13 Stolen Girls (6 page)

Somebody tucked her in,
Remington thought.

“What about this one, Johnny?” Remington kept her voice low, whispering to Velske. “Is she worth it?”

The ripe smell of death wafted up from the bed. It was faint, but it was there. Why the rot of human flesh was ever described as “sweet” or “sugary,” Remington could not understand. To her, it always smelled bitter. Soon enough, she knew, the insect swarms would heed the siren call of decay, the blowflies and bottle flies and parasitic wasps. It was time to get the body into a climate-controlled pathology lab.

Kropper used some sort of metal wand—a gun-cleaning instrument?—to carefully, slowly, tenderly clear the sweep of hair that concealed the neck of the dead girl.

“As I thought,” the pathologist said. “Do you see?”

From where Remington stood she couldn't see a thing. Kropper shined a pocket-size flashlight into the shadowed cavity where the blanket covered flesh.

“Some sort of ligature mark there,” he said.

Strangled, then. A victim vanished from her domicile for almost a month, then somehow returned to the same domicile dead. Remington backed away from the circle of men around the body.

The surroundings displayed the living personality of the deceased. The posters on Merilee Henegar's walls reflected the local music scene.

Start with that, Remington told herself. She had a vague awareness that Agoura Hills was ground zero for a gnarly brand of music called nu metal. The sound was fast, dark and aggressive. Outsiders had tagged it “agro,” implying that the songs perfectly reflected the seething anger of contemporary adolescence.

From the evidence plastered across her bedroom, Merilee might have strayed far beyond local mainstream rockers, such as Linkin Park, into the darker realms of death metal. A few of the posters had the eyes of the band members torn away, or actually stabbed out by the blade of a letter opener or a penknife. Black scribbles of Magic Marker defaced other posters. Merilee Henegar had been one pissed-off young goth girl. Maybe her black hair was a dye job.

Another hazmat-suited forensic tech joined Bell Kelly, and the two conferred in low voices. In the opposite corner of the bedroom, Remington encountered a shrine of sorts—a collection of books, the popular Rose and Thorn series, all with well-worn covers. Wax from black candles had been allowed to drip onto the shelf, building up into fantastic shapes. A picture was tacked on the wall, a moody shot of the actor who had played Damien Thorn in the movie version of the Rose and Thorn books. The actor's eyes and mouth had been outlined with a red pen, like smeared lipstick.

A bad vibe all around. But was it out-of-the-ordinary bad? Or just average-teenager bad?

In an attempt to clear her head, Remington left the room. As she did so, she encountered a plainclothes cop she didn't recognize. The dude looked totally out of place. If he hadn't had a badge wallet hanging around his neck, Remington would have challenged his right to be there. He resembled a skell who had wandered in from some downtown park, lured by the scent of free coffee. He was unshaved and wore an army-surplus jacket with the name “Dickson” stenciled on it. Aggressively undercover. A non-cop cop.

The Dickson guy said, “Hey,” as he passed her and joined the group of men around the victim.

The bedroom at the end of the hall was clearly the mother's. Remington glanced inside. No band posters there, just ordinary middle-class Laura Ashley–style furnishings. The two bedrooms were like cultural polar opposites.

The bay window at the end of the corridor gave a view out onto the yard. The Holmes Canyon subdivision bordered the freeway, snug up against a U-shaped formation of steep, forbidding hills. The three-hundred-home residential area centered itself around a neighborhood park. A fence and a strip of dense underbrush cut off the back of the Henegar yard.

Remington noticed a streetlight beyond. She brought up a Holmes Canyon map on her cellphone screen and discovered a dead-end cul-de-sac just a few yards from the property line.

The intruder came in through there,
she thought. Carrying Merilee's body. The approach from the street in front would have been too exposed. Nobody in forensics had thought to process the yard as of yet. They had their hands full with the interior. They would wait until daylight.

Have it cordoned off
. Strict orders for no one to disturb the area. Impression evidence, footprints, drag marks, the intruder's whole approach might be read there.

A gust of emotion swept through Remington. Fury at a world where young girls were taken. A forlorn, abandoned air hung about the darkened yard….And the pin-neat mother's bedroom affected her almost as much as the goth lair of the daughter.

“Jesus, Detective, are you crying?” Deputy Velske had walked up on her.

“It's just stress, Johnny.” Remington swiped at her eyes. “It doesn't mean a damned thing.” She could tell the veteran cop's impulse was to go all Tom Hanks on her, inform her sternly that there was no crying in policing, but Velske refrained.

He and Remington headed back down the hall. Lieutenant Merl joined them at the open doorway of the victim's bedroom.

“Too many people in there,” Remington said.

Velske nodded. “What I was thinking.”

