13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  The problem was, Stills was right. He had the goods to establish probable cause, which was, after all, a ridiculously low hurdle to clear. During the actual criminal trial, reasonable doubt was the much more rigorous standard, but the looser criterion of probable cause served at the prelim. Angle’s fingerprints at the Terry and Tamas scenes, paired with Mace Arthur’s physical possession of the chimp during that period, was enough. Any judge in the system would allow the state to bring the case to trial.

  What happened the night Remington was attacked was still being investigated. The LAPD had a crack team from the murder squad on it. There were several promising leads. Meanwhile, everyone told Layla that she should just sit tight, not worry herself over the case, and concentrate on getting better.

  Marooned for another day in the Glendale condo, she brooded. Her thoughts came in a tumble. She wondered to what degree they were still scrambled by the concussion. She tried to assemble everything she knew about Odalon, but it was like herding cats. Her mind wouldn’t stay focused.

  She considered the red blobs on Ehrlich’s computer simulation of the Lost Hills wildfire. What had they told her? She visualized them, spreading, growing, spawning other little red blobs. The spot fire that consumed Odalon, Ehrlich had told her, didn’t really fit with the larger picture.

  So the shooter did the deed on the sanctuary apes, then climbed into the hills and set a fire that later merged with the larger maelstrom. If she bent her reasoning into some sort of convoluted pretzel shape, the idea of the shooter setting a fire could fit with the mercy-killing scenario. But not really. The scenario it did fit was one Remington had seen over and over in her life as a police: a bad guy does a bad deed, then uses fire to cover his tracks.

  What about the evidence gleaned from the ape autopsies? These kinds of postmortem reports were sometimes called “death narratives,” because they told a tale. What story had pathologist Kenny Bedford presented to her?

  One detail stood out. The biggest of the sanctuary chimpanzees, the huge male called Booth, had most probably been killed first.

  Remington struggled to understand the implications of that. Either Ian Terry or Cindy Iracane (she sifted her memory in vain, knowing that since they were both dead now, she couldn’t exactly go back to them and check) had told her that Booth was the dominant male in the sanctuary chimp colony. It wasn’t exactly a eureka moment, but it did allow Layla to peer deeper into the night the chimps were killed.

  If one was going to attack a group of apes—or a group of humans, for that matter—it made sense to eliminate the leader first. Which meant that the shooter had to have known that Booth was the dominant male at Odalon. Which, in turn, meant that the shooter was intimately familiar with what went on at the sanctuary.

  Where did that leave her? Look closest first. Okay, but the people with the most familiarity with Odalon were the ones getting attacked, one by one. The autopsies had dished up a solid clue. The shooter had some inside knowledge about his targets. She left it at that.

  Remington couldn’t fit these bits and pieces into the larger picture. What stymied her mind—it was like a Gordian knot at the center of the whole affair—was the fact that something had happened that, by all the lights of reason and logic, could not have happened.

  As she sat and thought about it, her mind got trapped in a closed loop. Her attacker had looked like Angle, moved like Angle, smelled like Angle. Yet, because Angle was locked up in the Griffith Park zoo, it simply could not have been Angle. It was like Angle’s evil twin. But chimpanzees don’t give birth to twins. Then back again to the beginning: her attacker had looked like Angle, moved like Angle….

  Remington knew too well the notoriously unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony. The scene that night had been dark and obscured by rain. She herself had been afflicted by panic, stress, and, afterward, partial amnesia. All sorts of factors argued against taking the impressions of that chaotic night at face value.

  Plus, she still had the nagging conviction that she was missing something. Some essential fact had somehow gotten lost when her brain caromed inside her skull the instant her head slammed down on the courtyard walkway.

  In the middle of all this painfully circular thinking, Remington suddenly recalled who Suzanne Durgess was. The firearms specialist at the Santa Monica forensics lab who had produced the ballistics report on Odalon. She dialed the number that the woman had left on her phone.

  “This is Detective Remington,” she said when Durgess answered.

  “Oh, hi, Detective!” Durgess chirped. She sounded as if she were sixteen years old.

