Lost Hills

by Goldberg, Lee

  Moffett took a seat behind his desk, leaving only Eve standing.

  “If Caitlin is still alive,” Duncan said, “then who is the third person who got killed in Tanya’s house?”

  “Donna Stokes, the Realtor who was going to help Tanya find a new home to rent,” Eve said. “Donna has been missing since Wednesday. I think she walked in on Tanya being killed and it’s her blood in Caitlin’s room. That also explains why we found no blood or anything else in Coyle’s car. He used Donna’s car to take away Caitlin, the body parts, and other evidence from the house.”

  The sheriff massaged his brow. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “The evidence was all there from the start but we misread it.” Eve set her stack of photos on Moffett’s desk and hastily sorted through them until she found the one she wanted. She held up a crime scene photo of Caitlin’s room. “Take a look at this. The pillowcase is missing from Caitlin’s bed. The assumption was that Coyle took it. But why would he do that?”

  “He was cleaning up evidence,” Duncan said.

  “Of what?” Eve said. “The blood is on the floor and the walls. There is no blood spatter on the bed or the headboard . . . so there wasn’t any on the pillowcase. It’s gone because he used it to cover Caitlin’s head.”

  “That’s a big leap,” Moffett said.

  She pointed to the standing fan, tapping it with her finger. “We missed this fan. The power cord is cut off. That’s because he used the cord to bind her.”

  Eve tossed the photo across the desk to Moffett and pulled another one from her stack, holding it up in front of each man in turn. It was a picture of the bloody print left on the floor by one of Caitlin’s shoes.

  “This print from Caitlin’s shoe was found in the hallway near the garage. The bloody print is tainted with cleaner and motor oil, so we know it was made after the killings. We assumed her shoe fell out of one of the trash bags Coyle lugged out,” she said. “We were wrong. Caitlin put her foot down for a moment as she was being carried away. That’s proof of life.”

  “Or it’s proof that a shoe fell out of a trash bag,” Lansing said.

  Eve tossed the photo back on the desk, found another picture, and thrust it in Lansing’s face. “We also have this.”

  It was a picture of a spec of blood on the wall. Lansing squinted at it. “Looks like just another spot of blood to me.”

  “This one is different,” she said. “It’s undiluted and on the wall near the footprint. It’s Caitlin’s blood.”

  “How do you know that?” Moffett said.

  “Because Duncan saw Coyle naked and he didn’t have a cut on him,” Eve said.

  “Not that I could see,” Duncan said.

  “It would need to be a big cut, on his head or arm, to leave a fresh spot of blood on the wall as he passed by. Did you see a cut like that?”

  “No,” Duncan said.

  “That’s why I know it’s Caitlin’s blood. She must have been cut by Coyle during a struggle, or he cut her to prove he was serious, like he did with the woman he raped,” Eve said. “The DNA results on that spot of blood, and the blood found in Caitlin’s room, will prove I’m right, but by then it will be too late to save her.”

  “It already is,” Moffett said. “Caitlin is dead. She has been since Wednesday.”

  Eve ignored him and turned to Duncan. “Remember what you said when you saw the surveillance video at Walmart and all the junk food that Coyle bought?”

  “He eats like a kid,” Duncan said.

  “That’s because he wasn’t buying the food for himself, he was buying it for her,” Eve said. “The Planet of the Apes DVD he bought there was for her, too.”

  “Eve, I know you want her to be alive,” Duncan said. “We all wish she was. But she’s not.”

  She looked at the faces of the three men and saw nothing but skepticism and sadness. They didn’t believe her. She knew the sheriff and the captain would be a hard sell, but she was counting on Duncan to be on her side. And he wasn’t.

  Duncan sighed. “You need to take a deep breath and be reasonable about this. You’re seeing what you want to see . . . but it isn’t there.”

  She wasn’t going to give up. She couldn’t. Not while there was a chance of saving Caitlin.

  Eve took out her phone and swiped through the pictures that Knobb sent her until she found one of Roger Karpis’ gaping neck wound. She held up her phone and showed the picture to the men as she spoke.

