13 Stolen Girls (21 page)

Her reward was a gush of water.

Splish splash! Hey! What's going on? Where's my rubber ducky?

Working along the rim, Remington pushed and pried, pushed and pried. The incoming flood soon made the task impossible. She had to wait for an agonizing moment while the water completely filled the barrel. She took a last gulp of fetid air.

Then she went under.

Glub glub! Glub gurgle glub!

Laboring desperately, her lungs exploding, she pried at the barrel lid. The bone broke, then broke again, until just a splintered stub remained in her hand. When the gap opened to a foot wide, then another foot more, she pushed herself through. The clawlike steel tabs of the rim raked her skin. In Remington's fevered thoughts, her barrel mate clutched at her ankle as she escaped.

Don't leave me.

But she did. As her vision went dim from lack of oxygen, Remington kicked upward. A second later she broke the surface, gasping, and took in a great, glorious lungful of sweet, beautiful nighttime air.

Alive.

For now.

Remington told herself to wait, to tread water, to remain hidden in the darkness of the lake. Larry Close considered her dead. Sam Brasov would come.

Up the hill, she could see the outline of the house. Light from the bungalow's windows reflected on the dirty, oily sheen that had spread itself around her. Body fluids and gunk from the barrel stained the water's surface.

She was unarmed. She had a terror of Larry Close returning. She could not suppress her retching coughs. Moving slowly, she paddled toward shore. The bondage rig Close had dressed her in trailed its leather straps in her wake. Her bare feet scraped on the bottom, a jumble of rocks slippery with algae.

She saw the dim, blocky shapes of other lake houses in the hills across the water. She decided that her best move would be to work her way along the shore, remaining half submerged until she was well clear of the Close ranch. But the footing proved too difficult.

Instead, she heaved herself onto the narrow strip of pebbled beach and lay there, gasping for breath. When Remington attempted to stop retching, she began sobbing. The surrounding silence magnified every noise she made.

Crawling along the shore, her progress was slow. That was okay. If it took an hour, she would damn well make it over to one of the neighboring houses, get on the horn, call the law-enforcement furies down upon the psychopath Larry Close.

A muffled whimper sounded in the darkness. Remington froze. A dog. Of course the man would have hounds on his property. She imagined Rottweilers, mastiffs, Baskerville-size monsters.

But, no. The whimpering was human. And female.

“Mmmee-mmeee. Mmmee-mmee.” Despite the indistinct syllables, the far-off whimpering managed to communicate some meaning. Remington's exhausted, abraded soul heard it as a kind of pleading.

Do not investigate,
she told herself. Her first priority had to be alerting the LASD. Let a sheriff's cohort find the source of the whimper. She was in no shape to rescue anyone.

Help me.
“Mmmmm-eeeee.”

Remington struggled to her feet. She searched among the shoreline thickets for a branch large enough to serve as a weapon. There was only scrub oak. She pried up a rock from the beach instead. Scrabbling around, she discovered a path that led off into a small draw at the foot of the slope.

I found myself in a dark wood…

Her cop sense screamed at her not to go it alone, to get the hell out, flee the scene, summon backup. She moved forward anyway, still stench-ridden and greasy from her time in the barrel, her rock gripped pathetically in her hand.

The journey she first embarked upon beside a busted-open barrel on an earthquake-ravaged Malibu hillside had finally led her here.

Finish it.

Lodged amid the underbrush in the draw was a small teardrop trailer not much bigger than a child's playhouse. No light spilled from its interior, but the pleading groan came from inside. Could it be some sort of trick? Larry Close crouched there, waiting in ambush. The moaning sound was simply a recording, a decoy to draw her in.

Holding her rock at the ready, Remington pushed open the door. Beyond the threshold, the space was blank as a cave. The moaning ceased abruptly. Blind, she edged her way forward. A string brushed her face and she flinched away. Realizing that it was a light cord, she reached out and pulled.

After absolute darkness, the stark-white blaze that lit the interior was painful. Remington stumbled back a step. The whimper transformed into a muffled shriek of fear.

“Ahhh-ahhh-ahhh!”

Remington stood inside a sado-masochistic hellhole. Her mind refused to take it all in, the piles of sex toys, the whips, the stainless-steel exam table centered in the space.

