Gone

CHAPTER 3

I heard about it the way most everyone else did: third story on the evening news, right after the trial of a hip-hop star accused of assault and floods in Indonesia.

I was eating a solitary dinner and half listening to the broadcast. This one caught my attention because I gravitate toward local crime stories.

Couple abducted at gunpoint, found naked and dehydrated in the hills of Malibu. I played with the remote but no other broadcast added details.

The following morning, the Times filled in a bit more: a pair of acting students had left a nighttime class in West L.A. and driven east in her car to the young woman’s apartment in the Pico-Robertson district. Waiting at a red light at Sherbourne and Pico, they’d been carjacked by a masked gunman who stashed them both in the trunk and drove for more than an hour.

When the car stopped and the trunk popped, the couple found themselves in pitch darkness, somewhere “out in the country.” The spot was later identified as “ Latigo Canyon, in the hills of Malibu.”

The carjacker forced them to stumble down a steep hillside to a densely wooded area, where the young woman tied up the young man at gunpoint and was subsequently bound herself. Sexual assault was implied but not specified. The assailant was described as “white, medium height, and stocky, thirty to forty, with a Southern accent.”

Malibu was county territory, sheriff’s jurisdiction. The crime had taken place fifty miles from LASD headquarters, but violent whodunits were handled by major crimes detectives and anyone with information was requested to phone downtown.

A few years back, when Robin and I were rebuilding the house in the hills, we’d rented a place on the beach in western Malibu. The two of us had explored the sinuous canyons and silent gullies on the land side of Pacific Coast Highway, hiked the oak-bearded crests that peaked above the ocean.

I remembered Latigo Canyon as corkscrew roads and snakes and red-tailed hawks. Though it took a while to get above civilization, the reward was worth the effort: a wonderful, warm nothingness.

If I’d been curious enough, I could’ve called Milo, maybe learned more about the abduction. I was busy with three custody cases, two of them involving film-biz parents, the third starring a pair of frighteningly ambitious Brentwood plastic surgeons whose marriage had shattered when their infomercial for Facelift-in-a-Jar tanked. Somehow they’d found time to produce an eight-year-old daughter, whom they now seemed intent on destroying emotionally.

Quiet, chubby girl, big eyes, a slight stammer. Recently, she’d taken to long bouts of silence.

Custody evaluations are the ugliest side of child psychology and from time to time I think about quitting. I’ve never sat down and calculated my success rate but the ones that work out keep me going, like a slot machine’s intermittent payoff.

I put the newspaper aside, happy the case was someone else’s problem. But as I showered and dressed, I kept imagining the crime scene. Glorious golden hills, the ocean a stunning blue infinity.

It’s gotten to a point where it’s hard for me to see beauty without thinking of the alternative.

My guess was this case would be a tough one; the main hope for a solve was the bad guy screwing up and leaving behind some forensic tidbit: a unique tire tread, rare fiber, or biological remnant. A lot less likely than you’d think from watching TV. The most common print found at crime scenes is the palm, and police agencies have only started cataloging palm prints. DNA can work miracles but backlogs are ferocious and the data banks are less than comprehensive.

On top of that, criminals are wising up and using condoms, and this criminal sounded like a careful planner.

Cops watch the same shows everyone else does and sometimes they learn something. But Milo and other people in his position have a saying: Forensics never solves crimes, detectives do.

Milo would be happy this one wasn’t his.

Then it was.

When the abduction became something else, the media started using names.

Michaela Brand, 23. Dylan Meserve, 24.

Mug shots do nothing for your looks but even with numbers around their necks and that trapped-animal brightness in their eyes, these two were soap-opera fodder.

They’d produced a reality show episode that backfired.

The scheme unraveled when a clerk at Krentz Hardware in West Hollywood read the abduction story in the Times and recalled a young couple paying cash for a coil of yellow nylon rope three days before the alleged carjacking.

A store video confirmed the I.D. and analysis of the rope revealed a perfect match to bindings found at the scene and to ligature marks around Michaela and Dylan’s limbs and necks.

Sheriff’s investigators followed the trail and located a Wilderness Outfitters in Santa Monica where the couple had purchased a flashlight, bottled water, dehydrated food packets designed for hikers. A 7-Eleven near Century City verified that Michaela Brand’s nearly depleted debit card had been used to buy a dozen Snickers bars, two packets of beef jerky, and a six-pack of Miller Lite less than an hour before the reported time of the abduction. Wrappers and empty cans found a half mile up the ridge from where the couple had staged their confinement filled in the picture.

The final blow was the report of an emergency room physician at Saint John’s Hospital: Meserve and Brand claimed to have gone without food for two days but their electrolyte tests were normal. Furthermore, neither victim exhibited signs of serious injury other than rope burn and some “mild” bruising of Michaela’s vagina that could’ve been consistent with “self-infliction.”

Faced with the evidence, the couple broke down, admitted the hoax, and were charged with obstructing officers and filing a false police report. Both pleaded poverty, and public defenders were assigned.

Michaela’s D.P.D. was a man named Lauritz Montez. He and I had met nearly a decade ago on a particularly repellent case: the murder of a two-year-old girl by two preadolescent boys, one of whom had been Montez’s client. The ugliness had resurfaced last year when one of the killers, now a young man, had phoned me out within days of his release from prison and turned up dead hours later.

Lauritz Montez hadn’t liked me to begin with and my digging up the past had made matters worse. So I was puzzled when he called and asked me to evaluate Michaela Brand.

“Why would I kid, Doctor?”

“We didn’t exactly hit it off.”

“I’m not inviting you to hang out,” he said. “You’re a smart shrink and I want her to have a solid report behind her.”

“She’s charged with misdemeanors,” I said.

“Yeah, but the sheriff’s pissed and is pushing the D.A. to go for jail time. We’re talking a mixed-up kid who did something stupid. She feels bad enough.”

“You want me to say she was mentally incapacitated.”

Montez laughed. “Temporary raving-lunacy-insanity would be great but I know you’re all pissy-anty about small details like facts. So just tell it like it was: She was addled, caught in a weak moment, swept along. I’m sure there’s some technical term for it.”

“The truth,” I said.

He laughed again. “Will you do it?”

The plastic surgeons’ little girl had started talking, but both parents’ lawyers had phoned this morning and informed me the case had been resolved and my services were no longer necessary.

“Sure,” I said.

“Seriously?” said Montez.

“Why not?”

“It didn’t go that smoothly on Duchay.”

“How could it?”

“True. Okay, I’ll have her call and make an appointment. Do my best to get you some kind of reimbursement. Within reason.”

“Reason’s always good.”

“And so rare.”