13 Stolen Girls Read Online Free

bad about the modern world would be unleashed the instant she contacted dispatch: the celebrity frenzy, the gossip and exploitation and the cruel jokes about dead girls in barrels.
    Call it in
.
    Instead, she got out her cell and punched the first number on her speed dial.
    “ ’Lo, darling,” answered a soothing male voice.
    Layla explained where she was and what she had discovered. She pronounced the name of the deceased.
    The man on the other end of the line went quiet. Then he said, “Did you ever see her little movie?”
    “Wasn’t so little.”
    “No, it wasn’t. I’d have to put it in my top ten.”
    “All time?”
    “Well, of the last decade or so. Tarin Mistry herself is in my all-time top ten for sure.”
    “You know women don’t normally make top ten lists, right? It’s a male thing, very hierarchy oriented.”
    “Maybe I’ll watch her again tonight. I’ve got the movie on Blu-ray somewhere— I can follow along with the commentary.”
    “I don’t think I could stand seeing it right now. Too sad.”
    Neither of them spoke for a while, letting the soundtrack of far-off emergency sirens along the PCH take over.
    “They going to let you keep the case?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah,” she answered, hating the way the desolation was working on her.
    He said, “I’m finding it hard to grasp the fact that you’re the one who finally found her.”
    “Well, actually, Cindy the H.R.D. dog found her.”
    “Right. Did I ever tell you what happened in New Orleans during Katrina?”
    Remington recalled the story well, but didn’t stop him from telling it again.
    “So after the big hurricane there were a lot of dog packs, abandoned pets, roaming the whole city, especially the Ninth Ward. Nobody around to feed them kibble, so they had to fend for themselves.”
    “Poor things.”
    “Which breed of dog do you think was alpha in those packs? You’d guess, you know, maybe pit bulls, Rottweilers, German shepherds, something big and aggressive like that, right?”
    Layla knew she should ring off and attend to business, but she let him go on.
    “It was always a beagle at the head of the pack, every time, all the other dogs following. You know why?”
    “Because they have the nose,” she said.
    “Right. They could smell dinner better than any other breed.”
    “They’re good dogs.” She told him about the pooch’s nose-blowing routine. He didn’t laugh, but she could tell that he was amused.
    “Of course,” he went on, “word in the Big Easy had it that a few of those dinners the beagles were sniffing out were the corpses of drowned humans—some of them probably their former owners. But it doesn’t take away from what a dog like that can do.”
    “All right, on that note, Dad, I have to go.”
    “You up there alone with her?” Gene Remington asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Say an Ave over the girl for me.”
    Layla told him she would. Then she rang off and got on her two-way, putting a call through to the sheriff’s department dispatch.
    —
    Tarin Mistry became famous only after she vanished at age nineteen. Before that, she had been merely one among the faceless hordes of wannabe actors that infested Los Angeles. Mistry’s celebrity came on her slowly, in absentia. A month before she disappeared, she had wrapped an independent movie called
Joshua Tree
. Mistry played the lead, Michelle Nunn, a Mormon bride of a Marine corporal on tour in Afghanistan.
    The shoot, in the desert around Twentynine Palms, had been chaotic. There were budget problems. No one involved seemed to have any faith in the project. A location scout was bitten by a Mojave rattlesnake and nearly died. The director, George Dannemoor, got into a fistfight on set with a teamster.
    Principal photography staggered to a close. The disheartened cast and crew scattered. In a marketplace flooded with product,
Joshua Tree
seemed destined to sink beneath the waves.
    But something terrifically strange