13 Stolen Girls Page 8

  When she stepped into the full glare of a California canyon morning, she saw a middle-aged male hot-stepping it away from the You Send Me offices, headed back off the highway along a dirt lane.

  “Sir? Hello?”

  The guy was bald and stocky. Remington called after him again. He did an odd thing, not turning around but raising his right hand in a dismissive sort of wave. All right, Remington thought. Jump in your vehicle and chase this hoo-hah down.

  Or not. Catch up to him on the next go-round. You Send Me might or might not warrant a return visit. It was too early to tell. For now, just enter a note in a mental-reminder file, the informal kind of data set all police tended to maintain, keeping tabs on anything hinky that happens to crop up.

  —

  On the first day of her Professional Ethics class at the Los Angeles Police Academy, Remington’s teacher, a former professor at John Jay in New York named Arlene Tomlinson, introduced one of the oldest moral parables in existence.

  “I know most of you will relate to this story via J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and in his series of Rings books. But there are many much older variations in fables from all over the world. Plato mentions an ancient king named Gyges.”

  The question, Tomlinson told her police-cadet students, was simple and basic: If you came into possession of a magic ring that allowed you to pass through the world unseen, what would you do?

  “What’s your next move? Head for the vaults of the nearest bank to loot and steal? Find your way into the secret chambers of someone you desire?”

  Tomlinson allowed a buzz of chatter to pass through the two dozen assembled cadets.

  “Well, it’s a trick question, of course. There exists no such ring that renders the wearer invisible. What you are really answering is another question altogether. How would you behave if all of society’s rules and restrictions were suddenly suspended? If you could slip the leash of propriety, dispense with morality and avoid the judgment of others? Such inquiries represent the foundational basis for our study of ethics in this class.”

  Remington had attended the police academy back when the World Wide Web was still a fairly new phenomenon. The first iPhone had yet to be released. Facebook hadn’t yet made much of a dent in the culture. But she had recognized even then that the Internet could function very much like the magic ring in the parable.

  The famous cartoon “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog” established the premise. The Web granted anonymity. The hand that moved the mouse wore the ring of invisibility on its finger.

  The whole arrangement functioned as an Ethics 101 laboratory. Sociology professors ginned up statistical analysis to study cyber behavior from this exact perspective.

  The results of their studies? The vast majority of people turned out to be ethically pretty okay. A few—mostly males, and mostly young—qualified as utter trolls. And a handful—again, testosterone being the rogue hormone that it is, almost all males—were inhuman fiends.

  In the days following her fruitless visit to You Send Me, Remington began the work of tracking Merilee Henegar’s computer usage. She experienced some of the far reaches of the Internet, realms that she knew existed but had never much visited herself.

  A twenty-two-year-old tech from the sheriff’s department named Dewey Tull acted as her guide. His expertise lay in computer forensics. Young as he was, Tull found himself in demand within the department for cases involving hacking, identity theft and white-collar crime, all bull markets in law enforcement.

  “I don’t usually catch cases that have to do with murder, so this’ll be fun for me,” Tull told Remington. “Well, not fun fun, but you know what I mean.”

  The two of them sat side by side in front of a gigantic monitor at the LASD Crime Analysis Unit offices in Santa Monica. Tull dressed like someone from another decade. The fabric of his leisure suit never admitted the existence of an organic fiber. His haircut, too, made him appear out of time, not in a hipsterish way but in a helmet-headed way. In keeping with the ways of his tribe, he was fumbling and socially graceless.

  Anyone with any sort of computer chops certainly wasn’t working in the public sector, so Remington had the uncomfortable feeling that Tull wasn’t very good. He didn’t need to be. The work they were doing together would be preliminary, only a dip into the murky cyber sea in which Marilee Henegar had most recently swum.

  “I thought you might want to see this material thrown up on a bigger screen,” Tull said, quickly opening a series of websites.

