13 Stolen Girls Page 11

  Strangeland was supposed to be famous and successful, at least in the movie/music world. He didn’t act like it, though, not like some boastful, big-time producer. The guy was almost…quiet. He came in without an entourage. He liked talking to Dixie. He always left a big tip. He was attracted to her—a girl could always tell—but she considered him too ancient to be believed. Nevertheless, Dixie was working up to where she could maybe ask for his help in the Search.

  A lot of well-known people came into Terry’s Deli, because it was near the Burbank TV studios and the movie soundstages at Warner’s. There were two Terry’s Delis with the same owners, both on Ventura Boulevard and separated from each other by about five miles. People were always getting mixed up about which was which and waiting at the wrong place to meet someone.

  Dixie had been at Terry’s only for a few weeks. Plenty of customers had already hit on her, though nobody who was even remotely interesting. Sometimes she felt like a swimmer with the sharks circling. Doc Strangeland was different. More like a teacher or an authority figure. She had a fantasy that the guy would turn out to be her real biological father.

  “Dixie? Honey?” A middle-aged woman with frizzy gray hair confronted her. “It’s your aunt, honey—Aunt Annie!”

  The pale, careworn person in front of Dixie did not much resemble the relative she had last seen…when? In Scottsdale, when she was little. Like, a decade back.

  “For pity’s sake, why didn’t you call us if you were here in L.A.?”

  “I’ve been meaning to, really, but I’ve only been here a short time.”

  “Your mother told me you were working at Terry’s.” She lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “We talk sometimes, but we don’t let the boys know.”

  The “boys” were brothers Jerry and Lawrence Close, Dixie’s father and uncle. They had stopped speaking to each other years ago. Dixie didn’t realize the two wives were in contact. She had no idea there was any communication between the two families at all.

  “It’s so good to see you, Aunt Annie. Are you eating here?”

  “It’s, it’s—well, it’s just amazing to see you, all grown and everything! I can’t believe you haven’t thought to look us up!”

  Aunt Annie and Uncle Larry. Her father’s brother and his wife. When Dixie was a child, they were the wealthy, important, out-of-town relatives from California. Their visits to Scottsdale were a treat. They always came bearing expensive gifts. “Auntie Antsy,” the little lisp-impaired Dixie called Annette Close. And Lawrence Close was always “Uncle Monkey,” after a stuffed toy he’d brought her.

  When Dixie was around ten or so, the Close brothers and their families seemed to drift apart. The visits to Scottsdale abruptly halted. Her parents, Sheila and Jerry, began to have their own problems—money issues, relationship difficulties. If she told the truth, Dixie would have had to say that she simply hadn’t thought of contacting her aunt and uncle when she arrived in Los Angeles, even though she knew they lived in the area.

  Now, of course, she thought, Why haven’t I reached out? I need help and I don’t know a soul in the big bad city. But I have Aunt Antsy! Wasn’t she Dixie Annette Close, named after this same woman standing in front of her? She kicked herself. “Enlist support of local relatives” should have been the first entry on her “Get Established” list.

  Aunt Annie was there waiting for Dixie at the end of her shift. She picked her up in a black coupe, drove her home to the ratty little apartment in Reseda, waited in the car while she went in and changed out of her work clothes, then took her out to a Sizzler on Sherman Way. Dixie loaded up at the salad bar. The older woman only picked at her food. Aunt Annie sat and listened while her niece unburdened herself.

  “The birth certificate I had turned out to be fake, can you believe that? According to the government, I was never born. I feel like I’m not even a person. I spend all this time at government agencies, and no one does a thing. I’m, like, unborn. I’m nothing.”

  Her aunt reached out to squeeze her hand. “You’re not nothing,” she said. “You’re Dixie. And I don’t care who your biological parents were, you’re a member of the Close family.”

  “Why is it so hard?”

  Aunt Annie gazed through the louvered blinds out to the strip mall where the Sizzler was located. With a jolt of certainty, Dixie realized that this woman had her own problems.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, blushing. “I’m only talking about myself.”

