13 Stolen Girls Page 22

  At 1335 that early afternoon, working off the tip of a credible informer and a search warrant signed by a superior-court judge, a joint operation by the Glendale Police and the LAPD broke open the storage compartment assigned to Gene Remington. Inside, officers discovered a collection of objects missing from a police evidence warehouse in Whittier. Each item was still tagged with its LAPD case-number identifier.

  The value of the stolen evidence elevated the case to a grand-theft felony offense. A rare coin collection at the center of a Huntington Park home invasion was valued at more than forty thousand dollars. A deck of Mexican brown heroin had been confiscated during a possession-with-intent-to-sell bust. Most radioactive was a leather art portfolio that contained various child-porn images, left over from a case in which the accused committed suicide after his indictment.

  Members of the police team had photographed the storage compartment before removing and cataloging its contents. Their activities were successfully kept concealed from the condo resident in question. Several of the participating officers knew beforehand that Eugene Remington was a retired former employee of the LAPD. This made them approach the crime scene with perhaps even more care than they would normally have employed.

  It was, all in all, a professional operation. Four from the team—two uniformed LAPD officers, an LAPD detective and a Glendale Police Department sergeant—left the storage locker and climbed a double flight of stairs to the suspect’s apartment. The four officers confronted Eugene Dale Remington at the front door of his condo and took him into custody without incident. The participation of the Glendale PD in the operation ended there. Remington was transported to the Metropolitan Detention Center for processing and afterward placed in a segregated protective unit of the jail.

  Gene used his one phone call to contact his daughter. The call went straight to voice mail. But his long association with the LAPD made the treatment he received at Metro perhaps more friendly than usual, and he was allowed to make another call. He enlisted a criminal attorney whom he knew, Olivia Chalmers, to help him make a case for bail.

  —

  “Does anyone know what this is?” Dixie asked.

  She held up a square gizmo, blue plastic about the size of a playing card. Her two roommates and their boyfriends were lounging in the living room of the Reseda apartment, watching a stupid reality TV show called Profiles in Crime. Lindsey’s boyfriend, the shaved-headed know-it-all Bryant Kay, took the thing from Dixie and examined it.

  “That is…” But his vast storehouse of knowledge failed him. “I don’t know.”

  Dixie’s roommate Kimmy faked a shocked gasp. “What was that? I’ve never heard Bryant say the words ‘I don’t know’ before, have you?” She put her hand on the guy’s forehead, checking to see if he had a fever.

  The crime show was on a commercial break, and they were all bored with it anyway. Lindsey balanced a bowl of ramen in her lap. She took the mystery item. “U.A.C.,” she read, a sloppy Sharpie scrawl across the plastic.

  “That stands for Useless And Queer,” Bryant said.

  “You are so ignorant,” Kimmy said, laughing.

  Dixie took her offering back and went into her bedroom. She thought the item was some sort of computer thing, but she had never run across one before, and she didn’t have anyone to ask apart from her clueless roomies. She would take it to the library. A computer lady there set you up with your machine. She might know.

  The blue plastic square had been in an envelope that was stuffed into the document box she had taken from Larry Close’s office at the Malibu ranch. Dixie had been mulling over what she should do about the ranch since she made her escape from it during her recent stealth visit. At first, she thought she would call the police right away. The creepy sex toy stuff in the trailer had been too weird to be innocent.

  Dixie had fled the Toy Box—even the name freaked her out—and plunged down the slope toward the shore of Malibu Lake. She hid there for a while, breathing hard. Then she waded in the clear blue shallows until she got to the yard of a neighboring house. A dog had alerted as she made a mad dash past the house toward the road. Every second had been a terror. She imagined Uncle Monkey’s white pickup coming after her. She hadn’t stopped running until she reached the bus stop near the freeway.

  Another terrifying aspect of the ranch was that cellphone service was pretty spotty. It was in a dead zone or something. When she got closer to the freeway and was able to get bars, she dialed 911—but hesitated before putting the call through.

