13 Stolen Girls Read online

  Don’t, Dixie warned herself. Uncle Monkey will come. She went forward anyway.

  No locks here. The door opened easily. She slipped inside. Flies buzzed in the gloomy dark. She could hide here until her uncle left. As her eyes adjusted to the shadows, she saw a large table of some sort stationed in the center of the trailer. Something strange and clinical, totally out of place. A gynecological exam table, with the stirrups cocked down and pushed to the side.

  On a narrow workbench lay a jumble of collars, handcuffs and whips. Sex toys. An automatic pistol nestled among the mess. Panic rose in Dixie’s throat. Her uncle would come here, she was certain. This trailer was really what the ranch was all about. He would employ his nasty-looking dildos on her.

  She picked up the pistol, a Ruger automatic. Jerry Close had made certain that his adopted daughter was familiar with firearms. Dixie automatically checked the thumb safety and made sure the gun was loaded. She felt better hefting the pistol in her hand. For protection, she told herself. Should anyone come.

  She couldn’t decide whether the trailer was a refuge or a trap. Perched on a silver tripod was an expensive-looking digital video camera, its lens aimed at the exam table. A TV monitor was fixed on brackets near the ceiling, and another camera gazed impassively down from beside it. With horror, Dixie realized that the ceiling camera’s red recording light blinked steadily.

  Uncle Monkey was watching.

  Gasping, she stumbled backward out of the camera’s range, tripping on some floor clutter. Alongside the exam table was a roll of duct tape, a pliers, some chicken wire and a scatter of fist-size rocks. This gave off an ugly enough chill, but it wasn’t the worst of it. In the uncertain light of the trailer’s interior, Dixie saw a darkened smear on the plywood floor and didn’t have to ask herself what it was.

  A burgundy-black stain. Blood.

  She shrank away, sickened.

  He’s coming. Run.

  —

  “I believe the last time you saw Detective Remington here,” Brasov said to Gus Monaghan, “you were groping her junk in your little basement chamber of horrors.”

  Monaghan’s lawyers had assembled. There were two males—neither of them his high-powered brother, Jimmy—plus a stunning female attorney who looked as though she could have been cast in one of the producer’s movies. A male attorney leaned over and whispered in his client’s ear.

  “As directed by my counsel, I’m not going to respond to that statement.”

  “S’okay, s’okay.” Brasov nodded. “I’m feeling a little outnumbered. How about you, Remington? Gus’s got all his blade runners with him, we’re just by our lonesomes.”

  After negotiations that rivaled a presidential summit, the producer and his lawyers had agreed to meet with the LASD detectives. The other side wouldn’t give an inch regarding the venue. They would gather in Monaghan’s limousine, at the moment parked outside the task-force offices in Century City.

  Six people plus the driver all jammed into the stretch. They sat with their knees crowded together. The interior had the faintly ripe smell of a lair. The producer’s legal team managed to pretend that the arrangement was the most natural thing in the world.

  “There really wasn’t any need for you to muster an army, Mr. Monaghan,” Remington said. “This interview is for informational purposes only.”

  Monaghan smiled, and gazed affectionately at his attorneys. “Pull me from the trap my enemies set for me, for I find protection in you alone.”

  “What’s that, Psalms? Really?” Brasov asked. “Have you been getting religion, Gus? Because from what I hear, you dabble in the dark side, the pagan side of things, like horned serpents and shit.”

  “We’d ask you to address our client respectfully, by his surname, please,” said the female lawyer.

  Monaghan affected a seedy look. He wore expensive athletic shoes, but left them unlaced with their tongues flopping sloppily forward. A five o’clock shadow made his face appear dirty. His hair—in fact, his whole person—gave off a greasy, unwashed impression. The final result was one of well-studied eccentricity.

  Brasov murmured an aside to Remington. “Dude thinks he’s Howard Hughes.”

  Another of the lawyers spoke up. “We have reason to believe that the Los Angeles County Task Force on Missing and Exploited Youth is merely a strategy to attack the reputations of figures in the movie community such as Mr. Monaghan.”

