13 Stolen Girls (19 page)

The last number was the only one where Dixie got anything other than a voice recording.

“LACTFOMEY,” said the curt female voice on the other end of the line. She didn't spell out the initials but pronounced it like a word.

“Um, hi,” Dixie said, uncertain how to proceed.

“This is Detective Layla Remington. Who am I speaking to?”

“I have a list, like, of missing persons, and I need to maybe check and find out if they're still not found? My uncle, Mr. Larry Close, he keeps a list and—”

The detective cut her off. “Who's calling, please?”

Dixie told her. Something about the detective's name rang a bell.

“Ms. Close, I have to tell you, I'm on another call, and right at the moment I'm the only one in the office. But I can take a number and have one of our people contact you first thing on Monday.”

“Sure,” Dixie said.

“If this is an emergency, you should dial 911.”

“No, that's all right.”

“Are you certain? You sound worried.”

“I'm okay.” Dixie gave the woman her number and rang off.

Layla Remington. Dixie shuffled through Uncle Monkey's missing-persons material. She couldn't find any mention of the detective.

Then she remembered. The Merilee Henegar case. Something strange had happened, so strange that Dixie had a hard time understanding it. Henegar had gone missing in the middle of September. Then, later on, she was found dead in her own home. The bizarre circumstances had sparked a firestorm of TV news interest.

Dixie hopped on her smartphone and found a Channel 5 video report archived online. This Detective Remington woman stood in front of the Henegar house for an edited-down sound bite that was all of seven words. But she looked nice enough. And Dixie thought the whole idea of a female detective was pretty cool.

Thinking that it would be good to speak to Detective Remington about all her worries and suspicions, Dixie again dialed the number of the task force. This time all she got was a recorded voice requesting that she leave a message.

Layla tried to keep it together in the wake of her dad's arrest. She set herself up in the task-force offices and worked the phone, assembling a Team Gene made up of his friends and old work associates. All hands on deck. There was an immediate and immense outpouring of sympathy for Gene when she told people what had happened. Not a single person who knew the man considered it possible that he might be guilty as charged.

“That's a total load of horse pucky,” responded Elvin Vaughan, Gene's former boss at the Parker Center. The sentiment was echoed with more colorful language by other friends.

Sam Brasov went into overdrive, reaching out to the LAPD detectives he knew to get the particulars of the case against Gene. He also had connections with the Glendale PD, and was up there now trying to sort things out.

Complicating her work on her father's behalf was Remington's own troubles with her superiors at the sheriff's department, stemming from her disastrous move against Gus Monaghan. It prevented her from mobilizing her LASD contacts on Gene's behalf.

“This is more of his crap,” Remington told her father glumly as they sat down for a face-to-face at Metro.

“Whose crap?”

“Monaghan. The producer guy I told you about.”

“Really? I've never met the man. I don't like his movies much, but that's no reason for him to put me in jail.”

“Ha-ha, but you should take this seriously. I was asking myself whether maybe Rack and Ruin had a hand in it.”

“Why do you automatically think that this frame has something to do with you?” Gene asked her. “I've got plenty of my own enemies, you know.”

“No, you don't. You should hear what your friends are saying. They're going to come down and storm the Bastille, bust you out.”

Layla was frustrated that she couldn't do more to break the old man loose, pronto.

“Oh, I don't mind it here,” Gene said. “The seg unit, you know, I'm away from the riffraff in the pop. I'm meeting some wonderful fellows—I mean, felons.” The “pop” was short for “general population,” where anyone with a police background would be vulnerable.

“You sure you want to go with Olivia Chalmers?” Layla asked, questioning Gene's attorney of choice. “We could enlist one of those high-powered O.J. lawyers, like Johnnie Cochran or somebody.”

“Johnnie Cochran's dead, honey. You really ought to keep up with the news. It's not going to help me much to have a stiff for a mouthpiece.”

“Rick Stills. He's at a missing-persons conference in Chicago right now, but I called him and he told me he'd fly back.”

“I can't afford Rick Stills,” her father pointed out. “Olivia is fine. She tells me I'll be out of here come Monday morning, as soon as an arraignment magistrate takes a look at this charade of a case.”

“Such a fucking disaster.” Layla rarely cursed around her father.

Gene took her hand. “I watched some college basketball yesterday, before…all this. You know what kind of games I like? When a team is never ahead, not once, not for one second the whole time. Until they win at the buzzer. They're the ones who never give up.”

“It's not a game, Dad.”

“It is if you play it like one. You're going to beat them, honey. You'll see.”

