Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (49 page)

Over the next few days I checked that name a thousand different ways. There were Michael Hypoks in forty-seven of our fifty states—but I couldn’t find a single hard fact that linked any one of them to Michael Hypok of 318 Wytton. The closest I got—thanks to Sam Welborn’s tireless combing of north Texas—was an oil rig worker who’d worked up around Wichita Falls back in the mid-seventies. After that he’d dropped from sight, vanishing from the area like a played note of music. A fingerprint comparison between The Horridus and the Michael Hypok whose Social Security card and license I found in the kitchen showed them to be altogether different men. But I wondered. Had Gene Vonn taken his name? Or that of another Michael Hypok altogether? Why? Had he known him and admired him? A buddy’s dad? A mentor? A character from a show or book? A name he had dreamed? There was no telling. No one knew and no one cared. After a while, neither did I.

It was easy enough to find Collette Loach. Her number was written down in several places because she was his sister. I got her by phone at her home in New Hampshire. She was genuinely surprised that her brother had been the number-one suspect in a series of violent sexual acts against children. She sounded concerned that he was now dead, but not bereft. She told me she never really understood why Gene wanted her to buy a house using his money—but she would have been a fool to turn down that kind of offer. She figured Gene was just shy, as always, just a little to himself, a little secretive, but a real sweet boy. She’d never heard of anybody named Hypok. She asked me if I’d be interested in cleaning out the house and renting it for her—she’d make it worm my while.

I spent most of my downtime studying the log-ons and phone activities of Ishmael, comparing them to what I had learned about I. R. Shroud. Shroud had been on the Net during all the times Ishmael, as Mal, had been. Mal, of course, was a name usable by anyone, but I used our log-on and IRC records to trace each call to the specific origin terminal. In every instance that corresponded to Shroud’s activity on-line, the Internet provider linkup was made from Ishmael’s computer, located behind the heavy doors of his office. Most of his chats with Shroud were early morning—5 to 6
A.M.
—or late evening, between seven and nine. Some were as long as eight minutes; others as short as thirty seconds. As might befit any complex business transaction, the longer ones came first, followed by the shorter nuts and bolts of delivery, approval, payment.

So far as money went, Ish spent $30,000 to commission ten images of me and seven-year-old Caryn Sharpe (nee Little). I was almost unbelieving that he could hate me that much. Thirty grand will buy you a lot of good things, and you can enjoy hatred in private for as long as you want. It’s free. I wondered if Shroud had put him through the paces at Moulton Creek, Main Beach and the Green Line Metro Rail, as he had to me. I thought not. He’d only tested me because he suspected me of impersonating the original Mal. He had smelled a cop, so he had wanted cash, and my picture taken as insurance.

It seemed to me that some kind of bank wire transfer of funds would be easier, so long as customer and provider trusted each other. I confirmed this idea through Gene Vonn’s bank statements, which showed two deposits of $15,000 wired direct. The bank manager gave me the name on the payer account, though my heart gave a little jump when she first said it. The account belonged to Melinda and Jordan Ishmael. It surprised me that Ish had left it joint so long after the divorce. Then I wondered if he’d used it at other times for other purposes: a safe, forgotten slush fund always at least half attributable to an unsuspecting ex-wife. Why not? And to have it surface in the financial records of The Horridus was a fate that Ish, even in his deepest, most prescient nightmares, could not have foreseen. You get not only what you pay for, but who you pay for it.

It took over a week to finally nail down my tormentor with something absolutely convicting: fingerprints on the pictures stolen from Ardith’s collection. Reilly took his sweet time in processing those latents because I told him quite frankly they weren’t part of any active case, and because I was quite casual about my request. I didn’t want to bring attention to myself or to a lieutenant who was my superior. So Joe put it low priority and I had to call him twice a day to see if he’d ID’d the prints.

It was late on a Friday—two weeks after the death of The Horridus—that I went to the lab to shake loose my final piece of evidence against Ishmael. I still wasn’t quite certain, even then, exactly what I was going to do with it.

