Free 13 Stolen Girls by Gil Reavill Page A

Jamie Guerra.”
    “Tell me you had time to check out the MUPR tonight, amid all your other important duties.”
    “Last three months or so, I’ve been banging the files of every single under-twenty-five female missing in L.A. County, plus a few from parts beyond. So I knew something about Merilee Henegar before I ever heard the comms explode with her tonight. Why I was anxious to come down.”
    Remington had been delving into the same files herself. She thought of the two of them, her and this undercover guy, both sitting up at night, eyes burning, identical desk lamps illuminating the same sad litany.
    “Subject: Knolf, Aileen. Born: 03-13-1997. Gender: female. Height: 59 inches. Weight: 135 pounds. Eyes: blue. Hair: lt. brown. Race: white. Identifying Marks: tattoos, black panther on upper right thigh….”
    Et cetera, et cetera.
“Last reported…” “Circumstances of disappearance…”
One case after another, Remington staring at the reports as though if she stared long enough they’d yield up their secrets.
    “So?” Remington said.
    “So.”
    “So what did you find, Detective?” It was like pulling teeth.
    “Oh, that’s proprietary knowledge. I don’t know you near well enough for us to share secrets. We haven’t even been properly introduced, have we?”
    He wet his thumb and forefinger, snuffed the butt of his cigarette and placed it into the pocket of the fatigue jacket he wore. Smelly, but Remington appreciated the delicacy of not wanting to contaminate a crime scene.
    She sighed. “Detective Layla Remington.”
    “Oh, we all know you, Detective. I’ve been following the Mistry case like everybody else. Dead girls just have a way of cropping up around you, don’t they?”
    Remington didn’t respond.
    “Brasov, Samuel,” the guy said, pronouncing it precisely and holding out a tobacco-stained hand to her. “Deputy detective investigator with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.”
    She shook hands with the guy. “If you’ve got something, Detective Brasov, I’d sure appreciate you not playing games.”
    He had something. And as he laid it out to her, she realized she had found it, too.
    —
    When Layla Remington was in her late teens, a few years before she entered the police academy, everyone she knew was devouring the same set of books. Or, at least, every female that she knew—the Rose and Thorn series was overwhelmingly a womancentric phenomenon. The tale sprang out of the fan-fiction world of the Internet, and told of the torrid relationship between an innocent college student, Rebecca Rose, and her wealthy older lover, Damien Thorn.
    There were three books in the series:
Rose and Thorn,
Rose and Petal,
Rose and Bloom
. It wasn’t just that a lot of Layla’s girlfriends were reading them. It was more the case that
every single female
between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five had the Rose books on her shelf. They were steamy stuff. The Rose and Thorn trilogy introduced a wide-eyed world to the fetish practices of submission and domination. Bondage went mainstream.
    Layla recalled a memorable incident in which she encountered her dad examining her copy of
Rose and Thorn
. As a single father raising a teenage girl, Gene Remington had struggled, and Layla struggled along with his struggles. They felt their way forward together. She almost had to laugh, though, when she witnessed the baffled look on his face as he dipped into the overheated prose.
    “It’s just a love story, Dad,” she had said.
    “Like a romance novel.”
    “Yeah.”
    “This stuff…you like it?”
    “Don’t worry about it, Daddy,” the nineteen-year-old Layla had said, plucking the offending volume out of his hands and retreating, deeply embarrassed, into her bedroom.
    Now, with the CAU team finishing up its work on the Henegar scene, Remington thought about the shrine in Merilee’s bedroom. Sam Brasov told her that the original missing-persons report on Merilee noted the girl’s passion for