Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (23 page)

“Well, not around here there aren’t, Johnny.”

“That’s what I mean. The only poisonous ones found here in the wild are the rattlers. But what if it’s a cobra, or a water moccasin or something?”

I was silent for a moment, as I tried to imagine The Horridus out in the far reaches of a wilderness. It fit. He let his victims go in places like that. In fact, he’d let Courtney go in the Caspers Wilderness Park. He liked the outdoors. It made sense, but not a lot.

“Where were the bites?”

“Buttocks, leg, face.”

“Bitten while he was alive.”

“Correct. And the ME said he was bitten just before he died. The venom hadn’t been assimilated very far into the tissue. He died not long after the bites.”

I just couldn’t put it together. “So this inquiring ranger tries to cite a guy for something, gets his throat cut, then falls down and a rattlesnake that just happens to be in the grass bites him once on the ass, once on the leg, then finished with a bite to his face? Johnny, there’s a whole lot of something wrong with that picture.”

“I know. Let me ask you something, Terry. If we strike out on the male sellers, why try the women?”

“Mother. Wife, girlfriend, sister.”

“That’s out of profile, isn’t it?”

“You know me, Johnny—I throw the net wide as I can.”

Another silence while Johnny vetted my methods. I’ve long been known at the department as the guy who goes the extra mile when he doesn’t have to. Maybe checking the women was just a waste of time. Apparently, Johnny Escobedo thought so.

“Hey, I should go.”

“Johnny, one more thing. I got this fax from Strickley at the Bureau. He found a weird thread that leads back to Texas. I think it’s worth—”

“—I already laid it on Ish. No dice.”

“
Ishmael?
”

“He’s acting head of CAY.”

“Ah, holy shit—”

“—And he said we’re better off looking here than looking in Texas, considering we don’t work in Texas. I’m trying to get them to send us a file. Slow going—the whole thing’s cool by now.”

My balls frosted with the news of Ishmael as acting head of my unit. It was all I could do to keep my mind halfway on track. “It’s worth it for one of us—one of you—to spend a couple of days back there. Who’d you talk to? Welborn?”

“Yeah. He’s … hey, Frank, I gotta go.”

“Listen, Johnny, there’s one more thing. I know I keep saying that. But we got to try the two dating services again.”

“None of the names matched.”

“But those were members. What about employees, service people who have both accounts, subcontractors and vendors?”

There was a pause. “That’s right, uh, Frank. I hadn’t thought of that. All right, man. Over and out.”

“Check the women sellers if the men—”

Click.

I got the fax and walked down to the beach. I sat on a green bench. The bench had a plaque on it, dedicated to Edward Kilfoy—1967–73. Six years old. What happened to him? I watched the people walk by. Some kids chased the retreating remnants of a wave,, stopped with their skinny legs bent, then screamed and ran back in ahead of the next one. Good, cold, April, Pacific Ocean brine, I thought. I opened the folded fax. There he was: short hair cut in a flattop, swept back, and a tight, narrow face. High cheekbones and a small mouth. Sleepy eyes, brown, according to the description. Medium everything. A sport coat, collared shirt, tan trousers. No glasses. I thought of Brittany telling me how bad his breath was. Should we have put that in the description? I recalled Steven Wicks’s version. They weren’t really close. Similarities, yes, but only general ones. What I wouldn’t give for a picture of him as good as the ones they had of me, to turn into billboards for freeways all over the county. I wondered if this rendition would be good enough to get results. I had to think not. But it was another piece, another tool.

I drove out Laguna Canyon Road to my street—former street—and passed it. What a sad-strange feeling, to pass a place that used to have your home on it. I U-turned, headed back, U-turned again and made a right onto Canyon Edge.

