13 Stolen Girls (2 page)

Dixie felt a blush creeping up on her. Her best friend, Nicole, reached over and gave her arm a squeeze. Nobody who wasn't adopted could understand what it felt like when everybody started going on like this.

But she needed to know. “What happened?” she asked Jonathan.

“Steve and her met at the food court in the Southridge Mall. At first he didn't tell his parents.”

“Who aren't his real parents,” Timmy pointed out.

Real parents
. How Dixie had come to hate that phrase. What did that make Sheila and Jerry Close, the couple who had raised her from infancy? Her “fake” parents? No, they were as real as any could be. They weren't biologically related, but so what? For Dixie, “mother” always meant Sheila, and “father” meant Jerry. She knew of no others.

Nicole, sensing what her friend was feeling, threw an arm around Dixie.

Nobody was interested anymore. They were all on to something new. They'd sucked the paltry bit of juice from Jonathan's story, and now the fickle finger of gossip pointed elsewhere. Dixie got it out of Jonathan that Steve Kurth finally did tell his mom and dad about his birth sister, and that now the two of them were all about finding their biological parents.

“What if they're, like, rich?” Jonathan wondered. But his attention wavered. He started talking to Chris about a party up in Cave Creek. “It's going to be
sick
.”

That was that. No big deal. But the incident at the Wall stuck with Dixie. She thought about it again before falling asleep that night. Where were her real parents? Were they still alive? Could she reach out to them? How would she even start?

Junior year at South High, everybody deep into college searches and future plans. Dixie was staring at a two-year program at Mesa Community. Her guidance counselor suggested that nursing was the way to go.

Now she thought she might have something to do first.

The next morning, Dixie used the get-to-work-and-school rush to drop a bomb on Sheila. “Mom, I've been thinking about tracking down my birth parents.”

Jerry overheard from the front hall and came to the kitchen doorway.

Dixie detected an extra current of tension passing between her father and mother. She had sensed it before. Was there something wrong about her adoption? Jerry and Sheila had always been prickly about it. Okay, so the topic was a difficult one. But was it more-than-ordinary difficult?

That morning she escaped the house before they could have one of their Serious Family Discussions. Dixie knew that sooner or later she'd have to confront Jerry and Sheila about the subject. This time she wasn't going to let them stop her. This time she was going to find out who she really was.

The Corean master took a break from his emergency-service work on the Malibu earthquake. He went grocery shopping and returned with his purchases to the apartment building on Jane Street.

The hallway that led to 3C exhibited the kind of banal environment he preferred. The Sheetrock walls had a knockdown finish. The rug-makers had designed the durable frieze carpet not to show stains. Fluorescent lighting rendered everything in a nicely sick shade of lime-white. He relished such places in the same way that a chameleon favors a green leaf.

The triple locks on 3C's cast-aluminum door seemed to be the only feature that set it apart from the forty-eight other apartments in the complex. The locks, plus the privacy/security film on the windows. And, yes, another oddity about 3C: the adjacent apartments, eight in all, had been left vacant. Because sound—weeping, moaning, screaming—travels.

Once inside, the Corean master set his groceries on the kitchen counter. Recently, he had resolved to treat his body better. No more of the sugar-and-fat junk food on which he had gorged in the past. The paper bag from the local Food Depot spilled over with produce, tomatoes, plums, Romaine lettuce. The bread was whole grain.

He felt a little impatient with himself, since he had often embarked on new healthy diets before, only to see the fruits and vegetables he bought rot in the refrigerator. This time would be different.

The apartment carried over the predictable decorating themes of the hall, with more white drywall, more industrial carpet, more innocuous lighting fixtures. The place barely looked lived in. Which made sense, since no one really did. Apartment 3C was just one of the Corean master's many apartments scattered around the Valley suburbs of Reseda, Canoga Park and Woodland Hills, California, all communities that were just over the foothills from his Malibu ranch.

Building management, the Corean master thought, not for the first time, represented the perfect sideline for a man of his interests. He had his fingers in a lot of pies, but among his numerous business perks one of the most useful, he felt, was his ability to gain access to empty apartments all across the area's heavily developed suburban landscape.

