13 Stolen Girls (16 page)

The hippies were all gone now. The neighborhood was far too pricey for anyone without a straight gig, as its tie-dyed former residents might have phrased it. The Corean master's real-estate dealings were priced out of the People's Republic of Topanga. Snooty, well-heeled motherfuckers. The fact that the road he was parked along was unpaved further enraged him. Rich folk pretending to be country.

He scoped out the target bungalow, twenty yards down on the left. The last light had winked out an hour ago. The bitch was in for the night. The whole street was crickets. No vehicles had driven by him in the past hour.

Do it
.

He knew very well whose voice that was, hissing the command into his ear. The One Who Could Not Be Refused.

He opened the car door silently and hefted himself out. When he flipped the seat forward to access the back, he forgot that the coupe's automatic seat advance would engage. The mechanical grind of the bucket seat moving sounded thunderous in the still night. Again, fury rose in him. Why couldn't things go right?

No harm, no foul. A dog barked somewhere up the hillside, that was all. He took out his tool bag and closed the car door softly.

The Corean master chose not the front entrance to the bungalow but a metal screen door off the breezeway next to the garage. The Ford pickup the woman had been driving since her SUV blew up was parked
right there
. He could slip another GPS tracker on the truck and be done with the whole business. Maybe fool with the brake lines, give her a surprise when she hit those twisty canyon roads.

That's the ticket. Just do the truck and leave. But the voice in his head kept up its hectoring routine. He hesitated. There
was
something alluring about penetrating the female detective's nest. His poisonous anger over their last encounter made him feel as though he had a score to settle.

Do it
.

The screen door to the house proved easily forced. Swinging it open produced an accordion-like wheeze, barely audible.

He stepped inside.

The place was small. How did a sheriff's detective live? The Corean master had always wanted to be a police officer, but his prison past proved problematic. He could skirt around his record to serve as an emergency or auxiliary volunteer, but the more rigorous background check required to enlist on the force itself would blow him right out of the water.

Old-timers always said they could smell cop. The interior of the bungalow had a woodsy aroma, not unpleasant. There was a real fieldstone hearth in one corner of the living room. There weren't, like, wanted posters, Sam Brownes or police insignia scattered around. Nothing spoke law.

The main living room and the kitchen were all one space. He moved toward a back hall where he knew the bedroom would be. It was approaching 2
A.M.
Or, recalling his mission mode, 0200 hours.

She'd be there. The bitch dick who had the gall to paw over their affairs. Who had claimed the sacred body as her own. She lived alone. Too stuck-up to attract a man.

How had the Manson family done their first murder? He'd boned up on it before coming. That would be cool, he decided. It would impress U.A.C. if he did it in the same way that Charlie's crew had worked theirs, forty-something years ago. Write “political piggy” on the wall in blood like they did, scare the piss-shivers out of everyone in the neighborhood.

Bobby Beausoleil and the Manson girls first cut off Hinman's ear, supposedly with a samurai sword. The Corean master didn't own a samurai sword. He had looked into buying one off the Web, but whoa, were they ever out of his price range. He brought along a fish fillet knife instead. He didn't think anyone would be able to tell the difference. One slice was as good as another.

Wake her up by doing her ear? The shock of it appealed to the Corean master. He reached in and extracted the knife from his tool bag. Put on the mask or don't put on the mask? No mask. He wasn't going to leave a live witness behind, so it wouldn't matter if she saw him or not.

He put the bag down in the hall. Carrying the knife with its blade pointed straight down and held along his right leg, he entered the bedroom and stood beside the bed. He examined the human form, indistinct in the darkness, breathing evenly. Not knowing what was going to come down on her. Sleeping Beauty, and here he was the opposite of a handsome prince. His heart swelled at her innocence.

Yet something about the woman intimidated him. She had fought like a hellcat during that catastrophe downtown. And she was a sheriff's detective. He imagined the avalanche of consequences that would bury him if he harmed her in any way. SWAT teams, police choppers, forensic scientists all over his DNA. He got a weak feeling in his groin just thinking about it.

Do it
.

Just to be safe, stab her to death first. A half-dozen shank hits to the heart,
bam bam bam,
just like they were back in the yard at Chino. Do the ear afterward.