  “His reputation,” Brasov muttered. “Huh.”

  Remington extended a photo of Merilee Henegar across the limo’s interior to Monaghan. The producer did not deign to accept the offering himself, but one of his attorneys did.

  “Do you know this woman?” Remington asked.

  Again, a whispered conference.

  “I don’t think I’ll answer that one, either,” Monaghan said. “I meet a lot of women in my line of business. I couldn’t possibly remember them all. Is she an actress?”

  “What she is, sir, is dead.”

  “Pity.”

  “Did you hear that?” Brasov maintained the same mocking manner. “Does the man even know what the word ‘pity’ means?”

  Remington said, “Coming up on her seventeenth birthday, left her home in Agoura Hills and vanished.”

  “Disappeared for a whole month before turning up dead,” Brasov added.

  “Oh, was this that girl? I heard about it in the news. What a bizarre story. I should do a film about her—probably not a feature, something for TV.”

  “A documentary,” Brasov said. “Maybe with a little surveillance footage from the Westlake Galleria.”

  One of the lawyers intervened. “Do you have questions for our client? We are making every attempt to cooperate here, but I can’t see where this is going.”

  “Merilee Henegar went missing on September seventeenth,” Remington said. “Can you tell us where you were that night?”

  “I’m sure one of my assistants could,” Monaghan replied. “They keep the logbooks.”

  “He’s got logbooks, Remington,” Brasov said. “Dude, that is so great, living a fully logged life.”

  The knockout female attorney broke in. “I would advise Mr. Monaghan to provide no information at all unless we know what this fishing expedition is about.”

  “Do you fish?” Brasov asked her.

  “That’s what you need specifically? Mr. Monaghan’s whereabouts on the evening of September seventeenth? What is the precise time frame, please?”

  “Did you happen to visit the Galleria mall in Westlake that evening?” Remington asked.

  “Normally, I have a personal shopper make my purchases, or one of my assistants, or have salespeople brought to my home.”

  Brasov emitted a low chirping whistle. “Who told you to wear those kicks, Gus?”

  “Detective Brasov, please,” complained the lady lawyer.

  “Let me help you out, sir,” Remington said. “We have surveillance footage from security cameras at the Galleria placing you there at the time in question, in the company of the victim.”

  Monaghan turned briskly to his lawyers. “Are you getting this, folks? That is a clear case of slander, isn’t it?”

  “Truth is an absolute, ironclad defense against libel, slander and all good things like that,” Brasov said.

  “I was never there,” Monaghan said.

  “We’ve got you nailed, pal,” Brasov snapped.

  “Can you provide this alleged footage?” one of the lawyers put in.

  “We have it copied onto a disk,” Remington said. “Right now the district attorney’s office is examining the material. We are eager to show it to Mr. Monaghan, in order to record his explanation. Under oath.”

  “Maybe, you know, that’ll be down at Metro Correctional,” Brasov said.

  “All right, I believe we are going to end this,” said a lawyer who had heretofore remained silent.

  The female attorney had been working her tablet. She pulled something up on-screen and passed the iPad to the detectives
.

  Remington glanced at the screen. “What’s this?”

  “That would be the Desert Springs Film Festival awards, on the night of September seventeenth. Mr. Monaghan was honored to be chairman of the festival jury this year. The event required him to be present and onstage for the whole evening. What was your time frame again, Detectives?”

  “That’s me, the handsome guy in the Brioni tux.” Monaghan smiled broadly.

  Remington looked across at four of the smuggest faces she had ever seen.

  “Desert Springs, Nevada, would be how many hours away from Westlake?” asked the female attorney, going in for the kill.

  “By helicopter, I wonder,” Brasov said feebly. But both he and Remington knew they had been the victims of a royal cop-block.

  —

  The celebrity producer’s high standing with the Hollywood press corps earned his lawyer (the pretty, telegenic one) face time on the five o’clock news. She looked as if she enjoyed rubbing their police faces in the mess.

