Jonathan Kellerman - Gone

Michaela and Dylan were gorgeous and young and thin and had come to L.A. for the obvious reason.

By day, he sold shoes at a Foot Locker in Brentwood. She was a lunch waitress at a pseudo-trattoria on the east end of Beverly Hills.

They’d met at the PlayHouse, taking an Inner Drama seminar from Nora Dowd.

The last time anyone had seen them was on a Monday night, just after ten p.m., leaving the acting workshop together. They’d worked their butts off on a scene from Simpatico. Neither really got what Sam Shepard was aiming for but the play had plenty of juicy parts, all that screaming. Nora Dowd had urged them to inject themselves in the scene, smell the horseshit, open themselves up to the pain and the hopelessness.

Both of them felt they’d delivered. Dylan’s Vinnie had been perfectly wild and crazy and dangerous, and Michaela’s Rosie was a classy woman of mystery.

Nora Dowd had seemed okay with the performance, especially Dylan’s contribution.

That frosted Michaela a bit but she wasn’t surprised.

Watching Nora go off on one of those speeches about right brain-left brain. Talking more to herself than to anyone else.

The PlayHouse’s front room was set up like a theater, with a stage and folding chairs. The only time it got used was for seminars.

Lots of seminars, no shortage of students. One of Nora’s alumni, a former exotic dancer named April Lange, had scored a role on a sitcom on the WB. An autographed picture of April used to hang in the entry before someone took it down. Blond, shiny-eyed, vaguely predatory. Michaela used to think: Why her?

Then again, maybe it was a good sign. If it could happen to April, it could happen to anyone.

Dylan and Michaela lived in single-room studio apartments, his on Overland, in Culver City, hers on Holt Avenue, south of Pico. Both their cribs were tiny, dark, ground-floor units, pretty much dumps. This was L.A., where rent could crush you and day jobs barely covered the basics and it was hard, sometimes, not to get depressed.

After they didn’t show up at work for two days running, their respective employers fired them.

And that was the extent of it.

Iheard about it the way most everyone else did: third story on the evening news, right after the trial of a hip-hop star accused of assault and floods in Indonesia.

I was eating a solitary dinner and half listening to the broadcast. This one caught my attention because I gravitate toward local crime stories.

Couple abducted at gunpoint, found naked and dehydrated in the hills of Malibu. I played with the remote but no other broadcast added details.

The following morning, the Times filled in a bit more: a pair of acting students had left a nighttime class in West L.A. and driven east in her car to the young woman’s apartment in the Pico-Robertson district. Waiting at a red light at Sherbourne and Pico, they’d been carjacked by a masked gunman who stashed them both in the trunk and drove for more than an hour.

When the car stopped and the trunk popped, the couple found themselves in pitch darkness, somewhere “out in the country.” The spot was later identified as “ Latigo Canyon, in the hills of Malibu.”

The carjacker forced them to stumble down a steep hillside to a densely wooded area, where the young woman tied up the young man at gunpoint and was subsequently bound herself. Sexual assault was implied but not specified. The assailant was described as “white, medium height, and stocky, thirty to forty, with a Southern accent.”

Malibu was county territory, sheriff’s jurisdiction. The crime had taken place fifty miles from LASD headquarters, but violent whodunits were handled by major crimes detectives and anyone with information was requested to phone downtown.

A few years back, when Robin and I were rebuilding the house in the hills, we’d rented a place on the beach in western Malibu. The two of us had explored the sinuous canyons and silent gullies on the land side of Pacific Coast Highway, hiked the oak-bearded crests that peaked above the ocean.

I remembered Latigo Canyon as corkscrew roads and snakes and red-tailed hawks. Though it took a while to get above civilization, the reward was worth the effort: a wonderful, warm nothingness.

If I’d been curious enough, I could’ve called Milo, maybe learned more about the abduction. I was busy with three custody cases, two of them involving film-biz parents, the third starring a pair of frighteningly ambitious Brentwood plastic surgeons whose marriage had shattered when their infomercial for Facelift-in-a-Jar tanked. Somehow they’d found time to produce an eight-year-old daughter, whom they now seemed intent on destroying emotionally.

Quiet, chubby girl, big eyes, a slight stammer. Recently, she’d taken to long bouts of silence.

Custody evaluations are the ugliest side of child psychology and from time to time I think about quitting. I’ve never sat down and calculated my success rate but the ones that work out keep me going, like a slot machine’s intermittent payoff.

I put the newspaper aside, happy the case was someone else’s problem. But as I showered and dressed, I kept imagining the crime scene. Glorious golden hills, the ocean a stunning blue infinity.

It’s gotten to a point where it’s hard for me to see beauty without thinking of the alternative.

My guess was this case would be a tough one; the main hope for a solve was the bad guy screwing up and leaving behind some forensic tidbit: a unique tire tread, rare fiber, or biological remnant. A lot less likely than you’d think from watching TV. The most common print found at crime scenes is the palm, and police agencies have only started cataloging palm prints. DNA can work miracles but backlogs are ferocious and the data banks are less than comprehensive.

On top of that, criminals are wising up and using condoms, and this criminal sounded like a careful planner.

Cops watch the same shows everyone else does and sometimes they learn something. But Milo and other people in his position have a saying: Forensics never solves crimes, detectives do.

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 Times and recalled a young couple paying cash for a coil of yellow nylon rope three days before the alleged carjacking.

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.”