Survival of the Fittest

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “What did he do after dropping out of college?”

  “Bummed around, worked different jobs. Then all of a sudden he calls me, announces he's graduated from the police academy. I hadn't heard from him since Mom died.”

  “When was this?”

  “About a year and a half ago. He told me the academy was a joke, Mickey Mouse. He'd graduated high in his class. He said he'd called me just to let me know. In case I happened to see him drive by in a car, I shouldn't be freaked out.”

  “Was he assigned to Hollywood from the beginning?”

  “No. West L.A. That's why he thought I might see him, at Cedars. He might come in to the E.R. with a suspect or a victim.”

  In case I happened to see him. What she'd described was less a family than a series of accidental pairings.

  “What kind of jobs did he work before he joined LAPD?”

  “Construction, auto repair, crewing on a fishing boat off Santa Barbara. That I remember because Mom showed me some fish he'd brought her. Halibut. She liked smoked fish and he had some halibut smoked.”

  “What about relationships with women?”

  “He had girlfriends in high school, but after that I don't know— can I walk around?”

  “Sure.”

  She got up, covered the room in small, choppy steps. “Everything always came easy to Nolan. Maybe he just wanted to take the easy way out. Maybe that was the problem. He wasn't prepared for when things didn't come easy.”

  “Do you know of specific problems he was having?”

  “No, no, I don't know anything— I was just thinking back to high school. I used to agonize over algebra and Nolan would waltz into my room, look over my shoulder, and tell me the answer to an equation. Three years younger— he must have been eleven, but he could figure it out.”

  She stopped, faced a bookshelf. “When Rick Silverman gave me your name, he told me about his friend on the force and we got into a discussion of the police. Rick said it was a paramilitary organization. Nolan always wanted to be noticed. Why would he be attracted to something so conformist?”

  “Maybe he got tired of being noticed,” I said.

  She stood there for a while, sat back down.

  “Maybe I'm doing this because I feel guilty for not being closer to him. But he never seemed to want to get close.”

  “Even if you had been close, you couldn't have prevented it.”

  “You're saying it's a waste of time to try to stop someone from killing themselves?”

  “It's always important to try to help, and many people who are stopped never attempt again. But if someone's determined to do it, they'll eventually succeed.”

  “I don't know if Nolan was determined. I don't know him!”

  She burst into loud, racking sobs. When she quieted I handed her a tissue and she snatched it and slapped it against her eyes. “I hate this— I don't know if I can keep doing this.”

  I said nothing.

  Looking to the side, she said, “I'm his executor. After Mom died, the lawyer handling our parents' estate said we should each write a will.” She laughed. “Estate. The house and a bunch of junk. We rented out the house, split the money, then after my divorce, I asked Nolan if I could live there, send him half the rent. He wouldn't take it. Said he didn't need it— didn't need anything. Was that a warning sign?”

  Before I could answer, she stood again. “How much more time do we have?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Would you mind if I left early?”

  She'd parked a brown Mustang off the property, out on the bridle trial that snakes up from Beverly Glen. The morning air was hot and dusty, the smell of pines from the neighboring ravine piercing and cleansing.

  “Thanks,” she said, unlocking the car.

  “Would you like to make another appointment?”

  She got in and lowered the window. The car was spotless, empty except for two white uniforms hanging over a rear door. “Can I get back to you? I need to check the on-call schedule.”

  Patient's version of don't call me, I'll call you.

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks again, Dr. Delaware. I'll be in touch.”

  She sped away and I returned to the house, thinking about the meager history she'd given me.

  Nolan too smart to be a cop. But plenty of cops were smart. Other characteristics— athletic, macho, dominant, attracted to the dark side— fit the police stereotype. A few years bumming around before seeking the security of a city job and a pension. Right-wing political views; I'd have liked to hear more about that.

  She'd also described a partial family history of serious mood disorder. A cop judged “different” by his peers.

  That could add to the alienation brought about by the job.

  Nolan's life sounded full of alienation.

  So even though his sister was understandably shocked, no big surprises, so far.

  Nothing that came close to explaining why Nolan had sucked his gun at Go-Ji's.

  Not that I was likely to get any closer to it, because the way she'd left told me it would probably be a one-shot deal.

  In my business you learn to make do with unanswered questions.

  3

  Milo called two days later, at 8:00 A.M.

  “They just gave me another cold one, Alex. I'm not sure I can pay you, though we did get brownie points on the last thing, so maybe.”

