Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (43 page)

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.”

“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.”

“There won’t be a house.”

The old fury surged through me as I stood there, realizing that cracking an alias hadn’t helped us much at all. He was still out there—The Horridus, I. R. Shroud, Gene Vonn, David Lumsden, Warren Witt, David Webb, John Q. Public, what did it goddamned matter—and we were still in here, waiting for
him
to make the next move. I felt like a fly caught in a web, trapped by the silk and knowing that the spider was moving in.

So I kicked the wall of the hallway. My foot went through the plasterboard. When I brought out my shoe it was covered in white dust.

“That hurts,” I said.

“I can see that it might, Terry. Maybe if you smash up your other foot too, it will help us catch this guy. You can’t expect him to go around town using his real name, can you?”

I kicked another hole in the wall.

“Nice to have you back, Terry!” someone piped from Room Horrible.

“Get to
work!
” I yelled back, already dialing the home number for Sam Welborn on my cell phone. I told him I was back in the hunt. He said he was happy to hear that, and I told him we had two more aka’s and bad addresses, a botched abduction and a murder. What I needed now was anything he could give me on Collette Loach.

He was silent. Then, “Who in hell’s
that,
Terry?”

“One of Wanda’s daughters or sisters, I’m hoping.”

“Well, I’ve already got the sisters checked out and Collette ain’t one of them. But her daughters, those girls were grown and gone by the time Wanda bought that place in Hopkin. All’s they did was visit sometimes.”

“Ask around, Sam.”

“I have been. That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Maybe someone out in Hopkin remembers her. Forget the phone company—we’ve already struck out with them.”

“What is it you want to know about her?”

“If she’s related to Wanda. And if so, exactly where she is. I need a phone number and an address and I need it soon.”

“I’m on it.”

Within the next fifteen minutes, CNB, all three networks and two L.A. stations had reporters and camera crews set up in the conference room, along with writers and photographers from the
Times
and the
Register.
Amanda Aguilar and the animal control officer had completed their collaboration and a blown-up version of the sketch now sat on an easel beside the podium. He looked like one of those hot new actors—a smartass with a Vandyke and a wispy mustache. I stood at the back of the room with hope in my heart, a hard glance at Ishmael and a secret smile for Donna, who didn’t notice me as she stood on the dais and completed a sound check with her shooter.

Everybody else noticed me, however. Their heads turned as if my name had been announced when I came in. They stared hard, disbelieving that the accused perv was back on Sheriff Department soil. Then they started toward me.

I held out my hands toward them, palms up, shaking my head.

“Talk to him,” I said, nodding over at Jordan Ishmael. “He’ll have the story for you. Part of it, anyway.”

With that, I retreated to Room Horrible.

Louis stood and faced me as I walked in. “The deputies just made the Capistrano address for Lumsden,” he said. “It’s the public library.”

H
ypok walked across the parking lot toward his van, Ruth and Loretta out in front of him, the lot filled with the bright bodies of expensive cars and the clean beams of their headlights. We’re quite the family unit, he thought—beautiful daughter, protective father, happy pup. He stole another glance over his shoulder: all clear.

“Here, I’ll unlock the back—the box is too big to take out the side doors.”

“How many again?”

“Three brothers and three sisters.”

“Before you said five.”

“No, it’s six. They’re unbelievably cute.”

He swung open the back door of the van. Luckily, the interior light was weak and unrevealing. He deliberately blocked its view with his body as he climbed in. He reached down into the console next to the tequila and brought out a Mag-Lite, the heavy aluminum, four-battery job with the adjustable beam. Shining the light in front of him, he looked over his shoulder at the Item: two feet from the doors, Loretta in its arms, trying to see past him to the desired box of puppy delight.

“Oh, wow, they’re all sleeping now! You’ve
got
to see them.” He knocked the flashlight against the seat back, reached forward and tugged at the console with one hand, then made a soft grunting sound. “Oh darn, I can’t get the whole box past this thing here. Just climb in and take a look.”

“Kind of dark in there.”

“I’ve got the flashlight, no problem. Come on up, but watch your knees on the cabinets—they’re hard. Here, I’ll take Loretta and you can climb in.”

Hypok kept the light trained in front of him, but he pivoted at the waist and held out one hand, palm up, for Loretta. He smiled at the Item and looked past it, toward the mall, but nothing at all seemed out of order.

Come on
…
hand the puppy to her master
…

The Item hesitated. He could feel the doubt coming off of it in quiet, uncertain waves. The way a mouse looks before a viper hits it

Loretta whined.

“Oh,
here,
honey,” he said, reaching further, his voice filled with sympathy and accusation.

