13 Stolen Girls Page 24

  Now, as she read, an awful realization formed in her mind. The nineteen-year-old Combe hadn’t vanished alone. Elizabeth had an infant with her, month-old Victoria Combe. Dixie came across this passage deep in the body of one of the newspaper articles:

  Miss Combe reportedly left her family’s Culver City home with her baby. The fact that she had not taken along supplies such as extra diapers and formula was considered significant by police investigators, since it could indicate the woman was not planning to be gone from home for long.

  Baby Victoria Michelle Combe was born on July 19, and no father’s name was listed on the birth certificate.

  Dixie’s skin crawled.

  “I went out to buy Huggies for you.” That’s what her aunt had said.

  Suddenly wide awake, she read the passage over and over. With an increasing level of sick excitement, she paged through all the Combe material, searching for any mention of Victoria Combe.

  July 19th had always been celebrated as Dixie’s own birthday. It was the date that had been listed on her bogus birth certificate.

  She was the baby that had disappeared. Dixie Annette Close was Victoria Michelle Combe. Dixie was the baby who had been stolen, renamed and then given to Jerry and Sheila Close.

  The Search was over. Dixie had finally found her birth mother: Elizabeth Combe, the first vanished girl in the clipping files of Larry Close. Had Jerry and Sheila known? Was Dixie’s whole life some sort of bad joke of kidnapping, betrayal and secrecy?

  “Victoria Michelle Combe,” Dixie whispered to herself, stunned. “I am Victoria Michelle Combe.”

  Could it really be true? She wept. She paced the cramped patch of floor beside her bed. The apartment was dark. Her roommates were all asleep. She had an impulse to wake them and announce the dreadful, terrible, exhilarating news. I know who I am. They wouldn’t care and would be all grouchy for having been awakened. Dixie was bursting with the news. I know who I am!

  At the same time, a boiling hatred rose within her. The moment felt biblical. She had tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and it was bitter. Uncle Monkey? Uncle Shit Heel was more like it. What had he done with her mother?

  Dixie didn’t know what to do. Call the police? The story was too bizarre. But she was on fire to do something, anything. She dressed hastily, slipping on sweatpants and a T. Slinging on her backpack with the pistol still inside it, she left the bedroom for the living room. She saw a set of car keys among the beer-bottles-and-ashtrays clutter of the coffee table. The only one among her roomies who possessed wheels was Lindsey’s boyfriend, Bryant Kay. The last time she wanted to use his van, Bryant had said no.

  She wasn’t going to ask this time. Dixie scooped up the keys. Then she left the apartment for the darkness outside.

  —

  Remington woke to absolute blackness. Waves of dizziness and nausea convinced her that she was conscious. Her state did not resemble being alive in any way to which she could relate. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t see. Her thoughts wouldn’t come straight.

  She could hear. Sounds were deadened but audible. A faint, faraway voice, mumbling and incoherent.

  “It likes barrels. It shall have a barrel. Not one of its own, no. It has to share.”

  Footsteps and a muffled noise of movement.

  A leather hood or mask of some sort covered Remington’s head. It had become partially filled with her own vomit. The real trouble was that she could not shift out of the way of the mess. She experienced terrific pain at the back of her neck. She was afraid that she was paralyzed. Her arms were pinned behind her. Her legs were bound and immovable. A gag closed off her mouth. She would die like a rock star, from aspirating her own puke.

  What had happened? She searched among her roiling thoughts. The white GMC pickup. The little compound above Malibu Lake. Quietly stepping through the open screen door and entering the house. Then, lights out. Nothing after that.

  She could not move, but someone moved her. New pain exploded behind Remington’s eyes as she was lifted like a piece of baggage. She moaned and inhaled the bitter stench of stomach acid. A door opened and closed. Cooler outside air hit her. She realized then that someone had stripped off her clothes and sheathed her body in a black leather bondage rig.

  Footsteps on gravel. Remington struggled to focus. She tried to count the steps, attempted to monitor her situation as a good detective should. But a vortex of dizziness and darkness took her. She passed out.

  He woke her by sweeping off her filthy hood.