She was distracted by the captive.

Suspended above the exam table in an elaborate suspension rig, the hooded female struggled and jerked as if experiencing a seizure. Remington's confusion and exhaustion dropped away. She lunged forward and embraced the flailing girl.

“It's all right, honey, it's all right.”

At the sound of a soothing female voice the girl stilled.

The suspension rig proved fiendish. Remington's fingers were raw and bleeding from her struggle in the barrel. She seemed unable to solve the rig's intricacies. The girl started to whimper again. Amid the strange clutter of the trailer, Remington discovered a huge, bowie-size knife. She cut away the leather straps, easing the bound-and-trussed form down onto the exam table. Then she stripped off the hood and tore away the ball gag that had muffled the girl's cries.

“He's coming, he's coming, he's coming.” The girl was panting, lost in panic. “Uncle Monkey!” she shrieked, babbling incoherently.

“I'm a sheriff's detective. My name is Layla Remington. I won't let anyone hurt you.”

Remington had her own doubts about what she was saying. The picture she made didn't exactly inspire confidence. Her half-stripped-away black leather corset reeked of death. She wore ankle cuffs. Her hair still had clots of rotted flesh tangled in it.

Even with all that, the girl clambered into Remington's arms. She was young, still in her teens. She, too, was encased in a leather outfit. Evidence of the treatment she had endured showed in bright-red welts raised on both her arms.

She clutched at Remington like a lifeline. “We have to…get out.”

“I know, honey.”

“He's coming. Uncle Monkey…”

“It's okay, I know, I'm a cop, I'm here, I won't let him.” The girl was right. They had to get the hell out of there. Remington still clutched the knife. But in the darkness outside the little trailer the threat seemed to lurk everywhere.

She helped the girl off the exam table.

“What's your name, honey?”

“Dixie. Dixie Annette Close. I mean, Victoria. Victoria Michelle Combe.”

Which one was it? The girl's poor mind had evidently gotten scrambled.

“All right, Dixie. I'm going to go out there—”

“Don't leave me!” Pleading like Remington's dead twin in the barrel.

“I have to make sure it's safe, make sure no one is there.”

“No! We go together! I called you! I called you!”

Still not making sense.

“I spoke to you on the phone! Detective Remington. Detective Layla Remington.”

“That's right, Dixie. Right now, I'm going to go, but I'll come right back, okay?”

“No!”

“It's all right. I'll leave you the knife, okay? How's that?”

Remington placed the blade on the exam table next to the addled girl.

“You take it.” Dixie held the knife out to her. “He's coming.”

“Okay.” Remington accepted the blade. She stepped back toward the door of the trailer. She realized that she was framed by the light.

“I'm going to switch this off, all right?”

“No!”

“We don't want him to see us, do we?”

Dixie shook her head numbly. “He's a devil. He can see in the night.”

“No, he can't.” Remington pulled the light chord and plunged them both into darkness.

The black was total. Remington groped her way to the door and stepped outside.

Two things happened at once. A figure rushed at her along the path.

“Little bitch!” it snarled.

And the trailer's interior light switched back on, spilling out to shine upon Larry Close. He stood paralyzed, staring at Remington as if he were seeing a ghost.

“You're dead,” he muttered. Then he spun away, plunging back along the path the way he had come.

Remington dived at him, stabbing with the big-bladed knife. She missed the torso but managed to slash the back of his right leg. Close's momentum carried him a few feet. Then he staggered and fell, his heel tendon severed. Blood poured from the wound. Remington was on him, kneeing him in the back, putting all her weight into it.

“Police!” she shouted.

“Stop! I'm bleeding, bitch! You cut me!” Thrashing below her.

“Larry Close,” Remington hissed. She pressed the blade against the man's neck. “I'm arresting you on suspicion of murder, kidnapping and assault.”

She called into the trailer. “Hello?” She couldn't immediately recall the girl's name. “Um, Dixie? Bring a pair of those handcuffs out, will you?”

The girl emerged, the light of the interior showing her in silhouette. The leather bondage gear hung half off her just as Remington's did.

It took a split second for Remington to realize that the black metal Dixie held was not a pair of handcuffs. It was a handgun. More than that, it was Remington's very own sidearm, the Ruger taken the night that the U-boat blew up.

