13 Stolen Girls Page 16

  Gamers, role-players and sword-and-sorcery fanatics employed the acronym irl, which stood for “in real life” and was usually pronounced with a sneer of contempt. “Vanilla” was the sexual slang equivalent. Most people read the Cor books for enjoyment. A few readers blurred the line between fact and fantasy. “Hard Cor,” they called themselves, seeking to establish a Corean caliphate.

  “Hey, Rack,” Paul Roone called out, as Walter Rack ambled past the office. “Our girl Remington here has shown herself to be a great reader of books.”

  “Yeah?” Rack briefly stopped in the doorway.

  “She must have her own library card and everything.”

  “Keep it up, Detective,” Rack said, playing along with his partner. “I’m told reading expands the mind.”

  Rack moved on.

  “I can’t say I’m impressed,” Roone told Remington. “I’ll tell you where the Tarin Mistry case gets solved, and it’s not at the local bookstore.”

  He tapped a wall map behind him. “It’s going to be here, along the Arizona-Nevada border, where the only reading materials allowed are the Book of Mormon and the Bible.”

  Remington gave up. The masters of the Criminal Investigation Section would never take direction from a low-status female. She didn’t get a chance to tell Rack and Ruin about an interesting facet of the Cor books, one that had drawn her to them in the first place. In Cor, a female of the slave caste was called a kajira. Just another example of sword-and-sorcery mumbo-jumbo, except for one thing.

  The kef. The stylized “k” identified a female as a slave, a kajira. In terms of typographical anatomy, the upright staff, or stem, of the “k” represented the phallic male master, while the curved, floral leg and arm was the worshipful female slave.

  In the Cor books, the kef was done via branding with a hot iron. Back in real life on planet Earth, the marking was more likely accomplished at a tattoo studio.

  Remington had seen two kef tattoos in her life, one for certain, the other more debatable. One was inked on the left hand of Merilee Henegar. The other appeared as a faint marking on the brown, mummified skin of Tarin Mistry. The L.A. coroner hadn’t been sure of the latter. Until the courts allowed him to perform a full autopsy, Dr. Gladney couldn’t determine if the scarified mark on the deceased girl’s hand was the result of a branding.

  “You might have waited until you had something solid,” Gene Remington told his daughter. Layla had called him on the hands-free as she left downtown that afternoon. “Those boys have been kings of the hill so long they’re not going to listen to anyone else, and they sure as hell aren’t going to let you in on a plum case like Tarin Mistry.”

  “I don’t like being humored, but Roone wasn’t even up for humoring me.”

  “I’m not that familiar with Roone, but Walter Rack was a cocksure SOB even before he started wearing Armani. Default Walt, they used to call him, because he wanted every single high-profile homicide for his own. The guy’s tan is from camera flash.”

  Traffic on the 10 crept forward. L.A. is becoming unlivable, Layla thought. She changed the subject, telling her dad about the invitation to the benefit ball that Rick Stills had shown her.

  “You’re moving in rarified circles, Princess. The air is thin up there.”

  “I don’t know if I’m going to go. I can’t decide if Monaghan is really my ally or if he’s got some sort of ulterior motive for romancing me.”

  “You know who his best cop friend is, don’t you? The other guy we were just talking about.”

  “Walter Rack.”

  “Yup. He and Monaghan are close as cousins. I’ve heard they go to Vegas together. And when Walter hangs out with Gus you know that means he’s turning a blind eye to all sorts of shenanigans.”

  “Might that include felonies?”

  “It’s your call, Princess,” Gene Remington said.

  —

  “She wasn’t an easy child, Detective,” Brandi Henegar said.

  “Parenting is always hard.”

  “I tried to do my best by her.”

  “Of course you did.”

  Coming off the entirely useless meeting with Paul Roone, Remington had decided on impulse to visit the Henegar house in Holmes Canyon. Forensics had finally released the scene. Remington had been reaching out to Brandi Henegar. The woman kept canceling appointments, promising to meet, canceling again. Her mother, Merilee’s grandmother, explained to deputies that Brandi was ill.

