Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

None of the three women were particularly active, either socially or professionally. They basically did their jobs and went home to take care of their daughters. Abby said she went to church occasionally, but usually not to the same one. It made her uncomfortable to be introduced as a guest, so she tended just to read her Bible sometimes for inspiration. She belonged to no professional associations except a credit union through work. She was an Automobile Club member, but she assumed that didn’t count. She took a junior college class in astronomy seven years ago, when her marriage was on the rocks, before Brittany was born. She said she didn’t belong to any of the “anonymous” programs because she didn’t have an addictive personality.

“I... well... no, that wouldn’t—”

“—Go ahead,” I said.

“Well... I joined a singles club. A dating service? Just recently. Last week.”

I imagined a membership of young men with access to Abby, and my heart sped up.

She gave me the name of the place.

“I mean, it was just three days ago I went on their active membership. I haven’t had a single date or even sent anyone a card. Or gotten one. That’s how it works — you look at pictures and send the person a card that says you’re interested? I would think that whoever did this would have...” Two big tears ran down her face and she looked at the carpet again. “...Would have known about me and Brittany before that.”

“Maybe not. Do the men who look at your pictures get your address or phone number or full name?”

She shook her head and looked down again. “It’s supposed to be confidential. They promise you that. Not until later, you give the guy that information if you want to.”

“You have a nickname, then, or a number so they can send you the card?”

“It’s first names and then a membership number.”

“I want yours.”

She went into her bedroom and came back a moment later. She told me the number and sat back down.

“They always say it’s someone you know, don’t they?”

“It isn’t, Abby. It could be someone you met yesterday. Have any of the Bright Tomorrows members talked to you? Even casually, at the service?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t spent a single minute there, as a member. That’s what I’m saying.”

I considered. “I want you to think back — I know it’s hard, but try — think back to every new male you’ve met in the last month, who’s between twenty and forty years old. In any circumstance, any occasion. Any one you talked to, were introduced to, had a conversation or encounter with. No matter how minor it might seem.”

“Oh, God. How can I—”

“—Just try. You’ll remember what’s important if you just relax.”

“You mean clerks and salesmen and—?”

“—All of them. Go ahead. Don’t edit. Just recall.”

She didn’t do real well. Her heart was heavy for Brittany and herself, and her mind was jammed with worry. She couldn’t recall names, her descriptions were hazy, her sense of time uncertain at best.

So I took out copies of Amanda’s sketches of the reptile fancier who had known so much about rattlesnakes.

“Have you seen a man who looks like this? Even slightly?”

The bearded version was a definite no. So was the unbearded. So was the glasses version, and the one without glasses. I watched her eyes as she studied the sketches, and I could tell that at least half of her mind was elsewhere. How couldn’t it be?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean, he looks kind of familiar. But it’s like... he looks like... everybody else? I’m sorry.”

It was true. Amanda hadn’t been able to pry from Steven Wicks’s memory the details of an image that wasn’t there. And even if it had been there, I knew that The Horridus was changing, shedding, “consolidating,”

as Strickley had said. The old skin in Brittany’s bed said the same thing. I understood it. It was exactly what I would have done if I were him. The old was passing and the new was taking form. He was hatching out — egg to serpent. The only thing we could assume was that he probably didn’t look anything like these pictures.

When her mother arrived a few minutes later Abby Elder collapsed into a fit of sobs, and her usefulness was temporarily over. The last thing I got from her were the name and telephone numbers of her ex-husband, and a surprisingly hostile stare from her mother. I got a recording at the ex’s home and a recording at his work. I called Bright Tomorrows, too, and still another canned message telling me they didn’t open until ten. It was that time of morning — seven-fifty — when everyone is on his way somewhere, but nobody’s there yet. When everyone is changing from who they are at home to who they become at work. Hatching out. Old to new. Egg to serpent.

I went outside and sketched the layout of the condo, trying to see what The Horridus had seen, what might have helped him decide. I stood there in the cool April morning and felt the old thing coming toward me. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten since I was a kid, and it comes at unexpected times. After all these years, I’ve learned to pay attention to it. It’s a feeling of change — rapid, dramatic, unalterable change. The kind of change that leaves you breathless, looking back at the way things were and will never be again. It’s the foreknowledge that a freight train of events from which you cannot get away will soon and suddenly be bearing down on you. I felt it coming, just a few days before Matthew.

I felt it in the elevator with Donna Mason. And I felt it now as the neighbors peeked through their windows at me and the joggers huffed by askance and a jet left a thin contrail high in the blue spring sky.

Johnny found plenty of prints from Brittany’s room, but most of them were small, and the others came from places her mother would likely have touched. He lifted a partial from the aluminum window frame and another from one corner of the window glass. The screen yielded nothing. He rolled the shed skin lengthwise in newspaper, hoping that the ALS or bench laser in the Crime Lab might illuminate a latent print.

“He’s slick as shit,” Johnny said to me quietly, glancing toward the hallway. “I’ll glass this whole room and where he was standing outside. I’ll get down on my hands and knees. I’ll pick up every bit of sand, hair or fiber I can find outside this window and let Reilly figure out where it came from. But you know what, man? He’s careful, he knows what he’s doing and he’s not giving us one goddamned thing.”

“He’ll make a mistake.”

He sighed and looked at the hole cut out of the glass. I pictured a snake crawling through that hole. “That’s what I want. I want to find a guy who’s got that piece of glass stashed in his van. Or his garage. Or his guest house. He’s not that careless, though. He’ll take it into a parking lot, step on it and kick the pieces everywhere. And even Johnny Escobedo won’t be able to put them together again.”

“Work it, Johnny. That’s all you can do.”

“We got to do something more, man. We can’t just wait on him. I’m sitting here playing with fingerprint tape and he’s got her out in the woods somewhere. Is that woman in there ever going to see her girl alive again?”

I knew he was right. The Horridus had waited twenty-six days between Pamela and Courtney. Now he was down to fifteen.

“There’s a miracle in here, Johnny. Somewhere. Find it.”

Johnny ran his hand past his widow’s peak and through his thick black hair. “We got to make a miracle of our own, man. He’s not going to do it for us.”

I called Louis and told him to drop the vintage clothing stores for now and triple up with me and Frances on the homes-for-sale listings. We were down to ten sellers who might be our man.