  “This man is Roger Karpis, a ranger at Malibu Creek State Park, where Planet of the Apes was shot. His body was left in a pickup truck sometime Wednesday night or Thursday morning on Mulholland at Mulholland, which is only a hundred yards from where Coyle lives.”

  She swiped to a photo of the bloody knife on the passenger seat and showed it around. Lansing studied it.

  “This is the knife that nearly took off the ranger’s head. It’s the knife that Coyle used to murder Tanya, Troy, and Donna,” she said. “I’ve had it sent to our lab. The DNA tests will prove me right . . . but it will be too late.”

  “I’m not seeing what this all means,” Lansing said and handed the photo back to her.

  “Because it doesn’t mean a thing,” Moffett said.

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Here is what happened. Donna Stokes walked in on Coyle butchering Tanya. Coyle killed Stokes in Caitlin’s room and cut her up, too. He was still at it when Caitlin and Troy came home from school. Coyle killed the boy but kept Caitlin alive. He tied Caitlin up with the fan cord and put the pillowcase over her head. Coyle used Donna Stokes’ Mercedes to stash Caitlin somewhere and to dispose of the bodies at the ruins of the old Planet of the Apes set in Malibu Creek State Park. That’s when the ranger stumbled on Coyle, who forced him at knifepoint to drive him nearly home.”

  Duncan nodded, thinking it through. “So you think Coyle killed the ranger to keep him quiet, left the knife behind in the truck, and walked back to his place. From there, he either walked or rode a bike to the Topanga trailhead where his Toyota was parked. That’s why the Toyota was clean.”

  “Yes,” Eve said, encouraged that Duncan was at least following the evidence. “The ranger was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Coyle had to kill him to cover up his crimes. But the ranger showing up was also a golden opportunity for Coyle. The ranger gave Coyle a way to get home without using Donna’s car, which could forensically link him to the murders at Tanya’s house if he was caught driving the Mercedes or if it was found near his place. The car is probably still somewhere in or near Malibu Creek State Park and close to wherever Caitlin is trapped.”

  “My God, Ronin,” Moffett said, shaking his head. “Listen to yourself. Your story is getting crazier by the minute.”

  “It’s not crazy. It all fits. Coyle has been arrested twice for masturbating in public while watching young girls, and those are just the two instances that we know about. He lives right behind a school for girls, so I suspect there are a lot more cases where he wasn’t caught,” Eve said. “On top of that, he’s obsessed with a movie where humans are kept as house pets.”

  “Telling me he’s a pervert with an ape obsession doesn’t mean he’s capable of plotting the elaborate scheme you’ve just laid out,” Moffett said. “In fact, it argues persuasively against it.”

  Eve slapped the stack of photos on Moffett’s desk. “I’m telling you Caitlin is stashed somewhere, probably in a house near Malibu Creek State Park that Coyle visited before on a service call.”

  “Eve,” Duncan began, but she cut him off, whirling around to face him.

  “Don’t you see, Duncan? That’s what I got wrong when I interrogated Coyle. I said we were looking for Tanya, Caitlin, and Troy’s body parts. He knew we didn’t know that she was still alive. That’s why he perked up. That’s also why Coyle wanted to meet with us this morning. He’s worried about Caitlin, too. He’s convinced he’s going to walk and wants it to happen today, while there’s a chance that she’s
still alive.”

  “You’ve convinced me,” Lansing said.

  Eve turned, stunned. She was certain Duncan would be the first one she convinced and he’d help her win over the others. Perhaps she’d underestimated the sheriff. But she wasn’t the only one who was surprised. So was the captain.

  Moffett looked at Lansing in disbelief. “You can’t be serious, sir.”

  “I think she’s right. Coyle killed the ranger and the body parts we’re looking for are buried somewhere in Malibu Creek State Park.” Lansing turned to Eve. “That was brilliant detective work, Ronin. You never cease to amaze me.”

  “We need to send deputies to every house Mr. Plunger sent Coyle to near Malibu Creek State Park,” Eve said.

  “Whoa, hold up, Ronin,” Lansing said, raising his hands in a halting gesture. “I’m with you on the bodies. But your theory about Caitlin is wishful thinking, to put it kindly. I’ll chalk it up to exhaustion and heartbreak. It’s a horrific case and I don’t blame you for dreaming of a happy ending.”

