13 Stolen Girls (12 page)

Her master herded his slave down a dirt path toward the shore of the lake. There, tucked away in a grove of cottonwoods, he kept a small trailer.

The Toy Box, the Corean master called it.

Oh, my God. My God, my God, my God
. The human being called Lisa Pressberger vanished that night. She disappeared into a nonentity called k-gurl. On the Internet, masters were always all capitals, while slaves were lowercase. That was how Lisa felt inside the Toy Box. Lowercased. Stripped and strapped and whipped and forced and lowered. She wasn't who she was. She was him.

After they had three sessions on three successive nights, Lisa began to suspect that something was wrong. She wasn't doing it right somehow. The Corean master wasn't satisfied. He found fault. Lisa could take the physical pain he inflicted. But the mental bullying pushed her into a dark place. She began crying herself to sleep.

At six in the evening the day after the third session, Larry came to her while she was in the office, stuffing envelopes. He appeared upset, bordering on furious.

“Your mother keeps calling,” he raged.

Lisa was surprised at how relieved she felt that someone from the outside knew where she was. But she realized it was a touchy issue. “I'll text her back and get her to stop.”

“You know you haven't earned the right to use a phone.”

He presented her with several sheets of blank paper. “Sign your name on the bottom of each one.”

“Why?” The question popped out of Lisa's mouth before she thought about it. If there was one thing Larry hated, it was being challenged. He had ruled the word “why” out of Lisa's vocabulary. Their whole relationship was based on her immediate and absolute obedience.

Larry slapped his hand on the desk next to her, making Lisa gasp. “What did you say?”

“Yes, yes, Master,” she said meekly.

He swept up the sheets as she signed them and then stormed out. She never saw the papers again. Or, for that matter, much of anything else.

Pull up in a $900,000 sports car—especially around L.A., where the populace was extremely sophisticated in its appreciation of the automobile—and onlookers tend to snap to attention. There were only eight hundred Porsche 918s in existence, half of those unleashed in America, mostly dispatched to Florida and California.

When Remington and Brasov rocketed down the Ventura Freeway, the Porsche Spyder constantly turned heads. A swarm of admiring motorcyclists rode alongside them for a while. Remington liked the picture she presented in the driver's seat, since no doubt every one of those eight hundred Spyders had been purchased by males. The vehicle was shaped like a phallus, and here it was being controlled by a woman. Horror of horrors!

The L.A. sheriff's department's confiscation of this particular car had raised squeals of protest about government overreach in civic forfeiture procedures. It had even been suggested (in the
Huff Post
opinion pages) that the LASD had targeted the owner, a dope slinger named Michah Lords, in order to nail the car for its own.

When they turned into the parking lot of the Drop, a hard-core rock club in Agoura Hills, all the head-turning stopped. The youths in the parking lot pretended a bored disinterest.

“Oh, yeah, they've, like, seen it all,” Brasov commented.

This was an early-evening show—no alcohol served, twenty-and-under welcomed. The clubgoers appeared like children trying very hard to be adults. Remington didn't hide her badge wallet as she climbed out of the car. She heard the little plosive “po” “po” “po” warnings—kiddie slang for “po-lice.” A few of the punks peeled off, one of them backing away and raising her arms, Ferguson style.

Some of the posters up in Merilee Henegar's bedroom had referenced the Drop. The metal scene in Agoura Hills was infamous and intense, but the venues were always changing. Clubs had the staying power of meteors. Db's had been on top for a while, but Web chatter said that its time was past and the Drop was the comer.

The club tucked itself behind a mall at the west end of Thousand Oaks Boulevard. The upscale, manicured, pleasantly tree-lined environs contrasted sharply with the slouching, kohl-eyed clientele assembled in the parking lot. The two dozen or so teenage metal punks seemed like forlorn demons displaced to paradise, seeking a path back to the netherworld.

Brasov and Remington chased down a small clutch of rockers who had drifted away as soon as they realized the two were police. Brasov whistled like a cowboy herding cattle, heading off the strays.

“We come in peace,” he called.

“We're looking for anyone who can tell us something about this girl.” Remington led with her snapshot of Merilee Henegar, holding it out in front of her as if she were raising a crucifix.

