Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (16 page)

Johnny found plenty of prints from Brittany’s room, but most of them were small, and the others came from places her mother would likely have touched. He lifted a partial from the aluminum window frame and another from one corner of the window glass. The screen yielded nothing. He rolled the shed skin lengthwise in newspaper, hoping that the ALS or bench laser in the Crime Lab might illuminate a latent print.

“He’s slick as shit,” Johnny said to me quietly, glancing toward the hallway. “I’ll glass this whole room and where he was standing outside. I’ll get down on my hands and knees. I’ll pick up every bit of sand, hair or fiber I can find outside this window and let Reilly figure out where it came from. But you know what, man? He’s careful, he knows what he’s doing and he’s not giving us one goddamned thing.”

“He’ll make a mistake.”

He sighed and looked at the hole cut out of the glass. I pictured a snake crawling through that hole. “That’s what I want. I want to find a guy who’s got that piece of glass stashed in his van. Or his garage. Or his guest house. He’s not that careless, though. He’ll take it into a parking lot, step on it and kick the pieces everywhere. And even Johnny Escobedo won’t be able to put them together again.”

“Work it, Johnny. That’s all you can do.”

“We got to do something more, man. We can’t just wait on him. I’m sitting here playing with fingerprint tape and he’s got her out in the woods somewhere. Is that woman in there ever going to see her girl alive again?”

I knew he was right. The Horridus had waited twenty-six days between Pamela and Courtney. Now he was down to fifteen.

“There’s a miracle in here, Johnny. Somewhere. Find it.”

Johnny ran his hand past his widow’s peak and through his thick black hair. “We got to make a miracle of our own, man. He’s not going to do it for us.”

I called Louis and told him to drop the vintage clothing stores for now and triple up with me and Frances on the homes-for-sale listings. We were down to ten sellers who might be our man.

“Ish told me Frances isn’t coming in today.”

“Why not?”

“Still upset about yesterday, I guess.”

“We’re all upset, goddamnit.”

“Yeah, but no telling what kind of pictures she found in Chet’s
den.
”

“Then it’s just you and me on the listings, Louis.”

I read off the next five names and agents to him, complete with phone numbers and the real estate office addresses.

“Double time, Louis. This guy’s brave and getting braver.”

Before ringing off I got Jennifer Clark’s and Bridget Simenon’s numbers from Louis. I had to wonder if either of them might have been looking for “bright tomorrows.” Who wasn’t?

I called Melinda. She answered in her investigator’s voice.

“It’s just me,” I said. “He took another one.”

“I heard. How old?”

“Five. He left a snakeskin in her bed. I … I just called to say things are going to be okay. They have to be okay.”

“What things? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

She was silent for a moment. “Well, Terry,” she said. “When you do, you can fill me in.”

“I just … Penny get off to school okay?”

“Of course she did. Why?”

“All right, Mel. Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Last night was really good.”

“Yes. It was.”

I hung up and called Donna. Her secretary knows me only as Skip, and to always put me through. She did.

“I wanted to hear your voice,” I said.

“And I yours. You don’t sound too good.”

“He took another one. A five-year-old.”

Donna’s intake of breath caught in her throat. For a woman who made her living on mostly bad news, Donna Mason could also choke—almost literally—at times of great emotion.

“I’m with you,” she said.

“I wish you were. I’ve got these bad feelings all around and I’m trying not to let them get in.”

“Where are you?”

I told her.

H
e hefted Item #3 over his shoulder and backed out of the side door of the van. The automatic opener had already shut the door behind him and the garage was lit only by a bare bulb, but it was enough to see by. The blinds on the window were down. He steadied his load as he straightened and walked toward the door to the guest house. The Item kicked and made noises, but its mouth and hands and ankles were taped and it was in the thick duffel and couldn’t move very well. When he was inside the bedroom he set it on the bed and opened the top of the bag wide.

He tried not to look directly at its face while he tied the little black velvet hood over its head. He’d made the hood himself, with small holes at the bottom so they could breathe but couldn’t see. During the brief time it took to fit the hood over its head he got a brief look at it—a lot like the mother—slender and pretty. But dark hair. Its eyes were brown, and wide with unutterable terror. The tape around its head was still tight over its mouth. With its eyes bugging out like this it looked like a rat being constricted by a snake, like his mother had looked when Moloch was wrapped around her. He snugged the drawstrings firmly and knotted them. Then he dug the Hiker’s Headlight out of the duffel, where he’d put it after stripping it off his head once he was back inside the van.

He didn’t worry that it would be able to describe him later because he was hidden behind the oversized, wraparound angler’s sunglasses—polarized to cut glare and reveal trout underwater—the baseball cap pulled down right on top of the frames and the bandanna over his nose and mouth like a bandit. His breath smelled extra terrible, trapped up close to his nose like this. When he had the hood secured over Item #3 he stripped off the hat and shades, pulled the bandanna down around his neck and dropped some cinnamon breath drops onto his tongue.

