by Gil Reavill
• Appellate judges rejected this office’s request to bar serial rapist James Madison Carr from being released into the county.
• A pedestrian was robbed at gunpoint on the third level of the Fair Oaks parking garage in Pasadena’s Old Town.
• A male Caucasian fired upon one of our sheriff’s deputies attempting to serve an eviction notice in Torrance. Suspect is in custody.
• A mother filed suit against Macy’s department store for selling her daughter a pair of shoes that she alleges were too large, causing the girl to slip and incur a strained ACL.
• Oh, and just for added novelty, just for typical unbelievable Southern California weirdness, thirteen dead chimpanzees were discovered at an animal sanctuary in the Malibu foothills. The creatures were evidently euthanized, after which their bodies were partially burned as the Lost Hills wildfire (still chewing up acres, by the way) bore down on them.
You’ll tell me none of this is as important as the death of an actor in the Hollywood Hills, shot and killed by another actor involved in a love triangle with a third celebrity movie star. Maybe not. But all I’m registering here is a plea for us to keep some sort of perspective amid the madness that is about to descend.
It’s late at night. I probably shouldn’t send this. But damn, I love what we do, and I don’t want to see us make a collective fool of ourselves. We live in a celebrity-addled world. That doesn’t mean we have to become addled ourselves.
See you in a few hours at the C-Center. Bright and early. Well, early anyway.
Rick
As soon as his finger clicked on the mouse, Stills realized that he had made a mistake. He wanted to call it back. Within the hothouse atmosphere of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, where reputations were calibrated in a finely shaded and highly nuanced manner, every shift, every opinion, every comment mattered. A thousand assistant district attorneys on the county staff constantly jostled for position. One wrong move could sidetrack a career. A seriously wrong move could doom one.
There were companies that prospered by selling software designed for just such a situation as Rick Stills found himself in, programs like Recall, which actually reaches into the server to extract an email message sent recklessly or in some unaccountable spasm of idiocy.
Stills was confident, masterly, a career adept, able to finesse the multiple political vectors in the county D.A.’s office. Whatever long knives were unsheathed had never embedded themselves in his back. He had made his two-year climb into the Major Crimes Group appear effortless. At the downtown Civic Center office, he was not only liked but well liked, seen as a comer, respected by colleagues and superiors.
He was too smart to send a stupid email. Thus he had never felt the need to install the Recall software.
They were kind to him when he headed into the fourth floor C-Center offices after a four-hour power sleep. Shaved, showered, mushy-headed from his hangover but ready to take his punishment. He got backslaps, a smattering of not too ironic applause, one “Way to go” and another “Had to be said.” But he could read the pity in their faces.
His stating the obvious in the email wasn’t the issue. His judgmental tone—well, they were all lawyers around there; they all knew how to climb onto a high horse. What killed him, he knew with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, were phrases like “shared communal folly,” “it’s clear we lost our minds a little bit back then,” and “we all know how that turned out.”
Those lines had implied criticism of the higher-ups, the senior staff who had been in the office for the Simpson debacle. Even though O. J.’s acquittal was more than a decade in the rearview mirror, they were still prickly. And they were powerful enough to do something about it.
“There he is, Professor Rick Stills, proceeding soberly and professionally upon his business,” ADA Max Reifsteck said. Stills shared a four-cubicle office with Max and two other ADAs in the Major Crimes Group.
“All right, all right, so I screwed the pooch,” Stills retorted.
“I believe the more accurate assessment is that you made yourself look like a monkey humping a football,” ADA Sheila Hightower said.
Underneath the mockery, beneath the pity, Stills could sense something else. They were gloating. Every ambitious ADA in the office—and there weren’t any other kind—was angling for the spectacular homicide that had unfolded the previous evening in a residential compound off Mulholland Drive.
