13 Stolen Girls (8 page)

“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.

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.”

One of them, anyway,
thought Remington.

“I'm afraid he's unavailable right now. May I help you?”

“Unavailable, like how? Unreachable by phone? Out on a film set? No coverage somewhere?”

“What's this in reference to?”

“An investigation.”

“I can have Jimmy give you a jingle,” Puente said. “He's Gus's brother. And his attorney as well.”

Remington for sure knew who Jimmy Monaghan was. Hollywood's lawyer. Get a call from Jimmy Monaghan, your phone started to melt in your hand, all that power on the other end of the line. She told the assistant that she'd prefer to speak to Gus Monaghan himself. Puente promised to inform his boss.

She was being pissy, she knew. She could very well find out the producer's movements, or make preliminary inquiries at least, without bothering the man himself. But she hated,
hated,
the self-importance of the movie industry in Los Angeles, the sway it had over the whole town.

Remington mused about the three competing brands of arrogance then at play in America—on Wall Street and in Washington and around Hollywood. The first two were based on the old reliables, money and power. But the third? Images dancing on a screen in the dark.

Out and about that afternoon, Remington drove right past Monaghan's production offices at Paramount. She had an impulse to bull her way through studio security and beard the guy in his lair. She didn't really believe that he had anything to do with Merilee Henegar. After all, what did she have to go on?

She recalled an element of Gus Monaghan's mythology. He didn't actually stay in his office much. There were stories of him roaming the freeways in a caravan of vehicles, restless, always on the move. Talent took meetings with him not at his production office but in his limo.

All of which naturally called to Remington's mind the tail she had picked up when she drove away from the Henegar scene. Could it be? She discounted the notion. But there was something else, too. Something that Brandi Henegar had mentioned.

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

Just a single comment that the victim may or may not have made to her mother. But with it Gus Monaghan became a box that Remington had to check off.

Meanwhile, she had to go see a man about a corpse.

Medical examiners classify deaths in different ways. They distinguish among the manner, cause and mechanism of death, with some M.E.'s listing mode of death, too. In the instance of Merilee Henegar, Dr. Ed Gladney, the L.A. County coroner, ruled the manner of death to be homicide, while the cause was strangulation and the mechanism asphyxiation.

“We talked it over and decided for homicide rather than suicide,” Gladney told Remington. “It was because of the particular nature of the ligature. I tried to avoid a determination of ‘unknown.' ”

They were in one of the morgue labs in the coroner's offices south of downtown. This was the cold lab, cooled to a chilly thirty-eight degrees. It was where they were keeping the body of Marilee Henegar, in an effort to halt the progress of decomposition that had already set in.

What was left of Merilee lay splayed out on a stainless-steel exam table. The autopsy had pretty much destroyed the integrity of the corpus. Its viscera had been entirely removed. One eyelid was peeled back, displaying the bright-red hemorrhaged eyeball that was a marker for asphyxiation.

“You seriously considered suicide?” Remington asked. “What about the disposition of the body? She turned up back at home like a prodigal child.”

Gladney bent to indicate markings on the corpse. “Normally, with strangulation, the ligature completely surrounds the neck. Here we have a ligature display that penetrates the skin and the subdermal tissues only in the anterior midline. There are fractures of the hyoid bone and of the thyroid and the cricoid cartilages.”

“Blunt force?” asked Remington.

“What I'm thinking is the person or persons responsible forced the victim's neck against a suspended cord or belt of some sort.”

Press the carotid arteries for ten seconds and unconsciousness results. Closing off the trachea completely takes a little more pressure, something like thirty pounds of steady force. Keep that up for four or five minutes and brain death will occur.

“Not a noose,” said Remington.

“No, it doesn't look like any rope I've encountered before. I once had a victim who was strangled with her own hair. Look here.”

Gladney traced an area along the front of Merilee Henegar's neck, above the larynx and just below the jawline. Then he lifted the head to display the nape of the neck.

“A noose would have left ligature displays on the dorsal surfaces, which, as you can see, are pristine. The cervical vertebrae would have been fractured. This was more like a strap. Maybe leather, perhaps a belt or some sort of restraint.”

Trace evidence was still being processed. TOD was problematic. The corpse of Merilee Henegar had been on quite a journey. Her body had been preserved, transported from the scene of the crime, deposited at the Henegar residence, then collected by the coroner.

“Time of death forty-eight to seventy-two hours before discovery—that's preliminary, and that's the best we can do right now.” Gladney shook his head apologetically. “Sorry, for all we know the victim could have been kept on ice, or, anyway, cooled somehow, and that would play havoc with TOD estimates.”

