13 Hollywood Apes Page 14

  The ADA came in with Randy Gosch reciting his morning calls. “Judge Nuñoz called, you have that noon thing with the personnel office, and oh, yeah, the Patricia Sedgewick woman called again, desperately wants a call back.” Gosch was putting his usual theatrical spin on the ordinary and the banal.

  “Remington,” Stills said.

  “ADA Stills,” Remington said. They exchanged tight-faced looks, like a couple of frustrated peace officers, which was what they were.

  “Randy,” Stills said, “just to demonstrate my technological competence with the office communications system, I want you to witness me actually lift this handset and dial a number myself, to assure you that I can make my own calls.”

  Since he arrived in Malibu, Stills had been having a comical amount of trouble with the phones. Gosch watched, amused, as the ADA performed the necessary actions.

  “Harry Cornell, please,” he said into the receiver. While he waited for the lawyer’s receptionist to connect him, Stills said sotto to Remington, “I’m going to have to lead him on a little, so you might not want to hear this.”

  “Harry! How are you, Counselor?”

  Remington and Gosch left Stills’s office together. “Lawyers are always so chummy, it’s disgusting,” Remington said. “They batter each other in court and then go out and drink at the same bars.”

  “An attorney is out on his yacht off Catalina, where there are always a lot of sharks in the water,” Gosch said. “He falls off the boat.”

  “I think I’ve heard this one, but go ahead, it might make me feel better.”

  “His cabin boy, who is wearing a very tight pair of white shorts, comes to the rail and sees the attorney splashing around as if he hasn’t a care in the world, even though there are fins circling all around him.”

  “Are the tight white shorts really relevant?” Remington asked.

  “The cabin boy calls out, ‘How come the sharks aren’t attacking you?’ The lawyer shouts back, ‘Professional courtesy.’ ”

  Remington nodded a laugh. Her phone buzzed. She was a little surprised to hear Cindy Iracane’s voice.

  “I’m scared, Detective,” the Odalon para-vet said. “Real scared.”

  Remington understood her to mean that she had heard about the Ian Terry murder. But she kept talking about San Bernardino, mentioning “Thomas,” babbling in a confused way.

  “Wait, wait,” Remington said. When she finally understood what Iracane was saying, the bottom dropped out. A sickening fear gripped her.

  “Do you think I could get, like, protection?” Iracane bleated. “A police officer posted outside my apartment?”

  “Stay where you are,” Remington said urgently. “I’ll call you right back.”

  She stormed back into Stills’s office. He was still on the phone with Harry Cornell. Remington slashed her finger across her throat to indicate that he should hang up, pronto. Stills held up his hand, telling her to wait.

  She reached over, pressed the hook mechanism, and killed the call.

  “Hey! What—?”

  “I think we have another one,” Remington said.

  —

  The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department—actually, the full title was the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner Department—was, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess. Reeling from year after year of budget cuts that slashed personnel, the department covered a huge unincorporated area, patrolling several small municipalities as well.

  The county’s public-information officer admitted candidly that the police could no longer afford to respond to certain kinds of calls. If you had a home burglary that wasn’t discovered actually in progress and you lived in one of the outlying districts of San Bernardino County, all the sheriff could offer was good luck and God’s speed.

  Deputies still snapped to attention for homicide. Cut the budget to the bone, but a blood-soaked scene like the one that greeted first responders at a run-down apartment building in Moreno Valley will still draw a response. The place was built sometime in the distant past, which for California meant the 1960s. Its blocky outline indicated that the architect had aimed for the dingbat style and somehow missed the mark. Things had gone downhill for 2245 Culver Lane since then. Poverty looks all the poorer when it’s sunbaked.

  By the time Remington got out to the scene, racing through a tangled nest of freeways, the apartment did not yield much that was useful. After hearing the news secondhand from Cindy Iracane, she called the sheriff’s department, waited an eternity on hold, and finally connected to a clerk in the offices of the detective detail. He informed Remington that the crime scene was about to be released by the police. She freaked. She pleaded for them to wait until she arrived.

