13 Stolen Girls Page 23
The man’s prison résumé embraced every level of confinement that the State of California had to offer. Q was the nickname for San Quentin. Vacaville was a medical and psychiatric facility. Chino Men’s Correctional generally featured medium security, while Pelican Bay, in Crescent City, was a supermax facility for the baddest of the bad.
“I had an uncle who lived in Yonkers, out in New York,” Cordone went on. “His name was also Uberto. A poor man, mentally dim, without resources. Yet every year he goes back to Sicily. How does he manage it?”
“How?”
“He spends all his time collecting deposit bottles. Every day he goes out, up and down the streets. He knows the—what do you call it? Collecting trash to be used again?”
“Recycling.”
“He knows the recycling schedule by heart. In the rich neighborhoods, they don’t bother to cash in their bottles and cans, they just throw them away. So Uncle Ubie builds his stake nickel by nickel throughout the year. Come springtime, he has enough to go to Naples. He’s never missed his annual visit yet.”
“That’s remarkable.” Cordone was talkative, but Gene didn’t mind. He had at least twenty-four hours inside before his arraignment and bail hearing. Best not to get arrested on a weekend—that’s what his lawyer, Olivia Chalmers, told him.
“I have heard the statistic that ninety-five percent of Italian men have never used a clothes washer,” Cordone went on. “I myself fit into this majority.”
“What do they do? Wear dirty laundry?”
“They get their mothers or sisters or other women to perform the duty. Have you heard this statistic? Or maybe it is a clothes dryer. However it goes. Perhaps it is a clothes washer. Italian men, myself included, are just naturally disinclined to grant women control. We dominate them in ways that the men of other societies don’t, at least not so completely and instinctually as we do.”
“Would you like this kind of treatment for your own daughter?”
“Daughters. I have two. Both extremely ugly. No man can look at them without thinking these girls should lower their faces and look at the ground.”
“Ugliness is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder,” Gene remarked.
“You’re thinking of beauty. And you have a daughter, is that correct? She is the Tarin Mistry police detective?”
Gene was instantly on his guard. “I don’t really want to talk about my family.”
“I saw her on TV a little while ago, after the big earthquake. Blah, blah, I discover the dead movie star, blah, blah, blah, look at me, I am the big hero cop.”
Gene stared at him. The formerly casual conversation had veered into darker territory. He mentally gauged his chances of fending off the guy should he be attacked.
Cordone kept talking. “You are looking at me, angry, wondering who would win between us in a fight. Maybe you think you even want to kill me. How many men have you caused to die, Mr. Remington? But you were never a real police officer, isn’t that correct? You were just a police clerk, shuffling reports—pick up one scrap of paper, make a little mark with your pencil, put it in a stack with the others.”
“You seem to know all about me,” Gene said.
“I’ll tell you who I am. I am quello che non muore mai. You don’t know Italian. I pity you. It is the language of love and also of death. I am quello che non muore mai, the one who never dies.”
Gene rose. “I’ll have to leave you now, Cordone. Planet Earth is calling for me.”
“Outside you are calm, inside your guts are boiling. What is this person? Why does he menace my precious daughter? You meet such strange people inside, don’t you, Eugene Remington?”
As Gene headed out of the yard, Cordone called cheerfully after him. “We’ll have ourselves a contest, Mr. Remington! We’ll see who gets gated out from this shithole the fastest, you or me. Whoever does, he gets to say hello to Detective Layla first.”
Phone privileges in the seg unit were more liberal than in the general population, but when Gene tried to reach his daughter he got the voice-mail runaround. He tried not to allow the fear rising in his gorge to take him over.
“You know, Gene, skells like Cordone are always trash talking,” said the correction officer he tried to enlist to do something. “He was just trying to get to you, man. Shrug it off.”
“He threatened my daughter.”
“The guy’s a major douche nozzle. But don’t worry, he’s got his 12:01.”
A “12:01” referred to a discharge time. “Today? Right now?”