  Eve felt her face flushing with anger, enraged by his lack of understanding and his patronizing lecture. How could he believe only part of what she’d told him? Recovering Caitlin was far more important than the bodies.

  “But Donna Stokes is missing, and all the forensic evidence proves that Caitlin—”

  “Nothing different than what we first assumed,” Lansing interrupted. “But even if I thought that Caitlin might be alive, and I don’t, it’s too dangerous to go up there right now for any reason.”

  “We have to take that chance,” Eve said.

  “It’s an inferno,” Lansing said. “We’ll send search parties into Malibu Creek Park, and deputies out to the adjacent homes that Coyle visited, to look for the bodies as soon as the fire department says it’s safe.”

  Eve shook her head in defiance. “No, sir, that’s unacceptable. We have to act now. Caitlin is out there, trapped and alone. We can’t leave her to die from dehydration or fire.”

  “You aren’t hearing me.” Lansing stood up and got right into her face. “She is already dead. You are not to suggest otherwise to anyone or I will take your badge. Do you understand me? It would be unspeakably cruel to give the family false hope.”

  “It would be worse to let her die,” Eve said and stormed out of the captain’s office, slamming the door behind her.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Eve ran out of the station, jumped into the plain-wrap Explorer, and sped to her condo, double-parked at the curb, and dashed inside to grab her list of Coyle’s service calls and get another look at the pushpins in her map. She couldn’t sit back and let Caitlin die, not if there was still a chance of saving her.

  Malibu Creek State Park was bordered by Mulholland Highway to the north; Crags Road, Lake Vista Drive, and its offshoots to the west; and Las Virgenes Road to the east. The only homes that directly bordered the park were on Lake Vista, Crags Road, and the neighborhoods that rimmed the eastern edge of Malibu Lake.

  She checked the map, and then the list, quickly identified six homes that Coyle visited adjacent to the park, and wrote the addresses on a slip of paper that she stuffed in her pocket. Now she just had to get to the houses, which wasn’t going to be easy, and then deal with smoke and possibly fire when she got there to search for Caitlin.

  She opened the closet under her stairs, grabbed the fire extinguisher and her earthquake kit, which was a duffel bag full of supplies that included goggles, leather gloves, dust masks, a first aid kit, and a crowbar, and rushed out of the house.

  As soon as she got into the Explorer, she tossed her bag and the extinguisher on the passenger seat and tuned in to the LASD patrol frequency to hear the latest news about the fire, evacuations, and road closures.

  She learned that the sheriff wasn’t exaggerating about the voracious ferocity of the blaze. The fire was devouring acres by the minute, driven by single-digit humidity and blistering fifty-mile-per-hour winds. The tsunami of flames had already crossed Topanga Canyon and raged west across ten miles of mostly uninhabited wilds, eating up the parched plants for fuel and building in intensity as it jumped across Las Virgenes into Malibu Creek State Park. Officials were terrified that the Stevenson Ranch blaze, now moving through Ahmanson Ranch, could connect with the Topanga blaze to create a megafire if they weren’t stopped.

  Eve made a sharp U-turn on Las Virgenes, hit the siren and grille flashers, and took the 101 four miles west to the Kanan Dume Road exit. Along the way, she stole glances to her left at the thick, churning cloud of smoke that filled the sky behind the Santa Monica Mountains.

  She got off at Kanan, turned left, crossed through the northbound stream of ash-covered vehicles packed with people, pets, and possessions escaping from the fire, and sped south on the overpass.

  Sawhorse barricades at Agoura Road prevented vehicles from heading south on Kanan and two deputies stood in the intersection, directing all the traffic onto the freeway. But the deputies saw her coming in fast and furious. One deputy held up traffic for her while another moved a sawhorse aside so she could pass.

  She waved her thanks to the deputies and hugged the southbound shoulder because both lanes on Kanan were filled with cars fleeing the fire zone. Water-dumping helicopters streaked overhead to the front line of the fire, only a few miles southeast.

  A quarter mile south of Agoura Road, she cut across Kanan to Cornell Road, forcing the cars full of desperate evacuees to let her slip through with insistent blurts of her siren.

