13 Stolen Girls (13 page)

Her name was Ruth Jakes, or at least that's what she went by in the States. She was an Ibo from Nigeria, a stunningly beautiful woman who was a little younger than Remington, charming and bright. She had come to Los Angeles as an actor. The last two years of auditioning for roles had worn away her immigrant naïveté and replaced it with cheerful cynicism.

The two of them hadn't spoken much on the way in, but one thing the driver had mentioned was that she had formerly worked for Gus Monaghan himself. Now Remington asked her about the experience.

“I got demoted from chauffeuring the Big Man when I wouldn't participate in his fun games. I like driving for Curtain of Pink much better. I get to meet fine folks like you.”

“His fun games?”

“You know, the kinky business up at the Brokedown Palace.”

Remington had a hard time understanding Ruth Jakes, and not because the driver had a British-accent lilt to her voice. She was speaking a different sort of language. Brokedown Palace?

“That's his party house in Holmby Hills, right up there near the Playboy Mansion.”

“And what kind of fun and games might go on up there?” Remington asked.

“Oh, you know.”

“Well, I've heard tales. Nothing specific.”

“You give someone unlimited power, and what usually happens? We understand all about that in Nigeria.”

“Monaghan has a lot of women over.”

Ruth Jakes blew out her cheeks. “
A lot
is putting it mildly.”

Stories of Monaghan's voracious sexual appetites had been floating around for years. “So he parties, so what? It's really a matter of course in this town.”

“It's the way he does it. For a couple of months last year, that's what I was doing, taking his Brokedown Palace guests home in the morning. I've had a lot of totally destroyed girls in my backseat, weeping, sobbing over what he did to them.”

At least the victims made it home alive
. Remington thought of Merilee Henegar.

“He used to have me put ‘Brokedown Palace' on repeat as I drove them home. Just to make them feel lousier than they already did. What a bastard.”

“The Grateful Dead song.”

“Yeah. You know that term ‘rough trade'?” Jakes asked. “He's getting worse, too. You know what he likes?”

Visions of whips and handcuffs danced in Remington's head. “I can imagine. Or maybe I can't.”

“He's got a couple Oscar statuettes.”

“I thought he never won any.”

“Oh, he hasn't. Get this—he
buys
them off winners who need the money more than the awards. And he uses them on the girls, you know, as—”

Remington held up her hand. “I get the idea.”

“You want me to try Santa Monica Boulevard? See the screen?” Ruth Jakes tapped the car's GPS monitor with a fingernail. “Traffic is one big clog all the way to the beach.”

“I'm in no hurry,” Remington said.

“I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't gossip so much. To a police detective. You don't have a recording device tucked down your blouse, do you?”

“See those towers over there?” Remington gestured toward the Century City complex, ahead of them to the north of the freeway. “Those towers were built by gossip.”

Ruth Jakes laughed. “This whole town, yeah.”

“You were telling me about Gus Monaghan's party preferences.”

“What Big Man gets off on now—more and more he's going this way—he likes to find a certain type of girl. He's very choosy. He likes innocence.”

“Innocence. I'll bet he finds it a difficult task locating that particular quality in Los Angeles.”

The driver laughed once again, a delightful trill that showed off her white-white teeth. “He sends out for them. He imports his talent from Wisconsin.”

“You're kidding, right?” Remington mentally checked the present-day legality of transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes. The Mann Act was still on the books, wasn't it?

“Okay, I don't really know where he gets them, but once I pick them up and bring them to the Palace, I know right away they're the ones who're about to receive the Big Man treatment. ‘Farm-fresh babes,' that's what Gus always says he wants. They go in giggling and come out crying.”

“Sadder but wiser.”

Ruth Jakes glanced over at Remington. “That kind of wisdom isn't worth the price, you know? After he finishes with them, he passes them off to his pals.”

Monaghan's Brokedown Palace, it turned out, was a celebrated piece of L.A. real estate, with an infamous past. The Italianate mansion on Knollwood Drive in Bel Air had been built in the twenties and was the site of some notorious Hollywood scandals.

Marilyn Monroe, when she was still an unknown starlet, had been forced to apprentice at the Knollwood house under the clawlike hands of the elderly Joe Schenck, co-founder and chairman of 20th Century Fox. At the time, the starlet was twenty and the studio head was sixty-eight.

