13 Stolen Girls (22 page)

“Souvenirs,” Brasov said.

“Tarin Mistry,” Stills repeated. “Do you think…?”

“We don't think,” Remington said. “In fact, we're sure Lawrence Close had nothing to do with the death of Tarin Mistry.”

“Really?” Stills asked. “She's another girl in a barrel.”

“We've been over that fairly thoroughly around here,” Brasov said. “Our theory is that Lawrence Close was copycatting the Mistry crime.”

Dixie pointed at the document box. “But Tarin's in these files, lots of articles. He collected them on her.”

Brasov shook his head. “When Tarin Mistry disappeared, your uncle was in Chino Men's doing four to fourteen on a grand-larceny rap.”

“He served only two and a half,” Remington added. “But a prison stretch is the best alibi in the world.”

“Don't call that asshole my uncle.” Dixie's eyes blazed. “I hate him.”

Stills laid his hand on his client's arm.

Brasov grinned. “Your counsel's cautioning you, Ms. Close, like maybe you don't want to be talking about ‘hate' in front of the po-po when referring to a man you just shot eight times.”

“It would have been more, only I ran out of bullets,” Dixie said.

Remington winced. “Well, we're all friends here.”

“And the camera's off,” Brasov added. “Is the camera off?”

“Like I said, cozy.” Stills gave them his brilliant smile.

“Does anyone know what this is?” Dixie asked. She pulled a square of blue plastic out of her jacket pocket.

“A computer floppy disk, old style,” Brasov said.

“I didn't know what it was until I went down to the public library and the lady there told me. It was stuck among the clippings and all the other stuff.”

“The disk was in this box?” Remington asked. “What's on it? Do you know, Dixie?”

Being the Sworn to Be True Testimony of Lawrence Decker Close

I want to leave behind some account regarding my fate, should I die under suspicious circumstances. While I am not clear about his intentions (he is impossible to read), if I turn up murdered I can say with perfect certainty that the killer will be one of my former cellies at Chino Men's Correctional, U.A.C., Uberto Anfiteatro Cordone.

Though we were together for only twelve weeks, I freely confess that I became Uberto's disciple. To this day I consider the man a real genius. I sat at his feet and he showed me the way. So why would a Christ kill his own apostle? Ask him. All I know is that I revered him, and still do, and at the same time fear the man more than any mortal who walks this earth.

So here's the thing, whoever's reading this. If and when I die at the hands of Uberto Cordone, I want to make damned sure he doesn't walk free. He's smart enough to do the deed without leaving a trace. So here goes, Uberto, a little payback for you being such a murderous prick.

While we shared a cell in Chino, Uberto told me a story. Before he went inside, he worked as a teamster on a movie set. There he first met Bethlehem Gunion. At that time she was masquerading as an actress under the name of Tarin Mistry. Uberto told me he instantly saw what she was. The two of them, he said, were matched like salt and pepper.

Uberto was always preaching about something he called the Ultimate Consummation. His sermons went something like this: A female says to a male, Worship me. A female says to a male, Love me. A female says to a male, Protect me. A female says to a male, Fuck me. A female says to a male, Impregnate me. A female says to a male, Kill me. “Out of all of these,” Uberto asked, “which is most true? Which is most honest? Which gets to the real root of things?” To him and me both, the answer was obvious.

Kill me. Murder me. End me. That's the Ultimate Consummation.

Uberto made it clear he wasn't talking about the begging of the tortured,
Just kill me, please,
meaning,
kill me so that I may be released from pain.
The Ultimate Consummation, he taught me, was rather a recognition of truth.
I was born for this as female. You were born for this as male. Kill me.
What is man's destiny but to be the master? What is woman's destiny but to be the slave?
Murder me. Dissolve me in you.

With Beth Gunion it happened, Uberto told me, at a house in the desert outside Joshua Tree, California. He took the body and washed it, cleansed it of the filth of this world, encased it in a steel-drum coffin, buried it in order to preserve it. So here's how you can tell that the testimony I'm giving here is true. I know where Tarin Mistry is. She rests in the old Chumash burial grounds on the slopes above Point Dume in Malibu. It was a place Beth Gunion loved more than any other. Those who want to look for her will find her there. “She lives in death,” Uberto told me.