“Honey?” she managed. She rose to her feet. Her crippled prisoner began to crawl away.

“Dixie? Give me the weapon, please. Dixie?”

Something blank and robotic about the girl's eyes. They locked onto the bleeding man squirming down the path a few feet away. Dixie stepped past Remington as though she weren't there. Remington had the bloody knife in her hand. She wasn't thinking about using it against Dixie. But she reached out, trying to stop her.

Dixie shrugged Remington away. Then she leveled the pistol and shot Larry Close in the back.

The victim gave a little shriek. “You hit me!”

Dixie strode forward and began yelling at him. “What did you do to my mother? What'd you do to my motherfucking mother, you motherfucker?”

Then she shot Close again. Grimly yelling, “Mother! Mother! Mother!” she blasted down at the man's torso, his groin, finally the base of his skull.

She didn't quit until the pistol clicked empty.

The stench remained in Remington's nostrils forever afterward.

Rotted amino-acid particles from the dead girl with whom she had shared the barrel, odorant molecules known by such evocative names as cadaverine and putrescine, could be thoroughly scrubbed from Remington's body. At the hospital, she was washed and alcohol-swabbed and decontaminated within an inch of her life. Nurses repeatedly laved her nasal passages with a saline solution.

But sense memory dictated that the stink of the barrel stayed with her. In a phenomenon called parosmia, Remington would get a foul whiff of the past, sensing something that was no longer there.

It was true what they said about death. Once you smell it, you never forget it.

The immediate cascade of events after the killing of Larry Close lasted through Sunday night and well into the next week.

Sam Brasov had finally showed at the Close ranch. When he arrived, the barn and the outbuilding office were both on fire. Flames spread through the compound and took the bungalow, too. Only the little Toy Box trailer in the draw down below remained intact.

In Brasov's wake came the deluge: fire trucks, first responders, EMT personnel, deputies, sergeants, commanders, the sheriff himself. The whole area lit up with the strobing bubble lights atop emergency vehicles.

A police roadblock kept the media at bay and spectators out of the neighborhood. But news helicopters hovered above the ranch and, yes, a small camera drone from a crime website buzzed by. The CAU team from the sheriff's department haunted the ranch property, a crew of Tyvek ghosts, augmented later on by another forensic team from the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.

The body count rose. Six corpses had been recovered from the line of steel drums retrieved from the ashes of the barn. Three DOAs were dragged from Malibu Lake encased in chicken wire, including the latest victim, an eighteen-year-old missing from Spokane named Lisa Pressberger. Two more of Larry Close's custom body-barrel tombs turned up in a storage locker he rented off the freeway in Camarillo.

The fire at the ranch had destroyed a lot of evidence. Given the degradation of the deceased, identification proved an arduous process. From dental records, the pathologists at the coroner's office ID'd the oldest corpse, Elizabeth Combe. The techs determined that Remington's barrel mate was Aileen Knolf. She had disappeared six months ago from a Santa Monica park. This was the same missing girl who had triggered Big Dada's ITVO alert on Larry Close.

Remington was long gone from the scene before all the bodies were recovered and processed. The first responders raced her and Dixie Close to Northridge Medical Center. The hospital kept Remington in a nice suite. An RN shot her up with antibiotics.

“You've been exposed to some pretty nasty stuff,” the nurse said.

Came a parade of doctors, all of whom enjoyed shining bright lights in Remington's eyes. They put her through a battery of tests. One involved following a
Shrek
video as it darted around on a TV monitor, a method of checking to see if both of her eyes were working in sync.

Every once in a while Remington dry-heaved with the memory of what had happened.

The blow to the back of her neck had caused no permanent damage. As the swelling went down the feeling in her extremities came back, with an uncomfortable stinging sensation that resembled an attack by hot needles.

She had visitors.

“You busted out,” Layla said to her dad when he walked into her hospital room. “How'd you escape?”

Gene planted a kiss on her forehead. “They can't keep a man like me inside.”

“I missed your bail hearing.”

“Yeah, I wondered,” he said. “I thought maybe you got caught up in something.” He had a hard time matching her offhand tone with tears in his eyes.

