13 Stolen Girls (3 page)

Dying is a famously good career move in Hollywood. It turned out that disappearing can be an even better one.

Some two dozen members of various law-enforcement and emergency-service agencies joined Remington at the site. Most of them were men. They arranged themselves in a ragged circle around the barrel grave of Tarin Mistry.

There were more coming. A seismic disaster in Malibu, yes, well, that was huge. But unearthing the body of a young movie star, a Marilyn Monroe who had vanished on the cusp of fame—well, which duty would your average cop rather pull?

Remington remained OIC, officer in charge at the scene. She felt like the little Dutch girl with her finger in the dyke, holding back the tide.

Her main ally present was actually an on-again, off-again enemy, Deputy Sergeant John Velske, who worked out of the same Malibu substation she did. Remington knew that somewhere deep in his heart Velske, a longtime veteran of the sheriff's department, still considered her a
girl
. As a detective investigator, she outranked him. That fact didn't prevent him from patronizing her.

A tortuous, well-traveled path of beaten dirt—one of the EMT guys christened it the Ho Chi Minh Trail—now led uphill from Big Rock Drive. A little Bobcat loader toiled toward the site, dragging behind it a trailer-hitched gas generator with a lighting-tower array. CAU 1, Crime Analysis Unit One, the top-tier forensic detail for the whole county, was suiting up in full hazmat to get to work. They hadn't accessed the body in the barrel as of yet. Just getting started. It would be a long process.

A half mile below the scene, an unmarked car pulled up and a couple of plainclothes detectives emerged. Even at a distance, Remington could read what they were.

And who they were.

She had expected these two, not quite so soon but eventually. Walter Rack and Paul Roone, aka Rack and Ruin, were the most celebrated, most decorated and most obnoxious detectives the Los Angeles Police Department had to offer. HBO's
True Detective
miniseries was at least partially based on the pair. Or so the rumor went, probably spread by Rack and Ruin themselves.

The two LAPD homicide cops had been the public faces of the Tarin Mistry investigation since forever.

Rack and Ruin hiked up the Ho Chi Minh Trail together, stopping every once in a while to exchange pleasantries with passing cops and emergency workers. It seemed that the two knew everybody, and that everyone knew them. Even the LASD personnel they encountered granted them deference.

LAPD versus LASD. Sparks of friction marked the interactions between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. The LASD was responsible for the unincorporated areas within the five thousand square miles of Los Angeles County. The LAPD had jurisdiction within the city boundaries of Los Angeles itself. Whenever and wherever the twain met, there were difficulties.

A couple of female EMTs had peeled off, and a CAU tech went out on an equipment run. That left Remington as the sole woman on the scene. She saw Deputy Velske greet Rack and Ruin with familiar ease. The dynamic duo from the LAPD climbed the last few yards up the slope.

“Detective,” Walter Rack hailed her. His voice had a natural military crispness.

Remington didn't know what to say, so she introduced herself.

Rack scowled. “Have we met? Are you Gene Remington's kid?”

“That's right.”

“I know your father from way back at the Parker Center. He's a good guy. Tell him hello from me, will you?”

Remington nodded. There was an awkward pause.

“Any media around?” Roone asked.

“Not yet.”

“Just wait.” Paul Roone sounded as if he looked forward to the prospect.

“So.” Walter Rack nodded at the team of white-suited crime-scene analysts. “Are we sure it's her?”

“Pretty sure.”

“No science on it yet, though, right? So no positive ID.”

“The necklace,” Remington said.

Rack and his partner exchanged looks. Remington could see that they were itching to dig in. Like a pair of honey badgers. Roone kept edging around Remington to approach the barrel.

She stood her ground. “Let the CAU do its job, gents.”

Rack and Ruin matched wardrobes—expensive, tailored, showy—as well as close-cropped hair. Remington tried to remember the last time she had encountered a police officer whose hair was longer than a half inch. The rest of the world might have moved on from the crew cut, but you couldn't tell it by cops. A shorn head was the true badge of the tribe.