Cool, calm and collected. Layla seemed more panicked by developments than her father was. He put a good face on it, but Metro was no place for a sixty-year-old ex–police clerk. If Gene's fellow inmates got a whiff of his LAPD connections, he'd have to sleep with one eye open.

Layla left the jail. She hesitated before doing it, but swallowed her pride and dialed the “ultra-classified personal cellphone number” that Radley Holt had given her.

Gus Monaghan answered by demanding to know who the hell was calling him.

“Uncle,” Remington said.

A long silence.

“Mercy,” she said. “You win. I'm crying uncle and asking you to call off your dogs.”

“I can't be speaking to you, Detective Remington. On the advice of counsel. This call is yet one more instance of your harassment campaign against me. And, of course, you're recording this, so that's entrapment right there.”

“I'm pleading for mercy,” Remington said, stubborn. “You came after my
father,
Mr. Monaghan? Really?”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I'm hanging up now.”

“Gus, please. Do you hear me begging you? Stop fucking with me.”

“You've got it backward, Detective. How exactly am I fucking with you? I believe you're the one with a police-harassment suit against you.”

“I don't know how you accomplished it with the security video, but it was masterly, sir, really impressive.”

“Say that again, that ‘master' and ‘sir' business. Put a ‘yes' in there with it. Say ‘Yes, Master.' ”

Remington wouldn't do it. Another long silence.

“Come up to the Palace sometime, we'll have a good give-and-take session, thrash things out.”

“Thanks, but no. I'm asking you to stop, one human being to another.”

“But I haven't even started yet. Goodbye, Layla.” He ended the call.

The exercise yard in the segregation unit at L.A.'s Metro jail wasn't a proper yard at all but a walled-off twenty-by-thirty space, paved in pebbled asphalt. Through the overhead grating that prevented escape by sprouting wings and flying off, Gene could glimpse the crown of one of downtown L.A.'s glass office towers. He spent an idle quarter of an hour trying to figure which one it was, and imagining that the inmates of that prison of commerce might have telescopes with which they could spy on the jail.

Segregation was a prize. Metro used the unit to hold those who might be in danger if released into the general jail population. Anyone with a police background qualified, and anyone with a celebrity profile was automatically placed in segregation. Recently, it was where Harvey Evers, the talk-show host, had been held on his vehicular manslaughter charge. Actors and musicians had always cycled through. They could boast of their time inside while experiencing a relatively benign imprisonment.

Harvey Evers was long gone, and nobody remotely famous was being held in the unit when Gene arrived. He tried to figure what his fellow prisoners had done to warrant segregation. Better not to ask.

Gene sat at a picnic table made of steel and rubberized plastic that was the yard's only furniture. A heavyset prisoner named Bert Cordone came out and took a seat at the opposite end of the table. He was hard to read. One of the CO's mentioned that Cordone was getting processed out after a four-year jolt in Chino. His solid, impressive presence implied that he had somehow survived imprisonment without allowing his spirit to be crushed. Some men could accomplish that. Most men couldn't.

Cordone shifted around on the picnic table's bench and gazed impassively at Gene. A long moment passed during which neither man spoke. Gene felt that the eyeball was supposed to provoke or intimidate him.

“Uberto Anfiteatro Cordone.”

“Eugene Remington.”

“Remington, that's English? I suppose you don't have to ask me my background, the name says it. ‘Anfiteatro' is from my mother's people. It means ‘amphitheater' in Italian.”

“Like the Colosseum in Rome.”

“Ah, have you been, Mr. Remington?”

Gene shook his head. “But you must go to Italy,” Cordone urged.

“Maybe when my present difficulties are resolved,” Gene said, smiling ruefully.

“This?” Cordone gave an airy wave at their surroundings. “This is nothing. I've been in the Q, and at Vacaville, and in Chino. I've been Pelicanized. This here is light time, my friend. Soon enough you'll be holding a cold rum cocktail with one of those small umbrellas stuck in it.”

The man's prison résumé embraced every level of confinement that the State of California had to offer. Q was the nickname for San Quentin. Vacaville was a medical and psychiatric facility. Chino Men's Correctional generally featured medium security, while Pelican Bay, in Crescent City, was a supermax facility for the baddest of the bad.

“I had an uncle who lived in Yonkers, out in New York,” Cordone went on. “His name was also Uberto. A poor man, mentally dim, without resources. Yet every year he goes back to Sicily. How does he manage it?”

“How?”

“He spends all his time collecting deposit bottles. Every day he goes out, up and down the streets. He knows the—what do you call it? Collecting trash to be used again?”

“Recycling.”