  “Us senior citizens always like big print.” Remington was approaching her thirtieth birthday. Elderly, in the eyes of a puppy such as Tull.

  “So, yeah, so, like, with Merilee people her age don’t use computers, not so much as mobile devices like cellphones and maybe tablets,” Tull said. “I grabbed what I could off her laptop. She used some easily crackable passwords. And, just like you thought, I found some stuff off of those books.”

  They called themselves “petals,” the young female devotees of Rose and Thorn. Tull clicked through a series of websites and blogs. He flipped through the pages so rapidly that Remington had trouble registering each one.

  “These are all sites she recently visited,” he said. “She used the screen handle Shar a lot, don’t know why.”

  “Her middle name. Sharmon.”

  “Yeah?” The tech didn’t seem that interested. “Imagine naming your kid after a brand of toilet paper?”

  Merilee Henegar’s digital trail included quite a few Rose and Thorn blogs. There were fan-fiction archives, recommendations for similar books, more than one outdated petition site begging that a movie finally (“Pul-leeeze!!!!”) be produced based on the trilogy.

  “Any use of IRC?” Remington asked.

  Tull gave her a cockeyed look, as if he was surprised she knew the abbreviated shorthand for Internet Relay Chat, formerly the dominant application of the chat room.

  “C’mon,” she said. “I went through the cyber-crime syllabus at the academy like all the other police.”

  “Well, then you’re familiar with TOR and the Deepnet.”

  “Right.”

  Despite Remington’s affirmative, Tull was ready to give his little lecture anyway, as if he doubted that anyone not in possession of a Y chromosome could possibly know this stuff.

  “Think of the Internet as an ocean. The part of it reached by Google-style search engines represents just a thin few inches near the surface. The fraction of the Internet that’s indexed and readily accessible is usually put at point two percent. That’s the stuff everybody can see—point two percent! And it’s, like, an old estimate. The real percentage is actually probably much, much lower now, so low that some experts say it can’t be quantified. What we’ve got out there is totally unindexed, huge, really immense, like the Mariana Trench of the Web—old sites, defunct URLs, material from the Pentagon that dates way back to the creation of the Internet.”

  Though popular use of the Web had started only a couple of decades back, Tull sounded as if he was referring to some impossibly distant past. Remington realized that he belonged to the generation that had never experienced a time when going online was not a dominant feature of human existence.

  He picked up his tale. “So there are a lot of dead sites, yeah—”

  “But there are also a lot of places for people who want to stay invisible.”

  “Right.”

  “Any evidence that Merilee had a TOR-enabled browser on her machine?”

  Again, Tull looked impressed that Remington would have a grasp of what he considered to be his realm.

  TOR.

  The term was an abbreviation of “The Onion Router,” so called because it routed an Internet user through a series of computer proxies, providing anonymity in several layers, like an onion. TOR software encrypted a user’s Internet-service-provider address so that online activities couldn’t be traced.

  It was Bilbo’s ring come to life. “The Web for criminals” was how one cyber-c
rime expert described it. The TOR network had a lot of legit uses, too, but its main feature was secrecy.

  “I was going to get around to talking about TOR and the encrypted material in Merilee’s computer trail,” Tull told her. “You know, I’m not sure, but it looks as if her laptop hard drive was at least partially wiped.”

  Remington let that news sink in. The intruder returns the corpse to the victim’s bed, then spends some time cleaning the victim’s computer of incriminating material? It could imply that victim and intruder had some sort of online connection. She reminded herself not to leap to any conclusions. There were lots of possible explanations. Merilee could have performed a wipe on her computer herself. Perhaps to keep some of her Web activities from Brandi Henegar’s prying eyes?

  “Even with the wipe, I turned up some code that looks like the remnants of a Tor software installation.”

  “Did you happen to run across the name Priapus anywhere?”