Joe looked at me over his glasses and pretended not to know why I was there. When I told him he changed the subject to the new ultraviolet/infrared analyzer that he had created to examine various materials, mostly inks. It was a funny-looking contraption with two different light sources and an ingenious system of adjustable wooden eyeshades to protect the examiner from ambient light. It sat on a corner bench with two stools in front of it. Joe’s people had nicknamed it Ugly Box and he assumed I’d want to give it a whirl.

“Joe, all I need is your make on the fingerprints, if you’ve come up with one.”

“We’ll get to that.”

Then a long pause.

I didn’t have to acknowledge that I’d put him in a tough position—helping condemn a fellow deputy against whom he had no personal or professional grudge. Also hanging in the air of his lab at that moment was the fact that Joe had been ready to testify against me on the mocked-up images. I’d decided to say nothing to him about it, and I didn’t. He was only doing his job, saying what he thought was true about the photographs he’d examined.

“I’ll run them through myself, if you’d like,” I offered, meaning I’d make the calls to the various print banks—CAL-ID, FBI and WIN—though I am not a fingerprint expert and wouldn’t really know what to tell them to look for. At least it would take the onus off Joe and his people.

He looked at me rather sadly with those cool blue eyes and said no, he’d done the work once so there was no sense in me doing it again. He shrugged. The expression he gave me was that of a doctor about to reveal a rare disease. Or a father whose son has brought some inadvertent disaster upon his family and friends.

“They’re Melinda’s,” he said.

M
elinda and Penny were home when I got there, packing for the move. The doors and windows were all open and so was the garage, stacked with boxes. I stood on the front porch and looked in through the open door. Moe jumped all over me, then flopped to his back and wiggled for attention. Melinda stopped in the middle of the living room with a stack of old 33’s in her arms, offering me a challenging look that tightened to hostility when she saw the expression on my face. She was dressed, as often, in her old sweats, and her hair was up inside a Dodgers cap. Penny came from the kitchen carrying a produce box. When she saw me she smiled, blushed and looked down, then came alongside her mother.

“Hi, Terry.”

“Hi, Pen.”

“Come to say good-bye to us?” asked Mel.

“Not exactly.”

“Do it anyway. It’s the last chance you’ll get. Penny, go to your room and get those posters off the wall. We’ve waited long enough on them.”

“—I—”

“—
Now.
Put the kitchen stuff down.”

Penny looked over her shoulder at me as she exiled herself to her room. Her face was flushed—embarrassment, I believed—but she still gave me the right-in-the-eye look that she had begun to offer me, just before my fall. Our Look. I returned it. I heard her door shut loudly.

Melinda carried the albums past me and I followed her out to the garage, petting Moe as he wagged along beside. I stood at the entrance, just under the door, and looked out at the canyon. Our “June gloom” had arrived early, as it often does, leaving the afternoon sky a humid, eye-squinting white, and muting the colors of the hills and houses. The eucalyptus trees, which always seemed to me to be perfectly suited to Laguna (they’re actually Australian), were languid and somnolent in the warm spring haze. I heard Mel set down the box of records somewhere behind me.

“So,” she said. “What’s the news?”

“I knew it was Ish,” I said, still facing the little street and the hills beyond.

“What was Ish?”

“Who set me up with the pictures.”

She said nothing.

“Did you count on that?” I asked.

“What on the face of the globe are you talking about?”

“Why? I mean the whole thing.
Why?
”

Her voice came, flat and not a little angry. “Have you spun out again? Like the good old days with the booze and your grimy little cave? Life’s pressures made you nuts again? I can’t be there for the rescue this time. Tell me what you’re talking about because I can’t read an addled mind.”

“There’s a lot we can just skip if you want to.”

“We could skip this whole conversation from the sound of it.”

“Things do need saying.”

“Then you’re going to have to explain yourself.”

