13 Stolen Girls (7 page)

She noticed that she had picked up a tail— a convoy, really. A stretch limo followed close behind her, and a Lincoln MKX sports utility came behind that. At first, she didn't think anything of it. All the canyons thereabouts were thick with movie folk. Limos, huge SUVs, and other extravagant automobiles came with the business. The drug dealers who catered to the stars used stretch limos to deliver their goods.

Both of the big cars remained with her as she made a few turns. Together they passed Pepperdine University, “Surf U,” its campus perched above the coast. Onto the Pacific Coast Highway, heavy with traffic. She glanced over at the sheriff's office in Malibu, where she kept a desk. She was too tired to stop.

Earthquake damage remained apparent all around. Backhoes and bulldozers had replaced squad cars and ambulances as the cleanup progressed. Vehicles slowed as tourists gaped at the wreckage.

Remington didn't really get concerned until the limo and SUV kept on her tail all the way up Topanga Canyon Road. When her new best friends followed her through the maze of small streets on the approach to her bungalow, Remington began to get pissed off. It was just too strange, and she was too tired for this kind of nonsense.

Abruptly and with a sudden jerk of the steering wheel, Remington pulled sideways and braked. She got out and slammed her bubble light on the roof of the U-boat. She strode back down the dusty canyon road toward the limousine, scrabbling at the small of her back to get at her sidearm.

The driver reversed course in a hurry. Whoever was at the wheel maneuvered skillfully backward at high speed. The MKX smoothly kept pace. Both the limo and the sports utility disappeared around a curve in the little dirt lane. A moment later, through a gap in the hills, Remington saw them racing away back down the canyon.

What the hell was that? Nothing, nothing at all. She was just exhausted and jumpy. She needed sleep but at the same time was afraid of it. She feared disturbed dreams. She parked the U-boat in the driveway and went inside.

The empty house that greeted her conjured up images of Brandi Henegar coming home to Holmes Canyon. Remington got herself a beer, flopped down on the couch, checked her phone. A few work texts had come in during the course of the night. Her father had called at around 1
A.M
., home from Whitey's and waiting up for her, wondering where she was and what was going on.

There was an odd text from a phone number that she didn't recognize.

H
OW DO YOU LIKE MY WORK?
P
RIAPUS.

A junk text? She didn't normally get many of those. Priapus, that would be…She searched her memory. Some sort of Greek demigod, responsible for male fertility, the protector of the penis—something silly like that.

Delete? Reply?

Neither, she decided. Keep it, get one of the forensic computer techs to check it out. See where it came from, how the Priapus texter had gotten her cell number.

Did the Corean master have a master of his own?

The previous calls from his overlord had always kicked off with a recorded female voice:

“This phone communication originates from the California Institution for Men in Chino, California. Excepting those that involve an attorney, the California Department of Correction monitors and may record all inmate communications. By remaining on the line you are acknowledging that such monitoring may be taking place and that you agree to such monitoring as a condition of accepting the call. Press one to signal your agreement and continue….”

On this particular call, there had been no recorded warning from the state. Just a long stretch of static-y silence.

“Hello?”

More silence, then a low, rolling laugh, coarse and insinuating. The Corean master knew instantly who was on the other end of the line.

“Are you…you got gated out?”

Another bit of silence. Then the voice. “Not just yet.”

That meant…His former prison cellmate had somehow managed to get his hands on a cellphone. Cellphones were pure gold on the inside, more highly prized than drugs, cigarettes or blades.

The Corean master knew of a keister bunny in Chino who trained himself by keeping a whittled-down bar of soap stuffed up his can. Then when the time came to put a phone up there he was ready. The newer big-screen cellphone models were bad news. Clamshells remained the favorites.

“You see it?”

The Corean master didn't answer. The sound of the voice drove him into a not very happy place, a time past when he was not master but slave.

“She bobbed to the surface. Unbelievable.”

“Took an earthquake,” the Corean master responded. Standoffish and non-committal, that was the way to go. But his nerves were jangling.

“Did you see the badge who turned up the body? Acting all proud of herself on TV. Some of them beg for correction, just by how they are. She looked like she was straight out of high school, with that haircut. Cops are all pricks, and cops with cunts are double pricks.”

The Corean master knew what was coming, and winced even before it came.

“I want you to do something about her.”

“Who?”

“The cop, the cop, the goddamned detective who stuck her nose in our business.”

“She's LASD.” Blurting out the obvious.

“That doesn't mean she can't be got. She's due for a little grueling. Nothing's impossible, not for stand-up guys like us.”