Paul Roone got on his cellphone.
So this is it
, Remington thought. Who might he be calling, exactly? Her boss, the L.A. County sheriff? Rack and Ruin had plenty of friends in high places. Perhaps the district attorney? How about the U.S. attorney general or—what the hell—the president?

“You've had your look-see,” Remington told them. “Can we just move back a little now?”

Walter Rack took a step toward Remington. “You know how many hours Roone and I have got clocked on Tarin Mistry, Detective?”

“I've got a feeling you're going to tell me.”

“Thirteen hundred, give or take,” Rack said.

“But who's counting?” Remington responded cheerfully.

“Those are only the ones on the official log.”

Roone covered the mic on his cellphone so that he could chime in. “Off the clock, it's more like double that.”

“We do it the old-fashioned way,” Rack informed her. “Thirteen hundred shoe-leather-shredding, evidence-collecting, false-lead-tracking, interview-recording hours. How many hours have you put in on her now, Detective? A couple? Three?”

“Yet in all those hours you never managed to turn up a body, and here I am with one.” It wasn't a great idea to alienate these two. But Remington couldn't help herself.

Johnny Velske moved over to hiss words into her ear. “Leave it alone. You finally made homicide. Now, don't screw it up.”

Roone handed her his cell. “Your C of D.”

The voice of LASD chief of detectives, Tyler Lott, came over the phone. “Detective Investigator Remington?” All formal like.

“Commander Lott.”

“As of right now, I have to officially relieve you as officer in charge at the scene.”

“Sir, I'm the one—” Remington began, but Lott cut her off.

“I'm instructing you to cooperate fully with the LAPD representatives.” Lott didn't sound happy about the situation.

“Sir?”

“This order comes from on high, Detective Remington.”

Heavy cases such as Tarin Mistry are always worked with the bosses breathing down your neck, not to mention the mad dogs of the press. Trying not to feel bullied, Remington rang off. She handed the phone back to Roone, who wore a smug smile on his face.

“You are relieved, Detective,” Roone said, pushing past her.

“Gentlemen,” Rack called out as he approached the CAU techs gathered around the barrel.

Anger surged in Remington. Sure, she had a bare six months of seniority in the LASD Homicide Bureau. Rack and Ruin were ensconced at the top of the LAPD food chain. It was just the way of the world. But she had made a promise to the dead girl. Who relieved whom didn't matter. Neither did orders sent down the chain of command.

With an impulse of bitter loyalty, she turned to follow the two LAPD dicks. She wasn't going to let it go. She'd force a confrontation.

Deputy Velske headed her off. “Not worth it.”

“
She's
not worth it?” Remington asked, tilting her head toward the steel drum.

“God marks the fall of every sparrow. But you're not God, Detective.”

An insistent buzz sounded above the scene. The assembled law-enforcement officers gawked as a small news drone arrived to hover fifty yards above them. The whirring, quadruple-rotor disk the size of a garbage-can lid appeared out of nowhere, like an alien being or some emissary from the future. More and more these days, what was real came off as surreal.

“TMZ.com,” read the white logo on the black plastic underbelly of the electronic bird.

The report of the Tarin Mistry discovery must have leaked. News-camera drones had debuted on L.A.'s highly competitive media landscape (skyscape?) only in the previous few months. They were used mostly for traffic reports, but one had recently covered a high-profile drug-gang shoot-out down in Crenshaw.

Remington herself had never encountered such a device before. Some pissed-off impulse moved her to draw her sidearm. She heard someone behind her—Velske, Paul Roone, or one of the CAU techs—call out,
“Gun!”

Remington lined up her shot and fired.

The banging report rebounded off the steep canyonside to the north. Alarmed shouts and chatter rose from the disorganized platoon of sheriff's deputies and plainclothes cops gathered at the scene. Discharge a weapon in the presence of armed law-enforcement personnel and you had better be following some sort of protocol or command.

The drone took the hit, spun in a loopy circle, then clattered out of the sky.

Rick Stills chose for himself the most recent of the fifty-plus missing-persons cases presented to the task force that evening, the sixteen-year-old only child of a single mom, pretty enough girl from her picture, three weeks gone. The mother herself sat opposite him now.

