And the fact that Chet had trafficked in child pornography for years wouldn’t get him much — such possession was legal in this country until just a decade ago. The fact that he had possessed certain pornographic images and supplied them to I. R. Shroud years later was past the statute of limitations — four years. The girl in those pictures was now a woman close to thirty-five years old. I looked at her again. She was still in the kitchen, cooking his dinner.
“How old was Caryn then?”
“Seven.”
“Who was in the original picture with her?”
“Her old man’s best friend. Her old man. Some other guys. There wasn’t just one.”
“You must have been in heaven when you met her. Daddy’s sex toy, all trained and broken in.”
“She’d retained everything good about the human spirit in her, Deputy.” The Chet-loves-Chet smile again. “She was made for love, and love is all you need. We never hurt Linda, you know. We all made love. We adored each other and we brought pleasure to each other and we respected each other’s bodies. It’s not what guys like you think it is. Guys like you call it a sin because you don’t have a word for anything that good and natural. You’re not honest. You got to be honest, like us, to live outside the law.”
Right there is everything I hate about the child molester. They rationalize the urges, and they look to others just like them for what psychologists call “validation,” whatever in hell that is. Then they spin these theories wherein they are natural and loving and help their young charges develop into wise, tolerant and satisfied adults. Into people like Chet.
It was a dumb question, but I still had to ask him. “How come you told the investigators that you got those pictures of me off the Web? They were the only thing in your whole collection you were actually innocent of.”
“Well, they were in my possession, so why deny ever having seen them? No one would have believed that. Especially when the negatives were found, though I had no idea that would happen. So I told them everything in my collection was taken off the Web. It’s true. More or less.”
“Not the magazines from Holland, or the books from Denmark.”
“Well, that stuff was completely legal to make, you know.”
“It isn’t anymore.”
Chet looked at me. I could see the thin blade of his viciousness, the tiny little sliver of something he would probably call courage. “Really, I figured anything that would hurt you would help me. They found evidence against you at my house — well, good. I’ll take you down with me as far as I can. We hate cops.”
“We hate you.”
He was smiling again. “I thought it was really endearing that you’d fallen for Caryn. And paid up good money to meet her in the flesh. Some of that money is going to our defense. Well, go in and talk to her if you want. Go live, Naughton. You paid for it.”
Maybe Caryn got the psychic waves coming from us, because she turned and looked our way. She must have known I was there. She looked neither surprised nor distressed, neither curious nor concerned. The look on her face was the same look I’d seen on a hundred young victims, and later, on their adult faces. It’s a look not so much of something missing but of something missed.
“See you in court, Deputy,” said Chet.
“I’ll be there.”
I walked across the street to the little girl’s house and rang the doorbell. She answered it and I asked to see her mom or dad. A moment later they were both standing in front of me, two thirty-year-olds still dressed for work, a nice-looking couple, the woman with a dishrag in her hands and the man with his shirt sleeves rolled up and a pair of glasses resting crookedly on his face.
I told them who I was, showed them my badge and they invited me in. They didn’t have to be told to get the girl into her room before we talked. She still had her stuffed bear. When the mother came back, I told them who Chet and Caryn were and what they were charged with and what had happened over in Orange that day. They’d heard about the case, but hadn’t seen any pictures of Chet or his wife or girl, and had no idea they were living right across the street. The woman’s face was pale and I could sense the physical threat coming off that man, even so mild a man, from across the room.
“Call me immediately if you have any problems,” I said, rising. “And let your neighbors know the score.”
“We’ll handle it,” said Dad. There was actually steam on the inside of his glasses.
And that, in a nutshell, is why I do what I do. Because the devourers of innocence are always around us and always have been. Because when one goes down, another pops up to take his place. Because the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But somehow we have forgotten what vigilance is, or never learned it in the first place. There’s a stream that trickles through all of us. It’s always there. It’s evil and we know this, so we force it to mix with the larger river inside us. We let it be consumed by the greater flow of good. But when the good in the river runs dry and there isn’t enough of it to dilute the stream, then the stream flows faster and harder, uncontrolled, and it finally floods one life, then another, then another. And it’s always the innocent who are easiest to pull down. It’s always the innocent who are standing there on the banks and looking in, curious and trusting and sometimes, maybe, even a little brave. The innocent never know. They need someone with an eye for evil, someone who sees it coming before there is anything at all to see. They need people who know the stream. They need people like me.
I didn’t see Donna until very late. She stayed at the studio to edit what she’d shot that day: 318 Wytton Street and environs, interviews with the mothers of the first three Horridus victims, the dating service employees who’d worked with him; interviews with Frances, Wade, Ishmael and Louis; a brief conversation with Gloria Escobedo; and a long talk with Daniel and Sara Freedman, parents of Ruth. I know this because Donna called me three times that first day, to keep me informed. I missed her and resented her working instead of nursing me, which, in turn, I resented myself for feeling. But I was too exhausted to harbor that sour emotion for long, and by the time I was expecting her to crawl in bed with me — I’d waited up as long as I could — I was longing for her company, her voice and her presence. She arrived, as she often did, just as I was beginning to dream, and her arrival was as close to comfort as I would get for some weeks. I remember her outline as she stood in the doorway in the near dark. I remember smelling her as I fell back into my waiting dreams.
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.