Authors: Gil Reavill
She kept churning the task-force missing-persons files. “
Stepperson, Faloma. Born: 1-8-1996. Gender: female. Height⦔
She searched the files for “k” tattoos. She knew them as slave markings in the sexual underground. Layla hadn't wanted to be explicit with Gene, who was turning into a regular Tarin Mistry groupie, but it looked as though his heroine had been branded as a slave in some sort of dominance-and-submission sex liaison.
“Detective!” Rick Stills said. His sudden appearance startled Remington, catching her, as he had, dozing in the LACTFOMEY offices. She had spent the night.
“Look who I found wandering our halls.” With Stills was one half of the Rack and Ruin bad-cop-bad-cop act, Detective Walter Rack.
“Detective,” Rack said.
“Detective,” Remington said back at him. She tried to shake loose the mental cobwebs. The view outside the Century City high-rise that morning was an impenetrable wall of autumn fog.
She and Rack didn't bother to mask their mutual disregard. Stills looked back and forth between the two cops. He put a mocking smile on his face. “Brrrrrr! Lenny! It's so chilly in here, could we please turn up the thermostat?”
An administrative assistant stuck his head in the doorway. “You wanted something?”
“Never mind,” Stills said. He turned back to the detectives. “If you two promise to play nice, I'll leave you to it.”
Walter Rack took a seat across the cluttered table from Remington. He ignored Stills, who muttered a “well, then” and left the room.
“Funny guy, that Rick,” Rack remarked. “You used to work on the D.A.'s staff together, didn't you? You two ever meet up, boy and girl?”
“You came all the way over here to give me a hard time?”
“I was in the neighborhood. You know, I could never understand why telling a woman she's attractive to men is considered somehow insulting.”
“Oh, no, not insulting,” Remington responded. “Just, you know, unprofessional.”
They had both instinctively zeroed in on a weak spot of the other. Remington's blush reflex kicked in whenever Rick Stills was around, and Walter Rack took excessive pride in his professionalism.
“Okay, somehow, I don't know how you did it, I don't know what kind of strings you pulled, but as of today I'm ordered to welcome you to the team investigating Tarin Mistry's disappearance and possible murder. Just out of curiosity, how'd you make it happen?”
“I didn't do anything, Detective Rack.”
“Sure, you didn't.” Walter Rack sounded unconvinced. “You know Gus Monaghan how, exactly?”
Not seeing where he was going with the question, Remington didn't respond.
Rack shrugged. “You are hereby detailed to us as a liaison officer from the LASD. As such, your role is strictly observational. You will conduct no unauthorized investigations of your own. You will watch and learn.”
“Well, watch, anyway.”
The LAPD cop glared at her. He waved a hand at the pile of document folders on the table. “What's all this? Task-force stuff? It doesn't have anything to do with Tarin Mistry, does it?”
Remington wasn't eager to share her theory about a connection among missing-girl cases. That's what it was, too, a theory. For now, it was all hung on a pretty slim reed, a preliminary examination of a severely degraded corpse.
Dr. Gladney and she had agreed that the marking on Tarin Mistry's left hand could be read in any number of ways. It might be the letter “k” or it might not. Remington thought so. The coroner had reserved judgment. They couldn't conclusively label it a burn, he reminded her, until a full autopsy was performed.
Under Walter Rack's gaze, Remington neatened the stack of missing-persons reports. “So where are you now with it?”
The older detective didn't look all that eager to share his theories, either. “We still like the pastor.” He bit off the words.
Three years before, the LAPD had announced a break in the Mistry case. The State of California unsuccessfully sued to extradite an evangelical minister, Pastor Curtis Kingman, associated with a secretive Nevada-Arizona religious commune at which Mistryâthen Beth Gunionâand her mother spent time. The extradition bid had failed. But Rack and Ruin managed to arrest Kingman when the man strayed into California, or was lured there, or was shanghaied across the border, depending on whom you believed.
The case against the minister fell apart spectacularly and publicly, in court, with the LAPD being spanked by the judge as he dismissed all charges. Lacking a dead body, the prosecution had seriously overreached. The lead assistant district attorney in the case saw her career go down in flames. Pastor Kingman later filed a multimillion-dollar civil suit against the City of Los Angeles, citing the sins of its overzealous detectives. That case, too, was dismissed, leaving the score tied at 0â0.
So here was Walter Rack, years later, telling Remington that he and Paul Roone remained marooned back at square one. “We can definitely put one of Curt's associates in Los Angeles at the time of the disappearance.”
