“That would kill me, Vinson. I need him working. I need him.”
“Then you’re in a peck of trouble.”
“I know. If you shut him down, I might not ever hear from him again. You have to remember, he’s not just making dirty pictures of guys like me. He’s abducting children and doing things unimaginable to them. Let me give you an example. This hasn’t gone outside my department, Vinson, so it’s just your ears, all right?”
The way to win a confidence is to offer one. So I told him about Mary Lou Kidder in Wichita Falls, Texas, and what The Horridus had done to her. I speculated that before she died, young Mary Lou was probably subjected to a massive sexual assault. I took pains to describe the pile of reptile feces in which I found the skull of a once vibrant, much loved and beautiful little human girl.
“What if Shroud is punning on Horridus? Different guys all along?”
“Shroud called himself that before Horridus was even known. They’re the same man, Vinson. If I doubted that, I wouldn’t be here. I know you’ve got everybody’s constitutional rights to protect here, and I don’t mean to demean that. But you’ve got a monster loose on your Net, and I’m asking you to give him to me.”
Vinson sat back and crossed his hands on his lap. I could see them under the acrylic table, clear as trout in a mountain stream.
“You are an accused sexual predator, Terry.”
“I need Shroud, Vinson.”
He nodded and continued to look at me.
I did my best to close him: “Look, Vinson. I know the drill here. You take the information to the law department, you balance the risks and the gains, you go to committee. It takes time. Maybe you land on a user, maybe you don’t. I’m asking you to go off road with this one. Give him to me. You don’t talk to the law department. You don’t talk to the sheriff. You don’t talk to law enforcement. You just listen in when I tell you we’re going to be on, and you trace his number in your user directory. You give me his name and address and I’m never heard from again. You pop an animal and I get my record cleared up. It’s just us and it’s right.”
He waved in irritation and sat forward.
“I’ll think about it.”
I ignored my obvious cue to get up and leave. I looked across the clear sweeping desk to him. “Let me just say one more thing, Vinson. I’d still be sitting here talking to you if none of this had happened to me. It’s not about me. It’s not about the Constitution. It’s about The Horridus.”
“You make a good case, Counselor.”
It was pure Vinson Clay — friendly and vague, affirming and noncommittal. The crooked smile was back as he stood to offer his manicured hand across the desk.
I rose and shook it and walked out. And I knew I’d never hear from him.
Twenty-Four
On my way home I stopped by the first four female-owned homes that were listed for sale on the MLS. Time is cheap to the unemployed. More than that, though, it was either follow through or desperation — take your pick. The Nicols residence in Anaheim, not far from the stadium, had closed escrow two weeks earlier and the old owner gone to Hawaii. The Parlett home in the Fullerton hills was a horse property owned by an elderly woman who lived alone — no tenants in the guest cottage down by the stable. She looked at me with gray lonely eyes as we talked. The Haun residence in Orange had a for sale sign and a lock box on the front door. The sheet told me it was built in 1976, with a nonconforming “second unit” bootlegged in the back in 1980. It was in a decent neighborhood, one of those streets with lots of nice flat lawns but not a lot of trees. The block felt kind of open and exposed. The fact that the home was empty would have deterred some investigators, but I slipped into the backyard and approached the second unit for a first-hand look. It was locked, too. I peered through a side window at the hardwood floors, the freshly painted walls, the little kitchen with chipper pink tile around a white sink.
Next was Tustin, roughly on the way to my place in the metro district, Collette Loach’s house had been listed for $225,000. It was a three bedroom with a detached guest unit and “mature landscaping.” It was built in 1948 and it was small — 1,300 square feet for the main and another 600 for the guest house. I vaguely remembered the street — Wytton — for two reasons. First, I had played in the nearby Tustin Tiller gymnasium just a few blocks away as a guard on the Laguna freshman basketball team (Darien Aftergood was on that team, and it was one of the few games we won that year, I believe). Second, I’d once arrested a terrified kid who had played a Fourth of July prank on his best friend and set three Wytton Street houses on fire with a smoke bomb. It was a nice old block, not far from the high school, small on crime and big on quiet.
The house was hidden by old sycamore trees that cast the roof in shade, and by a rock wall that came out almost to the sidewalk. The wall was six feet high. It was one of several houses on the street with walls, and they all looked just a little funny sitting there amid the frank and unguarded others, saying, it seemed: stay out, stay clear, stay away. There was a wrought-iron gate across the driveway opening in the wall, and a buzzer box was fastened to the stones beside it. Under the box was the mail slot.
I got out and went up to the buzzer and pressed it. I have no idea where or if it rang. There was no movement from the house. So I walked along the wall, turned and followed it back until I was stopped by the next-door neighbor’s grapestake fence. It was cool in the shade there and when I looked up through the canopy of fresh May sycamore all I saw of the lowering sun were slivers slanting in from the west.
I backtracked around to the front and tried the other side. There was a very narrow pathway between the neighbor’s rose garden and the rock wall. The rose garden was the most lovingly tended patch of dirt I’d ever seen, weedless and rich brown, with dark green bushes heaving scores of color-drenched flowers into the air. An old man stood in the middle of the garden looking at me. He had baggy tan trousers and a green cardigan sweater and a pair of clippers in one hand. His face and head were brilliantly pale, almost blue white.
I said good afternoon and he nodded.
“I’m interested in the house,” I said, only then realizing there was no for sale sign in the yard.
The old man’s voice was faint. “I lost three Mr. Lincolns last week. Lost two Snowfires, two Deep Purples and a Blue Girl. Did you take them?”
“No, sir. I’m not a thief.”
“How do you do?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“You could be one,” he said, but his voice was full of deliberation, not accusation. “Peg can tell a thief from a pilot.”
I shrugged and smiled stupidly. “Have you seen Collette recently? Ms. Loach, the owner?”
“I can’t really see you.”
“She lives here, I think. She listed the house for sale, but I didn’t see a sign.”
“Pangloss. My wife said I’m a Pangloss. She died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Her sons live there. Two of them. Nice young men — a minister and a salesman.”
“Do you mean Mrs. Loach’s sons?”
“Yes. Here, take this. The body of Christ.”
He held out a brilliant white rose with eight inches of stem. I took it and thanked him.
I looked at the wall beside me. Over the top I could see the roof of the house, and the dense sycamore. A power pole stood just behind the trees and you could see where the line curved upward to the pole top and where the utility company had trimmed the foliage back for safety.
“What are the sons’ names?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you describe them to me?”
“I don’t see them often. I only see up close. They look like sons to me.”