When she felt up to it, which meant late Monday afternoon, the endless debriefing interviews began. Sam Brasov sat in on the first one for moral support. A trio of detectives from the sheriff's Homicide Bureau led the charge, all longtime veterans of the murder squad, all men.

“You say the offender advanced upon the girl,” said Mark Skolnik, the lead detective on the debriefing team. “Did he have a weapon? How far a distance separated them?”

Skolnik wore one of the well-brushed walrus mustaches that the department issued along with gold shields, but he was serious and civil, and Remington didn't mind him much.

“They grappled,” she told him. To protect Dixie Close, Remington had to tweak her recounting of the events in question. The mental effort cost her. “She was in danger of being overpowered. The weapon went off as they struggled for it. I had the blade in my hand.”

“The gunshot wounds indicate that the perpetrator was shot in the back.”

“He must have twisted around in the struggle. I can't recall exactly. It was dark.”

“And the weapon was your own Ruger nine-millimeter, stolen from your vehicle the night”—Skolnik referred to his notes—“the night you were attacked on Violet Street?”

“My department-issued LC9, yes, sir.”

“Did you recognize it as your personal sidearm?”

“The situation was far too confused for that.”

“The uncle outweighed the niece by some fifty pounds. Are you saying that she fought him off and gained control of the weapon?”

“The pistol discharged in the struggle. He was struck and collapsed.”

“And she kept firing.” Skolnik made it a statement rather than a question.

Detective Nathan George, sitting to the right of Skolnik as they faced Remington, raised his gaze from the incident report he was studying. “Lawrence Close was struck by eight shots. Your Ruger had a seven-plus-one box magazine. So Miss Close effectively discharged the weapon fully.”

Brasov broke in. “Look, she told you already, the kid was totally freaking out. Think of where she was, in an S & M den, for Chrissakes!”

“Detective Brasov, you've been told—”

“Plus you know what the action is like on those Rugers,” Brasov said, talking over Skolnik. “They overtravel and stack at the rear of the trigger guard. You pull and keep pulling.”

Remington had to settle him down. “Brasov…”

“Okay, okay, I'll shut up.”

Skolnick addressed Remington's partner. “You're present as a courtesy, Detective, with the agreement that you observe and don't speak.”

Brasov nodded. “I was just saying…” he muttered under his breath.

Pleading exhaustion, Remington ended the session as soon as she could and got rid of the Bureau boys. The interview had covered the scene in the Toy Box trailer, but Remington hadn't spoken much about what had happened just before, in the ranch house. One aspect of the initial attack that had knocked her unconscious bothered her. The memory of it was still unclear, but a question was starting to burn through the haze.

Larry Close had stood ten feet away from her, searching among his tools. That's how she was remembering it now. So who had clubbed her from the back?

She and Brasov sat together in the darkened hospital room, him not speaking, allowing her to rest.

“There were two of them,” Remington said, after letting a quarter of an hour go by in silence.

Brasov nodded lazily, coming out of a doze himself. “Yeah, I was thinking that might be the case.”

“Should I…?”

“What, air it out with them?” He meant the LASD debriefing team.

“Don't you think?”

“It could be important.”

Who was suspect number two? Maybe Remington was just confused. “The wife?”

Annette Close had been taken into custody as a material witness.

“Or Gene's guy,” Brasov said. Remington's father had told Brasov about the conversation he'd had with a strange, aggressive con in the seg unit at Metro the afternoon before. He hadn't mentioned it to his daughter, believing her to be in too fragile a state for serious police business. But Brasov gave Remington a thumbnail.

“I got city R & I looking into it,” he said, referring to the Records and Identification Division of the LAPD.

“Gus Monaghan,” suggested Remington.

Brasov laughed. But Remington was serious. Brooding about it over the period of her recovery, she realized that the producer represented a missing link. A vital connection in the case floated just beyond her grasp. Salting her dad's condo storage locker with stolen police evidence, faking security footage—such absurd follies seemed to pale beside all the dead women being turned up. But what if there was some deeper correlation there?

Another thing bothered her. Larry Close had been in prison on a larceny rap when Tarin Mistry disappeared. Of all the victims in all the steel drums scattered over Southern California, there was no possible way the actress's murder could be pinned on Close. That stubborn fact formed a knot in a tangle that was otherwise gradually unraveling.