  The Border Drive house presented a blank face to the neighborhood. The contrast between its split-level dullness and what had happened inside served as a lesson about the banality of evil. Remington parked in front. She left the street and walked the scene. As she had the night Merilee’s body turned up, she skirted around to the back of the house. The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. So does the cop.

  The yard was empty and forlorn.

  He brought her in through here, Remington decided, approaching the thicket of underbrush that bordered the property. She ducked into the tangled plantings. The CAU techs had turned up some strange impression evidence in the dry soil of the thin strip of land between the yard and a cul-de-sac turnaround twenty feet to the north.

  He parked here, then unloaded. There was indeed a large DEAD END sign posted at the cul-de-sac. Remington pictured Merilee’s killer with his macabre burden, humping through the underbrush.

  Something was wrong with the footprints that forensics had collected. They seemed to have been left by an impossibly gigantic human. The shoes were oversized, moon boots or some such monsters. The depth of the impressions indicated the heaviness of the load. Most of the prints were crumbled and useless because of the dry soil.

  He was masking his prints. Bigfoot knew that his approach to the Henegar house would be thoroughly processed by police crime-scene units. So he had slipped on a huge pair of galoshes, maybe (who in Southern California owned galoshes?), or something like size-twenty-one rubber boots. The CAU was still trying to track down the specific brand from the few treads they had been able to cast from the decayed impressions.

  Bad guys watched CSI like everyone else. They had taken to disguising their crimes to disrupt forensic analysis. Rapists were using condoms more often as a guard against DNA sampling. Murderers torched scenes to destroy trace evidence. It was like the Cold War arms race, each side attempting to outfox the other.

  Remington ducked back through to the yard. She saw a face in a second-story window of the house. Brandi Henegar raised a hesitant hand in greeting. Brandi’s mother, Carla Kernis, met Remington at the sliding back door off the terrace.

  “She’s very fragile, you know,” whispered Carla, as she admitted Remington to the house.

  The three of them sat in the kitchen nook over bad percolator coffee. Brandi Henegar looked like what she was, a woman who had traveled through hell.

  “I’ve found that sometimes it helps people to talk it out,” Remington said.

  “I know, I know.” Brandi looked off across the yard, then jerked her head down, as if the tableau beyond the back windows stirred up bad thoughts.

  Her mother had the good sense to stay silent.

  “The night she disappeared, did Merilee give any indication where she was going?”

  “No.” Brandi’s voice sounded flat and dull.

  “Did she leave the house often at night?”

  “No. Sometimes.”

  “When she did, where would she go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got to try to help me here, Brandi.”

  “She went to meet friends, I guess.”

  Carla broke in. “We’ve spoken to them all. It turns out that in the past few months none of her usual friends had seen much of her outside of school.”

  “I have them on my interview list,” Remington said. “Dana Turecek, right?”

  Carla nodded. “And Melissa and Katrine Bernstein—those three are the most important.”

  “Do you know a girl ni
cknamed Eensy? A small girl, her head half shaved?”

  “No. I don’t know that name. She shaved her hair off?”

  “Like Britney Spears did, Brandi,” the grandmother said.

  “If Merilee didn’t go to see any of her friends, is there anywhere else she would have gone at that time of night?”

  Brandi shrugged. “One of the malls, I guess. She didn’t have the use of a car.”

  “Which malls did she like?”

  “I don’t know. We went to the ones in Westlake.”

  “How about the Drop, the music club?”

  “She wasn’t allowed to go there anymore. I think that music, the thrash-metal stuff, that’s what made her…” Brandi’s words trailed off.

  “Brandi had to put it off-limits,” Carla said. “I thought it was bad for Merilee, too. She was too young.”

  “You didn’t think anything,” Brandi snapped. “You weren’t really a major part of her life, were you, Mom?”

  A painful silence. Carla reached out for her daughter’s hand, but the younger woman angrily pulled away. Remington didn’t blame Brandi for the attitude. On the Web, a chorus of amateur commentators claimed that Merilee’s mother had to be guilty. Brandi had strangled her own daughter, kept her on ice for a month, then revealed the corpse to the police. A cruel and nonsensical theory of the crime.

