13 Stolen Girls Page 4

“Her,” Brandi Henegar said to Stills now. Indicating with a tired gesture the female LASD investigator who stood across the auditorium. “I want to talk to that one.”

  “Detective Remington?” Sure. Of course. Everyone wanted Layla Remington. Her new standing as the discoverer of Tarin Mistry’s corpse lent her celebrity among cops and other law-enforcement personnel, not to mention the media.

  But the truth was, Mistry wasn’t even Remington’s case anymore. The LAPD had plucked it away from her. Stills had heard scuttlebutt that Remington was pursuing the investigation on her own, strictly on a personal, unofficial basis. She had better watch herself, Stills decided. She was stepping on some very important toes.

  Part of the problem was that Layla Remington had developed a media presence. The press hordes couldn’t exactly interview Cindy the cadaver dog (though they tried), so they clamored for Remington. LAPD Detective Walter Rack, the once and future lead investigator on Mistry, was an infamous publicity whore. Rack didn’t admit rivals, and he possessed the power to flatten an interloping junior detective from Malibu.

  Brandi Henegar wanted Remington. Stills had an impulse to tell the grieving mother to join the crowd. He had other impulses as well, such as suggesting that Brandi ought to be searching for her dear daughter Merilee in the skin parlors of Orange County, say, or maybe a strip club farther afield, in Vegas, Albuquerque or Sacramento. Kids split. It was an age-old story that of late had taken on a particularly wicked modern twist.

  Stills left Brandi Henegar sitting alone and threaded his way to where Layla Remington stood. They had worked together the previous year, before he joined Buffum Buffum. For the life of him he couldn’t recall how they had left off. Did Remington hate him now for some reason? Had he done her wrong somehow?

  He searched his memory. They hadn’t had a thing—he was certain of that. No? Was he sure? Not that particular drunken night…? No. But women were so often smitten with Rick Stills, only to turn on him later.

  A cluster of men stood around Remington, lawyers and police. In the present circumstance, Stills didn’t want to be just one more supplicant tugging at her sleeve. But she saw him walking over and came forward to meet him. There was an odd, almost pained look on her face. Maybe something had happened between them. He frowned.

  “Task Force Director Stills,” she said.

  “Detective Remington.” Next they would click heels and salute. “You’re the one who—”

  “Yeah,” Remington said, saving him the trouble of completing the sentence. The one who turned up the girl in the barrel.

  “And they let you slide on that DWI?” he asked her. For the high crime of blowing away a news drone, Remington had faced a DWI investigation, which in this instance meant not driving while intoxicated but discharged-weapon incident.

  “Can’t touch me,” Remington responded.

  The press being what it was and cops being what they were, the police personnel at the scene forgave Detective Remington for firing her weapon and putting a scare into all of them. The shot-down TMZ.com news drone was treated as a trophy of war. Instead of a reprimand, Remington received backslaps and handshakes for putting her foot down in such an explosive manner.

  “You okay?” Stills asked her.

  “I’m fine.” She wasn’t. Rumor had it that the girl-in-the-barrel affair was telling mentally on the young detective. Sleep issues. Disturbed dreams. Consultation with the departmental shrink.

  “I’m over there interviewing the Merilee Henegar mom.”

  “Right,” Remington said.

  “Brandi Henegar. Brandi with an ‘i,’ you know? She wants to speak to you.”

  “They’re telling me I’m out of the whole thing.”

  “Oh. Why are you here, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I need you.”

  “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. I mean…” Remington turned her face away. “It’s not the department. It’s me.”

  “What, you’ve got feelings, Layla? Well, jam ’em back down in your gut and man up. You’re a murder police.”

  Stills wondered how much longer Remington would be able to wear the gold badge. She looked lost to him, gazing across the auditorium at the forlorn mother.

  “I hate that phrase,” she murmured. “ ‘Man up.’ ”

  —

  Dixie Close swore that slaving in the bakeshop made her put on weight. Not in the usual way, either. After her first working day amid all the pastry, cupcakes and doughnuts, she’d totally lost her appetite for any item the bakery offered for sale. Dixie existed almost exclusively on carrots, yogurt and Diet Coke. Her only explanation for the extra pounds was that it was some form of funky osmosis.

