13 Stolen Girls (18 page)

Six people plus the driver all jammed into the stretch. They sat with their knees crowded together. The interior had the faintly ripe smell of a lair. The producer's legal team managed to pretend that the arrangement was the most natural thing in the world.

“There really wasn't any need for you to muster an army, Mr. Monaghan,” Remington said. “This interview is for informational purposes only.”

Monaghan smiled, and gazed affectionately at his attorneys.
“Pull me from the trap my enemies set for me, for I find protection in you alone.”

“What's that, Psalms? Really?” Brasov asked. “Have you been getting religion, Gus? Because from what I hear, you dabble in the dark side, the pagan side of things, like horned serpents and shit.”

“We'd ask you to address our client respectfully, by his surname, please,” said the female lawyer.

Monaghan affected a seedy look. He wore expensive athletic shoes, but left them unlaced with their tongues flopping sloppily forward. A five o'clock shadow made his face appear dirty. His hair—in fact, his whole person—gave off a greasy, unwashed impression. The final result was one of well-studied eccentricity.

Brasov murmured an aside to Remington. “Dude thinks he's Howard Hughes.”

Another of the lawyers spoke up. “We have reason to believe that the Los Angeles County Task Force on Missing and Exploited Youth is merely a strategy to attack the reputations of figures in the movie community such as Mr. Monaghan.”

“His reputation,” Brasov muttered. “Huh.”

Remington extended a photo of Merilee Henegar across the limo's interior to Monaghan. The producer did not deign to accept the offering himself, but one of his attorneys did.

“Do you know this woman?” Remington asked.

Again, a whispered conference.

“I don't think I'll answer that one, either,” Monaghan said. “I meet a lot of women in my line of business. I couldn't possibly remember them all. Is she an actress?”

“What she is, sir, is dead.”

“Pity.”

“Did you hear that?” Brasov maintained the same mocking manner. “Does the man even know what the word ‘pity' means?”

Remington said, “Coming up on her seventeenth birthday, left her home in Agoura Hills and vanished.”

“Disappeared for a whole month before turning up dead,” Brasov added.

“Oh, was this that girl? I heard about it in the news. What a bizarre story. I should do a film about her—probably not a feature, something for TV.”

“A documentary,” Brasov said. “Maybe with a little surveillance footage from the Westlake Galleria.”

One of the lawyers intervened. “Do you have questions for our client? We are making every attempt to cooperate here, but I can't see where this is going.”

“Merilee Henegar went missing on September seventeenth,” Remington said. “Can you tell us where you were that night?”

“I'm sure one of my assistants could,” Monaghan replied. “They keep the logbooks.”

“He's got logbooks, Remington,” Brasov said. “Dude, that is so great, living a fully logged life.”

The knockout female attorney broke in. “I would advise Mr. Monaghan to provide no information at all unless we know what this fishing expedition is about.”

“Do you fish?” Brasov asked her.

“That's what you need specifically? Mr. Monaghan's whereabouts on the evening of September seventeenth? What is the precise time frame, please?”

“Did you happen to visit the Galleria mall in Westlake that evening?” Remington asked.

“Normally, I have a personal shopper make my purchases, or one of my assistants, or have salespeople brought to my home.”

Brasov emitted a low chirping whistle. “Who told you to wear those kicks, Gus?”

“Detective Brasov, please,” complained the lady lawyer.

“Let me help you out, sir,” Remington said. “We have surveillance footage from security cameras at the Galleria placing you there at the time in question, in the company of the victim.”

Monaghan turned briskly to his lawyers. “Are you getting this, folks? That is a clear case of slander, isn't it?”

“Truth is an absolute, ironclad defense against libel, slander and all good things like that,” Brasov said.

“I was never there,” Monaghan said.

“We've got you nailed, pal,” Brasov snapped.

“Can you provide this alleged footage?” one of the lawyers put in.

“We have it copied onto a disk,” Remington said. “Right now the district attorney's office is examining the material. We are eager to show it to Mr. Monaghan, in order to record his explanation. Under oath.”

