13 Stolen Girls (17 page)

“Two weeks ago, I think. Maybe more. I don't know exactly. I'd come down there, but I'm flat busted. Does the government pay to help moms track down missing kids?”

“Has your daughter been out of touch before?”

“I got two letters from her.”

“You've heard from her?”

“Yes, but she sounded funny. She never writes letters.”

“What did she say?”

“She said the job wasn't working out and she was going to a new job in Hawaii. Hawaii!”

“So she relocated.”

“Those letters weren't Lisa's!”

“All right. What makes you think that? Was it her handwriting?”

“Her signature.”

“She signed them.”

“Yes.”

“And you recognized her signature?”

“Yeah, sure, but—”

Noreen cut in. “I'm not sure this is a case for missing persons. Your daughter has been in contact with you.”

“The whole rest of the letters was typed!”

“Yes?”

“But Lisa don't type! She's bad dyslexic. She didn't write those letters. She
couldn't
.”

“But she signed them.”

“He abducted her into it! Forced her to—” Helen started to cry.

“Who, Ma'am? Who forced her?”

“I don't know!”

The signal dropped when the battery on Helen's own phone died. She felt a confused sense of despair.
Try to do the right thing, and it always comes out wrong.
She didn't know what to do, what her next move should be. Head down to the Four Roses, she decided. Have a good, long drink-and-think about it.

Brasov absented himself to give court testimony on a homicide down in Pedro. Remington was relieved to work solo once again. The Henegar investigation felt stalled. She had turned up bits and pieces but nothing that added up to a solid theory of the crime.

Whenever she was stuck on a case, the answer was always the same. Do more footwork. Remington had leads to follow. One of them led to the Galleria mall in Westlake, where Eensy had told her that Merilee Henegar met up with her “big Hollywood producer.”

Footage from most surveillance cams had a limited shelf life. No one used videotape anymore. Everything had gone digital. Security firms had to free up space on their computers, so the longest they normally kept footage was a couple of weeks. But a huge liability judgment had recently been leveled against the Galleria, so it had changed its policy, installing more servers and storing its surveillance footage in six-month blocks.

“I need the night of September seventeenth, nine o'clock on.” Remington sat in front of a bank of monitors in the Galleria's security center, a windowless room in the bowels of the sprawling retail complex. Natasha Katznelson, one of the security techs for the mall, guided her through the process of retrieving dated footage. September 17th was the evening that Merilee Henegar disappeared.

“We have seventy-two nodes, which is what we call our camera locations,” Katznelson informed her. “It would help a lot if you could narrow down which area of the mall you're interested in.”

“Let's try the parking lots, near the entrances.”

“There are fourteen entrances, if you count the loading docks.”

“Only the public entrances.”

The process turned into a painstaking grind. Find the footage for the proper date, scroll through views from Camera Node 646, do the same for Camera Node 078, Camera Node 307, on and on through twenty-five possible views of the parking lots. Katznelson had a gap between her front teeth the size of a mall loading dock. She also sported an Afro-size wealth of curly black hair that occasionally obscured Layla's sight line to the monitors. She seemed edgy.

It took three hours, but in a eureka moment they finally stumbled on what Layla was looking for. At a time code of 21:34:52 on Camera Node 175, the footage gave a view of the west parking lot. A limousine approached. It parked parallel to one of the lot's meridians. A Cadillac SUV pulled up behind it. Remington watched as a middle-aged male in dark clothing emerged from the limo and entered the mall.

“Can we pick him up as he heads inside?”

Katznelson worked the controls. She pulled up a beautiful frontal shot that gave a clear picture of the limo guy.

“Christ, there he is,” Remington murmured.

She was staring at the unmistakable face of Gus Monaghan. The producer moved directly in front of the lens. This wasn't the old-fashioned kind of grainy CCTV surveillance footage. The new technology was high-definition, sharp and ready for prime time.

The mall closed at eleven and was already clearing out. Katznelson helped Remington follow Monaghan's progress among the shops, kiosks and escalators. They lost him at a double-entrance restroom that wasn't covered by security cameras.

“Where is he?” Remington demanded.

The security tech cycled through the views, one camera after another, attempting to locate Monaghan among the shoppers.

“Listen, it's very important—I have to see him make contact.”

The footage, or at least Katznelson and Remington's search of it, did not reveal any further shots of the quarry.

