by Gil Reavill
One of them, anyway, thought Remington.
“I’m afraid he’s unavailable right now. May I help you?”
“Unavailable, like how? Unreachable by phone? Out on a film set? No coverage somewhere?”
“What’s this in reference to?”
“An investigation.”
“I can have Jimmy give you a jingle,” Puente said. “He’s Gus’s brother. And his attorney as well.”
Remington for sure knew who Jimmy Monaghan was. Hollywood’s lawyer. Get a call from Jimmy Monaghan, your phone started to melt in your hand, all that power on the other end of the line. She told the assistant that she’d prefer to speak to Gus Monaghan himself. Puente promised to inform his boss.
She was being pissy, she knew. She could very well find out the producer’s movements, or make preliminary inquiries at least, without bothering the man himself. But she hated, hated, the self-importance of the movie industry in Los Angeles, the sway it had over the whole town.
Remington mused about the three competing brands of arrogance then at play in America—on Wall Street and in Washington and around Hollywood. The first two were based on the old reliables, money and power. But the third? Images dancing on a screen in the dark.
Out and about that afternoon, Remington drove right past Monaghan’s production offices at Paramount. She had an impulse to bull her way through studio security and beard the guy in his lair. She didn’t really believe that he had anything to do with Merilee Henegar. After all, what did she have to go on?
She recalled an element of Gus Monaghan’s mythology. He didn’t actually stay in his office much. There were stories of him roaming the freeways in a caravan of vehicles, restless, always on the move. Talent took meetings with him not at his production office but in his limo.
All of which naturally called to Remington’s mind the tail she had picked up when she drove away from the Henegar scene. Could it be? She discounted the notion. But there was something else, too. Something that Brandi Henegar had mentioned.
“A couple weeks before she went missing, Merilee said that she had met a producer on the Tarin Mistry movie.”
Just a single comment that the victim may or may not have made to her mother. But with it Gus Monaghan became a box that Remington had to check off.
Meanwhile, she had to go see a man about a corpse.
Chapter 7
Medical examiners classify deaths in different ways. They distinguish among the manner, cause and mechanism of death, with some M.E.’s listing mode of death, too. In the instance of Merilee Henegar, Dr. Ed Gladney, the L.A. County coroner, ruled the manner of death to be homicide, while the cause was strangulation and the mechanism asphyxiation.
“We talked it over and decided for homicide rather than suicide,” Gladney told Remington. “It was because of the particular nature of the ligature. I tried to avoid a determination of ‘unknown.’ ”
They were in one of the morgue labs in the coroner’s offices south of downtown. This was the cold lab, cooled to a chilly thirty-eight degrees. It was where they were keeping the body of Marilee Henegar, in an effort to halt the progress of decomposition that had already set in.
What was left of Merilee lay splayed out on a stainless-steel exam table. The autopsy had pretty much destroyed the integrity of the corpus. Its viscera had been entirely removed. One eyelid was peeled back, displaying the bright-red hemorrhaged eyeball that was a marker for asphyxiation.
“You seriously considered suicide?” Remington asked. “What about the disposition of the body? She turned up back at home like a prodigal child.”
Gladney bent to indicate markings on the corpse. “Normally, with strangulation, the ligature completely surrounds the neck. Here we have a ligature display that penetrates the skin and the subdermal tissues only in the anterior midline. There are fractures of the hyoid bone and of the thyroid and the cricoid cartilages.”
“Blunt force?” asked Remington.
“What I’m thinking is the person or persons responsible forced the victim’s neck against a suspended cord or belt of some sort.”
Press the carotid arteries for ten seconds and unconsciousness results. Closing off the trachea completely takes a little more pressure, something like thirty pounds of steady force. Keep that up for four or five minutes and brain death will occur.
“Not a noose,” said Remington.
“No, it doesn’t look like any rope I’ve encountered before. I once had a victim who was strangled with her own hair. Look here.”
Gladney traced an area along the front of Merilee Henegar’s neck, above the larynx and just below the jawline. Then he lifted the head to display the nape of the neck.
“A noose would have left ligature displays on the dorsal surfaces, which, as you can see, are pristine. The cervical vertebrae would have been fractured. This was more like a strap. Maybe leather, perhaps a belt or some sort of restraint.”
Trace evidence was still being processed. TOD was problematic. The corpse of Merilee Henegar had been on quite a journey. Her body had been preserved, transported from the scene of the crime, deposited at the Henegar residence, then collected by the coroner.
“Time of death forty-eight to seventy-two hours before discovery—that’s preliminary, and that’s the best we can do right now.” Gladney shook his head apologetically. “Sorry, for all we know the victim could have been kept on ice, or, anyway, cooled somehow, and that would play havoc with TOD estimates.”
