Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“Shit, Johnny, I’m sorry,” I said.

“I understand, man. I really do.”

He didn’t rush to hang up on me, for which I loved him dearly.

“The worst part, Johnny, is I’m out. The Horridus is planning number four, we’ve got kids in ditches, infants in file cabinets and pervs all over the place and I’m sitting here with my thumb up my ass.”

“If it didn’t happen it didn’t happen. I know it didn’t happen.”

A desperate heart is a soft one. Mine practically melted. “I love you, man. And I don’t even want your beer. Though I could use one right now.”

“I should go.”

“What’s Reilly got on the Elder scene?”

“Still working. Nothing yet. The news here is the park ranger out at Caspers.”

He told me about a ranger named Bret Stefanic who was found murdered the evening before.

“Way out in the woods off the Ortega,” said Johnny. “Guy cut his throat wide open. Didn’t really grab my interest until the ME said he’d been bitten three times by a venomous snake — probably a rattlesnake.”

I thought a moment.

“It looked like Stefanic stopped somebody out there. His citation book was out, found it in the weeds. The last three tickets were ripped out of the book. We think the perp was written up, surprised him somehow. Reilly said he died from the slashing. The snake bites were premortem. Very strange, uh... Frank.”

Reduced to Frank. It was what I had left.

“ Crotalus horridus? ”

“We’re sending out some of Stefanic’s blood to a toxicologist over at Irvine and a herpetologist in Chicago. They both told me already there’d be no way to differentiate one rattlesnake venom from another, once it’s in the blood. That’s if the bites even were from a rattler. The ME said venomous snake. There’s lots of those.”

“Well, not around here there aren’t, Johnny.”

“That’s what I mean. The only poisonous ones found here in the wild are the rattlers. But what if it’s a cobra, or a water moccasin or something?”

I was silent for a moment, as I tried to imagine The Horridus out in the far reaches of a wilderness. It fit. He let his victims go in places like that. In fact, he’d let Courtney go in the Caspers Wilderness Park. He liked the outdoors. It made sense, but not a lot.

“Where were the bites?”

“Buttocks, leg, face.”

“Bitten while he was alive.”

“Correct. And the ME said he was bitten just before he died. The venom hadn’t been assimilated very far into the tissue. He died not long after the bites.”

I just couldn’t put it together. “So this inquiring ranger tries to cite a guy for something, gets his throat cut, then falls down and a rattlesnake that just happens to be in the grass bites him once on the ass, once on the leg, then finished with a bite to his face? Johnny, there’s a whole lot of something wrong with that picture.”

“I know. Let me ask you something, Terry. If we strike out on the male sellers, why try the women?”

“Mother. Wife, girlfriend, sister.”

“That’s out of profile, isn’t it?”

“You know me, Johnny — I throw the net wide as I can.”

Another silence while Johnny vetted my methods. I’ve long been known at the department as the guy who goes the extra mile when he doesn’t have to. Maybe checking the women was just a waste of time. Apparently, Johnny Escobedo thought so.

“Hey, I should go.”

“Johnny, one more thing. I got this fax from Strickley at the Bureau. He found a weird thread that leads back to Texas. I think it’s worth—”

“—I already laid it on Ish. No dice.”

“ Ishmael? ”

“He’s acting head of CAY.”

“Ah, holy shit—”

“—And he said we’re better off looking here than looking in Texas, considering we don’t work in Texas. I’m trying to get them to send us a file. Slow going — the whole thing’s cool by now.”

My balls frosted with the news of Ishmael as acting head of my unit. It was all I could do to keep my mind halfway on track. “It’s worth it for one of us — one of you — to spend a couple of days back there. Who’d you talk to? Welborn?”

“Yeah. He’s... hey, Frank, I gotta go.”

“Listen, Johnny, there’s one more thing. I know I keep saying that. But we got to try the two dating services again.”

“None of the names matched.”

“But those were members. What about employees, service people who have both accounts, subcontractors and vendors?”

There was a pause. “That’s right, uh, Frank. I hadn’t thought of that. All right, man. Over and out.”

“Check the women sellers if the men—”

Click.

I got the fax and walked down to the beach. I sat on a green bench. The bench had a plaque on it, dedicated to Edward Kilfoy — 1967–73. Six years old. What happened to him? I watched the people walk by. Some kids chased the retreating remnants of a wave, stopped with their skinny legs bent, then screamed and ran back in ahead of the next one. Good, cold, April, Pacific Ocean brine, I thought. I opened the folded fax. There he was: short hair cut in a flattop, swept back, and a tight, narrow face. High cheekbones and a small mouth. Sleepy eyes, brown, according to the description. Medium everything. A sport coat, collared shirt, tan trousers. No glasses. I thought of Brittany telling me how bad his breath was. Should we have put that in the description? I recalled Steven Wicks’s version. They weren’t really close. Similarities, yes, but only general ones. What I wouldn’t give for a picture of him as good as the ones they had of me, to turn into billboards for freeways all over the county. I wondered if this rendition would be good enough to get results. I had to think not. But it was another piece, another tool.

I drove out Laguna Canyon Road to my street — former street — and passed it. What a sad-strange feeling, to pass a place that used to have your home on it. I U-turned, headed back, U-turned again and made a right onto Canyon Edge.

There was no reason for the house to look different than it had less than a day earlier, but it did. The pepper tree outside was bigger, lazier, sadder. The little house seemed to have missed me. I pulled into the driveway and sat there for a while. Moe had missed me, and I saw the proof. He stood on his hind legs with his paws up on the fence, barking and wagging his tail. I rolled down the window. The pepper tree dropped a cluster of dried-out pinkish balls to the hood. The cluster skidded across the paint in the breeze. How on earth, I thought, have you managed to mess everything up so bad? Mel would be at work; Penny at school. I doubted she’d changed the locks this fast. After taking a deep breath I swung open the car door and got out. Moe mugged me inside the gate and I got down on my knees and grabbed the thick fur and skin around his neck. He plopped over and I scratched his yellow soft belly. I knelt there for a moment, petting my dog, trying to look integral. No one would know I wasn’t. Right?

But my heart was thumping as I tried my key. It worked. I let myself in as I’d done a thousand times before, and closed the door behind me. My heart was still pounding. The smell of the place got me: the old wood and varnish of the floors, the faint aroma of food cooked recently, the fresh femininity of Melinda and Penny, all hovering nicely above the scent of Moe’s dogness.

So, having burgled my way onto private property, I went to Melinda’s study. Moe clicked along beside me. I caught Melinda’s smell in here too, but stronger. I tried to ignore it. The drapes were pulled shut and the room was cool. I turned on her computer and booted it up. It’s a fast, strong machine, supplied by the department for Melinda’s Fraud and Computer Crime work at home. I got onto the Web and got myself to a site I’d been to many times before.