Stop crying and don’t worry,
he said amiably, screwing the top back onto the little bottle. Fresh.
You’re going to be just fine.

He set up the three tall tripods and affixed his cameras to them—one video and two digital stills. He used a stool to get them aimed down at the bed where Item #3 lay and get the still cameras focused right. Then he climbed down and took the extra long remote exposure cables and set them on the floor just under the bed where he could reach them easily.

Brittany lay on her side, breathing fast, her heart pounding. She felt her ankles wrapped tight together and her arms tied behind her back. Not being able to move was the worst feeling in the world. Her nightie was all twisted up and half choking her. She had thought just minutes ago, when she was inside the heavy bag, that she might faint from the lack of air. She just couldn’t draw enough in with her mouth taped shut and the bag all around her. And she could hardly move. They were in a white van then, she knew that. He hadn’t put her in the bag until they were inside and the door was shut.

Now she was on a bed and there was some kind of opening near her nose and she was getting deep breams that didn’t smell like canvas tennis shoes. Instead, she smelled someone else’s smells, like when she stayed at her grandmother’s house. These odors were kind of similar—bed smells, blanket smells—sweet and personal. Then they would go away and she would smell something sticky and industrial that she understood was the tape beneath her nose.

The hood he had just put over her was already damp on the side from her tears. She had only gotten that one quick look at him in the sudden light. Sunglasses. Cap. And a scarf around his face. He could be anybody, but she named him Dead Gopher Man because his breath was awful. She’d first noticed it when he carried her from her room to the front door of her house, the way he held her head right under his chin. At first she thought he was Daddy, but she realized quick he wasn’t. Daddy wasn’t that rough, that much in a hurry, and his breath didn’t smell like the dead gopher they’d found in the corner of the playground at school. Daddy wouldn’t wake her from sleep by wrapping a piece of tape around her face. Daddy didn’t have one giant bright eye shining at her from his forehead.

She opened her eyes inside the hood but saw only darkness. She closed them and the darkness got darker. She could hear him across the room, talking quietly to someone.

Like it? I thought you would. See, I can get them to like me any time I want. They see me like Collie and Valee saw me. Like you never did. Oh, fuck you, bitch, and stay where you belong.

Brittany decided again that this was just a bad dream. And, like any other bad dream, she could get out of it by shaking her head real fast, squishing her eyes shut real hard and screaming real loud. And when you screamed you shook your whole body as hard as you could and that’s how you broke out of a bad dream. When you opened your eyes again, you were out of it. It worked. It worked when Finger Man was chasing her and she couldn’t run. It worked when Slow Man came up at her from under the bed. It worked when she was falling. She called it Dream Busting. You just closed your eyes and shook hard, and when you opened your eyes again you had busted out.

She took a deep breath through her nose.

She closed her eyes as hard as she could.

She screamed against the tape, but the scream stayed inside her throat and sounded against the inside of her ears.

She shook her whole body as hard as she could.

She shook it some more.

What are you doing, you little idiot?

She shook it even more than that.

It’s having a fit. What shall we do about that, Mom?

His
mom
is here?

Brittany gave her body one last supreme shake—head to toe and everything in between. Then she opened her eyes.

She saw only the darkness and felt the stifling closeness of the hood.

Her sobs pulsed down in her neck and she could hear them with the inside of her ears instead of the outside. She could feel the wet part of the hood higher on her cheek now because it had moved when she shook. The open spot that let in the air was still down by her nose, but she could see a little light now. She could feel the new tears running down toward the tape. When she cranked her eyeballs all the way down she could see through a real small slit in the open part: a red bedspread.

Don’t go full convulsive. Everything’s cool. Just lie there and get used to your habitat.

His voice was kind of high, like it was coming through his nose. It was a dull voice. It sounded like he was talking to someone he didn’t believe was there, or maybe talking in a dream.

Better now?

She lay still and listened to the hiss of breath coming in and out of her nose. She strained her eyeballs down and saw the sliver of red bedspread. She smelled the bed she was lying on—someone else’s, an old person’s bed—and she closed her eyes again.

Somehow, Brittany thought, if you saved up and concentrated real hard and did it just right, the Dream Busting might work—
even if you weren’t dreaming.
You could just burst your way out of one place and into another. I’m going to do that, soon as I stop crying. Soon as I stop crying. Soon as I stop crying.