Then Ruth gave in, leaned into the van and lifted the puppy toward him. Hypok reached just past Loretta and caught the Item by its wrist, yanking hard. The dog hit the floor. The Item sailed over the transom toward him. It yelped. It was midair and starting to scream when Hypok slammed the flashlight into its oncoming head. A sharp and heavy crack and it landed on the van floor, limp and silent as a dropped blanket He hurtled over it and landed in the parking lot He looked once more over his shoulder as he slammed the van doors shut, then walked around to the driver’s side slapping his hands together like a carpenter dusting off, and got in.

Two minutes later he was half a mile away, at a stoplight down on Jamboree, waiting for the light to turn, plotting the quickest course back to Wytton Street, Loretta on the seat beside his.

The Item was completely silent. He got out his bottle and took three nice long gulps—almost gone. He didn’t bother to turn on the radio because the chorus of voices singing in his head now was more beautiful, deep and resonant than anything he’d heard in a long, long time.

Down Jamboree in the comforting darkness, to Redhill Avenue heading toward Tustin, past the old blimp hangars of the Marine Corps Air Station looming in outrageous bulk against the sky—largest wooden structures on earth, Hypok had heard—then into the fringes of Tustin, a quiet little town for the most part, middle America, familyville, good schools and churches, the kind of place where young people bought the homes their folks and neighbors used to own and settled in to give their own children lives remarkably similar to the ones they had had, the kind of place where a Lumsden, Webb, Shroud, Horridus or even Hypok could quietly lose himself with appropriate behavior and never so much as raise an eyebrow, but could hunt a delicious young Item or two or three when it became necessary and still remain safe against the world in his little walled home, his nerve center, his headquarters, his lair—was Item #4 stirring?

He looked behind him for just a second, training the Mag-Lite beam on its jiggling head. Nice, the way the hair and blood shined in the light. Far out in dreamland. Not too far out, Hypok hoped: both he and Moloch preferred live prey. He tapped the light against his crotch then, listening to the solid thump of it against his risen self. Clunk, clunk clunk. Funny. It was going to happen tonight, he knew, the complete act, the full circle of desire and satisfaction and the transformation of one strong human into an organizing God, another lowly human into a lofty angel; the human molt; the private pageant symbolizing the power of life over death, immortality over sin, need over shame. He checked his speedometer against the 35 mph sign whisking by on his right, and let off the gas a little. No time to be careless now, he thought, not on this warm night in May, blessed, bountiful May, when all reptiles move in earnest to eat and mate and assert themselves in the private darkness away from man.

Onto First Street, follow it into old town. Past Wytton once, and quick look down toward his house to be sure there was no trouble, then an assertive cruise past it once again. He made a quiet U-turn at the intersection and reached up for the garage door opener—deluxe model, a two-hundred-foot response radius—and pressed the open button. He saw the towering sycamore beside his garage accept the softly growing light from below. He used the gate opener and timed it perfectly so the gate had just slid to its furthest point when the nose of the van slipped past and before he was even through he hit the close button. He rolled slowly into the garage, then pressed the control again and brought the front tires to rest against the railroad tie he had bolted into the cement to keep him from cracking into the wall, keeping as far away from the Saturn as he reasonably could. There. The door closed behind him and Item #4 stirred very quietly—just a dreamy whimper—and Hypok knew that all of his preparation, his versatility, his conviction and confidence had paid off again. He wiped a tear of gratitude and happiness from the corner of his eye as he swung himself into the back of the van, lifted Item #4’s head by its warm, damp hair and shined the flashlight at its face. Beauty, he thought, a true angel’s beauty, once you get the blood wiped off. Its eyes opened slowly and it whimpered again.

“There, there,” he said sweetly. “The worst is already over.” He got Loretta and put her down by Item #4 and Loretta licked its sticky face. “
Ohhhh .
. .
let’s get you inside and cleaned up!
”

Hypok sat in the chair by the old bed and ate the ravioli out of the pan. The Item lay on the bed with the black hood over its freshly washed head and face, and one of Collette’s old sundresses—a pale blue background with clouds and cowgirls atop white bucking broncos. He had taped its hands together in front of it, and its ankles, too, and of course, its mouth. Loretta lay beside it. Moloch knew something was up; he watched Hypok from inside the big dollhouse, his head visible through the “dormer” window that protruded from the roof. Tongue out; wobble in the air; tongue in. Motionless silver eyes with the black vertical cut of pupil; armored head; scales, bone, muscle.

He took a neat gulp of cactus juice and looked to the bed again. Item #4 wasn’t a fighter. Either that, or it wasn’t scared. It didn’t struggle like the others, though maybe the flashlight conk had something to do with that. All it did was moan “
Hmm-mmm-MMM!
” every once in a while, and quiver some. He’d cleansed the wound and blotted most of the blood out of its hair, and it was a nasty cut all right—an inch long and deep, and widened out like a smile from the tautness against the skull. Other than that though, it was in near mint condition.