“Okay, Mel. You took the stills of the cave with my camera. But you didn’t know that cameras leave tool marks on a negative, like a gun leaves marks on cartridge. The tool marks matched up perfectly, once the Bureau and Will Fortune got my old Yashica into the lab. It seemed to confirm the theory that I took the pictures. But I knew better, and I began to wonder who had access to it. I was pretty sure it was Ish, until Joe found your fingerprints all over the pictures you stole from Ardith’s notebooks. Those were still at Wytton Street.”

I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. When I looked back at her she was leaning against the garage wall with her arms crossed, head tilted down a little, but her eyes fixed straight on me. It was easier to accuse her to the hills than to her face. I wanted her to defeat my case, shatter my evidence, provide me with a surprise but ironclad defense. But she didn’t and I knew she wouldn’t. So I turned back to the oblique spring haze.

“It was easy enough to get the pictures of me—the raw material. You just took a day off, had a couple of drinks maybe, and played burglar while you knew Ardith was at work. It probably took you fifteen minutes, once you decided to do it. You knew those shots were somewhere in Ardith’s possession because I’d told you about them. Well, maybe it took half an hour—they were up in the closet. The hard part was getting to Shroud on the Web, fishing around as Mal. You knew it was one of my handles, and you did the fishing early or late, before work, and after everyone else was gone. You used Ishmael’s terminal. It took you close to forty conversations, once you were referred to the proper creator. I’d be willing to bet you did some horse trading right here at home, too. The artwork cost you thirty grand, because you wanted good stuff, real convincing, state-of-the-art images. You put them in the pink envelope and slipped it into Chet Alton’s house the night after we took him down. Ditto the negatives from the film recorder. Not really too difficult—you knew we were about to sting a creep so you were ready. All you needed to know was where he lived—easy enough to find out, with your terminal linked up to everybody else’s. But that’s why you came home late and headed straight into the tequila—lots of nerves needed cooling by then. Kind of a celebration, too. You figured Chet would have to explain away those pictures of me to cover his own pathetic ass, like all the other stuff he’d collected. They were just a handful out of a million pictures at that point, so when he said he’d never seen them before, nobody on the planet would believe him. Of course, he couldn’t argue away the negatives, too, could he?”

One of my former neighbors drove slowly past and rubbernecked me from his car. I waved like a suburban dad: all systems normal, family life rolling along. “Amazing how your neighbors ignore you until you’re an accused child molester,” I said. “Then you could write a book and they’d line up at a mall to buy it.”

“The whole world’s that way.”

“Want me to keep going, close my case?”

“Do what you want.”

“You paid on your old joint account, which you never closed out or took Ish’s name off of. I don’t know why. Maybe you thought if I traced things that far, I’d figure it was Ish for sure and challenge him to a duel or something. But you didn’t have two payments of fifteen grand sitting around, so you got an unsecured loan at God knows what rate, figuring you’d cover it with what you could get out of the house equity here. You settled for a lousy deal because you needed the money sooner than later. Plus, you understood by then that you were helping to finance The Horridus, not some closet perv named Shroud. That made things kind of hot, especially inside your soul. Time to quit the game and get out. According to the papers I signed, you’ll get less than twenty of the original thirty you paid up for this place. Same with me. But that was enough to borrow against, keep the cash flowing and get you up to Portland. I could go on with more details, but I think you get the drift.”

Silence.

I turned. She had picked up one of Penny’s aluminum softball bats. She had the handle in one hand and the barrel in the other. She appeared to be studying the logo. Then she looked at me, her face glum but her eyes charged with something I had never seen in her before. Her irises were black. She fixed me with a look of pure fear and fury. and I understood what I was to her. I was a monster standing in the mouth of her cave. If I hadn’t turned to look just then—would she or wouldn’t she? A cold shiver blossomed across the middle of my back because I didn’t know the answer.

Then, motion to my left.

“Mom?”

Penny’s face was uncomprehending as she looked at her mother. As uncomprehending as mine must have been.