Strange thing was, when I left Chino Uberto ordered me to go out there and dig her up myself, reveal to the police where she was. I never got around to it. The whole idea was a little too buggy for my taste.

If you're reading this, I'm already dead, so it doesn't matter if I make a confession of my own. There are legions of us, all disciples of Uberto. He ordered us to seek out what he once found: females who, like Beth Gunion, would voluntarily arrive at those simple words:
End me.
Many were called, but so far none have been found worthy….I'm going to keep at it until I get it right.

Uberto Cordone was in the wind. The new evidence came at an awkward point for Walter Rack and Paul Roone. They had just re-indicted the Arizona pastor, Curtis Kingman, for the murder of Tarin Mistry. The previous case against the pastor had been dismissed without prejudice, so here was round two.

“This is a pack of lies,” Walter Rack declared. He flipped his hand dismissively at the paper transcript of Larry Close's postmortem testimonial.

Remington and Brasov were in Rack and Ruin's downtown office in the LAPD's Criminal Investigation Section.

“Prison felons love to tell tall tales,” Roone explained, his tone patronizing. “Everyone has a lot of time on their hands, so that's what they do. It's such a rookie mistake to believe any of it.”

“Except…” Brasov was laconic, trying to be gentle with them.

“Except nothing,” Rack snapped. “Pastor Curtis Kingman committed the Mistry murder. When we put our case in court, you'll see.”

“We'll save you both front-row seats in the gallery,” Roone said. “You can watch it play out.”

Remington picked up the transcript. “Except, gentlemen, this text nails where the body of Tarin Mistry could be found. And only the person or persons responsible could know where that was.”

“An Indian burial ground? For Christ's sake, you bought that?” Rack argued that the mention of Malibu wasn't precise and that the whole thing could well have been written after the barrel was churned up in the earthquake.

“Except…” Brasov said again.

“Jesus, who is this guy, Remington?” Rack tried to stare down Brasov, who gazed mildly back at him.

“What my partner Detective Brasov means to say is that this ‘testimony,' as Larry Close termed it, came tagged with a time code on the original floppy disk. We had our computer tech take a look. The document was created three years ago. Tarin Mistry's body at that point remained undisturbed.”

“A time code could be rejiggered or faked after the fact,” Roone pointed out.

“It's bullshit.” Rack rendered his judgment with finality.

Remington sighed. She wasn't going to argue it out with a pair of lame dicks who had already made up their minds.

“They'll come around,” she told Brasov, as the two of them emerged from the LAPD offices.

“We give them their guy all tied up in a ribbon, and they go all doubting and agro on us.”

Remington couldn't understand it, either. Rack and Ruin remained locked in on Curtis Kingman while the real killer, Uberto Cordone, was out on the bricks. Investigatory bias was a detective's disease.

Since she had gotten released from the hospital, Brasov had been driving Remington around in one of his confiscations, a pretty little yellow Alfa 4C. The problem with such a zippy sports car in L.A. was the sludgelike pace of rush-hour freeway traffic. It felt silly to be crawling along in a machine designed to do zero to sixty in 4.3 seconds.

“I'm still working the chronology out,” Brasov told her. “So Uberto C. meets Tarin on the set of
Joshua Tree
. He does whatever he did to her and buries her in the 'Bu.”

“Then he gets hauled off to Chino on a manslaughter rap. Nothing to do with Tarin Mistry.”

“Yeah, what was up with that?”

“Took on three assailants in a street fight, killed one of them.”

“Never mind, my head's spinning. I don't want to know.”

“Uberto C. meets Larry Close inside.”

“Right. In Chino. Now, there's a match made in purgatory. Uberto spins a sick prison fable about his exploits out in the world—”

“And Close becomes a fan.”

“Uberto stays inside, but Larry gates out of prison and starts copycatting his mentor.”

“With a vengeance,” Remington said. “Eleven victims that we've found. There could be more.”

“But then Dixie's mother, the girl's birth mother?”

“Elizabeth Combe. That's way back in the past. Long before Close ever met up with Uberto Cordone. I figure it as Larry's first kill.”

“So Close was dirty from the start. He's fist-bumping his new cellie Uberto, they've both got blood on their hands.”

