13 Stolen Girls Read online

  When the guy saw Layla staring at him, he stepped back hastily, retreating out of the line of sight. At that distance, she couldn’t tell if he’d actually left the scene. Call in a patrol, brace him, ask him if it was an emergency, otherwise, what was he doing stopping on the busy freeway?

  “Princess,” Gene said. He didn’t have eyes on the looky lou. He had kicked a bit of wreckage out of the mud in the shallows of the river.

  A black box made of metal and high-impact plastic, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Two circles of dark silver were affixed to one side.

  Gene moved to give the box to his daughter, then stopped. “Maybe you ought to glove up before you handle this.”

  “A GPS tracker,” Layla said, getting a closer look at it. The silver circles were sintered alnico magnets used to attach the small device to the undercarriage of a vehicle.

  Gene rotated the box, allowing them both to examine it. “The sheriff’s department use these?”

  “Not that I know of. Might not have been from the wreck.”

  “Right. Could have flown off a car passing on the freeway, bounced a quarter mile or so, then wound up in the river mud.”

  Layla shrugged. “You can buy a gadget like that at RadioShack for a hundred bucks, you know, or anywhere on the Internet.”

  “Well, if it was off the truck, then somebody had a trace on your movements.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me that God was watching?”

  “Not God,” Gene said.

  Chapter 10

  Remington was sorely tempted to do the detective work herself, tracking down the GPS device and making an arrest for illegal surveillance. But in the end she presented the little black box, bagged and still covered with Los Angeles River mud, to her superiors at the sheriff’s substation in Calabasas.

  Patrick Cohen was the captain there. He listened to Remington’s story of finding the dingus at the accident site.

  “Could be nothing, but it should be fairly simple to check the system on this,” Remington said. The devices were transponders that had to be linked to a computerized tracking-service account.

  Cohen held up the bag. He wore thick lenses for myopia, and his eyes swam behind them. “I wonder if you should have left it in place, let forensics have a whack.”

  “A highway-patrol MAIT had already processed the crash, and somehow they missed it.”

  “Usually they’re pretty methodical.” Cohen frowned. There were other LASD personnel crowded into his office with them—a deputy, a sergeant, all men. Plus there was the scruffy undercover guy she had last encountered at the Merilee Henegar scene.

  Detective Sam Brasov.

  Gingerly, Cohen placed the baggie with the device back down on his desk, as if it were somehow dangerous. “Well, we will certainly take a look.”

  “It’s serious, though, right?” Remington felt it necessary to prompt him.

  “Very serious, especially in light of what happened to you downtown. Your investigation into the Henegar case, for one, could be compromised.”

  “So we’ll fast-track it?” Again, as with the original attack, Remington had the maddening sense that no one was treating the situation with the gravity it deserved.

  “We will fast-track the tracker,” Cohen said, smiling wanly.

  “Let me know who gets assigned, okay?”

  “Will do.” Cohen rose to his feet. “How are you feeling, Detective? You had a close call.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We want to make sure you’re fully recuperated before you get back into harness.”

  “I’m good. I don’t need recuperating.” And there are girls going missing. Why did no one feel the urgency she did?

  “You’re good? That’s good. I want you to meet Detective Sam Brasov, up from Region Two to help us out.”

  “I know Detective Brasov.” Remington nodded to him.

  “Turning up like a bad penny,” Brasov said lightly.

  “Since your own ride is down, I’m tasking Detective Brasov as your partner for a few weeks.”

  “I work alone, sir.” Cohen knew that. Everyone in the department knew it.

  “No offense,” she said to the undercover.

  He grinned. “Some taken, but I’ll survive.”

  “Detective Brasov is a fine police, and I know you’ll do great work together.” Cohen couched his directive as not quite an order, but Remington could read the subtext. The sheriff’s department is worried about you. Well, she was worried about the department, so they were even.

  Brasov followed her out to the parking lot of the sheriff’s substation. For the time being, and until the county saw fit to assign her another vehicle, she was driving her dad’s thirty-year-old pickup.

