“They’d have to compare it to the real one for that. There’d be no way — just based on the image — for them to know that it was created, if it was created skillfully. And Terry, that document he’d create, that picture you’d finally show the FBI, it would be totally, 100 percent genuine. It would be — or could be — finally, after all the work was done, just a simple, authentic photograph.”
“Even though the event depicted never happened.”
“It didn’t happen until the artist created it.”
“It never happened, Darien. What you see in the picture did not fucking happen. Did it? The woman never gave the kid a bath. Did she?”
“Okay. It never happened.”
“Good Christ, no wonder we could never run a simple pick and roll.”
Silence for a moment, my anger waning.
“We were bad basketball players, weren’t we?” he asked.
“Didn’t you get ten against Newport Harbor?”
“Eight. I never got double digits my whole career.”
“Me neither.”
We sat in his office for a while and talked about the old days, the new days, some of the days in between. Then the conversation got thin.
“What are you working on, Terry? Can I ask?”
I considered my reply for a moment. “Darien, there’s a mudbath pending for a very close friend of mine. We’re talking about somebody getting royally screwed by pictures of something he didn’t do.”
“That’s bad.”
“It’s worse than bad. It’s a career, a life, maybe a prison term. This guy didn’t do what they say he did. What the pictures say he did.”
“They’d have to have more than just pictures, wouldn’t they?”
“For a court of law, maybe. For everything else, the pictures will do quite nicely. They’ll ruin him.”
“Blackmail?”
“No. The cops are sending the pictures to the FBI and the alleged perp is trying to save his ass.”
Darien sat back, fiddling with a pencil on his desktop. “The anomaly would have to be in the image, then — not in the medium.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I mean, if portions of the image are unique, the way a person is unique, a fingerprint is unique, then anything digitally created could be shown to be inaccurate.”
“But you’d need the real thing to prove it.”
“Right. You’d need the mother, or the boy, or the bathroom.”
I thought about this. Me. The cave. The girl.
Who has pictures of me?
Ardith, the enthused amateur: many. Melinda, an occasional snapshooter: a few. Louis, Johnny and Frances, from our frequent socializing: maybe. Donna, via file footage: some.
And everyone else at the Sheriff’s Department, through my personnel file: left side, right side, straight on.
I got Johnny by phone just before lunch. I shamed him into faxing me a copy of Amanda’s sketch of The Horridus, as described by Brittany Elder. I had to go to a pharmacy in Laguna with a fax service to receive the thing, banished as I was from my home. I asked about the real estate listings and Johnny said they were down to three male sellers of detached-unit homes.
“If the male sellers don’t pan out, try the women,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment. It was my first whiff of actual day-to-day banishment, and it weighed my heart like a death in the family. I was putting Johnny Escobedo in an impossible jam.
“Shit, Johnny, I’m sorry,” I said.
“I understand, man. I really do.”
He didn’t rush to hang up on me, for which I loved him dearly.
“The worst part, Johnny, is I’m out. The Horridus is planning number four, we’ve got kids in ditches, infants in file cabinets and pervs all over the place and I’m sitting here with my thumb up my ass.”
“If it didn’t happen it didn’t happen. I know it didn’t happen.”
A desperate heart is a soft one. Mine practically melted. “I love you, man. And I don’t even want your beer. Though I could use one right now.”
“I should go.”
“What’s Reilly got on the Elder scene?”
“Still working. Nothing yet. The news here is the park ranger out at Caspers.”
He told me about a ranger named Bret Stefanic who was found murdered the evening before.
“Way out in the woods off the Ortega,” said Johnny. “Guy cut his throat wide open. Didn’t really grab my interest until the ME said he’d been bitten three times by a venomous snake — probably a rattlesnake.”
I thought a moment.
“It looked like Stefanic stopped somebody out there. His citation book was out, found it in the weeds. The last three tickets were ripped out of the book. We think the perp was written up, surprised him somehow. Reilly said he died from the slashing. The snake bites were premortem. Very strange, uh... Frank.”
Reduced to Frank. It was what I had left.
“Crotalus horridus?”
“We’re sending out some of Stefanic’s blood to a toxicologist over at Irvine and a herpetologist in Chicago. They both told me already there’d be no way to differentiate one rattlesnake venom from another, once it’s in the blood. That’s if the bites even were from a rattler. The ME said venomous snake. There’s lots of those.”
“Well, not around here there aren’t, Johnny.”
“That’s what I mean. The only poisonous ones found here in the wild are the rattlers. But what if it’s a cobra, or a water moccasin or something?”
I was silent for a moment, as I tried to imagine The Horridus out in the far reaches of a wilderness. It fit. He let his victims go in places like that. In fact, he’d let Courtney go in the Caspers Wilderness Park. He liked the outdoors. It made sense, but not a lot.
“Where were the bites?”
“Buttocks, leg, face.”
“Bitten while he was alive.”
“Correct. And the ME said he was bitten just before he died. The venom hadn’t been assimilated very far into the tissue. He died not long after the bites.”
I just couldn’t put it together. “So this inquiring ranger tries to cite a guy for something, gets his throat cut, then falls down and a rattlesnake that just happens to be in the grass bites him once on the ass, once on the leg, then finished with a bite to his face? Johnny, there’s a whole lot of something wrong with that picture.”
“I know. Let me ask you something, Terry. If we strike out on the male sellers, why try the women?”
“Mother. Wife, girlfriend, sister.”
“That’s out of profile, isn’t it?”
“You know me, Johnny — I throw the net wide as I can.”
Another silence while Johnny vetted my methods. I’ve long been known at the department as the guy who goes the extra mile when he doesn’t have to. Maybe checking the women was just a waste of time. Apparently, Johnny Escobedo thought so.
“Hey, I should go.”
“Johnny, one more thing. I got this fax from Strickley at the Bureau. He found a weird thread that leads back to Texas. I think it’s worth—”
“—I already laid it on Ish. No dice.”
“Ishmael?”
“He’s acting head of CAY.”
“Ah, holy shit—”
“—And he said we’re better off looking here than looking in Texas, considering we don’t work in Texas. I’m trying to get them to send us a file. Slow going — the whole thing’s cool by now.”
My balls frosted with the news of Ishmael as acting head of my unit. It was all I could do to keep my mind halfway on track. “It’s worth it for one of us — one of you — to spend a couple of days back there. Who’d you talk to? Welborn?”
“Yeah. He’s... hey, Frank, I gotta go.”