  “Mr. Monaghan has been the target of local law enforcement’s efforts to trade on his celebrity before, and has a personal history with Detective Investigator Layla Remington. She auditioned and was rejected for one of Mr. Monaghan’s television productions. We hope that the County Task Force is more professional in its efforts than what we’ve seen so far.”

  Remington had been caught out. She could almost feel the LASD brass preparing to crash down on her.

  Even Sam Brasov was pissed. “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “Jesus, Remington! I have never been screwed over in that particular way before. I thought I was in The Matrix or something.”

  “Desert Springs Film Festival. Is there even such a thing?”

  “You saw the security footage from the mall, and it was Monaghan, right? Right?”

  “Yes!”

  But the whole business slowly turned to absolute shit in front of Remington’s eyes. The D.A.’s office informed her that the disk she had provided to them contained only random surveillance images, and no footage of Gus Monaghan at all. She contacted the Galleria’s security offices. She asked to speak to the supervisor and to Natasha Katznelson, the video tech who had helped her nail down the footage.

  “Ms. Katznelson is no longer working for us,” the security supervisor informed her.

  “I spent a couple of hours with her two days ago! Natasha Katznelson, black-haired young woman, maybe mid-twenties.”

  “She withdrew from our employment,” the security supervisor responded.

  It was all…impossible. The incriminating surveillance footage that put Monaghan at the Galleria that evening, the shots that showed him exiting the mall in the company of Merilee Henegar, had somehow disappeared. The DVD copy Katznelson provided proved not to show the essential scenes.

  Again, Brasov almost shouted at her. “What the hell, Remington!”

  It was Monaghan, Layla decided. He had gamed her in some unimaginable way.

  Later that night, her father mulled it over with her. He called what happened “gaslighting,” a term spun off from the classic Ingrid Bergman movie Gaslight. Most of Gene’s references were from old-time Hollywood films. This one involved a husband tricking his wife into thinking that she was going insane.

  “If I were not mad,” Bergman’s character says to her tormentor, played by Charles Boyer, “I could have helped you. But I am mad, aren’t I?”

  Remington was mad, as in “angry,” knowing that Gus Monaghan was trying to make her out to be mad, as in “crazy.” Right from the start, the producer must have despised the whole idea of an exploited youth task force. He was one of those libertarian sociopaths who rejected any restraints on their behavior and resented anyone monitoring them.

  Plus he was clearly obsessed with Tarin Mistry. Monaghan owned the actress’s life rights and had handled the nationwide rollout of Joshua Tree. Add the fact that all Hollywood producers at his level were bound to be megalomaniacs, almost as a job requirement, and Remington could see how Monaghan might delight in gaslighting an LASD detective who was looking into his affairs.

  “I’m so completely screwed, Daddy,” she told Gene. “They’re going to take my badge.”

  “No, they won’t. They know what a good police you are.”

  “I’ll lose my job.”

  “Then I’ll hire you, Princess. We can go into business together, farm ourselves out as private investigators.”

  Chapter 17

  Brasov eventually cooled down to the point where he could see things a little more clearly. They were parked outside the task-force offices, sitting in his latest confiscation vehicle. The late-model Land Rover meant they were coming down in the world. It was only a high-five-figure ride, not one of the six-figure ones they were used to.

  Remington couldn’t get her mind off the encounter in the producer’s limo. “Did you smell the guy? I thought he was supposed to be such a player.”

  “That’s part of the mystique. Lots of big men never washed and were still able to get the babes. Mao didn’t brush his teeth, you know? They were, like, covered in green slime. Brecht stank to high heaven, and still mowed more lawn than John Deere. Brando was supposed to have been pretty ripe. Gus is just the latest in a long stinky line.”

  “You see what he’s done, don’t you? He’s made it impossible for us to go after him. Any move we make, those attorneys of his are in court, screaming harassment.”

  “So we sidestep,” Brasov suggested. “We go after that security office at the Galleria, really take them apart. Somebody had to have gotten in there and…”

  He trailed off. His imagination failed him. “You actually saw his face on that footage, didn’t you? And Merilee Henegar?”