There was no reason for the house to look different than it had less than a day earlier, but it did. The pepper tree outside was bigger, lazier, sadder. The little house seemed to have missed me. I pulled into the driveway and sat there for a while. Moe
had
missed me, and I saw the proof. He stood on his hind legs with his paws up on the fence, barking and wagging his tail. I rolled down the window. The pepper tree dropped a cluster of dried-out pinkish balls to the hood. The cluster skidded across the paint in the breeze. How on earth, I thought, have you managed to mess everything up so bad? Mel would be at work; Penny at school. I doubted she’d changed the locks this fast. After taking a deep breath I swung open the car door and got out. Moe mugged me inside the gate and I got down on my knees and grabbed the thick fur and skin around his neck. He plopped over and I scratched his yellow soft belly. I knelt there for a moment, petting my dog, trying to look integral. No one would know I wasn’t. Right?

But my heart was thumping as I tried my key. It worked. I let myself in as I’d done a thousand times before, and closed the door behind me. My heart was still pounding. The smell of the place got me: the old wood and varnish of the floors, the faint aroma of food cooked recently, the fresh femininity of Melinda and Penny, all hovering nicely above the scent of Moe’s dogness.

So, having burgled my way onto private property, I went to Melinda’s study. Moe clicked along beside me. I caught Melinda’s smell in here too, but stronger. I tried to ignore it. The drapes were pulled shut and the room was cool. I turned on her computer and booted it up. It’s a fast, strong machine, supplied by the department for Melinda’s Fraud and Computer Crime work at home. I got onto the Web and got myself to a site I’d been to many times before.

http:\\www.fawnskin.com

After the usual delays and waiting, I got myself to the Web site.
Fawnskin.
Interesting word, isn’t it? For one, it’s the name of a mountain community in Southern California. You think of snow and slopes and cabins. Beyond that, it suggests something sensually engaging, something tactile and pleasant. It suggests youth and the touching of youth. After a few hours on the sex net—and I had spent many there as part of my job—you start to learn the vernacular. The home page was boring enough, with a slow graphic of a snowy mountain with a ski run going up the side, and big letters at the top, announcing
LOCAL SNOW!
Below the title was the home page synopsis for the site:

http:\\www.fawnskin.com—Nothing beats the local mountains for quick and fun skiing, camping, fishing and hiking. Find your trail through us.

I scrolled forward to the list of realtors who handled rentals. Fine. The site had that dull, legitimate face of business. But to me it felt like the jacket for something else entirely, which is how the illegal networkers hide their faces from innocent browsers. The last realtor listed had a different Web site, so I clicked there and waited. It isn’t a realtor’s home page at all—it’s a coded chat room schedule for men whose sexual preference is for children. A chat “room” is comprised of Internet Relay Chat, IRC for short. Providers sell access to private and public IRC as part of their service—anybody can use a room, as long as they can find it. At any rate, I was looking for some men who call themselves the Midnight Ramblers. I know the individual who updates this changing chat room schedule, and he knows me. He was in federal lockup between 1986 and 1989 for distributing child pornography across state lines. I was the one who busted him, long before our CAY unit was established. I allow him to operate here because his roving band of Web perverts are open to my lurking, so long as I don’t shut them down. They don’t know that Mal—my Web name—is Terry Naughton, the same way that I’m not supposed to know who they really are. Some I do; most I don’t. I knew the chat room site, and I was pretty certain the pervs would be talking. But I checked the schedule to make sure. It was just a matter of reading the
Farmer’s Almanac
quote at the end of the page. It was always followed by a series of random-looking numbers that appear to be a mistake or a code in the posting. They just run them together for the next date and times, backward.

005100313050005100212050

May 2, noon to 3
P.M.
, and May 3, 1
A.M.
to 3
A.M.

Easy. From years of experience I knew that noon was one of their usual times to yak it up through IRC. The Midnight Ramblers were currently in session.

I wound my way through the search engine and found the private room. The name Mal was my admission.

Mal: contented with day-to-day. Seeks counsel of like brethren in soul chit-chat and bets on the come line . .
.
seeks info only sexperts might possess.

