Джонатан Келлерман - Serpentine

He held out a ring of keys, removed one. “That’s her wheels over there, I called Moe and he’s sending Arredondo over.”

Pointing to a silver Honda Civic parked a few yards up. “This one, the Medeco does the garage. Better lock than on the damn house but the back door’s a piece of crap, nothing woulda helped. Now tell me why you want to get in there.”

“Long shot,” I said. “Quick thinking, asking Ellie. Are you hoping for more than good-deed credits?”

“Such as?”

“Ellie and Deirdre get to know each other, Deirdre remembers something.”

“Wish I was that smart but nah, just doing the bleeding-heart thing. Deirdre gets a safe place, Ellie gets some company, maybe it’ll draw her out of her mood.”

I said, “Emotionally smart. Wish I’d thought of it myself.”

“Give yourself good-influence credits.”

No sense wasting time debating but I knew he was wrong. He didn’t need me or anyone else to do the right thing.

He said, “So why the garage ?”

—

Ducking under the tape, keys in hand, with Milo following, I passed through an open wooden gate to the left of the house. The backyard was a meager square that mirrored the front lawn: grass, lemon tree, orange. Boxed by smog-pocked block walls that reduced it even further. A tech kneeled on the rear stoop, dusting the splintered remains of a sixty-year-old service door.

The garage was a single, taking up the left-hand corner of the property. The lock was gamy but I managed to key it open.

Manual door. The hinges groaned. I made sure it was stable in the open position before entering.

In front of me was a three-foot ribbon of empty space backed by clutter. Nothing messy or soiled, just too much stuff in too little space.

A good deal of the area was taken up by hacked-up sections of three Harleys that brought to mind butchered carcasses. The rest consisted of cartons, piles of them, sealed and neatly labeled in black marker. Saddlebags, lids, fenders, fire ext., clutches, brk levers, tappets.

The right-hand wall was lined with bolt-together steel shelves filled with smaller boxes . Screws, bolts, nuts, nails, hand tools.

For all of his rep as a sloppy detective, Phil Seeger had kept it organized at home.

A section of shelves in the far corner was my goal. It took some time clearing a path to reach it.

Floor-to-ceiling magazines that reminded me of my mother’s collection. The way she sat pretending to read when I tried to escape my father’s wrath.

I pushed that lovely memory aside and examined the periodicals. National Geographic, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest.

What I was after was stacked at the bottom, which took more clearance time and some cramp-inducing kneeling that felt oddly prayerful.

Fifty or so luridly covered magazines, pulpy covers falling apart.

The front pages of a type: screaming headlines and paintings of minimally clad, voluptuous women on the verge of victimhood.

The titles were an exercise in adjective manipulation: True Detective, Shocking Detective Stories, Ace Detective, Amateur Detective, Official Police Detective.

I was prepared to remove the entire stack but Phil Seeger had made my life easy. A small yellow triangle extended from the third magazine from the top.

Corner of a yellow Post-it, !!! written on it in the same black marker.

Third from the top was where you’d stick something you wanted to shield from casual eyes but didn’t want to waste time searching for.

I pulled out the issue, careful but unable to prevent a dandruff puff of acid-ruined paper dust.

Dark Detective, June 1976.

Turning to the tabbed page induced another dirt-fall but the interior of the magazine, shielded from the weather, was in surprisingly good shape, print and images still clear. Bloody Trail of the Lolita Murderess! The Shocking Tale of an Orgy of Forbidden Love and Violence!

In the right-hand margin, Phil Seeger had written: HER!!!

—

A brief scan gave me the basics of the story.

Martha Maude Hopple, a fifteen-year-old girl from the rural southern tip of Illinois, had teamed up with a thirty-four-year-old ex-con named Langdon “Mike” Leigh and embarked on a four-month, multistate crime rampage. Eight people wounded, including a seven-year-old, plus six fatalities.

Plenty of black-and-white photos to go with the overheated prose.

Mike Leigh glared at the camera, scrawny, jug-eared, and with the flat eyes of a shark and a barely visible wisp of mustache trailing the top of a sneering mouth.

Martha Maude Hopple was equally hostile to the camera, managing to harden an adolescent face still larded with baby fat.

Compressed eyes, flaring nostrils, the barest upturn of lip.

Pretty girl once you got past the anger and the mannish, chopped haircut Mike Leigh had given her as a disguise.

A caption below his arrest photo proclaimed the habitual felon’s intention to “take the rap, she didn’t do nothing.”

A caption below Martha Maude’s portrait quoted her proclamation of innocence and the fact that “he forced me.”

The twitchy partial smile—enjoying a private joke—suggested otherwise.

HER!!!

I didn’t need Seeger to educate me.

Puberty, plastic surgery, and long-term aging can alter appearances radically, but short of that, facial proportions don’t change.

I said, “Look.”

Milo said, “Oh, shit.”

Both of us staring into the smug, psychopathic, teenage face of the woman who’d called herself Dorothy Swoboda.

—

I’d half expected, half hoped, but my heart rate had kicked up anyway. Milo was breathing fast. I heard his teeth grind.

He took the magazine, examined the title, the photos, the first paragraph of text. A droplet of sweat formed on his brow and rolled down to the magazine, forming a little gray dot on the browning paper. He wiped his face angrily with his hand.

“How the hell did you connect to this ?”

“Small steps, nothing dramatic,” I said.

“Screw the modesty. Tell me.”

“When Strattine told us about an older bad girl Benni had fallen in with before she left town I flashed on the Azalea shot and Dorothy being a few years older than the other two women. Then I started thinking about the photo, itself.”

I brought up the image on my phone. “She’s apart from the other two. Not just physically, but emotionally. Apart from Des Barres, too.”

“Everyone’s having a good time except her.”

“Grim,” I said. “Same expression as in the forest shot with Stan Barker.” I tapped the article. “Same as this, back when she was fifteen and committing violent crimes.”

He studied all the screens. “Oh, man, once you point it out it’s obvious…I’m seeing more than grim. That’s perp anger—those eyes. Still, how’d you figure to find the story here?”

“Like I said, a long shot. You know I’ve been wondering on and off about all the accidents. Including Phil Seeger dying on his bike shortly after he retired. What if he’d learned something as a private citizen and died because of it? Then Deirdre mentioned he’d collected detective pulps. Why would a cop read about crime? So maybe he went digging into the past and discovered something. The final straw was the break-in. Maybe just a burglary, but what if it wasn’t? Long as we were here, I figured couldn’t hurt to look.”

“How your mind works…so our gal is Martha Maude. Who the hell’s Dorothy Swoboda?”

“Most likely the usual,” I said. “Name on a gravestone. When the investigation started, I looked her up and the only thing I found was a woman who’d died in the 1800s.”