  “Just a few more questions for now,” Remington said. “I noticed from her room that she liked the Rose and Thorn books.”

  Brandi gave a bitter nod. “Oh, yeah, big favorites.”

  “Have you read them, Detective?” Carla asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we all have, haven’t we? But I sometimes wonder what kind of world we’re leaving to our children.”

  Brandi spit out a derisive “Christ!” and got up from the table. She stood staring out the window at the yard.

  “Just one more question,” Remington persisted. “Your daughter had several tattoos.”

  “She would have a lot more if I had let her.”

  “Can you tell me about one, the letter ‘k’ on her left hand?”

  “She was always putting marks on herself.”

  “So you didn’t notice this particular one, when she might have had it done?”

  Brandi didn’t answer, just walked out of the room. Remington heard her mount the stairs to the second floor, and a moment later came the closing of a bedroom door.

  Carla Kernis gave a wincing smile. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m afraid it’s part of my job, talking to people about the worst day of their lives.”

  “She blames herself. This has been so awful for us. Just give her time.”

  “Of course.” Remington rose and thanked Carla for the coffee.

  “I’ll show you out.”

  They walked together through the empty, silent house.

  As she opened the front door, Carla hesitated. “One thing I should say—you’re the detective who found Tarin Mistry, aren’t you?”

  Remington nodded.

  “Our Merilee loved that movie. She watched it all the time. She was totally obsessed with Tarin. I think that’s why, that night, at the event downtown, you know, that’s why Brandi sought you out. Because she felt the kinship.”

  Why was it, Remington asked herself, that whenever she asked about the Rose and Thorn books the conversation seemed to turn to Tarin Mistry?

  —

  “Hello, Detective Remington? Mr. Monaghan would like to send a car for you so we can squeeze you in for the screen test.”

  Pip Pham, girl producer, was on the line again.

  Confronted by Pham’s voice at a little before 7 A.M. on a Thursday morning, Layla couldn’t manage much more than a “What’s this now?”

  “A studio slot just opened up today for an afternoon screen test—makeup, hair, wardrobe, the whole package. You are a very lucky person, Detective. In a few hours, you won’t recognize yourself.”

  Remington didn’t feel lucky. She felt tired. She had tried and failed to extract herself from the clutches of Profiles in Crime. The PIO for the sheriff’s department, Assistant Sheriff Peter Clemetts, thought it was a wonderful idea for her to participate. “You know, this kind of thing usually goes to the LAPD. The sheriff is very pleased for you to have such an opportunity.”

  The public-information officer had added that Gus Monaghan was “a great friend of the LASD” who had contributed “very healthy amounts” to the department’s “999 for Kids” charity, benefiting a fund for physically and mentally handicapped children.

  Remington understood the timing of Pham’s offer of a full-blown studio makeover. The Oceana charity benefit was scheduled for that evening at Monaghan’s Holmby Hills mansion. She had already cleared her day and was planning on visiting a hairstylist herself. But her sugar-daddy movie producer had more grandiose plans for her.

  Once again, the cheerful Ruth Jakes served as her driver. She delivered Remington not to the old Columbia studios where Profiles was shot but to the Fox lot in Century City. The car turned off West Pico Boulevard to confront the famous New York set, a block-long collection of facades used in countless movies. From the moment Remington presented her ID and was waved through the studio’s front gate, she felt not so much ushered as whisked, whisked, into a million-dollar makeover machine.

  Fox’s hair and makeup studio physically resembled a car wash, a long bin of a building with huge garage doors at either end. The windows were blacked out. Inside, there was nothing of the soothing earth-toned atmosphere of a suburban beauty parlor. Racks of wigs, immense caches of cosmetics, salon chair after salon chair—the place perfectly illustrated an old comment of Oscar Levant’s: “Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you will find the real tinsel underneath.”

