13 Stolen Girls (5 page)

Merilee had returned home.

“Meri? Honey?”

The girl's form, outlined under the covers, lay inert in sleep.

Impossible. No, no, no. Brandi's mind was playing cruel tricks.

But yes.

She knew it was Merilee because of the splay of black hair across the pillow. It was her daughter's hair, she would know it anywhere.

“Oh, my dear God,” Brandi called out, and rushed forward to take the sleeping Merilee in her arms.

The body cold. The girl dead. The mother screaming.

Layla drove to meet her father for a late supper at Whitey's, a restaurant he favored. It was just after nine o'clock on a Wednesday night. The air was dry and clear. Even inside the SUV she had the sense of the daunting siroccos sweeping down off the mountains. People blamed the Santa Ana winds for making autumn the most parched season of the year, for spreading wildfires, for spiking the murder rate. A bizarre claim surfaced that the desert winds had caused the recent Malibu earthquake by drying out the land.

Now that she had moved to the West Side, father and daughter didn't get together as much as they had formerly. Layla was late for their restaurant supper. Her phone had run out of juice, so she couldn't call. She thought Gene Remington might have gone ahead with his meal, but he had waited. She saw him before he saw her. He sat alone in a back booth in the bar area, without his usual clutch of saloon buddies around him.

He's getting old,
Layla realized, the truth of it hitting her hard. The sagging, melancholy expression Gene wore on his face didn't help any. Encountering him solitary like this, she realized how much of a front her father put up whenever he spent time with his only child.

“Hi, Princess,” he called out, brightening when he saw her. She kissed his cheek and slid onto the bench seat opposite him. A bourbon magically materialized in front of her, as though her father had the drink order all primed and ready.

“Thanks,” she said to Sissy, the waitress.

“How'd it go?” Gene asked. He was talking about the evening's task-force event.

“I can't imagine it helping anyone,” Layla said.

Gene grunted and sipped his beer.

“Rick Stills was there. He got D.A. Baez to name him task-force director.”

“How about Rack and Ruin? Did they show?”

“Not their thing,” Remington said.

“They still freezing you out on Tarin Mistry?”

“I called Detective Rack two days ago, left a message. I'm still waiting.”

“He's a busy guy. Important guy. Palling around with his friend the mayor and all.”

“It's okay,” Layla said. “I've made my peace with it.”

“You look tired. How are you sleeping?”

Layla didn't answer him directly. Nightmares had returned for the first time since her childhood. “It's like I want the Mistry case and don't want it at the same time. I feel like I'm standing at the edge of a cliff. And there's a pile of bodies at the bottom.”

“You have to figure out a way not to take it to heart.”

Layla had worked her first heavy murder case only the previous month, a gnarly triple homicide at a meth lab in the desert. Now missing girls.

Compartmentalize. That's what all homicide detectives did. That body hanging by the neck on the closet doorknob, the brutalized dead woman with the blank staring eyes, the gaudy violence of the axe-happy home invasion—shut all of it up in a little mental box. Open the box for work. Close it tight while off duty, when socializing with friends, watching the Lakers, trying to fall asleep. Otherwise, letting the job bleed into your private life led directly to crazy.

Oh, yeah, go ahead and objectify the dead, too. The corpses you encounter aren't people who formerly lived and breathed and laughed and loved. They're things. Just lifeless things. A case number on an incident report. Do the job and get on with it.

Murder dicks who failed to accomplish this necessary psychological buffering eventually dropped out of the squad. The Bureau wasn't for everybody. Remington wondered, after all, if she had the stomach for it. But she knew that if she requested reassignment (something desk-bound and safe, like the criminal assessment and profiling unit), she'd find it hard to look herself in the eye.

They sat quietly for a long beat, father and daughter. The bar noise washed over them. Layla thought that she ought to nudge her dad off his Tarin Mistry fixation. He kept trying to arrange for her to come over to his Glendale condo to watch the doomed girl's movie,
Joshua Tree
.

“Did you see it again last night?” she asked.

“It's one of those films that hold up under repeated viewings. I'm always finding something new.”

