Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (24 page)

This guy, I. R. Shroud, had porn for sale. Maybe he was a buyer, too. Maybe a collector. He might even create it himself. Which was an interesting thought, considering my circumstances.

I always get off the kid porn Web feeling like I should take a long bath in acid, or have my skin peeled and replaced. You touch your finger to that invisible stream, and it’ll try to suck you in. It goes right for your soul.

I shut down the computer and wandered the house for a while. I stood for a moment in Melinda’s bedroom—my bedroom until last night—and registered its presence. The furniture was all hers, as was most of the furniture in the house. I’d left “ours” with Ardith; Jordan had left “theirs” with Mel. I’d never fully acclimated to putting my ass onto the same couch that had cushioned Jordan Ishmael’s. It was odd, though. With me gone, the room didn’t seem very different than it did with me in it. The whole house didn’t seem very different. I remembered our brief contentions over what came into the new home and what stayed in storage (mostly my stuff), how things were to be arranged, how the household would be organized. She was particular about what went where—furnishings, electronics, pictures, knickknacks. Melinda had her way on almost every point, and to be truthful, that was fine with me. I’ve got no eye for design. But it was strange to see how little I’d influenced my own home. Take out Terry, his clothes, personal effects and dog, and there wasn’t much left to prove he’d ever lived here. I felt leased.

I drove to the nearest computer store and got a slick new machine set up with a fast modem and plenty of memory to get me into the Net. It was a portable one and quite expensive, about the price of my first new car, a 1975 VW. I paid cash. I considered it a sound investment in reclaiming my life from whoever was trying to take it. I might have bought a powerful automatic handgun too, and learned how to use it, but I already had one and already did.

I really wanted to get to know this I. R. Shroud. Though the other kid-rapers on the Net thought we had dealt with each other before, we hadn’t. I’d know, wouldn’t I? Even during my months of blackout drinking, I’d remember purchasing pornography from one I. R. Shroud. Correct? But somebody on the Web had used my name to get to the Ramblers, and that person had gotten product from Shroud. E-Rection had told me so.

I was walking out of the computer store when an idea hit me. Just one of those little blips of thought that race in from nowhere and slide away forever if you don’t slow them down and make them feel welcome. I wondered if this pretending Mal might have requested images of a certain guy. They’re called customs, where the customer wants his own body in the image. Naturally, the ultimate pornography features yourself. But in this case, Mal had ordered images of someone else—me. Interesting. I locked the new machine in the trunk with a corollary thought: no one except a few of my cohorts at the department knew that I was Mal, or that the name would get him into the Ramblers’ chat room. In fact, I couldn’t think of anyone I worked with outside of CAY who knew my handle. Johnny, Louis and Frances. Oh, and of course, supervising lieutenant Jordan Ishmael.

I got my stitches removed at a walk-in clinic in Laguna—not the one where I took my son, because that one has since gone out of business. Fun. The puncture wounds were ugly and the scars would be small but definite.

Then I stopped by a travel agency and booked a little two-day vacation. I needed it. American Airlines to Dallas/Ft. Worth, Alamo Rental Car. Holiday Inn in Wichita Falls. Just the kind of place where there’s enough to keep you busy, and the rest of the time you can forget the world you left behind, and hope it forgets you.

W
ichita Falls is in north central Texas, way up by the Oklahoma border, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from D/FW International Airport. Those are Texas hours, by the way—quite a bit longer than the ones we have in California. The city lies in the Red River Valley, also the name of a tune that is difficult to get out of your head once you hear it. I heard it on the radio. It didn’t matter, because I’ve always liked it. I clipped along in the rental Olds at the speed limit, which—I remember from the stories of friends once stationed out at Sheppard Air Force Base—is strictly enforced.

The land is green in April, and always flat. You can see oil rigs and water towers far out in the distance against the vast sky, and have little idea of how far away they really are. Oil goes boom and bust out there, and right now, it’s mostly bust. There’s some ranching and farming—cattle and cotton. It was a big cattle center for a while. I always thought the Texans were smart to exploit their land for beef and oil, two staples this country will always need.

The locals are quick to point out two things of interest. First is that Larry McMurtry lives near here, and he is just a regular guy. You see him all the time. Second is that Wichita Falls sits in “Tornado Alley,” as mentioned by a convenience store employee, the Holiday Inn desk clerk and a desk officer at the WFPD, who answered my arrival call to his captain. The desk clerk told me the big one of ‘64 flattened her parents’ house and threw a heavy steel mascot steer that once adorned a local butcher shop some eight hundred yards into a cotton field. It was found there, upright, the next day. It also blew blades of straw into a soft-drink bottle that her dad discovered, unopened and perfectly intact, after the twister passed. She said she’s seen the bottle and it’s true—he still has it on his fireplace in the new house they built.