“Curt.”
He calls his suspect Curt.
Remington tried to keep the pity from her eyes. She didn't tell Rack that he was probably too close to the case to see it properly.
There were a lot of names for it: confirmation bias, investigatory bias, prosecutorial bias. “Bias” being the operative word. The human mind had a deep-seated ability to fool itself. Another way of saying it was that people believed what they wanted to believe. Rack and Ruin saw the Tarin Mistry case in a certain light. They had put in so much time investigating a single angleâthe Arizona-Nevada religious radical connectionâthat they were locked into thinking it was the only way to go.
And Layla Remington, what was her bias?
She tried to tell herself that she was keeping an open mind, nudging along a theory of the crime that led her down some subterranean pathways, sure, but receptive to other possibilities. If the deaths of Marilee Henegar and Tarin Mistry were somehow related, that would be a big deal. A monstrous big deal indeed. It could mean that one serial-killing SOB had been loose and operating in Los Angeles, picking off young girls, using the Rose and Thorn books to recruit his victims.
Her phone buzzed. “â'Scuse me a second, will you, Walter?” Now that they were working together, now that they were on the same “team,” Remington figured she could call the man by his first name.
Rack gazed sourly at her. The male voice at the other end of the line ID'd himself. Remington shot to her feet as though she had been called to attention by God.
“Detective Remington? This is Radley Holt.”
There might be women in the world who could react with style and ease when contacted by the world's biggest movie star, but Remington wasn't one of them.
She had seen variations of the situation often enough in comedies. The person called would at first think that one of her friends was pranking her. There'd be an awkward, confused exchange during which she insulted the very important caller. Then she would realize her mistake and stammer out her flustered apologies.
Remington did none of that. She knew it was Radley Holt, because it was Radley Holt's distinctive voice that she heard on the phone. What she did do was jump to her feet, blush and begin to stammer as though she were back in high school. Feeling an impulse to hide what was going on, she turned her back on Walter Rack.
The movie star on the phone ignored Remington's fluster. “I thought we could meet sometime and I could give you what I know about the case.”
“Uh, um, sure, yeah, sure.” The case? That would beâ¦the case of Tarin Mistry, Holt's co-star on his breakthrough film.
“Gus Monaghan gave me your number. He suggested I contact you.”
Of course. The producer-puppetmaster. Remington should have expected it. Monaghan realized that he had an LASD detective stalking him. He had turned it around, stalking Remington right back.
Stillâ¦she was on the phone with Radley Holt!
“How about today? Are you free?”
“I could meet you,” Remington said. It came out more like a question.
I could meet you?
“I'm at Paramount for the week,” Holt said. “Right now I'm in an apartment across the street from the Farmers Market. We could either connect up here or maybe have a bite at the Monterey Café in the Market.”
Tempting as it was to “connect up” with Radley Holt at his apartment, Remington arranged to meet him at the café. She hung up, still a little dazed and embarrassed at herself for being such a
girl
.
“Hot date?” Walter Rack asked.
“I sure hope so,” Remington said.
There were no doubt dozens of real farmers' markets set up in parking lots and parks throughout Los Angeles, but when anyone suggested meeting at the Farmers Market they meant the venerable institution on Fairfax, an open-air warren of food stalls, greengrocers and specialty shops. Monterey Café was a homey bistro-style place tucked in the heart of the sprawling Market.
“I'm here to meet Radley Holt?” Why was everything coming out of Remington's mouth a question? The hostess led her to a semi-private space, an L-shaped nook behind the kitchen that was normally used for staff dining. They would still be visible to the general foot-traffic population through a doorway and down a short hallway, but any paparazzi or fans would have to look quick.
Holt was eleven minutes late and showed up with his running buddy, the actor Judd Lowe. So Remington found herself crammed at a back-room restaurant table facing off with a couple of billion dollars in box office. She tried to maintain the same illusion that Holt and Lowe seemed to subscribe toâthat they were just a trio of ordinary human beings sitting around having coffee.
“Nice here,” Lowe said. From the pained look on his face, Judd Lowe the movie star was evidently in the grips of some harsh level of alcohol poisoning.
Holt must have been a regular at the café. His coffee came without his having to order, a vat-like cup frothed with
crème
and placed in front of him like a votary offering.
“What'll you take? A latte? I'll bet you're a latte girl.” He turned his smile on the waitperson. “She'll have a latte.”