“They just took him out on scheduled release. He’s not going to give you any more trouble.”
—
Remington hid out at the Century City Hyatt Regency that night. She wanted to be close to her task-force office and within striking distance of the superior court in the morning, when Gene’s hearing was scheduled. But she also thought that keeping a low profile was a good idea all around.
Storm clouds loomed. The toll for the Gus Monaghan mess would have to be paid. It was Sunday night, and Remington felt sure that by Monday morning her troubles with the department would begin in earnest. The LASD command was gunning for her badge, summoning its disgraced detective for interviews and fact-finding sessions. What did she know about the bogus Westlake mall security-camera footage? And when did she know it? So Remington screened her calls and stayed out of touch.
The telephone might be radioactive, but the computer was safe. She got on her laptop, clicking through files on the Stolen Girls case. That night she didn’t look at the victims but instead went the other way, digging into Gus Monaghan’s past. She had downloaded TOR software, the program that enabled anonymous searches of the Deep Web. She slipped the ring of invisibility on her finger and submerged herself in the fetish underworld. The maddening thing was that the link between the Hollywood producer and the multiple disappearances of young girls seemed to hover just beyond her reach.
Email was also safe. Lying in bed, room-service food cooling on its tray, she scrolled through her messages. They divided fairly evenly between sternly worded “please contact” memos from work and communications from her father’s friends and allies, who wanted to know what was happening and what they could do to help.
One random email came from an address she didn’t recognize. The sender was ID’d as “Big Dada.” She had her cursor over the delete button before she remembered the fussy-looking computer academic she met on the Profiles in Crime set.
Subject: Linkage
Date: Sunday, October 22, 12:25 A.M.
From: “Big Dada,” aka Ronald Ron
To: Det. Layla Remington
Dear Detective Remington,
As per your suggestion, I ran comprehensive comparison data sets on three time/date/locations: Holmes Canyon +1mile sample range for the night of the MH discovery, the same Holmes Canyon +1mile for the night MH disappeared, and +1mile at Penmar Park in Santa Monica, +/-1 hour when Aileen Knolf was last reported seen.
A positive hit came up on a white 2005 GMC Canyon pickup truck, CA plate number 6FLP923, reg. number F4595492, registered to Mark XII Management Consultants, Malibu, CA.
I cross-referenced the company (defunct) and came up with a name, Lawrence Decker Close, a number of addresses, incl. 75 Rancho Sequito Rd., Malibu, and 10B Church Drive, Camarillo, CA.
If anything comes of this please let me know.
Cheers,
“Big Dada” aka Ronald Ron
Big Data Profiler, Discovery Channel’s Smash Hit Reality Television Program, Profiles in Crime, 9 P.M. Tues., check cable provider listings
She forgot all about Gus Monaghan. The sensation of everything suddenly falling into place for Remington was almost physical.
Mark XII. Or Mark Twelve, the company listed on the untraceable pay stub recovered from Merilee Henegar’s bedroom. The You Send Me rental PO box.
The hinky woman at the shabby little mail-forwarding business off the Ventura Freeway. Lawrence Decker Close, the owner-operator of You Send Me and Mark Twelve, had been ITVO—“in the vicinity of”—two of the most recent disappearances Remington had been tracking.
Something else prodded her memory. That name. Lawrence Decker Close. Larry Close. It registered on the radar somehow. Hadn’t the random task-force caller earlier that afternoon, the young woman whose call she fielded without really meaning to—hadn’t the girl mentioned the name Larry Close? It wasn’t likely, she realized. Probably her mind was confusing two things that weren’t related at all. Still…
She had Gene’s arraignment the next morning. She was in LASD limbo, unsure if she was still a detective or (more probably) suspended pending an investigation into the Monaghan business. The Merilee Henegar case was bubbling to a boil. There were loose ends and unfollowed leads strewn all over the LACTFOMEY offices. Plus she had to deal with Rack and Ruin somehow.
She called her erstwhile partner.