  Second thoughts. Dixie imagined how the conversation would go. “See, I broke into my uncle’s ranch house and found—” Then the 911 operator would stop her and ask what she was doing breaking and entering somewhere. Uncle Monkey was a member of the auxiliary police force, according to a certificate posted on the wall of his office. She would be the one to get into trouble, not him.

  So she took the bus back to Reseda and tried to figure out what to do. Dixie paged through the missing-girl articles that her uncle had collected. In her rooting around in the document box, she turned up the square blue plastic mystery item.

  Something about the disappeared girls spoke to her. There was a puzzle there, with a solution that hovered just out of reach. One of Dixie’s favorite movies was The Silence of the Lambs. She pretended she was FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling. She wrote down names and dates from Larry Close’s clippings. She made a fresh version of the list, copying over everything again but organized in order of when the girls had gone missing. Then she stared at the names and tried to tease out a pattern.

  Eleven names, eleven missing girls. The list began with Elizabeth Combe seventeen years ago. Then there was a long gap until the flurry of Tarin Mistry articles. After that, the missing girls turned up with regularity, two or three every year. The last name on the list was Merilee Henegar from Agoura Hills. Recent and close to home.

  If Dixie closed her eyes, she could visualize the bloodstain on the floor of the Toy Box trailer. Was she letting her imagination get away from her? The blood could have been anything. A rabbit, maybe. A coyote. Someone’s cat. The Santa Monica foothills were pretty wild. Pets were always going missing.

  So were girls. The ages of the girls on Dixie’s list were all in the same range, all around the late teens. Her own age, she thought with a shiver. She had to do something. She couldn’t just sit there and stare stupidly at a list of names. But she wasn’t exactly Clarice Starling. She wasn’t even Harriet the Spy.

  She ventured back into the apartment’s common living room. The television was on. It was never off. Someone was usually camped out on the couch for the night. They were always either watching or had it on mute.

  “Hey, Kimmy? If I want to find out, like, what government agency I should call for something, how do I do it?”

  “For what?” Kimmy asked, distracted by the TV.

  “I don’t even know. Los Angeles is so confusing.”

  “Dial 311,” Kimmy said. “That’s what my mom did when my grandma started to lose her marbles.”

  Yes, of course. Dixie should have known that. She returned to her little closet of a bedroom and entered into a telephone labyrinth of government bureaucracy. The 311 operator was open and helpful.

  “I think I might have information to give on some missing persons,” Dixie told him. “Or, anyway, I need to get some information.”

  “Which one is it, ma’am?”

  It was Sunday, and many of the public offices were closed. The 311 operator gave her a long list of phone numbers to call. The LAPD Adult Missing Persons Unit. The Missing and Unidentified Persons Office of the California Department of Justice. A Missing Persons Hotline run by the local CBS television station. The Sheriff’s Department’s Missing Persons Bureau. Something called LACTFOMEY, the Los Angeles County Task Force on Missing and Exploited Youth.

  The last number was the only one where Dixie got anything other than a voice recording.

  “LACTFOMEY,” said the curt female voic
e on the other end of the line. She didn’t spell out the initials but pronounced it like a word.

  “Um, hi,” Dixie said, uncertain how to proceed.

  “This is Detective Layla Remington. Who am I speaking to?”

  “I have a list, like, of missing persons, and I need to maybe check and find out if they’re still not found? My uncle, Mr. Larry Close, he keeps a list and—”

  The detective cut her off. “Who’s calling, please?”

  Dixie told her. Something about the detective’s name rang a bell.

  “Ms. Close, I have to tell you, I’m on another call, and right at the moment I’m the only one in the office. But I can take a number and have one of our people contact you first thing on Monday.”

  “Sure,” Dixie said.

  “If this is an emergency, you should dial 911.”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “Are you certain? You sound worried.”

  “I’m okay.” Dixie gave the woman her number and rang off.