  San Bernardino didn’t know what it had. The deputy detectives assigned to the case initially wrote the murder off as a particularly grisly home invasion. Forensic analysis would probably soon enough indicate that the assault was perpetrated not by human agency (not directly, at least) but by animal predation. Specifically, a chimpanzee attack. The San Berdoo cops would eventually determine the truth. Just give them a minute.

  The right hand evidently didn’t know what the left hand was doing. The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department remained blissfully unaware that there had been a similar murder two nights before in the canyons above Malibu. The BOLO put out by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department had either slipped through the cracks out San Bernardino way or its import hadn’t sunk in. The situation enraged Remington—the missed chance to head off another killing, corral Mace Arthur, and cage his partner in crime, Angle Bundy.

  Dukundane Tamas, the twenty-nine-year-old victim, had come to the United States from the Democratic Republic of the Congo four years ago. A national park in Burundi formerly employed Tamas in his native Africa, so the administration of the San Diego Zoo had sponsored the man’s work visa for his expertise in handling great apes. But America proved to be too much for Tamas. Drugs, alcohol, bright lights, and big cities took their toll. The zoo fired him, he drifted through a series of jobs, and eventually wound up as an employee at the Odalon Sanctuary.

  When Remington arrived at Tamas’s apartment on Culver Lane in Moreno Valley, the scene was in the last stages of being processed by forensic techs. The body had already been collected by the coroner. Fingerprint dust covered the door frames, doorknobs, and areas around the light switches. Someone had drawn vector lines with a ruler and a graphite pencil on blood-splatter patterns and then scrawled category markings (E2, F6, B7, etc.) alongside them.

  A lot of blood: spilled, spattered, and soaked into the shabby carpet. A big circular stain, the size of one of those plastic kiddie pools, had collected in one corner. Remington tried to read the scene. Why were the acts on display here somehow different from the blood bomb that exploded in Ian Terry’s school van? This was both more discreet and more discrete, she decided. The brutality was contained in space and time. She got a sense less of frenzy than of control.

  Torture? The killer tortures here, where there were people all around, where there was a real chance of being reported, if not stumbled upon? The same killer (it almost certainly had to be the same one) performed a speed job out in the boondocks of Malibu, where there was little possibility of discovery. It didn’t make sense.

  Thirteen chimps shot dead. A couple of nights later, one of their handlers is killed by a chimp attack that appeared to have been planned and directed by a human being. Two nights after that, another of the Odalon chimp handlers is felled in a carbon-copy assault.

  Three distinct incidents—yet they formed a single chain of events. Remington tried to parse it in her mind. A maniac with a passion for murdering apes and their keepers? Was the sanctuary massacre really just a mercy killing? Or were the human murders an attempt to cover the tracks of the perp in the original Odalon job?

  Cindy Iracane’s plea for protection had to be taken seriously, Remington decided. She’d counsel the woman to change her circumstances, move in with relatives
immediately. In lieu of that, Remington would ask Rick Stills to provide round-the-clock protection for the para-vet.

  Nothing in the puzzle was more clear to her than the fact that Mace Arthur and Angle were somehow at the center of it. Locate the rock star and the survivor chimp, and the rest of the pieces would fall into place.

  Remington glanced one last time around the three-room Moreno Valley apartment. The place looked vaguely psychedelic, as though it had been decorated by the musician Prince. This was due to the use, by crime-scene techs, of Leuco Crystal Violet, or LCV, a coloring reagent that turned bright purple in sunlight. LCV implied murder, or at least violence, since it raised fingerprints made in blood. In the language of forensics, blood was the “transfer medium” of the prints in question, and it catalyzed the LCV crystals in reaction to hydrogen peroxide.

  Remington entered a formal request that fingerprint analysis be expedited and the results forwarded to her. Given the impoverished state of the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, she didn’t hold out a lot of hope for a speedy response.