“Hey, yeah, that's Shar,” one of the girls said.

“Merilee Henegar.”

“Right, right, Merilee.”

Another kid cut in, an older boy who wore a gray sleeveless T, extravagant surfer shorts and unlaced leather boots. “Gone, Ossifers, she be long gone.”

“We know about her, like,
dying
.” The kid who said this made it sound outlandish, as though Merilee had flown to the moon.

“Anyone ever hear of the name Priapus?” Remington found herself confronted by expanses of bad teenage skin, most of it well inked, punctured here and there with studs and other ornaments.

The older boy in surfer shorts snorted in derision. “Grindcore band—they're from North Carolina or somewhere. They suck.”

“What doesn't?” a girl said.

Inside the Drop, Remington had even less luck with the club personnel. The manager, looking very un-metal, with long dreadlocked hair and a full beard, didn't recognize Merilee from the snapshot. He said that he'd read about her death but didn't have much of anything to say about her. He asked Remington if she could understand how many kids cycled through the place. How could he possibly keep track of all of them? She gave out her business card and asked him to show the Merilee photo around to his other employees.

A band exploded onstage, a massive ear-rape of guitars that Remington could feel throbbing in her rib cage. She figured it was time to go, and met Brasov in the parking lot. A different selection of kids hung out there. A band bus and a long black limousine idled in the shadows. Teenage rage was always big business.

Two girls lingered next to the Porsche, a tall beanpole and a smaller figure, a butch female in an army jacket with the sides of her head shaved.

“You ladies aren't up for Killshot?” Brasov asked, referring to the band currently imploding the club's sound system.

“We're holding out for Avernus.” The taller girl was pretty, once you got past the piercings and the haircut. Her tinier companion shifted under Remington's gaze, fidgety and nervous.
A little meth, maybe,
Remington thought.

The tall one stepped forward. “You guys asking around about Shar?”

“Did you know her?” Remington tried to be casual, fearing that coming on too strong would spook the prey. She offered her card to both girls.

“Eensy knew her, all right.” The taller girl nudged the smaller one forward.

“Eensy? That's your name? Can you tell me anything about her? Was she unhappy? Did she hang out with anyone special?”

The smaller girl wouldn't look at Remington. “Po-po always have a lot of questions, but what I want to know, how come you never have any answers?”

Remington watched Eensy's face suddenly crumple. In a strange, spastic move, the girl jerked her body around and stalked off across the parking lot. Overacting, Remington thought. Something was not quite right about Eensy. From the look and the newness of her clothes, she might have been a rich girl playing poor.

The tall girl shrugged. “She told me the dead girl used to be, like, a real good friend.”

Remington and Brasov crossed to the Spyder. “This time you've got shotgun,” he said, climbing into the driver's seat of the Porsche.

Remington could see Eensy, sitting alone on a curb on the far side of the lot. Green fluorescence cast a sick light over the entire scene. The guitar chords from inside melted into one long scream.

“Come on, get in, Remington.” Brasov turned the engine over.

Remington and her quarry locked eyes across the empty parking lot. Eensy got on her phone, and Remington's own phone buzzed.
If this is the way she wants to play it,
Remington decided.

“I ain't a rat,” Eensy announced by way of hello.

“All right.”

“The po-po always cause trouble.”

“If you know something that might help me find who killed Merilee—”

“Don't call her that. She hated that name.”

“Shar, then.”

“She's, like—did she—was she, like, all wrecked up?” In the darkness, the light of Eensy's phone cast a ghostly sheen onto her face.

“If you know anything, now's the time to tell.”

Eensy said nothing. Remington waited her out.

“Hey, yo,” Brasov called, but Remington ignored him.

“A perv hits on you in this town,” Eensy said, “and they always say they're like movie producers. It's like a line, you know? The whole freakin' town is filled with them.”

“So Meri—I mean, Shar…?”

“Yeah, she, like, disappeared. All I could get out of her was that she had gotten into some deep thing with a big-bucks film producer.”

“He have a name?”

“It wasn't that way. It was like some sick shit. She called him her master, you know?”