  Layla Remington. Dixie shuffled through Uncle Monkey’s missing-persons material. She couldn’t find any mention of the detective.

  Then she remembered. The Merilee Henegar case. Something strange had happened, so strange that Dixie had a hard time understanding it. Henegar had gone missing in the middle of September. Then, later on, she was found dead in her own home. The bizarre circumstances had sparked a firestorm of TV news interest.

  Dixie hopped on her smartphone and found a Channel 5 video report archived online. This Detective Remington woman stood in front of the Henegar house for an edited-down sound bite that was all of seven words. But she looked nice enough. And Dixie thought the whole idea of a female detective was pretty cool.

  Thinking that it would be good to speak to Detective Remington about all her worries and suspicions, Dixie again dialed the number of the task force. This time all she got was a recorded voice requesting that she leave a message.

  —

  Layla tried to keep it together in the wake of her dad’s arrest. She set herself up in the task-force offices and worked the phone, assembling a Team Gene made up of his friends and old work associates. All hands on deck. There was an immediate and immense outpouring of sympathy for Gene when she told people what had happened. Not a single person who knew the man considered it possible that he might be guilty as charged.

  “That’s a total load of horse pucky,” responded Elvin Vaughan, Gene’s former boss at the Parker Center. The sentiment was echoed with more colorful language by other friends.

  Sam Brasov went into overdrive, reaching out to the LAPD detectives he knew to get the particulars of the case against Gene. He also had connections with the Glendale PD, and was up there now trying to sort things out.

  Complicating her work on her father’s behalf was Remington’s own troubles with her superiors at the sheriff’s department, stemming from her disastrous move against Gus Monaghan. It prevented her from mobilizing her LASD contacts on Gene’s behalf.

  “This is more of his crap,” Remington told her father glumly as they sat down for a face-to-face at Metro.

  “Whose crap?”

  “Monaghan. The producer guy I told you about.”

  “Really? I’ve never met the man. I don’t like his movies much, but that’s no reason for him to put me in jail.”

  “Ha-ha, but you should take this seriously. I was asking myself whether maybe Rack and Ruin had a hand in it.”

  “Why do you automatically think that this frame has something to do with you?” Gene asked her. “I’ve got plenty of my own enemies, you know.”

  “No, you don’t. You should hear what your friends are saying. They’re going to come down and storm the Bastille, bust you out.”

  Layla was frustrated that she couldn’t do more to break the old man loose, pronto.

  “Oh, I don’t mind it here,” Gene said. “The seg unit, you know, I’m away from the riffraff in the pop. I’m meeting some wonderful fellows—I mean, felons.” The “pop” was short for “general population,” where anyone with a police background would be vulnerable.

  “You sure you want to go with Olivia Chalmers?” Layla asked, questioning Gene’s attorney of choice. “We could enlist one of those high-powered O.J. lawyers, like Johnnie Cochran or somebody.”

  “Johnnie Cochran’s dead, honey. You really ought to keep up with the news. It’s not going to help me much to have a stiff for a mouthpiece.”

  “Rick Stills. He’s at a missing-persons conference in Chicago right now, but I called him and he told me he’d fly back.”

  “I can’t afford Rick Stills,” her father pointed out. “Olivia is fine. She tells me I’ll be out of here come Monday morning, as soon as an arraignment magistrate takes a look at this charade of a case.”

  “Such a fucking disaster.” Layla rarely cursed around her father.

  Gene took her hand. “I watched some college basketball yesterday, before…all this. You know what kind of games I like? When a team is never ahead, not once, not for one second the whole time. Until they win at the buzzer. They’re the ones who never give up.”

  “It’s not a game, Dad.”

  “It is if you play it like one. You’re going to beat them, honey. You’ll see.”

  Cool, calm and collected. Layla seemed more panicked by developments than her father was. He put a good face on it, but Metro was no place for a sixty-year-old ex–police clerk. If Gene’s fellow inmates got a whiff of his LAPD connections, he’d have to sleep with one eye open.