  “You like barrels, Detective?” her captor shouted at her. The man roughly dug the toe of his boot into Remington’s eye sockets, one after another, cleaning them of their crusted plugs of vomit. The scene in front of her cleared somewhat. The gag still blocked her mouth.

  What she saw wasn’t anything her bruised brain could rationally accept.

  A blocky male figure outlined in the dark worked on an eighty-five-gallon drum with a crowbar. A screech of metal on metal sounded as he pried at the barrel’s lid. It came open with a wheezing gasp.

  The stench of death instantly obliterated every other sensation.

  The figure stepped out of her line of sight. She heard the hiss of a butane lighter. A flare of light revealed the building’s interior for the first time. Remington saw a line of steel drums beyond the newly opened one. She tried to count the number of barrels, but the flame from the lighter died.

  A wheezing exhale behind her. An acrid smell mixed with the incredible stench of rotted flesh. Smoke from a crystal-meth pipe.

  Another flare, another hit of meth.

  Her captor leaned in close. “Upsy-daisy,” he said brightly.

  He hefted Remington as if she were a rag doll. She again moaned in pain. She caught a glimpse of a bald-headed man with a wrestler’s build. She wasn’t allowed much more than a glimpse. The man flung her upside down and upended her over the open barrel. The maneuver put Remington face-to-face with a rotted human head that sagged above an equally decayed body.

  The steel drum’s current resident.

  “How do you like my work, Detective?”

  Remington screamed behind the ball gag in her mouth. She tried to thrash but was abruptly shoved downward next to the corpse. Her face wound up smeared in the fetid, rectified mess at the bottom of the barrel. Gagging and heaving, she tried to twist away.

  The true terror was yet to come. The interior of the drum went dark as the barrel’s lid slammed down and her captor hammered it home.

  —

  Only fear kept Remington from losing consciousness. She retched again. The steel drum tipped and crashed horizontal. Mucky human fluids washed over her. Her dead barrel mate flopped forward in a horrid embrace, thin, stinking arms clutching Remington’s own.

  The steel drum began rolling. As in some enormous cocktail shaker, the barrel’s contents sloshed and mixed and combined. Remington lost all sense of up and down, left and right.

  A brief, lurching halt. The world kept spinning even when the insane ride stopped. There was a series of shattering bangs as the crowbar pounded on the steel of her barrel prison.

  Then, the blender.

  The steel drum crashed down the hillside with Remington and the corpse slammed together inside. The pummeling trip ended with an enormous splash as the barrel hit the lake. It began to sink with the weight of the two human bodies inside.

  She would die. She would drown. She lost consciousness.

  —

  Remington split in two. One part went insane. The other part cruised in for a bumpy landing in an alternate universe. Where the dead spoke.

  Too close! A nagging, insistent whisper. Too close now! Too close!

  No more blood rushed in Remington’s veins. She was seized up, rusted, clotted. She couldn’t breathe.

  Comfy? asked her barrel mate.

  “No.” It felt unreal to say anything out loud. Had she spoken? The gag was still in place. The sound came out
in a weak quaver. It gave birth to a tiny interior echo, which then died.

  Neither am I. You’re going to have to leave.

  Laughter. From a corpse.

  Remington had piteous thoughts of her dead mother. With a burst of hope, she fantasized that she was with her now. Mona Seeger Remington. Uttering the word like a prayer.

  “Mama?”

  Another dry, rattling laugh. Guess again…

  Remington was like a baby in a womb whose twin had died. Her partner in slime. She passed out again.

  Wake up!

  Blank silence. Then the nagging voice returned.

  You can wriggle out of those cuffs, you know. Harry Houdini did it. We all did it. That stuff is called grave wax, adipocere. Makes everything real slippery.

  No. Not happening. Couldn’t possibly attempt it. Too broken.

  Go ahead. I can wait.

  It took a while. But Remington first slipped out one hand, then the other. She stripped off the ball gag and sucked in deep, heaving breaths.

  Hey! You’ll use up all the air.

  A joke. The corpse laughed once more.