“How about you? You have a name?” Across the lot, she could see Eensy shake her head. It was like doing an interview on a prison visit, the two of them separated by an invisible glass wall.

“I only saw Shar a couple times, last few months. She said she would always tell her mom she was going to the Galleria mall in Westlake. He'd pick her up there in his limo. A limo, right? I was not into believing her at all. Afterward she, like, stopped answering my texts and stuff. Then she showed up dead on the TV news.”

Remington thought the girl was going to say more. They were silent for a long moment. She could hear the bleed of music coming through the phone and from the club at the same time.

“I hope you get the prick,” Eensy said. “One thing she told me one time, like, the guy she was with was the Tarin Mistry producer.”

The insistent buzz of her cell woke Remington too soon the next morning. The thing about Hollywood that not many outsiders realize is that it is a very early town. Ben Franklin's adage about early to bed, early to rise was in operation throughout the movie industry. Early
A.M.
calls were common for casts and crews. As far as that healthy, wealthy and wise business of old Ben's, well, there was health and wealth in abundance around Hollywood. Two out of three ain't bad.

“Hello?” Remington said into her phone.

“Detective Remington, I'm Pip Pham, from Curtain of Pink Death Productions. Have Gus's people contacted you about coming down to see us?”

Remington had experienced another night of bad dreams. Her sleep-deprived brain struggled to piece together the chain of syllables spoken by the female voice at the other end of the line.
Pip. Pham. Curtain. Pink. Death. Gus.
She didn't believe that precise sequence of words had ever been linked in the history of human speech.

The woman didn't wait for Remington to catch up. “We've sent a car, and the driver called in. She should be waiting outside your bungalow right now. Can you come? She's got latte. Gus said you take latte.”

Come? Where?

All obstacles fell before the power of Monaghan. Pip Pham was a producer for an unscripted reality television show, and the LASD had strict guidelines about its personnel cooperating with the media, protocols to follow and permissions to secure. Remington had other business to attend to that morning. None of that mattered. An hour and a half after her phone first buzzed, she found herself following the clicking stiletto heels of the very young, very hip, very perky Pip Pham as she crossed the production set of a TV show called
Profiles in Crime
.

The cable series was being shot at the old Columbia Pictures in Gower Gulch, off Sunset Boulevard. Remington knew the neighborhood from Roscoe's House of Chicken & Waffles, just up the block. In the old days, the area would be crowded with cowboys and Indians, costumed extras waiting for work on serials when Westerns were popular.

“Was the drive in okay?” the brisk twentysomething producer asked. “Aren't things more comfortable with a driver of your same gender? It's really the way things are going these days. Can I get you another coffee? Pam, do we have the detective's latte? We're all assembled over here.”

In work environments such as these, questions weren't necessarily posed to yield answers. They were more like conversational space fillers. Remington actually took her espresso black and hot—a
doppio
, yes, please. But Radley Holt had read her as a latte girl, and who was she to argue?

“Do you know our show?”

Gene Remington watched it, having excess time on his hands. Layla never had the pleasure.

Pham presented Remington to a panel of experts, a tragically non-telegenic collection of beards, glasses, tweed suit jackets, bow ties and—in the case of the single female—burgundy leather pants and a flower-print blouse, both full to bursting.

Profiles in Crime
had a fairly creaky premise. The panel of six profilers—that is, criminologists who developed theoretical portraits of unknown offenders, working off physical evidence and information collected by the police—considered evidence in celebrated unsolved cases, mostly homicides. They would then create a collective profile of the perpetrator. The half-hour show was filled with a lot of fluff, including re-creations, interviews and eerie music, but it had proved durable, having survived three seasons.

As far as Remington could tell, the premise was out of date. Profiling was now referred to as “criminal investigative analysis.” The discipline enjoyed somewhat of a bumpy reputation with working cops, who still believed shoe leather solved crimes.

“Gents—and Jane—this is Detective Layla Remington. She comes to us courtesy of our executive producer, Gus Monaghan. She's working with LACTFOMEY, the missing-persons task force we've all heard so much about. Why don't we all go around and introduce ourselves?”

“Harvey Lobotsky, Ph.D., geographical profiling.”

“Jay Brady, I do trace-evidence profiling, including genetic material.”