The voice brought back the man. Thick, fleshy body, prison-pale skin, hair close-cropped and steel-gray. Something wrong with his gut. He took a dump and it stank up the entire frigging cell block. At first meet-up he dismissed the guy as nothing special, but soon learned different. Kind of a bug, but someone who really knew how to put the fear in gear. Within a week after he was transferred in, the Corean master found himself doing his new cellie's laundry.

“Her name's Remington. Goddamned sheriff's detective.”

“Right.”
Just tell him no
. Just tell him to step off. He's in, you're out. He can't do anything to you. But the voice got inside his head.

“Did you see her on the TV? So smug and superior. Acting cute. As if she did something. She didn't do anything! She's standing there with her thumb up her junk when the ground opens up. Now she expects applause. Typical. I say the girl needs some schooling in the realities of the world.”

“She does.”

“I'm almost all the way, and I thought about waiting so I could be there to watch her get done.”

All the way
. He meant his prison stretch was almost up. Four years and change for voluntary manslaughter, pleaded down from murder.
The justice system really was screwed up,
the Corean master thought.

The voice went on. “I was thinking maybe we'd do it together.”

“Right, right, that'd be good.” Put it off, maybe he could dodge out of it. What his old cellie had in mind: the murder of a law-enforcement officer. Probably a torture session involved. The guy always went off about needle-nose pliers, hacksaws, kitchen shears, common household tools like that.

It wasn't…feasible. The Corean master got sick just thinking about it. One of those bent prison fantasies ill-suited for the outside. Inside, you have plenty of time to build your elaborate spookhouses in the sky. You get out on the bricks, reality bitch-slaps you upside the head, asks what the hell you were thinking.

“But you know, now I've decided, no, you've been such a good boy, you deserve a prize of your own. So let me hear about it on the five o'clock news. I want her hurt.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck
. He didn't say anything.

“You going to tell me ‘Okay'?”

“Right.”

“Are you going to tell me ‘Okay'?” Putting some bite into the question this time.

Tell him no
. “Yes,” the Corean master said.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

Remington pulled the U-boat off Mulholland Highway and into the dusty parking lot of a small postal services store called You Send Me. This was the outback of Malibu, across the hills and through the canyons from the beaches. The Paramount movie ranch was nearby. But You Send Me didn't seem to participate in Malibu or Hollywood glamour. The place looked forlorn, as if it was only a step away from going out of business.

The store's address on Mulholland Highway had been listed on a handwritten pay stub recovered in the search of Merilee Henegar's bedroom.

When Remington did a reverse lookup and discovered that the location matched that of a small shipping-and-packaging business, she was initially dismayed. Such establishments offered mail-forwarding services, which were often used by other firms to mask a company's true location, or a lack of any brick-and-mortar location at all. Owners could boast of a prestige Malibu address, when the reality was this sad little storefront in the middle of nowhere.

Her call to You Send Me had gone straight to voice mail. She left a message, but no one got back to her. She was forced to make contact the old-fashioned way, in person.

Inside, the store had a messy, cluttered feel. A buzzer rang upon Remington's entry, but apart from the hum of houseflies, the front lobby was devoid of life. A countertop showed a thin film of yellow dust. Finally she heard voices, a male and a female squabbling. A door opened and closed, and a sad-eyed woman of about fifty emerged from the back regions of the store.

No “How may I help you?” or even a hello. The woman simply made herself busy behind the counter, moving boxes and papers out of the way. Remington read her as maybe younger than she first appeared. It was her hair, a frizzy wealth of salt-and-pepper. The woman managed to look aged and burdened even beyond the hair.

“I'm Detective Investigator Remington from the sheriff's department. I called earlier inquiring about a firm listed at this address. Mark Twelve Enterprises.”

The woman continued her manic busywork. Remington pulled out her badge wallet and displayed her gold shield, giving it a sharp knock against the countertop for emphasis.

“We rent boxes,” the woman mumbled. She sounded as though she were being charged by the word. Remington wondered if she might be mentally slow, or disabled in some way.

“May I have your name, please, ma'am?”

The woman finally turned to Remington and stepped to the front counter. “Annette Close.” Again, her speech appeared torn from her mouth.

“Ms. Close—”

“It's ‘Mrs.' None of that ‘Ms.' stuff.”

“All right. Could you help me with some information on a company that might have used your mailbox services? Mark Twelve Enterprises?”

“Discontinued.”

“Discontinued,” Remington repeated. “What does that mean, ma'am?”

“They didn't pay their rent. When you don't pay, your box gets discontinued.”

