13 Stolen Girls (11 page)

The truck careened into the enormous concrete box culvert of the river. It took a slow, greasy drift to the side, then toppled over. Still sliding, sparks flying, the U-boat plummeted toward the thin trickle of water below. The windshield exploded into chiclets of glass. The attacker remained somewhere behind Remington in the backseat. She heaved herself upright and leaped free from the truck, hitting the concrete hard and bouncing like some sort of human pinball.

The U-boat spun downward. Flames appeared on its back end as the showering sparks ignited gasoline spilling from the fuel tank. Flung out onto the culvert's concrete lip, Remington watched as the truck splashed into the river water and exploded.

Orange-black flames burst into a skull-shaped fireball. Remington could feel the heat from where she lay sprawled. Not quite believing what she was seeing, she witnessed her attacker dash out from amid the roiling blaze. He staggered away from the wreck. She half expected him to be on fire himself, like some movie stuntman.

“Police.” Remington's breath had been knocked out of her. The word barely rose to a shout. She couldn't even hear herself above the roar of the burning SUV.

“Police!” she yelled louder. “Stop!”

The effort cost her a coughing spasm. The neck plate hung broken at her throat. She tore it off and flung it aside. She began to slip down the angled concrete of the culvert, sliding directly toward the flaming truck. Only a desperate roll kept her from being engulfed by burning gasoline.

Fifty yards away by now, fading into the dark toward the looming freeway interchange, her attacker turned and pointed at her. Too late, Remington realized that he was aiming her own gun in her direction. The shot echoed loudly. A ricochet ping sounded against the concrete ditch.

She ducked, trying to put the smoking hulk between herself and her attacker. The last glimpse she had of him, he was loping away to the south, limping but still managing to run. He splashed across the shallow river and disappeared into the night.

In the mad jumble of the crash, Remington had managed only a single close look at the guy. The image burned itself into her memory. A red-and-white lucha libre mask, the same one worn by the big dom whom she had seen at the club earlier in the evening.

Remington's father wanted to see where the U-boat had screwed the pooch. Two days after the incident, they headed out together in his ancient F-150 pickup.

Remington had brutal pavement burns on both hands, plus bumps and bruises all over her body. Her beloved U-boat was a charred wreck in the shallows of the Los Angeles River. But, for all that, she counted herself lucky.

Bonnie Lareda had arrived at the scene around dawn, when she left the club and noticed the police presence at the end of Violet Street. The burned-out SUV was still being processed by a Multidisciplinary Accident Investigation Team, or MAIT, from the California Highway Patrol. Layla shepherded her photographer friend inside the perimeter. Bonnie took a couple of rolls of the wreck and the MAIT folks surrounding it.

The attempt on Remington's life triggered an immediate response by her cohorts in law enforcement. The police debriefings were not all that brief. First, the LAPD and then the LASD focused on what the hell she had been doing in that neighborhood in the middle of the night. They asked a lot of “why hadn't” questions. Why hadn't she kept the Ruger with her? Why hadn't she checked the backseat before entering her vehicle? Remington got a whiff of blaming the victim.

The fact that a department-issued weapon had been stolen seemed extremely important to her interrogators, even more vital, she began to think, than the fact that the breath had almost been choked out of her. A police sidearm on the loose worried everyone. Layla had been forced to borrow Gene's Colt in order not to go about naked in the world.

She told her interviewers some but not all of what had happened.

“You were wearing this?” Deputy Johnny Velske fingered the cracked gorget that had effectively saved Remington's life.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Why?”

“The whole thing was just a goof, Johnny. A girls' night out.”

After the debriefings, Layla took some off-duty time. Gene was worried, she could tell. He was always her best nurse. Whenever she fell sick, he'd put her up in the extra bedroom he kept for her in his condo. She knew he wanted her to move “back home,” as he would have phrased it, completely and for good. She was liking the West Side more and more, but it wasn't just that. Approaching thirty and living with her dad? As much as she loved Gene, no thanks.

The two of them drove downtown together. The warehouse district looked even seedier in the cold light of day. Paddles was shut up tight. High-tension wires hung above the river. The freeway interchange resembled a busy hive.

“Right about here.” Layla pointed. Her dad parked at the dead end of Violet Street. They both got out.

She had visited the site once before, just a drive-by. In addition to Bonnie Lareda's shots, there were some photos of the flaming truck taken from the freeway and posted on social media.

A couple days had passed, and the wreck still hadn't been pulled out of the culvert. A yellow-and-black strip of police tape hung across the gap where the U-boat had blasted through the railway fence. The scar from the runaway ride slashed itself across the rails beyond. Gene and Layla slipped the tape, waited until a Metrolink commuter train roared past, then hurried across the rail line toward the river.