“All right, okay.” Remington tried to calm her excitement. She had put Gus Monaghan at the mall where a source had also placed Merilee Henegar on the night of her disappearance. “Can we—listen, can we go back outside and watch the limousine?”

Katznelson returned to footage from Camera Node 175. They watched as the Monaghan limousine idled for nineteen minutes, the tech performing a gradual fast-forward in time. The big land boat moved at 21:53:07, slowly approaching a curb next to a recessed door.

“What's that? Where's that entrance?”

Katznelson was flustered. “I think it's—Giselle's, the back door to, like, a steak restaurant.”

It was brief, but it was there: Monaghan emerged from the mall with a figure beside him—what looked like a young woman wearing a tan knee-length coat. The producer loaded his companion into the limousine. With the Cadillac SUV following behind, the two vehicles drove out of the parking lot.

“Damn, damn, damn, damn!” Remington was certain she had just witnessed evidence of a crime. “Run it again, please, will you? Just from the exit to where they get into the car.”

Nobody knew what Merilee Henegar was wearing on the night that she left her home in Holmes Canyon. The girl had gone out of the house without her napping mother's seeing her. There were any number of ways that she could have gotten to the Galleria. Buses ran along Agoura Road. There were car services. Merilee could conceivably have walked the six miles, although, given the time frame, that was doubtful.

Remington had the security tech run the brief segment again and again. It was a three-second shot, and she could tell nothing of the teenager's expression or even see her face, not really. So why did she think Merilee was coming along willingly?

Dixie Close tracked down her uncle's fabled “ranch in Malibu” with just a single visit to the West Valley Regional Library. The computers there were a pain, because users had to sign up and were limited in the amount of time they could spend during any one session. But Dixie had no laptop of her own. She didn't have a choice, so she made the library's machines work for her.

It was a wonder what the Internet could do. Los Angeles County plat maps were digitized and searchable. Property documents listed one Lawrence Decker Close as the owner of record for a two-acre plot of land near a small body of water called Malibu Lake. Larry Close's ranch, if that's what it was, wasn't anywhere near the beach. On maps, the lake showed up in the foothill canyons at the far northern reaches of Malibu, off the Ventura Freeway.

Of course, Dixie could have just asked her aunt and uncle if they would have her out to their Malibu place for a visit. But her relations with them had cooled after that first dinner. She tried calling and leaving a message. They didn't get back to her. And she didn't really want to see the ranch with them looking over her shoulder. She wanted to dig around on her own. Aunt Annie had mentioned an office at the place. Dixie convinced herself that Uncle Monkey possessed some clue to her beginnings, and that she might discover it at the ranch.

From the plat map, she knew where the place was. Now all she had to figure out was a way to get there. Dixie thought that not having a car in Los Angeles should have been classified as a disability, like missing a limb or being legally blind. No way she could afford a cab. She tried to haggle the use of a van belonging to Bryant Kay, her roommate Lindsey's boyfriend. She told the guy she'd pay him and everything. But Dixie didn't have a real driver's license, only an expired learner's permit from Arizona, so Bryant didn't go for it.

The express bus from Reseda to the Westlake Village malls made a stop off the freeway in Agoura Hills. She could walk from there, two miles up into the canyons.

Tuesday was her day off from Terry's Deli. The late-October morning was sunny and warm. She memorized the directions. Tramping along, a bag lunch in her backpack, she was the only pedestrian on the road. Dixie endured a humiliating sense that every driver in every passing vehicle scorned her.
What, you don't have wheels? You are a pathetic loser.

In her computer searches, Dixie had also discovered records for several businesses that Larry Close owned. Uncle Monkey sure had a lot going on. Bungalow Billy's Rental Properties, Colony Real Estate Management, Decker Consultants. Another one was called Mail Solutions, Inc., dba “You Send Me,” with a single location on Mulholland Highway, near the ranch.

Her hike to Malibu Lake would take Dixie directly past You Send Me. Feeling like some sort of sleuth, she approached the place cautiously. She didn't want her aunt and uncle to know that she was in their neighborhood. Her disguise was a hoodie. She stood in the weeds a little way off the road and watched the storefront for a good ten minutes. It appeared shabby and deserted. Emboldened, she covered the last hundred feet and checked the place out up close.

Hi, Uncle Monkey! I was just passing by and
…But she needn't have worried. The front door had a closed sign posted. It was just after eleven o'clock. What kind of enterprise was shuttered during prime business hours? Cars were passing. It would be bad luck for Dixie to get stopped for trespassing before she ever got to the ranch, so she didn't investigate You Send Me further.

