by Gil Reavill
“This guy,” Carroll said. “He just showed up twenty minutes ago. One of the caretakers here, name of Ian Terry, an African, hard to understand his accent. He and I were about to head down—”
“Okay, okay.” Remington cut off the uniform’s chatter, preferring to get her information straight from the source.
As they approached, the caretaker rose unsteadily to his feet. Remington introduced herself as a detective investigator.
“Ian Terry.” The caretaker pushed his INS green card at her. He looked gaunt, his lean frame draped in a T-shirt and canvas overalls. Terry’s pleasant, open face betrayed nervousness. Of late, anyone with an accent—anyone with doubtful citizenship status—tended to be wary around the authorities. Welcome to America, folks, the land of the free and the home of Homeland Security.
Terry told Remington that he had come over to the States from “Africa, East Africa, Rwanda.” He said it all qualified like that, like a branch diagram. Probably used to Americans not knowing where the hell Rwanda was.
“Why are you here?” Remington asked.
“I work at this place for two, three months now. Helping care for the animals.”
“No, I mean why were you the only one who stayed with the wildfire coming?”
“I didn’t,” Terry said.
The day before, he told her, the scene around the sanctuary had turned chaotic. They had been trying to bring in a cattle truck to take the animals out. The sanctuary ordered a leased semitrailer, but the vehicle broke down on the highway before it ever got there.
“Yesterday, in the evening, it began to feel like a disaster,” Terry said. His accent hovered somewhere between British and French, but Remington could understand him well enough.
“Are you the only staff member here now?” she asked.
“We cleared out since the fire. I’m back first. I called them—they’re coming, too.”
Deputy Carroll said, “The barns, office, and living quarters are back over this ridge a quarter mile. All pretty much burned out.”
“We were supposed to evacuate together,” Terry said.
“Who is ‘we,’ Mr. Terry?” Remington asked.
“Us, the staff and the animals. Cindy Iracane—Cynthia—she’s the boss. She helps take care of the chimps. Could you call me Ian?”
Remington had him list the sanctuary staff, three of whom lived on-site. She wrote the names down.
“Who owns the place, Ian?”
“A foundation. An animal-welfare charity.”
“And you have a residence on the grounds?”
“I have an old van that I converted, used to be a school bus. But I got out, too. I had to. We stayed until the last minute, maybe around just before midnight. Cindy was organizing the evacuation. She was tracking the Lost Hills fire, and it didn’t seem we were going to get hit. It was all to the east and north. But we had procedures, to be safe. This little fire here just came too quick.”
“Who found the bodies of the animals back there?”
“We did, when we came down after we heard the gunshots. I saw that Jeepers and Monk and them were dead.” He gazed over the hills, a dark look of grief crossing his face.
“You didn’t call it in? Our records show that a fire-team captain reported finding the scene.”
Terry shook his head. “That was what was bad. About nine o’clock, the fire took away a cell tower over in Calabasas. We had no service—we couldn’t call nobody. No cellphones made it really scary.”
He gestured back toward the yard.
“I just…” He choked off a sob. “They were all my friends.”
Remington stepped away to give him a moment.
“You know what I think?” Carroll said.
Remington didn’t reply, her eyes passing over the ground on the opposite side of the dirt track from the blockhouse, where the slope rose to the blacked-out hills.
“You want to know what I think?” Carroll said, insistent. “I think you ought to cut bait and return to Malibu. I’ll wait around for the CAU techs, send ’em packing when they show, and we can dump this whole thing into the lap of Animal Control, or the ASPCA, or whoever cleans up dead monkeys.”
“Apes,” Remington said absently.
She left the deputy and headed down the rutted track twenty yards, wanting to check something she had noticed on the way up. Some sort of discarded junk by the side of the road. She stopped and crouched next to an object that was half buried in the scorched dirt. She poked it loose using a pen she took from her pocket.
A rifle. Its wooden stock had been burned away to leave only a charred remnant, plus the metalworks—the blued-steel trigger mechanism, the barrel. A bolt-action .270, or a thirty-aught-six, it looked like.