  The tale she had to tell was sufficiently grown-up. Doing ballistics on a homicide case from Rancho Palos Verdes, Durgess confessed that she felt an eerie sense of familiarity when she stared through the comparison microscope at a discharged bullet placed in evidence.

  “Copper-clad lead, a marked absence of lands or grooves, extremely high-caliber, a monster round, something like .700,” Durgess said. “Sound familiar?”

  It was only luck that Durgess had caught the case at the lab. One of the other firearms experts—there were three—could have done the analysis and never connected it with the Odalon shootings.

  “It was pretty much serendipity that they even found the discharged load,” Durgess said. “The scene was at Marineland, you know? It’s an abandoned theme park down there along the coast. Ordinarily, with only a homicide detail working it, they wouldn’t have turned up anything. But they had a crew of cadets from the academy out to walk the scene. One of them found the discharged bullet inside the park.”

  The recovered bullet was in remarkably pristine shape, the firearms expert told Remington. “Usually, with a high-velocity, high-caliber load like this, the lead totally flattens out or gets mangled somehow on impact. This one here, it must have blown right through the body—never hit bone, only soft tissue, it looks like.”

  “Who was the vic?” Remington asked.

  “Gregg Robert Hickler. I think you may want to look at this guy. He had tattoos up the wazoo, some real strange ones.”

  “The shooter doesn’t happen to be in custody, does he?”

  “Last I checked, no.”

  “Is there a suspect?”

  “I wear a lab coat,” Durgess retorted dryly. “I’m not exactly in the loop on that. But I don’t think so, no.”

  Remington was silent for a beat, thinking. “Has anyone else seen your report on this?”

  “I haven’t done a full report yet,” Durgess said. “I red-flagged a preliminary finding and sent it through the pipeline, but so far nobody’s reached out. Anyone minding the store up there in Malibu while you’re disabled?”

  “Send me whatever info you’ve got on the victim, will you?” Remington said. She gave Durgess her intranet address for secure departmental communication.

  “How are you feeling, Detective?” Durgess asked before they ended the call.

  Like homemade shit, Remington thought. But she told the forensics tech that she was fine.

  An hour later, after she had paged through the incident report on the Marineland killing, she called out to her father. Gene was in the kitchen fixing them both a sandwich for lunch.

  “Hey, Dad, how’d you like to take a drive with me to San Diego?” She rechecked the victim’s address given in the incident report. “Actually north of San Diego, a place called Vista.”

  “I know Vista.” Gene poked his head around the breakfast nook to look at his daughter. “Business or pleasure?”

  “Oh, spending even more time with you than I am already, I’m sure it’ll be pure pleasure.”

  “So you say,” her dad remarked, appearing unconvinced. “I probably shouldn’t cater to your obsessive pursuits.”

  “Plus, we could maybe make a stop on the way down,” Remington said. “I need to visit the morgue.”

  22

  It did not occur to Remington until they were on their way to San Diego, but the Marineland vic’s last name, Hickle
r—well, that sounded pretty damned close to Hitler, didn’t it?

  Gene drove the U-boat, with Layla beside him in the passenger seat. This was in contravention of departmental policy, which had ordained that only a sheriff’s officer could use the vehicle, but so what? Remington knew that she could talk her way out of whatever jam she got into by playing on the sympathy due to her as a chompanzee attack victim. All she had to do was display her bandaged ribs.

  Incredibly, the coroner’s office was closed when they stopped by, forced into a six-day-a-week schedule because of the city’s fiscal woes.

  “What if they gave a murder and nobody came?” Gene asked.

  Trying to avoid traffic on the miles-long parking lot called the San Diego Freeway, Layla’s father drove the long away around, taking the Foothill Freeway to the Corona Freeway, which eventually turned into something called the Avocado Freeway. L.A. natives rarely referred to the area’s superhighways by their numbered routes, only by their more imaginative nicknames. It was a way of confusing newcomers and outsiders.