  The director of the effort was the celebrated Brownie Babb, a makeup artist who hosted a reality TV show (Beauty Boot Camp!) of his own. “You’re a police officer?” Brownie asked, frowning when they were introduced. “Well, that explains a lot, dear ones, doesn’t it?”

  His crew of a half-dozen assistants giggled. Remington was about to ask him what the hell that was supposed to mean, but one of Brownie’s elves stuck an electronic skin-tone monitor in front of her face and they were off to the races. Brownie circled like a boxer examining his opponent.

  “Don’t fight it,” one of the elves whispered in her ear. “Just lie back and enjoy.”

  And there was something mesmerizing, almost intoxicating, about the experience. Remington thought of the “couple-of-la-di-das” makeover scene in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and company—Toto, too—were primped and pampered within an inch of their lives.

  “No highlights, nothing like that,” she managed to tell Brownie, in between the mud mask and the hot oil. He just laughed at her.

  “You don’t deny an artist his palette,” he decreed. An elf came in with the tinfoil strips. This was the film business. No customer coddling allowed.

  Theoretically, at least, Remington objected to women being treated as arm candy. She had certainly always aspired to be something more than a plaything for men. But she surprised herself. The process proved to be something of a pleasurable ordeal. Toward the end of it, someone out of her line of sight came by and murmured a comment: “Why, she’s really very pretty.”

  She was under the gun for two and a half hours. Remington expected some kind of salon voila! moment at the climax, when she would be presented with a mirror and allowed to shower compliments, wonder and gratitude on her crew of fairy godmothers. It didn’t happen. Instead, she was once again whisked, whisked, in a golf cart across the Fox lot to wardrobe.

  The costume building was old Hollywood all the way. On display in the entry hall was Bette Davis’s brown gown from All About Eve. Remington didn’t get a chance to linger over it.

  Inside, the victims were all running around in their skivvies, men and women both. The wardrobe master assigned to Remington, Mr. Regard, had her dimensions calibrated instantly with a n
ewfangled digital scanner. He gave a nod to the past with an unused tape measure that dangled around his neck.

  “That’s you.” He pointed to a monitor where a mannequin-style body was displayed, its surfaces overscored with crimson contour lines.

  Mr. Regard wore a beard and a short ponytail of the kind the Royal Navy would have dipped in tar. He crossed to a garment-summoning mechanism familiar to Remington from her dry cleaners. He punched a few numbers into a keyboard. The racks whirred, emerging from the depths of the building with a succession of matchless outfits.

  He proffered a gorgeous tricolor gown to Remington. “A Prabal Gurung knockoff,” he said. “Sandra wore something like this to the Globes a couple years back.”

  Sandra? Would that be Sandra Bullock?

  Remington thought it much too dressy. “This is for a reality TV show.”

  “Really? The work order specified ‘red carpet.’ ”

  He displayed the document. Sure enough, under the category “Wardrobe,” the computerized printout read, “red carpet glam.”

  “I-I don’t have the shoes for it,” Remington stammered.

  Mr. Regard sniffed. “We don’t do shoes, honey. They aren’t ever in the shot, anyway. You can wear sneakers, for all they care.”

  Remington had a glimmer of understanding that the “screen test” was a charade. She wasn’t going in front of cameras that day. Monaghan the puppetmaster was again pulling the strings. He intended to dress her for his own gala.

  She left Fox wardrobe wearing the gown with her flatfoot flats. When she approached Ruth Jakes, waiting at the car, the driver shook her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am, this car is reserved for Detective Layla Remington.” Doing a laughable, exaggerated double take, she said, “My lord, it’s you!”

  “Cut it out,” Remington muttered. She felt light-headed from the high-dose inhalation of hair spray.

  When she tried to climb into the front seat, Ruth Jakes insisted on opening the back door for her. “No, no, milady, this one time you shall allow yourself to be driven.”

  Gowned and styled, Remington rode the 10 from Century City to the West Side, gazing out on a sunlit Los Angeles afternoon and feeling totally out of place. L.A. was an early-call town, and that meant the formal events started early, too. Monaghan’s Oceana benefit kicked off at the unseemly hour of six o’clock.