The former Norma Jean Mortenson had the best words to say about it: “Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.”

Turn her out
.
Bust her out
. That was pimpspeak for introducing a girl to the wonderful wide world of prostitution.

“We should get off the freeway, Ruth, don't you think? Go up to Santa Monica, or better yet, Sunset, maybe take a short detour and swing by Knollwood Drive.”

“Detective, you are going to get this girl's black ass fired,” Ruth Jakes said.

“You want to go after Gus Monaghan.” Rick Stills pronounced the words as a statement, not a question.

He and Remington were in the task-force offices at his law firm. She sat across a cluttered desk from him. Stills looked harried and tired, but such were his good looks that he managed to carry exhaustion off with style. Though it was late in the day, there was still a lot of activity around the firm.

“Well, I don't know about ‘go after,' ” Remington answered. “I just want to poke around a little bit, see what he's up to.”

“Okay, what I just asked? ‘Do you want to go after Gus Monaghan?' If you plug those words into Google Translate, it comes out,
‘Are you insane?' 
”

“I know, I know.”

“There's a hierarchy in the world, as I'm sure you're aware.”

“Rick—”

He wouldn't let her interrupt. “Down here is the pope, then comes the president, then, I don't know, somewhere up a little higher is your new best friend Radley Holt. But way up here”—he gestured—“way up here in the stratosphere is Gus Monaghan. He's a Hollywood producer with three—count 'em,
three
—billion-dollar movie franchises going on at the same time.”

“So Monaghan's untouchable.”

“Nobody's untouchable, Remington. A hornet's nest hanging on a tree branch isn't untouchable. It's a question of consequences.” He sighed audibly, an I-don't-need-this look of distaste crossing his face. “Look, the graybeards in the Motion Picture Association are already convinced that this task force is anti-Hollywood, anti-industry.”

In Los Angeles, if people used the term “industry,” they meant the movies.

“Maybe it is,” she said. “Or, you know, maybe it should be.”

“Are you being intentionally thickheaded? You were born and raised in this town, weren't you? You know the realities out there. We antagonize these folks at our own risk.”

She understood all this. One reason LACTFOMEY was headquartered in cushy quarters at a Century City law firm, Remington knew, was that the arrangement made it easier for the powers that be to keep an eye on its activities.

“Missing and Exploited Youth.” Well, where might one look for such a victimized population? In the porn mills of the Valley, sure, but also in the audition bins of Hollywood. To quite a few people with quite a lot of power, the former was much preferable to the latter as a subject for the task force's attention.

Earlier in the day, Remington had Ruth Jakes drive her past Gus Monaghan's Knollwood estate. The mansion successfully echoed a gracious Renaissance villa, with such Tuscan touches as buff stucco walls, a red tiled roof and a fountain on the well-manicured front lawn. A façade of perfect respectability and wealth, hiding what?

They had idled at the curb, scoping out the house from afar. “Maybe I should go up to the front door, ring the bell,” Remington had suggested.

“He's got world-class security,” Ruth Jakes had warned. “Right now, the license plate of this car is being entered into a computer, logged and ID'd. I'll probably be getting a call later, asking what the hell I was doing bothering the boss.”

Brokedown Palace,
Remington mused.
What a joke
.

“I'm not going to upset the apple cart,” she said now to Rick Stills. “It's just that I'm getting some real hinky vibes from the guy.”

“Hinky vibes.” Rick rolled his eyes. “What do you have on him, really?”

Nothing
, Remington realized.
Nothing at all
. He was a distributing producer on
Joshua Tree
. She had received a random text, signed “Priapus.” That was also the name of a picture Monaghan had in development.

Then there was a bit of gossip from his former driver, suggesting that the producer's leisure-time activities were veering from the kinky to the extreme limits of legality. Did the weeping females whom Ruth Jakes retrieved after nights spent at the Palace describe their experience as consensual?

What did it add up to? Not much. There were probably at least a dozen alpha males prowling around Los Angeles who could match or exceed Gus Monaghan as suitable subjects for investigation.

But there was something else, too, something Remington couldn't quite put into words.
I'm gaming you
, Monaghan always seemed to be saying,
and you are not even going to know you're getting gamed
. That was the man's attitude toward the whole wide world.