  “So Vista, that’s like Ozzie and Harriet territory,” Gene said.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Layla said.

  “It means white-bread. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is an old TV show. You can watch it on one of those nostalgia cable channels, or, I guess, probably on YouTube. You’ve never heard of Ricky Nelson?”

  “Your point is?” Layla said. “I know you have one.”

  “Well, the vic is African-American, didn’t you say? He’d be a fish out of water in Vista, for sure. Unless it’s changed over the years since last I knew it.”

  “Everything’s changed since you last knew it,” Layla said. She was being sharper with her father than she usually was. A product of my achy-breaky head, she thought.

  On the way south, she examined the incident report on the Marineland killing for the twentieth time. A memory surfaced amid her racing thoughts. The description of the shooter that Angle had supposedly signed to Mace Arthur on the DVD. Bettina Brownstein, the ASL interpreter, had pretty much discounted it, though other people—Trish Sedgewick included—seemed to be able to understand the ape’s signs.

  Dark-skinned adult male around six feet tall. As vague as that description was—and it was so imprecise as to be practically useless—it did happen to fit Gregg Hickler. He was a thirty-nine-year-old African-American male, with his driver’s license height listed as six-one.

  Vista, when they got to it, was as Gene Remington described it, like something out of the past century. Kids from eighties sitcoms still rode bicycles on the sidewalk. Her father was riffing on a song about saying hello to a girl named Mary Lou.

  “That’s a Ricky Nelson hit,” Gene told her. “He was the dreamboat son on Ozzie and Harriet. The tune’s got a killer guitar solo by Elvis’s guitarist, James Burton. Do you know James Burton?”

  Jesus, thought Layla. I should have driven my own self down.

  The address listed on the homicide report turned out to be some sort of ranch compound lodged hard up against a crumbling forty-foot dirt cliff. The neighborhood didn’t resemble the other parts of Vista they had driven through. It was closer to Oceanside, the sprawling community that fed off the nearby Camp Pendleton U.S. Marine Corps base.

  The yard at 2245 Missouri Drive was well fenced and posted with numerous NO TRESPASSING signs. The place wasn’t so much a residence as a fortress. It faced the street as if it had a chip on its shoulder. The brown dirt of cliff behind the house looked barren and incapable of supporting life. Remington could imagine a rainstorm-triggered mudslide engulfing the whole property.

  An L.A. County sheriff’s squad car and a pair of San Diego County Sheriff’s Department cruisers were pulled up in front, as well as a couple of sedans that Remington marked as detective cars. Two plainclothes cops, one on a cellphone, lingered on a terraced patio. Most of the personnel seemed to be inside the residence, with only a single uniform watching over the vehicles and keeping the looky-loos at bay.

  Much to Gene’s disgust, Remington made her father stay behind in the U-boat. “If I had known you were going to treat me this way, I never would have come,” he grumbled. But he settled in with one of Elmore Leonard’s cowboy novels.

  Remington ID’d herself to the duty watch and entered the house. Right away, she had it figured as the residence of the Odalon shooter. Gregg Hickler liked guns, liked them a whole lot. There were firearms throughout the premises, all of them in the process of being tagged by the investigators. Bullet magazines competed with print magazines about weapons. Hickler evidently subscribed to Guns & Ammo, Handguns, Shotgun News, American Handgunner, RifleShooter, and Gun World, since copies were flopped open on almost every surface.

  Collected on a half-assed trophy wall were photos of the ranch home’s sole resident. Gregg Hickler in desert-dun combat fatigues. Gregg Hickler posed with an AK-47 knockoff aimed directly at the camera. Hickler bench-pressing, Hickler holding up some sort of plaque and grinning, Hickler looking all corporate in a three-piece suit.

  As if discarded carelessly or in haste, a set of night-vision goggles lay amid the clutter on an end table near the living-room sofa. The straps of the head mount had streaks of ash on them and—when Remington picked up the glasses, using a ballpoint pen so as not to smudge fingerprints already there or leave behind her own—the whole rig smelled faintly of wood smoke.