“Maybe, you know, that'll be down at Metro Correctional,” Brasov said.

“All right, I believe we are going to end this,” said a lawyer who had heretofore remained silent.

The female attorney had been working her tablet. She pulled something up on-screen and passed the iPad to the detectives.

Remington glanced at the screen. “What's this?”

“That would be the Desert Springs Film Festival awards, on the night of September seventeenth. Mr. Monaghan was honored to be chairman of the festival jury this year. The event required him to be present and onstage for the whole evening. What was your time frame again, Detectives?”

“That's me, the handsome guy in the Brioni tux.” Monaghan smiled broadly.

Remington looked across at four of the smuggest faces she had ever seen.

“Desert Springs, Nevada, would be how many hours away from Westlake?” asked the female attorney, going in for the kill.

“By helicopter, I wonder,” Brasov said feebly. But both he and Remington knew they had been the victims of a royal cop-block.

The celebrity producer's high standing with the Hollywood press corps earned his lawyer (the pretty, telegenic one) face time on the five o'clock news. She looked as if she enjoyed rubbing their police faces in the mess.

“Mr. Monaghan has been the target of local law enforcement's efforts to trade on his celebrity before, and has a personal history with Detective Investigator Layla Remington. She auditioned and was rejected for one of Mr. Monaghan's television productions. We hope that the County Task Force is more professional in its efforts than what we've seen so far.”

Remington had been caught out. She could almost feel the LASD brass preparing to crash down on her.

Even Sam Brasov was pissed. “What the hell was that?”

“I don't know, I don't know.”

“Jesus, Remington! I have never been screwed over in that particular way before. I thought I was in
The Matrix
or something.”

“Desert Springs Film Festival. Is there even such a thing?”

“You saw the security footage from the mall, and it was Monaghan, right? Right?”

“Yes!”

But the whole business slowly turned to absolute shit in front of Remington's eyes. The D.A.'s office informed her that the disk she had provided to them contained only random surveillance images, and no footage of Gus Monaghan at all. She contacted the Galleria's security offices. She asked to speak to the supervisor and to Natasha Katznelson, the video tech who had helped her nail down the footage.

“Ms. Katznelson is no longer working for us,” the security supervisor informed her.

“I spent a couple of hours with her two days ago! Natasha Katznelson, black-haired young woman, maybe mid-twenties.”

“She withdrew from our employment,” the security supervisor responded.

It was all…impossible. The incriminating surveillance footage that put Monaghan at the Galleria that evening, the shots that showed him exiting the mall in the company of Merilee Henegar, had somehow disappeared. The DVD copy Katznelson provided proved not to show the essential scenes.

Again, Brasov almost shouted at her. “What the hell, Remington!”

It was Monaghan, Layla decided. He had gamed her in some unimaginable way.

Later that night, her father mulled it over with her. He called what happened “gaslighting,” a term spun off from the classic Ingrid Bergman movie
Gaslight
. Most of Gene's references were from old-time Hollywood films. This one involved a husband tricking his wife into thinking that she was going insane.

“If I were not mad,” Bergman's character says to her tormentor, played by Charles Boyer, “I could have helped you. But I am mad, aren't I?”

Remington was mad, as in “angry,” knowing that Gus Monaghan was trying to make her out to be mad, as in “crazy.” Right from the start, the producer must have despised the whole idea of an exploited youth task force. He was one of those libertarian sociopaths who rejected any restraints on their behavior and resented anyone monitoring them.

Plus he was clearly obsessed with Tarin Mistry. Monaghan owned the actress's life rights and had handled the nationwide rollout of
Joshua Tree
. Add the fact that all Hollywood producers at his level were bound to be megalomaniacs, almost as a job requirement, and Remington could see how Monaghan might delight in gaslighting an LASD detective who was looking into his affairs.

“I'm so completely screwed, Daddy,” she told Gene. “They're going to take my badge.”

