He looked at me again. It isn’t often you see a look of such affronted disgust on a peace officer. “Doesn’t rape them?”
“Not yet. I think he has before. I think he’ll start again.”
“Now why do you think that, Terry?”
“It’s about sex. Sex in his head. Sex in his memory, in bis past. You know how strong it can be. We think about it. Talk about it. Dream about it. Sooner or later, we try our damnedest to make it real. That’s what he’s doing — making it real. And once you start, well, you can call yourself off if you’ve got enough willpower, maybe. But not forever. Not once you know you can get what you need. He’s working himself up to the act again. That’s my take on it.”
“Little lacy robes, like they were angels?”
I thought about that. I hadn’t really figured out the robes — if they even were figurable. I had assumed they were some kind of symbolic skin. Something akin to the shed he’d left in Brittany Elder’s bed. A way of saying that he was about to... change the girls, hatch them into something else. But Sam’s word connected to something I’d thought before, namely, that The Horridus wasn’t — in his mind — taking the girls as captives, he was freeing them. So, maybe they were angels’ robes, or angels’ wings. He was taking them as mortals and releasing them as angels. After what I’d seen today in Wanda Grantley’s backyard, I would have believed almost anything about him.
“Angels, hatchlings — I don’t know.”
“Hatchlings?”
“It’s just a... notion, Sam. Tied in with his snake totem and his fantasy. He calls himself The Horridus. Horridus is Latin for a kind of rattlesnake.”
“If I saw him, I’d shoot him like a rattlesnake. And that’s about how bad I’d feel after. I got no tolerance for people like that. None a’ tall.”
“Get me all of Wanda Grantley’s married names, if you can.”
He looked at me but said nothing.
After the second race we went down to the pits and found his friend, Buck. He was a wiry little guy with a red jumpsuit on and an STP cap tilted way up on his head. Big smile, a drawl. The hood of his Ford was up and Sam leaned in with him for a look at the works. They talked for a minute about the supercharger and how to cool it. I stood back and looked at them, wishing I knew something about cars, wishing I had a friend I’d known for thirty years who I could just be with. Like Sam was just being with Buck — casually interested in the same things, tacitly pulling for each other, relaxed, undefended, whole. The big dark Texas sky seemed to make everybody look smaller to me, to reduce them to a heavenly perspective. It made me feel real small, like I was just one guy out of many millions, walking on feet, breathing through lungs, seeing through eyes and doing the best he can with his seventy years, or whatever I’d get And that’s a good thing, I think: people behave better when they know they’re not the center of the universe. Where I’m from, in California, a lot of them never realize that.
We walked through the pits, Sam spitting into his cup, his free hand jammed into his windbreaker.
“Be a good thing for you to leave in the morning,” he said. He didn’t look at me, but I noted the hard-pressed expression of his face as he looked over the lip of the cup. It was the face of the Sam Welborn you wouldn’t want to mess with.
“You met my team,” I noted quietly.
“I don’t know what you’re into back there, Terry. Don’t want to know. But I’m not supposed to discuss this case with you anymore. I told them you’d be back on that plane first thing tomorrow, and I don’t want you makin’ a liar outta me.”
“Who called you?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I was planning to go, anyway.”
“Puts me in a tough position, you know, because I got nothin’ against you. Fact, I like ya. You helped me out with Mary Lou. You solved a crime I’d been working on for two years and getting nowhere.”
“There’s some politics going on back home. That’s all it is.”
We rounded the pits and stood up by the entryway fence to watch Buck’s Ford rumble past. On the ground like this, the cars were even more impressive — you could feel their power rattling your guts and bones when they were just idling. Buck, lost in a red helmet, waved at us from behind his meshed side window.
There wasn’t much more Sam and I could say to each other. His suspicion, and my implied guilt, hung over us like a black, oppressive sky. I was furious, but had no target for my anger, no vent for my bile.
Buck won and we clapped. After that Sam gave me a ride back to the Holiday Inn.
Twelve hours later I got off the plane at John Wayne Airport, greeted by Jordan Ishmael and two deputies I barely knew.
“Guys,” I said.
“Terry.”
“Nice to see some friendly faces.”
I thought of running for it, but I know a dumb idea when I get one. Most of the time.
They fell in around me and we headed away from the crowd of people awaiting the passengers. Ishmael leaned in close, like he was telling me a secret.
“You’re under arrest, Terry. Unlawful sexual intercourse, lewd act on a child, oral cop. I can waive the cuffs for now but not the Miranda. Let’s head over to that corner there, get it taken care of without causing some big hairy scene, okay? Unless you want me to call Donna Mason for the story.”
Ishmael’s powerful, controlling grip on my arm was the single greatest insult I have ever known.
Nineteen
If you’re a regular guy, they march you to the Intake-Release Center, which sits next to the jail. Then they take away everything you’ve got, search you, take off your cuffs, make you sign some forms, try to figure how much of a hazard you are to others and yourself, fingerprint you, photograph you, spray your body for lice — making you bend over naked to get a solid dose between your cheeks — let you rinse in a cold shower, then give you an orange jumpsuit with Orange County Jail stenciled on the back. Then they let you make your calls. Then you go to your tank and the fun really starts.
If you’re a cop accused of sex with children, it’s all the same, but they put you in a small cell alone instead of a general population tank because general population inmates are known to murder men like you. It’s called protective custody, and it’s reserved, generally, for child molesters, those accused of heinous crimes, cops and celebrities. I felt like I was the first three, with a good shot at becoming the fourth.
I made my two phone calls from the Intake-Release Center, from a phone bank built into the dreary wall. It was a little room with a smoke-stained acoustic ceiling and a table with a bunch of phone books strewn across it. Other accused were making calls, some whispering, some whimpering, some shouting, some just standing silent with the receivers to their ears, as if being pumped with some numbing drug through the cord. I hunkered up close to the wall and called Donna. I was surprised and crestfallen that she answered. I didn’t even try to ease into the subject — it can’t be done — and just blurted out that I’d been arrested, and why. I said I was innocent. I said I was being framed. I said there were photographs that had been altered or tampered with and that the FBI would establish this to be true. My heart sank even lower as I said this, realizing that the FBI had likely done just the opposite, and my arrest had been the result.
All I heard for the longest time was the in and out of Donna’s breath, followed by the silence during which I could see her clearly: slender face and sad brown southern eyes, her dark hair curling forward over her pale skin, the swatches of blush on her cheeks, her red and knowing lips. I told her I was innocent. I told her I wanted her to learn about this from me, first. I told her I was innocent again. I told her I wasn’t sure what I’d do — try to make bail and lie low until my defense experts could disqualify the evidence. I told her, matter-of-factly, that I loved her, and, again, that I was innocent.