. Well, you know how that can go. First, he had an embolism that knocked him out while he was in the water. Then, he almost drowned because he was unconscious. I saved his life at that point. Then, well, Donna, what happened was he was alive when I started off with him up Coast Highway, but when I laid him on the table, he was gone. While I was running, you know? Because of the way I had his head up against me? Because he was cold and I didn’t want to drop him? He didn’t drown. What happened was, I suffocated him.”

  There was a silence as the zone along the window-pane hummed where the pink room met the blue sea. The onyx birds turned slowly.

  My eyes burned and my heart was trying to hide. Or was it trying to be found?

  Donna’s voice was a whisper.

  “I’m sorry for
you, Terry. And for Matthew, too.”

  I couldn’t speak right then. I heard the faint sound of the Virginia hollows in her voice and I believed for a moment that I was back in one of them, surrounded by green hills, a continent away from the Pacific I love and hate.

  “You’ve never told anyone?”

  “Ardith.”

  “You’re a magnificent and stubborn man.”

  “Now you.”

  “Yes. Now me.”

  “Never tell?”

  “I can’t tell what isn’t mine to tell, Terry.”

  “Forgive me?”

  “I can’t do that, either. You can.”

  I thought about that. It would be the end, and the beginning of everything.

  Sample Chapter from The Blue Hour

  “That’s what I’m after.”

  Brighton smiled in a minor key. “I think you’re after more than that, Tim. I think you need a way to stay busy, keep your hand in things.”

  “There is that.”

  “He’s got to be some kind of psychopath. There really isn’t much to go on yet. This kinda guy makes me sick.”

  Hess had suspected but now he knew. “The National Forest dumps.”

  “Dump isn’t really the word. But you saw the news. They both went missing from shopping malls, at night. Cops waited the usual forty-eight to take the missing persons reports. The first was half a year ago, the Newport woman. We found her purse and the blood. That was a month after she bought nylons at Neiman-Marcus, walked out and disappeared forever.”

  Brighton squared his briefcase, fingered the latches, then sighed and folded his hands on it.

  “Then yesterday late, the Laguna one. A week ago she went to the Laguna Hills Mall and vanished from sight. Hikers found her purse. The ground near it was soaked in blood again—like the first. It’ll hit the news tomorrow—repeat this, serial that. More mayhem on the Ortega Highway. Both the victims—apparent victims—were good people, Tim. Young, attractive, bright women. People loved them. One married, one not.”

  Hess remembered the newspaper picture. One of those women who seems to have it all, then has nothing at all.

  He looked up the crowded sidewalk toward his apartment and drank more coffee. It made his teeth ache but his teeth ached most of the time now anyway.

  “So, it’s two sites off the Ortega in Cleveland National Forest, about a hundred yards apart. They’re eight miles this side of the county line. Two patches of blood-stained ground. Blood-drenched is how the crime scene investigator described it. Scraps of human viscera likely at the second one. Lab’s working up the specimens. No bodies. No clothing. No bones. Nothing. Just the purses left behind, with the credit cards still in them, no cash, no drivers’ licenses. Some kind of fetish or signature, I guess. They’re half a year apart, but it’s got to be the same guy.”

  “Everyday women’s purses?”

  “If bloodstained and chewed by animals is everyday.”

  “What kind of animals?”

  “Hell, Tim. I don’t know.”

  Hess didn’t expect an answer. It was not the kind of answer the sheriff-coroner of a county of 2.7 million needed to have. But he asked because scavengers have differing tastes and habits, and if you can establish what did the eating you can estimate how fresh it was. You could build a time line, confirm or dispute one. It was the kind of knowledge that you got from forty-two years as a deputy, thirty in homicide.

  We are old men, Hess thought. The years have become hours and this is what we do with our lives.

  He looked at the sheriff. Brighton wore the brown wool-mix off-the-rack sport coats that always make cops look like cops. Hess wore one too, though he was almost half a year off the force.

  “Who’s got it?” asked Hess.

  “Well, Phil Kemp and Merci Rayborn got the call for the Newport Beach woman. Her name was Lael Jillson. That was back in February. So this should be theirs, too, but there’s been some problems.”