“No, they won't. They know what a good police you are.”

“I'll lose my job.”

“Then I'll hire you, Princess. We can go into business together, farm ourselves out as private investigators.”

Brasov eventually cooled down to the point where he could see things a little more clearly. They were parked outside the task-force offices, sitting in his latest confiscation vehicle. The late-model Land Rover meant they were coming down in the world. It was only a high-five-figure ride, not one of the six-figure ones they were used to.

Remington couldn't get her mind off the encounter in the producer's limo. “Did you smell the guy? I thought he was supposed to be such a player.”

“That's part of the mystique. Lots of big men never washed and were still able to get the babes. Mao didn't brush his teeth, you know? They were, like, covered in green slime. Brecht stank to high heaven, and still mowed more lawn than John Deere. Brando was supposed to have been pretty ripe. Gus is just the latest in a long stinky line.”

“You see what he's done, don't you? He's made it impossible for us to go after him. Any move we make, those attorneys of his are in court, screaming harassment.”

“So we sidestep,” Brasov suggested. “We go after that security office at the Galleria, really take them apart. Somebody had to have gotten in there and…”

He trailed off. His imagination failed him. “You actually saw his face on that footage, didn't you? And Merilee Henegar?”

He was wavering, doubting her again. Remington was beginning to doubt herself.

“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you think Gus Monaghan has the resources to fake a surveillance video?”

Brasov snapped his fingers. “Course he does. He's got computer-effects wizards who can convince you that black is white and vice versa. I'm thinking on it now, and it's pure brilliance. The dude's got way too much power over reality. Have you seen the
Goth
movies? The real world is, like, modeling clay for him. He probably doesn't even believe in reality. He could trick anything up—make it look like you were aiming a high-powered rifle at the president of the United States, say, bring the Secret Service down on your ass just for shits and giggles.”

“Why?”

“Why ask why, Remington? Hollywood is one headfuck of a town, have you ever noticed that? Monaghan's gone all film-simple. Watch his movies. His characters are always fighting the power, you know? It's like he's forever telling and retelling the story of his own life.”

“Okay, okay, just to cook up a theory…”

“He bribes his way into the security shop at the Galleria.”

“No, first he has the CGI nerds at the studio fake some store surveillance footage.”

Brasov nodded, getting hyped. “He gives them some excuse, like it's for a prank he's playing on someone. They don't care, they're getting paid. They're in awe that the great Gus Monaghan is descending into their tech dungeons to talk to them. ‘Sure, we can develop something like that, coming right up, Mr. Monaghan,' and he says, ‘Call me Gus.' ”

Remington wasn't totally buying it. Not yet. “How does he know we would hit the Galleria security footage?”

Brasov thought. “The girl at the club…”

“Eensy.”

“Yeah. She seem one hundred percent to you? A little off somehow, maybe?”

“It was like I needed to believe her.”

“Investigatory bias. Girl was telling you what you wanted to know.”

“Handing us our first real break in the case.”

“And we jumped right on it. And,
and
—get this. Who has access to an infinite number of actresses? Like, hordes of them. Young wannabes, they would kill to do
anything,
anything at all for an in with Gus Monaghan?”

“Including play mind games with the po-po?”

“He finds the right girl, yeah, sure as shooting. It's a world of desperate desperation out there. Monaghan knows it. He feeds off it. He probably already has an ‘actors who'll do anything' contact list.”

Eensy as a ringer. It was diabolical. “Are we crazy, Brasov?” Layla asked.

“Yeah, we are, but Gus Monaghan's crazier.”

Remington ticked a list off on her fingers. “Impeding a police investigation. Obstruction of justice. Interference with government administration.”

“Juice any one of those up into a nice, fat felony charge.”

They sat and mused. The Century City skyscrapers towered over them, and the Fox lot was off to their right. Remington remembered her makeover experience. In retrospect, it seemed to her a hideous charade. Wasn't that what the town was all about, manufacturing alternatives to uncomfortable realities? Building castles in the air? One faint breath could make them vanish.

