13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  13 Hollywood Apes is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi eBook Original

  Copyright © 2014 by Gil Reavill

  Excerpt from 13 Stolen Girls by Gil Reavill copyright © 2014 by Gil Reavill

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book 13 Stolen Girls by Gil Reavill. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eBook ISBN 9780553395051

  Cover design: Scott Biel

  Cover image: Hal Bergman/Photodisc/Getty Images

  www.readalibi.com

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  Chimpanzee, n. [from Bantu kampensi, “fake man” or “mockman”]: A great ape of the genus Pan, native to Africa, believed by evolutionary biologists to be the closest existing relative to human beings.

  Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions…The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.

  —Charles Darwin

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from 13 Stolen Girls

  1

  The family members settled for the night among the sweet-smelling spindle trees and eucalyptus along the eastern boundary of the yard. They had been restless all day from the sharp scent of smoke in the air, the far-off call of sirens, the busy staccato motor noise of humans in the hills around them. Delinquent flames showed on a ridgeline to the north, orange-black in the distance.

  Dread of fire, an age-old fear, was bred into their bones. They gathered as a family that sweltering October night, the last of their lives. For all their nervousness, they performed their usual evening rituals, grooming one another, shaping their tree-bough bedding for the night. Janey and Arbor, always the best of friends, played at tossing clumps of leaves and broken-off sticks onto the cargo nets strung between wooden posts below them.

  They fell into wakeful sleep one after another: Mister Jeepers, Monk, Chow-Chow, Stella. Veronica curled up with the playful youngster she had adopted, Bee Bee. Pamela slept with her daughter, Amy. Eric paired off with the elderly Bess.

  Out of the dark came a laser pinprick of light. Odd, dancing, crimson, it searched among its targets until it settled upon Booth, the pepper-haired patriarch, who lay alone in a self-created sling of branches high up in a eucalyptus.

  The gunshot broke the night open.

  The family startled instantly awake, and the yard echoed with screeches, barks, and howls. As the others scattered, Booth remained inert and motionless at the foot of the tree.

  The night air filled with sharp, echoing reports, one after another, spaced among the screams. Moment by moment, the members of the family fell. The big chain-link fence cut off all retreat. There was nowhere to run. The killing took but six minutes.

  Finally only a single lost soul survived, an eight-year-old male, running along the ditch on the grassy western side of the compound, frantic after the death ruckus of the others. He sped not away but toward the shooter. Confused, or angry, bent on revenge.

  The ruby laser dot searched, discovered, settled. Five grams of copper-clad lead caught the last survivor with a glancing blow on his right shoulder, spun him around, and pushed him into the concrete ditch.

  Then, silence. A few night birds called, poorwills and mourning doves. Above, through the leaves, the far-off, uncaring stars. Somewhere to the east a two-stroke engine sputtered, sounding barely there.

  Later that night, the dry October winds pushed the flames down out of the hills into the parched grasses and brittle, needle-heavy trees of the compound. But the wildfire found nothing left to kill and, in its impotent rage, could do nothing more than cook the dead.

  2

  Why a deputy detective investigator with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office might be carrying a potato on the night of the Lost Hills wildfire was a fact that did not readily admit to explanation.

  The sheriff’s department posted Layla Remington at a junction along Las Virgenes Road, in the canyons above Malibu. The sky a mile to the north of her was a wall of smoke, lit orange and red from the inside, coin-size floaters of ash in the air, with a background noise like the distant rumbling of a freight train. To the east, homes, ranches, and camp buildings nestled in the dry landscape went up like so many birthday candles. The fire teams found themselves helpless to stop the destruction.

  When she was off duty at the D.A.’s office, and in recognition of the fact that she had no real life, Detective Investigator Remington volunteered for fire duty. She did backup traffic control for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, wearing an orange reflective smock that made her look like a traffic cone. The big Lost Hills blaze, out to flatten a vast slice of the county, represented an all-hands-on-deck situation.

  From her post at the intersection, Remington could hear the propane-gas pigs on the barbecue grills outside the burning homes explode one after another. The fire crowned in dense stands of sycamore, fir, and gray pine. Mingled with the wood smoke was the smell of burning meat from all the steak-filled chest freezers in houses that were getting roasted in the flames.

  The beef smell made her think of the potato.

  Denny Hamilton, long-dirty-blond-haired, scruffy-bearded captain of a fire team from the Sierra Nevada that called themselves the Wooly Mammoth Hot Shots, told Layla Remington about the potato thing. “An old guy with the Mammoth Lake Fire Department said they used to do it all the time back during the war.”

  “That would be the Civil War, right?”

  Denny thought Layla might be serious, not quite getting her yet. “No, no, I guess he meant, you know, World War Two, or maybe—Jesus, you’re right, maybe it was Vietnam.”

