Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“Later doesn’t sit too well with me,” he said.

“Which leads us to option two,” I said. “We can try something proactive — draw him out, force his hand.”

“Something like what?” said Wade.

“We could edit the profile and release it to the media,” I said. “They’d give it good play and he’d feel the pressure.”

“The media hound barks again,” said Ishmael.

I looked at him sharply. “We could blow up his handwriting sample, Horridus, and put it on billboards, see if anyone recognizes it. It’s only one word, but it’s fairly distinctive. The Bureau did that once — and it worked.”

Ishmael groaned. “ Advertise for him?”

“That’s exactly right,” I said. “Or, we can keep the profile to ourselves, just like we have on some of the evidence, and set up something to attract him — I’m just brainstorming now — but, you know... get one of the papers to do a piece on fashions for little girls, use five or six models he might like and mention the agency that handles them. Set up a phone number of our own inside the agency, run a trap and trace on the calls that come in. No, this is better, we get the papers to do a story on an audition for young girls to star in a commercial, do modeling for clothes... something like that. There’s a chance he’d show up.”

“And if he gets to one of those models, or somebody’s girl, we all end up as security guards,” said Ishmael.

But Wade seemed interested. “Go on.”

“Come on, guys,” I said, looking around the table. “Any fool can dance alone.”

Woolton was next: “Set up a reptile show.”

Vega: “They got those already. Kind of a swap meet. My kid goes.”

Burns: “It says he likes reptiles, maybe. We know he likes little girls. So we set up a reptile show for little girls.”

All: Laughter.

“Or advertise a kiddies’ hour at the show,” I said. “Where they get to handle some animals. Use a picture of a girl holding a lizard, to promote it. Right there we’ve provided him with two temptations. We’d lay in heavy, look for someone who fits the description.”

“Kick butt and take names,” said Burns.

“He’d change his appearance,” said Ishmael.

“Likely,” I said. “Plus our description is pretty thin to start with. She saw him at night, a hundred feet away, getting into the van.”

“We’ll shake down all the guys wearing Groucho glasses,” said Woolton.

Ishmael: “And if he finds his next girl there, then what? What if he tracks down the girl with the lizard? That’s the trouble with this public stuff — if it backfires it backfires big.”

“Noted,” I said. “The smaller we keep it, the better we can control it.”

“How about a tryout for a girls’ basketball league?” asked Rafter, obsessed as always with the game.

The room went quiet, then.

“Naw,” Rafter said. “Like Ish said, too many ways to go wrong.”

“There’s something you all should know,” I said. “The Bureau thinks he’ll work faster now. They also think he’ll start to rape and kill them if we apply pressure and don’t get him. They’re almost always for proaction, but not for The Horridus.”

Sheriff Wade looked at me. “So he’s going to speed up if we wait, and he’s going to start killing if we move?”

“ Great ” said Vega.

“The hell does that leave us?” asked Burns.

“It leaves us with quaint methods, such as old-fashioned police work,” said Ishmael.

I nodded and the room went quiet again. “He’s right. The first thing I want to do is get my people on the real estate angle. If we figure he’s sold his home, or is trying to, we’ve got a place to start. The detached maid’s quarters or guest house is important. It narrows things down considerably. All the offerings are centralized in the multiple listings guide that the realtors use.”

“MLS. There you go,” said Wade. “Okay.”

“Where the hell you going to start?” said Woolton.

“Santa Ana,” I said. “It’s between Orange and San Clemente, where he took the girls.”

“Biggest city in the county,” said Vega.

“Should we start with the smallest because it’s easier to cover?” I snapped.

Vega held up his hands. “Just thinking out loud, Terry.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “This guy’s just pissin’ me off.”

“You and everybody else,” said Woolton.

“Look,” said Ishmael, turning to the sheriff. “Painful as it is to have Naughton agree with me, I vote to stay basic on this scum. No need to get novelistic right now. If we try something proactive and it flops, we’re setting him off. Let him think we’re asleep. Work him like we work anybody else, except maybe harder.”

“I don’t like the idea of him speeding up,” said Burns.

“Who could?” said Woolton.

“Terry?” Wade asked. “This is your baby.”

“Painful as it is to agree with Ishmael agreeing with me, I do.”

Wade studied me. He said, “You’ve got that bad look on your face, Naughton. Agreeing with Ishmael can’t be that awful.”

There were the requisite chuckles a leader always gets.

“I wish I knew where he was right now,” I said. “What he was doing. Who he is.”

“Ishmael? He’s right here,” said Burns. “Sitting on his ass.”

I gave Burns a look that has been described to me as icy, ferocious, drop dead, freezing, withering. Take your pick, To me, it feels like all of them at the same time.

“Terry’s getting his panties in a bunch again,” someone noted.

“I’m worried about this shitbag.”

“Amen,” said Rafter.

“What else?” asked Jim Wade.

I filled them in briefly on another high-profile CAY case, that of a dead baby found last week in a storage room file cabinet. The office was out in Buena Park. Nobody knew who the infant was or how she got there. One of the secretaries smelled something and found her. We’re working the staff and the cleaning crew and the security company and the vendors and the temp help. A lot of people had keys and could have come in late at night. When something like this happens, the person you’re looking for first is the mother. She’ll be young, broke, unstable, using drugs and under pressure from a husband or boyfriend. Intolerable as it sounds, that kind of thing happens all the time. Two months ago it was a three-year-old boy who wandered away from home. His parents were distraught. It took us three weeks to find him, and when we did he was at the bottom of a water-district pit less than a half a mile from his house. He’d been dead a week. The parents confessed to dropping him in there because he cried a lot and they couldn’t afford to feed him right. That’s the kind of stuff we do, day in and day out.

When I was finished with the CAY rundown, Ishmael covered the department’s other big CAP (Crimes Against Persons) cases: the former county secretary shot dead in her home by an UNSUB with a crossbow; a postal worker gone nuts and killing three; a young man accused of killing his family then putting them all in a car he then set on fire; rumors of another gang war down in the Santa Ana barrio, less than a mile from where we were sitting.

My mind wandered. It’s hard to give serious consideration to cases outside your own, which is one of the reasons we meet like this. I did wonder what kind of cold sonofabitch could shoot a woman in the heart with a crossbow at close range. And I wondered where our man was now, our Horridus, from the Latin horridus meaning rough or bristling. As I thought about what he looked like and where he worked and what he saw when he looked in a mirror, the discussion of other crimes swept past my brain: more rumors of blame for the county bankruptcy of ’94; political crap going down again in one of our state assembly districts; mobile Asian gangs running strong in central county; white supremacists in Newport Beach; two old women raped in a nursing home in Yorba Linda.