Medea Creek, which fed into Malibu Lake, looked as though it hadn't seen any water for a very long time. Dense thickets of brush clotted the streambed. The homes in the area were well kept and upscale. But the whole neighborhood seemed oddly empty of life. Dixie encountered not a single human soul except those behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Malibu Rancho Road led to a smaller, dead-end lane. Topping a rise, she saw the lake below. It seemed to Dixie the sweetest place on earth. The surface of the water gave off yellow glints in the sun. A little rounded hill stood above the shores, reminding Dixie of something out of one of her favorite books,
The Hobbit
. She couldn't remember right then the name of the village where Bilbo lived. But that's what she felt she was looking at.

Aunt Annie! Hello! I was bumming around and I thought I'd stop by
…Once again, no explanations proved necessary. There wasn't anyone around. The dry-husk noise of insects rose and fell. At the dead end, she slipped by an aluminum gate that had No Trespassing warnings plastered all over it. The driveway led to a tiny, cheap-looking house, a single-story bungalow with a few equally faded structures surrounding it.

This was the “Malibu ranch” her aunt and uncle had so often boasted about?

She came to the barn first, so she stuck her head inside. An incredible clutter of junk pretty much obstructed all entry. The interior smelled musty and foul. A half-dozen rusted steel barrels were lined up against one wall.

She found the office. The locked screen door was easily gotten past. One of Dixie's skills, developed during her wayward youth in Scottsdale, was to be able to open pretty much any door with just a piece of plastic, like a library card or a student ID. She couldn't exactly break into a bank, but the patio doors and garages of suburbia were nothing to her.

Why, Uncle Larry, you've caught me red-handed! I came like a thief to burglarize your place, since I'm convinced that you know way more than you're telling me about my past!

A half hour of rooting through the papers and filing cabinets of Larry Close's office proved disappointing. There were numberless documents, stacks of what read like fund-raising letters, business, business, business. Nothing that would help Dixie in her quest. She had an inkling, though, that a tax guy from the IRS, say, or some detective investigating white-collar crime might find the papers she looked through very interesting. For one thing, Larry Close used an awful lot of fake names.

One of the office's filing cabinets was locked. It took her a while, but she jimmied it open with the end of a wire hanger. Inside were yet more documents. None had anything to do with Dixie Annette Close, G. A. Services in Inglewood or adoption.

All this way for nothing. Wasting one of her precious days off. Burglarizing the premises of her own relatives! Really, what kind of person was she?

Yet a few of the files in the cabinet intrigued her. Inside a rectangular document box were three buff legal folders held together by a single rubber band. One file contained a collection of yellowed newspaper clippings almost twenty years old. There were a half dozen of the articles, all concerning the police search for a missing woman named Elizabeth Combe. Dixie could trace the interest in the story as it faded, with bigger headlines on the first couple of clippings from two separate newspapers, then smaller and smaller articles until the last one, an inch-long filler from six months after the disappearance, mentioning that the search had so far proved fruitless.

The other two file folders in the box were eerily similar. The first centered on the missing actress Tarin Mistry. It bulged with five-year-old articles, not original clippings but Xeroxes of newspaper pages. Inside the third folder were more pieces that concerned missing persons, all of whom were young females. The dates were more recent, spread over the past four or five years. The faces of the victims stared up at Dixie from the black-and-white articles, blurry portraits taken from high-school yearbooks or family photos.

One other element made the last file disturbingly different. Fastened to a few of the articles were women's earrings, the kind worn in pierced ears. The posts were pushed through the paper and fixed there with an earring back. One of the earrings had come loose and was rattling around in the document box.

Dixie tried to tell herself it was quite possible that none of it meant anything. From her searches among the office documents, Dixie noticed that Larry Close was a volunteer emergency-services worker. Perhaps the news clippings were just reminders to himself that he should be on the lookout for this or that missing person.

But the earrings…What was that all about?

The whole business skeeved Dixie out.

Her recent dinner visit to her aunt and uncle's house had left a bad taste in her mouth. The discovery of the missing-girl files only highlighted the strange vibe she was getting from Uncle Monkey.

She was just being paranoid, she told herself. But she recalled a line that her Scottsdale friend Chris Jenner used, making her laugh. “Even paranoid people have enemies,” Jenner always said. “Sometimes they really
are
out to get you.”

