Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“Hmm. Eyes look the same. He’s got that... intellectual look. Like a guy who went to college, maybe. But these sketches — seems they’re either right there or way off.”

“I know.”

“I’ll tell ya, we passed that picture out to everybody in town, twice. We had it on the TV and all the papers. We thought we’d probably run him out, then the girl went missing. Man, it was bad. Just breaks your heart when something like that happens on your watch.”

“I know that, too, Captain.”

He studied me with his clear green eyes. I could see the lump of dip stuck up under his cheek, and smell the wintergreen flavoring.

“My personal belief is that he wasn’t from this town,” Welborn said. “Now, I can’t substantiate that with anything concrete, but I believe it. See, we get to know our people here pretty well. We only got about a hundred thousand in Wichita, and we get to know ’em. You got your black element on the other side of Flood Street, then you got your Mexicans mostly grouped up in the north end, around Scotland Park and the river. This fella was Caucasian. Preying on his own type. And that group is pretty well connected up. They recognize each other, mostly. We recognize them. Know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“I think he lived somewhere close by. Not here, though. It’s just a theory.”

I took back the file and scanned through. “If I wanted to check real estate listings for the time period after Mary Lou Kidder disappeared, who would you recommend?”

“Katie Butler, over at Coldwell Banker. Happy to make a call for you. What’s the idea behind that?”

“If you smoked him out of town and he owned a home, he’d sell. The Bureau has a strong hunch that our guy lives in a place that has a detached second unit. If your guy is our guy, maybe he lived in one here, too.”

“Well, the big mansions in Country Club all have servants’ quarters. Rent them out now, mostly.”

“We wouldn’t anticipate him coming from that kind of wealth. We’re thinking middle class. A house with a granny flat or maybe even a detached garage he could convert.”

Welborn’s green eyes settled on me again. “Convert into what?”

“A place to take them. His victims.”

“You got evidence of that?”

“Some.”

“The Feds do up one of those profiles for you?”

“They did.”

He shook his head. “I always thought that was voodoo, myself. But that’s just me. I hope you catch your guy. I hope he’s our guy, too. We can execute him once in each state.”

“If you’d be willing to call Ms. Butler, I’d much appreciate it.”

He set his dip cup on the desk and dialed out. “Katie, this is Sam. How ya doin’ over there, sweetheart?”

Katie Butler was stout and wide faced, with a swirl of red hair done up stiff. She smiled like she’d known me all her life. She welcomed me to Wichita — the locals all seemed to drop the Falls — and said if I ever wanted to move here, it was a buyers’ market, great deals all over, get three times the house I could have in California, for less money.

“A course, we’ve got our tornadoes here,” she said. “You just have to include acts of God as part of life. But you got your quakes and all, so you know what natural disaster is like. They’re usually not so bad as everybody likes to make out.”

“Most of our earthquakes aren’t so bad, either. You don’t even know they’re happening.”

“Well, we do get champion-sized twisters here, I’ll tell you. In ’72 the steer blew off the butcher and landed in Archer County, standing up in a pasture like the real cows. That’s a five-hundred-pound, decorative steel steer. Funny things like that happen all the time.”

She set me up with the multiple listings for March through June of two years back. My window was kind of big, but that might make it easier to crawl through. She led me to a private little room and brought me a big cup of coffee.

“Sam says you’re looking into the Mary Lou thing?”

“That’s right.”

“My niece went to school with her. They were friends. She was a cute little girl. I remember her smile, because it was so happy looking, and funny, too, because her two front teeth fell out and left a gap. She was a real doll, a real angel.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything. Her warm blue eyes were gray now, and I could not mistake the ferocity in them.

“Think she’s alive?” she asked.

“I really can’t say, Ms. Butler.”

Her face turned accusing, then askance, then judgmental, then resigned. And, finally, for reasons I would never know, forgiving. “Ya’ll let me know what else I can get you. ’Kay?”

An hour later I’d found all the listings for homes with detached units. Four were in a moderate price range, and three of them were sold by men. None of their names matched the sellers in Orange County, the ones that Johnny was just about finished checking out. I got that funny, embarrassing feeling in my guts that told me I’d been following a trail that was about to disappear into nothing.

Katie Butler read each one that I’d marked.

“Now, I knew this fella — Al Jeeter — and he sold because he wanted to move back to Virginia, where he grew up.”

“How old was he?”

“Oh my... late sixties, I’d say.”

“What about the next one?”

“Lindy Dillard? Don’t know him, but I do know we sold the house. I can get the paperwork if you want. Sometimes, escrow documents have the age of the seller and buyer. Here, let me just get them all for you.”

“Forget Wanda Grantley,” I said.

“Pretty easy to do,” said Katie.

“Why’s that?”

“Not my kind of people, those two. Be right back.”

I waited in the lobby while she went through her files. I could see her hard red hair past the counter when she knelt at a file cabinet. I drank another cup of coffee and thought about Donna and how surprised she was that I was leaving. She was suspicious, but she held her questions. I thought of Melinda and Penny. I thought of the pictures that Wade had of me, and the trail that led to I. R. Shroud. I thought of the ranger, Stefanic, and wondered if our boy had been there. I thought of The Horridus, waiting, watching, planning. Would Johnny work the dating services again, try to find a common point? Or would he let Ishmael run the show now, forget about me and my big ideas? I sighed. Here I was, a million miles away, working a case that was no longer mine, escaping one miserable swamp of problems for another. I suddenly felt tired and stupid, tracking down obscure leads for a department that didn’t want me around in the first place.

“Okay,” said Katie, sitting on a chair beside me. “Jeeter was sixty-eight, about like I guessed. Lindy Dillard was fifty-two. If I remember right, it was a relocation for him. I’m really not sure. This last one, Bevaro, the escrow papers say he was forty-six.”

I wrote down the ages of each seller in my notepad, as my mind drifted off to other times and places: my honeymoon with Ardith on Grand Cayman; Matthew and me chasing blue lizards over white dunes on vacation in New Mexico — don’t worry, Ardith, the sun isn’t going to kill him; Donna Mason astride me just one morning ago and her faintly southern voice filling that little dawn-filled apartment with something I hope is love. It’s amazing how a man — no matter what he’s done — still wants love, and can convince himself that he deserves it.

Nice as Katie Butler was, nice as Sam Welborn and the rest of Wichita Falls seemed to be, I wanted out of there. I wanted to be back home where I could scream.

“Forget Wanda, then?” Katie asked.

“Umm?”

“Wanda Grantley, the other seller. That listing was out in Hopkin, anyway. Two towns over. Widow. Says here late fifties, but she looked eighty.”