“I understand. But you must have contact information from when the firm opened an account with you.”

“Tossed it out.”

“Really?” From the look of the surroundings, not a single scrap of paper in the You Send Me office had ever been discarded, not since the early Stone Age.

Remington tried again. “The sheriff's department is investigating a possible homicide.” That prompted no real reaction from the woman, just a sullen stare.

“Are you sure you can't give me anything on Mark Twelve? You must be aware that it's a Class Three misdemeanor in California for a mail-forwarding service not to keep records of accurate contact information on its clients.”

“Class Three,” Annette Close said, as if discounting the whole concept. Remington almost laughed, the woman was so stubbornly unhelpful. A certain sector of the populace just did not like the police.

“Ma'am, I could come back with a subpoena, but that would be tiresome, for me and, I promise you, for yourself also. Do you own this business? Is there perhaps some other person who could help me?”

“I'm here alone. I'm busy. I won't go rooting about looking for records I don't know whether I have or not. The government is always so pushy. Serve us with paper if you want. I can't squat down and crap out something that I threw away months ago.”

“Who's ‘us'?”

“What?”

“You said, ‘serve us with paper.' Who is ‘us'?”

“My husband and I are small-business owners, Officer. We are sick and tired of being harassed by an overbearing government. You people just need to leave us alone. We heard the message you left on our phone machine. We looked for the material you wanted. We didn't have it. That's all we have to say.”

A whole speech, some of it straight
Fox News
talk. Remington reached into her pocket and withdrew a picture of Merilee Henegar. She laid it on the countertop.

“Have you ever seen this woman?”

“No.”

“Ma'am, will you please look at the photograph?”

Annette Close glared at Remington. Then she picked up the photo, took a long look and pushed it back across the counter. “I told you, no.”

Was this the way it was going to go with the Merilee Henegar case, every step a struggle?

Remington retrieved the photo and replaced it on the countertop with her business card. “Mark Twelve Enterprises,” she repeated. “If you ever do turn up any information, I would sure appreciate a call.”
But I won't hold my breath
.

You Send Me was just the first stop on what could be a long investigation. Merilee had vanished almost a month ago, so the trail was already cold. Mark Twelve could be meaningless, just a scribbled address discovered in the bedroom of a dead girl. As a murder investigator, Remington would no doubt have to go through a whole lot of meaningless nothings in order to arrive at a meaningful something.

When she stepped into the full glare of a California canyon morning, she saw a middle-aged male hot-stepping it away from the You Send Me offices, headed back off the highway along a dirt lane.

“Sir? Hello?”

The guy was bald and stocky. Remington called after him again. He did an odd thing, not turning around but raising his right hand in a dismissive sort of wave.
All right
, Remington thought. Jump in your vehicle and chase this hoo-hah down.

Or not. Catch up to him on the next go-round. You Send Me might or might not warrant a return visit. It was too early to tell. For now, just enter a note in a mental-reminder file, the informal kind of data set all police tended to maintain, keeping tabs on anything hinky that happens to crop up.

On the first day of her Professional Ethics class at the Los Angeles Police Academy, Remington's teacher, a former professor at John Jay in New York named Arlene Tomlinson, introduced one of the oldest moral parables in existence.

“I know most of you will relate to this story via J.R.R. Tolkien in
The Hobbit
and in his series of Rings books. But there are many much older variations in fables from all over the world. Plato mentions an ancient king named Gyges.”

The question, Tomlinson told her police-cadet students, was simple and basic: If you came into possession of a magic ring that allowed you to pass through the world unseen, what would you do?

“What's your next move? Head for the vaults of the nearest bank to loot and steal? Find your way into the secret chambers of someone you desire?”

Tomlinson allowed a buzz of chatter to pass through the two dozen assembled cadets.

“Well, it's a trick question, of course. There exists no such ring that renders the wearer invisible. What you are really answering is another question altogether. How would you behave if all of society's rules and restrictions were suddenly suspended? If you could slip the leash of propriety, dispense with morality and avoid the judgment of others? Such inquiries represent the foundational basis for our study of ethics in this class.”

Remington had attended the police academy back when the World Wide Web was still a fairly new phenomenon. The first iPhone had yet to be released. Facebook hadn't yet made much of a dent in the culture. But she had recognized even then that the Internet could function very much like the magic ring in the parable.

The famous cartoon “On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog” established the premise. The Web granted anonymity. The hand that moved the mouse wore the ring of invisibility on its finger.

The whole arrangement functioned as an Ethics 101 laboratory. Sociology professors ginned up statistical analysis to study cyber behavior from this exact perspective.