“Forget Tarin Mistry,” Stills said to her now. “You've been told again and again to leave that case to Walter Rack.”

“That's another thing. It seems that, courtesy of Gus Monaghan's intervention, I'm now an official member of the LAPD's Team Tarin. Why would he go out of his way to get me put back on that?”

“Because he might think you're a great detective?”

“Yeah, well, this detective detects that he's screwing with me.”

Stills shook his head with frustration. “He's trying to help you!”

Remington didn't reply.

“Concentrate on Merilee Henegar,” Stills went on. “You have your hands full with that. A murdered girl dumped on her mama's doorstep? That's not a bizarre enough slice of trouble for you? You feel the need to go looking for more?”

Stills searched among a pile of papers in his in-box. “I wasn't going to show you this. It'll probably only serve to increase your level of paranoia about the guy.”

He fished out a card printed on heavyweight cream-colored stock. Tossing it across the desk to Remington, Stills gave her an odd smile.

“It'd be our first date,” he said.

The card was an invitation addressed to Stills from Gus Monaghan. The party, Remington saw, would be held at the Knollwood Drive mansion. A gala for charity, benefiting a group called the Oceana. “Dance for the Dolphins, Wail for the Whales,” read the invite, giving the date and time. A note suggested “Glamour dress.”

Scrawled on the bottom were the words
“Bring Det. Remington.”

She tossed the invite back across the desk to Stills. “You see? He introduces me to his celebrity friends, wants to put me on one of his TV shows. I've never met him, but I'm telling you: the guy has some sort of weird fixation on me.”

“And you see that as a bad thing?” Stills shook his head. “There are plenty of women lined up and eager for any crumb that falls from Monaghan's table.”

“His obsession with Tarin Mistry doesn't sit right. He owns her life rights, did you know that?”

“Do you want to go to his bash or not? Oceana, that's a favorite Leonardo DiCaprio charity. Which means he'll be there. I wonder how old Leo gets along with the latest boy wonder Radley Holt.”

At the very least, the gala would be a way for Remington to get inside the fabled Brokedown Palace. And Stills was right. Why should she look a gift horse in the mouth? Monaghan could serve as a powerful ally. And an evening out with Rick Stills—that was way better than a poke in the eye with sharp stick, wasn't it?

When Ruth Jakes had dropped Remington off the day before, the driver left her with a last thought. “Be careful, Detective. Excuse my French, but what Gus Monaghan enjoys more than anything else is fucking with people's heads.”

Beneath these considerations lurked another all-important question, an immediate problem that floated up from Remington's girly depths.

What would she wear?

They made her wait. She sat in one of Rack and Ruin's conference rooms, watching the two LAPD stars through an open door. They schmoozed with the other detectives in the section. Everything was hail-fellow-well-met. Remington was the outsider, the skirt. Next they were going to ask her to get them coffee.

Walter Rack and Paul Roone scorned the LAPD headquarters to work out of their own suite in a Criminal Investigation Section on Figueroa. After a quarter of an hour, Paul Roone came in to her. “Walt has a scheduling thing, so he told me to speak to you and I'll pass whatever it is on to him.”

It was time, Remington figured, to lay out her theory of the crime in the Tarin Mistry case. “I've been looking into linkages.”

Roone fussed with his tie, then spoke without looking at her. “Didn't we agree, Detective, that your presence here would be one of observation rather than participation?”

“I've got a similar in Agoura Hills that you might want to look at.”

“A homicide?”

“Sixteen-year-old white female, reported missing mid-September, discovered deceased at home in bed twenty-five days later.”

“Jesus, the girl who was put back dead?”

“Merilee Henegar.”

“Where'd you get this, from the task force? What's the connection to Tarin?”

Remington wasn't going into the conversation with a lot of weight behind her. She was the only female murder police in Los Angeles, the LASD or the LAPD both. Rack and Ruin no doubt considered her some sort of affirmative-action baby, or suspected her of being an Internal Affairs plant.

She plunged ahead anyway. “Did you ever turn up a mention of Rose and Thorn with Tarin Mistry?”