“Just you and her alone together with the flat screen. It's unhealthy, dear Father.”

“I thought I'd gotten over love, but it's come to me again in my old age. You know that Bette Davis line? ‘Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism.' That's Tarin.”

Calling her by her first name now. “She was pretty enough,” Layla said.

“Looking at you, I'm betting you can't forget her, either. Are you okay, sweetie?”

“I'm fine.”

“But you've got something new on the girl, haven't you?”

Layla sighed. Ever since childhood, it had been impossible for her to hide anything from her dad.

“Come on,” Gene said. “Give.”

“I don't know what I have, really. It's probably nothing.”

“But it could be something.”

“I've just looked into a few cold cases, that's all.”

Layla had been spending time at the LAPD's Records and Identification Division, trying to tease out a pattern. Working back from the approximate date of Tarin Mistry's disappearance, and then working forward, too. It was dusty duty. A lot of the old files had remained undigitized. She compiled a list, a dozen or so victims linked only by her own vague hunch.

“Anybody know what you're up to?” her dad asked.

Layla gave a guilty shrug. After an interview that she gave to a pestering reporter had shown up on the evening news, her superiors at the sheriff's department had read her the riot act. They sternly directed her to stay away from the media and to divorce herself completely from the Mistry investigation. So her informal inquiries, if they came to light, could have serious repercussions for her career.

She wanted to leave the whole business alone. But she couldn't. There was a ghostly chorus of missing girls calling to her. Tarin Mistry sang lead.

“You're always working by yourself,” Gene said. “Maybe if you were a man folks would call you a lone wolf. That's a romantic figure. As it is, male cops are going to conclude that you're a headstrong female who needs to be put in her place.” Gene looked at her, love mixed with worry in his gaze. “Why don't you get a partner? It's a dark alley, and you shouldn't have to walk down it by yourself.”

“I'll be okay,” Layla said. “I'll leave a trail of bread crumbs, so you can find me if I get lost.”

“So, what's popped? I mean, in these secret investigations of yours.”

“They're not secret!”

“Nope, I get you—it's just that you're neglecting to inform anyone what you're doing, that's all.”

“Well, there've been other cases that fit the profile. Missing persons, female, young, mostly aspiring actresses, unsolved disappearances, no bodies.”

“Jesus, I bet there've been others. Hollywood's a goddamned buzz saw, uses young girls for logs.”

“Nice, Dad.”

“Just sayin'.”

“The fact that no bodies have been turned up is significant. You know how hard it is to get a murder indictment without a corpus. It means they're being hidden, maybe in buried barrels all over L.A.”

“I still know people at the R & I Division. Maybe I could help.”

Gene Remington had worked his whole career as an administrative clerk at the Parker Center, aka “the Glass House,” the LAPD's old headquarters. He knew practically everyone in law enforcement and was on a first-name basis with many of the old-timers.

“You know, you have to approach this stuff with a pretty cold eye,” he said.

“This stuff.”

“What we're talking about here is male predators hunting down and killing young women. If you let it get inside your head, it can turn real bitter on you.”

“Right.”

“I'm serious.”

“I know you are.”

“We had the Night Stalker back in my day, you know. So bring a cold eye to it.”

“Okay.”
Whatever that means
.

Layla actually did know exactly what her father meant. The same human animal that produced Leonardo da Vinci and Mother Teresa also spawned Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. Brood on that, lend it too much weight, and something changes inside you. It'll take your joy away. Most people don't even want to hear about it. But when you're a police such ugly matters are your job.

“A police.” That's the way they always said it, among themselves. Not “a police officer.”
A police
.

Layla hadn't ordered supper, but her father had done it for her. Sissy served their food, calf's liver with onions and bacon for Gene, a French dip for Layla. Because of the task-force event she had gone without dinner, but with the plate in front of her Layla realized that she wasn't hungry. As her father dug in, she heard her name being called above the clamor of the bar.

“Is there a Detective Remington present? Gene? Is your daughter here?”

One of the bartenders held up the handset of a landline phone, motioning her over.