  Eve sped down the narrow rural residential street and plowed through the curtain of smoke. Day suddenly became night, the sun almost entirely blotted out by the clouds of ash and swirling embers.

  Twenty yards ahead, at the far edge of her diminishing field of visibility, an LASD patrol car was parked across the road as a barricade. A deputy, his face covered with a bandana, got out of the car and held up his hand for her to stop.

  Eve rolled down the window just enough so she could hear him talk. Smoke seeped into the Explorer.

  “You have to turn around,” the deputy said. “The whole area south of here is under mandatory evacuation.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve been sent to check for stragglers and convince them to get the hell out, forcibly if necessary.”

  “They’d be insane to stay. The fire is vast and out of control here. Even the firefighters are retreating in a few minutes to make their stand down at Malibu Lake and further west on Mulholland.”

  “I’ll be right behind you with anybody I’ve found,” she said.

  He stepped out of her way and she drove past, slower now, moving through the dense fog of ash and embers, toward Mulholland Highway. She was in a race against time but she didn’t want to mow down any firefighters in her haste.

  The road was awash in a flurry of blazing embers that was igniting the dry brush all around her. To her right, a meadow in Paramount Ranch looked like it was alight with dozens of campfires. To her left, on a slight rise, an entire house was ablaze, abandoned by firefighters who were now in full retreat, rolling up their water lines and piling into their trucks. The house was a lost cause and there was nothing they could do now to prevent the firestorm from advancing. They’d have to make their stand farther west.

  The firefighters were leaving, but she was going in. She knew it was dangerous, but she didn’t have a choice. Caitlin was out there and Eve wasn’t leaving without her.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Eve crossed Mulholland Highway and glanced to the east, where everything was aflame against a dark sky of billowing ash. There was a terrifying beauty to the flaming landscape—the snow-flurry of embers, trees turned into towers of fire, the little bonfires everywhere. It was like Christmas in Hell.

  The first house on her list was off of Lake Vista, though there was no lake to be seen today. It was a Spanish-Mediterranean McMansion with a four-car garage, a cobblestone motor court, and a row of pine trees ringing the property that were fully engulfed in flames, bombardin
g the house with embers.

  She put on her LASD baseball cap, the pair of goggles, and a dust mask, grabbed the crowbar, and dashed up to the house. It was like running through a storm of hot needles. The front door was ajar. She pushed it open the rest of the way, rushed across the two-story foyer and into a large open-concept kitchen and family room. It was immediately clear to her that the house had been recently occupied by a large family. The marble-topped island in the kitchen was the center of the family’s life and was covered with the day’s mail, the morning newspapers, and cereal boxes. There were children’s toys scattered on the family room floor. Coyle couldn’t have been using this house to hold Caitlin captive. It was occupied. Whoever lived here had just left in a hurry.

  It took Eve less than sixty seconds to make that determination and then run back outside. But in that short time, the fire had reached the house, igniting the wood under the eaves and the dried pine needles in the rain gutters.

  She jumped back into her car, made a fast three-point turn, and sped out onto the road to hit the next house on her list—located on a private lane off of Lake Vista, only a quarter of a mile away.

  The smoke was even thicker now, swirling around her car, making it difficult to see. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and slammed on her brakes, nearly hitting a deer on fire, the shrieking animal charging across the road directly in front of her. The blazing deer tripped in a culvert, tumbled into the brush, and instantly ignited it.

  Eve couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by the horrific sight and drove on as fast as she could given her limited visibility. It was so hard to see that she almost passed the road she was looking for and would have if not for the cluster of mailboxes on the corner. She made a sharp left onto the narrow, poorly maintained road, bouncing hard into every pothole and over every bump, through a tunnel of flames, embers, and smoke.

  At the end of the tunnel, she could see a sprawling ranch-style home surrounded by tall, dry weeds. It might as well have been in a pond of gasoline. As Eve got closer, she could see there was a car parked in front of the house. It was a metallic-blue 2017 Mercedes E-class, the fire on the roadway making the fake Swarovski crystals sparkle around the license plate. The car belonged to Donna Stokes, the missing Realtor.