13 Stolen Girls (10 page)

“It's so good to see you, Aunt Annie. Are you eating here?”

“It's, it's—well, it's just amazing to see you, all grown and everything! I can't believe you haven't thought to look us up!”

Aunt Annie and Uncle Larry. Her father's brother and his wife. When Dixie was a child, they were the wealthy, important, out-of-town relatives from California. Their visits to Scottsdale were a treat. They always came bearing expensive gifts. “Auntie Antsy,” the little lisp-impaired Dixie called Annette Close. And Lawrence Close was always “Uncle Monkey,” after a stuffed toy he'd brought her.

When Dixie was around ten or so, the Close brothers and their families seemed to drift apart. The visits to Scottsdale abruptly halted. Her parents, Sheila and Jerry, began to have their own problems—money issues, relationship difficulties. If she told the truth, Dixie would have had to say that she simply hadn't thought of contacting her aunt and uncle when she arrived in Los Angeles, even though she knew they lived in the area.

Now, of course, she thought,
Why haven't I reached out? I need help and I don't know a soul in the big bad city. But I have Aunt Antsy!
Wasn't she Dixie Annette Close, named after this same woman standing in front of her? She kicked herself. “Enlist support of local relatives” should have been the first entry on her “Get Established” list.

Aunt Annie was there waiting for Dixie at the end of her shift. She picked her up in a black coupe, drove her home to the ratty little apartment in Reseda, waited in the car while she went in and changed out of her work clothes, then took her out to a Sizzler on Sherman Way. Dixie loaded up at the salad bar. The older woman only picked at her food. Aunt Annie sat and listened while her niece unburdened herself.

“The birth certificate I had turned out to be fake, can you believe that? According to the government, I was never born. I feel like I'm not even a person. I spend all this time at government agencies, and no one does a thing. I'm, like, unborn. I'm
nothing
.”

Her aunt reached out to squeeze her hand. “You're not nothing,” she said. “You're Dixie. And I don't care who your biological parents were, you're a member of the Close family.”

“Why is it so hard?”

Aunt Annie gazed through the louvered blinds out to the strip mall where the Sizzler was located. With a jolt of certainty, Dixie realized that this woman had her own problems.

“I'm sorry,” she said, blushing. “I'm only talking about myself.”

“That's okay, dear. I'm going to tell you what we'll do. First, we'll have you out to our place in Camarillo for dinner sometime. I don't like the neighborhood your apartment is in. It doesn't seem safe. Maybe, if Larry says it's okay, you could come stay with us. I would love to have someone to talk to.”

“I couldn't do that, Auntie. That would be too much. I have to make my own way.”

“Then I'm also going to ask your uncle Larry to help you. He knows about these things. He can sort it all out if anyone can. Of course he's very busy right now, he always is, working harder than ever, but he'll just have to find the time. He was with your father when they brought you home, you know.”

“He was? Then maybe he knows something! Uncle Monkey!”

Her aunt laughed. “Don't get too excited,” she cautioned.

They spoke of other things, about Jerry and Sheila, how Los Angeles was different from Phoenix, about the recent earthquake and its aftershocks. Soon enough Dixie felt the two of them running out of things to say. Her aunt paid the bill.

The drive home through the evening Valley traffic was quiet. Dixie noticed that the black coupe her aunt drove was a little dented. An old Acura. She glanced over at the odometer. The car had more than two hundred thousand miles on it. She remembered the gleaming, brand-new Cadillacs and Mercedes that Larry Close drove whenever they came to Scottsdale to visit.

Dixie had always believed that her aunt and uncle were fabulously wealthy. They carried themselves as if they were.

“He always has to be the big man,” Jerry said of his brother.

Maybe during the past ten years, when the two families hadn't been in touch, things had changed. The downturn in the economy hit everyone hard.

“All right, honey,” her aunt said, pulling up to the curb in front of Dixie's apartment. “We are going to see each other again real soon.”

“And Uncle Larry?”

“We'll try.”

She gave Dixie what seemed to be an almost desperate hug. When she sat back, her niece realized that the woman had tears in her eyes.

“Happy tears, Aunt Ansty?”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Yes, of course, happy tears.”

Dixie approached the front door of her apartment building trying to hold on to the idea that things would get better, now that she had two new allies. Her aunt gave a goodbye honk as she pulled away.

Earlier that day, Doc Strangeland had pushed a business card on her, saying that he could take her out that night to hear some music. There was a band he was thinking about putting in a movie he was producing.
Maybe give him a call,
Dixie decided. She could handle the old man well enough, if he ever got frisky on her.

