Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“I know.”

“You better be goddamned careful what you do.”

I nodded. “Johnny, I got to ask you something.”

“Then ask it, man.”

“What do I do? You were me, what would you do? Can I trust Wade with this?”

He looked at the tabletop for a long moment: yellow Formica with brown flecks and plenty of scratches from the flatware, old circular stains from warming beer glasses stacked up onto each other; cigarette burns; dings.

“I don’t think you can say anything. Until you know for sure, you know it all, and you know you can prove it. Until then, I think it’s your solemn duty to keep your mouth shut. It’s also what’s best for you. What if you’re wrong?”

I nodded and watched the clock hand move for exactly twenty-three seconds.

“Thanks.”

“Can you get him, through the Net?”

“I’m trying. I’d love to lure him out, but he’s real shy.”

“What about the other way?”

“Vinson? You know where he stands on helping us.”

He patted my hand, then gently slapped my face. “Know something, boss?”

“You’ll have to tell me.”

“I don’t ever want to be you. I want to be a regular guy with no big problems, raise a family, do thirty with the Sheriffs and retire up in Havasu. Fish all day, maybe get a boat. Speed over to Laughlin once a week to gamble and drink. Teach a grandson how to play blackjack, kick a football. Doesn’t that sound better than being you?”

“Quite a goddamned bit!”

He slapped my shoulder on his way out.

Vinson Clay is a lean, tanned, curly-haired man, quick to smile, slow to act. He’s like a dam, all roaring activity on one side, while behind him piles up a large tonnage of silent power. He was with the Sheriffs for twenty years, and all that time we wondered if he was slow or just congenial and content When he left us five years ago to attend law school we began to see the arc of his ambition, and when he signed on with PlaNet legal department as corporate security director — for a rumored salary of $200,000 — we sort of gulped and rewrote our opinions of him. At the Sheriffs he’d worked computer crime and PR, so our paths didn’t directly cross all that much. I remembered him as cheerful but kind of remote, too, never the type to fraternize after work or drink with the other deputies. You got his hours and you got his easy good humor, then he was gone, vanished to a home life that no one knew about, and to a career path that no one was aware of. You had to respect him.

It wasn’t easy to get my call through that afternoon. I had to plead with his secretary just to get him on the line, and when I finally did I begged even harder for twenty minutes of his time. I felt like Moe. But it worked.

“I surmise this has to do with you and the charges against you,” he said.

“Vinson,” I said, “it’s got to do with The Horridus.”

“And I’m talking to you as a deputy or a citizen?”

“Just a citizen.”

“Twenty minutes is about all I’ve got, Terry.”

The PlaNet offices were located on a shady Pasadena street, halfway between downtown and the Jet Propulsion Lab. Pasadena is where the money used to live, back when Los Angeles was a young town. The building was on the outskirts of a neighborhood of tree-shaded, million-dollar homes. I was ten minutes early. His secretary escorted me in ten minutes late. Vinson and I shook hands and sat across from each other, with his prodigious curving acrylic desk between us like some kind of crystal clear river.

He was still all smiles, his crooked teeth giving him a hick, friendly look. But Vinson’s suit was of the two-thousand-dollar variety and his nails were either professionally manicured or he spent more time on them than any man I know. I started out by asking how he liked L.A., and he said the best thing was the Dodgers being close by. “I catch all the home games I can,” he said with a smile. “Well, Terry, how are you holding up?”

“I’ve been framed. Framed by someone very good at manipulating images. The FBI has the alleged evidence against me, and I’m certain they’ll find out that it was created.”

His grin was half there now, like something he’d forgotten to close all the way.

“This is the deal, Vinson: I think it was an inside job — inside the Sheriffs, I mean. I’ve been using the Net to talk with the pedophiles and pornographers. That’s my area anyway, and I’ve made good progress. I’ve got the guy who either procured those pictures of me, or maybe even produced them. He goes by I. R. Shroud in the Fawnskin chat room.”

“That’s just a handle, right, not his user name?”

“He wouldn’t be dumb enough to put his user name or his e-mail address out there.”

“So, you’re buying from this guy?”

I nodded.

“You said something about The Horridus.”

“The Horridus is I. R. Shroud. It’s an anagram.”

He ran a hand through his curly golden hair and stared down.

“Is this a joke?”

“Definitely not. The FBI profile says The Horridus will be a networker, a porn collector. Why not a supplier, too? There’s money in it. Thrills.”

“What browser are you using to talk to him?”

I told him.

He nodded and looked down at the paper again. “Is he talking business?”

“Not yet. I hope he will be, and soon.”

“No monitor interruptions from us?”

“Not one. I’ve been lurking these guys for a year and a half, Vinson.”

Monitoring computer conversations, of course, is the way the software industry tries to keep crime off the Web. They always talk a hard game about listening in on transactions, making sure no one is breaking the law. The trouble is, talking about anything is basically legal — short of conspiring to commit a crime — and talking about sex is legal, too. There’s a fine line between talking about sex and conducting business around sex, and the pervs have come up with their own language to sound less suspicious. Guys like Vinson — and me — are always a step behind them. And guys like Vinson don’t want their networks to get reputations as being insecure or risky in any way. They say it’s a matter of First Amendment rights, and it partially is. But the bottom line in business is business, and no Net supplier wants to be known as the one with the big ears. So, tough monitoring is bad for business. Vinson knew this, and so did I.

“Have you completed a business transaction with him, using PlaNet?”

“No.”

“You haven’t exchanged any kind of payment or goods for any product or service, as of this date?”

“Not yet.”

He looked at me now, his smile gone, his suit throwing off a swank reflection of the recessed lights above the desk. “I can shut him down, Terry. I can shut down anybody I want to.”

“That would kill me, Vinson. I need him working. I need him. ”

“Then you’re in a peck of trouble.”

“I know. If you shut him down, I might not ever hear from him again. You have to remember, he’s not just making dirty pictures of guys like me. He’s abducting children and doing things unimaginable to them. Let me give you an example. This hasn’t gone outside my department, Vinson, so it’s just your ears, all right?”

The way to win a confidence is to offer one. So I told him about Mary Lou Kidder in Wichita Falls, Texas, and what The Horridus had done to her. I speculated that before she died, young Mary Lou was probably subjected to a massive sexual assault. I took pains to describe the pile of reptile feces in which I found the skull of a once vibrant, much loved and beautiful little human girl.

“What if Shroud is punning on Horridus? Different guys all along?”

“Shroud called himself that before Horridus was even known. They’re the same man, Vinson. If I doubted that, I wouldn’t be here. I know you’ve got everybody’s constitutional rights to protect here, and I don’t mean to demean that. But you’ve got a monster loose on your Net, and I’m asking you to give him to me.”