Cops watch the same shows everyone else does and sometimes they learn something. But Milo and other people in his position have a saying:
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
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.”
CHAPTER 4
Michaela Brand came to see me four days later.
I work out of my house above Beverly Glen. In mid-November the whole city’s pretty, nowhere more so than the Glen.
She smiled and said, “Hi, Dr. Delaware. Wow, what a great place, my name’s pronounced Mick-
The smile was heavy firepower in the battle to be noticed. I walked her through high, white, hollow space to my office at the back.
Tall and narrow-hipped and busty, she put a lot of roll-and-sway into her walk. If her breasts weren’t real, their free movement was an ad for a great scalpel artist. Her face was oval and smooth, blessed by wide-set aquamarine eyes that could feign spontaneous fascination without much effort, balanced perfectly on a long, smooth stalk of a neck.
Faint bruising along the sides of the neck were masked by body makeup. The rest of her skin was bronze velvet stretched across fine bones. Tanning bed or one of those spray jobs that last for a week. Tiny, mocha freckles sprinkled across her nose hinted at her natural complexion. Wide lips were enlarged by gloss. A mass of honey- colored hair trailed past her shoulder blades. Some stylist had taken a long time to texturize the ’do and make it look careless. Half a dozen shades of blond aped nature.
Her black, stovepipe jeans hung nearly low enough to require a pubic wax. Her hip bones were smooth little knobs calling out for a tango partner. A black jersey, cap-sleeved T-shirt rhinestoned
Lots of time and money spent to augment lucky chromosomes. She’d convinced the court system she was poor. Turned out she was, the debit card finished, two hundred bucks left in her checking account.
“I got my landlord to extend me a month,” she said, “but unless I clear this up soon and get another job, I’m going to get evicted.”
Tears welled in the blue-green eyes. Clouds of hair tossed and fluffed and resettled. Despite her long legs, she’d managed to curl up in the big leather patient’s chair and look small.
“What does clearing it up mean to you?” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Clearing it up.”
“You know,” she said. “I need to get rid of…this, this mess.”
I nodded and she cocked her head like a puppy. “Lauritz said you were the best.”