  “I think I’m absorbing fat particles directly through my skin,” she told Petra Sorrel, her co-worker. They took turns in front of the bakeshop’s deep fryer.

  Petra laughed. “Dude, it’s all the snackage.”

  But it wasn’t. Dixie had uprooted from Scottsdale and repotted herself in Los Angeles. She put in place boot-camp discipline. Don’t party. Go solo. Spend no money. Eat like a bird. Limit TV, cell, anything with a screen. Keep thine eyes on the prize.

  On Craigslist she found an apartment, living with five roommates jammed into a three-bedroom in Reseda. Petra was one of the roommates, and she got Dixie the greasy gig at a Let Them Eat Cake franchise on Ventura Boulevard.

  Working for minimum wage, sleeping for minimum hours. It had to be that way.

  Dixie had one big rule that she had formulated during her bus ride to L.A. from Arizona. Devote every single extra moment to the Search. Someday later on, you can go back to school, get some real friends, have some fun. Now, not.

  She kept lists. “Mastering the Los Angeles Transit System of Buses and Trains” was one. “Learn My Rights as an Adopted Person” was another. “Being On My Own.” “Self-Help Books That Might Help.” A favorite was, “Keeping Up My Spirits, aka Don’t Let Killjoy Los Angeles Harsh My Mellow.”

  “Marsh my mallow” was how Petra said it, which made Dixie laugh.

  One lesson she’d learned reading self-help was to refrain from thinking that she could do it all at once.

  “We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a big flurry of activity, such as studying all night for a test,” wrote Temple Hope-Davies. “On the other hand, we tend to underestimate what we can do if we apply ourselves a little every single day.”

  Temple had authored Effective Being: Finding Our Way Amid the Maze of Possibility, a book that Dixie, with her newfound thriftiness, had checked out of the West Valley Regional Library.

  In a lot of ways, Los Angeles was just another Phoenix. Or was Phoenix another L.A.? Same sprawl, same traffic, same strip-mall sensibility. A fundamental rule in both places: don’t not have a car. Dixie imagined the folks whizzing by her on the freeways, pitying the lonely girl waiting at the bus stop. In reality, no one gave her even a split second of thought.

  She was proud of herself for leaving Scottsdale, for managing the move to L.A. and all the rest. It was the most elaborate task she’d ever accomplished, and she did it all alone. Jerry and Sheila had been too distracted with their own troubles to help her. Or stop her. Dixie couldn’t dive into the Search right away. She had to check off items on her “Get Established” list first.

  Job. Place to Stay. Knowledge of Surroundings.

  Then, two weeks after stepping off the Greyhound in a weird out-of-the-way Los Angeles neighborhood near downtown, Dixie started in on the Search.

  First she compiled a list called “What I Know.” She knew that she had been born in the Los Angeles area. Adopted. Shipped to Scottsdale, Arizona. Renamed Dixie Annette by her non-real, nonbiological parents, the Closes, Sheila and Jerry, lately a not very close couple. Raised by them. Always feeling out of place and incomplete, like a puzzle with one piece missing. Now relocated to California in order to search out that missing piece.

  What was her first move? Take the birth cert
ificate that Sheila had given her down to the Vital Records Office on Figueroa Street. Dixie had put the tattered, well-folded piece of paper into a Ziploc bag to preserve the thing, her only official link to personhood.

  Setback. Birth certificates were filed at Vital Records only for babies under one year old. Are you, Dixie Annette Close, under one year old? You certainly don’t look like it. Then what are you doing here?

  The bow-tied clerk-man at Vital Records directed her to the office of the County Clerk, way down in Norwalk, the opposite end of endless L.A. from Reseda. That meant a whole second day of travel, which meant that Dixie had to wait for her next day off.