“Are you guys—”

Mel looked at her as if Penny were a stranger. Then the rage passed and the pale gray returned to Melinda’s eyes. She dropped the bat back into the box like it was scalding hot. “We’re okay, honey. Just ugly adult stuff that you don’t need to hear. Go back in.”

Penny’s doubt was mollified just enough that she could glance at me, then back at her mother, and pretend she hadn’t seen something that would stay with her forever. She looked down and absently petted Moe. “I can’t find the … the tubes we had for the posters.”

“Under your bed.”

A pause. Another look at me, then at her mother.

“It’s okay, honey,” said Melinda. “Go back inside.”

But Penny looked at me before she spoke. Her voice was soft, so girlish, but it was built of conviction and forethought. “I’m going to say something, whether you guys say I can or not. I liked us all here together. You both drank too much because you were totally sad but you were getting over it. You guys were trying. Everything was going to be all right. Things started going pretty good. Then this thing happened and it all got worse. I knew you didn’t do what they said you did, Terry. But I wish you would have told me that yourself. And I wish you two would, like, get your shit together, because it’s
definitely
not. And if it’s not, you’re just going to ruin everything again for everybody around you, no matter where you go.”

Then she looked again at her mother before coming over to me and throwing her arms around my neck. I smelled the hot sweet tears on her.

“ ’Bye, Terry.”

“I’ll miss you, Pen.”

“Then call.”

She looked behind at her mother again as she walked back to the house. Moe tucked himself up close to her and followed her away. Then she was gone and I had the thought that it would be many years until I saw her again.

“Proud of yourself?” Mel hissed. “
That’s
what I never wanted to happen, and it did anyway. You came here and you took her heart and you left. You fell in love with your TV cunt and you did exactly what I knew you’d do when we started out. I loathe you for what you did, Terry, but I loathe me even more for knowing it would happen from the very goddamned
beginning.
”

“I had higher hopes than that.”

“High as a kite, I’m sure. Like you were.”

“Then why did you even let it get started?”

She was silent, and some of the ferocious anger rose again in her eyes. I’d never really known, until that moment, how much of Melinda’s considerable willpower was tapped to keep a lid on the furies in her blood.

“For
me.
To make
me
happy. To make
me
feel good again, like I was something of value. I’m too goddamned old to need a man to make me feel valuable. I know that But it doesn’t do any good to know you shouldn’t feel a way you feel. You pushed my buttons, Terry, you hung my moon for a while, and there wasn’t a lot I could talk myself out of. And you know something? I did it for you, too. I did it for your secrets and your son and your sadness and all the crazy, crazy shit you were going through when I first got to know you. You needed what I had. Hell, you needed
everything.
And it made me feel like an angel to give it.”

I looked at her. The flesh of her face was red and sagging and she looked, in spite of her anger, defeated.

“You put me back together, Melinda.”

“But I liked you better in pieces, because you were mine then. And I’ll tell you, if I wasn’t going to keep you, no snot-nosed newscaster was going to get the man I fixed up, either. That’s a hateful thing to say, and what I did was a hateful thing to do. But I’ll stand by them, because that’s the way I
felt.
So I acted accordingly. By the time of your birthday I was ready to move. You deserved to have your cute little world busted up some, for what you did to me. That’s the thing about men, Terry—you take things and really don’t think of the consequences. You take and you take and you take, and you don’t think about what it’s costing. And when the bill comes due, you try to walk away. Nobody walks away from Melinda Vickers. I do the walking, when it’s time. So get out, and do what you want with what you know. I’m giving you something valuable here, Terry. I’m giving you the luxury of being thrown out. Take it Feel wronged. You can remember me any way you want, but don’t suck up to my kid anymore. You don’t qualify as a part of her life. You’re just history we’re going to forget.”

I looked at her a long while.

“Well?” she asked.

“I’m sorry for what I did.”

“I’m not, for what I did. I wish you could have sizzled on the grill a little longer.”

“You lay it on pretty thick, Mel.”

“Life with you was a bag of shit, Terry. What’s it matter how I spread it?”

I nodded and walked away.