“You mean those spanking books? You're putting me on, right? Your vic and our vic, they both read what's only the most bestselling of all the lady bestsellers—you're telling me that's your common thread? Next you're going to bring up that they both breathe air.”

“How about the
Cor
books?” she asked. “Ever stumble across those?”

Remington had. Bonnie Lareda had been right. The Cor books were all over the domination-and-submission underground. The obscure science-fiction series, by an author using the pseudonym James Saxon, was first published in the mid-sixties and put out at a rate of about a volume a year since then. The thirty-three Cor novels portrayed a fictional world in which power hierarchies were the essence of all relationships, especially those involving men and women.

On planet Cor—or perhaps it was the parallel universe of Cor, from her brief dip into the books Remington wasn't sure—castes of male masters and female slaves lived in highly structured, tightly controlled societies. Soft-core sub-dom sex was part of the formula. In a few of the stories, Earth women were kidnapped and brought to Cor in order to serve as slaves for Corean masters.

The author was actually a Princeton-educated, City College philosophy professor. Real name: James Ellery Schwanger. His books would represent nothing more than another sci-fi series in a cultural landscape crowded with them were it not for the fact that a certain segment of the populace had adopted the Cor series as their bible, applying the principles of Cor to earthbound lives.

A social arrangement with a place for every man and in which every woman was put in her place is a very comforting fantasy. Disorder bedeviled all those who yearned for control. This was true in spades for young, panicked Earth men who felt that the Earth women around them were getting uppity and threatening.

Gamers, role-players and sword-and-sorcery fanatics employed the acronym
irl,
which stood for “in real life” and was usually pronounced with a sneer of contempt. “Vanilla” was the sexual slang equivalent. Most people read the Cor books for enjoyment. A few readers blurred the line between fact and fantasy. “Hard Cor,” they called themselves, seeking to establish a Corean caliphate.

“Hey, Rack,” Paul Roone called out, as Walter Rack ambled past the office. “Our girl Remington here has shown herself to be a great reader of books.”

“Yeah?” Rack briefly stopped in the doorway.

“She must have her own library card and everything.”

“Keep it up, Detective,” Rack said, playing along with his partner. “I'm told reading expands the mind.”

Rack moved on.

“I can't say I'm impressed,” Roone told Remington. “I'll tell you where the Tarin Mistry case gets solved, and it's not at the local bookstore.”

He tapped a wall map behind him. “It's going to be here, along the Arizona-Nevada border, where the only reading materials allowed are the Book of Mormon and the Bible.”

Remington gave up. The masters of the Criminal Investigation Section would never take direction from a low-status female. She didn't get a chance to tell Rack and Ruin about an interesting facet of the Cor books, one that had drawn her to them in the first place. In Cor, a female of the slave caste was called a
kajira
. Just another example of sword-and-sorcery mumbo-jumbo, except for one thing.

The
kef
. The stylized “k” identified a female as a slave, a
kajira
. In terms of typographical anatomy, the upright staff, or stem, of the “k” represented the phallic male master, while the curved, floral leg and arm was the worshipful female slave.

In the Cor books, the
kef
was done via branding with a hot iron. Back in real life on planet Earth, the marking was more likely accomplished at a tattoo studio.

Remington had seen two kef tattoos in her life, one for certain, the other more debatable. One was inked on the left hand of Merilee Henegar. The other appeared as a faint marking on the brown, mummified skin of Tarin Mistry. The L.A. coroner hadn't been sure of the latter. Until the courts allowed him to perform a full autopsy, Dr. Gladney couldn't determine if the scarified mark on the deceased girl's hand was the result of a branding.

“You might have waited until you had something solid,” Gene Remington told his daughter. Layla had called him on the hands-free as she left downtown that afternoon. “Those boys have been kings of the hill so long they're not going to listen to anyone else, and they sure as hell aren't going to let you in on a plum case like Tarin Mistry.”

“I don't like being humored, but Roone wasn't even up for humoring me.”

“I'm not that familiar with Roone, but Walter Rack was a cocksure SOB even before he started wearing Armani. Default Walt, they used to call him, because he wanted every single high-profile homicide for his own. The guy's tan is from camera flash.”

Traffic on the 10 crept forward.
L.A. is becoming unlivable,
Layla thought. She changed the subject, telling her dad about the invitation to the benefit ball that Rick Stills had shown her.