The visit with her aunt, which was actually really a good development, somehow wound up making Dixie feel lonely. Going out with Strangeland would be better than sitting at home.

“So he was at Paramount this week? Is that how he said it? ‘I'm at Paramount'?”

Layla enjoyed regaling her movie-fan father with the story of her brush with celebrity at the Farmers Market. She watched him attempt not being impressed and failing at it.

“And he meets you at the Farmers Market, not Ivy or Madeo or one of those snooty upscale places. I've always heard Holt was a down-to-earth guy.”

“It's just the two of us here, you can call him Radley if you want to.”

As soon as she realized that she was staying at her dad's for dinner, Layla had gone out to the U-boat and fetched in her task-force files. Poking through them, she was a little distracted by the smell of Gene cooking steak out on the deck of the condo.

She had by now examined dozens of missing-persons reports assigned to LACTFOMEY, and had separated out a handful that, in her mind at least, seemed to be linked.

A roster of stolen girls. The thread connecting them might be broken in places, or it disappeared amid the weave, but Layla felt sure the stitching was there. Was she the only one who saw it?

A short dozen victims. Her mandate was to prevent there being any more.

She needed to find out everything she could about the girls themselves. The names provided a way forward. They represented the common link to a killer.

Sitting there on her father's couch, the smoke from the barbecue drifting in from the deck, Layla tried to focus on a specific element of the male-female dynamic. Domination and submission embedded themselves deep in human psychology. Their interplay continually cropped up in relations between men and women. No better demonstration of that state of affairs existed than the astonishing popularity of the Rose and Thorn books.

There was something secret and repressed about all this. Domination and submission seemed an ugly throwback to darker times. We were more enlightened now, weren't we? Evidently not, or a trilogy of books about a master-slave affair wouldn't be a universal bestseller among women.

Talk about an inconvenient truth. Most women—some psychologists said all women—have sexual fantasies about being overpowered. How to reconcile that fact with the equally universal revulsion triggered by sexual assault? Men victimized women to a relentless, merciless extent. Remington knew all too well the reality of the matter, since she had spent her early policing career making keep-the-peace calls in the Valley, running up against one instance of domestic violence after another.

She wondered about Martina Matindale, one of her cases in Chatsworth. The woman's ear had been torn off by her husband. Martina returned to her abuser only to have him put her into a coma with a serious beating. She came out of the hospital and went back to her beloved Robby Matindale once again. That time he finished her for good, slicing open her carotid artery with an electric carving knife that she had given him as a birthday present.

Was Martina Matindale among those one hundred percent of women who have rape fantasies? Remington never got to ask. It seemed an irrelevant question, with the wife dead and the husband doing twenty-five to life in San Quentin.

“Men and women, women and men. It will never work.” Layla had always liked that rueful Erica Jong quote. Back in the day, after addressing multiple domestic-violence cases on patrol, she had to admit the truth of the line. The sexes seemed locked in a Stone Age mind-set. The caveman still dragged the cavewoman off by the hair.

The received feminist wisdom pointed out a fundamental difference between rape fantasies and actual rape. Rape fantasies were something women could control. Rape they could not. But the whole subject made people uneasy. No one spoke about it, no one liked to confront it. The yuck factor was too strong.

Layla searched her own soul. How much did she participate in this all-too-prevalent, all-too-perverse domination-submission dynamic? As far as she could recall, she had exactly zero ravishment fantasies. Was this denial on her part? Or were the psychologists—probably all male—full of it?

During her late teenage years, when she first encountered the Rose and Thorn books, she attended Sierra Vista High School in Covina. She attracted the attention of one of the senior boys, a footballer named Colin Arness. He had a steady girlfriend, but he still dogged Layla once in a while. She recalled feeling like a deer in the headlights, as though it was impossible for her to flee from the attentions of this hunky older boy.

Colin Arness. Jesus, she hadn't thought of him in years. The sex had been nasty, brutish and short. She could hardly remember her feelings. Was Colin Arness her master, and had she been his slave? The question sounded sick and sentimental at the same time. She had submitted to the demands of a more powerful male. She couldn't recall if she had enjoyed it. At the time, enjoyment seemed almost beside the point.

“Hey there,” her father said, startling Layla out of her thoughts. “I've been calling you. I guess you've been off somewhere.”

She got up and followed Gene out to the deck, where he had set up a table for two. Steak fajita fixings were spread out in all their peppery glory.

“You should ask Radley if you could get on the Paramount lot, watch him do interiors during the
Tommy Gates
shoot.”