It was forty minutes before the traffic-jammed 10 released them onto the PCH. Even then, Brasov didn't fully wind out the Alfa. Remington appreciated his restraint. Nausea was never far away since her ordeal in the barrel. He stayed gentle on the accelerator as they headed up Topanga Canyon.

Brasov and Remington's father immediately hit it off. They bonded over Gene's love of old movies. They both liked jazz. Remington left them jawing together. Not feeling up to taking out the Alfa, she drove Gene's Ford to pick up three mixed-grill takeout dinners from Abuelita's, a Mexican place just down the road.

When she got back home, Sam and Gene were on their third beers and going strong.

They ate. Her father put on one of his favorite movies,
Out of the Past
.

“Mitchum's great, but you have to keep your eye on Rhonda Fleming,” he told Brasov.

“Have you seen this one?” Brasov asked Layla.

“Only about a dozen times,” she said.

Everyone was trying too hard to beat back the shadows thrown off by recent events. Gene pushed beers on Brasov, who tried to fend him off by saying that he had to drive. “Well, Layla doesn't have a guesthouse here, but we do have a guest couch.”

“Dad…” Layla said. She wasn't sure she'd be up to seeing Sam Brasov's scruffy-haired face first thing in the morning.

She kept a lazy eye on the movie while working her laptop. A line from Larry Close's “testimony” nagged her.
“There are legions of us….”

Really? Legions?

Close's words clicked with something else, what Bonnie Lareda, Layla's old schoolmate, told her that night at Paddles. A “network” of Hollywood guys was rumored to exist, “a circuit, trading girls,” Bonnie had said.

Layla again submerged herself in the deepest regions of the Internet, using TOR software to turn over rocks and see what skittered out from underneath. Chasing the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Playing hide-and-seek with that dark presence she had lately felt lurking behind the Stolen Girls. She would catch glimpses and hints. Then it would slip away.

“They meet, you know, like a book club or something,”
Bonnie had said.

Typing “Rose and Thorn book club” into TOR, Layla knew she would turn up a blizzard of hits. She refined her search, looking at dead sites only, defunct URLs, the wreckage of the Web. Going deep, deep, deep. What had LASD tech Dewey Tull called it? “The Mariana Trench of the Internet.”

It didn't come easily, but it came. When she found what she was looking for, she might as well have poked her finger into a light socket.

What she turned up had been deleted from the original site but remained a Deepnet ghost presence. Her computer screen displayed a photo of poor quality, showing a collection of a half-dozen males posed staring up at the camera. A homey group shot, like a portrait of the participants in a business conference or a school reunion.

Or some sort of cracked, demonic book club.

The faces gazed out at Layla, impassive, handsome, a span of ages and body types. All wore the leathers of the S/M underground. Three of the figures held up copies of
Rose and Thorn.

The bestselling books had made it a very good time to be a sexual predator.

Among those assembled, Layla recognized two.

Gus Monaghan. And Uberto Cordone.

“Hey, Brasov.”

On the DVD, Robert Mitchum was informing someone of a home truth. “Nothing in the world is any good unless you can share it.”

No one was listening to Layla. “Brasov,” she said again.

Brasov took one look at her face and emerged from his film-noir daze.

“I've got him.”

Remington's partner crossed to where she was sitting. She turned her laptop to face him. “Recognize our boys?”

“Sweet bleeding Christ,” Brasov murmured. “It's him.”

“It's
them
. Monaghan and Uberto Cordone know each other.”

“What's going on?” Gene shut off the TV.

“Familiar with any of the others?”

Brasov nodded, poking his finger at the screen. “That's Craig Dickerson, big-time agent, used to be at Atlas-Rove, but I think he runs his own independent shop now. This one is Jolie Dare, the music producer. Older now than he's looking here. Can't figure the other two.”

“Can someone please tell me what's happening? Princess?” Gene asked.

“It's all right, Daddy.” Layla slammed her laptop shut. She got up off the couch, whistling a phrase from “Brokedown Palace.”

“You up for a trip to Bel Air, maybe drop by Knollwood Drive?”

“You think?” Brasov asked.

“I'm certain. Don't you see? I could never quite believe it was just a coincidence that my dad was put in Metro with Uberto Cordone. Doesn't it seem like the work of a puppetmaster?”

She and Brasov explained the situation to Gene, giving him the broad-strokes version.