“You're moving in rarified circles, Princess. The air is thin up there.”

“I don't know if I'm going to go. I can't decide if Monaghan is really my ally or if he's got some sort of ulterior motive for romancing me.”

“You know who his best cop friend is, don't you? The other guy we were just talking about.”

“Walter Rack.”

“Yup. He and Monaghan are close as cousins. I've heard they go to Vegas together. And when Walter hangs out with Gus you know that means he's turning a blind eye to all sorts of shenanigans.”

“Might that include felonies?”

“It's your call, Princess,” Gene Remington said.

“She wasn't an easy child, Detective,” Brandi Henegar said.

“Parenting is always hard.”

“I tried to do my best by her.”

“Of course you did.”

Coming off the entirely useless meeting with Paul Roone, Remington had decided on impulse to visit the Henegar house in Holmes Canyon. Forensics had finally released the scene. Remington had been reaching out to Brandi Henegar. The woman kept canceling appointments, promising to meet, canceling again. Her mother, Merilee's grandmother, explained to deputies that Brandi was ill.

The Border Drive house presented a blank face to the neighborhood. The contrast between its split-level dullness and what had happened inside served as a lesson about the banality of evil. Remington parked in front. She left the street and walked the scene. As she had the night Merilee's body turned up, she skirted around to the back of the house. The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. So does the cop.

The yard was empty and forlorn.

He brought her in through here,
Remington decided, approaching the thicket of underbrush that bordered the property. She ducked into the tangled plantings. The CAU techs had turned up some strange impression evidence in the dry soil of the thin strip of land between the yard and a cul-de-sac turnaround twenty feet to the north.

He parked here, then unloaded
. There was indeed a large
DEAD END
sign posted at the cul-de-sac. Remington pictured Merilee's killer with his macabre burden, humping through the underbrush.

Something was wrong with the footprints that forensics had collected. They seemed to have been left by an impossibly gigantic human. The shoes were oversized, moon boots or some such monsters. The depth of the impressions indicated the heaviness of the load. Most of the prints were crumbled and useless because of the dry soil.

He was masking his prints
. Bigfoot knew that his approach to the Henegar house would be thoroughly processed by police crime-scene units. So he had slipped on a huge pair of galoshes, maybe (who in Southern California owned galoshes?), or something like size-twenty-one rubber boots. The CAU was still trying to track down the specific brand from the few treads they had been able to cast from the decayed impressions.

Bad guys watched
CSI
like everyone else. They had taken to disguising their crimes to disrupt forensic analysis. Rapists were using condoms more often as a guard against DNA sampling. Murderers torched scenes to destroy trace evidence. It was like the Cold War arms race, each side attempting to outfox the other.

Remington ducked back through to the yard. She saw a face in a second-story window of the house. Brandi Henegar raised a hesitant hand in greeting. Brandi's mother, Carla Kernis, met Remington at the sliding back door off the terrace.

“She's very fragile, you know,” whispered Carla, as she admitted Remington to the house.

The three of them sat in the kitchen nook over bad percolator coffee. Brandi Henegar looked like what she was, a woman who had traveled through hell.

“I've found that sometimes it helps people to talk it out,” Remington said.

“I know, I know.” Brandi looked off across the yard, then jerked her head down, as if the tableau beyond the back windows stirred up bad thoughts.

Her mother had the good sense to stay silent.

“The night she disappeared, did Merilee give any indication where she was going?”

“No.” Brandi's voice sounded flat and dull.

“Did she leave the house often at night?”

“No. Sometimes.”

“When she did, where would she go?”

“I don't know.”

“You've got to try to help me here, Brandi.”

“She went to meet friends, I guess.”

Carla broke in. “We've spoken to them all. It turns out that in the past few months none of her usual friends had seen much of her outside of school.”

“I have them on my interview list,” Remington said. “Dana Turecek, right?”

Carla nodded. “And Melissa and Katrine Bernstein—those three are the most important.”

“Do you know a girl nicknamed Eensy? A small girl, her head half shaved?”

“No. I don't know that name. She shaved her hair off?”

“Like Britney Spears did, Brandi,” the grandmother said.

“If Merilee didn't go to see any of her friends, is there anywhere else she would have gone at that time of night?”