“Brasov.” His voice came through sounding just as harried as she felt.
“Meet me at Kanan Road and Mulholland Highway in Malibu, will you?”
“Is this about the Galleria security footage? Because I might have something on that.”
“Forget it. What’s your twenty?”
“Still in Glendale. But as it turns out—”
“You’re half an hour away, forty minutes tops. It’s off the Ventura, by the exit with the McDonald’s.”
“I know where it is, Remington. But I won’t be able to get out there until—”
“Just move,” she said, and hung up on him.
One good thing about having a father in jail is that she had the unlimited use of his vehicle. The valet at the Hyatt might be a little offended by having to pull around such an ancient redneck wreck, but she didn’t give a damn. Gene’s F-150 pickup rumbled up as if the old man’s presence was still with her. Remington tipped the valet five instead of the usual two.
It was nighttime in Los Angeles, she was a murder cop, and the freeways were free.
As she drove, Remington tried to mentally connect the dots in the Henegar case. But the damned thing was like a pointillist painting—all dots, no connections. She exited the 10 and flowed onto the 405, normally a parking lot but now empty except for a few night owls. In the green dashboard light, she sang along with Tarin Mistry.
Who am I, baby, who am I?
I’m the one who watched you go
Who’s that standing in my shoes?
Someone I no longer know
The missing girl Aileen Knolf was last seen in a Santa Monica park the previous spring. She was eighteen years old and, according to her parents, very active online. “Web shites,” the father had called them in the MUPR. Remington remembered that. She could visualize Aileen’s picture, her face round and serious, her hair dyed a severe black.
Baby I don’t know me without you
No I don’t know me without you
Big data (Remington thought of it as Big Brother) had gathered information from countless sources—traffic surveillance, credit-card receipts, red-light cameras, police stops, CCTV, mini-mall security footage—aggregating it all, feeding it into its gaping digital maw, digesting it, vomiting it back up in searchable chunks. Modern society was fast becoming a place where no one could hide. Big data was like God, or Santa Claus. It saw when you were sleeping, it saw when you were awake.
The principle of transference—the idea that criminals always left something of themselves behind at the scene of a crime—had now taken on a digital aspect. Big data had detected a white 2005 GMC Canyon pickup truck, California license plate number 6FLP923, as present ITVO two separate disappearances. It could be a coincidence. But it was enough to send her flying along the Ventura Freeway at night.
She beat Brasov to the rendezvous point. As she sat parked on the shoulder of Mulholland Highway, she checked the criminal-records database for Lawrence Decker Close. His jacket popped up right away. He pulled a first jolt fifteen years back, when he was in his mid-thirties, a sixty-day stretch of “shock time” in San Bernardino County Central Detention Center. The crime was the theft of a six-thousand-dollar check from a grocery store.
The shock time didn’t shock sufficiently. A decade later, Larry Close was back inside, sentenced under the Habitual Criminals Act, doing five to fourteen at Chino Men’s for swindling investors in a partnership that had organized phony backache seminars.
Nothing violent. The guy was a con man, a scam artist. Digging a little deeper, though, Remington turned up a notation about a seventeen-year-old missing-persons investigation. Elizabeth Combe was the mother of an infant child who had vanished along with her. Larry Close had known the woman. Police on the case interviewed him. Official interest in his connection to the disappearance faded when he was imprisoned on the backache swindle.
Looks like our guy, Remington thought, almost jumping out of her skin when she glanced up to see a white GMC Canyon pickup drive past her on Kanan Road. She couldn’t scope the truck’s license plate in time. Headlights off, she pulled onto its tail.
The driver followed Kanan Road, then branched off. Remington was scrambling with her cellphone, trying to alert Brasov. Something was wrong with the connection. She left a message but didn’t know if it got through. Coverage in the canyons was always iffy. As she climbed the hills around Malibu Lake, cell service dropped out completely.