Time now to daydream a little, as he always did when he had an Item in place and ready. A sense of accomplishment overtook him, coupled with a rising frazzle of anticipation. Have to keep the two in balance, he thought—a little reward after work well done, and a little something to look forward to in the next hours. A working man’s Friday night. He couldn’t help but think about his first full human transformation, the Item back in Hopkin, and how he was so nervous he hardly knew what to do. Stage fright. He wasn’t sure if Moloch would even be interested, though withholding food for two months probably helped. The next time, when he offered up his mother, things didn’t go smoothly at all: sophomore jinx. He thought back, fondly now, on the rigorous diet he’d enforced upon wretched Wanda, the Ultra Slim Fast shakes and no-salt, no-fat crackers, the way he had to gag and tie her in the basement for the last week while he made sure she was edible. Then, Moloch still wasn’t sure what to make of the naked, trembling old crone released into his Eden, hungry though he was. Moloch had watched her for a long while, then manifested himself next to her, his big shoebox-sized head across from hers, looking her right in the face. Must have terrified him, tasting the scent she gave off. She had backed into a corner, for what good it might do. But Moloch swerved away and redistributed himself into the playhouse, looking somewhat morose, Hypok believed, at the prospect of an edible item smelling so bad. But his mother’s bad smell hadn’t thrown him for more than a second, no: he went to the freezer, got out some frozen rats he used for his big
horridus
and microwaved up a couple of large ones until they were piping hot. A pair of scissors and off with their feet Click, click, click, into the wastebasket Then he’d entered Moloch’s realm—very warily—and smeared his dismal shrew of a mom with warm rat blood. It came out like ketchup from a plastic packet, except thinner, and steaming. Then he retreated outside and watched as Moloch, keen to the smell of rodent, slid his four hundred pounds of appetite over to gagged and bloody Wanda, then grabbed her by the shoulder, looped three times around her skinny little body and did the tighten-up. Hypok would never forget her bug-eyed stare. Of course, she seemed to be blaming
him
for her fate, but that was hardly a surprise. You could predict that. He couldn’t be sure exactly when she died, because her face was purple and her eyes popping with blood but her superfluous white fingers strained against Moloch’s armored bulk for a full five minutes or so. Then Moloch let go of her shoulder and nosed around his catch for a long lazy while, tongue berserk, finally deciding to start with her head, as big constrictors usually do. She stuck in his throat for a second, quite literally. It figured. Then Moloch unhinged his jaws and loosened up his neck—the narrowest part—and the plates of his pale mouth crept methodically down, and the next thing you knew Wanda was gone up to the shoulders. Hypok remembered standing there on the other side of the glass, intrigued by the spectacle, noting the way Moloch’s throat widened even more as he started in on the shoulders, his dark green scales parting widely against the pale pliant grout of underskin, the way they looked like counter tiles set casually apart. To be honest, Moloch had looked pretty funny with Wanda’s shoulders inside his neck, like he had these wings inside that were trying to press through a wall of gristle to get out. After that, it was fairly routine: the slow mechanical advance of unhinged jaws, half an inch of Wanda at a time, no hurry, an occasional rest, then another effort. Her head and shoulders started out as a dramatic lump inside him, but they eventually blended into Moloch’s massive bulk. There was a moment—Hypok’s favorite—when the snake’s mouth had advanced all the way to his mother’s white, drippy little rump and Moloch raised his head and Wanda’s ass and legs lifted skyward in the cage, scissoring apart rather lewdly, and Hypok wondered if Moloch was concerned about the lack of a tail. Apparently not, because Moloch stayed like that—his head upright, probably six feet off the cage bottom—while Wanda’s shriveled butt disappeared and her legs slowly came together like in water ballet and a moment later her ankles and up-pointed toes were going down in the slowest of motions, like a diver disappearing into a pool of pink tar.

You could just lose yourself in the past, thinking about good times like that.

“
Hmm-mmm-MMM!
”

“True,” he said.

Time now to change into the good skin. Hop to.

He stripped down, then got the shimmering, scaly suit out of the bedroom drawer. Cotton backing; polyester/acrylic overlay. He’d hand-washed it in an expensive detergent for wool products since his last shed, and it smelled fresh. He glanced just once at his sores—festering now, always giving him fits at times like this—but he chose to ignore them and just try to be the best he could be, like in the army. Legs and arms, squeeze in and close the big zipper up the front. Booties and gloves. Hood. Blue, silver, white of pearl, indigo, violet. Oil on water, abalone polish, faceted, changing, shifting always. For a while he stood in front of the mirror in the darkened room, only the lamp to illuminate his new self, and admired his transformation. Gone the frail, blistered man, gone the human cursed by God, gone the reeking mortal meat of Hypok. Look
now,
though—at the shine of scales, at the glimmer of limb, at the svelte metallic repto-hominid poised here at the peak of evolution.
Look now,
he thought. Here I am—Future Man But More Than Man:
Homo hypokithicus.