Layla went to the edge of the box culvert. She could see the burned truck lying on its side in the trickling river.

“You okay?” Gene was always anxious lately. “Not having post-trauma flashbacks or anything like that?”

She shook her head, stepped off the rim and started to hike down. Her dad came behind her. The two of them skittered along, half sliding down the concrete slope.

“You know the movie
Them!
?” Gene asked. “Giant radioactive ants battled it out with the U.S. Army in the riverbed right along here.”

Layla didn't feel much like talking classic cinema with her dad.

The poor U-boat. The vehicle had given Layla good service ever since she got boosted up from patrol. She had always worked un-partnered, and “U-boat” was local L.A. police slang for a solo ride. Now the SUV listed at a crazy tilt, charred and smashed, its guts torn open. The violent rips in the sheet-metal body displayed shiny, knife-sharp edges.

“How'd you survive this, Princess?”

“I got out.”

“God was watching over you.”

She wanted to point out that the Big Guy in the Sky had allowed some vile creep to attack her in the first place. Such brushes with mortality—her own or that of others—always gave rise to thoughts of her mom. She died when Layla was too young to remember more than a few moments of her—an image, an embrace. Mona Seeger Remington. Maybe that's who had been watching over her.

Sentimentality didn't suit Layla. She walked the scene, already thoroughly pawed over by first responders and then, later on, by the MAIT from the highway patrol. Debris had been left scattered over a broad area. There were cracked pieces of reflector lenses, a crazily intact side window, a side panel crushed into the shape of a heart. The smell of gasoline was faint but still noticeable.

An investigator had discarded a mess of latex gloves in the river, where they remained, a blue rubber clump with the feeble current flowing around it.

Gene came up beside her. “He wanted to finish you, darling.”

“Maybe it was a warning.”

“Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? To kill the person who's being warned?”

Layla looked up from the bottom of the culvert, tracing the U-boat's hundred-yard plunge. Opposite, across the river, she noticed a lone figure standing on the freeway shoulder, looking down at her. A tall male, stocky and bald, poised in half-shadow and side-lit by the sun. Maybe a looky lou, wanting to see the wreck. But in her present mood of post-attack paranoia all sorts of suspicious thoughts occurred to her.

When the guy saw Layla staring at him, he stepped back hastily, retreating out of the line of sight. At that distance, she couldn't tell if he'd actually left the scene.
Call in a patrol, brace him, ask him if it was an emergency, otherwise, what was he doing stopping on the busy freeway?

“Princess,” Gene said. He didn't have eyes on the looky lou. He had kicked a bit of wreckage out of the mud in the shallows of the river.

A black box made of metal and high-impact plastic, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Two circles of dark silver were affixed to one side.

Gene moved to give the box to his daughter, then stopped. “Maybe you ought to glove up before you handle this.”

“A GPS tracker,” Layla said, getting a closer look at it. The silver circles were sintered alnico magnets used to attach the small device to the undercarriage of a vehicle.

Gene rotated the box, allowing them both to examine it. “The sheriff's department use these?”

“Not that I know of. Might not have been from the wreck.”

“Right. Could have flown off a car passing on the freeway, bounced a quarter mile or so, then wound up in the river mud.”

Layla shrugged. “You can buy a gadget like that at RadioShack for a hundred bucks, you know, or anywhere on the Internet.”

“Well, if it was off the truck, then somebody had a trace on your movements.”

“Didn't you just tell me that God was watching?”

“Not God,” Gene said.

Remington was sorely tempted to do the detective work herself, tracking down the GPS device and making an arrest for illegal surveillance. But in the end she presented the little black box, bagged and still covered with Los Angeles River mud, to her superiors at the sheriff's substation in Calabasas.

Patrick Cohen was the captain there. He listened to Remington's story of finding the dingus at the accident site.

“Could be nothing, but it should be fairly simple to check the system on this,” Remington said. The devices were transponders that had to be linked to a computerized tracking-service account.

Cohen held up the bag. He wore thick lenses for myopia, and his eyes swam behind them. “I wonder if you should have left it in place, let forensics have a whack.”

“A highway-patrol MAIT had already processed the crash, and somehow they missed it.”

“Usually they're pretty methodical.” Cohen frowned. There were other LASD personnel crowded into his office with them—a deputy, a sergeant, all men. Plus there was the scruffy undercover guy she had last encountered at the Merilee Henegar scene.

Detective Sam Brasov.

Gingerly, Cohen placed the baggie with the device back down on his desk, as if it were somehow dangerous. “Well, we will certainly take a look.”

“It's serious, though, right?” Remington felt it necessary to prompt him.

