Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” I said.

“I hope to see them looking my way, in about three hours.”

Those next three hours at the station were interesting. First of all, I had a fax from Mike Strickley at the Bureau:

Terry— Something remote came up, but I’m passing it along anyway. We’re putting together a national index for sex crimes against juveniles, per President Clinton. We hope to have it up and running late this year. It’s going to put some more teeth in Megan’s law. Right now, we’re collecting everything we can get our hands on. I’d discussed The Horridus with one of our people who’s working on the index. Yesterday, she came across this, from Wichita Falls, Texas. Seems they had a guy two years ago, he was driving around in a van and offering free clothes to girls on their way home from school. The clothes weren’t new. He’d let them use the van to change out of their old ones. Two changed, one just took her booty home with her. White male, late twenties to early thirties, medium build, beard and glasses. Three complaints from citizens and that was the end of it. Wichita Falls cops never found a suspect. They hit the child molesters’ registry and came up with nothing. One month later a six-year-old disappeared between school and home. She’s still missing — maybe a connection with the van man, maybe not. Those were the only incidents. Nothing since then and no leads — several subjects questioned and released. But the van, the clothes, the ages of the girls fit your man. If he’s abducting now to make them wear what he likes, it’s a classic escalation. Maybe he split and landed in your backyard. Maybe he wanted more girls to choose from. Maybe he got scared. Maybe he scared himself. Use it if you can. The guy to talk to in Wichita Falls is Captain Sam Welborn. Good guy. Good luck.

The air in the station that afternoon was strange, though it had nothing to do with my compatriots in CAY. Louis stayed in the field to interview the listing agents about the sellers of homes with second units. We were down to eight now — the two Louis had investigated that morning came up clean. One was black and the other was too old. Frances was at home, allegedly, still sick. I called twice to see how she was doing, but got only her message and no return call. Johnny was down in the lab, hovering over Joe Reilly while he processed the evidence from the Brittany Elder abduction.

The strange thing was the brass — undersheriffs Woolton and Vega, Captain Burns and Lieutenant Ishmael — and even Jim Wade himself. They seemed to linger around the station, looking at me. Wade from behind the glass of his office. Ishmael during strolls past my work station. Woolton and Vega from a coffee machine that lies at a diagonal from my desk, to and from which there is a clear sight line. Burns peeked at me once over the top of my divider and said he was looking for Frances, but everybody knew she wasn’t in. How couldn’t he?

It was Friday afternoon, and like a lot of other workplaces on Friday afternoon, the department usually went through a communal exhale. Nobody was exhaling. No talk of weekend plans, none of the usual goofy pleasantries that mark the end of the workweek for most of us. Instead there was a rigid silence in the air, and a feeling of anticipation. It was especially odd, also, because Wade’s swanky annual equestrian show and benefit for County Youth Services — called simply the Orange Classic — was set for Sunday. This weekend, the last in April, was always a high time for Jim and the whole Sheriff Department. In fact, I wondered what he was doing still in his office, looking gray and grim as a shark, with all the work he had to do to get his ranch ready for the fling.

I stuck my head in his door.

“What gives?”

He looked at me and shook his head, but said nothing. So I beat it. Kick some furniture and people start to think you’re dangerous. I wasn’t worried. I had more important things to do than worry about why the Sheriff Department heavies were all treating me like I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe.

Fridays I usually leave work an hour early and visit Matt. He’s up in Newport Beach, on a bluff that overlooks the Pacific. It’s between the department and Laguna, right on my way home.

Ardith is often there, too, as she was on this unsettling Friday, already standing on the grass by the grave when I pulled up and parked along the curb.

It’s blustery and cool up the bluff, on almost any day of the year. That Friday the breeze was quite stiff coming off the ocean toward us. Out on the sea the triangles of sails cut slowly through the whitecaps. The water was dark gray and the end of the earth was just a thin black line with the blue of an April sky above it. Catalina Island lay offshore, clearly revealed by the wind.

Ardith had her long black coat on, and her curly blond hair was tangled by the breeze. The dark solidity of her shape and the lightness of her hair stood out against the green of the cemetery grass. She wore jeans under the coat and little black boots that laced to just above her ankles, and a red scarf around her neck. When she looked at me I was struck by the sun-browned color of her skin, but I always am. Ardith has a face of summer: bronze skin and straw-yellow hair and eyes blue as desert sky. She is a California girl. Grew up here, like I did. She works for a ritzy hotel now, group bookings. Her lips are slender and pretty and they turn downward at the edges, giving her a look of etched sadness. A spray of wrinkles beside each of her striking eyes echoes the turn of her mouth and reminds me that Ardith and the world and I are all growing older by the second.

“Hi,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled faintly.

“Hi, Terry.”

I stood across the headstone from her. It’s a flat stone, flush with the ground, because the upright style isn’t allowed here. We picked a red granite one, on the theory that red was cheerful and youthful. The letters are a cursive script rather than the more formal blocked ones; again, we were trying for something more upbeat than conventional. It’s hard to say if it worked. I guess that depends on your mood. The red is red, all right, but the sun seems to have dulled it more than its neighbors of slate gray and black. No matter how many times I spray and wipe it with the glass cleaner and paper towels I keep in my trunk, it maintains a dull barrier instead of the glistening red patina I’d envisioned when we ordered it. I’ve doubted in my more somber hours that the concept of an upbeat headstone is a sound one.

I knelt, sprayed off the stone and wiped it with one paper towel, then another. Opaque streaks formed in the heat of the rock, then shrunk away. Matthew Paul Naughton. I picked off the dead grass that always jumps onto the stone when you nudge the paper towel against the edges of the lawn as you wipe. It’s the springy Bermuda grass that has lots of dry dead blades in it.

I stood and looked down. It wasn’t very good, but no matter how many times you wipe that granite, it looks the same. I can imagine the shape and size and condition of what lies beneath that headstone, but only vaguely, and not for long. I don’t mean to be morbid, it just happens. I always blot out that kind of thinking with memories of my beautiful robust son, alive in the world. I go from the horrible to the beautiful in just a beat of the heart, then travel back to the here and now. The trouble is the here and now has a big empty space in it. You don’t want that space to be empty. So you try to fill it with something. Imagination is a poor substitute for living flesh and flowing blood, for the sound of voice and the thrill of touch. You do what you can.

“That granite just won’t come clean,” I said.

“It’s all right, Terry.”