  “The potato thing, Denny,” Layla prompted him.

  Hamilton was waiting around at her intersection after a resupply, looking for a lift back to the front lines. Layla didn’t mind him hanging out. The guy looked half-charred, his eyebrows singed off, the scruff on the right side of his face curled by wildfire heat. He was dirty and ashy and in his rootless early twenties, like hotshot team members everywhere. But the whole package added up to hero-handsome.

  “Okay, so you find a century plant, like an agave, you know? The spiky ones? And you impale your tuber onto the top spike.” Hamilton mimed the move, impaling one of the several potatoes he kept on his person on an imaginary cactus.

  “Like you le
ave it on the cactus spike there, it kind of looks like those tennis balls people put on the ends of their car antennas, you know?”

  “Then the fire comes along—”

  “Right, yeah, the fire comes and cooks it, but that isn’t the only thing. Agave plants are designed to survive fire, you know? Like, they’re like jack pines and ponderosas, you know? Wildfires are good for them.”

  “Right,” Layla said, wanting him to get on with it.

  “The heat forces the sap of the agave up through the spike and into the tuber. What you get is a baked potato that tastes like a hit of mescal.”

  Layla scoffed. The Wooly Mammoth Hot Shots were all wastrels. They worked hard, but they played even harder. Tequila was their national pastime, and mescal was their world series.

  Hotshot teams were part of a whole weird subculture. In the off-season for wildfires, most of these guys (and girls, not many, but a few) worked as guides on river-rafting excursions in Alaska, say, or on ski patrol in Utah. Or they surfed in Costa Rica. They were itinerant risk junkies. Some of them had no permanent addresses; they just lived out of storage lockers.

  “There aren’t any agave plants in Malibu,” Layla told Denny when he tried to push a potato on her.

  “You can stick it on a branch of a ponderosa pine—it comes out tasting like butterscotch.”

  Layla laughed and shook her head. The guy was so damned irresistible.

  “No, really,” Denny insisted. “What you do is you go up to a ponderosa pine that has direct sunlight shining on it, give it a hug. I’m telling you, put your face right into the bark—it smells exactly like butterscotch. Like, I mean, exactly.”

  “You’re a tree-hugger now, Denny?”

  “Did you know the first tree-huggers were a band of Hindu women in the foothills of the Himalayas who were trying to save a grove of sacred trees from loggers?”

  Later that night Denny Hamilton went up-canyon to face off with Lost Hills. Layla wound up holding one of his big oblong Idaho baking potatoes. She stuffed it into the pocket of her orange reflective smock. She thought she might try out the “tuber or not tuber” pun that her dad had taught her on some poor victim, but in the flurry of activity around the wildfire she actually forgot about the thing.

  Until the nimrod in the Mercedes morgue wagon showed up.

  He came on a little after 1 a.m. The blocky, outlandish vehicle he drove pretended to be a sport-utility crossover of some sort, the German answer to the Hummer. For all its upscale design, a Mercedes G55 AMG wound up looking like a child’s idea of a hearse. The black truck gave a throaty growl as it pulled up at the Las Virgenes Road intersection.

  The driver didn’t even bother to roll down his window, just pointed past the roadblock up toward the fire. Deputy John Velske, one of several Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department personnel assembled at the intersection, approached the vehicle. He made a circling motion with his finger, indicating that the driver should open his window, the gesture held over from when people still cranked windows down manually.

  “Sir, this road is closed.” Velske stated it as a fact but kept his tone polite.

  “Gotta get up there,” the driver barked. He was smooth and well tanned, as if he had been cast in an ad for the car he was driving.

  “We have emergency protocols in place, sir,” Velske said.

  “Deputy, is it? Deputy, I’ve got a five-million-dollar residence up in Coral Canyon and I am within my rights to secure said residence.”

  Great, we’ve got ourselves a lawyer. Remington could almost read Velske’s thoughts.

  “I could try to contact the fire teams in the vicinity and have them radio down a report,” the deputy offered.

  “I don’t want a goddamn report, Deputy. I want to retrieve the three gold records that are up on the wall in my office, the platinum record in the entry hall, the contents of my safe.”

  Velske turned to Remington and mouthed the word “douche.”

  “What did you just say to her?” Like the guy could read lips. He wore his hair wicked up and, even though it was past midnight, had a pair of five-hundred-dollar sunglasses propped on the back of his head, probably slept with them on.

  He said, “Okay, I’m heading up right now, and if you try to restrain me the sheriff’s department is going to find itself in a world of trouble.”