  The cellphone that originated the Priapus text that had popped up on Remington’s screen proved to be a burner, probably untraceable. Remington had duly informed the department of the incident. She kicked it around with a few other detectives. They decided she should text back “who r u?” She did so, but had received no reply. Her commander directed some uniformed deputies who were attached to the Homicide Bureau to try to track down where the cheap, disposable phone was sold. They might get lucky with a store surveillance video that showed the buyer.

  “Priapus?” Tull asked now. “You’re kidding, right? Yeah, I heard about somebody reaching out to you with a mystery text. But you’ve got to understand, that screen name, that avatar, in some parts of the Web it’s pretty much the most common pseudonym there is. You search for ‘Priapus,’ it’s like searching for John Smith or John Doe or something. I wrote some code and turned up twenty-five hundred separate IP addresses without even trying.”

  “What part of the Web might that be?” Remington already knew the answer, she just wanted it confirmed. “I mean, where, exactly, might Priapus be a real common screen name?”

  “Oh, you know, Priapus is all over the hookup sites, fetish, bondage, S & M, anything like that. Anywhere a male might want to boast about, you know, his skill in the sack. Which is pretty much everywhere on the Web.”

  “Like the Rose and Thorn websites.”

  “Yeah, you bet.” To prove the point, Tull performed a quick search of the several dozen Rose and Thorn pages they had just visited. He turned up multiple threads that featured posters who called themselves some variation of “Priapus”: Priapus666, Priapus_CM, a more imaginative one who used Priapussy.

  “I told you to be careful with this business,” her father warned when she filled him in on new developments later the following evening. They were in the Glendale condo. Gene had cooked up one of his specialties, an especially creamy version of macaroni and cheese.

  “What you told me was to approach it with a cold eye.”

  “Now you’ve got a guy who returns a dead body like it was a deposit bottle, who knows your phone number, who reaches out to ask if you enjoy his work.”

  “Might not be a bad thing. Could be a way to nail him.”

  “You’re thinking like a police. I’m thinking like a dad.”

  —

  One of the aspects of law enforcement that doesn’t get a lot of notice—an element that the endless number of cop shows, cop novels and cop movies don’t feature—is the grinding, painstaking, oftentimes routine nature of investigation. Her father had been a police clerk all his life. Remington had to remind herself of that fact whenever she got bogged down in a morass of clerical duties.

  Mark Twelve Enterprises, the company listed on Merilee Henegar’s pay stub, wasn’t registered with the California secretary of state as an incorporated entity, a dba, or subchapter S corporation. Remington went sideways and checked with the secretaries of state in Nevada, New York and Florida, turning up nothing. She finally found a single mention of the name on an outdated list of “talent agencies” in the Los Angeles area. After that, the trail seemed to dry up like a pool of water in the desert.

  A talent agency. In Los Angeles, the phrase was so flexible as to be absolutely meaningless. It could refer to anything from sucker houses offering introductions to top producers for outrageous fees to pimp scouts for the porn mills of the Valley and licensed agencies offering roles in movies, TV and commercials. In that world, even the apparently legit was suspect. The spectrum ranged from shadowy to pitch-black.

  One element of the Henegar case kept coming back to her. During her brief conversation with Brandi Henegar at the task-force missing-persons event, on the evening when her daughter’s body reappeared, the mother made a stray comment. One of the reasons she wanted to speak to Remington, Brandi Henegar said, was because of something she remembered her daughter telling her.

  “A couple weeks before she went missing, Merilee said that she had met a producer on the Tarin Mistry movie.”

  Tarin Mistry wasn’t Remington’s business anymore. She had been warned off the case often enough. Walter Rack was a jealous god. But in the process of tracking down the details of the Merilee Henegar murder she needed distraction. After an evening spent watching Joshua Tree with her dad, Remington decided that it wouldn’t hurt if she spoke to some of the people who were involved in the original production.