  “That’s okay, dear. I’m going to tell you what we’ll do. First, we’ll have you out to our place in Camarillo for dinner sometime. I don’t like the neighborhood your apartment is in. It doesn’t seem safe. Maybe, if Larry says it’s okay, you could come stay with us. I would love to have someone to talk to.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Auntie. That would be too much. I have to make my own way.”

  “Then I’m also going to ask your uncle Larry to help you. He knows about these things. He can sort it all out if anyone can. Of course he’s very busy right now, he always is, working harder than ever, but he’ll just have to find the time. He was with your father when they brought you home, you know.”

  “He was? Then maybe he knows something! Uncle Monkey!”

  Her aunt laughed. “Don’t get too excited,” she cautioned.

  They spoke of other things, about Jerry and Sheila, how Los Angeles was different from Phoenix, about the recent earthquake and its aftershocks. Soon enough Dixie felt the two of them running out of things to say. Her aunt paid the bill.

  The drive home through the evening Valley traffic was quiet. Dixie noticed that the black coupe her aunt drove was a little dented. An old Acura. She glanced over at the odometer. The car had more than two hundred thousand miles on it. She remembered the gleaming, brand-new Cadillacs and Mercedes that Larry Close drove whenever they came to Scottsdale to visit.

  Dixie had always believed that her aunt and uncle were fabulously wealthy. They carried themselves as if they were.

  “He always has to be the big man,” Jerry said of his brother.

  Maybe during the past ten years, when the two families hadn’t been in touch, things had changed. The downturn in the economy hit everyone hard.

  “All right, honey,” her aunt said, pulling up to the curb in front of Dixie’s apartment. “We are going to see each other again real soon.”

  “And Uncle Larry?”

  “We’ll try.”

  She gave Dixie what seemed to be an almost desperate hug. When she sat back, her niece realized that the woman had tears in her eyes.

  “Happy tears, Aunt Ansty?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes, of course, happy tears.”

  Dixie approached the front door of her apartment building trying to hold on to the idea that things would get better, now that she had two new allies. Her aunt gave a goodbye honk as she pulled away.

  Earlier that day, Doc Strangeland had pushed a business card on her, saying that he could take her out that night to hear some music. There was a band he was thinking about putting in a movie he was producing. Maybe give him a call, Dixie decided. She could handle the old man well enough, if he ever got frisky on her.

  The visit with her aunt, which was actually really a good development, somehow wound up making Dixie feel lonely. Going out with Strangeland would be better than sitting at home.

  —

  “So he was at Paramount this week? Is that how he said it? ‘I’m at Paramount’?”

  Layla enjoyed regaling her movie-fan father with the story of her brush with celebrity at the Farmers Market. She watched him attempt not being impressed and failing at it.

  “And he meets you at the Farmers Market, not Ivy or Madeo or one of those snooty upscale places. I’ve always heard Holt was a down-to-earth guy.”

  “It’s just the two of us here, you can call him Radley if you want to.”

  As soon as she realized that she was staying at her dad’s for dinner, Layla had gone out to the U-boat and
fetched in her task-force files. Poking through them, she was a little distracted by the smell of Gene cooking steak out on the deck of the condo.

  She had by now examined dozens of missing-persons reports assigned to LACTFOMEY, and had separated out a handful that, in her mind at least, seemed to be linked.

  A roster of stolen girls. The thread connecting them might be broken in places, or it disappeared amid the weave, but Layla felt sure the stitching was there. Was she the only one who saw it?

  A short dozen victims. Her mandate was to prevent there being any more.

  She needed to find out everything she could about the girls themselves. The names provided a way forward. They represented the common link to a killer.

  Sitting there on her father’s couch, the smoke from the barbecue drifting in from the deck, Layla tried to focus on a specific element of the male-female dynamic. Domination and submission embedded themselves deep in human psychology. Their interplay continually cropped up in relations between men and women. No better demonstration of that state of affairs existed than the astonishing popularity of the Rose and Thorn books.

