by Gil Reavill
Only it wasn’t a scene. It was chaos. Paz Tejeda was part of an h.r.d. team from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, searching the area around a parking garage that had collapsed downhill into an apartment building. A pair of structural engineers were already on-site.
The deputy pointed up the slope. Remington focused her field glasses. She could see nothing but a clutter of mid-size boulders and an immense skid of dirt where a landslide had taken out a section of the hillside.
Tejeda had her cadaver dog with her, a beagle that wore a black vinyl vest with the letters “H.R.D.” and the words “LA County Sheriff’s Department” emblazoned on it. H.R.D., meaning human remains detection.
“We’ve got multiple fatalities in the apartments.” Tejeda gestured toward the dog. “Cindy and I were working our way around back, and all at once she takes off upslope. I called her back, but she wouldn’t break her run. Then she alerted.”
Why call in homicide? Remington wondered. She was fairly new to the murder squad. When the earthquake hit, the whole department was called out on emergency duty. But dispatch said Deputy Tejeda had specifically requested that personnel be detailed from the homicide unit.
“It’s the way Cindy alerted,” Tejeda replied to Remington’s unspoken question. “She’s trained to respond in different ways for different situations. She didn’t sit, she lay down.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’s indicating that she detected decay or decomposition. The bodies from the quake wouldn’t have time to rot yet. She would sit for those. But this one she lay right down for.”
Remington stared off toward the highway. The emergency sirens were constant. Helicopters throbbed overhead, including a big Huey up from Miramar. Malibu had exploded. She was looking at a billion dollars’ worth of destruction. In the midst of all the madness, was she going to take her cue from a trained canine?
She glanced down at Cindy, who was looking up at her handler, eager, stepping in place.
“All right,” Remington said. Tejeda unsnapped the beagle’s leash. Cindy bounded away, straight-arrowing it up the slope.
The barrel, when Remington got to it after a steep, precarious climb, lay ruptured amid a jumble of landslide debris. The detective didn’t need a cadaver dog to identify the sugary stench of death.
Even in the midst of catastrophe, the sun shone on California as if the place remained forever in a state of grace. Somehow, though, the rays didn’t penetrate the darkness of the fifty-five-gallon drum’s interior. Remington unsnapped the small equipment pack she wore on her hip. She took out her Maglite and trained it past the jagged edges of the ripped-open steel.
The body lay curled up within the tight space. If left exposed in a dry environment, a human corpse will slowly retract into a praying posture, head bowed, hands pulled in under the chin, knees bent. Remington tried to tell herself that there was nothing particularly meaningful about it, despite the religious symbolism. It was simply a case of muscles tightening owing to tissue dehydration. But the effect was undeniably spooky.
The beam of her flashlight played across the mummified remains. In the sudden illumination, the platinum swirl of hair lit up like a Clairol ad. Jean Harlow hair, so pale and exquisite that it seemed to give off glints of silver.
Even before Remington saw the necklace, the name occurred to her because of that distinctive, white-blond hair. The girl was famous for it.
Tarin Mistry.
The aspiring actress’s disappearance, more than a decade ago, had triggered a massive search effort, equally massive press coverage, and a derailed homicide prosecution dismissed by the judge for lack of a body. Born Molly Gunion, she had starred in a sleeper indie that had broken huge. Breathless “Mystery of Tarin Mistry” documentaries still cropped up occasionally on cable. It was one of those deaths that wouldn’t die.
A necklace rested against the brown leathery skin of the corpse’s throat. The silver chain displayed a single ornament, a cheapo enameled charm.
The cursive letter “T,” embedded with an opal birthstone.
Every gold badge in California knew that charm. The missing-persons report on Tarin Mistry described the piece in minute detail. People had been searching for it for more than ten years.
Layla Remington had just caught the case of a lifetime.
—
Dixie’s quest began because she overheard a story. Jonathan White told it. He was a year behind her at Scottsdale, Arizona’s, South High School, but Dixie knew him and his brothers through their cousin Cynthy McClellan, who was in her grade.
“He gets a call on the family landline,” Jonathan said. “It turns out to be a birth sister he didn’t even know he had.”
She overheard this as they were all grouped together along “the Wall,” which was how everyone referred to their hangout by the student parking lot. They were the “Wallies,” a synonym around South High for “stoner.” Lunchtime, ciggie time, during a drag of a school day that seemed like it would never end.
“A landline,” Corey Stanton said, and laughed, not getting the point of the story.
“Wait, what?” Dixie said, leaning over toward Jonathan. “Who got a call?”
“Steve Kurth,” Jonathan answered. “You know he’s adopted, right?”
Not everyone knew that Dixie Ann Close had been adopted. But since her seventeenth birthday the previous month, Dixie had been thinking a lot about the fact that the mother and father she knew as her family weren’t her biological parents. Nudging it around in her mind, she wondered what being adopted meant or should mean or didn’t mean.