“Maybe I could bring along my dad.” Layla scooped up some charcoal-roasted peppers and slices of marinated steak, folding them into her tortilla.

Gene pushed the bowl of salsa and the sour cream her way. “Monaghan's got that
Priapus
epic in development, too. That's going to be huge— it's like
Avatar,
all CGI. Supposed to have taken three years just to—”

Layla held up her hand. “What?”

“What, what?”

“Monaghan's movie. What did you say it's called?”

“
Priapus
. That's the ancient god of—”

“I know what it is,” Layla said, cutting him off. She tried to dismiss as pure coincidence the fact that the name of an obscure mythological deity had cropped up twice within a few days.

Gus Monaghan was well known as a world-class horndog, party boy and hedonist. Gossip programs like
E!
loved him. He stood out even in the decadence-drenched vice dens of Hollywood. It would be perfectly natural for the guy to make a film about the Greek god of the penis.

“The
Priapus
thing is on the Paramount lot, too. You remember what Mae West said, right? ‘I'm the girl who works at Paramount all day and Fox all night!' ”

Whenever Gene told even a slightly off-color joke in front of his daughter, his face scrunched up into an apologetic wince. Normally, Layla would have laughed at the Mae West line. She had heard her father quote it before. On this particular evening, in her present mood, it didn't seem that funny.

Priapus.

Remington knew Bonnie Lareda back when she was still Bonnie McGowan, during the time the two of them were growing up together and going to some of the same schools in Covina. Lareda was always a spitfire of a girl, and developed into a fiery woman, a photographer who got famous reporting from war zones like Iraq and DR Congo. Remington had always been a little in awe of her. They ran into each other again in their adult lives when Lareda worked on a groundbreaking photo-essay documenting domestic violence.

Remington was on patrol in the Valley at the time. Somehow Lareda managed to insert herself into household after dysfunctional household, and to keep on clicking while scenes of abuse were actually going down. The shots were incredible. As an LASD rookie, Deputy Layla Remington made a cameo appearance, standing in uniform off to one side in a photo that got printed in Lareda's book,
No More
. Lareda was said to have just missed a Pulitzer with it.

Now Remington connected up with her old friend in a warehouse district near the butt end of Skid Row, downtown. The photographer had directed Remington to meet her on a certain block of Violet Street, in an area of import-export firms, produce shippers and freight companies, all early-morning businesses that went dead at night.

“I'm in a red '78 GTO.” The shiny muscle car stood out in the shabby neighborhood. Layla pulled up behind it in the U-boat, her rather battered unmarked SUV.

“Hey, girl!” Bonnie shouted at her.

Layla joined Bonnie in her vehicle. They had a good time catching up with each other, laughing about their school days. Bonnie proved to be the first person in a while who didn't want to know all about Layla's discovery of the dead movie star in Malibu. Instead, they spoke of their present-day lives in generalities.

“The Homicide Bureau, huh?” Bonnie looked impressed. “I should job-shadow you for a couple months.”

“Cop work is pure boredom, punctuated by a few seconds of raging adrenaline.”

Bonnie laughed. “War is pretty much like that all over.”

She scoped out Layla's outfit—gray slacks, yellow jersey and a light suede jacket. “Too suburban for tonight.”

They were headed to a nearby venue that billed itself as “Paddles—The Friendly S/M Club.” Night moths were attracted to the only light left burning on Violet Street.

Bonnie fished into the backseat of the GTO and pulled out a patent-leather bustier and black, elbow-length satin gloves.

“Jesus, I'm not going to wear those!”

“Sure, you are.” Bonnie retrieved a pair of stiletto heels. “We were always the same size, yeah?”

For the first time, Layla took a good look at what Bonnie was wearing. Her bomber jacket was zipped up, but her micromini and net stockings made up for it in terms of exposure. She had always been a little on the punk side, even back in high school.

“Here, look.” Bonnie got out of the car, unzipped the jacket and performed a slow turn. Her cinched leather corset communicated the message loud and clear. She looked like the classic dominatrix, only more lethal.

“Damn, Bonnie! I'll feel ridiculous.”

“They expect the whole costume.”

“Who? The bouncers?”

“The men—the men, Layla. My slaves.” She garbed Layla in the uniform of the sexual underground, including an elaborate collar with a decorative neck plate. Layla submitted, thinking about how often she and Bonnie had played dress-up as kids.

Bonnie made her leave her sidearm behind in the U-boat. “I don't take my camera, you don't take your gun.”

Layla was thus technically in violation of LASD rules, which ordained that off-duty officers carry their weapons at all times. Wearing dominatrix gear meant she was off-off duty, with maybe a few more “offs” tossed in for good measure. She stashed her Ruger in the U-boat's glove box.