  There was something secret and repressed about all this. Domination and submission seemed an ugly throwback to darker times. We were more enlightened now, weren’t we? Evidently not, or a trilogy of books about a master-slave affair wouldn’t be a universal bestseller among women.

  Talk about an inconvenient truth. Most women—some psychologists said all women—have sexual fantasies about being overpowered. How to reconcile that fact with the equally universal revulsion triggered by sexual assault? Men victimized women to a relentless, merciless extent. Remington knew all too well the reality of the matter, since she had spent her early policing career making keep-the-peace calls in the Valley, running up against one instance of domestic violence after another.

  She wondered about Martina Matindale, one of her cases in Chatsworth. The woman’s ear had been torn off by her husband. Martina returned to her abuser only to have him put her into a coma with a serious beating. She came out of the hospital and went back to her beloved Robby Matindale once again. That time he finished her for good, slicing open her carotid artery with an electric carving knife that she had given him as a birthday present.

  Was Martina Matindale among those one hundred percent of women who have rape fantasies? Remington never got to ask. It seemed an irrelevant question, with the wife dead and the husband doing twenty-five to life in San Quentin.

  “Men and women, women and men. It will never work.” Layla had always liked that rueful Erica Jong quote. Back in the day, after addressing multiple domestic-violence cases on patrol, she had to admit the truth of the line. The sexes seemed locked in a Stone Age mind-set. The caveman still dragged the cavewoman off by the hair.

  The received feminist wisdom pointed out a fundamental difference between rape fantasies and actual rape. Rape fantasies were something women could control. Rape they could not. But the whole subject made people uneasy. No one spoke about it, no one liked to confront it. The yuck factor was too strong.

  Layla searched her own soul. How much did she participate in this all-too-prevalent, all-too-perverse domination-submission dynamic? As far as she could recall, she had exactly zero ravishment fantasies. Was this denial on her part? Or were the psychologists—probably all male—full of it?

  During her late teenage years, when she first encountered the Rose and Thorn books, she attended Sierra Vista High School in Covina. She attracted the attention of one of the senior boys, a footballer named Colin Arness. He had a steady girlfriend, but he still dogged Layla once in a while. She recalled feeling like a deer in the headlights, as though it was impossible for her to flee from the attentions of this hunky older boy.

  Colin Arness. Jesus, she hadn’t thought of him in years. The sex had been nasty, brutish and short. She could hardly remember her feelings. Was Colin Arness her master, and had she been his slave? The question sounded sick and sentimental at the same time. She had submitted to the demands of a more powerful male. She couldn’t recall if she had enjoyed it. At the time, enjoyment seemed almost beside the point.

  “Hey there,” her father said, startling Layla out of her thoughts. “I’ve been calling you. I guess you’ve been off somewhere.”

  She got up and followed Gene out to the deck, where he had set up a table for two. Steak fajita fixings were spread out in all their peppery glory.

  “You should ask Radley if you could get on the Paramount lot, watch him do interiors during the Tommy Gates shoot.”

  “Maybe I could bring along my dad.” Layla scooped up some charcoal-roasted peppers and slices of marinated steak, folding them into her tortilla.

  Gene pushed the bowl of salsa and the sour cream her way. “Monaghan’s got that Priapus epic in development, too. That’s going to be huge— it’s like Avatar, all CGI. Supposed to have taken three years just to—”

  Layla held up her hand. “What?”

  “What, what?”

  “Monaghan’s movie. What did you say it’s called?”

  “Priapus. That’s the ancient god of—”

  “I know what it is,” Layla said, cutting him off. She tried to dismiss as pure coincidence the fact that the name of an obscure mythological deity had cropped up twice within a few days.

  Gus Monaghan was well known as a world-class horndog, party boy and hedonist. Gossip programs like E! loved him. He stood out even in the decadence-drenched vice dens of Hollywood. It would be perfectly natural for the guy to make a film about the Greek god of the penis.