She had had bouts of such questioning before. She first learned of her status as a child of nine. But her parents were so much the focus to her life back then that the fact that they weren’t blood kin didn’t matter. In the past few years, though, their solid relationship had crumbled. The Close family was going through hard times.
Now here was Jonathan talking about someone else who was adopted.
“So Steve gets the call—he just happens to answer the phone. It’s the most whack thing; he swears he never, ever uses the landline. But he answers it this time, and he hears a strange girl’s voice saying she thinks they might be brother and sister.”
“Shit, I would, like, literally freak fucking out,” said Karen Chupsky.
“I know, right?” Jonathan said.
“I’ve got enough trouble with my own bitch sisters, I don’t need any more,” Chris Zenner said.
Steve Kurth. Which one was he again? Dixie got a vague picture of a boy who had been in her biology class the year before, a little chubs, hung out with the film-club nerds. Played some sort of instrument.
She spoke up. “How’d she find him?” she asked Jonathan.
“The sister? I don’t know. I think she went through all the paperwork hassle, birth certificate—you know, adopted kids have got, like, rights now, you know?”
“Well, if it had been an open adoption, he’d have known he had a sister,” Tamra commented.
“So did they hook up?” Karen Chupsky asked.
“Hook up, like…?” Chris said.
“Eeewww, that’d be gross,” Karen said. “What if you had a sister or brother you didn’t even know about, and you, like, meet them at a job or something, and you, like, started going out and everything with each other.”
Everybody was laughing and talking over each other now. “It’s happened, it’s happened!” Timmy Heller shouted. “I saw it on TLC.”
Dixie felt a blush creeping up on her. Her best friend, Tamra, reached over and gave her arm a squeeze. Nobody who wasn’t adopted could know what it felt like when everybody started going on like this.
But she needed to know. “What happened?” she asked Jonathan.
“Steve and her met at the food court in the Southridge,” Jonathan said, referring to one of Scottdale’s second-tier malls. “At first he didn’t tell his parents.”
“Who aren’t his real parents,” Timmy pointed out.
&nb
sp; Real parents. How Dixie had come to hate that phrase. What did that make Sheila and Jerry Close, the couple who had raised her from infancy? Her “fake” parents? No, they were as real as any could be. It didn’t matter that they weren’t biologically related. For Dixie, the word “mother” always summoned up Sheila, and the word “father” did the same with Jerry. She knew of no others.
Tamra, sensing what her friend was feeling, threw an arm around Dixie.
Nobody was interested anymore; they were all on to something else. They’d sucked the paltry bit of juice from Jonathan’s story, and now the fickle finger of gossip pointed elsewhere. Dixie got it out of Jonathan that Steve Kurth finally did tell his mom and dad about his birth sister and that now the two of them were all about finding their biological parents.
“What if they’re, like, rich?” Jonathan wondered. But his attention wavered. He started talking to Chris about a party up in Cave Creek. “It’s going to be sick.”
That was that. No big deal. But the incident at the Wall stuck with Dixie. She thought about it again before falling asleep that night. Where were her “real” parents? Were they still alive? Could she reach out to them? How would she even start?
Junior year at South High, everybody was deep into college searches and future plans. Dixie was staring at a two-year program at Mesa Community. Her guidance counselor told her that nursing was the way to go.
Now she thought she might have something to do first.
The next morning, Dixie used the get-to-work-and-school rush to drop a bomb on Sheila. “Mom, I’ve been thinking about tracking down my birth parents.”
Jerry Close overheard from the front hall and came to the kitchen doorway.
Dixie detected an extra current of tension pass between her father and mother. She had sensed it before. Was there something wrong about her adoption? Jerry and Sheila had always been prickly about it. Okay, so the topic was a difficult one. But was it more-than-ordinary difficult?
That morning, she escaped the house before they could have one of their serious family discussions. Dixie knew that sooner or later she’d have to confront Jerry and Sheila about the subject. This time she wasn’t going to let them stop her. This time she was going to find out who she really was.
—
The Gorean master took a break from his emergency-service work on the Malibu earthquake. He went grocery shopping and returned to the apartment building on Jane Street with his purchases.
The hallway that led to 3C exhibited the kind of banal environment he preferred. The Sheetrock walls had a knock-down finish. The durable frieze carpet was designed not to show stains. The fluorescent lighting rendered everything in a nicely sick shade of olive-white. He relished such places the way a chameleon favors a green leaf.
The triple locks on 3C’s cast-aluminum door seemed to be the only feature that set it apart from the forty-eight other apartments in the complex. The locks, plus the privacy/security film on the windows. And, yes, another oddity about 3C: all the adjacent apartments, six in all, had been left vacant.
Once inside, the Gorean master set his groceries on the kitchen counter. Recently, he had resolved to treat his body better. No more of the sugar-and-fat junk food on which he had gorged in the past. The paper bag from the local Food Depot spilled over with produce, tomatoes, plums, Romaine lettuce. The bread was whole grain.