The results of their studies? The vast majority of people turned out to be ethically pretty okay. A few—mostly males, and mostly young—qualified as utter trolls. And a handful—again, testosterone being the rogue hormone that it is, almost all males—were inhuman fiends.

In the days following her fruitless visit to You Send Me, Remington began the work of tracking Merilee Henegar's computer usage. She experienced some of the far reaches of the Internet, realms that she knew existed but had never much visited herself.

A twenty-two-year-old tech from the sheriff's department named Dewey Tull acted as her guide. His expertise lay in computer forensics. Young as he was, Tull found himself in demand within the department for cases involving hacking, identity theft and white-collar crime, all bull markets in law enforcement.

“I don't usually catch cases that have to do with murder, so this'll be fun for me,” Tull told Remington. “Well, not fun fun, but you know what I mean.”

The two of them sat side by side in front of a gigantic monitor at the LASD Crime Analysis Unit offices in Santa Monica. Tull dressed like someone from another decade. The fabric of his leisure suit never admitted the existence of an organic fiber. His haircut, too, made him appear out of time, not in a hipsterish way but in a helmet-headed way. In keeping with the ways of his tribe, he was fumbling and socially graceless.

Anyone with any sort of computer chops certainly wasn't working in the public sector, so Remington had the uncomfortable feeling that Tull wasn't very good. He didn't need to be. The work they were doing together would be preliminary, only a dip into the murky cyber sea in which Marilee Henegar had most recently swum.

“I thought you might want to see this material thrown up on a bigger screen,” Tull said, quickly opening a series of websites.

“Us senior citizens always like big print.” Remington was approaching her thirtieth birthday. Elderly, in the eyes of a puppy such as Tull.

“So, yeah, so, like, with Merilee people her age don't use computers, not so much as mobile devices like cellphones and maybe tablets,” Tull said. “I grabbed what I could off her laptop. She used some easily crackable passwords. And, just like you thought, I found some stuff off of those books.”

They called themselves “petals,” the young female devotees of Rose and Thorn. Tull clicked through a series of websites and blogs. He flipped through the pages so rapidly that Remington had trouble registering each one.

“These are all sites she recently visited,” he said. “She used the screen handle Shar a lot, don't know why.”

“Her middle name. Sharmon.”

“Yeah?” The tech didn't seem that interested. “Imagine naming your kid after a brand of toilet paper?”

Merilee Henegar's digital trail included quite a few Rose and Thorn blogs. There were fan-fiction archives, recommendations for similar books, more than one outdated petition site begging that a movie finally (“Pul-leeeze!!!!”) be produced based on the trilogy.

“Any use of IRC?” Remington asked.

Tull gave her a cockeyed look, as if he was surprised she knew the abbreviated shorthand for Internet Relay Chat, formerly the dominant application of the chat room.

“C'mon,” she said. “I went through the cyber-crime syllabus at the academy like all the other police.”

“Well, then you're familiar with TOR and the Deepnet.”

“Right.”

Despite Remington's affirmative, Tull was ready to give his little lecture anyway, as if he doubted that anyone not in possession of a Y chromosome could possibly know this stuff.

“Think of the Internet as an ocean. The part of it reached by Google-style search engines represents just a thin few inches near the surface. The fraction of the Internet that's indexed and readily accessible is usually put at point two percent. That's the stuff everybody can see—point two percent! And it's, like, an old estimate. The real percentage is actually probably much, much lower now, so low that some experts say it can't be quantified. What we've got out there is totally unindexed, huge, really immense, like the Mariana Trench of the Web—old sites, defunct URLs, material from the Pentagon that dates way back to the creation of the Internet.”

Though popular use of the Web had started only a couple of decades back, Tull sounded as if he was referring to some impossibly distant past. Remington realized that he belonged to the generation that had never experienced a time when going online was not a dominant feature of human existence.

He picked up his tale. “So there are a lot of dead sites, yeah—”

“But there are also a lot of places for people who want to stay invisible.”

“Right.”

“Any evidence that Merilee had a TOR-enabled browser on her machine?”

Again, Tull looked impressed that Remington would have a grasp of what he considered to be his realm.

TOR.

The term was an abbreviation of “The Onion Router,” so called because it routed an Internet user through a series of computer proxies, providing anonymity in several layers, like an onion. TOR software encrypted a user's Internet-service-provider address so that online activities couldn't be traced.

It was Bilbo's ring come to life. “The Web for criminals” was how one cyber-crime expert described it. The TOR network had a lot of legit uses, too, but its main feature was secrecy.