Gladney’s summary report gave Remington all there was to know so far. But she lingered in the lab. Gladney sheeted the victim, de-gloved and washed his hands at a stainless-steel sink along the far wall.
The coroner turned to her. “So.”
“So.” I’ll see your so and raise you another so.
“So do you want to see her?”
“Who?”
“Come on, Detective, you didn’t come all the way down here for a preliminary report that I could just as easily have emailed to you.”
Somewhere on the premises, Remington knew, rested the mortal remains of Tarin Mistry.
“Not my case,” she said.
“As I’ve been informed, repeatedly,” Gladney responded. “Walter Rack has commanded that access to the corpus be strictly limited. But right now there’s nobody here but us chickens.”
The coroner gestured toward the lab door. “Come, I’ll take you to her,” he said.
—
Dr. Gladney sometimes referred to the cadavers at the morgue as his “guests,” as though he were a dinner-party host or a hotel keeper. A tug-of-war legal battle loomed over Tarin Mistry’s corpse, so it looked as though the poor girl would remain Dr. Gladney’s guest for at least the foreseeable future.
Ever since her daughter’s body emerged from the Malibu quake rubble, Tarin Mistry’s mother, Cathy Gunion, had been very much in evidence—on TV news reports, in the press, on the Web, everywhere. Mrs. Gunion enjoyed the spotlight. She usually either began or ended her TV appearances by asking viewers if they had heard the Good News.
Having passed through various flavors of evangelical Christianity, her spiritual restlessness preventing her from settling on any one, she currently embraced a cultish movement called 2,025, that being the exact number of words in the received New Testament vocabulary of Jesus Christ. Movement believers tried to limit their speech to those specific sacred syllables. When Cathy Gunion wanted to order Chinese, say, she had to point wordlessly at a menu, “chow mein” not being found in the mouth of our Lord.
“Autopsy,” also, was unavailable to the mother. Nevertheless, the attorneys whom she hired were not similarly constrained. They filed an injunction to prevent the “desecration of the mortal remains of our dear daughter in Christ, Tarin Mistry, born to the world as Bethlehem Gunion.”
Cathy Gunion sued to halt the autopsy on religious grounds. Courtesy of her daughter’s postmortem fame, she was wealthy and could afford to be persistent.
Normally, the mood arou
nd the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner was, oddly enough, lively and workmanlike. There was nothing of the funeral home’s hushed sanctity. Pathologists went about their jobs without sentimentality and—provided that no citizens were within earshot—with a hint of gallows humor. This being L.A., the coroner’s office had a gift shop attached to it.
When Gladney said, “Come, I’ll take you to her,” he brought Remington from one exam room to another, down a corridor into the white-tiled, non-refrigerated precincts of Forensics Lab No. 3.
The first thing Remington saw wasn’t the body but the barrel. The eighty-five-gallon steel drum she had discovered amid the rubble of a Malibu landslide was now laid out on the floor, separated into four pieces. Both its lid and its bottom had been removed, and the remaining bent and ruptured cylinder had been sliced in half. Bright steel showed along the cut, but the rest of the metal was rusty.
“Do we have a source on the barrel?” Remington asked.
“Detective Rack has his minions tracking it now. A lot number stamped along the edge of the lid gives us a manufacturer, Rockham Steel of Pennsylvania. Evidently, the drum originally held automobile antifreeze. That’s consistent with the size of the barrel, too.”
Remington frowned. “Nasty.”
“Well, toxic anyway. A residue turned up in spectrum analysis. The interior had been well scrubbed before being put to its present use.”
“Present use” was a tactful way to phrase it. “Any other trace evidence turn up?”
“Yes, indeed, fibers and soil. Plus we’ve collected a few spores, so far unspecified, although they’re under the scope as we speak.”
“Pollen spores might provide a time frame of incidence, right?”
Dr. Gladney nodded. “Come,” he said, leading her farther into the lab.
Finally, after being separated from each other for more than a week, Remington and Tarin Mistry were reunited. Dr. Gladney unsheeted the mummified remains that lay upon the examination table. Again, Remington was struck by the girl’s sun-colored hair.
“Gunion, Bethlehem, aka Tarin Mistry. Born: 7-18-1992. Gender: female. Height…”
“Legally, until the suit is adjudicated we’re not allowed to perform a full autopsy,” Gladney said, as they both stared down at the corpse. Apart from the hair, she was now a girl of leather and bone. The body’s curled-up posture remained as it was when Remington had first shined her Maglite upon it on the day of the Malibu quake.
In a plastic evidence bag resting next to the corpse were the girl’s entire worldly goods, which amounted only to the celebrated “T” necklace with the opal birthstone.