He felt a little impatient with himself, since he had often embarked on new healthy diets before, only to see the fruits and vegetables he bought rot in the refrigerator. This time would be different.
The apartment carried over the predictable decorating themes of the hall, with more white drywall, more industrial carpet, more innocuous lighting fixtures. The place looked barely lived in, which made sense, since no one really did. It was just one of the Gorean master’s apartments, one of many scattered around the Valley suburbs of Reseda, Canoga Park, and Woodland Hills, California, all just over the foothills from his Malibu ranch.
Building management, the Gorean master thought, not for the first time, represented a perfect sideline for a man of his interests. He had his fingers in a lot of pies, but among his numerous business perks perhaps the one he ranked most useful was his ability to gain access to empty apartments all across the area’s heavily developed suburban landscape.
This one, for example. Partially visible through the open door of the first bedroom, his current slave was splayed out in a special rig of the master’s own devising. He had not only drawn the plans for it but fabricated it himself. The circular steel hoop had a radius of five feet, suspended within a sturdy frame, which was anchor-bolted to the floor, wall, and ceiling.
The master had fastened his unclothed, blindfolded, and gagged submissive to the steel hoop by means of mink-lined leather cuffs and lightweight aluminum chains. The hoop rotated within the frame on industrial-strength ball bearings, providing all-direction access. In his magnificent, masterful generosity, he had allowed the slave to remain upright when he left for work and shopping, its arms secured at the ten and two o’clock positions, legs at seven and five.
Through his angled view of the bedroom, cut off and limited by the door frame, the master saw that its thin, bony body sagged a bit within the rig. It made no sound. He wondered if it might have fallen into an exhausted sleep. He looked more closely.
Something was wrong.
Disliking the cheap orange ball gags sold in the sex shops, the Gorean master had painstakingly fashioned one himself, using an ivory death’s head originally intended as a custom shift knob for a manual automobile transmission. It wasn’t real ivory, of course, just plastic, but it looked fierce and served its purpose.
Usually, he would hear the thin wheeze of ball-gag-obstructed breath from his slave. He heard nothing.
The squeeze of stress in his chest nearly took his own breath away. Stress stressed him out.
So, okay. No need to get upset. Just breathe. Out of all the activities in the world, what worked to soothe him the most? Why, the same one available right down the hall, behind door number one.
Eat, shower, gear up, then stride in and wake it up with a good, furious twirl of the hoop. Rotate it long enough, fast enough, and it lost all sense of direction, of time—all sense of itself, really. There was no danger it would lose its lunch, since he hadn’t fed it for days.
The master removed his T-shirt as he strode down the hall. He would put on his bulldog harness and his U.S. Marines jock strap. He wanted it to see him in his full Gorean glory when it woke up. But as he passed the bedroom the sagging posture of the slave struck him once again.
Now real panic seized him.
He entered the bedroom, crossed to the hoop, and grabbed the slave by the jaw, pulling its head upward. But the master’s hand jerked away as if he had touched a hot stove.
The skin was cold and clammy, the body limp. The slave was dead.
The Gorean master’s stunned surprise was immediately overwhelmed by rage. She had cheated him, the little bitch! The horror of what had happened stalled out his mind. Somehow, she had gained the upper hand. Somehow, the slave had proved the master.
He had been so careful, so meticulous. What could have gone wrong?
He reached out a trembling hand, extending two fingers, middle and fore, to feel for a pulse. Nothing. It was really true.
“Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” he barked out.
Though he could hardly think, he slowly grasped what had happened. She had worked her head up through her restraints. It must have been an agonizing process. The head harness was cinched tight. But she had gotten it so that one leather strap circled her neck.
Then the girl had strangled herself.
Strangled herself. He should never have left her alone.
The Gorean master considered himself something of an anatomical expert. He understood that normally it was a physical impossibility for a human being to self-asphyxiate. Yes, one can hang oneself, that happened all the time, but it wasn’t what occurred here. Ther
e was plenty of give in the restraint strap. It was sized for a head and hung loosely around the throat.
This creature, this rancid whore, this little bound-and-gagged cheat had to have pushed her windpipe against the strap and held it there long enough to die.
It was an act of defiance.
The Gorean master tried to remember her name—her real name, not her slave name. Marjorie? MaryAnn? Something with an “m.”
An ugly, weak feeling took over his groin, familiar from childhood but since then exiled from his life by sheer determination. He felt his member shrivel. She had robbed him of his manhood.
After he went to the toilet and vomited, he returned to the kitchen. He intentionally avoided glancing into the first bedroom as he passed. Let her rot. He opened the refrigerator and took out one of the peach wine coolers that he so loved.
He was back to square one. He would have to start again. Again, again, again. So many do-overs!
The Gorean master made a promise to himself. This time he would find the perfect one. He would finally accomplish what he had been put on earth to do.
He would create his masterpiece.
Every great mystery needs an Alibi
eOriginal mystery and suspense from Random House
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