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.
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.