Partially visible through the open door of the first bedroom, his current slave was splayed out in a special rig of the master's own devising. He had not only drawn the plans for it but had fabricated the device himself. The circular steel hoop had a radius of nine feet, suspended within a sturdy frame, which was anchor-bolted to the floor, wall and ceiling.

The master had fastened his unclothed, blindfolded and gagged submissive to the steel hoop by means of fur-lined leather cuffs and lightweight aluminum chains. The hoop rotated within the frame on industrial-strength ball bearings, providing all-direction access. In his magnificent, masterful generosity, he had allowed the slave to remain upright when he left for work and shopping, its arms secured at the ten and two o'clock positions, legs at seven and five.

Through his angled view of the bedroom, cut off and limited by the doorframe, the master saw that its thin, bony body had sagged a bit within the rig. One reason he liked this slave was that it had gone through some sort of auto accident and its skin was covered over with surgical scars.

Now it made no sound. He wondered if it might have fallen into an exhausted sleep.

He looked more closely.

Something was wrong.

Disliking the cheap orange ball gags sold in sex shops, the Corean master had painstakingly fashioned one himself, using an ivory death's-head originally intended as a custom shift knob for a manual automobile transmission. It wasn't real ivory, of course, just plastic, but it looked fierce and served its purpose.

Usually he would hear the thin wheeze of ball-gag-obstructed breath from his slave. He heard nothing.

A squeeze of fear nearly took his own breath away. Something had happened while he was gone. He hated not being in control. Stress stressed him out.

So, okay. No need to get upset. Just breathe. Of all the activities in the world, what worked to soothe him most? Why, the same thrill available right there, with the slave behind door number one. They were headed together toward the Ultimate Consumation.

Eat, shower, gear up, then stride in and wake it up with a good, furious twirl of the hoop. Rotate it long enough, fast enough, and it lost all sense of direction, of time, all sense of itself, really. There was no danger that it would lose its lunch, since he hadn't fed it for days.

The master removed his T-shirt as he strode down the hall. He would put on his bulldog harness and his U.S. Marines jockstrap. He wanted the slave to see him in his full Corean regalia when it woke up. But as he passed the bedroom the sagging posture of the slave struck him once again.

Now real panic seized him.

He entered the bedroom, crossed to the hoop and grabbed the slave by the jaw, pulling its head upward. But his hand jerked away as if he had touched a hot stove.

The skin was cold and clammy, the body limp. The slave was gone.

The Corean master's stunned surprise was immediately overwhelmed by rage. She had cheated him, the little bitch! The horror of what had happened stalled out his mind. She had gained the upper hand. Somehow, the slave had proved the master.

He had been so careful, so meticulous. What had gone wrong?

He reached out a trembling hand, extending two fingers, middle and fore, to feel her neck for a pulse. Nothing. It was really true.

“Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” he barked.

Though he could hardly think, he slowly grasped what had happened. She had worked her head up through the restraints. It must have been an agonizing process. The head harness was cinched tight. But somehow she had gotten it so that one leather strap circled her neck.

Then the girl had strangled herself.

Strangled herself
. He should never have left the bitch alone.

The Corean master considered himself something of an anatomical expert. He understood that normally it was a physical impossibility for a human being to self-asphyxiate. Yes, one can hang oneself, that happened all the time. That was gravity doing the job. But it wasn't what had occurred here. There was plenty of give in the restraint strap. It was sized for a head and hung loosely around the throat.

This creature, this rancid little whore, this bound-and-gagged swindler had accomplished an unachievable feat. She had pushed her windpipe against the strap and held it there long enough to die.

It was an act of
defiance
.

The Corean master tried to remember her name, her real name, not her slave name. Marjorie? MaryAnn? Something with an “M.”

An ugly, weak feeling took over his groin, familiar in his youth but since then exiled from his life by sheer determination. He felt his member shrivel. She had robbed him of his manhood.

After he went to the toilet and vomited, he returned to the kitchen. He intentionally avoided glancing into the first bedroom as he passed. Let her rot. He opened the refrigerator and took out one of the peach wine coolers that he so loved.