The LASD had the Henegar house on Border Drive in Agoura Hills well surrounded. Remington counted four sheriff's black-and-whites parked every which way in front of the split-level ranch. She herself drove an unmarked sheriff's department SUV, a police-spec Ford Explorer affectionately nicknamed the U-boat. A pair of deputies stationed at the head of the street recognized her state-issued vehicle and waved it on.

Remington had to nose past small gatherings of neighbors standing around in the warm California night. They had assembled hoping for a glimpse, a tidbit, a chill-thrill. Or perhaps they had heard what happened and sought out one another's company simply because they were afraid.

Deputy Lieutenant Terry Merl was OIC when Remington arrived. “Detective,” she called.

“Hey.”

“We had trouble reaching you, but you got here fast enough,” Merl said. “As of right now I'm officer in charge, unless you want to relieve.”

“No, no.”

They proceeded up the sloping concrete driveway together. The front door of the house hung open, and the interior blazed with lights.

“Strangest damned thing I've ever seen,” Merl said.

“The techs here?” Remington asked.

“They're showing up in dribs and drabs. Bell Kelly, have you met him? He's already started dusting upstairs.”

Remington knew Lieutenant Merl only vaguely, but they shared the community of female police officers in an overwhelmingly male world.

“Four main rooms on this level,” the lieutenant said as she led Remington inside. “Kitchen and dining to the left, some sort of living room or rec room to the right, then a guest room that doubles as a home office.”

Merl sounded like a real-estate agent.

“Second floor?” Remington indicated the staircase that led up from the central hall.

“Two bedrooms and a sort of alcove.”

“I was asking if the mother was upstairs.”

“You didn't see her? EMT has Brandi Henegar outside in one of their trucks.” Merl lowered her voice. “The woman is totally destroyed. They've got her sedated, something quick-acting. I saw her fade out. I mean, my God, can you imagine?”

Remington turned toward the stairs.

Merl laid a hand on her arm. “Is what I heard right? You spoke to the mother tonight? At the D.A.'s missing-persons thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you must have impressed her, because in between her bouts of hysteria she kept asking for you.”

Remington nodded. She wanted to get away from the talky lieutenant. As she climbed the carpeted steps to the second floor, she heard chatter from a trio of uniformed deputies gathered in the upstairs hall.

“The good news is your daughter's back home, the bad news—”

The deputy who spoke, Chuck Santore, cut himself off as soon as he saw Remington, but his buddies were already laughing.

“You three, out,” Remington said.

“Detective—” Santore began.

She held up her hand. “Relieve the watch at the end of Border Drive.”

“Aw, come on! It was only…”

Remington looked back to check with Lieutenant Merl. “Okay? These guys are eighty-sixed from the scene.”

Merl shrugged her assent, and Remington continued into the hall. It ended at an expansive bay window that looked out on a darkened backyard. To her left was the alcove, small and well cluttered. Farther on to the left was an open door, and to the immediate right another one that led into a bedroom.

She lingered in that right-hand doorway. Wall posters revealed a teenager's lair. The forensic technician, Bell Kelly, wearing Tyvek and a respirator, puffed out sprays of graphite fingerprint powder from a small rubber bulb, working along a window frame of stained-and-varnished wood.

Six people, all men, three in uniform and three in plainclothes, gathered around the queen-size bed in the middle of the room. None of them wore hazmat, but all had gloved up. Two of them knelt, and the other four stood.

“Detective.” Deputy Sergeant Johnny Velske was senior among the uniforms around the bed, and he backed away to make space for Remington. The mood in the bedroom was more hushed than it had been downstairs or outside. They were in the presence of the dead, after all.

“The mother asked for you,” Velske informed Remington, making it sound like an indictment.

She nodded her reply. She recognized one of the kneeling men as Neal Kropper, a field pathologist from the county coroner's office.

“He just got here,” Velske told her. “First responders pronounced death at twenty-two hundred hours.”

The corpse of sixteen-year-old Merilee Henegar lay as if asleep. Her pillowed head was turned away from Remington, facing toward the back of the house. A spill of black hair showed against the crisp white linen of the bedclothes.