  Driving back to her home base through the chaotic jumble of Inland Empire car dealerships, fast-food outlets, and strip malls, Remington kicked herself the whole way. The death of Dukundane Tamas was her worst-case scenario in policing, a murder she might have prevented had she just been a little smarter, a little quicker, a little more on the ball. She was guilty along with the perpetrator. She felt anger toward Mace Arthur, a sociopath hiding behind a mellow hippie façade, upset with Harry Cornell, his enabler lawyer, and upset with Rick Stills for, well, for being Rick Stills.

  When Remington was first on patrol, doing mostly domestic in the Valley, she had been great, a conciliator, a sure-handed settler of situations. One night she had sat and counseled a man with a cocked pistol in his hand. She read his eyes and said a single word, “calmness,” over and over, whenever his face tightened and his temper flared. Nineteen long minutes of that and he had handed over the weapon. The incident helped earn Remington a gold shield.

  Her first year as a detective in general investigations wasn’t so great. She had an eighty-six-percent clearance rate. She couldn’t understand what she was doing wrong. She had never put an innocent man in jail, but her methods allowed too many guilty ones to go free. She wasn’t slack. But something was missing.

  They transferred her to the county D.A.’s staff, a backwater, and then to the Malibu satellite office, which meant they were effectively doubling down on the backwater business. A few months later, she had walked in on ADA Rick Stills sitting in the inner office, where the important people sat.

  Now, driving back from the Inland Empire, Remington had the awful suspicion that she had left some vital business undone, that she was again drifting toward failure. By the time she hit the Malibu office, she was thoroughly wound up. She didn’t simply enter Stills’s office, knocking on the door frame as was the polite protocol. She barged.

  “Rick!” she began, intending to launch into the catalog of insights, imperatives, and complaints that she had developed on her drive over.

  Remington pulled up short. The ADA sat on the edge of his desk, as if being behind it would place him too far away from the striking female who sat gazing up at him. The look on her face was one that Rick Stills had probably encountered all his life, an equal mix of the adoring and the flirtatious.

  People were dying, and what was this? Happy hour? Remington was enraged.

  “Detective,” Stills said. “I want you to meet Patricia Sedgewick. She’s a public-interest lawyer who came all the way out here from—”

  “We’ve got to put deputies on every Odalon staff member,” Remington blurted out, interrupting him. “They’re all in danger, and—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Stills said, interrupting her back.

  “I should get out of your hair,” Patricia Sedgewick said to Stills. The way she said “your hair” made it sound as though she were running her fingers through it.

  “No, no, stay,” Stills said. “Detective Remington’s passion for her job sometimes makes her forget her manners. Patricia Sedgewick, this is Detective Investigator Layla Remington.”

  Sedgewick gave Remington a brisk, practiced handshake. Remington felt momentarily put off. Her whole life, women like this one had intimidated her. Every piece of clothing Sedgewick wore was worth more than anything in Remington’s entire wardrobe. Pearls, of course. Her natural blond hair expensively highlighted. And something else, too, an air of maddening confidence that contrasted with Remington’s own manner.

  “You’ve got quite a case on your hands,” the Sedgewick woman drawled. “Fascinating.” Even her accent was expensive.

  “Trish is the director of a new center at the Birmingham School of Law,” Stills informed Remington.

  “We call it Jus Animalium,” Sedgewick said. “It means—”

  “I know what it means,” Remington said testily.

  Sedgewick glanced over at Stills. Have I done something to offend your detective?

  “Remington has just come from a fairly brutal crime scene,” Stills said.

  “The Moreno Valley killing.” Sedgewick nodded, sounding as if she already knew everything about everything.

  Remington glared a “Did you tell her?” look at Stills, and Sedgewick breathed out a fake-sounding laugh. “Relax, Detective Remington, I have my own sources for information.”

  “Now, I really have to be going,” Sedgewick said. She rose to her feet, which brought her face-to-face with Layla. The woman gave a toothy smile and held out her hand to Stills, reaching past Remington to do it. “We’ll see each other soon—Friday, we said, correct?”