All right. Okay. Track the vehicle however far it would go, then circle back and connect with Brasov. Remington’s standing in the sheriff’s department was presently so funky that she didn’t know what kind of reception she would get if she contacted dispatch. Maybe Brasov could alert her former cohorts in the LASD, inform the department that the two of them were going in on a bust.
The white GMC entered a little maze of lanes near the lake. Remington didn’t feel that she could follow without giving herself away. She was unfamiliar with the neighborhood and couldn’t be sure if there was another way out. Making an executive decision, she pulled to the side of the road and put the F-150 into the first leg of a Y-turn. Then the ruby brake lights of the truck she was following blinked on. Headlamps shone on a gated driveway a hundred yards up, where the single-lane back road dead-ended.
Make a first pass alone, she decided. Even though her comms were down, it might be worth it so as not to lose the guy. Monitor the situation. Maybe the driver was in for the night, and she and Brasov could organize some deputies into a jump-out team.
She parked the Ford on the shoulder. After a weapons check of her daddy’s Colt pistol, Remington moved forward in the dark. A cool fall night with a clouded-over crescent moon. It was so quiet that she could hear the lap of lake water from below.
The far-off whoop of a male’s voice came from somewhere within the compound. She froze. She couldn’t tell if it was a cry for help. The sound was loud enough to echo, but she clocked it from the direction of the driveway where the white GMC had disappeared. Holding her sidearm at the ready, she proceeded toward a collection of buildings that topped a small promontory.
The driver had left the pickup next to a barnlike structure, the truck’s cooling engine ticking softly. The only light came from a small one-story house that appeared to be the property’s main residence. Visible inside as Remington approached was a white male who fit the description of Larry Close. The man’s face matched the mug shot she had just pulled up from the database of the California Department of Corrections.
Seeing him in the flesh, Remington realized that she had run into the guy before. He was the fool in the EMT windbreaker on the morning of the Malibu earthquake, the one who had tried to stop her from the climbing up to the landslide where she would discover the dead body of Tarin Mistry.
The little bungalow’s screen door hung open. Close was rooting around in a toolbox with his back turned to her. Remington stepped quietly inside the house and trained her pistol at the guy’s back. T
en feet separated them.
“Police!” she shouted, hoping to startle him into submission. He was heavyset and muscular. She didn’t want him to come up out of the toolbox with a plumber’s wrench. Or a gun.
“Down on the floor, on the floor, on the floor!” she yelled.
They were the last words she would be able to say for a while. A blunt object caught her with a vicious blow to the nape of the neck, and Remington was the one who went down.
Chapter 19
The Ruger automatic Dixie had stolen from her uncle’s ranch still lay at the bottom of her backpack. It gave off an oily smell. She knew the rule of thumb that the person most likely to get shot by your own gun was you. Riding on city buses, doing research at the West Valley library, heading into work at Terry’s, she could have gotten busted at any time for carrying a concealed weapon. But the creeped-out-ness Dixie felt about her recent discoveries overwhelmed her common sense.
Late in the evening, Sunday. The document box she had swiped from the ranch office gave off the same evil energy that the pistol did. It was as if they were both calling her, messengers from the dark side. She had trouble sleeping because of them.
Uncle Monkey. Only Larry Close wasn’t her uncle, not really. He wasn’t blood at all. It bothered her, the vague childhood memories of him. The stuffed-monkey doll he had given his adopted niece was still back home in Dixie’s Scottsdale bedroom. It appeared less innocent in the light of what she knew about the person who had presented it to her. The doll’s face danced in her head, leering and demonic.
Unable to stop her racing thoughts, Dixie got up and retrieved her uncle’s document box. She hadn’t read all the clippings from start to finish, merely taken notes and organized them by date. Exhausted, her eyes burning from lack of sleep, she began at the beginning, with Elizabeth Combe.
She had missed something in her previous examinations of the oldest clips in the files, something important. The articles were not Xerox copies but originals from seventeen years ago. They were brittle and fragile, and the ink came off and dirtied her hands. She hadn’t wanted to fool with them much.