“Mr. Terry?” she called. “Ian?”
Carroll came back down the road with the caretaker. Remington indicated the half-incinerated weapon. “Recognize it?”
Ian Terry moved to pick it up, but Remington stopped him.
“It’s the sanctuary gun,” Terry told her. “I think that’s it, anyway. We keep it for coyotes, when they bother the animals.”
“Why would it be lying here in the dirt?”
“I don’t know,” Terry said.
Remington wondered about this particular finger of the larger Lost Hills wildfire, looking up-canyon to try to read what had happened the night before: an inferno whipped by twisting, changeable fall winds, screaming down upon an obscure little patch of the Los Angeles County outback.
“You want me to call it?” Carroll asked.
Remington sighed. “Go ahead,” she said, again moving off from Terry to stand a distance away with Deputy Carroll.
“Okay. Last staff members evacuate at around, say, twenty-three hundred. They have to leave, they don’t want to, they still have hopes for a truck to come to save the monkeys. But when you see a wildfire crown along a ridgeline a quarter mile off, something happens to your mind. Forget about the animals, forget about women and children first, every man for himself, everybody skedaddles.”
“All right,” Remington said. She could see where the deputy was going.
“But one of the caretakers has second thoughts. The monkeys are his pals, he feels bad, he comes back. With me?”
“Sure,” Remington said.
“Takes the zoo’s coyote gun, pop-pop-pop thirteen times, probably crying his eyes out as he does it. Puts the whole herd out of its misery. You know, mercy-killing them before they all burned to death. Okay?”
Well, yes. A mercy killing. She could understand how Carroll might see it like that. A damned shame, but stuff happens. Every sign at the scene pointed in one direction.
“I say the department should forget this,” Carroll said again. “Let Animal Control handle it.”
“That’d be one way to go,” Remington said.
The patrol deputy turned back to the weepy caretaker. “I’m sorry for your loss. We’ll see about sending someone out here from county services.”
“You don’t want to wait and talk to Cindy?” Ian Terry asked.
“I think we’ve got all we need,” Carroll said. “Have her contact the sheriff’s department, tell her to ask for Detective Remington at the district attorney’s office in Malibu, and we’ll follow up.”
Remington took out her badge wallet and gave one of her cards to Terry. “If you see Ms. Iracane before I do, ask her to call me.”
She didn’t bother to correct the flaw in the deputy’s “mercy killing” reasoning.
Remington saw no floodlights posted around the perimeter of the yard that might have illuminated the scene. There had been no moon the night before, and even if there were one, the smoke from the wildfires would have obscured it.
Which meant that the shooter conducted his deadly sniper campaign in pitch-blackness. A feat that an experienced marksman could easily have accomplished, but only with the aid of some sort of night-vision equipment—a Ghost Hunter scope, thermal-imaging goggles, some expensive, extravagant h
igh-tech gizmo like that.
None of which had been recovered with the sanctuary rifle.
Such enhanced-vision devices were widely available. They could be purchased by anyone, at a local Walmart or through sportsmen catalogs. But, in reality, night-vision equipment usually meant one thing.
Military. Retired or otherwise.
“Where do you think Ms. Iracane might be right now?” Remington asked Ian Terry.
“She took the young one back to our vet in town,” Ian said. “It’s a place called All-Pets Clinic.”
“The young one?”
“Angle. His name is Angle. He’s the survivor.”
5
The Malibu satellite office of the L.A. County District Attorney was located in the government administrative building on Civic Center Way, just up from the Malibu public library and across the Pacific Coast Highway from a surfboard shop.
Previous to his encounter with Dave Lister that morning, Rick Stills had only a dim awareness that the county actually kept a satellite office in Malibu. Somehow the reputation of the beach town didn’t embrace such mundane entities as law courts. On past visits, Stills remembered being vaguely surprised that a supermarket existed in the community. The whole concept of groceries seemed too banal for the town’s chichi reputation.