The lady detective moaned in her sleep. Then she shot upright in bed and shouted “No!” in a bellow that echoed down the canyon.

Holy sweet Jesus it freaked him out. He staggered back from the bed. His heart was going nuclear, the voice in his head was screaming at him, but he couldn't stop himself. He fled. He scooped up the tool bag from the hall, hustled across the living room and was out the screen door and into the little breezeway before he knew what was happening.

His last vision had been of the cop flopping back down on the mattress like a corpse. So it had been, what? Only a nightmare? The One Who Would Not Be Refused whispered insistently into his ear.

Go back in there and do her
.

No way. No effin' way. He was over and out for the night. As he split, he left his little GPS present attached to the undercarriage of the bitch dick's truck.

The Porsche Spyder had headed to police auction, so Brasov commandeered a new ride from the pool of confiscated vehicles that the LASD had on hand. Remington could only laugh when Brasov pulled up outside the sheriff's substation to pick her up. The cool blue Mercedes-AMG GT S sports car was just slightly less outlandish than their previous set of wheels.

They were headed out on a canvass of local tattoo parlors. She got into the passenger seat, not arguing for the wheel this time. “Boys and their toys,” she muttered.

“What?” Brasov was all false innocence. “What does your old man drive? A farm wagon.”

“That truck is my father's pride and joy.”

“Right, right.” Brasov merged expertly into the heavy freeway traffic and headed east. “So what about your
young
man? What does he drive?”

Remington remained silent.

“Wait. You've got it going on with someone, right?”

“See, this is why I work alone.”

“What?”

“Let's keep it professional, all right?”

“Oh, come on. You, Detective Remington, are sadly out of step with the times. Everything nowadays is
Real Housewives
, gossip and spilled guts. So come on—spill.”

She gave an impatient sigh. “No. I am not seeing anyone.”

“Married to the job,” Brasov said. “One hundred percent police, a cop to the core, is that it? All right, all right, I can work with that.”

“No, that's not it.” He was only teasing her, but it was getting under her skin.

“Do I detect a crack in the façade lately? Got yourself a fancy haircut, some new threads, buff up the feminine image a little. Yeah, I feel you. Always a fine line to walk, being a police lady in the thin blue world.”

They headed into a warren of surface streets in the Woodland Hills neighborhood. There were, what? A few dozen or so tattoo studios in the Valley. They had to start somewhere.

Distinct Ink, the first one they hit, had the sleek feel of a spa. The beehive of multiple tattooing needles provided background noise. The decorating scheme was pink leather, steel and glass.

Brasov gave a mocking comment. “Look at this, all bourgeois and everything.”

“Don't call it a tattoo parlor, call it a body-art salon,” Remington said.

“Damn, I remember when tattooing used to be sleazy, had to be, like, delivered up by some gnarly biker guy with bad teeth and a bushy beard.”

“Back when you were running free in the commune at Woodstock. How old are you?”

“More ancient than you, baby girl.”

By just a few years,
Remington thought. A well-inked middle-aged woman hefted herself off a barstool in the back of the studio and approached them.

“What can I do for you, Detectives?”

“We that obvious or are you that smart?” Brasov asked her.

Remington had printed out an image of the Corean
kef
sign, the small red “k” enlarged on a plain sheet of white paper. She showed it to the woman. “Anyone come in recently asking for something like this?”

The woman—the nametag she wore identified her as “Sal”—didn't think so. “The initial K?”

“Sort of,” Remington said. “It's from the BDSM underground, a marker for a submissive.”

Sal didn't bat an eye. She took the sheet and showed it around to the artists in the salon's three tattooing stations. She came back shaking her head.

“Nada.”

“Could you contact me if anyone makes a request for it?”

“I'll take your information,” Sal said. “But I can't promise anything. We like to protect the privacy of our clients.”

“I understand, but—”

Brasov cut in. “We're with the sheriff's Homicide Bureau. We think there may be young girls getting picked off.”

Sal's eyes widened. “Really?”

Brasov went all low-voiced on her. “That information is confidential and privileged, ma'am. So let's keep it just between us, okay?”

Remington showed her the photo of Merilee Henegar.