  The last thing was the murder of a psychology professor stalked and stabbed a few yards from her home in Westwood. Thinking it unsolvable after months of no leads, Milo's superiors had handed it to him as punishment for being the only openly gay detective in LAPD. We'd learned a few secrets about the victim and he'd managed to close the file.

  “Well, I don't know,” I said. “Why the hell should I do you any favors?”

  He laughed. “Because I'm such a pleasant fellow?”

  I simulated a game-show buzzer. “Try again.”

  “Because you're a shrink and committed to unconditional acceptance?”

  “Don't go on Jeopardy! What's the case?”

  I heard him sigh. “A kid, Alex. Fifteen years old.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know how you feel about that but this is an important one. If you have any time at all I'd appreciate tossing things around.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Come over right now.”

  He showed up carrying a box of files, wearing a turquoise polo shirt that proclaimed his gut, wrinkled brown jeans, scarred beige desert boots. His weight had stabilized at around 240, most of it distributed around the middle of his six-three frame. His hair was freshly cut in his usual style, though to use style in conjunction with Milo was a felony: clipped short at the sides and back, shaggy on top, sideburns to the earlobes. Gray was winning the battle with black and the sideburns were nearly white. He's nine months older than I am and sometimes looking at him reminds me time is passing.

  He put the box down on the kitchen table. His pocked face was chalky and his green eyes lacked spark. A long night, or several of them. Looking at the refrigerator, he frowned. “Need I spell it out?”

  “Solid or liquid?” I said.

  “Been working on this since six.”

  “So both.”

  “You're the doctor.” He stretched and sat heavily and I heard the chair creak.

  I fixed him a cold roast beef sandwich and brought it over along with a quart of milk. He ate and drank quickly and exhaled noisily.

  The box was filled to the top. “Looks like plenty of data.”

  “Don't confuse quantity with quality.” Pushing his plate away, he began removing bound folders and rubber-banded stacks, arranged them neatly on the table.

  “The victim is a girl named Irit Carmeli. Fifteen, slightly retarded. Thirteen weeks ago, someone abducted her and killed her during a school field trip up in the Santa Monica Mountains— some nature conservancy owned by the city. Her school goes there every year, the idea is to get a little beauty into the kids' lives
.”

  “Are all the kids retarded?”

  “All with some kind of problem. It's a special school.”

  He ran a hand over his face, as if washing without water. “Here's how it lays out: The kids were dropped off near the entrance by a chartered bus, and hiked about a half-mile into the park. It gets thickly wooded pretty quickly but there are marked pathways for novice hikers. The kids ran around for an hour or so, had snacks, bathroom breaks, then reboarded. Almost two hours had lapsed by then. They called roll, Irit wasn't there, they went looking for her, couldn't find her, 911'd Westside Division, who sent a couple of units, but they couldn't find her either and called for K-9 backup. It took half an hour for the dogs to get there, another half to sniff her out. The body was about a mile away, lying in a pine grove. No overt signs of violence, no ligature striations, no subdermal hemorrhaging, no swelling, no blood. Except for the positioning they would have assumed she'd had a seizure or something like that.”

  “Sexual positioning?”

  “No, show you in a second. The coroner found bruising on the hyoid and the sternohyoid and the pharyngeal muscles. No sexual assault.”

  “Strangulation,” I said. “Why no external marks?”

  “Coroner said you can get that when the choke-force is spread out over a broad area— using a soft ligature like a rolled-up towel or a clothed forearm. Gentle strangulation, they call it.”

  Grimacing, he removed the top file and flipped it open to two pages of snapshots in plastic strip-fasteners.

  Some were of the surrounding forest. The rest were of the girl. Thin and fair-haired, she wore a white T-shirt with lace trim around the neck and sleeves, blue jeans, white socks, pink plastic shoes. Very thin. Pipe-cleaner limbs, the elbows prominent, as if recently enlarged by a growth spurt. I would have guessed her age at twelve, not fifteen. Lying on her back, brown earth beneath her, arms at her sides, feet pressed together. Too symmetrical to have fallen. Arranged.

  I studied a facial close-up. Eyes closed, mouth slightly parted. The dirty-blond hair, long and very curly and spread on the ground.

  More arrangement.

  Someone taking the time . . . playing.

  Back to the full-body shot. Her hands were next to her thighs, palms up, curled open, as if asking Why?

  Insipid olive-gray shadows washed across the pale face like brushstrokes.

  Light filtering through the trees above.

  My chest felt clogged and I started to close the file. Then I noticed something small and pink near the girl's right ear. “What's that?”

  “Hearing aid. She was also deaf. Partially in one ear, totally in the other.”

  “Jesus.” I put the file down. “Irit Carmeli. Is that Italian?”