  The trip, when she finally made it, wasn’t pleasant. At times, L.A. could be a little creepy. A guy on the Metrolink train made a big deal of taking a nearby seat and opening and closing his legs, grinning loopily all the while, like the move was supposed to entice her. She got up and changed seats, but Edward Scissorlegs followed her. What a perv. Then, during her tromp along Imperial Highway to the County Clerk’s, a white van slowed down and drove alongside her for, like, a quarter of a mile. When she caught a glimpse of the driver, he wore a clown mask, totally flipping her out.

  She finally made it to the proper office, situated in a big blocky building that looked like a Rubik’s Cube with smoked windows.

  There Dixie learned that she didn’t exist.

  Inside, the place was slow-motion anarchy. Lots of people waited in a snail’s-pace line, getting served one every twenty minutes.

  “City’s so screwed up because rich folks don’t pay no taxes,” explained her new best friend, a cool guy in line in front of her. He told her that he was filing papers to legally change his name to Resident.

  “That way, I figure I’ll get a lot of mail.”

  He gave a cackling laugh. Dixie didn’t ask him why he wanted to receive junk mail when everyone else in the world was trying to stop it from coming. Resident told her the reason anyway—that he’d rigged up a stove in his room and he could burn mail-order catalogs to cook his rice and beans. Dixie foresaw tragedy, but she didn’t mention that.

  It took her a full hour and a half to get through the line and be able to speak to a clerk. The little plastic nametag thingie the woman wore spelled out “S. Juhn.”

  Here’s how it worked when you were adopted, a process Dixie had written down under her list “Learn My Rights as an Adopted Person.” When birth parents abandon their legal connection to their baby, the original birth certificate becomes “null and void”—words she had underlined three times in her notebook. The government issues an amended birth certificate, which names the adoptive parents rather than the biological parents. The amended one was Dixie’s only legitimate birth certificate. In the eyes of the State of California, the original had been “rendered illegitimate.” Underlined, underlined, underlined.

  What she was looking for from S. Juhn was the original birth certificate, the one that listed her biological parents. Dixie took the B.C. she got from Sheila out of the baggie and slid it across the counter.

  Setback.

  S. Juhn slowly examined the paper through a set of half-glasses she had propped on the end of her nose. She swiveled her chair a few inches, typed on a keyboard for a few minutes and examined the monitor in front of her, all without saying a word. Then she turned back to Dixie.

  “Miss, what you’ve given me here isn’t a legal document.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “It means it wasn’t issued by an official agency.”

  Dixie felt a flush of dread. “It says ‘Certificate of Birth’ right there.”

  “You’re not in the system. This here, I don’t know what it is, but it’s not an official birth certificate. There’s no imprimatur, no date stamp, nothing. It’s not even the form we use here at County Clerk. The paper’s wrong. We didn’t issue it.”

  “Listen, I’m adopted. I am almost eighteen years of age. I am within my legal rights to request my original birth certificate.”

  S. Juhn nodded. “All that may be true. But you aren’t going to find out anything using this.”

  She pushed the bogus birth certificate back toward Dixie.

  “Please,” Dixie said. She felt as though she might cry.

  S. Juhn took up the paper again, peering at it through her half-glasses. “What’s this business here?”

  Under “issuing agency,” the line was filled out with typewritten words, smeared by age. “G. A. Services, 3903 W. Manchester Blvd., Englewood Park, CA.”

  “Get in touch with them, maybe they can help you,” the clerk said.

  I don’t exist. The words echoed in Dixie’s brain as she rode the train back to Reseda. Reexamining the birth certificate, she saw how cheap and fake it looked, like something someone had rigged up and printed in a home office. Why hadn’t she seen through it before?

  Dixie had already tried to track down G. A. Services. No such entity could be found. There wasn’t even an “Englewood,” not in California. There was an Inglewood, in South Central Los Angeles, where a Manchester Avenue was one of the main thoroughfares. But who would misspell the name of their own town?

  The Metrolink rocked northward, through neighborhoods made newly ugly by Dixie’s disappointment. She felt like President Obama, without a real birth certificate.

  She started a new list in her notebook, “How to Deal with Setbacks.” Dixie stared at the words for a long time. She couldn’t think of a thing to write down.