It was an assignment that could easily make a career. If handled properly, the way Rick “Sure Hand” Stills knew he could handle it, the case could conceivably remove the “A” from “ADA” and get someone elected as the top dog: district attorney for Los Angeles County. After that, the statehouse in Sacramento was within reach, the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., total world domination.
In his own mind, Stills tried to put a good face on the situation. He hadn’t really said anything that anyone could disagree with. It was more in the nature of a “let’s keep our eyes on the prize” message. But, at the same time, he cursed himself. An idiotic slip at precisely the wrong time. The question was what to do now. Keep a low profile, wait it out? Or head into the office of David Lister, head of the Major Crimes Group, and face the music?
Sure. Lister had always demonstrated a fondness for Rick, hadn’t he? The younger man couldn’t quite call the older one a mentor. Dave was too gruff a presence for that. Lister rode herd over the dozen-plus junior ADAs in the MCG like a bullwhacker driving a wagon team. He didn’t dole out sugar cubes to his mules very often.
Just as Stills was about to force himself to walk down the hall to the senior ADA’s office, one of the staff underlings stuck his head in the doorway, said, “Lister wants you,” and disappeared. Hightower and Reifsteck busied themselves at their desks. With dread in his step, Stills left his own office and approached his boss’s open door.
“You like monkeys?” was the first thing Lister said to him.
4
The Odalon Animal Sanctuary was located in the rugged Santa Monica foothills to the south and west of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. The thousand-acre, hatchet-shaped property aimed its blade toward the mountains and, across them, the thickly populated city.
Channeled along the foothill highways and the interstates, L.A.’s rampant development flowed around Odalon like a river current around a stone outcropping. In the general vicinity, that sprawl was epitomized by Westlake, Thousand Oaks, and Calabasas—upscale communities that fed off the Ventura Freeway. To the south of the sanctuary, approached through a maze of parched canyons, lay the golden shores of Malibu, among the priciest stretches of real estate on earth.
Heading out toward Odalon from the Malibu Civic Center, driving north into the foothills, Detective Investigator Layla Remington entered a stark, blackened landscape. Patchy bits of straw-colored rye grass had somehow managed to duck beneath the recent sweep of wildfires, but for the rest, the hills looked dirty and charred.
Los Angeles County could boast some ten million souls, a sprawling metropolis unequaled anywhere else in America, seventy miles of gorgeous Pacific coastline, but also, in the western half of its four and three-quarter thousand square miles, a realm of arid, unforgiving mountains. The Tinderlands, folks called them, for their tendency to go up in smoke.
Ah, yes, come all you music producers, car-dealership owners, and fast-food franchise moguls, all you privileged souls with a few million in credit available to you, erect your dream home in the starkly beautiful foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, peaceful, far from the rat-race sprawl of the city to the east, a wild paradise that will have you living the Southern California dream.
Until the fires come.
Remington passed the same intersection where she had been posted on traffic duty just hours before. According to news reports, firefighting crews managed to have the Lost Hills blaze eighty-five percent contained. With detours and the circuitous canyon roads, getting to the Odalon Sanctuary from Malibu cost her almost an hour.
&n
bsp; She drove a rattletrap Ford SUV that the D.A.’s office had assigned her. It was over a decade old and showed it, its body dinged and dented, its interior threadbare. Remington loved the truck because it was hers alone. The Ford Explorer was a singleton or a loosie in police jargon, a vehicle assigned to a single officer, as opposed to a cruiser used by a two-partner team. Locally, LAPD cops called such loner patrol vehicles U-boats.
She had always marveled at old-codger police partners who had been paired up for eight, ten, even twenty years. Cop partners, she thought, could be defined as two men with guns getting on each other’s nerves. She preferred to work solo. Then again, she didn’t have much of a choice. Owing to budget cuts, the staff at the Malibu D.A.’s office had been decimated.
Officially, Layla Remington was a deputy detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. She was a woman who could easily be overlooked, especially amid the snap and dazzle of celebrity-heavy L.A. For the past year she had been detailed to various offices of the county district attorney. She worked with prosecutors, conducting interviews, developing cases, making sure evidence was in order. The small Malibu satellite office of the L.A. County D.A. suited her well.
