by Gil Reavill
She got out her cellphone. Cell service had taken a hit since the Lost Hills fire blew up several of the phone towers in the area. But, even with no coverage, Remington could still use a preloaded app featuring topos of the whole county in 7.5-minute, 1:24,000 quadrangles.
The topographical image on her screen gave up little data. The area immediately adjacent to Odalon was empty, an undeveloped expanse of canyon country that ran along a north-northwest axis for almost five miles, all the way to the boundary of a housing development off the 101 Freeway. A single fire road snaked into the area and dead-ended a half mile away, over the crest and out of sight of the sanctuary in the draw below. Any penetration from that direction had to be difficult.
Military, yes. And a particular kind of military, someone trained in rugged terrain. Ranger? SEAL? Special Forces? The narrative of the night slowly coalesced in her mind, full of gaps and shadows. Some bad guy had been determined to eliminate the sanctuary apes.
Remington had read somewhere that intelligence could be measured by the relative inability to be surprised. She judged herself pretty idiotic when she practically leaped out of her skin upon seeing a human figure watching her from the burned-out expanse of brush beyond the fence.
He wore a work jumpsuit, originally red but so washed-out that it looked pink. A battered hard hat rested on his head, but Remington could see close-cropped steel-gray hair beneath it. He had a face like the bottom of a well-worn shoe.
She raised her arm in uncertain greeting. The spell was broken as he stepped forward to the edge of the yard.
“Hey,” Remington said. “Sorry, but you startled me a little. I didn’t think anyone was up here. Where’re you from?”
“Burn boss,” the jumpsuit guy said.
Yes, of course. There were liable to be all sorts of fire personnel still in the area, assessing damage, looking for flare-ups.
“Your team from this area?”
“Arizona,” said the burn boss.
“Wow, all the way up here.” Remington knew that wildfires often brought interagency crews from a wide area, counties and even states away. “Hey, do you know the Wooly Mammoths, Denny Hamilton, those guys?”
The burn boss didn’t answer. She noticed that he gazed across at the yard full of dead chimpanzees.
“They didn’t die in the wildfire,” the guy said.
“Well, as of right now we’re treating this as the scene of a crime,” Remington said. “I’m an investigator from the county D.A.’s office down in Malibu. You boys tore up this turf pretty thoroughly last night, brought your rigs in here, made my job pretty hard.”
“They were shot, weren’t they?” The burn boss gestured with a meaty hand toward the bodies scattered across the yard.
“This was an animal sanctuary,” Layla said, for some reason feeling unwilling to let the man know more than he could take in just by looking.
The burn boss’s steel hard hat teetered back and forth in a nod. “You’re an investigator. Are you going to investigate?”
“I wonder if you could help spread the word among the burn teams that we’ve got an active crime scene up here and we’d appreciate it if you could give us some time to work.”
Without rolling your dozers through here again, she meant, destroying every last little bit of evidence that hadn’t been burned, chewed up, and plowed under the night before. “I’m Detective Layla Remington,” she added.
She expected the guy to reciprocate by identifying himself. Instead, he turned around and strode away through the fire-ravaged landscape. He disappeared down an ashy, still smoking gully to the east of the yard, leaving Remington to wonder if he had really been there at all.
She wanted to call after him, but at that moment her phone vibrated with an incoming call. At last, cell coverage had been restored. On the line was Ruben Ibanez, a forensics technician with the Crime Analysis Unit.
“Yeah, I’m up here at the Odalon Animal Sanctuary,” Remington said, in response to Ibanez’s dutiful “What’s your twenty?” question. “I’m waiting on a team. You got one coming?”
The connection wasn’t good. Ibanez’s voice kept cutting out. But the gist of his call was that Remington shouldn’t be expecting a CAU detail to visit anytime soon.
“They’re thinking of sending a front-loader or a truck,” Ibanez told her.
“What?”
“Dispatch…administration…bury them there.”