  She moved from the living room to the kitchen. On the dinette table stood two handloaders—given Suzanne Durgess’s ballistics report, Remington especially liked the looks of those—alongside rack upon rack of ammunition. You know you’re a redneck, Jeff Foxworthy might say, if you have to move an assortment of rifle cartridges aside just to sit down and eat.

  So, okay. The weaponry and the related literature might not have been significant in and of themselves. But as soon as Remington walked into the kitchen she saw a series of three photos thumbtacked to a corkboard, chimpanzees in triptych: an adult baring its teeth (or maybe just caught yawning); what looked like a mother and child in a cage environment; and a big, hulking male staring directly into the camera lens.

  “What we’re looking at,” the L.A. murder-squad deputy present at the scene told Remington, “is this guy’s participation in a racist website called Chimpalooza.com. Like, a black guy running a website catering to bigot dirtbags, you know? What’s that all about? We think maybe some member of his customer base got wind of the fact that this Hickler was in reality a shine shining them on, so to speak.”

  “So to speak,” Remington said. A shine? Had the deputy really used the term? In quite a few contexts, including maybe this one, such a loose tongue would be enough to stall a career. She and the deputy remained unintroduced. Remington wasn’t there in any official capacity, which meant, broadly speaking, she shouldn’t have been there at all.

  “The Internet crazies get upset,” the deputy detective continued. “They’ve been following Hickler as their grand wizard, right? All of a sudden, whoa—what the hell? People like them, they don’t censor themselves by using the term ‘n-word.’ They’re comfortable with the full monty. So they lure him out to Marineland and execute him with a shot to the heart, some kind of a warning to others to take this KKK business seriously.”

  “Well, yeah,” Remington said, wholly unimpressed with the theory of the crime the deputy was presenting. She suggested that he look at the similars in the firearms report being prepared even now by the department’s forensics lab.

  “You might want to watch that mouth of yours, too, Deputy,” she said. Then she walked away to check out the ranch home’s bedrooms.

  Over an unmade bed and next to a stack of Andy Griffith Show DVDs—Andy Griffith? The vic was indeed one weird bird—she saw a snapshot-style photograph of Hickler posed beside a gent who could answer to Cindy Iracane’s description of a “big fat slob.” Both of them standing there grinning loopily. The big guy’s arm was visible, holding the camera for a selfie.

  In the backgr
ound of the shot, but somewhat out of focus, was exactly the kind of parched vegetation one might find in the vicinity of the Odalon Sanctuary. And, and—Remington bent her head close to the shot, still not touching it but closely examining the surroundings displayed—could that be the chain-link fence protecting the sanctuary from public intrusion?

  Remington used her smartphone to take a series of photographs of the photo. She tried to zoom in on the face of the man standing with the late victim. Mr. Fat Slob looked more like an amorphous blob the closer in she got.

  She returned to the living room, found the San Diego chief of detectives who was there, and tried to impress upon him that she needed copies of both the thumbtacked photo in the bedroom and any other shred of evidence that featured the fat man posed beside Hickler.

  “Piece of my puzzle,” Remington told the chief, using police shorthand for a vital element in an investigation.

  “I need to know who this guy is,” she said, tapping the face displayed on her smartphone.

  When she got home that evening, she printed out the best shot of the series she had taken earlier, enlarged and enhanced the best she could make it. She placed that photo next to the burn-boss portrait sketched by Wolf Perez. Big fat slob versus the fake burn boss.

  No match. Not even close. Now she had two different blank-eyed “Who are you?” faces staring back at her. Pieces of her puzzle, yeah, but ones that didn’t yet fit.

  —

  The day after she sifted through the remnants of Gregg Hickler’s life in San Diego, Remington returned to the Malibu D.A.’s office. Randy Gosch and the others greeted her as though she were a heroic casualty of war. It was only a visit, she said. She wouldn’t be coming back to work just yet.

  “Of course not,” Rick Stills said to her.

  “I just want to clear up some stuff I left behind,” Remington said.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Stills said. “Think of this as an opportunity to take a long rest.”