“And, and, your daughter—” Stills stumbled, shuffling the missing-persons report on the scarred folding table set up for the event.

“Merilee,” the mother said.

There was something wrong with the woman's eyes. They looked at Rick without seeing him. It felt eerie. He could not imagine what she was going through. Hope was like spilled blood, he decided, bright when fresh, darkening with time.

“Yes, Merilee,” Rick said. “Ms. Henegar, is that how you pronounce it? When was your last contact, Ms. Henegar?”

There were dozens of detectives and prosecutors gathered at the old Grand Olympic Auditorium in downtown L.A. In the past, the landmark theater had been the city's prime venue for boxing and wrestling matches, then later on for concerts and raves, but it was now the headquarters of a Korean Christian denomination. The church had offered the facility to the district attorney's office for the present event, held under the auspices of the Los Angeles County Task Force on Missing and Exploited Youth.

“LACTFOMEY,” the unfortunate acronym on the letterhead read. Then, below that, atop a list of names, “Rick Stills, Esq., Director.” Prominently positioned, just below the D.A. herself.

Janiece Baez, the present district attorney for Los Angeles County, had requested that Stills head up the task force as a personal favor. He was a star attorney and equity partner in the powerful law firm of Buffum, Buffum, Oatman & Stanfill. LACTFOMEY—an abbreviation, Stills believed, that had awkward associations with breast-feeding—was the kind of prestige public-interest appointment that furthered a lawyer's career. His firm gladly lent him out.

The Grand Olympic had to be the saddest place in the world just then. Seated in the auditorium were about a hundred hollow-eyed people, all haunted by the disappearance of loved ones. Stills had argued with the district attorney against the arrangement. Why do it all at once like this? Why not let them assume their losses were personal, private and special?

“County and city authorities processed ninety-seven hundred and sixty-three missing-persons reports last year,” D.A. Baez had announced in her opening remarks. She had characterized the evening as a “mission reset” of missing-persons investigations. To Rick Stills, the event more resembled a cattle call.

It wasn't illegal for people simply to disappear. Walk away, leave that annoying family or abusive hubby behind, go out for cigarettes and never come back. Who hadn't dreamed of it at one time or another? But a “voluntary” disappearance wasn't the issue with the cases up for a reset that evening. These were abductions of adolescents or young adults, every case a missing child between twelve and twenty-five.

“We have representatives here from the Sheriff's Detail on Missing Persons and Unsolved Cases, the LAPD Adult Missing Persons Unit, county-welfare services and public-school authorities,” Baez had said. “This task force is dedicated to taking a fresh look at the disappearance of your loved ones.”

Baez had paused, and with a glance sought out Layla Remington among the assembled lawyers and detectives. “The recent press coverage surrounding the Tarin Mistry case has focused the public's attention on the problem of missing and exploited youths,” she continued. “We will use that new awareness to help us find those whom you have lost.”

A collective sigh arose from the audience when Baez mentioned Mistry's name. The parents attending the event had desperately hoped their missing children would be found alive and unharmed. Now they were all dealing with the mental image of a dead girl in a barrel.

Nine-thousand-plus missing-person cases. Eight-thousand-plus classified as “voluntary.” Nine hundred and ninety-six listed as missing “under suspicious circumstances.” A hundred and twenty-nine of those investigated as everyone's worst-case scenario, “stranger abductions.” Families, witnesses, investigating detectives had been brought together that evening for a round of interviews, questioning and hand-holding.

Stills had assigned himself the reset of Merilee Henegar's case, retrieving that particular file folder from the pile for no particular reason other than the fact that it was relatively new. Some of those present were searching for children who had been gone for years, even decades. The victims were neither dead nor alive. All were simply vanished.

Merilee Sharmon Henegar, six months shy of her seventeenth birthday. A sometime student at Indian Hills High School up in Conejo Valley, where a guidance counselor's report indicated that Merilee had been increasingly unhappy. Rick Stills had a general awareness that many children are unhappy in high school. He himself had breezed through his teenage years as a popular and high-achieving student.

“Her,” Brandi Henegar said to Stills now. Indicating with a tired gesture the female LASD investigator who stood across the auditorium. “I want to talk to that one.”