Looking like a matched set of leather-clad she-wolves, the two former high schoolers marched a couple of doors down on the deserted nighttime street to the door of the club. Layla did feel ridiculous. She didn't understand how anyone could keep a straight face rigged up the way she was.

“How'd you get into this?” she asked Bonnie.

“It's the front lines, you know? That's always where I have to be. And the men, the submissives, you won't believe it. They're so
thankful
.”

The doorman at Paddles was, as the club's motto had promised, friendly enough. “Mistress Tuck,” he greeted Bonnie.

“My friend, Mistress…”

“Remington.” As soon as she said it, Layla realized that she should have used an alias.

The doorman thought it
was
an alias. “Oh, that's perfect! Just like the rifle.”

When Layla offered a bill for the twenty-dollar posted entrance charge, the doorman waved it away.

“That fee's just for men,” Bonnie explained. “Women never pay.”

Layla followed her into a darkened hallway. “I didn't tell anyone you're a cop,” Bonnie whispered. “Could be a wet blanket, yeah?”

A steady bass-and-drum beat pumped through the interior. Bonnie was welcomed with familiarity by several underworld denizens, including the club's blowsy blond owner, Lady Jane. Whole herds of cows had perished in order to furnish the leather outfits worn at the club that evening. Layla had always considered the S/M scene—its commercial side, anyway—to be more of a New York phenomenon, New York and maybe New Orleans. Yet here it was in L.A.

But there was something off-kilter about Paddles. It had the unreal flavor of a play dungeon that you might find included with a dominatrix Barbie doll kit. The warehouse interior was gloomy enough. There were suspension rigs posted at intervals, and padded cubicles lining one wall. But once you stepped outside the place you'd encounter fig palms waving in the warm Southern California breeze, and a freeway that led to the beach. The contrast was jarring.

While Bonnie—Mistress Tuck—gabbed with her friends, Layla had the chance to check out the place. A scattering of hunched, sad-looking men wandered the premises, waiting for a mistress to abuse them. Some of them were bare-chested, and most of them wore dog collars. A dominatrix thrashed a slave who crawled on all fours, pleading to be allowed to use the bathroom. The clientele flocked to witness.

It was all too…sad. Layla thought she was hallucinating when she saw a child dressed in a satin Little Red Riding Hood outfit pass in and out of view on the opposite side of the cavernous warehouse. She looked no more than six years old. Upon closer inspection, she proved to be not a child but a little person, enjoying her status as a mascot for the festivities.

Bonnie took Layla up to an office space overlooking the floor. Lady Jane served them mugs of blood-orange tea, then left them alone. They gazed down at the groups of squirming, wormlike men.

“This is it, huh?” Layla asked. “How about the opposite side of the coin? Female submissives? Male doms?”

“Whole other scene. That guy along the wall in the mask? I'd peg him as a male dominator. I noticed his leather jockstrap reads ‘U.S. Marines.' A sure tip-off.”

The bare-chested male stood alone. He wore a leather bulldog harness, some sort of camo thong with a codpiece and high-laced boots. His lucha libre mask covered his face, a black hood with red and white markings. Layla noticed a few geared-up others in the club, strapping, well-muscled males. She could not understand the dynamics at play. Were they gay? Straight? The whole arrangement seemed too strange to plumb.

“There don't seem to be any girls here,” she noted. “Not submissives, anyway.”

“A female sub comes into a place like this, there's a riot. You'd think she'd get taken apart.”

“That's what she wants, though, right?”

“You have to be in the scene pretty deep before you understand it,” Bonnie said. “I'm just beginning to get my bearings. It's very stylized—like Kabuki, almost.”

“Does anyone take it seriously?”

Bonnie laughed. “Look at you, girl, all dressed up in dominatrix leathers, asking if anybody is serious. Sure, they are. Those boys down there are serious.”

“Dead serious?”

“You mean…?”

“I'm a murder cop, Bonnie. You ever hear of anything along those lines?”

Bonnie looked away, gazing down at the action below. “Outsiders like you, when they come into a scene like this they haul along a lot of preconceptions.”

“Yeah, one of my preconceptions about humans is that they sometimes kill each other. Why do you think I asked you to bring me here? If you know anything, tell me.”

“Most sub-dom encounters use safety words.” Bonnie spoke carefully. “When the pain gets too intense for the submissives, or if the slaves feel that the scene is spiraling out of control, they call out a safety word. ‘Red' is a popular one. Say ‘red' and the clothespins come off the nipples.”