“I’m not hearing you right,” Remington said. “I want these animals fully processed.”
“Animal Control and Property Crimes are batting it back and forth,” Ibanez said, his voice suddenly coming in clearly. “Forensic processing would be too expensive is what they’re saying up in administration. Budget constraints.”
“Somebody took these guys out with a high-powered rifle,” Remington insisted. “That doesn’t interest anybody?”
“It isn’t me, Remington. I’m just the one telling you.”
Layla fumed. She looked across the yard. The bodies of the chimps, she knew, would soon enough be too ripe for processing. No one wanted to deal with them. No one cared.
“Get Jenny Calderone to call me, okay?” Jennifer Calderone was Ibanez’s superior at the sheriff’s Santa Monica CAU. “Ruben? Hey, Ruben, are you there?”
The line had gone dead.
The desolation of the scene, the dead apes dotting the yard, and the visit from the taciturn burn boss served to depress Remington. She had an impulse to walk away. Yeah, let Animal Control handle it, send a front-loader, dump them all in a common grave. But, for pity’s sake, something had gone down here. Maybe it was all relatively innocent, as Deputy Carroll had suggested. Mercy killing to keep the animals from roasting alive. It didn’t feel like that to Layla, though.
She went back down to Trappe Ranch Road, where she found her deputies aggressively goldbricking. They straightened up hastily when they saw her coming.
“Hey, Carroll,” she called out. “Do you carry body bags?”
—
Malibu’s late-morning sun had spread its yellow fantail across the Pacific by the time Remington returned to the office. Her cargo worried her. It wasn’t every day that she drove around with thirteen dead chimpanzees in the back of her SUV. She needed to find a way to get them processed as soon as possible. It could prove awkward if in its current heavily laden state her U-boat-as-ape-hearse was in violation of some obscure statute. She was well aware that there were all sorts of laws regulating the transporting of human remains, but felt unsure whether similar laws existed for dead animals.
She halted as soon as she entered her workplace, which was normally deserted this time of day. Gosch was out. But seated at a desk in the inner office, tilted back in his chair and staring off into space, was ADA Rick Stills.
Though the two of them had had a couple of work encounters over the past years, she knew Stills more by reputation. He was one of the slick, handsome, and ambitious assistant district attorneys in the powerful coterie that made up the Major Crimes Group. He’d be working Ro-Co-Co, Remington felt sure. Was there some local Malibu angle to the Hollywood Hills murder case?
Remington passed through the outer office and rapped on the door frame of the inner one. Stills looked over at her, uncocked his tilted chair, and gave her a flashing smile with no hint of recognition in it.
Stills didn’t remember her. Of course not. Such a fabulous life as his had no room for a mouse like her.
“Hey,” he said, a noncommittal greeting.
“Detective Investigator Layla Remington,” she said.
“Of course,” Stills said, finally rising from his chair and giving her a wave that stood in place of a handshake. “I was just getting myself familiar.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
“Not right now,” Stills answered. “I’ve been going through the pendings, and I’ll be able to task you soon. I know the Mills case, in particular, that’s going to be adjudicating in the next few weeks.”
“No, no,” Stills said. “As of this morning the Malibu office is possessed of its very own assistant district attorney. Which would be me.”
He gave her his brilliant smile once more, adding, “For the time being, at least, it looks as though we’re stuck with each other.”
Remington wondered what particular screwup had brought Stills to this end. In the eyes of the world, Malibu was a prized destination, a golden habitat unattainable by all but the most privileged citizens. But for the staff of the Los Angeles District Attorney the Malibu satellite office was a dead end. It hadn’t even been assigned a dedicated ADA for the past three months. Now star prospect Rick Stills filled the slot. How the mighty had fallen.
It occurred to Remington to ask Stills if he recalled working with her in the past, on a high-profile drug case that had pleaded out, and on a messy eviction proceeding targeting a divorced husband who refused to vacate the mansion of his movie-producer ex. The words “You really don’t remember me, do you?” died in her mouth.