  “Oh, hell, no,” Brasov said when he saw her ride.

  “What? It’s a classic.”

  “We shooting a beer commercial or something? Picture us home on the range in our trusty truck, hump some hay bales, kick back with a brew.”

  “It’s what I’m driving,” Remington said stubbornly.

  “Wait here.” Brasov disappeared into the recesses of the county garage.

  He was gone a long time. She climbed into the F-150. Ever since she got her gold shield, she had worked solo. Some of it was that the overwhelmingly male force still wasn’t comfortable working with a “girl,” a “lady.” Shunned, Remington had turned her solitary status into a positive. She liked not having to check in with a male in order to make a decision.

  A mechanical scream emerged from the garage. Brasov pulled up alongside Gene’s ancient pickup in a silver-flake Porsche Spyder. The hugely expensive exotic automobile rumbled like a fighter jet.

  Remington couldn’t help herself. Shaking her head, she got out of her dad’s truck to examine the outlandish vehicle.

  “You know Michah Lords, the coke dealer we just busted? This was his whip.” Brasov gunned the engine, grinning at her. “It’s going on the auction block, Remington. We only got it for a couple more days. Plus, you know, it’s environmentally sensitive.”

  Remington had to raise her voice to be heard. “No way this thing is green.”

  “Sure it is, it’s a hybrid—got not one but two electric motors in it.”

  “As well as a V8 power plant.”

  “Damn, Remington knows her automobiles.” He tapped the accelerator. “Come on, how many chances like this you going to get?”

  He was right. “Okay,” she said, “but I’ll drive.”

  “No, no,” he wailed. But when she walked around to the driver’s side and stood there waiting, he reluctantly emerged.

  “I knew you were a hard woman.”

  It took a beat for Remington to familiarize herself with the car’s interior and its high-tech center console. It sounded like a fighter jet, and felt like one inside, too.

  Brasov climbed into the passenger seat. “This is a travesty. I was born to drive this car.”

  “Seatbelt.”

  “Where’re we going?” Brasov’s body slammed back into the seat as Remington gave a faint tap on the accelerator. They popped out onto Agoura Road and, seconds later, were on the freeway, flying west.

  —

  The job hadn’t exactly turned out as Lisa Pressberger had expected. The man she knew as Larry Wayne had promised her a rose garden if she would just leave her mother’s house in Washington State and come work for him in sunny Southern California.

  Lisa had long felt that she was at a dead end. She was eighteen years old. She worked at a Bob’s Big Boy and still slept in the bedroom of her youth. The Internet saved her. Through reddit and social media, she met loads of people who weren’t like the dreary losers she felt had been all around her in Spokane.

  Her mom, Helen, had warned her about strangers on the Web. She even took away Lisa’s Internet access for agonizing stretches, controlling computer use as a punishment. It drove Lisa up the wall.

  And, eventually, it drove her out of the house, too, out of Spokane and all the
way to Malibu.

  Malibu! How could anyone resist? It was like a magic kingdom. Money and movie stars and white-sand beaches. She met Priapus CM on a Rose and Thorn reddit thread. The two of them soon peeled off into a private IM exchange, spending hours getting to know each other intimately. They “talked”—actually texted—about everything. The conversation seemed to embrace the whole world. Lisa was attracted to the idea of submitting herself completely to a stronger, older man, just as Rebecca Rose had done with Damien Thorn.

  Before long, Priapus CM had told Lisa his real name, as she had revealed hers. They turned out to be soul mates. The age difference didn’t matter. Her father, David, had left Helen when Lisa was little, so she’d never had a real dad. She needed someone powerful, someone with authority, a person who could tell her what to do in life.

  Lawrence John Wayne—they joked about his macho name—sounded like her dream master. He wasn’t all blustery and fake like the other wannabe doms she met on the Web. Larry Wayne was…sensitive. There was no other way Lisa could describe it. He knew her heart. Plus, he was wealthy. He lived in Malibu, didn’t he? You had to be rich just to exist in that fabled 90265 zip code.

