Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (48 page)

Early on my second day off duty, Louis brought me all that I’d requisitioned from Sheriff Wade, and, surprisingly, been granted. The department phone call-out lists for February, March and April. The Computer Crime and Fraud log-ons and IRC records once collected and organized by Melinda and soon to be taken over by her temporary replacement—Jordan Ishmael. Time cards and expense sheets for the entire CAY unit (a decoy) as well as for Ishmael, Woolton, Vega and Burns (all decoys, too, except for one). It was a lot of material, but there was a lot I wanted to learn. I pored over it and started to piece together the activities of Ishmael for the last three months. I was looking for the smoking gun, the link that would lead from his thirty-something log-ons to I. R. Shroud to the pictures of me in the cave with Caryn Sharpe.

When the tedium got to me, I dozed and dreamed about that muzzle flash in the darkness of the flood control channel and I kept seeing Johnny standing up, arranging his face back into place and looking like he felt sorry for me.

At noon I joined the search team of the home on Wytton Street. What a haul. We pulled eighteen boxes of child porn from a spare bedroom of the main house—photos, books and magazines, 8 millimeter and video, even printed booklets with long ornate faux 19th-century narratives of firsthand sex with children and no pictures at all. A lot of it was stuff I’d never seen before, things he’d created or collected over the years, most of it old, but some of it quite new. There were digital images of all three of his Orange County victims. They all showed him, too, mostly from the back and above, completely disguised in his scaly suit. In the manner of most pedophiles, The Horridus had organized and catalogued the stuff with great care and thoroughness. He’d even cross-referenced the girls and boys according to their physical appearance and whatever names they might be given, in case he wanted to follow a certain “career.” There was a fascinating collection of “photographs” depicting celebrities with various children, in various poses—all of them very convincing. If it wasn’t the president of the United States, you wouldn’t laugh.

Of greater interest to me, and to the FBI people who helped us, was the equipment on which he had created some of the images. There was a studio in one of the main house bedrooms. It was neat and organized, just like his library was, and we guessed he had over eighty thousand dollars invested in a big fast Apple, a good scanner and digital ESP, all the Adobe software you could buy, and good printers—about fifty grand’s worth of machinery—which gave him the ability to reproduce the finished images so accurately. Throw in a film recorder, which would turn the final image from a digitized work of “art” back into a photograph, and you could do whatever your skill, patience and time would allow you to. He had done up some pictures of me with other girls and boys, too. Likely, they were practice runs for the ones he finally printed, photographed and passed along to Ishmael. There were also pictures of the cave interior—without me or anyone else in it. Had he taken those himself? Or had they been supplied to him? Remembering Will Fortune’s lessons on the camera anomalies, I studied the negatives on one of the film editors and made a mental note of the edge marks on the film and the anomalies of the camera that originally captured the image. I also carefully pocketed three of the pictures of myself—two of them with Matthew—that had been stolen from Ardith’s home. I would lift the fingerprints off them myself, and run them against Ishmael’s, on file in personnel.

Of course, Ishmael was there, helping to oversee the search. It took me a while to find the right time, but while he helped load the printers into one of our vans for transport downtown I got a financial ledger out of the box it was already packed in and took it with me to the bathroom. I shut the door and locked it and sat down on the pot seat. It didn’t take me long to crack his bookkeeping, because The Horridus hadn’t done anything much to disguise it. His handwriting was neat and careful:

2/12 RC. M. 15$/5I/DN.5

My translation: Received from Mal $15,000 for five images, half down. This was back in February, on the twelfth. It truly impressed me—although a man sitting on a toilet can be thought of as impressionable by circumstance—that Ish would go to such expense to embarrass me. Had he hoped to get more for his money? Certainly, and he almost had.

The Horridus was a busy craftsman:

 

2/16 RC. A. 1.5$/3I/DN.5
2/23 RC. S. .5$/11F
3/08 RC. F. 2$/5I F
3/15 RC. D. 12$/6I/DN.5

I made a careful replication of these entries onto my own small notepad, then wondered if the financial ledger might disappear from the evidence room, just as the pink envelope containing my damnation had disappeared a few weeks ago. I thought the chances were good. So I unbuttoned my shirt and slipped the ledger in, where it could ride up against my stomach for the next few hours and remind me what I was after. I looked in on my bandage and felt the itch of the stitches underneath. Stitched and bandaged human flesh has an indescribable smell. I went back out and helped log and load evidence, carrying the burgled box myself, nodding at Ishmael on my way to the van.

On a bookshelf in the guest house we found an adult human skull. I understood it instantly to be his mother’s, though I wasn’t happy about my wisdom. Some thoughts you just wish you never had. The front mandibles had been lipsticked bright red in a ridicule of womanhood, or perhaps of all life itself. It was perched up high, and aimed down to look at the bed where her son took the girls. Beside the skull was a whole femur, most of a small human foot, and a complete left hand on which a wedding band was affixed. Joe Reilly wandered around the scene without saying much, except to caution the techs about handling the evidence. He looked gray in the face, but so did everyone else. Joe reached down, touched the red wool blanket on the bed and looked at me, nodding.