“We can't do anything about it,” Remington murmured. “That's the real genius of it.”

Brasov's phone buzzed. He fielded the call, said, “Yeah,” and turned to Remington.

“Your phone on? They're trying to reach you.”

“I bet they are. I turned it off for the Monaghan interview, out of respect for the big producer and his lawyers. Who is it? Commander Lott?”

The news of Remington's ridiculous gaffe involving the most powerful movie producer in town was no doubt wending its way through the sheriff's department hierarchy. The repercussions would hit her policing career hard. Perhaps terminating it altogether.

“It's not that,” Brasov said.

“What?”

“Your old man. Gene was just arrested.”

Like many condominium complexes, Gene Remington's Oak of Peace Townhouses development in Glendale allotted storage spaces to each of its residents. A lower level in one of the buildings was divided into locked compartments by flimsy aluminum partitions. Modern culture's obsession with
stuff
found its natural expression there. Holiday pennants, camping equipment, whole wardrobes of unworn clothing, outdated tax documents kept long after the IRS's seven-year deadline, scrapbooks, once-a-year turkey roasters, mementos, souvenirs, crap. Every compartment seemed packed full.

At 1335 that early afternoon, working off the tip of a credible informer and a search warrant signed by a superior-court judge, a joint operation by the Glendale Police and the LAPD broke open the storage compartment assigned to Gene Remington. Inside, officers discovered a collection of objects missing from a police evidence warehouse in Whittier. Each item was still tagged with its LAPD case-number identifier.

The value of the stolen evidence elevated the case to a grand-theft felony offense. A rare coin collection at the center of a Huntington Park home invasion was valued at more than forty thousand dollars. A deck of Mexican brown heroin had been confiscated during a possession-with-intent-to-sell bust. Most radioactive was a leather art portfolio that contained various child-porn images, left over from a case in which the accused committed suicide after his indictment.

Members of the police team had photographed the storage compartment before removing and cataloging its contents. Their activities were successfully kept concealed from the condo resident in question. Several of the participating officers knew beforehand that Eugene Remington was a retired former employee of the LAPD. This made them approach the crime scene with perhaps even more care than they would normally have employed.

It was, all in all, a professional operation. Four from the team—two uniformed LAPD officers, an LAPD detective and a Glendale Police Department sergeant—left the storage locker and climbed a double flight of stairs to the suspect's apartment. The four officers confronted Eugene Dale Remington at the front door of his condo and took him into custody without incident. The participation of the Glendale PD in the operation ended there. Remington was transported to the Metropolitan Detention Center for processing and afterward placed in a segregated protective unit of the jail.

Gene used his one phone call to contact his daughter. The call went straight to voice mail. But his long association with the LAPD made the treatment he received at Metro perhaps more friendly than usual, and he was allowed to make another call. He enlisted a criminal attorney whom he knew, Olivia Chalmers, to help him make a case for bail.

“Does anyone know what this is?” Dixie asked.

She held up a square gizmo, blue plastic about the size of a playing card. Her two roommates and their boyfriends were lounging in the living room of the Reseda apartment, watching a stupid reality TV show called
Profiles in Crime
. Lindsey's boyfriend, the shaved-headed know-it-all Bryant Kay, took the thing from Dixie and examined it.

“That is…” But his vast storehouse of knowledge failed him. “I don't know.”

Dixie's roommate Kimmy faked a shocked gasp. “What was that? I've never heard Bryant say the words ‘I don't know' before, have you?” She put her hand on the guy's forehead, checking to see if he had a fever.

The crime show was on a commercial break, and they were all bored with it anyway. Lindsey balanced a bowl of ramen in her lap. She took the mystery item. “U.A.C.,” she read, a sloppy Sharpie scrawl across the plastic.

“That stands for Useless And Queer,” Bryant said.

“You are so ignorant,” Kimmy said, laughing.

