Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

I could see the carbon powder on the windowpane and the rectangular shapes where the acetate lifting tape had been applied, then removed.

“The window was crawling,” said Johnny. “Frances is running them through CAL–ID and WIN with all our parameters on The Horridus.”

I looked glumly at the dust and glass, knowing The Horridus was wearing gloves when he came through.

“Gotta try, boss,” he said.

I turned and looked at the closet. It was easy to know where Margo had been standing when she surprised him because the room was small — not much space between the door and the closet. There was a chalk outline on the carpet in the shape of human legs, continuing into the closet, then the outline of a head against the far wall inside. Some of Chloe’s little-girl clothes were piled to either side of the silhouette. Beneath and beside the clothes were Chloe’s shoes. Mixed in with the shoes were those things you might expect in a seven-year-old’s closet that hadn’t been organized lately: dolls and drawing tablets, books and markers, stuffed animals, plastic horses, balls. Obviously, the sliding closet door had been open and Margo had reeled backward with The Horridus on top of her, probably with both hands locked on her throat. I knelt down and looked in.

“What did you take?”

“The pepper spray container, two books for prints — even though it’s a long shot — and a couple of shiny leather shoes that he might have touched. It was hit and miss, boss. There wasn’t anything that looked too good. The CSI’s really combed through for hair and fiber, though. There’s a lot for the lab.”

“No dust. Did you ALS the wall here inside?”

“We did. Nothing.”

“Coins, keys, pens, nail clipper, Chapstick — anything he might have lost from his pockets?”

“Not unless he carries Little Miss Makeup.”

“Loose button, thread?”

“Come on, boss. We’d be all over something like that.”

“Yeah, I know that...”

My voice trailed off, like it was consumed by the closet in which Margo had fought and died.

“The blood and skin’s our payoff,” said Escobedo. “If we get a suspect we can make him all the way.”

I turned and wondered what Chloe was doing while her mother fought for her life in the closet. Escobedo read my thoughts.

“The girl used a little Indian bead belt on him, she said. We’ve got the belt for fiber. She said when the guy was done with her mother, he stood up and she ran for it. Out the door, down the hallway, around the corner and out the door. She said he never touched her.”

“But no description?”

“Black hair, average, average. She only saw him from the back, half covered with the clothes that had fallen down. When he chased her through the house it was dark. She left the lights off as she ran, thinking ahead. Bright little girl. Outside she saw him when he gave up the chase. Dark too — couldn’t see much at all. No help there, boss, except the dye job on his hair. Black, she said. Not dark brown — black.”

“What was he wearing?”

“She was too scared to notice.”

I thought for a moment. “Latex might tear in a struggle.”

“That’s why we dusted the living shit out of this place.”

I knelt again and picked up one of Chloe Gayley’s shoes. It was a white canvas tennis shoe with some purple cartoon characters on it. I lifted it, turned it over and shook it: just a few grains of sand, and that was all. I couldn’t help but wonder at the tragedy of it. Just a day earlier, Margo and Chloe Gayley were a struggling little family unit, trying to pay the bills, get the grades, have some fun, do things right. Nice little apartment. Churchgoers. Good people trying hard to scratch out a life from a marriage that didn’t work. Now, Chloe was without a mother she had seen murdered, Margo was dead forever and their life was destroyed. Would some good come out of it? Maybe someday. But was that good anything like the good that might have come if this had never happened? No. This was just a loss, pure and simple, all caused by a monster’s appetite. An appetite as yet unsatisfied.

“He’ll move again soon,” I said. “He’s moving now.”

“What if he lies low, licks his wounds, figures he’s on a cold streak?”

“Pray for that one, Johnny. Pray for Margo Gayley to stand up and walk again too, while you’re at it.”

I lifted Chloe’s clothes off the closet floor and set them aside. Then I went through every one of her shoes, turning them over or feeling inside.

“Terry, what exactly are you looking for?”

“A miracle.”

There were no miracles in Chloe Gayley’s shoes, except that she would walk in them again. Survival as miracle.

My cell phone rang against my hip. I’d forgotten what a pleasure it was to feel a call coming through and know it was probably from my people at the department. It was Frances, who, alone among my CAY brethren, had neither welcomed me back to the fold nor acknowledged that she had been wrong about me. Frances too, I thought, who had found the pink envelope in Alton “Chet” Sharpe’s den and hand-delivered it to Jim Wade.

It was strange to recall my words to Wade, just an hour earlier, with which I had admitted that Frances, too, was well aware of the Mal handle, and the terrible access that name was granted in certain private chat rooms.

“Terry,” she said in a flat, businesslike voice, “we might have something useful here. We just got a call from an animal control officer up in Orange. Says The Horridus was at the animal shelter about two hours ago. She thought he looked familiar when she talked to him, but couldn’t place the face. Then she drove past the billboard on her way home.”

“Describe.”

“Black hair. Facial hair too — mustaches and those little sharp beards the kids are wearing, a completely revised edition. But she says it was him. She said his breath was bad — and she hadn’t seen Ish say so on TV.”

A current of joy buzzed into my heart. I thought about The Horridus at the animal shelter.

“What’s his name?”

“Warren Witt, a Santa Ana address, deputies on the way.”

I could see it. I could see him. And the logic behind his visit to the animal shelter came clear. “Did he take a puppy?” I asked.

“Yes. For his daughter.”

“He’s using it for bait , Frances.”

“I know he is, Terry. The officer made the van for us, because the guy was so weird — white, late-model Dodge, Cal plates 2JKF869. Plates stolen off an ’89 Toyota three weeks ago in Irvine — a little side street off of Von Karman, a business area.”

“Give me his residence address.”

Frances did.

“We’ll be there in twenty,” I said. “Before you leave, get Amanda Aguilar and the animal control—”

“—I already did. They’re on their way here.”

I was still holding one of Chloe’s shoes in my hand, a little suede hiking boot with a red flannel lining. When I turned it over, nothing whatsoever came out.

We got there in less than twenty minutes, and just as I had suspected, it was not a residence at all. Instead there was a tortilla factory that had been in business, the owner told us, for forty years. No Witt. No Warren. He gave us each a sack of fresh tortillas, the nolard, low-fat kind the gringos like. He was just about to lock the door for the day.

We stood in the twilight outside the shop. You could hear the mariachis a few doors down, and taped music coming from a record shop up the street. Friday night in the barrio: good music, good food, goodwill toward men. It sort of made you want to stay there and forget about the world outside.

“Frances,” I said, “get started on the body shops, will you? Get a couple of the new deputies to help you. Somebody painted that van in the last two weeks and we need to know whose it is.”