  Layla left the jail. She hesitated before doing it, but swallowed her pride and dialed the “ultra-classified personal cellphone number” that Radley Holt had given her.

  Gus Monaghan answered by demanding to know who the hell was calling him.

  “Uncle,” Remington said.

  A long silence.

  “Mercy,” she said. “You win. I’m crying uncle and asking you to call off your dogs.”

  “I can’t be speaking to you, Detective Remington. On the advice of counsel. This call is yet one more instance of your harassment campaign against me. And, of course, you’re recording this, so that’s entrapment right there.”

  “I’m pleading for mercy,” Remington said, stubborn. “You came after my father, Mr. Monaghan? Really?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m hanging up now.”

  “Gus, please. Do you hear me begging you? Stop fucking with me.”

  “You’ve got it backward, Detective. How exactly am I fucking with you? I believe you’re the one with a police-harassment suit against you.”

  “I don’t know how you accomplished it with the security video, but it was masterly, sir, really impressive.”

  “Say that again, that ‘master’ and ‘sir’ business. Put a ‘yes’ in there with it. Say ‘Yes, Master.’ ”

  Remington wouldn’t do it. Another long silence.

  “Come up to the Palace sometime, we’ll have a good give-and-take session, thrash things out.”

  “Thanks, but no. I’m asking you to stop, one human being to another.”

  “But I haven’t even started yet. Goodbye, Layla.” He ended the call.

  Chapter 18

  The exercise yard in the segregation unit at L.A.’s Metro jail wasn’t a proper yard at all but a walled-off twenty-by-thirty space, paved in pebbled asphalt. Through the overhead grating that prevented escape by sprouting wings and flying off, Gene could glimpse the crown of one of downtown L.A.’s glass office towers. He spent an idle quarter of an hour trying to figure which one it was, and imagining that the inmates of that prison of commerce might have telescopes with which they could spy on the jail.

  Segregation was a prize. Metro used the unit to hold those who might be in danger if released into the general jail population. Anyone with a police background qualified, and anyone with a celebrity profile was automatically placed in segregation. Recently, it was where Harvey Evers, the talk-show host, had been held on his vehi
cular manslaughter charge. Actors and musicians had always cycled through. They could boast of their time inside while experiencing a relatively benign imprisonment.

  Harvey Evers was long gone, and nobody remotely famous was being held in the unit when Gene arrived. He tried to figure what his fellow prisoners had done to warrant segregation. Better not to ask.

  Gene sat at a picnic table made of steel and rubberized plastic that was the yard’s only furniture. A heavyset prisoner named Bert Cordone came out and took a seat at the opposite end of the table. He was hard to read. One of the CO’s mentioned that Cordone was getting processed out after a four-year jolt in Chino. His solid, impressive presence implied that he had somehow survived imprisonment without allowing his spirit to be crushed. Some men could accomplish that. Most men couldn’t.

  Cordone shifted around on the picnic table’s bench and gazed impassively at Gene. A long moment passed during which neither man spoke. Gene felt that the eyeball was supposed to provoke or intimidate him.

  “Uberto Anfiteatro Cordone.”

  “Eugene Remington.”

  “Remington, that’s English? I suppose you don’t have to ask me my background, the name says it. ‘Anfiteatro’ is from my mother’s people. It means ‘amphitheater’ in Italian.”

  “Like the Colosseum in Rome.”

  “Ah, have you been, Mr. Remington?”

  Gene shook his head. “But you must go to Italy,” Cordone urged.

  “Maybe when my present difficulties are resolved,” Gene said, smiling ruefully.

  “This?” Cordone gave an airy wave at their surroundings. “This is nothing. I’ve been in the Q, and at Vacaville, and in Chino. I’ve been Pelicanized. This here is light time, my friend. Soon enough you’ll be holding a cold rum cocktail with one of those small umbrellas stuck in it.”