Dixie took her offering back and went into her bedroom. She thought the item was some sort of computer thing, but she had never run across one before, and she didn't have anyone to ask apart from her clueless roomies. She would take it to the library. A computer lady there set you up with your machine. She might know.

The blue plastic square had been in an envelope that was stuffed into the document box she had taken from Larry Close's office at the Malibu ranch. Dixie had been mulling over what she should do about the ranch since she made her escape from it during her recent stealth visit. At first, she thought she would call the police right away. The creepy sex toy stuff in the trailer had been too weird to be innocent.

Dixie had fled the Toy Box—even the name freaked her out—and plunged down the slope toward the shore of Malibu Lake. She hid there for a while, breathing hard. Then she waded in the clear blue shallows until she got to the yard of a neighboring house. A dog had alerted as she made a mad dash past the house toward the road. Every second had been a terror. She imagined Uncle Monkey's white pickup coming after her. She hadn't stopped running until she reached the bus stop near the freeway.

Another terrifying aspect of the ranch was that cellphone service was pretty spotty. It was in a dead zone or something. When she got closer to the freeway and was able to get bars, she dialed 911—but hesitated before putting the call through.

Second thoughts. Dixie imagined how the conversation would go.
“See, I broke into my uncle's ranch house and found—”
Then the 911 operator would stop her and ask what she was doing breaking and entering somewhere. Uncle Monkey was a member of the auxiliary police force, according to a certificate posted on the wall of his office. She would be the one to get into trouble, not him.

So she took the bus back to Reseda and tried to figure out what to do. Dixie paged through the missing-girl articles that her uncle had collected. In her rooting around in the document box, she turned up the square blue plastic mystery item.

Something about the disappeared girls spoke to her. There was a puzzle there, with a solution that hovered just out of reach. One of Dixie's favorite movies was
The Silence of the Lambs
. She pretended she was FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling. She wrote down names and dates from Larry Close's clippings. She made a fresh version of the list, copying over everything again but organized in order of when the girls had gone missing. Then she stared at the names and tried to tease out a pattern.

Eleven names, eleven missing girls. The list began with Elizabeth Combe seventeen years ago. Then there was a long gap until the flurry of Tarin Mistry articles. After that, the missing girls turned up with regularity, two or three every year. The last name on the list was Merilee Henegar from Agoura Hills. Recent and close to home.

If Dixie closed her eyes, she could visualize the bloodstain on the floor of the Toy Box trailer. Was she letting her imagination get away from her? The blood could have been anything. A rabbit, maybe. A coyote. Someone's cat. The Santa Monica foothills were pretty wild. Pets were always going missing.

So were girls. The ages of the girls on Dixie's list were all in the same range, all around the late teens. Her own age, she thought with a shiver. She had to do
something
. She couldn't just sit there and stare stupidly at a list of names. But she wasn't exactly Clarice Starling. She wasn't even Harriet the Spy.

She ventured back into the apartment's common living room. The television was on. It was never off. Someone was usually camped out on the couch for the night. They were always either watching or had it on mute.

“Hey, Kimmy? If I want to find out, like, what government agency I should call for something, how do I do it?”

“For what?” Kimmy asked, distracted by the TV.

“I don't even know. Los Angeles is so confusing.”

“Dial 311,” Kimmy said. “That's what my mom did when my grandma started to lose her marbles.”

Yes, of course. Dixie should have known that. She returned to her little closet of a bedroom and entered into a telephone labyrinth of government bureaucracy. The 311 operator was open and helpful.

“I think I might have information to give on some missing persons,” Dixie told him. “Or, anyway, I need to get some information.”

“Which one is it, ma'am?”

It was Sunday, and many of the public offices were closed. The 311 operator gave her a long list of phone numbers to call. The LAPD Adult Missing Persons Unit. The Missing and Unidentified Persons Office of the California Department of Justice. A Missing Persons Hotline run by the local CBS television station. The Sheriff's Department's Missing Persons Bureau. Something called LACTFOMEY, the Los Angeles County Task Force on Missing and Exploited Youth.