Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“Goddamned Witt, probably,” she said. “And every one of them will be closed by now on Friday. He’s driving around out there, Terry. He’s got that damned little dog and he’s going to get a girl with it.”

“Try anyway. While you’re at it, we’ll plaster this bastard’s new face all over Christendom.”

“That’ll take time.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Terry, I just wanted to say how glad I am to have been wrong about you. I... wasn’t sure what to do with what I found. I’m glad to have you back and I’m glad to call you boss. I don’t know what happened, but I... I hope we can find out. I know the last few weeks must have been hell for you.”

High as I was on the adrenaline of closing in on The Horridus, my heart still warmed at Frances’s words. I had always liked her and thought her judgment sound, and the fact that she had so quickly taken sides against me was not the least of the thousand arrows I had felt.

I nodded and gently touched her arm. She pulled it away and hugged me.

“It means a lot,” I said.

“I’ll help you get to the bottom of it,” she said. “That’s the least I can do.”

Johnny drove. And I called Donna Mason at CNB, then all three networks. Then I called two local L.A. stations, and both the big papers in Orange County. I told them all we’d have a new face for them in about an hour.

I’ve never seen a group of men and women work as hard and as fast as we did for that next hour. Joe Reilly and his lab techs were still there, three of them working the hair and fiber for matches with evidence from the three earlier abductions; two were lasering the objects collected from Chloe’s closet for prints; one still making the Hae HI enzyme cuts on the flesh and blood DNA from under Margo’s nails; while Reilly himself was hybridizing the first of the high-weight nucleotides, which he’d cut and blotted earlier in the day. Joe looked at me briefly as I passed through, his thin black hair flying like a man in a wind. We had yet to broach the topic of Joe being on a witness list against me in a case that was dropped. I wondered if we ever would, and what good it would do.

“Get me a body, Naughton. We’re solid state at this end.”

“Coming up, Joe. What about the latent on the snake scale and prints from Gayley’s—”

“—We’ve got a match. We know it’s The Horridus. Now do your job and bring him in.”

In the task force room — it was christened Room Horrible — we had a deputy on each of the three 800 lines; Louis double-checking the statement from the neighbors to whom Chloe had fled; Frances briefing Amanda Aguilar and the animal control officer before they were sequestered in a conference room to do the sketch; one FBI volunteer on a CAY computer lurking the chat rooms for any gossip about I. R. Shroud; the other Fed in conference with an L.A. Sheriff sergeant who was part of the joint-agency SAFE group working child sex out of the Federal Building in L.A.; three deputies collecting paint-and-body-shop numbers from a stack of phone books a yard high; Rick Zant from the DA’s office trying to convince the corporate lawyers for Bright Tomorrows that a release of their employee and subcontractor list might save a life; Woolton on the phone to half the police departments in the county; Burns on the line to the other half; two young deputies trying their best to track property ownership, DMV records and credit information on the ten remaining Eugene Webbs and the eight remaining Eugene Websters in three huge Southern California counties; a young deputy checking out-of-state phone companies for one Collette Loach; and Jordan Ishmael hovering over the room like some kind of mute god, seeing all and saying nothing.

And that was just in Room Horrible. We had twelve more deputies in the field, assigned specific tasks: two who were reinterviewing fabric store and pet shop employees, in case The Horridus had made another purchase in the last week; another pair dispatched to the home of the regional manager of the county’s largest auto paint chain, which, we had learned, kept computerized records of work they had done; one deputy assigned to each of the three release sites The Horridus had used; one staked out at each of the residences he’d already hit, to make sure he didn’t try to take a good thing twice. We even had a team following my footsteps at the behest of I. R. Shroud, moving from Moulton Creek to Main Beach to the Norwalk Green Line station in hope — slim at best — of encountering one of The Horridus’s allies. Besides those, there were ten units cruising the obvious places where The Horridus might hunt that night — amusement parks, malls, theaters showing kids’ movies, entertainment complexes — and two helicopter teams shadowing them from above, strafing the same haunts with searchlights and glassing the world below for a white van. We’d already pulled over nine vehicles by then, with another few thousand to go.

Jordan Ishmael stood in the conference room. We were both getting ready for the press. He was checking the mike at the podium when I walked in. We looked at each other across the empty chairs.

“Congratulations, Naughton. You beat the rap.”

“Thanks.”

He turned the mike on and spoke into it, his voice amplified into the room: “YOU’VE MESSED UP A LOT OF LIVES, FRIEND. YOU DESERVED WHAT HAPPENED, WHETHER YOU DID THOSE GIRLS OR NOT.”

“It was a nice try, Ishmael. But you left a big fat trail, and I’m not the only one on it. See, the way it works when you mess with me is you get messed with back.”

“NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.”

“Next time you invite yourself over to my apartment, make sure I’m home.”

“WHY WOULD I WANT TO DO THAT?”

“So I can kick your ass back out the door.”

“NOT LIKELY, LITTLE FELLA.”

“Going to be a long ride down, Ish. Bring Drama-mine. I’ve got you.”

“WHAT YOU’VE GOT IS MAGGOTS IN YOUR SOUL. I CAN SMELL THEM FROM HERE. ONE GOOD THING ABOUT MEL AND PENNY LEAVING IS THEY WON’T HAVE TO SMELL THEM ANYMORE.”

“I think the volume’s about right.”

I heard the mike click off and looked at Ishmael studying me from behind the podium.

“I. R. Shroud spells Horridus, Ish. How could you be so goddamned thick you didn’t see that?”

“Why would I?”

“Because you talked to him thirty times the last two months, while he was out there taking girls. That’s why.”

“You’re one mixed-up little leprechaun, Naughton. Donna suck all your brains out, too?”

“I’m saving you for another day, Ish. It’s going to be a good one for me. Count on it.”

I heard the door open behind me and Frances stood there with a sheet of flimsy fax paper in her hand. On top was a shot of the rear end of a white van. The bottom shot was from the side, and showed a blur of a driver, a dark-haired male with facial hair was about all you could say for sure.

“Motion-activated cameras shoot toll lane violators and they get tickets in the mail,” she said. “They got this at 2:19 this morning. White Dodge, plates 2JKF869, eastbound on the 91 toward Yorba Linda. One of the FasTrak people saw our press conference, knew about the van, thought we might use this. It’s our van.”

“Can Reilly’s people enhance the driver?”

“The prints are being messengered over right now.”

“Talk to Joe. Tell him what’s coming in and we need a rush on it. If we can get an enhancement for Aguilar and the girl to work from, it might make things a whole lot more convincing.”

“Can do.”

In the doorway I literally ran into Rick Zant.

“I finally got the Bright Tomorrows attorney to come around,” he said. “They ID’d him from the press conference composite. He was there, shooting video for members. David Lumsden — home address in Capistrano. Dawn Christie was kind enough to follow suit if we’d offer a specific name. Bingo — he shot videos for them, too. Same name and address. Woolton has four men out of the Capo substation on the house.”