Malibu residents (Malibuvians? Malibuites?) lived within a bulletproof bubble of wealth and pleasure. They wouldn’t dream of relying on the public constabulary. Instead, they hired their own private security services. Checking out his new posting, Stills took a quick look at the Malibu crime stats. No homicides within the past five years, only two over the course of the past decade.
What, precisely, were the duties of an assistant district attorney assigned to the Malibu office? What occupied his time? Stills couldn’t imagine. Dealing with a lot of First World problems, he supposed. Policing paparazzi, maybe, corralling stalkers, defending from burglar barbarians the wall safes and Aladdin caves of the rich and famous. Exterminating coyotes that threatened to eat Fluffy.
He didn’t really know. Of course, as the world had just seen, some fifteen miles away from Malibu, in a movie star’s compound in the Hollywood Hills, privileged people sometimes murdered each other just like plain ordinary folks. He could always hope.
Driving out from downtown—traffic on the 10 Freeway proved predictably hellish—Stills visualized his career trajectory. What had been a smoothly graphed line rising to the vertical now featured a jagged dip. He had to turn off the radio and stay away from the Internet, since every single media outlet was saturated with news of the Donald Coll–Ross Murphy murder. Even now, in the Major Crimes office downtown, they were parceling out assignments and putting together their team. And he was out of it! Shunted aside.
“I just fielded a call from an L.A. Times reporter,” Dave Lister had informed him that morning. Some rat bastard in the Major Crimes Group had leaked Stills’s email memo. Jim Romenesko threw it up on his blog. In the flurry of celebrity-murder coverage, a lonely dissenting voice was worth a mention, especially seeing as it came from an up-and-coming star in the county D.A.’s office.
“We’re going to shift you out to the Malibu satellite for a few months,” Lister had told him. “They need you there. This thing at the wildlife sanctuary requires some attention.”
“No, boss, really—” Stills had begun, desperate to plead his case.
Lister had held up his hand, silencing Stills before he got started. The whole administration, from the D.A. on down, was inordinately thin-skinned about criticism, no matter how well-meaning. There was an election coming up. How much and in what ways the office was in thrall to the entertainment industry had been a sensitive subject ever since Hollywood’s Golden Age. Back then, the major movie studios owned the district attorney and had the whole Los Angeles court system in their pockets.
An empty space was open in the parking lot behind the Malibu administrative building. A blue-and-white sign read reserved for l.a.c.d.a. Right next to it was a space designated for the town sewer commissioner. In these parts, Stills noticed, the sewer commissioner drove a Mercedes.
He took the reserved space and climbed out of the Lincoln sedan that he himself leased. He stood for a moment in the sea-breeze sunshine. Well, there was that. “The ’Bu, as locals called it, did have its undeniable charms.
Then the faint tang of wood smoke drifted down from the wildfire-blasted canyons. Stills glanced up toward the parched gray slopes that loomed over the highway to the north and east. He imagined himself with some sort of super X-ray vision that could reach over the foothills to the Mulholland Drive crime scene that the whole world was now fixated on. It was where he wanted to be, his proper place, a case where he could excel. In his imagination, the Hollywood Hills compound, crowded with cops and forensic techs and besieged by reporters, seemed bathed in golden light.
Meanwhile, he was marooned here in Malibu.
The D.A.’s quarters in the administrative building—yes, his offices were indeed just down the hall from the sewer commissioner’s—were humble and deserted. Two rooms, three desks total. Stills entered through an unlocked door and placed his briefcase on one of the desks.
“ADA Richard Stills?” A bushy-bearded gent in a plaid shirt and a knit tie, but without a suit jacket, came into the room.
“Rick,” Stills said, offering his hand to shake.
“I’m Randy Gosch, your administrative assistant. You’re in through here,” he added, indicating the next office space.
Gosch led the way, pushing aside stacked file boxes of legal papers as he went. “We haven’t actually had a resident ADA here for a few months. John Bierman has been coming up from the Santa Monica office when the occasion warrants.”