Why were the genes for killer looks and arrogance so closely linked on the human chromosome?
“You were on the job?” Stills asked her, the phrase “on the job” being cop shorthand for “doing police work.”
“Yeah,” Remington said, distracted by the man’s eyes. They were a peculiar color of stonewashed blue, like faded denim.
“On?”
“On?” Remington repeated stupidly after him.
“What case?”
“Oh!” she said. “Oh, you know, the Odalon thing.”
He didn’t know. His face showed that he was drawing a blank. “The animal sanctuary,” she said. “Thirteen dead chimpanzees.”
Stills threw up his hands. “Those goddamned monkeys!” he exclaimed.
“Apes,” Remington said automatically, and immediately regretted it. The subject was evidently a sore one for him.
“I can’t tell you—this thing, I don’t want it dogging me. What the hell went on up there?”
“The victims were killed with what looks like rounds from a high-powered rifle.”
“Well, I knew that—I mean, the initial reports indicated something like shot first, then burned by the fire. So tell me something new.”
“There’s a survivor,” Remington said.
“But he’s not talking,” Stills said, a sarcastic tone to his voice.
“He’s at a veterinarian’s,” Remington said.
“We’re going to lay this off on Animal Control, or a Property Crimes detail, depending on ownership issues,” Stills said. “Listen—”
He stopped, groping for her name.
“Remington, sir,” Remington said.
“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ It makes me feel old,” Stills said. “Remington? Have we worked together before?”
“Not that I recall,” Remington said.
“Listen, I want this case off my plate as soon as possible. I don’t care what happens or what’s the final disposition—I just don’t want to hear about it, all right?”
“You want to take a look at the victims?”
“What did I just say?” Stills growled. Then he changed his tone, a slow realization coming to him. “Are you asking me to ride up the canyon with you? No, don’t tell me—where are the corpora now? Remington?”
“I removed them from the scene, sir,” she said.
“You had them take…you had the vics taken…where? Please don’t tell me—”
“Come look,” said Remington, and she headed out of the office.
6
Remington didn’t have to check to see if the newly arrived ADA, the highly successful, bone-crunchingly aggressive, and very dynamic Rick Stills, was following her. She knew that he was, since he was calling out as she headed to the parking lot, saying her name mostly, but also “Please stop,” and “Don’t.”
“You have them in your truck?” Stills said as they approached Remington’s U-boat. “Is this an official county vehicle, Detective Investigator?”
She swung open the back hatch. The half-dozen gray, 36-by 90-inch TCP-CF3 waffle bags—the county sheriff’s department purchased them by the gross—looked bulky, since some of them held two chimp bodies each.
“No, no, no,” Stills said. “This was very poorly conceived, Detective Investigator Remington.” Evidently, when he was upset ADA Stills tended to employ full job titles.
“I was going to take them down to County General,” Remington said. The L.A. County Department of the Coroner was located on the grounds of Los Angeles County General Hospital, near the sheriff’s department headquarters and the Metropolitan Detention Center, where the I-5 crossed the I-10 south of downtown.
“The coroner—Dr. Gladney—the coroner’s office takes human remains.” Stills stared at the stacked-up body bags in the U-boat’s back bay. “Human remains, Remington, human. These animals are the wrong species.”
“Oh, I reached out to the coroner’s office,” Remington said cheerfully. “I didn’t talk to Dr. Gladney himself but to one of his assistants. She said they have an empty refrigerator truck parked outside in the lot beside the morgue. I told her that’d be perfect. They’re quite pumped about this down there. They said it would be a change of pace from the usual for them—they’d bring in a forensic veterinarian, make a party out of it.”
“There is no such thing as a forensic veterinarian,” Stills said, but he looked uncertain.
“Malibu is on fire. These animals were cooked in a wildfire.”