“He knows the recycling schedule by heart. In the rich neighborhoods, they don't bother to cash in their bottles and cans, they just throw them away. So Uncle Ubie builds his stake nickel by nickel throughout the year. Come springtime, he has enough to go to Naples. He's never missed his annual visit yet.”

“That's remarkable.” Cordone was talkative, but Gene didn't mind. He had at least twenty-four hours inside before his arraignment and bail hearing. Best not to get arrested on a weekend—that's what his lawyer, Olivia Chalmers, told him.

“I have heard the statistic that ninety-five percent of Italian men have never used a clothes washer,” Cordone went on. “I myself fit into this majority.”

“What do they do? Wear dirty laundry?”

“They get their mothers or sisters or other women to perform the duty. Have you heard this statistic? Or maybe it is a clothes dryer. However it goes. Perhaps it is a clothes washer. Italian men, myself included, are just naturally disinclined to grant women control. We dominate them in ways that the men of other societies don't, at least not so completely and instinctually as we do.”

“Would you like this kind of treatment for your own daughter?”

“Daughters. I have two. Both extremely ugly. No man can look at them without thinking these girls should lower their faces and look at the ground.”

“Ugliness is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder,” Gene remarked.

“You're thinking of beauty. And you have a daughter, is that correct? She is the Tarin Mistry police detective?”

Gene was instantly on his guard. “I don't really want to talk about my family.”

“I saw her on TV a little while ago, after the big earthquake. Blah, blah, I discover the dead movie star, blah, blah, blah, look at me, I am the big hero cop.”

Gene stared at him. The formerly casual conversation had veered into darker territory. He mentally gauged his chances of fending off the guy should he be attacked.

Cordone kept talking. “You are looking at me, angry, wondering who would win between us in a fight. Maybe you think you even want to kill me. How many men have you caused to die, Mr. Remington? But you were never a real police officer, isn't that correct? You were just a police clerk, shuffling reports—pick up one scrap of paper, make a little mark with your pencil, put it in a stack with the others.”

“You seem to know all about me,” Gene said.

“I'll tell you who I am. I am
quello che non muore mai
. You don't know Italian. I pity you. It is the language of love and also of death. I am
quello che non muore mai,
the one who never dies.”

Gene rose. “I'll have to leave you now, Cordone. Planet Earth is calling for me.”

“Outside you are calm, inside your guts are boiling. What is this person? Why does he menace my precious daughter? You meet such strange people inside, don't you, Eugene Remington?”

As Gene headed out of the yard, Cordone called cheerfully after him. “We'll have ourselves a contest, Mr. Remington! We'll see who gets gated out from this shithole the fastest, you or me. Whoever does, he gets to say hello to Detective Layla first.”

Phone privileges in the seg unit were more liberal than in the general population, but when Gene tried to reach his daughter he got the voice-mail runaround. He tried not to allow the fear rising in his gorge to take him over.

“You know, Gene, skells like Cordone are always trash talking,” said the correction officer he tried to enlist to do something. “He was just trying to get to you, man. Shrug it off.”

“He threatened my daughter.”

“The guy's a major douche nozzle. But don't worry, he's got his 12:01.”

A “12:01” referred to a discharge time. “Today? Right now?”

“They just took him out on scheduled release. He's not going to give you any more trouble.”

Remington hid out at the Century City Hyatt Regency that night. She wanted to be close to her task-force office and within striking distance of the superior court in the morning, when Gene's hearing was scheduled. But she also thought that keeping a low profile was a good idea all around.

Storm clouds loomed. The toll for the Gus Monaghan mess would have to be paid. It was Sunday night, and Remington felt sure that by Monday morning her troubles with the department would begin in earnest. The LASD command was gunning for her badge, summoning its disgraced detective for interviews and fact-finding sessions. What did she know about the bogus Westlake mall security-camera footage? And when did she know it? So Remington screened her calls and stayed out of touch.

The telephone might be radioactive, but the computer was safe. She got on her laptop, clicking through files on the Stolen Girls case. That night she didn't look at the victims but instead went the other way, digging into Gus Monaghan's past. She had downloaded TOR software, the program that enabled anonymous searches of the Deep Web. She slipped the ring of invisibility on her finger and submerged herself in the fetish underworld. The maddening thing was that the link between the Hollywood producer and the multiple disappearances of young girls seemed to hover just beyond her reach.

Email was also safe. Lying in bed, room-service food cooling on its tray, she scrolled through her messages. They divided fairly evenly between sternly worded “please contact” memos from work and communications from her father's friends and allies, who wanted to know what was happening and what they could do to help.