  The Mercedes G55 lurched forward an inch as the driver slammed it into gear. Remington marveled. She had seen men face off like this all her professional life, and even before, in the school yard. Velske and the morgue-wagon driver were like a couple of silverback gorillas in the rain forest. What was the guy going to do now, plow his rig over a sheriff’s deputy?

  What he did instead was maneuver his ultra-expensive sport utility into the ditch for a little improvised off-roading.

  None of the law-enforcement personnel stationed at the intersection could believe it. The nimrod had a death wish. Coral Canyon was right in the path of the Lost Hills fire.

  “Sir? Sir?” Deputy Velske yelled, but the guy just kept going.

  As the glossy Mercedes bumped slowly past her, Remington extracted the potato that Denny Hamilton had given her from the pocket of her smock. She reached down and crammed the tuber into the vehicle’s exhaust pipe, where it vented immediately in front of the rear wheel.

  Velske saw her make the move. He grinned and nodded. The two of them watched the driver pull down into the ditch, around the roadblock, and back up onto the pebbled asphalt of Las Virgenes.

  “I’ll give him fifty yards,” Velske said, staring after the vehicle.

  “Twenty,” Remington guessed.

  The Mercedes compromised and died about thirty yards up the road, the exhaust fumes backed up in the manifold to choke off the engine.

  “You know, the Germans just don’t make cars like they used to,” Velske said.

  The platinum-record-in-the-entry-hall guy stormed out of the G55 and stood there staring at his $115,000 vehicle, disabled by a potato.

  The shoulder-mounted two-way that Remington wore crackled with incoming comms from Denny Hamilton’s team working in the hills.

  “Wooly Mammoths Hot…We’re at…34.115642 north, 118.679937 west…We got…Trappe Ranch…wildlife sanctuary.” Blasts of static kept interrupting the message.

  Remington fumbled with her speaker-mic. “Mammoths, this is the sheriff’s post at Las Virgenes Road. Repeat.”

  “…Thirteen dead monkeys…”

  “Mammoths, this is Las Virgenes roadblock. Please repeat. Mammoths?”

  The connection went cold.

  3

  Never compose a work email in the wee hours. Rick Stills, an assistant district attorney for Los Angeles County, knew the rule. The unwritten “Thou shall not write” rule.

  Stay away from email altogether on the job, as much as you can. That was the prudent course. Nothing to subpoena later, should it come to that, as it did more and more often lately. A message worked up in the dead of night—anytime between, say, midnight and 6 a.m.—was the professional equivalent of drunk dialing.

  Or, okay, so write the thing, one hand gripping the cold-beaded Amstel Light and the other hand pecking at the keyboard, but, Christ in the foothills, for pity’s sake don’t click send.

  Don’t click send.

  Don’t do it.

  He clicked send.

  Subject: Ro-Co-Co Etc

  Date: Monday, October 18, 3:25 AM

  From: Rick Stills

  To: Major Crimes Group and 14 other recipients

  Conversation: Dispensation of cases

  People—Okay, once again I can feel it happening, the office tempo ramping up, the publicity whirlwind sweeping us all into some sort of shared communal folly. Yes, I realize there’s been a celebrity murder on our watch. Yes, indeed, do I ever know that public interest in the Mulholland Drive case is going to be ferocious. The incident only went down a few hours ago. But I feel
strongly that in the face of this situation we have to keep hold of our integrity, our common sense, and our purpose. We have to refrain from drinking the Kool-Aid that is about to be dispensed in vast, gushing quantities by TMZ.com, E!, and all the other eager media outlets.

  It was before my time, but we’ve seen this before, haven’t we? The office got rocked back on its heels when Mr. O. J. Simpson was on trial, and I think it’s clear we lost our minds a little bit back then. We all know how that turned out.

  We’re better than that now, aren’t we? Can we refrain from the sort of feeding frenzy that degrades and belittles us? Can we not elbow each other at the trough? Who will be assigned to this oh-so-important celebrity murder case? Me! Me! Me! Does it really matter? Isn’t the wiser course to proceed soberly and professionally with our business and let the great world spin, as the phrase has it? We are the law, people. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard than Matt Drudge or Perez Hilton.

  While the news helicopters were scrambling over Mulholland Drive, while Donny Coll was still bleeding out and with Ross Murphy still on the run, when America’s TV networks were gearing up to go all Ro-Co-Co 24-7, you want to know what else happened? In case you’re interested. In case your focus is not totally monopolized by the prospect of a box-office darling on the witness stand and a bad-boy superstar in the dock, here’s what came across the wire while everyone was panting after celebrity:

  • An LAPD antigang detail recovered victims of what appears to be a double homicide, probably gang-related, from a storm drain of the Los Angeles River near La Brea.

  • A DUI struck a utility pole and caused a spot fire and a power outage in West Valinda.