Gil Reavill - 13 Stolen Girls: A Layla Remington Mystery

Her mother suggested that God must have meant for the girls body to be found. It had been extremely well hidden, concealed in an eighty-five-gallon steel drum, the barrel sealed shut, weighted with a concrete slab and buried on a remote hillside in Malibu, California.

Our darling would have been there until Christ summoned her on the Final Day, said Cathy Gunion, a woman of such severe evangelical beliefs that her daughter had fled the family home to escape.

For a long time, the barrel remained safe and secure in its subterranean home. The area was locked in a terrible drought, and even in normal times was celebrated for its relative lack of rain. Water, the enemy of all those at rest beneath the ground, never penetrated the four-foot-deep retreat.

The naked victim was drugged and unconscious when she was placed in the barrel. A terrible question naturally occurs. Did she wake? We can only imagine the horror if she did. Better to believe that the airless confines of the steel drum produced a gentle, sleepy asphyxiation.

Days, then weeks, passed. Spinal and brain fluid leaked from the dead girls orifices. She bloated, the bloat collapsed, the body began the long process of dry decay, more familiarly known as mummification. Months, then years. At some point her fingernails detached from her hands, to drop off and land soundlessly in the soft muck at the bottom of the barrel.

Only the girls hair survived unchanged, feathery, white-blond, her most distinctive feature while she was alive. Human hair is nearly indestructible. Fire will do it, of course, but most acids wont, nor will immersion in water or exposure to ultraviolet rays. The simple march of time seems to have no effect. In the waste pools of Auschwitz there is still hair from Holocaust victims, intact seven decades after the fact.

Unstirred by the ocean breezes up top, the limp hair of the victim in the barrel remained, like a marker or a calling card.

Or a prayer.

I was me. I was here. Remember me.

Five years, two months, sixteen days. The prayer changed, became distilled, refining itself to its essence.

Revenge me.

What could accomplish that hopeless task? How would it possibly happen? Who might turn up such an unsavory, unseen prize?

A contractor at work on a foundation for a million-dollar Malibu mansion? A crew of laborers digging a trench for a gas main? Some mad treasure hunter?

None of the above. Whether a divinity was responsible, as the born-again mother claimed, or perhaps some darker force, it would not be human agency that evicted our darling from her makeshift crypt.

I was me. I was here. Remember me.

Revenge me.

Were not positive what it is, Deputy Paz Tejeda told Detective Investigator Layla Remington when dispatch routed the call through. But the dog alerted, so were pretty sure its human remains.

Where are you?

East. By Piedra Gorda, on Big Rock.

Remington could hear the sirens and civil-defense horns above the radio static. Were totally overwhelmed up here. Can you get someone else?

I tasked homicide. The crime-scene unit said you were the only detective available near the scene.

Human remains. Of course such a filthy job would fall to Remington. She had the least seniority on the murder squad. Itll be a while before I can get there.

Dispatch marked the time of Tejedas call as 0842. The disaster had struck Malibu four and a half hours earlier, at 0417 that morning, a 6.1 earthquake. The Malibu Fracture Zone, a fault line running eastwest just off the coast, had finally done what seismologists had long been predicting it was going to do, which was kick the holy hell out of some of the worlds most expensive real estate.

Ground velocity measured as extreme as anything since the Northridge quake in 94. An expert interviewed that morning on KTLA came up with a homey image: You shake a rug on your floor, you flip it up and down, and something like a wave will pass through itthats what happened in Malibu this morning.

When Remington fielded Tejedas call on her shoulder-mounted two-way, she was on emergency duty, standing ankle-deep in a flood from a utility-main break. The tangle of roads above Malibu Lagoon ran in a steady torrent toward the Pacific Coast Highway. Leaking natural-gas pipes flared with orange and red flames, making it appear as if the flowing water were burning.

It took Remington half the morning to travel five miles from central Malibu down the coast to the communitys far eastern border. She passed through a battle zone, one more front in the ongoing war of Nature versus Los Angeles. The PCH was closed, with parts of the roadway heaved two feet from true. Units of the Guard were moving in.

Malibu being the haven of the stars that it was, rumors of celebrity deaths flew. The actress Halle Berry was supposed to have died when her beachfront mansion collapsed. The buzz had it that Bob Dylan had been swept out to sea. Both accounts later proved false. But Remington heard tsunami from the lips of stunned, vacant-eyed citizens, the term hanging in the air like a drone of insects. The feared giant wave never came.

Up there, in that grove of cottonwoods, where the slide pushed against the check dam, Deputy Tejeda told Remington when the detective finally made it to the scene.

Only it wasnt a scene. It was chaos. Paz Tejeda was part of an h.r.d. team from the L.A. County Sheriffs 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-sized 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. The beagle wore a black vinyl vest with the letters H.R.D. and the words L.A. County Sheriffs Department emblazoned on it. H.R.D., meaning human remains detection.