“How often did you need him?” Stills asked. His heart was sinking fast.
“We have—well, I’ll tell you a fun fact about Malibu. It has the distinction of being the most heavily patrolled community in America. We have a one-to-one ratio of private security personnel to local residents, so everyone around here could have their own personal rent-a-cop, if they wanted one, which they do, only they prefer not to have them right in their laps.”
During his info ramble Gosch continued to tidy the space that was intended to be the ADA’s inner sanctum.
“Much of the crime consists of whatever nastiness the citizens do to each other in their own homes. That, and, you know, we have a terrible coyote problem. Look on the lampposts around town and you’ll see a lot of missing-pet posters.”
Jesus, Stills thought, Fluffy is actually really dead and gone.
“New assignments are always so difficult,” Gosch said kindly, in a fussy tone that Stills interpreted as “I am a gay American.”
“I’ll take the call sheets for the last week or so, when you get a chance,” he said. “Just to get myself acclimated.”
“Surely,” Gosch said. “The sheriff’s substation is just around the corner. You’re going to want to meet the deputies. Layla is out up in the foothills, off Trappe Ranch Road somewhere.”
“Laura?”
“Detective Layla Remington. She’s your staff investigator.”
“Investigator, singular,” Stills said. “This office is assigned only one investigator?”
“Well, yes,” Gosch said, reading the disappointment on the ADA’s face. “Sleepy” or “backwater” didn’t begin to describe the office’s atmosphere. The long arm of the law was foreshortened. Layla Remington would be Stills’s woman in the field, his sole subordinate apart from Randy Gosch. It was quite a change from the Major Crimes Group, where Stills had worked with a staff of a dozen detectives.
“Great, thanks,” Stills said. “Just let me get settled in.”
—
Remington trekked back to her vehicle, retrieved a roll of evidence-collection bags, and preserved the half-burned rifle the sanctuary had used to scare off coyotes. She didn’t have a plastic sheath large enough to cover the whole weapon. Careful not to touch the rifle’
s surfaces, she slipped one evidence bag over the butt-end trigger mechanism and one over the muzzle end.
The barrel of the rifle looked to be warped and rendered cockeyed by the 3,000-degree heat of a wildfire burn. Ballistics might not be able to get a test slug out of the gun to compare with the ones Remington hoped would eventually be recovered at the scene, either from the bodies of the slaughtered apes or, if the rounds had penetrated clean through, from the dirt of the yard.
Still thinking that the CAU techs would show up sooner or later, Remington left Carroll with his partner, Brunt, posted at the lower end of the sanctuary property. She had Ian Terry stay with them. Then she hiked back up to the sanctuary yard to attempt to read the story of the previous night.
From the road, the yard extended to the east, ending in an abrupt rise. Along the near side was a stand of trees, trimmed back so that they wouldn’t overhang the fence. The yard had also been cleared on that side, yielding an expanse of dirt and beleaguered weeds, now thoroughly burned over. To the north, the fenced area ran up the slope, to end a football field away at the perimeter chain-link.
She made another round of the dead. She couldn’t be totally sure, and any certainty would have to wait for the crime-analysis guys, but from the trajectory it looked as though the shooter had been to the west of the yard, spraying the space with gunfire in a precise, organized pattern from a single point of origin.
The sanctuary road ran along the eastern edge of the yard. Any easy access would come from that direction. If Ian Terry, say, or another caretaker, was intent on a mission of mercy killing, he would have had to come down from the blockhouse and the residence houses farther up the slope. He’d naturally have used the road.
Why would he work his way around to the west, to the opposite boundary of the yard? To avoid the clump of trees along the eastern side, in order to get a clearer shot? It didn’t make sense.
No, despite the recovery of the coyote rifle, the theory of an outside shooter seemed to fit.
But access from the west Remington read as problematic. The slope was steep there, the ground difficult. Using field glasses, she examined the terrain. All she saw was black char and ashes. Parts of the slope had been chewed up by what looked like a human presence, but the hotshot crews had been through, and she couldn’t read what was what.