“Detective Remington?” Sure. Of course. Everyone wanted Layla Remington. Her new standing as the discoverer of Tarin Mistry's corpse lent her celebrity among cops and other law-enforcement personnel, not to mention the media.

But the truth was, Mistry wasn't even Remington's case anymore. The LAPD had plucked it away from her. Stills had heard scuttlebutt that Remington was pursuing the investigation on her own, strictly on a personal, unofficial basis. She had better watch herself, Stills decided. She was stepping on some very important toes.

Part of the problem was that Layla Remington had developed a media presence. The press hordes couldn't exactly interview Cindy the cadaver dog (though they tried), so they clamored for Remington. LAPD Detective Walter Rack, the once and future lead investigator on Mistry, was an infamous publicity whore. Rack didn't admit rivals, and he possessed the power to flatten an interloping junior detective from Malibu.

Brandi Henegar wanted Remington. Stills had an impulse to tell the grieving mother to join the crowd. He had other impulses as well, such as suggesting that Brandi ought to be searching for her dear daughter Merilee in the skin parlors of Orange County, say, or maybe a strip club farther afield, in Vegas, Albuquerque or Sacramento. Kids split. It was an age-old story that of late had taken on a particularly wicked modern twist.

Stills left Brandi Henegar sitting alone and threaded his way to where Layla Remington stood. They had worked together the previous year, before he joined Buffum Buffum. For the life of him he couldn't recall how they had left off. Did Remington hate him now for some reason? Had he done her wrong somehow?

He searched his memory. They hadn't had a thing—he was certain of that. No? Was he sure? Not that particular drunken night…? No. But women were so often smitten with Rick Stills, only to turn on him later.

A cluster of men stood around Remington, lawyers and police. In the present circumstance, Stills didn't want to be just one more supplicant tugging at her sleeve. But she saw him walking over and came forward to meet him. There was an odd, almost pained look on her face. Maybe something
had
happened between them. He frowned.

“Task Force Director Stills,” she said.

“Detective Remington.” Next they would click heels and salute. “You're the one who—”

“Yeah,” Remington said, saving him the trouble of completing the sentence. The one who turned up the girl in the barrel.

“And they let you slide on that DWI?” he asked her. For the high crime of blowing away a news drone, Remington had faced a DWI investigation, which in this instance meant not
driving while intoxicated
but
discharged-weapon incident
.

“Can't touch me,” Remington responded.

The press being what it was and cops being what they were, the police personnel at the scene forgave Detective Remington for firing her weapon and putting a scare into all of them. The shot-down TMZ.com news drone was treated as a trophy of war. Instead of a reprimand, Remington received backslaps and handshakes for putting her foot down in such an explosive manner.

“You okay?” Stills asked her.

“I'm fine.” She wasn't. Rumor had it that the girl-in-the-barrel affair was telling mentally on the young detective. Sleep issues. Disturbed dreams. Consultation with the departmental shrink.

“I'm over there interviewing the Merilee Henegar mom.”

“Right,” Remington said.

“Brandi Henegar. Brandi with an ‘i,' you know? She wants to speak to you.”

“They're telling me I'm out of the whole thing.”

“Oh. Why are you here, then?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, I need you.”

“I can't. I want to, but I can't. I mean…” Remington turned her face away. “It's not the department. It's
me
.”

“What, you've got feelings, Layla? Well, jam 'em back down in your gut and man up. You're a murder police.”

Stills wondered how much longer Remington would be able to wear the gold badge. She looked lost to him, gazing across the auditorium at the forlorn mother.

“I hate that phrase,” she murmured. “ ‘Man up.' ”

Dixie Close swore that slaving in the bakeshop made her put on weight. Not in the usual way, either. After her first working day amid all the pastry, cupcakes and doughnuts, she'd totally lost her appetite for any item the bakery offered for sale. Dixie existed almost exclusively on carrots, yogurt and Diet Coke. Her only explanation for the extra pounds was that it was some form of funky osmosis.

“I think I'm absorbing fat particles directly through my skin,” she told Petra Sorrel, her co-worker. They took turns in front of the bakeshop's deep fryer.