“Well, I don't recognize her, not right off.” Sal indicated the paper with the kef sign copied onto it. “Can I keep this? I'll staple it on our bulletin board.”

She took the sheet and Remington's business card and headed into the back recesses of the salon, a woman with a mission now.

“You're going to get people freaked out,” Remington warned Brasov. “Like there's a serial killer on the hunt.”

“They should be freakin' freaked.”

Sal returned to them. “Thanks for your help,” Remington said.

“I see you're a virgin,” Sal said.

“Excuse me?”

Brasov snorted a laugh. “She means tattoowise. I think. You meant in terms of not having any ink, right?”

Sal waved her hand at the displays of tattoo designs that covered the walls of the place. “We offer virgins a ten-percent discount.”

“How does that work?” Brasov asked. “You have to examine, like, every inch of her body? Make sure she's all un-inked?”

“We take your word for it,” Sal said.

Remington and Brasov continued to make the rounds, hitting studios in a twenty-mile freeway circuit. Their stops were about evenly split between shops that were open and cooperative and those that put up a stone wall. A few owners launched into confused lectures on big government, the police state and the guarantee of free expression under the First Amendment. One of the studios, as a matter of fact, was actually called First Amendment Tattoos.

By the end of the tour, they had come up with exactly nothing. Or almost nothing. At a place called Nat's Tats, in Moorpark, an inker who said his name was Gary Gumfold took a long look at the
kef
.

“Yeah, sure, I might have done one of these. Or, actually, I didn't do one.”

Brasov, tired by then of the tattoo slog, was all over him. “What does that mean, ‘did one but didn't do one'?”

“Well, I recognize it, for sure,” Gumfold admitted.

“Was this recently?” Remington asked. She showed the guy the Merilee Henegar photo.

“Wasn't her,” Gumfold said.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure, I'm sure. This girl was about the same age, but her hair was different and—she just wasn't the same one, okay?”

Remington and Brasov exchanged a look. They were on the trail of Merilee Henegar. Now
another
girl with a
kef
turns up?

Nat's Tats had an obvious hemp smell to it. A sign behind the barber chair used for clients read,
PRESCRIPTION MARIJUANA IN USE ON PREMISES FOR HEALTH REASONS.
Gumfold went in for the long-at-the-sides-and-bald-on-the-dome haircut combination that Remington thought never really worked.

“Why don't you tell us what happened,” she said.

“It was only a few days ago, like maybe a week. Guy and girl came in, wanted something like that same design inked on her hand. I called it a ‘k,' and he said it wasn't, that it was some mystical sign or something. Whatever, right? I get everything, people wanting real crazy-assed shit. I don't judge. Custom designs like this are extra, you know?”

“So, what—you did the tat or not?” Brasov asked.

“I agreed to do it, but the guy got riled for some reason. He and his girlfriend left.”

The inker described the pair to them, the man older, maybe late forties, heavyset, bald, the girl young, around twenty, curly-haired, slight.

“I couldn't figure them as a couple, but it takes all kinds, right? She was real quiet. Nice-looking. Never said a word the whole time, maybe whispered to her man once or twice. He was definitely the asshole of the two. He wanted me to know that he knew more about tattooing than I ever would.”

Gumfold reached into a teak box on the tattoo shop's counter. “Do you mind?” he asked, firing up a small pipe without waiting for an answer. “I got a prescription for my anxiety. I love smoking weed in front of cops.”

Brasov wordlessly took the pipe out of his hand, knocked the contents out into a countertop ashtray and tossed it back into the box.

“Have some respect,” he said.

Gumfold shrugged and exhaled.

“How about Nat of Nat's Tats?” Remington asked. “The owner? Where's he? Could he have some information about who these two were?”

“Right now he's checked into the psych ward at the veterans' hospital in Oxnard.”

“The pressure of the tattoo business too much for him?”

“Something like that,” Gumfold said agreeably. “Anyway, Nat wasn't around when this couple came in.”

Remington persisted. “Tell me about the male. Did he have any tattoos? Something to identify him?”

“I'm not sure.”

“You're not sure?”

“Well, I thought I saw some sort of nasty prison ink on his chest, like, where he had his shirt open a top button or two. But I didn't get a good look.”