“Oh, L.A. is always on fire somewhere or other,” Stills said.
Remington tugged down the heavy-duty No. 9 zipper on one of the bags. The head of an adult chimpanzee flopped out. The wildfire had burned off all the facial hair, so the ape’s expression—viewed upside down, as though the head were pitched back in a posture of play or laughter—seemed like that of a bald, elderly human.
Wafting out of the body bag, also, was the faint smell of decay. “Damn, I really have to get these guys downtown and into a cooler,” Remington said.
Stills was staring. Remington had meant just to rub his face in it a bit, nothing more. But something passed between the two of them, a detective and her district attorney boss, standing there in the Civic Center parking lot bathed by the Malibu sunshine.
“He looks like my grandfather.” Stills bent his head to try to see the animal right side up.
Well, at least he didn’t vomit, Remington thought. It was a particular delight of all sheriff’s deputies, detectives, and investigators to expose the young ADAs on the legal staff to the gorier aspects of policing. Usually, evidence photos did the trick. It was rare that anyone had an actual body to show them.
Stills resurfaced as if from a deep dive. “Okay,” he said. “Yes, well.”
“Yes, well,” Remington repeated after him. She tucked the ape’s head back inside and rezipped the body bag.
“I guess—well, carry on,” Stills said. “I’ll just be back in the office and…” He trailed off.
“We should talk,” Remington said.
“Yes! We should!” Stills said, maybe a little too chirpily. “We have cases pending, don’t we?”
“We do,” Remington said. “Welcome to the Malibu satellite office, sir.”
—
Working all her assignments required a bit of juggling. At the Department of the Coroner downtown, the apes caused a little stir among the junior pathologists, who promised to arrange autopsies within a few days. But Remington wound up having to unload the dead herself, transferring the body bags one at a time to a small, secondhand meat truck, the logo of its former owner (“Golden State Provisions”) still visible on its side panels. The bags were unwieldy, displaying the curious dead-weight quality of corpses everywhere, which made one swear that a ninety-pound body, say, was at least twice that heavy.
The remainder of her afternoon Remington spent at sheriff’s headquarte
rs sorting out the case against a burglary defendant who was already in the system, a repeat offender named Richard Cranston Whalen, who was currently residing in a cell at Metro. She arranged interviews for sheriff’s deputies the next day with some of the burglarized homeowners, all of whom were residents of area housing developments.
Then, as the shadows went long with the sun dropping below the rim of the Pacific, she tracked Cynthia Iracane, the Odalon caretaker, to the All-Pets Animal Clinic.
The veterinarian’s offices stood a quarter of a mile off the beach, at the foot of Topanga Canyon. Sunset Boulevard, if one followed its course all the way west, finally stuttered to a stop there, the great avenue of broken dreams ending not with a bang but a whimper. The animal clinic shared a strip mall with a Jack in the Box, an Argentinean steak house, and a Chevron station, set off by a twenty-foot strip of lawn and a half-dozen date palms, all of them shaggy with untrimmed bark. The yard in front of the vet’s looked untended, marked too many times by too many dogs.
Approaching as the evening fell, Remington found the front door of All-Pets locked. Inside, she saw an aquarium with a collection of stunned, lazy angelfish. There was a table spread with magazines: Cat Fancy, Modern Dog, K9. She used her U-boat keys to rap on the smoked glass of the door, did it a couple of times before light spilled from an inner room and a thirtysomething guy in scrubs, with long black hair and a pale face, rolled out of a hallway on a desk chair.
Remington took out her badge wallet and flopped it open, pressing it against the glass. Scrubs rose from his chair, crossed the darkened lobby, and unlocked the front door with a key on a retractable chain that he wore at his waist.
“Sheriff’s department,” Layla said. “I’m an investigator with the district attorney.”
“I’m Osi.”
“Do you have someone here—a Cynthia Iracane, Cindy?”
“Oh, yeah, Angle,” Osi said.