  —

  Brandi Henegar drove home from the missing-persons task-force event at the Grand Olympic pretty much gutted from exhaustion. In the past month, since Merilee had been missing, tiredness had gone so deep and become so lasting that it resembled a new state of being. Or nonbeing. Heartbroken. Frustrated. Angry. Or tired, which meant not being able to muster any of those other feelings.

  “I’m not made for this,” she said out loud, her voice hardly audible above the drone of freeway tires. In former days she’d loved blasting home at top speed late at night, rocketing up the 110 amid the glittering towers of downtown. She always thought of the Wicked Witch zooming through Emerald City. What a buzz-thrill!

  That was Before. Now, tonight, nothing. Brandi had joined the ranks of those humans for whom there was a before and an after.

  The clock on the dashboard of Brandi’s Honda moved to a minute past 9 P.M. She always marked the hour. It was like those flip-number clocks from her youth. You could watch the minute change. This particular moment, nine o’clock at night, always flipped with an ominous crash. One minute it was one time, the next minute it wasn’t. Now it had become twenty-five days ago, not twenty-four, that Merilee Henegar left her home in Agoura Hills and didn’t return.

  In another sense, time hadn’t budged since 9 P.M. twenty-five days ago. It was always September 17th for Brandi, and she was still coming home from work. Calling upstairs to her daughter.

  No, Brandi corrected herself. That’s not how it had gone down.

  Coming home from work. First getting herself a glass of white wine from the fridge. Then calling out.

  “Meri?”

  Hearing a muffled “Hi, Mom” shout from her daughter’s bedroom.

  That night Brandi had taken her wine into the living room and slumped down on the flower-print sofa. She turned on the television. The TV! Watching some stupid news show (KTLA, a report about a woman giving birth immediately after taking off on a flight from LAX) and falling asleep.

  Really? Napping? Had she been unconscious while her own daughter was…what? Being kidnapped? Disappearing? Already vanished? How could a mother sleep while that was happening?

  She woke later to a Two and a Half Men repeat on TV. She marked the time, 9 P.M. After realizing that Merilee had gone out, Brandi went into the kitchen for her phone. Not getting her daughter, but not leaving a message, knowing that the call from Mom would register on Merilee’s cell.

  Then, then, then. Waiting. Still unconcerned.

  E
very moment of that evening had become etched in acid. Memorialized by guilt. Later on, Brandi had called around to her daughter’s friends—Melissa, Dana, Katrine. Even Merliee’s old boyfriend, Donny. Dropping back into a restless doze right there on the couch. Unremembered dreams. Asleep once again! With her child gone! What kind of mother was she?

  Then, finally, only the next morning—finally, for Chrissakes—calling the police.

  When Merilee had been twenty days gone, Brandi had started going to a support group for loved ones of missing persons. Most of the people there were from NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Brandi still didn’t know if the group was right for her. Merilee was sane, or at least, what passed for sanity in a sixteen-year-old girl.

  The dozen troubled souls gathered in a dingy windowless room at the Community Center on Malibu Hills Drive. Most of the building was taken up by athletic facilities. The support-group members could hear the pounding of basketballs from next door. They sat in a circle and talked about ghosts. The vanished ones were zombies, the undead, not exactly alive but not dead, either.

  “I keep thinking about whether it would’ve been better if Jason went missing when I wasn’t there,” said Jason’s sad-eyed father, who had lost his son in a crowd after a college football game. “Would I somehow feel less guilty? I don’t know.”

  “What difference does it make?” snarled the sister of a disappeared schizophrenic. “If they’re gone, they’re gone, am I right?”

  Brandi felt herself losing it, as if she were fading into a shadow. What part had she played in her daughter’s disappearance? Would things really have been so different if Brandi had come home that night to find Merilee already gone? And maybe her daughter really had not been there. What if Brandi had only imagined that she heard that ghostly “Hi, Mom” from upstairs?

  The immediate aftermath of Merilee’s disappearance was a blur. Brandi had seen enough Lifetime movies to know what should happen when a child went missing. After an initial period of infuriating official resistance (always dramatic), the police eventually rumbled into action. Neighbors and friends rallied around. Everyone gathered in a nearby church basement to make flyers and work the phones.