“Well, you're one of them. Do you really have to be here?”

“I was securing the scene.”

“Uh-huh, from bedside,” Remington responded. “Who's the undercover guy?”

She meant the scruffy dude who had joined the party late. Lieutenant Merl glanced over. “You don't know Sam Brasov?”

“Detective from Region Two field operations,” Velske told her.

Remington shook her head. “Yeah, well, we're a long way from South Bay, aren't we?”

“You want to take over as officer in charge?” Lieutenant Merl asked. “You rank, and believe me, this is one I'd give up without any problem.”

“Plus the mother asked for you,” Velske repeated.

“Don't keep saying that.” Remington paused. “The way I read it, the mom's away at the task-force event, an intruder enters the house and deposits the body.”

Velske gave her a “No shit, Sherlock” kind of look.

Remington ignored him. “That means the bedroom, the whole house, the yard, everything is active. I want it processed inch by inch.”

“You think maybe clear it and start over?” Merl asked.

The punk police guy from Region II appeared beside them. “It could have been intruders, plural. Or, you know, another way to go would be that the runaway girl comes back home, tail between her legs, Mom chokes off her own daughter in a rage, puts her to sleep in her own bed, then waits a few days to call it in.”

Remington, Merl and Velske all stared at the guy as if he had come out of left field, which he had.

“I'm sorry,” Remington said. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

The guy—what was his name? Basoff?—smelled heavily of tobacco. “I was close by, yeah? So, you know, here I am.” He gave a crooked grin and a slight mock bow. “But as a discoverer of dead girls, I yield to you, Detective Remington.”

“Get dispatch,” Remington told Merl. “I want a log of all personnel present. And shoo everyone out who doesn't have to be in there.”

The lieutenant nodded. “I guess that means—”

“Remington is taking over the case,” Velske said, completing Lieutenant Merl's sentence and giving the words a theatrical flavor.

“Unless and until she gets told otherwise,” Sam Brasov put in.

“No, it's mine,” Remington said. “I'm not going to let them steal another one away from me.”

A long, moonless night. A whole battalion of forensic techs now swarmed over the scene. The coroner's body collector had been by. Emergency-service personnel transported a distraught Brandi Henegar to Kaiser Hospital for overnight observation.

Remington stepped outside, taking the thin concrete sidewalk around the exterior of the house to the back patio. The CAU hadn't waited for the break of day. They had set up floodlights and were already processing the backyard. Remington thought of archaeological digs, where the fossil hunters went at it with fine tools, whisk brooms, dental picks, toothbrush-size implements. That kind of patient attack was required here.

Nobody gets away clean. Transference was as much a foundational principle in crime-scene processing as it was in psychotherapy. The idea had been pounded into Remington's brain at the academy: criminals always left something of themselves behind at the scene, and took something with them when they left. The transfer medium might be microscopic, it might even be molecular, but it was unavoidable.

Forensic science—that is, science designed to be presented in a court of law—views human beings as constantly sloughing off evidence. Fingerprints and footprints, yes, but also skin cells, hair, saliva, fibers from clothes. As we pass through the world we leave a detectable trail, like the phosphorescent wake left by a boat in the ocean.

With a big enough computer and omniscient collection devices, our life paths could conceivably be traced all the way back to birth. Remington imagined swirling human trails covering the earth's surface, spinning out, crossing one another, intertwining. Sometimes one human's path ended when it encountered another's. She recalled speaking to the broken mother, Brandi Henegar at the task-force event, and felt a fierce responsibility to pick up the least scrap of evidence. Something, anything, that might lead to the monster who took away a living girl and then brought her back to her mother dead.

A figure came out onto the flagstone patio to her right. The undercover cop she had encountered before, out for a smoke.

“And he's still here,” Remington said.

“Yup.”

“Tell me again how you just happened to be in the neighborhood.” Remington regretted her tone. Maybe she was more tired than she cared to admit. She had actually caught glimpses of the guy throughout the previous night, staying out of the way, mostly, but being quietly helpful, directing the techs to this or that area of the house.

“I'm driving around in the Valley, I hear this unbelievable call come over the two-way. Like I can hear even dispatch can't believe it. I clock them reaching out to you, saying, like, ‘Mrs. Henegar wants to talk to Detective Remington.' ”

Jesus
, Remington thought.
Is everybody going to dog me with that?

“I get my bony ass down here, put my shoulder to the wheel.”

“Right,” Remington said. “Stepping up just like a real police.”

“I know, I know, I get your tone. You're wondering what a skeevy undercover is doing nosing around your case. It is your case, right? I mean, you've got the department's blessing, right?”

“How about I tell you this is my case, Tarin Mistry's my case, and every damned missing girl in L.A. is mine, too?”