  Hess knew something of the problems. “Kemp and Rayborn. I thought that was a bad combination.”

  “I know. We thought two opposites would make one whole, and we were wrong. I split them up a couple of months ago. Phil’s fine with that. I wasn’t sure who to put her with, to tell you the truth. Until now.”

  Hess knew something of Merci Rayborn. Her father was a longtime Sheriff Department investigator—burg/theft, fraud, then administration. Hess never knew him well. He had accepted a pink-labeled cigar when Merci was born, and he had followed her life through brief conversations with her father. To Hess she was more a topic than a person, in the way that children of co-workers often are.

  At first she was a department favorite, but the novelty of a second-generation deputy wore off fast. There were a half dozen of them. Hess had found her to be aggressive, bright and a little arrogant. She’d told him she expected to run the homicide detail by age forty, the crimes against persons section by fifty, then be elected sheriff-coroner at fifty-eight. She was twenty-four at the time, working the jail as all Sheriff Department yearlings do. In the decade since then, she had not become widely liked. She seemed the opposite of her soft-spoken, modest father.

  Hess thought it amusing how generations alternated traits so nimbly—he had seen it in his own nieces and nephews.

  “Tim, she filed that lawsuit Friday afternoon. Went after Kemp for sexual harassment going back almost ten years. Physical stuff, she says. Well, by close of the workday two more female deputies had told the papers they were going to join in, file suits too. The lawyer’s talking class action. So we’ve got a lot of deputies taking sides, the usual battle lines. I was sorry Rayborn did it, because basically she’s a good investigator for being that young. I don’t know what to make of those complaints. No one’s ever complained about Phil before, except for him being Phil. Maybe that’s enough these days. I don’t know.”

  Hess saw the disappointment. For a public figure Brighton was a private man, and he bore his department’s troubles as if they sprung from his own heart. He had always avoided conflict and wanted to be liked.

  “I’ll try to fly under all that.”

  “Good luck.”

  “What did the dogs find?” he asked.

  “They worked a couple of trails between the sites and a fire road about a hundred yards south of the highway. The two trails were real close to each other—a hundred yards or so. He parked and carried them through the brush. Did whatever he does. Carried them back out, apparently. Besides that, nothing.”

  “How much blood?”

  “We’ll run saturation tests on soil from the new scene. Janet Kane was her name. With the first, most of it’s dried up and decomposed. The lab might get some useful DNA. They’re trying.”

  “I thought you’d find them buried out there.”

  “So did I. Dogs, methane probe, chopper, zip. A pea-sized part of my brain says they still might be alive.”

  Hess paused a moment to register his opinion on the subject of this hope. Then, “We might want to draw a bigger circle.”

  “That’s up to you and Merci. Merci and you, to be exact. Her show, you know.”

  Hess turned and stared out at the riptides lacing the pale green ocean. He could feel Brighton’s eyes on him.

  “You do look good,” said the sheriff. The breeze brought his words back toward Hess.

  “I feel good.”

  “You’re tougher than a boiled owl, Tim.”

  Hess could hear the sympathy in Brighton’s voice. He knew that Brighton loved him but the tone pricked his pride and his anger, too.

  The two men stood and shook hands.

  “Thanks, Bright.”

  The sheriff opened his briefcase and handed Hess two green cardboard files secured by a thick rubber band. The top cover was stamped COPY in red.

  “There’s some real ugly in this one, Tim.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Stop by Personnel soon as you can. Marge’ll have the paperwork ready.”

 
About the author

  T. Jefferson Parker is the author of 19 crime novels. He was won two Edgars for best novel, one Edgar for best short story, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His first novel, “Laguna Heat,” was made into a movie by HBO. He lives in California.

  Connect with T. Jefferson Parker Online

  Website: www.tjeffersonparker.com

  Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tjeffersonparker

  Other Books by T. Jefferson Parker

  T. Jefferson Parker is the author of 19 crime novels, including “Laguna Heat,” “California Girl,” “The Border Lords” and “The Jaguar.”

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Sample Chapter from the Blue Hour