Remington felt as though she had just stepped on one of those moving sidewalks at the airport. Radley Holt's world moved faster than that of ordinary mortals.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” she said.
“When I work with the armed forces, I always tell them, âThank you for your service.' It's like something you say, you know? But I always wonder if I'm meant to say the same to police. Anyway, Detective, thank you for your service.”
The million-watt boy-grin.
Lowe broke in. “No, what you say to police is âThat baggie's not mine, Officer,' âShe's my niece and she's not underage' and âThe damage to the hotel room will be compensated.'â”
“Okay, okay. Down, boy.” Holt gave his friend's shoulder an affectionate chuck. “He likes to show off. Withdraw into your dreamworld, Juddy boy, the detective and I have business to attend to.”
“Wait, waitâRad told me you're the one who found her. In the barrel.”
Remington nodded.
“Whoa, that must have beenâ¦majorly intense.” Lowe lit a clove cigarette. He accepted but did not touch a coffee vat of his own. Then he did as he was told, sinking back behind his mirrored sunglasses, zoned out and nursing his hangover.
“You know, I've thought a lot about this,” Holt told Remington. “I've had to, since people keep asking me about it. And I don't know how much of what I remember about Tarin is because of what happened afterward, like with the movie blowing up and her disappearing. You think memories are solid, but they get colored by time, you know?”
“You called her Tarin? Not Beth?”
“Oh, we all knew her as Tarin Mistry, yeah. I never heard her real name until a long time afterward.”
“On the
Joshua Tree
set, was she accompanied by handlers, or her agent or anyone?”
Holt grinned. “You've got to understand, this movie was extremely bare-bones. We were all rookies. No one had any handlers. Craft services was peanut-butter sandwiches. Our dressing rooms were cubicles partitioned off with plastic shower curtains, for Chrissakes.”
Judd Lowe rumbled to life. “I've been there, buddy.”
“You have not.” To Remington, Holt said, “Judd was born with his own cast trailer in the family's backyard in Hancock Park.”
“So Ms. Mistry showed up on set⦔
“Alone. That was the thing about Tarin, she was always alone. Beautiful women, really beautiful women, they're always with someone, right? I don't think I've ever known one to be alone. It's a rule of life. Everyone believes they need company.”
Holt spoke as someone who had encountered his share of beautiful women.
“I remember the very first time I saw her, I thought she was some local drifted over to watch the activity on set. She was a vision. That hair. But the self was all interior, all guarded. Like she wasn't even of this world, you know?”
“No handlers, no agent. How about boyfriends?”
“Or girlfriends. Bees to honey, men and women both. She would look at you with those eyesâ¦.”
Judd Lowe stirred out of his pretend sleep. “ââIf you haven't cried, then your eyes can't be beautiful.' Sophia Loren said that.”
Holt nodded solemnly, taking his friend seriously. “There was this terrible sadness about Tarin,” he said. “Everybody wanted a piece of her. But she was unreachable.”
“She sure enough reached me,” Lowe put in.
“That's just it,” Holt cried. “She could reach you on the screen, yeah? It was like flipping a switch. Most people stiffen up when they know they're in the shot. It was the opposite with Tarin. The only time she really came alive was when those cameras were rolling.”
“Anything between her and any of the cast, or the crew?”
“I don't know how to describe it. You didn't want to sleep with her”âLowe gave a derisive snortâ“you wanted to hold her and tell her that everything would be all right. She was like some pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, you know?”
“I'm thinking an older man, a father figure or something,” Remington said. “Anyone like that ever visit her on the set?”
“It's been a long time, but no. You should talk to Gus. In factâ” He took Remington's pen and scribbled a phone number on a napkin. “He wants you to call him.”
Lowe peered over Holt's shoulder. “Wow!” he said. “That is the man's in-house, ultra-classified personal cellphone number. Gus Monaghan doesn't give it out to anybody,
anybody
. Half the town would kill for those digits.
I
don't even have it.”
Remington assured the two of them that she would indeed call her new Hollywood mentor, Gus Monaghan. But she needed to nudge the interview back on track. “This might seem like a strange question, Mr. Holt, but did you ever see Tarin Mistry with the Rose and Thorn books?”
“It's Radley, please. Don't make me feel old, call me Radley. The what, now? Those bondage things?”
“They came out around the time you were working on
Joshua Tree
.”
“Yeah, everyone was reading them. I never have. Have you, Judd?” Sotto to Remington: “He doesn't read.”