Police Captain Sam Welborn had a friendly, green-eyed face with a smile that seemed half for me and half for himself. He seemed amused. He was tall and big boned, with thinning black hair and an air of congeniality. He was the kind of big friendly cop you wouldn’t want to get riled up. He handed me file 199591, then rolled back on his chair and spit a brown tobacco blast into a plastic cup. I could smell the wintergreen.

“She was a real sweet girl, they say. Good student, minded her parents real good. It was a pretty big deal here, when she went missin’.”

I opened the folder. “We’ve got a guy who’s taken three in less than two months. Hasn’t raped them yet. Hasn’t killed them yet. He dresses them up in old clothes, these lacy robes and hoods, then cuts them loose out in the woods. We think he’s escalating.”

“This one here had a thing about clothes. Trying to get young girls to put them on.”

“That’s what got our attention.”

“FBI?”

“Yeah.”

“Those boys can be pushy sometimes, but they’re pretty sharp, too.”

I scanned through the missing persons’ report on Mary Lou Kidder. She left school a little late after talking to a teacher, never came home. A woman who lived on Mary Lou’s route home from school said she saw a white van parked on her street that she hadn’t seen before and never saw again. She didn’t notice who was driving it, and she didn’t see anybody get in or out. Mary Lou Kidder had been gone now for two years, one month and three days. There was a picture of her from school—a round-faced, happy-looking girl with bangs and a bow in her hair.

“We couldn’t connect the clothes guy with Mary Lou,” said the captain. “But we still think he took her.”

“I’d think that, too.”

In line with that assumption, the WFPD had included in Mary Lou’s file the incident reports, witness and subject interviews on the UNSUB Male who’d been trying to outfit school girls in free clothes that weren’t new. The physical description was somewhat similar to our early Horridus: white male, early thirties, medium build, eyeglasses, beard and mustaches. The cops had even put together a composite sketch of the suspect. I took a copy of our first Horridus attempt from my briefcase and compared the two. He looked not unlike Amanda’s version from Steven Wicks, with the facial hair and glasses. The Texas version was fuller in the face, and his hair was longer. The glasses were shaped differently. Both sketches were frustratingly vague. I handed our sketch, and the file, over the desk to Welborn.

“Hmm. Eyes look the same. He’s got that … intellectual look. Like a guy who went to college, maybe. But these sketches—seems they’re either right there or way off.”

“I know.”

“I’ll tell ya, we passed that picture out to everybody in town, twice. We had it on the TV and all the papers. We thought we’d probably run him out, then the girl went missing. Man, it was bad. Just breaks your heart when something like that happens on your watch.”

“I know that, too, Captain.”

He studied me with his clear green eyes. I could see the lump of dip stuck up under his cheek, and smell the wintergreen flavoring.

“My personal belief is that he wasn’t from this town,” Welborn said. “Now, I can’t substantiate that with anything concrete, but I believe it. See, we get to know our people here pretty well. We only got about a hundred thousand in Wichita, and we get to know ‘em. You got your black element on the other side of Flood Street, then you got your Mexicans mostly grouped up in the north end, around Scotland Park and the river. This fella was Caucasian. Preying on his own type. And that group is pretty well connected up. They recognize each other, mostly. We recognize them. Know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“I think he lived somewhere close by. Not here, though. It’s just a theory.”

I took back the file and scanned through. “If I wanted to check real estate listings for the time period after Mary Lou Kidder disappeared, who would you recommend?”

“Katie Butler, over at Coldwell Banker. Happy to make a call for you. What’s the idea behind that?”

“If you smoked him out of town and he owned a home, he’d sell. The Bureau has a strong hunch that our guy lives in a place that has a detached second unit. If your guy is our guy, maybe he lived in one here, too.”

“Well, the big mansions in Country Club all have servants’ quarters. Rent them out now, mostly.”

“We wouldn’t anticipate him coming from that kind of wealth. We’re thinking middle class. A house with a granny flat or maybe even a detached garage he could convert.”

Welborn’s green eyes settled on me again. “Convert into what?”

“A place to take them. His victims.”

“You got evidence of that?”

“Some.”

“The Feds do up one of those profiles for you?”

“They did.”

He shook his head. “I always thought that was voodoo, myself. But that’s just me. I hope you catch your guy. I hope he’s our guy, too. We can execute him once in each state.”

“If you’d be willing to call Ms. Butler, I’d much appreciate it.”

He set his dip cup on the desk and dialed out. “Katie, this is Sam. How ya
doin’
over there, sweetheart?”

Katie Butler was stout and wide faced, with a swirl of red hair done up stiff. She smiled like she’d known me all her life. She welcomed me to Wichita—the locals all seemed to drop the Falls—and said if I ever wanted to move here, it was a buyers’ market, great deals all over, get three times the house I could have in California, for less money.

“A course, we’ve got our tornadoes here,” she said. “You just have to include acts of God as part of life. But you got your quakes and all, so you know what natural disaster is like. They’re usually not so bad as everybody likes to make out.”

“Most of our earthquakes aren’t so bad, either. You don’t even know they’re happening.”