“Prison ink.”

“Homemade, anyway. Not professional, you know?”

Gumfold hadn't seen the tattoo clearly enough to give a description. The LAPD and the LASD shared a database of identifying tattoos, piercings and body modifications for all felons, mostly directed at known gangbangers but a fairly comprehensive statewide listing. If this mystery man who visited Nat's Tats with his young ladylove had ever been busted on a felony, his ink would be cataloged. It could be a way to ID him. But without a coherent description that avenue was a dead end.

They couldn't get much more out of Gumfold because he didn't have more to give. Remington took down the most complete description of the couple that the man's smoke-addled memory was capable of providing. They left Nat's Tats with Gumfold vowing to contact them immediately if the two ever showed up again.

“Might be nothing,” Remington said to Brasov as they drove south toward Thousand Oaks. There were a few more tattoo studios to check out.

“Right,” said Brasov.

“Could have zip to do with Merilee Henegar.”

“Just a fun couple out for an afternoon jaunt, searching for a way to celebrate their love.”

“Right.”

“We might want to file it away in the tickle file, though.”

“You know, I never really liked that term ‘tickle file,' ” Remington said. “I don't enjoy the whole idea of tickling. It always comes off as aggressive.”

“You must be a real fun girl on a Saturday night. It's physiologically impossible to be tickled by someone you don't like, did you know that?”

“Urban myth.”

“It's true. We could maybe try experimenting with it sometime.”

Remington gave him an “in your dreams” roll of her eyes, and they drove in silence for a while.

“Nat's Tats drove Nat bats,” Brasov murmured in a low singsong. “What do you think about that?”

When they asked her what was the nature of her emergency, Helen Pressberger said, “I'd like to report a missing person.” The 911 operator was patient with her. A non-emergency missing-persons report should go to the local police, he said. He gave Helen a Spokane phone number.

But when Helen called it, that was wrong, too. Lisa Pressberger had not gone missing in the Spokane area.

“What you probably need to do, ma'am, is contact the authorities down there in Los Angeles, in the jurisdiction of your daughter's last known address.” The operator worked for COPS, the “policing services” volunteer organization. He eventually came up with yet another number for Helen to call, the Missing Persons Unit at the Los Angeles Police Department.

The whole process drove her to drink. Literally. She checked in for a few days at her favorite home away from home, Four Roses Tavern. Under a brandy haze, Lisa's whereabouts didn't seem such a vital concern. Helen resurfaced from her bender, as she always did eventually, shamed and swearing that she would do better. It took her a few more days of recuperating to take up the task of locating Lisa.

Helen Pressberger knew that she wasn't the most together mom in the world. Her life was a mess. It had been that way ever since she was a teenager. She made bad choices. Poor impulse control, that's what her counselor in rehab told her. “Getting it together” was a concept that Helen always linked to tomorrow, never today.

Somewhere amid the chaos of her days, in between the meth jags, the drunks and the casual turns she took hooking at the local no-tell motel, Helen Pressberger held on to what was right. A mother didn't let her daughter go to the dogs without a fight. It was a small flame inside her, but it burned fiercely. She wanted Lisa to avoid the mistakes she had made. So she didn't quit.

Finally,
finally,
she found herself on the telephone with a female officer of the LAPD's Adult Missing Persons Unit in Los Angeles.

“I'm worried about her. I think it might be an abduction.” That was a word Helen had learned to use only recently, during her dealings with the police about her daughter's being out of touch. You don't say “kidnapped.” You say “abducted.”

“What makes you believe that, Helen?” The LAPD officer—her name was Noreen—remained reassuringly calm.

“I dunno. I just do.”

“Your daughter recently took on new employment in the Los Angeles area.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you tried contacting her place of work?”

“I don't have no number.” Helen felt like a fool. She was a bad mother, a bad mother, baaa-d. “No address, no nothing. It was called Mark Twelve, or something like that. Her boss was Larry. He recruited her over the computer.”

“I see.” Noreen sounded as though she didn't see, not really.

“We kept in touch with her phone. Now that's not answering anymore.”

Noreen asked for the cellphone number. Helen gave it to her. “It just says this number is no longer in service.”

“You last talked to Lisa when?”