Brasov mimed being blown backward by Remington's ferocity. “Yes, ma'am.”

“Sorry. I'm just…”

“Frustrated, yeah. The brass, right? Plus those two LAPD dickwads, Rack and Ruin. The farther up the ladder you go, the farther your head's stuck up your ass, am I right?”

Brasov held out his hand for a low five, but Remington left him hanging. He shrugged it off. “Well, okay. Here's me, and I'm thinking, I've got similars, maybe I can help the good lady detective out.”

“Oh, you've got similars? You mean you have cases where missing individuals were brought back deceased to their former residences?”

“Well, no—that's a new one on me, and I bet it's a new one on you, too. Soon as the TV hacks get wind of it, the NewsFive chopper is going to be hovering right about there.” He pointed upward. “Maybe, you know, you can indulge in some of your famous target practice, bring down a big one this time.”

Remington let the comment pass. “So, similars, like how?”

“Females under twenty-five gone missing. Vanished, like, no body, no witnesses, no nothing. ‘Family bereft, police puzzled,' you know?”

“It happens.”

“Sure, it does. I'm working up a criminological treatise on how come our culture hates young girls so much while all the time professing to love them. Present my research paper to some big conference of sociologists, go on the morning talk shows.”

“Good luck.” The guy was maddening. “I'm still not getting you.”

“You delve much into the MUPR on Marilee Henegar?” He meant the initial Missing/Unidentified Person Report, pronounced “mooper.”

Remington didn't want to confess that she hadn't yet studied the report. She merely shook her head.

“It's interesting. Compiled mainly by an interviewer at the Lost Hills sheriff's station, down there right across the freeway from us. Deputy name of Jamie Guerra.”

“Tell me you had time to check out the MUPR tonight, amid all your other important duties.”

“Last three months or so, I've been banging the files of every single under-twenty-five female missing in L.A. County, plus a few from parts beyond. So I knew something about Merilee Henegar before I ever heard the comms explode with her tonight. Why I was anxious to come down.”

Remington had been delving into the same files herself. She thought of the two of them, her and this undercover guy, both sitting up at night, eyes burning, identical desk lamps illuminating the same sad litany.

“Subject: Knolf, Aileen. Born: 03-13-1997. Gender: female. Height: 59 inches. Weight: 135 pounds. Eyes: blue. Hair: lt. brown. Race: white. Identifying Marks: tattoos, black panther on upper right thigh….”

Et cetera, et cetera.
“Last reported…” “Circumstances of disappearance…”
One case after another, Remington staring at the reports as though if she stared long enough they'd yield up their secrets.

“So?” Remington said.

“So.”

“So what did you find, Detective?” It was like pulling teeth.

“Oh, that's proprietary knowledge. I don't know you near well enough for us to share secrets. We haven't even been properly introduced, have we?”

He wet his thumb and forefinger, snuffed the butt of his cigarette and placed it into the pocket of the fatigue jacket he wore. Smelly, but Remington appreciated the delicacy of not wanting to contaminate a crime scene.

She sighed. “Detective Layla Remington.”

“Oh, we all know you, Detective. I've been following the Mistry case like everybody else. Dead girls just have a way of cropping up around you, don't they?”

Remington didn't respond.

“Brasov, Samuel,” the guy said, pronouncing it precisely and holding out a tobacco-stained hand to her. “Deputy detective investigator with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.”

She shook hands with the guy. “If you've got something, Detective Brasov, I'd sure appreciate you not playing games.”

He had something. And as he laid it out to her, she realized she had found it, too.

When Layla Remington was in her late teens, a few years before she entered the police academy, everyone she knew was devouring the same set of books. Or, at least, every female that she knew—the Rose and Thorn series was overwhelmingly a womancentric phenomenon. The tale sprang out of the fan-fiction world of the Internet, and told of the torrid relationship between an innocent college student, Rebecca Rose, and her wealthy older lover, Damien Thorn.

There were three books in the series:
Rose and Thorn,
Rose and Petal,
Rose and Bloom
. It wasn't just that a lot of Layla's girlfriends were reading them. It was more the case that
every single female
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five had the Rose books on her shelf. They were steamy stuff. The Rose and Thorn trilogy introduced a wide-eyed world to the fetish practices of submission and domination. Bondage went mainstream.

Layla recalled a memorable incident in which she encountered her dad examining her copy of
Rose and Thorn
. As a single father raising a teenage girl, Gene Remington had struggled, and Layla struggled along with his struggles. They felt their way forward together. She almost had to laugh, though, when she witnessed the baffled look on his face as he dipped into the overheated prose.

“It's just a love story, Dad,” she had said.

“Like a romance novel.”