Remington pulled into a small unpaved lot off Trappe Ranch Road. The Odalon Animal Sanctuary. A chain-link fence ran along the northern border of the property, part of it lying sagging and torn where the hotshot fire crews had busted trucks and dozers through in their battle against the blaze.
No signage, nothing to mark the place, just the pull-off, the small lot, and a gated, single-lane dirt track running up the slope to the south. The hillside above had been scorched black and was marked by stumps of burned pines.
The sheriff’s department had indicated that a uniformed officer would be present, but there were no other vehicles around. Remington crossed the lot and approached the dirt road. She proceeded on foot into the sanctuary, entering a birdless quiet, the damped-down, dispirited feel of a landscape after a forest fire, the stench of smoke like a pall. Far off in the hills to the north, a chain saw buzzed.
Forget any crime-scene integrity around the immediate vicinity. Tire tracks from the firefighters scribbled over every inch of the ground. Balancing herself, she climbed over a swaying, downed chain-link gate and headed up the black, ash-dusted road. Burned-out manzanita and live oak stood on both sides. The torched pines were farther up, covering the ridgelines. Over a low rise she encountered a collection of gutted sheds and outbuildings. Remington stopped and focused.
A twelve-foot fence, braced with poles of galvanized steel every twenty feet, enclosed an expansive, acre-size yard. An electrified wire topped out the chain-link. The wildfire had passed through the scrubby brush into the yard, burning it flat.
A series of small, humpbacked mounds punctuated the enclosure. Remington counted five or six bodies among the burned-out trees on the far side. It was hard to tell exactly how many from the distance. The rest were distributed across the open, flat middle of the yard, inert dark smudges on the blackened earth.
She passed along the fence, heading toward the outbuildings.
Earlier at the D.A.’s satellite office in Malibu, sheriff’s dispatch had informed her that the vics weren’t human. Fire teams working near the animal sanctuary, including Denny Hamilton’s Wooly Mammoths, had reported thirteen dead chimpanzees. No humans meant no homicide. The chimps were technically someone’s property, which is why the case would reasonably fall to Property Crimes, instead of landing with detectives at the homicide division. Her investigation on behalf of the D.A.’s office would sort out what manner of crime might be prosecuted.
“I’m glad you caught it and not us,” sheriff’s deputy Johnny Velske had said to Remington before she went out. There was always a friendly rivalry between the sheriff’s deputies and the D.A.’s staff. They were housed in the same building. The deputies considered themselves the real police in the neighborhood. They brought in the most action, nailing speeders on the PCH to the tune of a million dollars in fines per year.
“This is a big one for you, Layla,” Velske had said. “You come back, you can tell us all what burned monkey flesh smells like.”
“They’re not monkeys,” Remington had told him. “They’re apes.”
—
The flames had been especially intense in the grove of trees along the fence on the eastern side of the yard. Remington knelt in the fine, granular dirt beside two blackened bodies, a large and a small one.
The bigger adult’s back, curled snail-like around the tinier form, had charred in a crisscross pattern, the flesh drawing in until the bones of the spine lay exposed. “Alligatored,” the arson guys called the crosshatched configuration. Some animal predation had hit the chimpanzee’s corpse, probably crows, but the yard was empty of birds and silent now.
Mother and child, Remington decided. Had to be. The way she’d bent protectively around the little one in the last seconds. The entry wound on the right side of the dorsal cavity, the bullet’s path centimeters away from the heart but put through the lung.
A high-velocity round, in the back, probably an assault rifle. Prior to the burn, Remington thought.
Trap, shoot, torch. Every killer’s favorite m.o.
Another victim lay nearby, the skull crushed with a bullet track.
The shooter knew what he was doing.
What an unholy mess, Remington thought.