“Michel Leopardo, I'm the author of
Every Murder Tells a Story
. I've founded a brand of forensics that I call narrative profiling.”

“Dr. Dickie Kwong, plain old vanilla behavioral profiling.”

“Jinny Dunham Hyde, I do something a little different, psychic profiling.”

“Ronald Ron, big-data profiling—but my handle is Big Dada.”

Pip Pham, her production assistants, and the panel members all looked at Remington as if they expected her to say something.

“Okay, well, I'm not familiar with a few of those specialties, but I have a general idea of how profiling works”—and quite often doesn't work, she thought cynically—“so I'm glad to meet such a distinguished group, all gathered in one place.”

Pip Pham nodded and beamed as if they were already on camera. “And we're thrilled to have Tarin Mistry as our showcase felony for next season's premier episode of
Profiles
.”

“Can you let us in on a few juicy details?” asked Jay Brady.

Dr. Kwong chimed in: “The real question is, was Tarin alive when that barrel was sealed?”

“Has there or hasn't there been foreign DNA collected?” demanded Jay Brady.

The panel members started speaking over one another in their eagerness to get the inside scoop.

Remington tried to put on the brakes. “It's an active case right now, so I can really provide only general background.”

They booed her. Or Lobotsky and Brady did, anyway.

“Please settle down, people,” Pham called out.

“Yes, mistress,” Brady said jokingly. With her chilly good looks and six-inch patent-leather heels, Pham did resemble someone's idea of the perfect dominatrix.

“Mr. Monaghan considers this a simple get-to-know-each-other meeting,” she continued. “We all know Detective Remington by reputation, including her incredible detective work in discovering Tarin's final resting place.”

Remington wanted to say it was luck, not detection, that put her on that Malibu hillside, but Pham continued. “Perhaps she's not as familiar with you as you are with her, so maybe each of you profilers could talk a little about your expertise.”

Talk they did. Harvey Lobotsky spoke about the wonders of geographical profiling. Input enough details of any crime, and with proper analysis he could pinpoint the neighborhood, the street, even the address of the offender. There were tricks of the trade, like the knowledge that criminals fleeing from the police tended to perform right-hand turns in their attempt to throw off pursuit.

“The typical offender chooses his crime scene in a zone that's neither too close nor too far away from his own domicile,” Lobotsky said.

Leopardo, the narrative profiler, was the only one on the panel who was not an academic. He wore jeans and sported a postage-stamp-size soul patch. Speaking with a slight Italian accent, he suggested that the Tarin Mistry case conformed to the Sleeping Beauty archetype.

“The barrel represents the evil curse that places the princess under the spell of death,” he explained.

Uh-huh. Remington realized that she had dropped into a rabbit-hole world, courtesy of Gus Monaghan's power and reach in Hollywood. First he had enlisted a couple of movie stars to help her. Now the producer had placed a whole production company at her disposal.

The idea that Tarin Mistry's death was connected to the case of Merilee Henegar and other disappearances was, to Remington, like a candle in the wind. She wanted to shield it, protect it, allow its flame to grow. She wasn't about to lay it all out on a reality TV set. Profiling lived and died by the quality of information that profilers had at their disposal. These half-dozen chattering individuals didn't have the facts that would have helped them to help her.

During a break, two of the profilers cornered Remington—Leopardo, the narrative guy, and Big Dada, who used computer data to profile offenders.

“Have you considered that the Mistry case might be linked to other missing-persons cases?” Leopardo asked her, reading Remington's mind.

“It's an interesting idea,” she replied, noncommittal.

“So here's how it goes, if the offender is telling the story that I think he is. He progresses through one chapter after another. It's as if the story is never perfect enough for him. The plotline always breaks down. So he has to try again.”

“And again, and again, and again,” Big Dada agreed. “We had the same thing with Green River, remember?”

“That was another guy trying to get a story right,” Leopardo said, nodding.

Big Dada nodded back. “And, right here in Los Angeles, the Grim Sleeper.”

For a certain sector of the populace, serial killers were like sports teams. People followed their progress. Remington had heard that there was a pack of serial-murderer playing cards. Aficionados debated the relative “merits” of Ted Bundy versus the Zodiac Killer.

