Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

I always get off the kid porn Web feeling like I should take a long bath in acid, or have my skin peeled and replaced. You touch your finger to that invisible stream, and it’ll try to suck you in. It goes right for your soul.

I shut down the computer and wandered the house for a while. I stood for a moment in Melinda’s bedroom — my bedroom until last night — and registered its presence. The furniture was all hers, as was most of the furniture in the house. I’d left “ours” with Ardith; Jordan had left “theirs” with Mel. I’d never fully acclimated to putting my ass onto the same couch that had cushioned Jordan Ishmael’s. It was odd, though. With me gone, the room didn’t seem very different than it did with me in it. The whole house didn’t seem very different. I remembered our brief contentions over what came into the new home and what stayed in storage (mostly my stuff), how things were to be arranged, how the household would be organized. She was particular about what went where — furnishings, electronics, pictures, knickknacks. Melinda had her way on almost every point, and to be truthful, that was fine with me. I’ve got no eye for design. But it was strange to see how little I’d influenced my own home. Take out Terry, his clothes, personal effects and dog, and there wasn’t much left to prove he’d ever lived here. I felt leased.

I drove to the nearest computer store and got a slick new machine set up with a fast modem and plenty of memory to get me into the Net. It was a portable one and quite expensive, about the price of my first new car, a 1975 VW. I paid cash. I considered it a sound investment in reclaiming my life from whoever was trying to take it. I might have bought a powerful automatic handgun too, and learned how to use it, but I already had one and already did.

I really wanted to get to know this I. R. Shroud. Though the other kid-rapers on the Net thought we had dealt with each other before, we hadn’t. I’d know, wouldn’t I? Even during my months of blackout drinking, I’d remember purchasing pornography from one I. R. Shroud. Correct? But somebody on the Web had used my name to get to the Ramblers, and that person had gotten product from Shroud. E-Rection had told me so.

I was walking out of the computer store when an idea hit me. Just one of those little blips of thought that race in from nowhere and slide away forever if you don’t slow them down and make them feel welcome. I wondered if this pretending Mal might have requested images of a certain guy. They’re called customs, where the customer wants his own body in the image. Naturally, the ultimate pornography features yourself. But in this case, Mal had ordered images of someone else — me. Interesting. I locked the new machine in the trunk with a corollary thought: no one except a few of my cohorts at the department knew that I was Mal, or that the name would get him into the Ramblers’ chat room. In fact, I couldn’t think of anyone I worked with outside of CAY who knew my handle. Johnny, Louis and Frances. Oh, and of course, supervising lieutenant Jordan Ishmael.

I got my stitches removed at a walk-in clinic in Laguna — not the one where I took my son, because that one has since gone out of business. Fun. The puncture wounds were ugly and the scars would be small but definite.

Then I stopped by a travel agency and booked a little two-day vacation. I needed it. American Airlines to Dallas/Ft. Worth, Alamo Rental Car. Holiday Inn in Wichita Falls. Just the kind of place where there’s enough to keep you busy, and the rest of the time you can forget the world you left behind, and hope it forgets you.

Wichita Falls is in north central Texas, way up by the Oklahoma border, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from D/FW International Airport. Those are Texas hours, by the way — quite a bit longer than the ones we have in California. The city lies in the Red River Valley, also the name of a tune that is difficult to get out of your head once you hear it. I heard it on the radio. It didn’t matter, because I’ve always liked it. I clipped along in the rental Olds at the speed limit, which — I remember from the stories of friends once stationed out at Sheppard Air Force Base — is strictly enforced.

The land is green in April, and always flat. You can see oil rigs and water towers far out in the distance against the vast sky, and have little idea of how far away they really are. Oil goes boom and bust out there, and right now, it’s mostly bust. There’s some ranching and farming — cattle and cotton. It was a big cattle center for a while. I always thought the Texans were smart to exploit their land for beef and oil, two staples this country will always need.

The locals are quick to point out two things of interest. First is that Larry McMurtry lives near here, and he is just a regular guy. You see him all the time. Second is that Wichita Falls sits in “Tornado Alley,” as mentioned by a convenience store employee, the Holiday Inn desk clerk and a desk officer at the WFPD, who answered my arrival call to his captain. The desk clerk told me the big one of ’64 flattened her parents’ house and threw a heavy steel mascot steer that once adorned a local butcher shop some eight hundred yards into a cotton field. It was found there, upright, the next day. It also blew blades of straw into a soft-drink bottle that her dad discovered, unopened and perfectly intact, after the twister passed. She said she’s seen the bottle and it’s true — he still has it on his fireplace in the new house they built.

Police Captain Sam Welborn had a friendly, green-eyed face with a smile that seemed half for me and half for himself. He seemed amused. He was tall and big boned, with thinning black hair and an air of congeniality. He was the kind of big friendly cop you wouldn’t want to get riled up. He handed me file 199591, then rolled back on his chair and spit a brown tobacco blast into a plastic cup. I could smell the wintergreen.

“She was a real sweet girl, they say. Good student, minded her parents real good. It was a pretty big deal here, when she went missin’.”

I opened the folder. “We’ve got a guy who’s taken three in less than two months. Hasn’t raped them yet. Hasn’t killed them yet. He dresses them up in old clothes, these lacy robes and hoods, then cuts them loose out in the woods. We think he’s escalating.”

“This one here had a thing about clothes. Trying to get young girls to put them on.”

“That’s what got our attention.”

“FBI?”

“Yeah.”

“Those boys can be pushy sometimes, but they’re pretty sharp, too.”

I scanned through the missing persons’ report on Mary Lou Kidder. She left school a little late after talking to a teacher, never came home. A woman who lived on Mary Lou’s route home from school said she saw a white van parked on her street that she hadn’t seen before and never saw again. She didn’t notice who was driving it, and she didn’t see anybody get in or out. Mary Lou Kidder had been gone now for two years, one month and three days. There was a picture of her from school — a round-faced, happy-looking girl with bangs and a bow in her hair.

“We couldn’t connect the clothes guy with Mary Lou,” said the captain. “But we still think he took her.”

“I’d think that, too.”

In line with that assumption, the WFPD had included in Mary Lou’s file the incident reports, witness and subject interviews on the UNSUB Male who’d been trying to outfit school girls in free clothes that weren’t new. The physical description was somewhat similar to our early Horridus: white male, early thirties, medium build, eyeglasses, beard and mustaches. The cops had even put together a composite sketch of the suspect. I took a copy of our first Horridus attempt from my briefcase and compared the two. He looked not unlike Amanda’s version from Steven Wicks, with the facial hair and glasses. The Texas version was fuller in the face, and his hair was longer. The glasses were shaped differently. Both sketches were frustratingly vague. I handed our sketch, and the file, over the desk to Welborn.