“Well, we do get champion-sized twisters here, I’ll tell you. In ‘72 the steer blew off the butcher and landed in Archer County, standing up in a pasture like the real cows. That’s a five-hundred-pound, decorative steel steer. Funny things like that happen all the time.”

She set me up with the multiple listings for March through June of two years back. My window was kind of big, but that might make it easier to crawl through. She led me to a private little room and brought me a big cup of coffee.

“Sam says you’re looking into the Mary Lou thing?”

“That’s right.”

“My niece went to school with her. They were friends. She was a cute little girl. I remember her smile, because it was so happy looking, and funny, too, because her two front teeth fell out and left a gap. She was a real doll, a real angel.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything. Her warm blue eyes were gray now, and I could not mistake the ferocity in them.

“Think she’s alive?” she asked.

“I really can’t say, Ms. Butler.”

Her face turned accusing, then askance, then judgmental, then resigned. And, finally, for reasons I would never know, forgiving. “Ya’ll let me know what else I can get you. ‘Kay?”

An hour later I’d found all the listings for homes with detached units. Four were in a moderate price range, and three of them were sold by men. None of their names matched the sellers in Orange County, the ones that Johnny was just about finished checking out. I got that funny, embarrassing feeling in my guts that told me I’d been following a trail that was about to disappear into nothing.

Katie Butler read each one that I’d marked.

“Now, I knew this fella—Al Jeeter—and he sold because he wanted to move back to Virginia, where he grew up.”

“How old was he?”

“Oh my … late sixties, I’d say.”

“What about the next one?”

“Lindy Dillard? Don’t know him, but I do know we sold the house. I can get the paperwork if you want. Sometimes, escrow documents have the age of the seller and buyer. Here, let me just get them all for you.”

“Forget Wanda Grantley,” I said.

“Pretty easy to do,” said Katie.

“Why’s that?”

“Not my kind of people, those two. Be right back.”

I waited in the lobby while she went through her files. I could see her hard red hair past the counter when she knelt at a file cabinet. I drank another cup of coffee and thought about Donna and how surprised she was that I was leaving. She was suspicious, but she held her questions. I thought of Melinda and Penny. I thought of the pictures that Wade had of me, and the trail that led to I. R. Shroud. I thought of the ranger, Stefanic, and wondered if our boy had been there. I thought of The Horridus, waiting, watching, planning. Would Johnny work the dating services again, try to find a common point? Or would he let Ishmael run the show now, forget about me and my big ideas? I sighed. Here I was, a million miles away, working a case that was no longer mine, escaping one miserable swamp of problems for another. I suddenly felt tired and stupid, tracking down obscure leads for a department that didn’t want me around in the first place.

“Okay,” said Katie, sitting on a chair beside me. “Jeeter was sixty-eight, about like I guessed. Lindy Dillard was fifty-two. If I remember right, it was a relocation for him. I’m really not sure. This last one, Bevaro, the escrow papers say he was forty-six.”

I wrote down the ages of each seller in my notepad, as my mind drifted off to other times and places: my honeymoon with Ardith on Grand Cayman; Matthew and me chasing blue lizards over white dunes on vacation in New Mexico—
don’t worry, Ardith, the sun isn’t going to kill him;
Donna Mason astride me just one morning ago and her faintly southern voice filling that little dawn-filled apartment with something I hope is love. It’s amazing how a man—no matter what he’s done—still wants love, and can convince himself that he deserves it.

Nice as Katie Butler was, nice as Sam Welborn and the rest of Wichita Falls seemed to be, I wanted out of there. I wanted to be back home where I could scream.

“Forget Wanda, then?” Katie asked.

“Umm?”

“Wanda Grantley, the other seller. That listing was out in Hopkin, anyway. Two towns over. Widow. Says here late fifties, but she looked eighty.”

I felt eighty. “You said she was married.”

“I most certainly did not, Mr. Naughton.”

“You said ‘those two’ weren’t your kind of people.”

“I know I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.”

“What two people, though, if she was a widow?”

“Her son.”

I did the math. I woke from my reverie, a little excited. Finally, a nibble. “He’d be in his late twenties, early thirties.”

“Full grown, anyway. Probably somewhere that age. Living with her.”

“In the second unit?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Hardly ever saw either of them out and about She had some older daughters, used to come around. Trashy women, if I have to say so. The mother—Wanda—tiny little thing, about as friendly as a rattlesnake. Now I
heard,
and this might not be true, but I was told she married something like six or seven times. I can’t say for sure, though. They all could have been decent folks, I guess. But you hear things. I just know they were real private people. Didn’t talk to the neighbors, kept to themselves. Had some money, but lived kind of low. Got no idea where they went to. You know, that place of theirs didn’t sell until last year. They were asking too much. Then, the man who bought it, it was for his daughter so she’d be on her own, well she got married anyway and moved out of state. So now it’s for sale again. Slow market. Buyers’ market, like I was saying.”