Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“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.

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, blushed 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.”

“There’s a lot we can just skip if you want to.”

“We could skip this whole conversation from the sound of it.”

“Things do need saying.”

“Then you’re going to have to explain yourself.”

“Okay, Mel. You took the stills of the cave with my camera. But you didn’t know that cameras leave tool marks on a negative, like a gun leaves marks on cartridge. The tool marks matched up perfectly, once the Bureau and Will Fortune got my old Yashica into the lab. It seemed to confirm the theory that I took the pictures. But I knew better, and I began to wonder who had access to it. I was pretty sure it was Ish, until Joe found your fingerprints all over the pictures you stole from Ardith’s notebooks. Those were still at Wytton Street.”

I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. When I looked back at her she was leaning against the garage wall with her arms crossed, head tilted down a little, but her eyes fixed straight on me. It was easier to accuse her to the hills than to her face. I wanted her to defeat my case, shatter my evidence, provide me with a surprise but ironclad defense. But she didn’t and I knew she wouldn’t. So I turned back to the oblique spring haze.

“It was easy enough to get the pictures of me — the raw material. You just took a day off, had a couple of drinks maybe, and played burglar while you knew Ardith was at work. It probably took you fifteen minutes, once you decided to do it. You knew those shots were somewhere in Ardith’s possession because I’d told you about them. Well, maybe it took half an hour — they were up in the closet. The hard part was getting to Shroud on the Web, fishing around as Mal. You knew it was one of my handles, and you did the fishing early or late, before work, and after everyone else was gone. You used Ishmael’s terminal. It took you close to forty conversations, once you were referred to the proper creator. I’d be willing to bet you did some horse trading right here at home, too. The artwork cost you thirty grand, because you wanted good stuff, real convincing, state-of-the-art images. You put them in the pink envelope and slipped it into Chet Alton’s house the night after we took him down. Ditto the negatives from the film recorder. Not really too difficult — you knew we were about to sting a creep so you were ready. All you needed to know was where he lived — easy enough to find out, with your terminal linked up to everybody else’s. But that’s why you came home late and headed straight into the tequila — lots of nerves needed cooling by then. Kind of a celebration, too. You figured Chet would have to explain away those pictures of me to cover his own pathetic ass, like all the other stuff he’d collected. They were just a handful out of a million pictures at that point, so when he said he’d never seen them before, nobody on the planet would believe him. Of course, he couldn’t argue away the negatives, too, could he?”

One of my former neighbors drove slowly past and rubbernecked me from his car. I waved like a suburban dad: all systems normal, family life rolling along. “Amazing how your neighbors ignore you until you’re an accused child molester,” I said. “Then you could write a book and they’d line up at a mall to buy it.”

“The whole world’s that way.”

“Want me to keep going, close my case?”

“Do what you want.”

“You paid on your old joint account, which you never closed out or took Ish’s name off of. I don’t know why. Maybe you thought if I traced things that far, I’d figure it was Ish for sure and challenge him to a duel or something. But you didn’t have two payments of fifteen grand sitting around, so you got an unsecured loan at God knows what rate, figuring you’d cover it with what you could get out of the house equity here. You settled for a lousy deal because you needed the money sooner than later. Plus, you understood by then that you were helping to finance The Horridus, not some closet perv named Shroud. That made things kind of hot, especially inside your soul. Time to quit the game and get out. According to the papers I signed, you’ll get less than twenty of the original thirty you paid up for this place. Same with me. But that was enough to borrow against, keep the cash flowing and get you up to Portland. I could go on with more details, but I think you get the drift.”