“Only sometimes, in the heat of the moment, the safety words don't work. Is that what you're saying?”

Bonnie took a sip of her blood-orange tea. “You know the Cor books?”

Remington shook her head.

“Science fiction, or fantasy. There's a whole series. In the Corean world, men are always masters and women are always slaves, or whatever terminology you want to use to talk about subs and doms. The Cor books are real popular in the S/M world.”

“So?”

“With Corean masters, there are no safety words.”

Bonnie told Layla that she had turned up hints—“Nothing definite,” she emphasized—of a sub-dom underground that was a great deal darker than any friendly local neighborhood S/M club.

“You know this town as well as I do, probably better,” Bonnie told her. “I've heard of Hollywood guys who are deep into Cor.”

“Hollywood guys.”

“Some sort of network of them is supposed to exist, or a circuit, trading girls, using them up and then recruiting more. They meet, you know, like a book club or something.”

“You have any names?” Layla asked.

“These people, they've had every experience in the known world, right? They spent half their time on yachts outside territorial waters. Orgies? Ho-hum, you know? They're jaded. They turn up their noses at vanilla. They're not even into Rocky Road anymore. They push things to the extreme.”

“I need a name, Bonnie. Something to go on.”

“And I don't have one. This is all rumor, you know, ghost stories told around a campfire to scare people. The deep reaches of the scene. What I hear is that a Corean master gets boasting privileges if he can get a slave to ask him to murder her.”

“Wow! Like, please kill me.”

“That's right. It's called the Ultimate Consummation.”

“Sick.”

“And what do you do when someone's sick? You try to heal them.”

Shaking her head, Layla gestured toward the floor of the club. “This? You consider this healing? You're heading down a total dead end, Mistress Tuck.”

“It's odd, but I think we work similar gigs, Layla.” Bonnie grabbed her friend's hand and held it. “We're both in the business of turning over rocks, aren't we? To see what's underneath. I use a camera, you use that pistol you left behind in your truck.”

Remington declined Bonnie Lareda's invitation to help make the slaves at Paddles all thankful for her attentions. She left the club and emerged onto Violet Street. The warm Southern California breeze was indeed wafting. The thing about L.A. was that it lulled you. The town never seemed dangerous, until it was. A gulf loomed between the darkness of the human heart and all that warmth and sunshine. The contrast formed a secret underpinning of the noir movies that her daddy loved.

She was the lone pedestrian on the block. She wobbled down to the U-boat on the outlandish spike heels Bonnie had lent her. Glancing around to check the emptiness of the neighborhood, she quickly unbuckled the leather bustier, stripped it off and re-dressed herself as plain old vanilla Layla. She bundled the borrowed gear into a neat package and left it atop the hood of Bonnie's GTO. She hoped it would somehow survive until Mistress Tuck retrieved it. But she could also imagine an alternative outcome, with some Skid Row bum tricked out tomorrow as a dominatrix.

Violet Street dead-ended at a set of railroad tracks beside the Los Angeles River culvert, which was near-empty with the dry season. Beyond the culvert, the towering Boyle Heights interchange coursed with a whining thrum of vehicles. The freeways in California always flowed more steadily than the rivers.

As she drove to the end of the block to turn around, the night descended into a nightmare.

A human figure reared up from the backseat of the U-boat. Remington tried to shout out, but a muscular forearm choked off her windpipe. She felt herself being pulled backward.

She thrashed wildly. Her assailant knocked away her flailing hands. Remington had neglected to remove the elaborate collar rig that Lareda had fastened onto her earlier in the evening. The hard plastic of the neck plate saved her.

“You fuck with us,” her attacker hissed in a thick male voice. “We fuck you.”

Her pistol. She had left the Ruger 9 mm in the glove box. Twisting and kicking, she managed to bust the little compartment open. The sidearm wasn't there.

The U-boat remained in gear, its progress blocked by a curb. Remington was half dragged out of her seat. She could barely reach the pedals of the vehicle. With a desperate lunge, she twisted sideways and jammed her foot on the accelerator.

The SUV bucked once, leaped the curb and rocketed forward. It smashed through a shaky chain-link that cut off access to the triple set of railroad tracks running alongside the river. Bumping and crashing across the tracks, the truck's undercarriage sent off showers of sparks. The front tires blew with twin explosions that sounded like gunshots. Another pair of bangs came as both front-seat airbags deployed.

The ride was too rough for Remington's attacker to maintain his hold. Their heads were slammed repeatedly against the U-boat's roof. Her foot slipped from the accelerator and their forward progress slowed. Fighting past the airbag, she found the pedal again.