  Remington began a feverish exploration of the mucky cave in which she was confined. Feeling with the hands of a blind woman, she pawed at the scabby steel, the two circular ribs that ran along the barrel’s circumference, the seams at its top and bottom rims, everything wet and greasy and rank. She had to reach past her ghastly twin in order to conduct her investigation.

  She earned a sneer for her efforts: There’s no exit, fool.

  Then, unexpectedly, a gentle dripping noise. Cold water leaked onto Remington’s face. The droplets felt decidedly strange, out of place, like a baptism.

  A baptism that meant she would die. Her barrel tomb was leaking.

  Knock knock.

  For pity’s sake.

  Knock knock.

  “Who’s there?” Feeling like a fool.

  Dwayne.

  “Dwayne who?”

  Dwayne the fucking water before we both dwown!

  The dead laughter was a long dry screech, fingernails on a blackboard.

  Remington searched with raw fingers for the source of the drip. The leak meant a gap. A gap meant an opening. An opening meant life. Bracing her back against the side of the barrel, she tried to push upward. Her twin sagged beside her.

  What you need is a can opener.

  The spray turned into a hiss. Remington’s choice seemed to be clear: rest easy and die, or work open the lid and drown.

  A half foot of liquid had sloshed into the drum. She pressed at the barrel lid once more, trying, and failing, to force her release. In a fury she screamed and raged, rocking her tomb back and forth. The mix of water and sick and body fluid splashed into her eyes, her nostrils, her ears.

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, cowgirl!

  The barrel tipped and settled again. Okay. Okay. She needed…If only her tormentor had buried her with a crowbar.

  If only he had put that crowbar in with us, right?

  “Right,” Remington said.

  Wait. Wait a minute. I happen to have a crowbar on me…right here.

  A solid piece of bone bumped into Remington’s hand.

  Oh, the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone…A cracked singsong, off-key and ghostly.

  The corpse in the drum had decayed to the degree that its flesh now hung loose on the bone. Remington fumbled in the dark.

  What was the longest, strongest bone in the human body? Trailing her hands down along the disordered length of the corpse, she located its left thigh. Shutting her mind against what she was doing, she dug into the rot to grasp whatever she could.

  Water coursed at her now, spilling into the drum, rendering every surface slippery and cold. Still Remington worked. She got a grip on the body’s femur and worried it back and forth. Was she just thinking wishfully or did the bone yield? She jerked at it again.

  What do you think you’re doing? Leave me alone!

  With a tremendous yank, the femur came loose.

  She had her crowbar.

  An inch-thick, foot-and-a-half-long shaft, splintered at the head. One end of the bone had snapped off, leaving a sharp, jagged blade. Remington jammed the blade into the gap in the barrel lid and pushed upward.

  Her reward was a gush of water.

  Splish splash! Hey! What’s going on? Where’s my rubber ducky?

  Working along the rim, Remington pushed and pried, pushed and pried. The incoming flood soon made the task impossible. She had to wait for an agonizing moment while the water completely filled the barrel. She took a last gulp of fetid air.

  Then she went under.

  Glub glub! Glub gurgle glub!

  Laboring desperately, her lungs exploding, she pried at the barrel lid. The bone broke, then broke again, until just a splintered stub remained in her hand. When the gap opened to a foot wide, then another foot more, she pushed herself through. The clawlike steel tabs of the rim raked her skin. In Remington’s fevered thoughts, her barrel mate clutched at her ankle as she escaped.

  Don’t leave me.

  But she did. As her vision went dim from lack of oxygen, Remington kicked upward. A second later she broke the surface, gasping, and took in a great, glorious lungful of sweet, beautiful nighttime air.

  Alive.

  For now.

  —

  Remington told herself to wait, to tread water, to remain hidden in the darkness of the lake. Larry Close considered her dead. Sam Brasov would come.

  Up the hill, she could see the outline of the house. Light from the bungalow’s windows reflected on the dirty, oily sheen that had spread itself around her. Body fluids and gunk from the barrel stained the water’s surface.