  “Israeli. Her father's a honcho at the Israeli Consulate. Which is why the department's inability to develop a single lead in three months is problematic.”

  “Three months,” I said. “I never read about it in the papers.”

  “It wasn't in the papers. Diplomatic pull.”

  “Sounds like a very cold case.”

  “Any colder and I'd be wearing fur. Any gut impressions?”

  “He took his time with her,” I said. “Meaning he probably abducted her fairly soon after she arrived. When's the last time anyone saw her?”

  “No one's sure. From the moment they let them off the bus it was chaos, kids running all over the place. That was the point of the conservancy. The school had gone there before, thought it was a safe place for the kids to run loose and explore.”

  “How'd the murderer get in without being noticed?”

  “Probably a backroad, the place is full of them on three sides, access from the Valley side, Santa Monica, and from Sunset. There's a thick belt of trees between the hiking area and the nearest road so you'd need to know your way around, meaning the piece of shit was familiar with the area, either hiked or drove. If he drove he parked at a distance because the roads closest to the murder scene were clean, no tracks.”

  “He parks, walks through the trees, finds a spot where he can see the kids, watches,” I said. “Any tracks on more distant roads?”

  “Nothing that could be identified because you get heavy enough traffic to blur everything. And I can't tell you they checked every square inch of the park early because in the beginning, it wasn't a crime scene, it was a missing kid. In addition to the K-9s and the teachers and the park rangers, her father came over with a whole posse of consulate people and everything got pretty much trampled.”

  “What about at the scene itself?”

  “Not a trace of anything physical, except for a few pieces of straw that the lab says came from a broom. Looks like the scumbag swept up the area around her.”

  “A neat one,” I said. “Compulsive. That fits the way he arranged the body.”

  I forced myself to look at the photographs again, picturing a fiendish face bent over the girl. But that's not the way it was. It always came down to people, not monsters.

  Arranging. Manipulating.

  Sweeping up.

  “Strangulation and positioning are usually sexual,” I said. “No assault at all?”

  “Nothing. She was a virgin. And you know how sex fiends usually position: spreading the legs, displaying the genitals. This was just the opposite, Alex. First time I saw the pictures she looked unreal. Like a doll.”

  “Playing with dolls.” My voice was low and hoarse.

  “Sorry for dropping this one on you,” he said.

  “How retarded was she?”

  “The file says “slightly.' ”

  “Abducted without a sound and carried a mile from the group. How much did she weigh?”

  “Eighty pounds.”

  “So we're talking someone strong,” I said. “Is the theory that she wandered off the path, just happened to be unlucky?”

  “That's one of them. The other is that he picked her for some reason. As far as no sound, he could have clamped his hand over her mouth and carried her away. Though if he did clamp, it wasn't hard. No finger marks. Not a bruise anywhere.”

  “So no evidence of any resistance on her part?”

  He shook his head.

  “Was she mute as well as deaf?”

  “She spoke but not clearly and her main language was Hebrew.”

  “But she had the capacity to scream?”

  “I assume.” He finished the milk and crushed the carton.

  “Watching til he found a victim,” I said. “Stalking the herd and picking off a weak one. How many other kids were in the group?”

  “Forty-two. Plus four teachers and two aides. Some of the kids were in wheelchairs and needed close supervision. Another reason the kids who could run around had lots of freedom.”

  “Still,” I said. “All those people and no one saw anything?”

  He shook his head, again, and pointed to the files. “Everyone's been talked to twice, three times. Teachers, the bus driver, kids to the extent they could talk.”

  “How often do they come to the conservancy?”

  “Once a year for the past five.”

  “Was the trip prearranged with the park?”

  He nodded. “Lots of schools come up there.”

  “So someone familiar with the park would know disabled kids were due to visit. Easy victims.”

  “The first guys on the case— Gorobich and Ramos— interviewed every park and school employee as well as former employees. The only criminal records they found was some old DUI stuff on a couple of the gardeners and their alibis all checked out.”

  “Sounds like they were thorough.”

  “Both were competent and a kid victim plus a diplomat father made the case high-priority. But they came up with nada and last week they got pulled and transferred to auto theft. Calls from above.”

  “So now they're trading two detectives for one?” I said. “I know you're good but—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I asked the same thing. Lieutenant just shrugged and said, “What,
Sturgis, you mean you're not a genius?' Only thing I can think of is the Israelis figure all the teamwork scut's been done, they want to keep it low-key so some Arab terrorist won't get ideas and declare open season on other consulate kids. As to why me?” He shrugged. “Maybe they heard about the Devane solve.”