  “The Priapus thing is on the Paramount lot, too. You remember what Mae West said, right? ‘I’m the girl who works at Paramount all day and Fox all night!’ ”

  Whenever Gene told even a slightly off-color joke in front of his daughter, his face scrunched up into an apologetic wince. Normally, Layla would have laughed at the Mae West line. She had heard her father quote it before. On this particular evening, in her present mood, it didn’t seem that funny.

  Priapus.

  Chapter 9

  Remington knew Bonnie Lareda back when she was still Bonnie McGowan, during the time the two of them were growing up together and going to some of the same schools in Covina. Lareda was always a spitfire of a girl, and developed into a fiery woman, a photographer who got famous reporting from war zones like Iraq and DR Congo. Remington had always been a little in awe of her. They ran into each other again in their adult lives when Lareda worked on a groundbreaking photo-essay documenting domestic violence.

  Remington was on patrol in the Valley at the time. Somehow Lareda managed to insert herself into household after dysfunctional household, and to keep on clicking while scenes of abuse were actually going down. The shots were incredible. As an LASD rookie, Deputy Layla Remington made a cameo appearance, standing in uniform off to one side in a photo that got printed in Lareda’s book, No More. Lareda was said to have just missed a Pulitzer with it.

  Now Remington connected up with her old friend in a warehouse district near the butt end of Skid Row, downtown. The photographer had directed Remington to meet her on a certain block of Violet Street, in an area of import-export firms, produce shippers and freight companies, all early-morning businesses that went dead at night.

  “I’m in a red ’78 GTO.” The shiny muscle car stood out in the shabby neighborhood. Layla pulled up behind it in the U-boat, her rather battered unmarked SUV.

  “Hey, girl!” Bonnie shouted at her.

  Layla joined Bonnie in her vehicle. They had a good time catching up with each other, laughing about their school days. Bonnie proved to be the first person in a while who didn’t want to know all about Layla’s discovery of the dead movie star in Malibu. Instead, they spoke of their present-day lives in generalities.

  “The Homicide Bureau, huh?” Bonnie looked impressed. “I should job-shadow you for a couple months.”

  “Cop work is pure boredom, punctuated by a few seconds of raging adrenaline.”


  Bonnie laughed. “War is pretty much like that all over.”

  She scoped out Layla’s outfit—gray slacks, yellow jersey and a light suede jacket. “Too suburban for tonight.”

  They were headed to a nearby venue that billed itself as “Paddles—The Friendly S/M Club.” Night moths were attracted to the only light left burning on Violet Street.

  Bonnie fished into the backseat of the GTO and pulled out a patent-leather bustier and black, elbow-length satin gloves.

  “Jesus, I’m not going to wear those!”

  “Sure, you are.” Bonnie retrieved a pair of stiletto heels. “We were always the same size, yeah?”

  For the first time, Layla took a good look at what Bonnie was wearing. Her bomber jacket was zipped up, but her micromini and net stockings made up for it in terms of exposure. She had always been a little on the punk side, even back in high school.

  “Here, look.” Bonnie got out of the car, unzipped the jacket and performed a slow turn. Her cinched leather corset communicated the message loud and clear. She looked like the classic dominatrix, only more lethal.

  “Damn, Bonnie! I’ll feel ridiculous.”

  “They expect the whole costume.”

  “Who? The bouncers?”

  “The men—the men, Layla. My slaves.” She garbed Layla in the uniform of the sexual underground, including an elaborate collar with a decorative neck plate. Layla submitted, thinking about how often she and Bonnie had played dress-up as kids.

  Bonnie made her leave her sidearm behind in the U-boat. “I don’t take my camera, you don’t take your gun.”

  Layla was thus technically in violation of LASD rules, which ordained that off-duty officers carry their weapons at all times. Wearing dominatrix gear meant she was off-off duty, with maybe a few more “offs” tossed in for good measure. She stashed her Ruger in the U-boat’s glove box.