  She was unarmed. She had a terror of Larry Close returning. She could not suppress her retching coughs. Moving slowly, she paddled toward shore. The bondage rig Close had dressed her in trailed its leather straps in her wake. Her bare feet scraped on the bottom, a jumble of rocks slippery with algae.

  She saw the dim, blocky shapes of other lake houses in the hills across the water. She decided that her best move would be to work her way along the shore, remaining half submerged until she was well clear of the Close ranch. But the footing proved too difficult.

  Instead, she heaved herself onto the narrow strip of pebbled beach and lay there, gasping for breath. When Remington attempted to stop retching, she began sobbing. The surrounding silence magnified every noise she made.

  Crawling along the shore, her progress was slow. That was okay. If it took an hour, she would damn well make it over to one of the neighboring houses, get on the horn, call the law-enforcement furies down upon the psychopath Larry Close.

  A muffled whimper sounded in the darkness. Remington froze. A dog. Of course the man would have hounds on his property. She imagined Rottweilers, mastiffs, Baskerville-size monsters.

  But, no. The whimpering was human. And female.

  “Mmmee-mmeee. Mmmee-mmee.” Despite the indistinct syllables, the far-off whimpering managed to communicate some meaning. Remington’s exhausted, abraded soul heard it as a kind of pleading.

  Do not investigate, she told herself. Her first priority had to be alerting the LASD. Let a sheriff’s cohort find the source of the whimper. She was in no shape to rescue anyone.

  Help me. “Mmmmm-eeeee.”

  Remington struggled to her feet. She searched among the shoreline thickets for a branch large enough to serve as a weapon. There was only scrub oak. She pried up a rock from the beach instead. Scrabbling around, she discovered a path that led off into a small draw at the foot of the slope.

  I found myself in a dark wood…

  Her cop sense screamed at her not to go it alone, to get the hell out, flee the scene, summon backup. She moved forward anyway, still stench-ridden and greasy from her time in the barrel, her rock gripped pathetically in her hand.

  The journey she first embarked upon beside a busted-open barrel on an earthquake-ravaged Malibu hillside had finall
y led her here.

  Finish it.

  Lodged amid the underbrush in the draw was a small teardrop trailer not much bigger than a child’s playhouse. No light spilled from its interior, but the pleading groan came from inside. Could it be some sort of trick? Larry Close crouched there, waiting in ambush. The moaning sound was simply a recording, a decoy to draw her in.

  Holding her rock at the ready, Remington pushed open the door. Beyond the threshold, the space was blank as a cave. The moaning ceased abruptly. Blind, she edged her way forward. A string brushed her face and she flinched away. Realizing that it was a light cord, she reached out and pulled.

  After absolute darkness, the stark-white blaze that lit the interior was painful. Remington stumbled back a step. The whimper transformed into a muffled shriek of fear.

  “Ahhh-ahhh-ahhh!”

  Remington stood inside a sado-masochistic hellhole. Her mind refused to take it all in, the piles of sex toys, the whips, the stainless-steel exam table centered in the space.

  She was distracted by the captive.

  Suspended above the exam table in an elaborate suspension rig, the hooded female struggled and jerked as if experiencing a seizure. Remington’s confusion and exhaustion dropped away. She lunged forward and embraced the flailing girl.

  “It’s all right, honey, it’s all right.”

  At the sound of a soothing female voice the girl stilled.

  The suspension rig proved fiendish. Remington’s fingers were raw and bleeding from her struggle in the barrel. She seemed unable to solve the rig’s intricacies. The girl started to whimper again. Amid the strange clutter of the trailer, Remington discovered a huge, bowie-size knife. She cut away the leather straps, easing the bound-and-trussed form down onto the exam table. Then she stripped off the hood and tore away the ball gag that had muffled the girl’s cries.

  “He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming.” The girl was panting, lost in panic. “Uncle Monkey!” she shrieked, babbling incoherently.

  “I’m a sheriff’s detective. My name is Layla Remington. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  Remington had her own doubts about what she was saying. The picture she made didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Her half-stripped-away black leather corset reeked of death. She wore ankle cuffs. Her hair still had clots of rotted flesh tangled in it.