He was back to square one. He would have to start again. Again, again, again. So many do-overs!

The Corean master made a promise to himself. He would find the perfect one. He would finally accomplish what he had been put on earth to do.

He would create his masterpiece.

For a serious stretch of time, Layla Remington was the only soul on earth who knew that the remains of Tarin Mistry had at last been located. Standing alongside the girl's busted-open barrel tomb, the detective hesitated. The chaos of the earthquake emergency died away, the sirens and the beat of helicopter rotors faded.

Remington's duty was clear. Establish a perimeter, alert her superiors in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, bring in the Crime Analysis Unit. Set the wheels in motion. What gripped her instead was a fierce protective instinct. She wanted to shield the poor fallen sparrow she had discovered, alone and forsaken, dry with death. The thought came to Remington that it might be better to bring in a backhoe and re-bury the damned barrel, to save Tarin Mistry from all the further indignities that were about to descend on her.

Cindy the H.R.D. dog lay panting amid the dirt and debris at Remington's feet. She knelt down and stroked the beagle's silky ears.

“Such a good girl,” Remington murmured. Cindy, on the job, ignored the attention and remained focused on the barrel.

Deputy Paz Tejeda huffed up the slope and stopped a few yards below Remington. “What have we got?” she asked.

“I'm going to declare this an active crime scene. We need to limit access. Who's down below that could help?” Remington waved a hand toward the collapsed parking structure and the emergency crews gathered along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Tejeda frowned. “There's supposed to be more personnel coming, but right now I think they're stretched pretty thin.”

The handler summoned her canine charge. Cindy rose and went to her, with reluctance, as far as Remington could read feelings in a dog. Tejeda attached the leash to Cindy's collar.

“What have we got?” the deputy asked again.

Tarin Mistry
, Remington wanted to say.
The body of America's most famous missing person is in that steel drum
. But she couldn't bring herself to break the spell.

“I don't suppose I could call for a no-fly zone overhead here,” Remington mused.

The sky above the disaster scene was alive with activity. Army choppers buzzed by constantly, and a trio of news choppers hung motionless farther off, documenting the earthquake aftermath. Remington wanted to shelter the immediate area from the prying eyes of the media. What she really needed was one of the department's tent units, have them set up and block the view.

A shout came from the collapsed buildings below them. A deputy wearing the dun-colored uniform of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department gave a wide-swing arm signal and shouted again. The words were unintelligible at this distance.

“I've got to bring Cindy…” Tejeda trailed off. Remington could tell the deputy was anxious to get back to searching the rubble of the apartment building for the quick and the dead.
Yes!
Remington thought.
Go about your business
. The truth was that she wished to be alone with the dead girl.

Tejeda moved back down the slope, taking Cindy with her. She promised to send up reinforcements.

Remington remained posted beside the barrel in the middle of the landslide. She watched the scramble of emergency crews along the Pacific Coast Highway. Sunlight played across the expanse of ocean. Death dims the pretty day.

Call it in,
police protocol ordered her. The requirements of duty, plus the dictates of responsibility that had been trained into Remington even as a child, agreed. Common sense seconded the motion.

Did Pandora hesitate before she sprang open her box of evils? Remington felt as though everything bad about the modern world would be unleashed the instant she contacted dispatch: the celebrity frenzy, the gossip and exploitation and the cruel jokes about dead girls in barrels.

Call it in
.

Instead, she got out her cell and punched the first number on her speed dial.

“ 'Lo, darling,” answered a soothing male voice.

Layla explained where she was and what she had discovered. She pronounced the name of the deceased.

The man on the other end of the line went quiet. Then he said, “Did you ever see her little movie?”

“Wasn't so little.”

“No, it wasn't. I'd have to put it in my top ten.”

“All time?”

“Well, of the last decade or so. Tarin Mistry herself is in my all-time top ten for sure.”

“You know women don't normally make top ten lists, right? It's a male thing, very hierarchy oriented.”