Gladney's summary report gave Remington all there was to know so far. But she lingered in the lab. Gladney sheeted the victim, de-gloved and washed his hands at a stainless-steel sink along the far wall.

The coroner turned to her. “So.”

“So.”
I'll see your so and raise you another so.

“So do you want to see her?”

“Who?”

“Come on, Detective, you didn't come all the way down here for a preliminary report that I could just as easily have emailed to you.”

Somewhere on the premises, Remington knew, rested the mortal remains of Tarin Mistry.

“Not my case,” she said.

“As I've been informed, repeatedly,” Gladney responded. “Walter Rack has commanded that access to the corpus be strictly limited. But right now there's nobody here but us chickens.”

The coroner gestured toward the lab door. “Come, I'll take you to her,” he said.

Dr. Gladney sometimes referred to the cadavers at the morgue as his “guests,” as though he were a dinner-party host or a hotel keeper. A tug-of-war legal battle loomed over Tarin Mistry's corpse, so it looked as though the poor girl would remain Dr. Gladney's guest for at least the foreseeable future.

Ever since her daughter's body emerged from the Malibu quake rubble, Tarin Mistry's mother, Cathy Gunion, had been very much in evidence—on TV news reports, in the press, on the Web, everywhere. Mrs. Gunion enjoyed the spotlight. She usually either began or ended her TV appearances by asking viewers if they had heard the Good News.

Having passed through various flavors of evangelical Christianity, her spiritual restlessness preventing her from settling on any one, she currently embraced a cultish movement called 2,025, that being the exact number of words in the received New Testament vocabulary of Jesus Christ. Movement believers tried to limit their speech to those specific sacred syllables. When Cathy Gunion wanted to order Chinese, say, she had to point wordlessly at a menu, “chow mein” not being found in the mouth of our Lord.

“Autopsy,” also, was unavailable to the mother. Nevertheless, the attorneys whom she hired were not similarly constrained. They filed an injunction to prevent the “desecration of the mortal remains of our dear daughter in Christ, Tarin Mistry, born to the world as Bethlehem Gunion.”

Cathy Gunion sued to halt the autopsy on religious grounds. Courtesy of her daughter's postmortem fame, she was wealthy and could afford to be persistent.

Normally, the mood around the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner was, oddly enough, lively and workmanlike. There was nothing of the funeral home's hushed sanctity. Pathologists went about their jobs without sentimentality and—provided that no citizens were within earshot—with a hint of gallows humor. This being L.A., the coroner's office had a gift shop attached to it.

When Gladney said, “Come, I'll take you to her,” he brought Remington from one exam room to another, down a corridor into the white-tiled, non-refrigerated precincts of Forensics Lab No. 3.

The first thing Remington saw wasn't the body but the barrel. The eighty-five-gallon steel drum she had discovered amid the rubble of a Malibu landslide was now laid out on the floor, separated into four pieces. Both its lid and its bottom had been removed, and the remaining bent and ruptured cylinder had been sliced in half. Bright steel showed along the cut, but the rest of the metal was rusty.

“Do we have a source on the barrel?” Remington asked.

“Detective Rack has his minions tracking it now. A lot number stamped along the edge of the lid gives us a manufacturer, Rockham Steel of Pennsylvania. Evidently, the drum originally held automobile antifreeze. That's consistent with the size of the barrel, too.”

Remington frowned. “Nasty.”

“Well, toxic anyway. A residue turned up in spectrum analysis. The interior had been well scrubbed before being put to its present use.”

“Present use” was a tactful way to phrase it. “Any other trace evidence turn up?”

“Yes, indeed, fibers and soil. Plus we've collected a few spores, so far unspecified, although they're under the scope as we speak.”

“Pollen spores might provide a time frame of incidence, right?”

Dr. Gladney nodded. “Come,” he said, leading her farther into the lab.

Finally, after being separated from each other for more than a week, Remington and Tarin Mistry were reunited. Dr. Gladney unsheeted the mummified remains that lay upon the examination table. Again, Remington was struck by the girl's sun-colored hair.

“Gunion, Bethlehem, aka Tarin Mistry. Born: 7-18-1992. Gender: female. Height…”

“Legally, until the suit is adjudicated we're not allowed to perform a full autopsy,” Gladney said, as they both stared down at the corpse. Apart from the hair, she was now a girl of leather and bone. The body's curled-up posture remained as it was when Remington had first shined her Maglite upon it on the day of the Malibu quake.

In a plastic evidence bag resting next to the corpse were the girl's entire worldly goods, which amounted only to the celebrated “T” necklace with the opal birthstone.

Gladney briskly snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “I can't cut her or take tissue samples, only visual examination. The county attorney tells me I'm not even allowed to palpitate. I've done what I could do without resorting to chisel and saw. The interior organs will be thoroughly desiccated anyway. I have a feeling they won't yield up much that's of any use.”