Take the document box, or leave the missing-girl files where they were? Larry might notice they were gone. He might figure out that an intruder had penetrated his office. Dixie decided to take the risk. She stuffed the box into her backpack with her uneaten lunch, closed the file cabinet and made sure it was locked, then headed out to continue her search over at the main house.

She never got the chance. As she exited the office—locking the flimsy screen door behind her—a white pickup truck approached the ranch's driveway. Dixie freaked. She dived behind the building and watched her uncle swing open the big aluminum gate, then return to the truck to pull it through.

He had Dixie trapped. She couldn't run uphill, since the property was well fenced in that direction, and, besides, she would be clearly visible from the driveway. A narrow path led downward through a thicket toward the lake. She plunged along it, crouching low for the first few yards until the brush grew high enough to hide her progress. Behind her, she could hear the truck tires crunching the gravel of the drive.

Hide and wait for her uncle to leave. What if he stayed all night? Go to him, apologize, say you just wanted to see the place. Larry Close's anger at her trespass into his home office at the Camarillo house flashed in her thoughts. Dixie sensed that her uncle was quite capable of violence. She could clearly imagine the possibility of him twisting off on her.

The underbrush concealed her in its shadows. The surface of the lake reflected light, but not enough to penetrate the thick, fragrant tangle of sages, cottonwoods and stunted live oaks. She was breathing hard, and her heart hammered violently. Above her, she could hear Larry Close banging around the ranch. A door creaked open and slammed shut. Dixie had an awful thought: Had she left some sign of her burglary behind? She visualized him confronting her, ripping open her backpack and spilling out the missing-girl articles she had stolen.

The path continued to the shore of the lake. Three-quarters of the way down the slope, a small trailer lay concealed, pulled back into a draw on the hillside. The trailer looked as though it had been there for a long time—years, maybe. The tires were rotted and flattened. The Toy Box was painted in faded homemade letters above the door.

Don't,
Dixie warned herself
. Uncle Monkey will come
. She went forward anyway.

No locks here. The door opened easily. She slipped inside. Flies buzzed in the gloomy dark. She could hide here until her uncle left. As her eyes adjusted to the shadows, she saw a large table of some sort stationed in the center of the trailer. Something strange and clinical, totally out of place. A gynecological exam table, with the stirrups cocked down and pushed to the side.

On a narrow workbench lay a jumble of collars, handcuffs and whips. Sex toys. An automatic pistol nestled among the mess. Panic rose in Dixie's throat. Her uncle would come here, she was certain. This trailer was really what the ranch was all about. He would employ his nasty-looking dildos on her.

She picked up the pistol, a Ruger automatic. Jerry Close had made certain that his adopted daughter was familiar with firearms. Dixie automatically checked the thumb safety and made sure the gun was loaded. She felt better hefting the pistol in her hand. For protection, she told herself. Should anyone come.

She couldn't decide whether the trailer was a refuge or a trap. Perched on a silver tripod was an expensive-looking digital video camera, its lens aimed at the exam table. A TV monitor was fixed on brackets near the ceiling, and another camera gazed impassively down from beside it. With horror, Dixie realized that the ceiling camera's red recording light blinked steadily.

Uncle Monkey was watching.

Gasping, she stumbled backward out of the camera's range, tripping on some floor clutter. Alongside the exam table was a roll of duct tape, a pliers, some chicken wire and a scatter of fist-size rocks. This gave off an ugly enough chill, but it wasn't the worst of it. In the uncertain light of the trailer's interior, Dixie saw a darkened smear on the plywood floor and didn't have to ask herself what it was.

A burgundy-black stain. Blood.

She shrank away, sickened.

He's coming. Run
.

“I believe the last time you saw Detective Remington here,” Brasov said to Gus Monaghan, “you were groping her junk in your little basement chamber of horrors.”

Monaghan's lawyers had assembled. There were two males—neither of them his high-powered brother, Jimmy—plus a stunning female attorney who looked as though she could have been cast in one of the producer's movies. A male attorney leaned over and whispered in his client's ear.

“As directed by my counsel, I'm not going to respond to that statement.”

“S'okay, s'okay.” Brasov nodded. “I'm feeling a little outnumbered. How about you, Remington? Gus's got all his blade runners with him, we're just by our lonesomes.”

After negotiations that rivaled a presidential summit, the producer and his lawyers had agreed to meet with the LASD detectives. The other side wouldn't give an inch regarding the venue. They would gather in Monaghan's limousine, at the moment parked outside the task-force offices in Century City.