  As far as she knew, Marc Lee Hughes was the main guy. Most modern films had lists of producers that were almost comically long. Sitting through the roll call of executive, associate and line producers, Remington always recalled the comic Fred Allen’s quip about an associate producer being the only person who would associate with a producer. Joshua Tree, thankfully, had only a single main guy.

  But Hollywood was a wilderness of mirrors. She could well imagine how many times some tool at a party introduced himself as a producer on the Tarin Mistry movie, trying to impress a young AWC—or “actress without credits,” as the cynical acronym had it.

  After she left a voice-mail message for him, it took a day for the real Tarin Mistry producer to get back to her. Marc Lee Hughes was in L.A., he said. “You’re the detective who found the body.”

  Remington went through her basic interview protocol, confirming that Marc Lee Hughes had been out of the country during the period of Merilee’s disappearance. Midway through their talk, she heard what sounded like a gasp on the other end of the line.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Hughes said. Not a gasp but a sob.

  “Mr. Hughes? Are you all right?”

  “It’s just…I’m okay. I have trouble thinking about her in that hideous barrel…”

  “Could you tell me if any other producers ever came on board for Joshua Tree?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t—I can’t do this—” The line abruptly went silent. Hughes had hung up. The man had indeed been weeping.

  Tarin Mistry, dead for more than five years, still reaching out and plucking heartstrings.

  Remington had a dim memory of an awards show, and a whole gaggle of people onstage accepting kudos for Joshua Tree. The movie got passed over at the Oscars, so it had to have been some other prize. The Golden Globes? People’s Choice? The number of statuettes flying through the air during the awards season kept the metalworking industry busy.

  She found what she was looking for on YouTube: the Independent Spirit Award show for the year Joshua Tree conquered the country. The Spirit Awards were like the Oscars for independent films. There they were, crowded around the podium, the Joshua Tree team, the famous and soon to be famous, Radley Holt and George Dannemoor and Mistry’s older female co-star, Jill Emil—a dozen people in all.

  Among them, Remington recognized Gus Monaghan.

  Ah, she thought. She should have known. Monaghan was the biggest of the big. Mr. Mega-Bucks Producer, presently hot as blazes. Gus Monaghan had his fat, grubby hands all over numerous Hollywood projects, so it made sense that he should lurk behind the scenes at the Spirit Awards.

&
nbsp; Monaghan had won the bidding war for Joshua Tree when the little indie was eventually picked up for national distribution. He wasn’t listed as a producer on IMDb or in the film’s hastily added credit roll. But he had been its rabbi when it blew up big.

  Poking around a little deeper, Remington discovered that Gus Monaghan literally owned Tarin Mistry. He was instrumental in getting her declared legally dead after her disappearance. He had negotiated with Cathy Gunion for the right to exploit the name and likeness of the woman’s daughter. The State of California had very strong laws in this respect, termed “personality rights” and jealously guarded by phalanxes of attorneys.

  The money staggered Layla when she checked into it. The deal with Gunion was worth millions, since the Mistry name was immensely lucrative. She was in the top ten on Forbes magazine’s list of top-earning dead celebrities, lagging behind Michael Jackson, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe but gaining on Elizabeth Taylor.

  The line of perfumes linked to her name—Tarin (floral accents), Mistry (spice), Joshua (for men)—brought in hefty licensing fees. There was said to be a Tarin Mistry hologram on the way. In a Vanity Fair article, Monaghan held out the tantalizing prospect that, “through the glories of CGI, Joshua Tree might not be the last Tarin Mistry movie.” In show business, death didn’t mark the end of a star’s usefulness.

  Monaghan and Mistry. There was nothing like serious amounts of cash to bind two names together.

  She put in the call. “This is Detective Layla Remington of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. I need to reach Gus Monaghan.”

  They handed her off to a couple of gatekeepers. How many were there—how many levels and buffers and rings of hell surrounded the man himself? What did it take to protect the most successful producer in Hollywood?

  After more transfers, a male voice came on the line. “Detective? I’m Pablo Puente, Gus’s personal assistant.”