“Oh, well, maybe we should all go and pay Mr. Monaghan a visit,” Gene said when he finally understood the scope of the conspiracy. “I may want to have a few words with the guy, him and my old Metro cellie both.”

Brasov contacted LASD dispatch to see if any disturbances had been reported at the Knollwood Drive mansion. It took a while, but the response came back negative.

“All quiet on the western front,” Brasov told Remington. “I asked them to send a patrol around, make sure.”

“I say we drop in on him anyway,” Gene said.

“Dad, you're not going anywhere.”

“We're driving a two-seater coupe, Eugene,” Brasov said. “Only room for me and your daughter.”

“We can take my truck.”

“Stay by your phone, Daddy,” Layla told him as she left.

To Brasov, she said, “I'll drive.”

As the crow flies, they were less than seven miles from Bel Air. The quickest way to the Brokedown Palace would have been to fly across the Santa Monica Mountains. The Alfa was fast, but not quite capable of flight.

Remington forgot all about her nausea. She picked up Sunset Boulevard off the Pacific Coast Highway and wailed. The street wound through the hills. This was the western end of the infamous street of broken dreams, an exclusive residential neighborhood with none of the glitter of the Strip. Lining both sides of the boulevard were huge, old-money estates, or what passed for old money in Los Angeles. William Holden floated facedown in all the swimming pools.

“Damn, girl!” Brasov muttered, getting rocked and rolled as Remington utilized all four lanes of the street, two of them oncoming. There were a lot of traffic lights. She blew through all of them.

“You've killed us!” Brasov shouted a couple of times. But she hadn't.

At the end of the roller-coaster ride, they drove up on a sheriff's black-and-white, idling outside the closed gate at the Knollwood Drive place.

“All clear,” reported the deputy who climbed out of the driver's side. His nameplate had him as Deputy Carl Seamon. His partner didn't bother leaving the squad car. “I buzzed and a security guy on the intercom said there were no problems.”

“Did he ID himself?” Remington asked.

“Well, now, no.” Seamon shook his head. “He said he was private security for the residence.”

Brasov had staggered out of the Alfa looking a little green around the gills. “Never, never let her drive,” he mumbled to Deputy Seamon.

“Do you mind, Detective?” the deputy asked Remington. “Me and my partner are at end of watch.”

“No, sure, go, go,” Remington said.

Seamon jumped back in the squad car and hightailed it.

Remington approached the intercom at the estate's entrance, a silver console set into an elegant tiled column. She pressed the call button, thinking about the first time she had come to the house, with Rick Stills. The gate had been open then, welcoming a line of Bentleys and Jags to a charity gala.

There was no voice response to her push of the button. But a heartbeat later the massive gate swung wide. She looked back at Brasov, who gave a “might as well” shrug. They returned to the car. Remington maneuvered the Alfa through the gate and down the drive toward the house.

The first person they ran into was dead. The front door of the mansion had been left wide open, a circumstance that led Brasov and Remington to pull their sidearms. The body lay just inside the mansion's entryway. A beefy male, equipped with a two-way radio handset. A cellphone was clutched in his hand. He wore a pistol at his waist in a Versacarry holster. Brasov knelt to check his carotid for a pulse, then shook his head.

“Bodyguard,” Remington said, and Brasov nodded.

Keeping their weapons out, they both juggled their cellphones to call in.

“I got nothing,” Brasov said.

“Me, neither.” Remington's phone emitted a strange, high-frequency whine when she tried to use it. “He's got a phone jammer or something.”

They heard a faint sound, music, a female singer's voice coming from deep inside the mansion. On impulse, they moved forward together, but Remington put a hand out to stop Brasov.

“Head to where you can get comms, call this in.”

“I'm not going to leave you here.”

“Do it. Brasov. Do it. Who's OIC? I'm OIC.”

“No way.”

“I'll be all right. Now go. And hurry.”

“I'm coming right back,” Brasov said. “Stay right where you are, Layla. Wait for me!”

He peeled off, running for the door. She heard the Alfa's engine turn over and a squeal of rubber on paving brick as Brasov tore away.

A shout came from within the house. It sounded like a cry of pain.

Remington didn't have to guess where she was headed. She avoided the more lived-in quarters of the residence and turned left off the soaring entrance hall, toward the mansion's older wing. The music sounded as though it came from there.