This is sex-net talk. You learn it after a few hours on the computer, networking with sick fucks who don’t have a whole lot better to do, apparently. Sex talk is legal. Even sex talk between pedophiles is legal, to a point. But it’s esoteric, cryptic and circuitous. It’s exclusive. And I was lucky right then, because at least one other twisted soul out there in our strange huge world was lurking the chat room:

Lancer: I remember you, Mal-content, Mal-adjusted, Mal-ady.

There it was. Right off the bat I was remembered. Nice. I hadn’t been on-line with the Ramblers for three or four months.

Mal: Nice to be back. I’m searching.

Lancer: Praytell for what, Mal-approp?

Mal: Image is everything.

O-Ring: Amen to that. Praise the lewd. New or used?

Mal: Newly minted.

Lancer: Semen-proof and very pricey.

O-Ring: See I. R. Shroud.

E-Rection: Go see Shroud! He’s your mail-man, male-man—delivers the goods. Why not go again?

I sat there for a moment in Melinda’s study, surprised by E-Rection’s assumption that I had already dealt with one I. R. Shroud, the man who “delivers the goods.”

My scalp tightened and my hands felt cold. I had
not
dealt with I. R. Shroud. So someone else had used my name—Mal—on the kid porn web.

I couldn’t wait too long, or my embarrassment might be inferred.

Mal: I’m fully intending to, but can’t find my old friend. Have you seen him? Did he take an extended Thai holiday?

The Thai holiday, of course, refers to the places in Thailand where children can be bought for sex. It’s every perv’s dream to stay at Pattaya—the country’s leading sex resort—and have intercourse with children to their heart’s content.

O-Ring: Shroud comes and Shroud goes. There’s other ways to acquire pix of qualitee-hee-hee.

E-Rection: I. R. is still the best. Cream of the cream.

Lancer: Mal-odorous, were you happy with what you acquired from the Shroud-man?

Careful, I thought: you can miss a beat here, and the chat room will empty like a theater on fire. What I needed was the approved way to contact Shroud—more than likely his e-mail box—but I couldn’t just ask without blowing the whole ruse. I had to stay cool, state my interest and get off the lot, like working a car salesman for a better deal.

Mal: I just need more, more, more.

Lancer: Don’t we all?

O-Ring: Why not post your treasures?

E-Rection: Share and share alike.

Mal: I intend to. There will be a time for that.

Lancer: Once you squee-gee them off, Mal-e-dick-shun.

Mal: I may require I. R. again.

O-Ring: I’m sure you will.

Mal: See you next time through Fawnskin.

E-Rection: Bugger off!

Good enough—O-Ring would pass the word. They were gone and I was alone again in Melinda’s study. It’s such a strange thing to slide into the Web like that, connect down to the underbelly. It feels like you’re geezing into a vein of pure wickedness. And it’s always there, always around and always invisible. It’s like a stream made out of nothing but vapors, evil and endless, and it runs through everything.

The guys were probably happy to have Mal back, another p-phile out there, another pedofreak, a man like themselves, a guy who considers himself a gourmet, an artist, an aesthetician of the world’s daintiest delicacies. They love to riddle and pun. They love anagrams, symbols, innuendo, code. What the hell kind of name is I. R. Shroud, anyway, besides fabricated? IRS? Internal Revenue Cover? I Am Death? It goes on and on. They love word games that make them look bright. They’ll tell you the art and practice of “loving children” goes back to ancient Greece, or the Romans, or to the Egyptians or the Bible. They’ve even got an organization—the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which has a newsletter and a lobby in Washington. Really, that’s no lie. Everything they do—from the children to the verbiage to the little games—is a way of trying to mask their inadequacies. And they’re about as inadequate as men can get. That’s why they’re despised, even in prison—the cons will turn them into bleeding punchcards in no time at all. The cons hate child molesters even more than they hate cops. A child-molester cop? He wouldn’t last long in the big house. I didn’t want to try, though the idea crossed my mind that I might have to.