One random email came from an address she didn't recognize. The sender was ID'd as “Big Dada.” She had her cursor over the delete button before she remembered the fussy-looking computer academic she met on the
Profiles in Crime
set.

Subject: Linkage

Date: Sunday, October 22, 12:25
A.M.

From: “Big Dada,” aka Ronald Ron

To: Det. Layla Remington cc.:
[email protected],
six other recipients

Dear Detective Remington,

As per your suggestion, I ran comprehensive comparison data sets on three time/date/locations: Holmes Canyon +1mile sample range for the night of the MH discovery, the same Holmes Canyon +1mile for the night MH disappeared, and +1mile at Penmar Park in Santa Monica, +/-1 hour when Aileen Knolf was last reported seen.

A positive hit came up on a white 2005 GMC Canyon pickup truck, CA plate number 6FLP923, reg. number F4595492, registered to Mark XII Management Consultants, Malibu, CA.

I cross-referenced the company (defunct) and came up with a name, Lawrence Decker Close, a number of addresses, incl. 75 Rancho Sequito Rd., Malibu, and 10B Church Drive, Camarillo, CA.

If anything comes of this please let me know.

Cheers,

“Big Dada” aka Ronald Ron

Big Data Profiler, Discovery Channel's Smash Hit Reality Television Program,
Profiles in Crime
, 9
P.M.
Tues., check cable provider listings

She forgot all about Gus Monaghan. The sensation of everything suddenly falling into place for Remington was almost physical.

Mark XII. Or Mark Twelve, the company listed on the untraceable pay stub recovered from Merilee Henegar's bedroom. The You Send Me rental PO box. The hinky woman at the shabby little mail-forwarding business off the Ventura Freeway. Lawrence Decker Close, the owner-operator of You Send Me and Mark Twelve, had been ITVO—“in the vicinity of”—two of the most recent disappearances Remington had been tracking.

Something else prodded her memory. That name. Lawrence Decker Close. Larry Close. It registered on the radar somehow. Hadn't the random task-force caller earlier that afternoon, the young woman whose call she fielded without really meaning to—hadn't the girl mentioned the name Larry Close? It wasn't likely, she realized. Probably her mind was confusing two things that weren't related at all. Still…

She had Gene's arraignment the next morning. She was in LASD limbo, unsure if she was still a detective or (more probably) suspended pending an investigation into the Monaghan business. The Merilee Henegar case was bubbling to a boil. There were loose ends and unfollowed leads strewn all over the LACTFOMEY offices. Plus she had to deal with Rack and Ruin somehow.

She called her erstwhile partner.

“Brasov.” His voice came through sounding just as harried as she felt.

“Meet me at Kanan Road and Mulholland Highway in Malibu, will you?”

“Is this about the Galleria security footage? Because I might have something on that.”

“Forget it. What's your twenty?”

“Still in Glendale. But as it turns out—”

“You're half an hour away, forty minutes tops. It's off the Ventura, by the exit with the McDonald's.”

“I know where it is, Remington. But I won't be able to get out there until—”

“Just move,” she said, and hung up on him.

One good thing about having a father in jail is that she had the unlimited use of his vehicle. The valet at the Hyatt might be a little offended by having to pull around such an ancient redneck wreck, but she didn't give a damn. Gene's F-150 pickup rumbled up as if the old man's presence was still with her. Remington tipped the valet five instead of the usual two.

It was nighttime in Los Angeles, she was a murder cop, and the freeways were free.

As she drove, Remington tried to mentally connect the dots in the Henegar case. But the damned thing was like a pointillist painting—all dots, no connections. She exited the 10 and flowed onto the 405, normally a parking lot but now empty except for a few night owls. In the green dashboard light, she sang along with Tarin Mistry.

Who am I, baby, who am I?

I'm the one who watched you go

Who's that standing in my shoes?

Someone I no longer know

The missing girl Aileen Knolf was last seen in a Santa Monica park the previous spring. She was eighteen years old and, according to her parents, very active online. “Web shites,” the father had called them in the MUPR. Remington remembered that. She could visualize Aileen's picture, her face round and serious, her hair dyed a severe black.

Baby I don't know me without you

No I don't know me without you

Big data (Remington thought of it as Big Brother) had gathered information from countless sources—traffic surveillance, credit-card receipts, red-light cameras, police stops, CCTV, mini-mall security footage—aggregating it all, feeding it into its gaping digital maw, digesting it, vomiting it back up in searchable chunks. Modern society was fast becoming a place where no one could hide. Big data was like God, or Santa Claus. It saw when you were sleeping, it saw when you were awake.