“Maybe I'll watch her again tonight. I've got the movie on Blu-ray somewhere— I can follow along with the commentary.”

“I don't think I could stand seeing it right now. Too sad.”

Neither of them spoke for a while, letting the soundtrack of far-off emergency sirens along the PCH take over.

“They going to let you keep the case?”

“I don't know.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she answered, hating the way the desolation was working on her.

He said, “I'm finding it hard to grasp the fact that you're the one who finally found her.”

“Well, actually, Cindy the H.R.D. dog found her.”

“Right. Did I ever tell you what happened in New Orleans during Katrina?”

Remington recalled the story well, but didn't stop him from telling it again.

“So after the big hurricane there were a lot of dog packs, abandoned pets, roaming the whole city, especially the Ninth Ward. Nobody around to feed them kibble, so they had to fend for themselves.”

“Poor things.”

“Which breed of dog do you think was alpha in those packs? You'd guess, you know, maybe pit bulls, Rottweilers, German shepherds, something big and aggressive like that, right?”

Layla knew she should ring off and attend to business, but she let him go on.

“It was always a beagle at the head of the pack, every time, all the other dogs following. You know why?”

“Because they have the nose,” she said.

“Right. They could smell dinner better than any other breed.”

“They're good dogs.” She told him about the pooch's nose-blowing routine. He didn't laugh, but she could tell that he was amused.

“Of course,” he went on, “word in the Big Easy had it that a few of those dinners the beagles were sniffing out were the corpses of drowned humans—some of them probably their former owners. But it doesn't take away from what a dog like that can do.”

“All right, on that note, Dad, I have to go.”

“You up there alone with her?” Gene Remington asked.

“Yes.”

“Say an Ave over the girl for me.”

Layla told him she would. Then she rang off and got on her two-way, putting a call through to the sheriff's department dispatch.

Tarin Mistry became famous only after she vanished at age nineteen. Before that, she had been merely one among the faceless hordes of wannabe actors that infested Los Angeles. Mistry's celebrity came on her slowly, in absentia. A month before she disappeared, she had wrapped an independent movie called
Joshua Tree
. Mistry played the lead, Michelle Nunn, a Mormon bride of a Marine corporal on tour in Afghanistan.

The shoot, in the desert around Twentynine Palms, had been chaotic. There were budget problems. No one involved seemed to have any faith in the project. A location scout was bitten by a Mojave rattlesnake and nearly died. The director, George Dannemoor, got into a fistfight on set with a teamster.

Principal photography staggered to a close. The disheartened cast and crew scattered. In a marketplace flooded with product,
Joshua Tree
seemed destined to sink beneath the waves.

But something terrifically strange happened.
Joshua Tree
reached the public by way of the oddest release ever in the history of Hollywood.

It wasn't a release, really, it was an anti-release. In an age overwhelmed by digital chatter, the film did not have a dedicated website of its own, or a Facebook page. Nobody blogged or tweeted or Instagrammed about it.
Joshua Tree
had zero presence in social media. It was never submitted to film festivals.

Normally, such a state of affairs would amount to a death sentence for any movie, especially an indie. But Marc Lee Hughes, the twenty-four-year-old producer whose baby it was, went the other way. Even with angry creditors on his case, Hughes was patient, tireless and canny. He set up screenings and carefully chose who first laid eyeballs on the film. He “curated” his audiences, as he later put it. In every city where
Joshua Tree
had a screening, Hughes managed to assemble a few hundred vital souls, tastemakers, “big-mouths,” as the industry called them. He did it without anyone knowing what was going on.

No one received invites. Somehow, through various chains of events, Hughes's big-mouths simply found themselves showing up at a rented movie theater for a film they knew nothing about. Chrissie Lembo-Dula, the
New Yorker
critic, did not come to the screening professionally but was accompanying an old childhood friend on an evening out. The lights went down, the reels unspooled. There was no credit roll, not even a title card, no names associated with the movie at all. Audiences emerged from the screenings crazed to know more.

Marketing departments at business schools all across the country are still studying Hughes's methods. Amid a deafeningly noisy media culture, the producer managed to come up with a cunning publicity strategy. Total silence.