It meant there was another shadow, some indistinct presence moving in the background of the Stolen Girls case. Remington beckoned to the figure in her mind. But the dark specter refused to step forward into the light.

“You want me to call Skolnik and bring the boys back in?”

“Let me think things over a bit first.”

Dixie Close had lawyered up. Remington knew the girl had little money. She reached out to Rick Stills and asked him to take her on pro bono.

“Big, high-profile case, in all the newspapers,” she coaxed, phoning him from her hospital room. “It'd be good for the firm.”

“You don't have to sell me,” Stills said. “I'll do it as a favor to my favorite detective.”

“You mean Walter Rack?”

Stills laughed and took the girl's number. Remington told him that Dixie had been too freaked out to go to work. She had been hiding out in her apartment. They rang off.

“He's so good-looking,” Dixie reported to her the next day, calling to thank Remington for connecting her with Stills.

Remington was restless. They were getting ready to release her from the hospital. Her dad wanted to pick her up. He was staying at her Topanga bungalow. Gene's lawyer had told him to keep away from the Glendale condo for a while, see how the stolen-evidence case against him shook out.

Brasov showed up at the hospital instead. “I come bearing a gift, only I guess it's yours to begin with, so I'm just bringing it to its true owner.”

He presented her with the Ruger LC9. “Like a salmon swimming upstream, it just wanted to return home.”

The pistol had come back to Remington after its temporary residency with Lawrence Close and its lethal, blazingly brief work in the hands of Close's niece, Dixie.

Brasov flopped down in one of the hospital suite's generic easy chairs. “You holding up?”

“Something like this happens to you, everyone keeps asking you how you're doing,” Remington said. “You get a little tired of it.”

“ ‘Something like this'? You mean getting stuffed into a barrel with a dead girl? Now, why would anyone ask you how you're feeling after that?”

Brasov drove them to the sheriff's substation at the civic center in Malibu. Rick Stills and Dixie Annette Close met them there. In the substation's sole interview room, Brasov and Remington sat on one side of the table and Stills and Dixie sat on the other.

“This is cozy,” Stills remarked.

“The time is sixteen-thirty-seven on October twenty-seventh.” Remington switched on the digital camera that was to record the interview. “I am Detective Investigator Layla Remington of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.”

They went around the room, ID'ing themselves out loud for the record.

“These proceedings concern the recent events surrounding the death of Lawrence Decker Close.”

Rick Stills leaned forward. “Could I jump in here right off the bat to say my client has something of supreme interest to offer you?”

“Hold on, my man,” Brasov said.

“Please,” Stills said. “You're going to want to see this.”

“The police have been bugging and bugging me to talk to them,” Dixie said. “They posted a deputy outside my apartment, for my protection, they said, but I think it was to keep an eye on me. After that night, I felt like disappearing myself.”

“I understand,” Remington said. “You had a lot to think about.”

“I always told the other cops that I just wanted to wait until I could talk to you.” Dixie dug into her backpack. She extracted an oblong box with an orange spine and speckled markings on the front and back.

“Ms. Close obtained this material on a previous visit to the Close ranch,” Stills explained. “She hesitated to bring it forward to the authorities until now because she feared she might be prosecuted for the illicit manner by which she had obtained it. I'd like to offer it here without prejudice.”

Dixie pushed the document box across to Remington.

“Jesus. Should we glove up?” asked Brasov.

Remington spoke to the video camera. “I'm suspending this interview in order to examine new evidence offered by Dixie Annette Close.”

She and Brasov rose to their feet. Remington opened the box, treating the material inside gingerly, poking at it with a pen. As soon as she saw what she had, she tapped on the glass window of the evidence room and signaled to a passing deputy. She asked for latex.

“Bring me a pair, too,” Brasov called out.

Inside the file box were clippings on missing girls, many of whom had already been preliminarily ID'd as bodies in the horror show out at the Close ranch.

Dixie wore an expression that combined fear and pride. “There are, like, a lot of them in there, including stuff on Elizabeth Combe. She's the woman who was my mom.”

“And a good many articles on Tarin Mistry,” Stills added.

Remington kept turning pages with her pen. “Plus…what are these? Earrings?”