  He was wavering, doubting her again. Remington was beginning to doubt herself.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you think Gus Monaghan has the resources to fake a surveillance video?”

  Brasov snapped his fingers. “Course he does. He’s got computer-effects wizards who can convince you that black is white and vice versa. I’m thinking on it now, and it’s pure brilliance. The dude’s got way too much power over reality. Have you seen the Goth movies? The real world is, like, modeling clay for him. He probably doesn’t even believe in reality. He could trick anything up—make it look like you were aiming a high-powered rifle at the president of the United States, say, bring the Secret Service down on your ass just for shits and giggles.”

  “Why?”

  “Why ask why, Remington? Hollywood is one headfuck of a town, have you ever noticed that? Monaghan’s gone all film-simple. Watch his movies. His characters are always fighting the power, you know? It’s like he’s forever telling and retelling the story of his own life.”

  “Okay, okay, just to cook up a theory…”

  “He bribes his way into the security shop at the Galleria.”

  “No, first he has the CGI nerds at the studio fake some store surveillance footage.”

  Brasov nodded, getting hyped. “He gives them some excuse, like it’s for a prank he’s playing on someone. They don’t care, they’re getting paid. They’re in awe that the great Gus Monaghan is descending into their tech dungeons to talk to them. ‘Sure, we can develop something like that, coming right up, Mr. Monaghan,’ and he says, ‘Call me Gus.’ ”

  Remington wasn’t totally buying it. Not yet. “How does he know we would hit the Galleria security footage?”

  Brasov thought. “The girl at the club…”

  “Eensy.”

  “Yeah. She seem one hundred percent to you? A little off somehow, maybe?”

  “It was like I needed to believe her.”

  “Investigatory bias. Girl was telling you what you wanted to know.”

  “Handing us our first real break in the case.”

  “And we jumped right on it. And, and—get this. Who has access to an infinite number of actresses? Like, hordes of them. Young
wannabes, they would kill to do anything, anything at all for an in with Gus Monaghan?”

  “Including play mind games with the po-po?”

  “He finds the right girl, yeah, sure as shooting. It’s a world of desperate desperation out there. Monaghan knows it. He feeds off it. He probably already has an ‘actors who’ll do anything’ contact list.”

  Eensy as a ringer. It was diabolical. “Are we crazy, Brasov?” Layla asked.

  “Yeah, we are, but Gus Monaghan’s crazier.”

  Remington ticked a list off on her fingers. “Impeding a police investigation. Obstruction of justice. Interference with government administration.”

  “Juice any one of those up into a nice, fat felony charge.”

  They sat and mused. The Century City skyscrapers towered over them, and the Fox lot was off to their right. Remington remembered her makeover experience. In retrospect, it seemed to her a hideous charade. Wasn’t that what the town was all about, manufacturing alternatives to uncomfortable realities? Building castles in the air? One faint breath could make them vanish.

  “We can’t do anything about it,” Remington murmured. “That’s the real genius of it.”

  Brasov’s phone buzzed. He fielded the call, said, “Yeah,” and turned to Remington.

  “Your phone on? They’re trying to reach you.”

  “I bet they are. I turned it off for the Monaghan interview, out of respect for the big producer and his lawyers. Who is it? Commander Lott?”

  The news of Remington’s ridiculous gaffe involving the most powerful movie producer in town was no doubt wending its way through the sheriff’s department hierarchy. The repercussions would hit her policing career hard. Perhaps terminating it altogether.

  “It’s not that,” Brasov said.

  “What?”

  “Your old man. Gene was just arrested.”

  —

  Like many condominium complexes, Gene Remington’s Oak of Peace Townhouses development in Glendale allotted storage spaces to each of its residents. A lower level in one of the buildings was divided into locked compartments by flimsy aluminum partitions. Modern culture’s obsession with stuff found its natural expression there. Holiday pennants, camping equipment, whole wardrobes of unworn clothing, outdated tax documents kept long after the IRS’s seven-year deadline, scrapbooks, once-a-year turkey roasters, mementos, souvenirs, crap. Every compartment seemed packed full.