“Very serious, especially in light of what happened to you downtown. Your investigation into the Henegar case, for one, could be compromised.”

“So we'll fast-track it?” Again, as with the original attack, Remington had the maddening sense that no one was treating the situation with the gravity it deserved.

“We will fast-track the tracker,” Cohen said, smiling wanly.

“Let me know who gets assigned, okay?”

“Will do.” Cohen rose to his feet. “How are you feeling, Detective? You had a close call.”

“I'm fine.”

“We want to make sure you're fully recuperated before you get back into harness.”

“I'm good. I don't need recuperating.”
And there are girls going missing
. Why did no one feel the urgency she did?

“You're good? That's good. I want you to meet Detective Sam Brasov, up from Region Two to help us out.”

“I know Detective Brasov.” Remington nodded to him.

“Turning up like a bad penny,” Brasov said lightly.

“Since your own ride is down, I'm tasking Detective Brasov as your partner for a few weeks.”

“I work alone, sir.” Cohen knew that. Everyone in the department knew it.

“No offense,” she said to the undercover.

He grinned. “Some taken, but I'll survive.”

“Detective Brasov is a fine police, and I know you'll do great work together.” Cohen couched his directive as not quite an order, but Remington could read the subtext.
The sheriff's department is worried about you
. Well, she was worried about the department, so they were even.

Brasov followed her out to the parking lot of the sheriff's substation. For the time being, and until the county saw fit to assign her another vehicle, she was driving her dad's thirty-year-old pickup.

“Oh, hell, no,” Brasov said when he saw her ride.

“What? It's a classic.”

“We shooting a beer commercial or something? Picture us home on the range in our trusty truck, hump some hay bales, kick back with a brew.”

“It's what I'm driving,” Remington said stubbornly.

“Wait here.” Brasov disappeared into the recesses of the county garage.

He was gone a long time. She climbed into the F-150. Ever since she got her gold shield, she had worked solo. Some of it was that the overwhelmingly male force still wasn't comfortable working with a “girl,” a “lady.” Shunned, Remington had turned her solitary status into a positive. She liked not having to check in with a male in order to make a decision.

A mechanical scream emerged from the garage. Brasov pulled up alongside Gene's ancient pickup in a silver-flake Porsche Spyder. The hugely expensive exotic automobile rumbled like a fighter jet.

Remington couldn't help herself. Shaking her head, she got out of her dad's truck to examine the outlandish vehicle.

“You know Michah Lords, the coke dealer we just busted? This was his whip.” Brasov gunned the engine, grinning at her. “It's going on the auction block, Remington. We only got it for a couple more days. Plus, you know, it's
environmentally sensitive
.”

Remington had to raise her voice to be heard. “No way this thing is green.”

“Sure it is, it's a hybrid—got not one but two electric motors in it.”

“As well as a V8 power plant.”

“Damn, Remington knows her automobiles.” He tapped the accelerator. “Come on, how many chances like this you going to get?”

He was right. “Okay,” she said, “but I'll drive.”

“No, no,” he wailed. But when she walked around to the driver's side and stood there waiting, he reluctantly emerged.

“I knew you were a hard woman.”

It took a beat for Remington to familiarize herself with the car's interior and its high-tech center console. It sounded like a fighter jet, and felt like one inside, too.

Brasov climbed into the passenger seat. “This is a travesty. I was born to drive this car.”

“Seatbelt.”

“Where're we going?” Brasov's body slammed back into the seat as Remington gave a faint tap on the accelerator. They popped out onto Agoura Road and, seconds later, were on the freeway, flying west.

The job hadn't exactly turned out as Lisa Pressberger had expected. The man she knew as Larry Wayne had promised her a rose garden if she would just leave her mother's house in Washington State and come work for him in sunny Southern California.

Lisa had long felt that she was at a dead end. She was eighteen years old. She worked at a Bob's Big Boy and still slept in the bedroom of her youth. The Internet saved her. Through reddit and social media, she met loads of people who weren't like the dreary losers she felt had been all around her in Spokane.

Her mom, Helen, had warned her about strangers on the Web. She even took away Lisa's Internet access for agonizing stretches, controlling computer use as a punishment. It drove Lisa up the wall.

And, eventually, it drove her out of the house, too, out of Spokane and all the way to Malibu.

Malibu! How could anyone resist? It was like a magic kingdom. Money and movie stars and white-sand beaches. She met Priapus CM on a Rose and Thorn reddit thread. The two of them soon peeled off into a private IM exchange, spending hours getting to know each other intimately. They “talked”—actually texted—about everything. The conversation seemed to embrace the whole world. Lisa was attracted to the idea of submitting herself completely to a stronger, older man, just as Rebecca Rose had done with Damien Thorn.