“I have people to do that for me,” Judd murmured, not opening his eyes behind his sunglasses.
“And after the shoot finished up? Did you see Ms. Mistry much afterward?”
“Nope, not at all, not once.” Holt's face took on a look of regret. “I tried, but, you know, not a working number, address unknown. That productionâwell, the whole thing was a mess. By the end, everyone was sick of the project and tired of each otherâI mean, among all the rest of us, not toward her. We didn't have a wrap party, we had a wrap wake.”
Lowe laughed, which induced a minute-long coughing jag.
“But you two got to know each other.”
“Am I a suspect?” Holt asked, smiling. “Look, Detective, working on a film is an intimate experience. Sure, I knew her. Tarin will haunt me until my dying day, and I don't say that lightly. She
changed
me.”
“I guess I'm talking about physically.”
“Really, Detective? You want the hot gossip?” He looked disappointed.
“She wants to know if you boned her,” Lowe interjected. “Come to think of it, I want to know, too. Did you wear a modesty pouch for the sex scenes?”
Remington held up her hand. “No, what I'm asking is if you noticed anything odd or remarkable about her physically. Any identifying marks or tattoos?”
“That hair was her identifying mark.”
Remington pinched the web of skin between her forefinger and thumb. “Ever notice anything right there, on Tarin's left hand?”
“
El picadors,
they come,” Lowe warned.
A photographer with a speed-advance mechanism on his camera stood at the end of the short corridor that led to the public walkway, pointing a lens toward them and blasting away. The café's hostess and one of its kitchen workers moved smoothly into place to block the view, but the paparazzo simply raised his camera above his head and kept shooting.
“Sorry,” Holt said, rising to his feet. “When this happens they come in hordes, like locusts.”
To Lowe, he said, “Come on, we've got an escape hatch through the kitchen.” Holt's celebrity pal rumbled to his feet.
“You've got my number,” Holt said to Remington. “I've got your number, we'll talk moreâLayla? Such a pretty name. May I call you that, Detective?”
He leaned down to kiss Remington on the cheek, not a Hollywood air kiss or a European double, just a regular friendly buss. He held up his left hand and tugged at the web of skin, the way Remington had done.
“And there wasn't anything there, not that I can remember, with Tarinâno marks or tattoos, I mean. Tarin wasâ¦pure.”
Then the two movie stars were gone.
Dixie served the producer his breakfast. Or dinner, or lunch, or whatever it was for a music guy who didn't keep regular hours. His name was Doc Strangeland, and he always came in around the same time, during the lull between the lunch and dinner rushes. He was involved in a project at a Burbank recording studio, he said, near the restaurant where Dixie now waitressed. He liked salami and eggs, the eggs scrambled loose. Sometimes he ordered waffles.
Strangeland was supposed to be famous and successful, at least in the movie/music world. He didn't act like it, though, not like some boastful, big-time producer. The guy was almostâ¦quiet. He came in without an entourage. He liked talking to Dixie. He always left a big tip. He was attracted to herâa girl could always tellâbut she considered him too ancient to be believed. Nevertheless, Dixie was working up to where she could maybe ask for his help in the Search.
A lot of well-known people came into Terry's Deli, because it was near the Burbank TV studios and the movie soundstages at Warner's. There were two Terry's Delis with the same owners, both on Ventura Boulevard and separated from each other by about five miles. People were always getting mixed up about which was which and waiting at the wrong place to meet someone.
Dixie had been at Terry's only for a few weeks. Plenty of customers had already hit on her, though nobody who was even remotely interesting. Sometimes she felt like a swimmer with the sharks circling. Doc Strangeland was different. More like a teacher or an authority figure. She had a fantasy that the guy would turn out to be her real biological father.
“Dixie? Honey?” A middle-aged woman with frizzy gray hair confronted her. “It's your aunt, honeyâAunt Annie!”
The pale, careworn person in front of Dixie did not much resemble the relative she had last seenâ¦when? In Scottsdale, when she was little. Like, a decade back.
“For pity's sake, why didn't you call us if you were here in L.A.?”
“I've been meaning to, really, but I've only been here a short time.”
“Your mother told me you were working at Terry's.” She lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “We talk sometimes, but we don't let the boys know.”
The “boys” were brothers Jerry and Lawrence Close, Dixie's father and uncle. They had stopped speaking to each other years ago. Dixie didn't realize the two wives were in contact. She had no idea there was any communication between the two families at all.