Petra laughed. “Dude, it's all the snackage.”

But it wasn't. Dixie had uprooted from Scottsdale and repotted herself in Los Angeles. She put in place boot-camp discipline. Don't party. Go solo. Spend no money. Eat like a bird. Limit TV, cell, anything with a screen. Keep thine eyes on the prize.

On Craigslist she found an apartment, living with five roommates jammed into a three-bedroom in Reseda. Petra was one of the roommates, and she got Dixie the greasy gig at a Let Them Eat Cake franchise on Ventura Boulevard.

Working for minimum wage, sleeping for minimum hours. It had to be that way.

Dixie had one big rule that she had formulated during her bus ride to L.A. from Arizona. Devote every single extra moment to the Search. Someday later on, you can go back to school, get some real friends, have some fun. Now, not.

She kept lists. “Mastering the Los Angeles Transit System of Buses and Trains” was one. “Learn My Rights as an Adopted Person” was another. “Being On My Own.” “Self-Help Books That Might Help.” A favorite was, “Keeping Up My Spirits, aka Don't Let Killjoy Los Angeles Harsh My Mellow.”

“Marsh my mallow” was how Petra said it, which made Dixie laugh.

One lesson she'd learned reading self-help was to refrain from thinking that she could do it all at once.

“We tend to
overestimate
what we can accomplish in a big flurry of activity, such as studying all night for a test,” wrote Temple Hope-Davies. “On the other hand, we tend to
underestimate
what we can do if we apply ourselves a little every single day.”

Temple had authored
Effective Being: Finding Our Way Amid the Maze of Possibility,
a book that Dixie, with her newfound thriftiness, had checked out of the West Valley Regional Library.

In a lot of ways, Los Angeles was just another Phoenix. Or was Phoenix another L.A.? Same sprawl, same traffic, same strip-mall sensibility. A fundamental rule in both places: don't not have a car. Dixie imagined the folks whizzing by her on the freeways, pitying the lonely girl waiting at the bus stop. In reality, no one gave her even a split second of thought.

She was proud of herself for leaving Scottsdale, for managing the move to L.A. and all the rest. It was the most elaborate task she'd ever accomplished, and she did it all alone. Jerry and Sheila had been too distracted with their own troubles to help her. Or stop her. Dixie couldn't dive into the Search right away. She had to check off items on her “Get Established” list first.

Job. Place to Stay. Knowledge of Surroundings.

Then, two weeks after stepping off the Greyhound in a weird out-of-the-way Los Angeles neighborhood near downtown, Dixie started in on the Search.

First she compiled a list called “What I Know.” She knew that she had been born in the Los Angeles area. Adopted. Shipped to Scottsdale, Arizona. Renamed Dixie Annette by her non-real, nonbiological parents, the Closes, Sheila and Jerry, lately a not very close couple. Raised by them. Always feeling out of place and incomplete, like a puzzle with one piece missing. Now relocated to California in order to search out that missing piece.

What was her first move? Take the birth certificate that Sheila had given her down to the Vital Records Office on Figueroa Street. Dixie had put the tattered, well-folded piece of paper into a Ziploc bag to preserve the thing, her only official link to personhood.

Setback. Birth certificates were filed at Vital Records only for babies under one year old. Are you, Dixie Annette Close, under one year old? You certainly don't look like it. Then what are you doing here?

The bow-tied clerk-man at Vital Records directed her to the office of the County Clerk, way down in Norwalk, the opposite end of endless L.A. from Reseda. That meant a whole second day of travel, which meant that Dixie had to wait for her next day off.

The trip, when she finally made it, wasn't pleasant. At times, L.A. could be a little creepy. A guy on the Metrolink train made a big deal of taking a nearby seat and opening and closing his legs, grinning loopily all the while, like the move was supposed to entice her. She got up and changed seats, but Edward Scissorlegs followed her. What a perv. Then, during her tromp along Imperial Highway to the County Clerk's, a white van slowed down and drove alongside her for, like, a quarter of a mile. When she caught a glimpse of the driver, he wore a clown mask, totally flipping her out.