Before long, Priapus CM had told Lisa his real name, as she had revealed hers. They turned out to be soul mates. The age difference didn't matter. Her father, David, had left Helen when Lisa was little, so she'd never had a real dad. She needed someone powerful, someone with authority, a person who could tell her what to do in life.

Lawrence John Wayne—they joked about his macho name—sounded like her dream master. He wasn't all blustery and fake like the other wannabe doms she met on the Web. Larry Wayne was…sensitive. There was no other way Lisa could describe it. He knew her heart. Plus, he was wealthy. He lived in Malibu, didn't he? You had to be rich just to exist in that fabled 90265 zip code.

The reality, when Lisa arrived that fall, was at first fairly exciting. Larry sent her a plane ticket for the trip from Spokane to Burbank. She had never flown in an airplane before and was terrified, but she got through the experience without losing her cookies.

Larry picked her up at the airport in a gorgeous luxury SUV. He had been everything she wished for. He'd give her curt, no-nonsense commands all the time, even about little things, such as how he wanted her to sit in a chair at a restaurant (leaning forward, straight-backed, legs spread).

They didn't have sex right away. When she was with Larry, she felt an overpowering sense of powerlessness that to her was better than any foreplay she'd ever experienced. She was, in the Bill Clinton definition of intercourse, still a virgin. Her previous sexual fumblings, with teenage friends of both genders, faded in memory. The boys, with their scraggly facial hair and eagerness, all vanity and ineptitude, now seemed particularly pathetic.

The Malibu ranch where Larry brought her hit the approval meter between “acceptable” and “fine.” Not luxurious, but pretty. The smallish two-bedroom house balanced on the top of a little hill above a lake, surrounded by a barn, an office, some other outbuildings. Larry put Lisa up in what he called a guesthouse but was really just a converted garage. The bed was a futon, and the rest of the furniture would have been rejected at any self-respecting thrift shop. Cheap sisal carpet covered the concrete floor.

Right off, Larry confiscated her phone. The move upset her. He promised she could have it back when she proved herself to him. Lisa submitted, but felt naked without her cell. He did allow her a single call to her mother, so that she could tell Helen she had gotten to California okay.

Lisa found the office work Larry Wayne had her doing to be odd in the extreme. She sent out endless numbers of letters to addresses that he provided. All the letters were variations on the same theme, about “ground-floor,” “zero-to-sixty,” “extremely exciting” investment opportunities in health care, agriculture, real estate. The letterheads changed: Mark Vee Consultants, Aqua-II, Malibu Lake Management, Agoura Associates. The strangest thing was that Larry signed different names to almost every letter, calling himself Jay Wayne, Lars Bittner, Eric Decker, John Lawrence Klos.

When Lisa asked him about it, he told her that was the way business was done. He was what he called a “vee-cee,” a venture capitalist. What he was doing, he said, was raising funds for various enterprises.

She was alone at the ranch most of the time. She wasn't allowed to go out much, but she could tell that there were a lot of expensive homes in the neighborhood. Once in a while a sad-eyed older woman named Ann came by the ranch office. Lisa could have used a female friend, even one as frumpy and downcast as Ann. But Larry had warned her away from the woman.

Two days after Lisa arrived, she and Larry did something that they had promised each other in their endless text exchanges. They got matching tattoos. Well, they didn't really match, they were more complementary. And hers was the only one they had actually done that evening, since Larry told her that he didn't have time right then for his.

Her master was fussy. They checked in on a half-dozen tattoo studios. He always found something wrong, like the premises weren't hygienic, or the tattoo guy was a dirtbag. One of them smoked weed right there in front of them. Larry was disgusted. What he really wanted was a female to do the job, so that a male wouldn't be able to paw over his lady. Lisa was secretly pleased that he was such a jealous lord.

Lisa finally got inked at a studio in Saticoy. Larry provided the design, the beautiful, small-“k”
kef
marking that bonded her to him forever. The color they chose was called Monthly Red, and they laughed about the name. During the procedure Larry asked Bridget, the tattoo artist, if he could wield the needle for a while. He bribed the gal to say yes, then took his place in the chair, looming over Lisa, staring intently into her eyes as he applied the pain. She almost creamed in her jeans.

The tattoo made it look as though her skin had boiled. It was ugly and scabby now, but in a couple of weeks, when it healed, it would look pretty.

The sex, when it finally came later in the week, consumed her. One evening Larry appeared at the guesthouse door dressed in black leather, almost like a cosplay costume. Lisa didn't even have to ask. She knew it was time. They'd had sub-dom sessions on the computer before, plenty of times, so she knew pretty much what was expected.