Free 13 Stolen Girls by Gil Reavill Page B

the Rose and Thorn books. Brasov said that he had also run across other references to Rose and Thorn, a few times in his survey of other missing-girl reports.
    She left the house and stood in the driveway. The LACTFOMEY gathering at Grand Olympic Auditorium seemed a million years ago. Morning rush hour had not yet begun on the freeway to the south. The eastern sky showed the mercury glow of the sprawling city and, above that, the barest glimmer of dawn.
    Remington should have been tired but wasn’t. It would hit her later, she knew. The whole time she was plugged into a crime scene, she somehow found herself energized, not drained.
    She had encountered Rose and Thorn in the course of her own investigation of missing-girl files.
Well, of course you did, Layla,
she told herself. She was surveying cases involving young girls, and virtually every girl in the country had a thing for those books. Therefore she had to expect to run into Rose and Thorn.
    Sam Brasov and she had both noted the same detail in their research. So what? Correlation wasn’t causation, right? Let’s say the girls in the missing-persons files all drank milk. She wasn’t about to conclude that drinking milk somehow figured into their disappearance.
    Still…That damned Rose and Thorn shrine in the corner of Merilee Henegar’s bedroom nagged at her.
    “Detective Remington?” She recognized the uniformed deputy as Jamie Guerra, from the Lost Hills sheriff’s substation. Probably just coming on first watch.
    “I did the MUPR on Merilee Henegar,” he said.
    “I took a fresh look at it again last night, Deputy. Very helpful, very professional.”
    Guerra ducked his head with a pleased smile. “Is the mother…?”
    “Totally out of it, as you might imagine.”
    “Okay, well…I just wanted to, you know…”
    “You wanted to check in.”
    “Right.”
    They stood together at the curb of Border Drive. Guerra kept flicking glances toward the Henegar house. He appeared disturbed, as though he had heard a sick thing that he didn’t want to know but couldn’t stop thinking about.
    “Something I didn’t see in the MUPR, Deputy—was there any analysis of Merilee’s computer trail?”
    “Uh, no, we were going to…but…” Guerra was nervous, afraid he was being criticized for screwing up.
    “Well, you can only spread yourself so thin, right?” Remington knew better than anyone else the staffing problems caused by recent county budget cuts.
    “Right,” Guerra agreed, stammering. “It was a question of, of, you know, man hours—I mean, woman and man hours, personnel hours.”
    Remington smiled. “Up in the victim’s bedroom, we came across items that indicated she liked the Rose and Thorn books. Are you familiar with them?”
    “Yes! I mean, I haven’t read them, but yeah. You know, the mother, Mrs. Henegar, she mentioned it during my original interview. She told me that the daughter was rabid about, you know, Rose and Thorn.”
    “I guess pretty much every female of a certain age has read them.”
    Guerra again looked uneasy, as if he had been caught out in a mistake. “I didn’t think—I didn’t record it in the MUPR, but it’s in the prelim assessment.”
    The Preliminary Assessment and Recommendation Regarding Missing Persons was the next step after the MUPR. “The girl’s computer or her cell, Detective, they would be something for sure I’d say for you to dig into now that, you know, it’s a homicide.”
    “Forensics bagged Merilee’s laptop,” Remington said. “Thank you for all your work, Deputy.”
    Guerra hesitated. “Detective? This is, like, the second dead one you’ve turned up in the past week. Do you think…?”
    Are they related?
She had an image of dead girls floating toward her, washing up at her feet with the tide. Detective Layla Remington, the dead-girl whisperer.
    A CAU tech called to her from the front porch of the house, so she didn’t have time to respond to Guerra’s uncompleted