Gladney briskly snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “I can’t cut her or take tissue samples, only visual examination. The county attorney tells me I’m not even allowed to palpitate. I’ve done what I could do without resorting to chisel and saw. The interior organs will be thoroughly desiccated anyway. I have a feeling they won’t yield up much that’s of any use.”
Remington leaned in close. She feared the body’s crumbling to dust. “May I…?”
“I’d glove up first, Detective. And don’t worry. When they’re in this kind of shape, they’re surprisingly durable, like beef jerky.”
Even through latex gloves, the body felt rough and hard. It was like touching a dead tree limb. The back of Tarin Mistry’s clawlike left hand displayed a raised area. The dry skin appeared almost caramelized. An oddly shaped portion between the thumb and forefinger was of a lighter color.
“Is this a scar?”
“I had it marked down provisionally as a contracture, perhaps evidence of a burn.”
Given the decayed shape of the body, it was difficult for Remington to be sure. But a rising sense of disgust and fear blew through her.
“The letter ‘k,’ ” she whispered.
Dr. Gladney either didn’t hear her comment or didn’t feel the need to respond. “I thought perhaps it might be second-degree. I’ll have to wait until I’m legally allowed to open our guest up to see if it’s a deep dermal burn. Do you feel that it’s significant?”
Remington had just seen another dead girl’s body laid out on a steel examination table down the hall. Amid Merilee Henegar’s numerous tattoos, piercings and body modifications, it had been easy to overlook.
A small “k” on the back of the left hand, done in red ink.
—
Big law firms were twenty-four-hours-a-day concerns. The attorneys at Rick Stills’s firm, Buffum Buffum & Oatman, put in their sixty-hour weeks, and after they had departed for their steakhouses, gyms or massage parlors the paralegals would take over, inputting data for the next day’s briefs.
The firm had generously donated an office suite for the use of LACTFOMEY, the civic entity that its fair-haired boy headed up as director. It was already late in the day when Remington arrived. She spread her work out on one of the task force’s conference tables. The aurora of a Los Angeles sunset spread its glow outside the tower windows. She concentrated on her task, only occasionally glancing up to mark the passing of the evening. The city was a wonder at night. The scrim of daytime smog wasn’t visible, and a spill of jewels spread out across the metropolis, going on seemingly forever.
It was all lost on her. Like some sort of search-engine spider, Remington crawled through the reams of incident reports and missing-persons documentation.
“Maldonado, Katheryne. Born: 10-27-1995. Gender: female. Height: 66 inches. Weight: 135 pounds. Eyes: brown. Hair: lt. brown. Race: white. Identifying Marks: birthmark, crescent-shaped, lower back.”
The office remained quiet.
Remington was distracted from her unhappy task by the ghost of Tarin Mistry.
She phoned her father. “Gene,” she said, using his name to put the call on a quasi-professional footing, “I want you to do something for me.”
“Sure.”
“Watch Joshua Tree again.”
“I thought you told me I was obsessing.”
“Never mind what I said. You can linger or fast-forward through it, for all I care. You probably have the whole thing memorized.”
“Where’s Barry? Where’s our driver?” Gene said, quoting the movie’s opening line.
“Just pay attention to the girl’s left hand. You know the skin between the thumb and forefinger?”
“It’s called a purlicue.”
“Picture me sitting here with my mouth hanging open, Dad. You crossword people are beyond belief.”
“Couple of years ago the Times crossword had it, as a matter of fact. Eight letters, the clue was ‘web exposed in hitchhiking.’ ”
Remington laughed, shaking her head in awe. “He not only knows the word, he remembers the clue.”
“The left hand, you say?”
“Right. I mean, correct.”
“And what am I looking for?”
“I’ve checked out the images of her on the Internet, and I couldn’t find one with the proper angle.”
“A scar of some kind?”
“An identifying mark. Just tell me if you see anything out of the ordinary.”
By midnight, the paralegal secretariat had completely taken over the law-office premises. Her father called back.
“Since I don’t know what I was supposed to be looking for, I can’t tell you conclusively, but I will say that Tarin Mistry has the prettiest purlicue of anyone in the cast.”
“Nothing visible.”
“You know movie makeup people. They can make anything disappear. Angelina Jolie actually has a huge Mike Tyson–style Maori tattoo spread across half her face, and you’d never know it.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“So did our girl here have a tattoo or something?”
“I’ve got to go, Dad.” Remington rang off.
She did some mental calendaring. Joshua Tree had wrapped five years back, in early July. The last time anyone saw the female lead of the movie alive was that September. Unless Mistry had already possessed the mark and it was
covered by makeup during filming, at some point during that ten-week interval she had burned a small “k” into her left hand.
Remington worked far into the wee hours. She hadn’t pulled an all-nighter since college. The law never slept. Buffum paralegals and Oatman data-input clerks toiled through the night. But none of them penetrated the LACTFOMEY office.
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.
—