  The reality, when Lisa arrived that fall, was at first fairly exciting. Larry sent her a plane ticket for the trip from Spokane to Burbank. She had never flown in an airplane before and was terrified, but she got through the experience without losing her cookies.

  Larry picked her up at the airport in a gorgeous luxury SUV. He had been everything she wished for. He’d give her curt, no-nonsense commands all the time, even about little things, such as how he wanted her to sit in a chair at a restaurant (leaning forward, straight-backed, legs spread).

  They didn’t have sex right away. When she was with Larry, she felt an overpowering sense of powerlessness that to her was better than any foreplay she’d ever experienced. She was, in the Bill Clinton definition of intercourse, still a virgin. Her previous sexual fumblings, with teenage friends of both genders, faded in memory. The boys, with their scraggly facial hair and eagerness, all vanity and ineptitude, now seemed particularly pathetic.

  The Malibu ranch where Larry brought her hit the approval meter between “acceptable” and “fine.” Not luxurious, but pretty. The smallish two-bedroom house balanced on the top of a little hill above a lake, surrounded by a barn, an office, some other outbuildings. Larry put Lisa up in what he called a guesthouse but was really just a converted garage. The bed was a futon, and the rest of the furniture would have been rejected at any self-respecting thrift shop. Cheap sisal carpet covered the concrete floor.

  Right off, Larry confiscated her phone. The move upset her. He promised she could have it back when she proved herself to him. Lisa submitted, but felt naked without her cell. He did allow her a single call to her mother, so that she could tell Helen she had gotten to California okay.

  Lisa found the office work Larry Wayne had her doing to be odd in the extreme. She sent out endless numbers of letters to addresses that he provided. All the letters were variations on the same theme, about “ground-floor,” “zero-to-sixty,” “extremely exciting” investment opportunities in health care, agriculture, real estate. The letterheads changed: Mark Vee Consultants, Aqua-II, Malibu Lake Management, Agoura Associates. The strangest thing was that Larry signed different names to almost every letter, calling himself Jay Wayne, Lars Bittner, Eric Decker, John Lawrence Klos.

  When Lisa asked him about it, he told her that was the way business was done. He was what he called a “vee-cee,” a venture capitalist. What he was doing, he said, was raising funds for various enterprises.

  She was alone at the ranch most of the time. She wasn’t allowed to go out much, but she could tell that there were a lot of expensive homes in the neighborhood. Once in a while a sad-eyed older woman named Ann came by the ranch office. Lisa could have used a female friend, even one as frumpy and downcast as Ann. But Larry had warned her away from the woman.

  Two days after Lisa arrived, she and Larry did something that they had promised each other in their endless text exchanges. They got matching tattoos. Well, they didn’t really match, they were more complementary. And hers was the only one they had actually done that evening, since Larry told her that he didn’t have time right then for his.

  Her master was fussy. They checked in on a half-dozen tattoo studios. He always found something wrong, like the premises weren’t hygienic, or the tattoo guy was a dirtbag. One of them smoked weed right there in front of them. Larry was disgusted. What he really wanted was a female to do the job, so that a male wouldn’t be able to paw over his lady. Lisa was secretly pleased that he was such a jealous lord.

  Lisa finally got inked at a studio in Saticoy. Larry provided the design, the beautiful, small-“k” kef marking that bonded her to him forever. The color they chose was called Monthly Red, and they laughed about the name. During the procedure Larry asked Bridget, the tattoo artist, if he could wield the needle for a while. He bribed the gal to say yes, then took his place in the chair, looming over Lisa, staring intently into her eyes as he applied the pain. She almost creamed in her jeans.

  The tattoo made it look as though her skin had boiled. It was ugly and scabby now, but in a couple of weeks, when it healed, it would look pretty.

  The sex, when it finally came later in the week, consumed her. One evening Larry appeared at the guesthouse door dressed in black leather, almost like a cosplay costume. Lisa didn’t even have to ask. She knew it was time. They’d had sub-dom sessions on the computer before, plenty of times, so she knew pretty much what was expected.