  “Yes!” Stills said, sliding off the desk so that he wound up directly next to both women. Chairs hemmed in the three of them. Stills laughed, but it felt awkward. Remington tried to escape first and wound up careening into Sedgewick.

  “Sorry!” she muttered.

  “Crash and burn!” Sedgewick said brightly.

  “I’ll walk you out,” Stills said, and the two of them left the office together.

  “The Moreno Valley killing,” Remington said to the empty space, attempting to mock the pearls-and-cashmere accent of the female lawyer but making a hash of it.

  —

  “Chompanzee”—the media loved assigning moronic shorthand names to stories—led all the local Los Angeles newscasts that evening. Clearly, chimp attacks remained the undercard, while Ro-Co-Co was still the main event. But the fact that a second Odalon staffer had been murdered was enough for most people to imagine that a serial-killer ape was on the loose. Meanwhile, the slow-moving San Bernardino police refused to comment on the case or even to confirm that Dukundane Tamas had been killed by a rampaging fellow primate.

  That night, Remington skipped her usual stopover at her dad’s condo and went directly home to Los Feliz. She tried to take a break from work, tried to stay away from the computer, but eventually gave up on Dancing with the Stars in favor of more Internet ape research.

  Her Google forays led her to something that she hadn’t realized existed. During those first few days after the wildfire, the Odalon massacre might have had a nonexistent media presence. But, right from the start, the news had lit up a specialized community of ape fanciers on the Web.

  “Mister Jeepers Is Dead!” was the title of one thread. Comments, eulogies, and conspiracy theories had developed into a dense hysterical tangle that spread across several websites, Facebook groups, and chat rooms. Remington knew well enough that the Internet sliced the demographic pie into pretty thin portions. There were interest groups centered on every single aspect of existence. But somehow she hadn’t thought to apply that fact to the present case. She had considered the Odalon chimps to be anonymous. But they weren’t. Some of them had appeared on TV, and that made all the difference.

  “I grew up with Pamela!!!,” read one post, using the common exclamatory idiom of the Internet. “I cried for hours all night over her & her baby Amy!!!! They died in ea
ch other’s arms!!!! What kind of a**hole would do such a thing!!!!”

  Pamela, Remington came to understand, was one of the Odalon victims who boasted a devoted following. The chimp had been a regular guest on a televised afternoon dance show that aired in the Bay Area in the 1990s. Pamela, Mister Jeepers, Monk, and Chow-Chow all had dedicated fan pages on Facebook, now quickly converted into their memorial sites. Several of the Odalon chimpanzees had IMDb listings.

  Someone—actually, a whole crowd of someones—was paying attention. Until the flare of media attention sparked by Dukundane Tamas’s death ignited, Remington had acted as though she were unobserved by anyone outside the Malibu D.A.’s office. Now everything changed.

  As she went through post after post and clicked on page after page about people who loved apes and the apes who loved them back (she blundered onto one vile and bizarre racist website that merrily equated chimpanzees with African-Americans), she became aware of a flaw in her approach. She had failed to grasp a fundamental truth. The apes at the center of the Odalon case weren’t abstract victims. They had been real living, breathing individuals.

  Stills called on her cellphone. “I took a chance you might be awake,” he said. Remington glanced at her computer’s clock. It was almost midnight.

  “Yeah, I’ve been immersing myself in chimp world.”

  “I just got a call from Janiece,” Stills said, naming Janiece Baez, L.A. County’s district attorney, their boss of all bosses. “She’s assigning three more investigators to the Malibu office. As of right now, you are the lead detective for Odalon, and it’s your only focus. The others will pick up your caseload and do whatever the hell we tell them to do in order to get Odalon nailed down.”

  “Wow!” Remington said. “That’s great.”

  “The main thing is bringing Arthur and Angle in,” Stills said.

  “Right. Did you have any luck with Harry Cornell?”

  “He says his client is ready to surrender. But he’s dicking me around. The usual lawyer stuff, conditions and quid pro quos.”