He opened a can of ravioli, dumped it into a pan and turned the gas up high. He filled a tumbler with ice and poured it three-quarters full of tequila, the rest with water. Predation made him hungry and thirsty. He was in the little guest house kitchen, but he could look through the doorway to the cage room and see the bed and Item #3 upon it and the tripods with his gear attached, aimed down. It was a feisty one. The way it would shake and try to scream, then stop and lie still, as if it were trying to break out of a nightmare. Maybe it was, he thought. He thought about what he might describe to the Midnight Ramblers in the chat room. You had to be careful, but you also wanted to let them know what a good thing you’d had.

When the ravioli was hot he got a spoon and picked up the pan by the handle and went back into the living room with it. He brought the highball, too. He sat in the overstuffed chair—the old floral thing with his mother’s matching arm protectors still on it—and looked at Item #3 on the bed, then past the bed to Mike’s huge glass tank.

He admired the tank and its construction. Twenty-seven feet long, seven high and seven deep. It intruded well into the room. Hypok could walk around in it, no problem, so long as he stayed alert. Full-spectrum light and heat lamps ran behind the bars on top, and underneath the gravel stratum on the cage floor were electric heat elements. The left one-third of it was a deep pool with a running waterfall. In the middle was a pile of big flat rocks overhung by the trunk and branches of a big orange tree he’d trimmed to fit. The right section of the cage was taken up by a child’s playhouse. Hypok sometimes thought of the tank as a separate world, with its own air, light and water, its own shelter—all created by him.

The playhouse looked something like a Victorian dollhouse, with a gabled roof and shingles and even a spire. It was a remarkably sturdy little house, strong enough for kids to climb in and out of the door and windows. It was purchased for Hypok’s sisters when he was five, and they had loved the thing. His mother had forced him to play with them in it—not as “Father,” which he’d wanted to be, or even “Brother,” but “Baby” or “Jeannie” like the girl’s name, or sometimes “Little Sister #3.” It had stayed behind when his sisters outgrew it, and Hypok had brought it here—to stately old-town Tustin—when he moved himself and his mother into more appropriate quarters.

Moloch was piled high inside the playhouse, with his head—about the length and width of a phone book—poking out near the top of the door. Moloch got curious when Hypok was in the room because it usually meant food. You wouldn’t really see him move inside the house, unless you were watching hard. That’s the way it was with big snakes—they didn’t locomote so much as simply adjust One second you’d look through the playhouse door and see two huge inert green coils lying atop each other, still as mossy logs, then the next time you looked his head would be there and he’d be eyeing you. Like now. Hypok could see his big silver eye with the black vertical slash of a pupil through it, and the heavy black tongue going patiently in and out of his closed mouth. Moloch—
Eunectes murinus
—his beloved anaconda from Paraguay, was close to thirty feet long now, and Hypok guessed his weight at a rather obese five hundred pounds. Realistically, though, how do you weigh such a thing?

Item #3 burst into another fit on the bed but Hypok ignored it. Was it epileptic? Whatever. He drank down the tequila—still warm—then went back to the kitchen for another couple of inches and some fresh ice.

When he came back to his chair he was reflecting upon, for the thousandth time, what a miracle it was that the snake was even alive. Yes, his own mother had tried to kill it when it was just a newborn, hardly twenty-four inches long, by spraying it every morning with bug killer. He was eleven when he bought the reptile, from a friend. He had long been sleeping in the “den” of the house, a miserable, windowless little room that Wanda locked him in during the night. This, due to some curious explorations on the part of Collette and Valeen, starting when he was four. The snake’s cage was in his “room,” and his mother would slide the outside deadbolt early, come in, check to see if Genie—her nickname for Gene—was asleep. And if she was convinced he was—he was great at faking it and lifting one eyelid from the depths of his pillow—she’d produce from the big pocket of her housecoat a red can of roach killer, slide open the cage top and shoot the poor thing right in the face with it. This went on for almost a week, until Hypok had gotten a small padlock and hidden the key. Moloch—he was named Mike, back then—had quit eating, lost his skin in little patches and generally grown depressed. Hypok’s own skin had started turning bad about that time, and he attributed both of their sufferings to the roach spray, but he was more worried about the snake than about himself. He thought the little anaconda would die. But slowly Mike got strong again, then he started growing extra fast. Hypok believed then, and still did now, that the roach killer had actually boosted Mike’s growth rate. A short two years later he was four feet long and taking large rats. Now he was high twenties, at least! The Brooklyn Zoo had just acquired a reticulated python that measured twenty-
three
, and that had made the news. So much for Mom and her stupid fucking hateful ideas on things. Even twenty-two years ago, as Hypok faked sleep and watched his tiny, wretched, perpetually drunken mother spray his snake, he had imagined how great it would be if Mike could just get big enough to eat her someday. Any woman who tried to turn her boy into a girl, then treated him like a criminal when it didn’t work, deserved what she got, in Hypok’s opinion. And the more he thought about it, the angrier he got.