Joshua Tree
became the little movie that could. Hughes's stealth screenings rose to the level of a phenomenon. Everybody wanted in. Rumor and word of mouth inflated the
Joshua Tree
bubble until it grew larger than studio releases with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets.

Of course, it would all have been for naught if there hadn't been something extraordinarily good on the screen. Somehow, despite the tortured, ramshackle process that had created it,
Joshua Tree
turned out to be a masterpiece. People might have staggered out of the theaters wondering
What the hell?
and
Who the hell?
But a good number of them had tears in their eyes. The story of a lonely military wife who slowly became mentally unhinged claimed its place among the greatest psychological dramas in modern cinema.

Hughes finally struck a deal with Paramount for proper distribution. After that, it was like a cascade.
Joshua Tree
took over America.

In the great tradition of
Citizen Kane,
the movie got skunked at the Oscars, losing out for best picture to a lightweight Sandra Bullock weepie. But in what would be hailed as the “
Joshua Tree
effect,” everyone involved in the project turned golden. Not just George Dannemoor, the director—who in the years after the film's release heard his name compared to Spielberg's—but also the screenwriters, the cinematographer, even the art director. The male lead, Radley Holt, rose to be one of the top-grossing stars in movies.

What of the girl at the center of it? For
Joshua Tree
was Tarin Mistry's film all the way. Her acting had a freshness, depth and delicacy that seemed impossible to pin down. She tore out her heart and wrung it dry over the audience. Like all great performances, hers conveyed a vision of what it means to be truly alive. Men and women alike fell in love. On a less grandiose level, Tarin's look in
Joshua Tree
spawned fashion trends and a hairstyle craze.

“Every second she's not on-screen is wasted,” wrote the critic Jason Thorell, riffing on something Eddie Fisher once said about Liz Taylor: “Every second she's out of the bedroom is wasted.” Ebert waxed poetic: “What is there not of this girl that is maddening to everyone in the world?”

Best of all, the icing on the celebrity cake, Tarin Mistry was gone. She was the original gone girl. When
Joshua Tree
went wide, the American public clamored for its new crush. After people discovered that they couldn't have her, their love turned desperate, tragic, obsessive. Tarin Mistry dream clubs formed, with membership supposedly limited to those whom the girl had visited, succubus style, in their sleep.

She had recorded a song for the film's soundtrack, a breathy number called “Me Without You,” but known universally as Tarin's Song. She sounded like Marilyn singing to the president, only mournful. When her celebrity developed, fans cooked up multiple YouTube music videos. The one with the most hits matched the song with scenes of a dreamy late-night drive, with Mistry's face fading in and out in the rearview.

Baby I don't know me without you

No I don't know me without you

What was Tarin like? Everyone wanted to know. George Dannemoor characterized her as a frightened doe, ready to spook at any moment. Radley Holt, her co-star, recalled a memorably intense style of kissing.

Police and journalists searched out the details of Mistry's life and her disappearance. Bethlehem Gunion was born to a long-gone father and a half-crazed mother. She spent her childhood in the outback along the Colorado-Arizona border, drifting from one religious commune to the next. There were ugly hints of pastoral abuse. No family photos existed. The mother had burned them as heretical. Beth escaped at age seventeen to wash up in L.A., its shores already heaped with the bleached skeletons of countless aspiring actresses.

About her disappearance, the facts were thin. She had only recently adopted her stage name. She lived without roommates in a tiny studio apartment in Laurel Canyon. An oddity among Angelenos, she didn't drive. No real friends surfaced. Co-workers at the data-collection center where she eked out a living struggled to recall the girl. Two months after
Joshua Tree
wrapped, all traces of Tarin Mistry had…evaporated.

Just another lost soul in America. The missing-persons effort materialized only later, when her celebrity demanded it. The trail had long since gone cold. The irony of this state of affairs—a girl unmissed until she became a star—played off the doomed romanticism of her performance in
Joshua Tree
. The mystery of Tarin Mistry became a thing. People wondered. They worried. They longed. How can you feel cheated of something you didn't know you had?