Leopardo asked her, “You're working the Merilee Henegar case right now, is that correct?”

“That's a case the LASD is investigating, yes.”

“See, the Henegar girl is the latest chapter in the story the killer is writing.”

Big Dada chimed in. “Your job as a detective is like some super-literary critic.”

The two profilers resembled Tweedledee and Tweedledum, each supporting and promoting the other. Now it was Leopardo's turn to flog his partner's expertise.

“Do you realize that Big Data is approaching critical mass?” he asked. “There's a time coming when we'll be able to list
all
people in
any
vicinity at a given moment.”

Remington knew that “big data” was a computer catchphrase of sorts, or some kind of media buzz term. Applied mostly to government and the health-care field, but making inroads in criminal investigation. Big data meant collecting and processing unbelievably huge batches of data. The result was supposed to be a God-like grasp of reality.

Was drug-abuse education accomplishing its goals? Collect the data, crunch the numbers. How many emergency personnel should be dispatched during a Cat 5 as opposed to a Cat 3 hurricane? Collect the data, crunch the numbers. Big data was like those old-time fortune-teller automatons at state fairs. It had all the answers. And if it didn't have an answer, well, try using a bigger computer.

Big Dada, or Ron Ronald, or whatever his name was, bubbled with enthusiasm. “Traffic cameras, surveillance footage, eye in the sky, facial-recognition software, the DMV and credit-reporting databases. Whip it all together, add some serious computing muscle, and I'll be able to tell you exactly who was where when. We're not quite there yet, but we're close, especially in urban areas.”

“Like L.A.,” Leopardo added.

“So amazing,” Remington murmured.

Leopardo bristled at what he judged to be Remington's patronizing tone. “Come on B.D,” he said to his co-profiler. “I guess the lady's not buying.”

“No, no.” Remington tried to be polite. “It's just…a lot to take in.”

“B.D. and I have encountered this kind of attitude before, haven't we?”

“Police always behave as if they own crime,” Big Dada complained. “As if no one who's not in blue could possibly grasp the intricacies of a case.”

“We call it the strong arm of the law,” added Leopardo.

She had offended them. But, really, these folks were little more than entertainers. She had actually run across Leopardo's book, and had a good chuckle at the subtitle:
Every Murder Tells a Story: The Narrative Strategies of Serial Killers
.

On impulse, Remington decided to call Big Dada's bluff. “All right, I'll tell you what. Work up some data sets on vehicles ITVO reported disappearances.”

“ITVO…?” Leopardo looked baffled.

“ ‘In the vicinity of,' ” Big Dada said quickly. “Pronounced ‘it-vo.' ” He was the kind of guy who probably collected police and military acronyms.

“Take the Henegar case as your baseline. You can pick up the geographical particulars from the newsfeeds.”

Big Dada nodded. “Holmes Canyon, right? Out near Agoura Hills?”

“Very good.” Remington was impressed in spite of herself. Big Dada seemed to have a bit more going on than the narrative-strategies guy. “Establish a sampling range, run data sets from the Henegar disappearance and correlate them with other missing-persons locations.”

“Right! See if the same offender shows up at more than one locale. Can you get me ‘last reported' on your linked cases?”

Remington shook her head. “You'll have to pull all that off the newsfeeds.”

Leopardo appeared miffed at being left out of the loop. “So what you're saying is it's a one-way street. You can't give us anything, and B.D. does all the work.”

“It's okay,” Big Dada assured him. “This could be great.”

His partner continued to act the bad cop. “The L.A. County Sheriff's Department has the resources to hire out something like this?”

“It would have to be your treat.” Giving Big Dada her sweetest smile.

She stood the whole “business called show” for as long as she could. As noon approached, she begged off Pip Pham's lunch invitation (“Mr. Monaghan got us a table at Cecconi's!”) and pleaded pressing police business in order to leave. The same car and driver that had transported her into town from Topanga waited outside the studio.

“Headed back to the West Side, Detective?”

“The sheriff's substation off the PCH in Malibu,” Remington said.

She hesitated as the driver opened a rear door for her. “You know, may I sit up front with you?”

“Of course,” said the driver.