Remington leaned in close. She feared the body's crumbling to dust. “May I…?”

“I'd glove up first, Detective. And don't worry. When they're in this kind of shape, they're surprisingly durable, like beef jerky.”

Even through latex gloves, the body felt rough and hard. It was like touching a dead tree limb. The back of Tarin Mistry's clawlike left hand displayed a raised area. The dry skin appeared almost caramelized. An oddly shaped portion between the thumb and forefinger was of a lighter color.

“Is this a scar?”

“I had it marked down provisionally as a contracture, perhaps evidence of a burn.”

Given the decayed shape of the body, it was difficult for Remington to be sure. But a rising sense of disgust and fear blew through her.

“The letter ‘k,' ” she whispered.

Dr. Gladney either didn't hear her comment or didn't feel the need to respond. “I thought perhaps it might be second-degree. I'll have to wait until I'm legally allowed to open our guest up to see if it's a deep dermal burn. Do you feel that it's significant?”

Remington had just seen another dead girl's body laid out on a steel examination table down the hall. Amid Merilee Henegar's numerous tattoos, piercings and body modifications, it had been easy to overlook.

A small “k” on the back of the left hand, done in red ink.

Big law firms were twenty-four-hours-a-day concerns. The attorneys at Rick Stills's firm, Buffum Buffum & Oatman, put in their sixty-hour weeks, and after they had departed for their steakhouses, gyms or massage parlors the paralegals would take over, inputting data for the next day's briefs.

The firm had generously donated an office suite for the use of LACTFOMEY, the civic entity that its fair-haired boy headed up as director. It was already late in the day when Remington arrived. She spread her work out on one of the task force's conference tables. The aurora of a Los Angeles sunset spread its glow outside the tower windows. She concentrated on her task, only occasionally glancing up to mark the passing of the evening. The city was a wonder at night. The scrim of daytime smog wasn't visible, and a spill of jewels spread out across the metropolis, going on seemingly forever.

It was all lost on her. Like some sort of search-engine spider, Remington crawled through the reams of incident reports and missing-persons documentation.

“Maldonado, Katheryne. Born: 10-27-1995. Gender: female. Height: 66 inches. Weight: 135 pounds. Eyes: brown. Hair: lt. brown. Race: white. Identifying Marks: birthmark, crescent-shaped, lower back.”

The office remained quiet.

Remington was distracted from her unhappy task by the ghost of Tarin Mistry.

She phoned her father. “Gene,” she said, using his name to put the call on a quasi-professional footing, “I want you to do something for me.”

“Sure.”

“Watch
Joshua Tree
again.”

“I thought you told me I was obsessing.”

“Never mind what I said. You can linger or fast-forward through it, for all I care. You probably have the whole thing memorized.”

“Where's Barry? Where's our driver?”
Gene said, quoting the movie's opening line.

“Just pay attention to the girl's left hand. You know the skin between the thumb and forefinger?”

“It's called a purlicue.”

“Picture me sitting here with my mouth hanging open, Dad. You crossword people are beyond belief.”

“Couple of years ago the
Times
crossword had it, as a matter of fact. Eight letters, the clue was ‘web exposed in hitchhiking.' ”

Remington laughed, shaking her head in awe. “He not only knows the word, he remembers the clue.”

“The left hand, you say?”

“Right. I mean, correct.”

“And what am I looking for?”

“I've checked out the images of her on the Internet, and I couldn't find one with the proper angle.”

“A scar of some kind?”

“An identifying mark. Just tell me if you see anything out of the ordinary.”

By midnight, the paralegal secretariat had completely taken over the law-office premises. Her father called back.

“Since I don't know what I was supposed to be looking for, I can't tell you conclusively, but I will say that Tarin Mistry has the prettiest purlicue of anyone in the cast.”

“Nothing visible.”

“You know movie makeup people. They can make anything disappear. Angelina Jolie actually has a huge Mike Tyson–style Maori tattoo spread across half her face, and you'd never know it.”

“No, she doesn't.”

“So did our girl here have a tattoo or something?”

“I've got to go, Dad.” Remington rang off.

She did some mental calendaring.
Joshua Tree
had wrapped five years back, in early July. The last time anyone saw the female lead of the movie alive was that September. Unless Mistry had already possessed the mark and it was covered by makeup during filming, at some point during that ten-week interval she had burned a small “k” into her left hand.

Remington worked far into the wee hours. She hadn't pulled an all-nighter since college. The law never slept. Buffum paralegals and Oatman data-input clerks toiled through the night. But none of them penetrated the LACTFOMEY office.