She stared off, taking in the whole yard. Two competing sensations—the chilling silence after a massacre, and an opposing thought that the victims were, at least, not human. Making it both more awful and undeniably less so at the same time.
Remington asked herself what she would do if the bodies in the yard were members of her own species, if she were indeed investigating the scene of a multiple-victim homicide.
A chain of circumstances had yanked Remington out of patrol and put her behind a gold shield on the county D.A.’s investigation detail. What she really wanted, what she hungered for, was the sheriff’s murder squad. Thirteen dead apes represented a good enough dry run. Didn’t they use chimps as a substitute for humans in medical experiments? Hadn’t they sent a chimpanzee into space?
You want to be a homicide dick, she counseled herself, you should act like one. First step?
Secure the scene.
The scene, as far as Remington could tell, was secure.
Next?
She had been training for this in her mind for quite some while now.
Develop a workable chronology.
Remington mulled over a T.O.D. estimate. Time of death might be different for these particular animals. She wasn’t sure if they would rigor up the way humans did. She had heard, in fact, that fire melted the stiffness of rigor mortis right out of people.
Sometime in the last twenty-four would be a preliminary guess at a T.O.D. But a guess it was—there was always plenty of wiggle room in T.O.D. calculations. Even highly trained forensic minds were ragingly imprecise. The best they could do was termed a “cable-guy estimate”: sometime between 10 a.m. and 2, an inexact range like that.
The blip of a siren sounded from farther up the slope. A sheriff’s cruiser maneuvered slowly down the dirt track toward her, coming from deeper within the sanctuary grounds. The deputies had evidently arrived before her and had driven directly onto the property.
The cruiser stopped twenty yards away from the fenced-in yard. Two deputies emerged from it. Both wore the dun-colored uniforms of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
“Hey, yo!” one called out. Their footfalls sent up small puffs of red-black dust as they approached. Remington recognized one of them as a senior patrol deputy named Bart Carroll.
“What the hell?” Remington said. “You know this is a crime scene, right? Get your damned ride out of here. You should have left it down by the road.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Carroll said, eyeballing her. He exchanged a covert glance with his partner. Remington couldn’t read the look, but it felt like a jud
gment. She had put on weight lately, and was shy about it.
Deputy Bart Carroll was at least forty. His wingman was only a little less ancient, which qualified them both as elderly in the eyes of the twenty-eight-year-old detective. On paper, at least, Detective Remington was lead officer at the scene. But a younger woman in command of older men was always a ticklish situation. She had learned to handle with care the egos of male deputies.
A year ago, her advancement from patrol to deputy investigator had propelled her over a majority of the force. Any quick rise by a woman was suspect within the department, attributable not to merit but to affirmative action. In the face of such distrust, Remington felt the wise course was simply to keep her head down and go about her work.
“We’ve put the call in for more personnel,” Carroll said. “They’re all out on fire duty. CAU told us they’d be here by now.”
“I need you in the lot next to the highway,” Remington told Carroll’s partner, whose ID tag read “Brunt.” “I don’t want anyone else driving up here.” The forensic techs in the Crime Analysis Unit would want to bring their truck. She told Brunt to ask them to proceed to the scene as she had, on foot.
Deputy Brunt moved off toward the patrol cruiser. Remington and Carroll watched as he pulled down past the yard, the vehicle rocking with the bumps in the terrain.
“One more set of tire tracks to sort out,” Remington said.
She regretted her sharp tone. The scene had already been thoroughly trampled by the fire crews. The whole area was remote and had been pretty well de-peopled by the wildfire, so there wasn’t much danger of sightseers spoiling evidence. CAU wouldn’t get much of anything anyway.
“Anybody work here?” she asked Carroll. “Have we got sanctuary staff around?”
“Up the way a couple hundred yards,” the deputy said.
The single-lane road they followed from the yard crested a hill and then dipped briefly downward. A green-painted cinder-block building came into view. Next to it, in the dark dust beside the wheel ruts, squatted the figure of a man.