“Yeah.”

“This stuff…you like it?”

“Don't worry about it, Daddy,” the nineteen-year-old Layla had said, plucking the offending volume out of his hands and retreating, deeply embarrassed, into her bedroom.

Now, with the CAU team finishing up its work on the Henegar scene, Remington thought about the shrine in Merilee's bedroom. Sam Brasov told her that the original missing-persons report on Merilee noted the girl's passion for the Rose and Thorn books. Brasov said that he had also run across other references to Rose and Thorn, a few times in his survey of other missing-girl reports.

She left the house and stood in the driveway. The LACTFOMEY gathering at Grand Olympic Auditorium seemed a million years ago. Morning rush hour had not yet begun on the freeway to the south. The eastern sky showed the mercury glow of the sprawling city and, above that, the barest glimmer of dawn.

Remington should have been tired but wasn't. It would hit her later, she knew. The whole time she was plugged into a crime scene, she somehow found herself energized, not drained.

She had encountered Rose and Thorn in the course of her own investigation of missing-girl files.
Well, of course you did, Layla,
she told herself. She was surveying cases involving young girls, and virtually every girl in the country had a thing for those books. Therefore she had to expect to run into Rose and Thorn.

Sam Brasov and she had both noted the same detail in their research. So what? Correlation wasn't causation, right? Let's say the girls in the missing-persons files all drank milk. She wasn't about to conclude that drinking milk somehow figured into their disappearance.

Still…That damned Rose and Thorn shrine in the corner of Merilee Henegar's bedroom nagged at her.

“Detective Remington?” She recognized the uniformed deputy as Jamie Guerra, from the Lost Hills sheriff's substation. Probably just coming on first watch.

“I did the MUPR on Merilee Henegar,” he said.

“I took a fresh look at it again last night, Deputy. Very helpful, very professional.”

Guerra ducked his head with a pleased smile. “Is the mother…?”

“Totally out of it, as you might imagine.”

“Okay, well…I just wanted to, you know…”

“You wanted to check in.”

“Right.”

They stood together at the curb of Border Drive. Guerra kept flicking glances toward the Henegar house. He appeared disturbed, as though he had heard a sick thing that he didn't want to know but couldn't stop thinking about.

“Something I didn't see in the MUPR, Deputy—was there any analysis of Merilee's computer trail?”

“Uh, no, we were going to…but…” Guerra was nervous, afraid he was being criticized for screwing up.

“Well, you can only spread yourself so thin, right?” Remington knew better than anyone else the staffing problems caused by recent county budget cuts.

“Right,” Guerra agreed, stammering. “It was a question of, of, you know, man hours—I mean, woman and man hours, personnel hours.”

Remington smiled. “Up in the victim's bedroom, we came across items that indicated she liked the Rose and Thorn books. Are you familiar with them?”

“Yes! I mean, I haven't read them, but yeah. You know, the mother, Mrs. Henegar, she mentioned it during my original interview. She told me that the daughter was rabid about, you know, Rose and Thorn.”

“I guess pretty much every female of a certain age has read them.”

Guerra again looked uneasy, as if he had been caught out in a mistake. “I didn't think—I didn't record it in the MUPR, but it's in the prelim assessment.”

The Preliminary Assessment and Recommendation Regarding Missing Persons was the next step after the MUPR. “The girl's computer or her cell, Detective, they would be something for sure I'd say for you to dig into now that, you know, it's a homicide.”

“Forensics bagged Merilee's laptop,” Remington said. “Thank you for all your work, Deputy.”

Guerra hesitated. “Detective? This is, like, the second dead one you've turned up in the past week. Do you think…?”

Are they related?
She had an image of dead girls floating toward her, washing up at her feet with the tide. Detective Layla Remington, the dead-girl whisperer.

A CAU tech called to her from the front porch of the house, so she didn't have time to respond to Guerra's uncompleted question.

“Rabid.” That was the word young Deputy Guerra had used. Maybe she wasn't looking for missing girls who just read the Rose and Thorn trilogy the same way everyone else did. Maybe she was trying to find girls who
lived
it. A thought had been hovering just outside her consciousness: Tarin Mistry had disappeared right around the time that Rose and Thorn had exploded into popularity.

Ridiculous,
thought Remington.
I'm just tired
. The exhaustion she had been holding at bay washed over her. She radioed dispatch and logged out from the scene. As she walked toward the U-boat, it seemed to her that Colonel Sanders had ordered up reality to be a little extra-crispy.

She headed home. Two months ago she had moved from her old place in Los Feliz to a rented bungalow in Topanga, closer to her assigned Region I field territory. She drove Las Virgenes Road through the canyons toward the coast. Most of the traffic flowed the other way.