  Her master herded his slave down a dirt path toward the shore of the lake. There, tucked away in a grove of cottonwoods, he kept a small trailer.

  The Toy Box, the Corean master called it.

  Oh, my God. My God, my God, my God. The human being called Lisa Pressberger vanished that night. She disappeared into a nonentity called k-gurl. On the Internet, masters were always all capitals, while slaves were lowercase. That was how Lisa felt inside the Toy Box. Lowercased. Stripped and strapped and whipped and forced and lowered. She wasn’t who she was. She was him.

  After they had three sessions on three successive nights, Lisa began to suspect that something was wrong. She wasn’t doing it right somehow. The Corean master wasn’t satisfied. He found fault. Lisa could take the physical pain he inflicted. But the mental bullying pushed her into a dark place. She began crying herself to sleep.

  At six in the evening the day after the third session, Larry came to her while she was in the office, stuffing envelopes. He appeared upset, bordering on furious.

  “Your mother keeps calling,” he raged.

  Lisa was surprised at how relieved she felt that someone from the outside knew where she was. But she realized it was a touchy issue. “I’ll text her back and get her to stop.”

  “You know you haven’t earned the right to use a phone.”

  He presented her with several sheets of blank paper. “Sign your name on the bottom of each one.”

  “Why?” The question popped out of Lisa’s mouth before she thought about it. If there was one thing Larry hated, it was being challenged. He had ruled the word “why” out of Lisa’s vocabulary. Their whole relationship was based on her immediate and absolute obedience.

  Larry slapped his hand on the desk next to her, making Lisa gasp. “What did you say?”

  “Yes, yes, Master,” she said meekly.

  He swept up the sheets as she signed them and then stormed out. She never saw the papers again. Or, for that matter, much of anything else.

  —

  Pull up in a $900,000 sports car—especially around L.A., where the populace was extremely sophisticated in its appreciation of the automobile—and onlookers tend to snap to attention. There were only eight hundred Porsche 918s in existence, half of those unleashed in America, mostly dispatched to Florida and California.

  When Remington and Brasov rocketed down the Ventura Freeway, the Porsche Spyde
r constantly turned heads. A swarm of admiring motorcyclists rode alongside them for a while. Remington liked the picture she presented in the driver’s seat, since no doubt every one of those eight hundred Spyders had been purchased by males. The vehicle was shaped like a phallus, and here it was being controlled by a woman. Horror of horrors!

  The L.A. sheriff’s department’s confiscation of this particular car had raised squeals of protest about government overreach in civic forfeiture procedures. It had even been suggested (in the Huff Post opinion pages) that the LASD had targeted the owner, a dope slinger named Michah Lords, in order to nail the car for its own.

  When they turned into the parking lot of the Drop, a hard-core rock club in Agoura Hills, all the head-turning stopped. The youths in the parking lot pretended a bored disinterest.

  “Oh, yeah, they’ve, like, seen it all,” Brasov commented.

  This was an early-evening show—no alcohol served, twenty-and-under welcomed. The clubgoers appeared like children trying very hard to be adults. Remington didn’t hide her badge wallet as she climbed out of the car. She heard the little plosive “po” “po” “po” warnings—kiddie slang for “po-lice.” A few of the punks peeled off, one of them backing away and raising her arms, Ferguson style.

  Some of the posters up in Merilee Henegar’s bedroom had referenced the Drop. The metal scene in Agoura Hills was infamous and intense, but the venues were always changing. Clubs had the staying power of meteors. Db’s had been on top for a while, but Web chatter said that its time was past and the Drop was the comer.

  The club tucked itself behind a mall at the west end of Thousand Oaks Boulevard. The upscale, manicured, pleasantly tree-lined environs contrasted sharply with the slouching, kohl-eyed clientele assembled in the parking lot. The two dozen or so teenage metal punks seemed like forlorn demons displaced to paradise, seeking a path back to the netherworld.

  Brasov and Remington chased down a small clutch of rockers who had drifted away as soon as they realized the two were police. Brasov whistled like a cowboy herding cattle, heading off the strays.