There were notebooks with descriptions of his encounters with Pamela, Courtney and Brittany, though he referred to them throughout as “Items” “1,” “2,” or “3,” respectively. He had kept a log for his time in Arkansas (two “Items”), Indiana (two more “Items”) and Texas (one “Item” I knew as Mary Lou Kidder). I spent enough time reading them to see that FBI profiler Mike Strickley had been right—he had “scared himself” to California, where he let his first two victims go for unknown reasons and his third escaped rape and death because we interrupted him. There were graphic descriptions of five earlier rapes, and five “transformations” involving his anaconda. In the handwritten narrative there was some evidence of a troubled conscience, though not nearly as much as you might expect. He addressed the damnation of his soul and how his mother had “born and suckled Satan”—meaning himself. I read his self-analysis with some interest because I’m always intrigued by how people get to be the way they are, and because, strangely enough, they usually know. He had one quality I especially admired: he hated himself. He knew what the stream was all about, and he couldn’t beat it so he finally gave up and let it have him.

A small notebook was dedicated to phone numbers and Web sites. The names attached to the numbers and descriptions of the sites were “coded” only by The Horridus’s own shorthand: “494–4698 RS.” During my brief perusal I recognized only one, that of Abby Elder. But because it was small and fit easily in my pocket, and because I desired that it implicate Lieutenant Jordan Ishmael, I took the notebook, too. There was more than enough to convict The Horridus of helping frame me, if he’d been alive to convict. A drop or two to seal the fate of a corrupt cop wouldn’t be missed in the larger bucket of things, and the bucket, of course, would never be missed in the stream.

We had more trouble with the big snake than with any other piece of evidence on the property. Apparently the monster had been undead after my three shots, and when the last deputies had left the guest house the night before it had moved out of its cage, through the broken glass and into the house. Deputies sealing off the scene the next morning found it stretched across the floor. But when we entered the guest house for the formal search a day later, it wasn’t there. We assumed it had been taken away. I found it in the bathtub, layered upon itself high up past the rim, with one huge section of body pressed against the bathroom wall and its tail trailing across the room where it stopped, just barely out of the doorway. Its defeated head was poked between two coils. Six men and three women spent the next hour (1) determining that it was dead, (2) unwinding it out to the living room, (3) holding it as straight as possible (not very) while Joe Reilly himself used a twenty-foot tape to measure it. Even with the death curves still in the body—no amount of manual weight, strength or force could get them out—I was surprised how long it was. Every time someone lost his hold the snake would move slowly as its muscles tried to reclaim their final shape, and we’d jump like fleas. Our screams and curses would flood into the air and nervous laughter would crackle through the room like electricity and we’d have to start again, pulling on the thing and trying to hold its powerful—even though dead—body still again. It seemed like the damned thing would never stop moving, and so far as I saw, it never actually did.

Joe finally looked up, using the second twenty-foot length of tape, his thumb on the inch mark, and said, “Thirty-one feet, seven inches,
not
including postmortem rigor.” I learned later in the week that it weighed in at 545 pounds. A local mortuary did us a favor and cremated the animal, all five sections, no charge. It was rumored that one of the crematorium workers skinned it before it was cut up, and rolled the skin up like a carpet and took it home. I wouldn’t have done that myself. I wouldn’t want that skin within a thousand miles of me. I don’t know where the ashes were disposed of, and I don’t care. But I know they’ll end up back in the stream.

Surprisingly, the hardest task I had was to find out who The Horridus really was. I found six complete sets of identification, which included CDLs, birth certificates and Social Security cards: Gene Vonn, David Webb, Warren Witt, Mark Yost, David Lumsden and Michael Hypok. He worked for the dating services as David Lumsden. He dealt with PlaNet as Mark Yost. He dealt with utilities and the phone company as David Webb. I found Gene Vonn on three bank accounts; David Webb on four more; and Warren Witt on three others. Two for Lumsden right here in Orange County. A total of twelve accounts at different banks in four states.

But it was only when I read his notebooks further that I learned who he was, at least to himself: Michael Hypok. I first came across the name in his notebooks, in third-person references. I thought at first he was writing about a friend, and I thought, oh shit—here we go again. He used the name only occasionally. It was suddenly, casually interspersed with the simple first-person “I,” so it took me a while to catch on. But after a while it was clear that he himself was Michael Hypok—at least sometimes—and those times were when he was at his most grandiose. When he wrote of “transcendence” or “transformation,” or got on a tirade about how stupid the police were, his voice shifted to a third-person narrative starring Hypok.
Hypok knew that the authorities, stupid though they were, were getting close.
I found no evidence that he’d used it as an alias. In fact, I couldn’t prove that he’d ever uttered the name out loud to anyone but himself. I wondered if it was just a name he liked. Then, at the bottom of a kitchen drawer in The Horridus’s home, I found a limp, stained envelope containing a Texas driver’s license and a Social Security card belonging to a Michael Hypok some twenty years older than The Horridus.