Survival of the Fittest

by Jonathan Kellerman

“So you're supposed to clear it quickly but quietly,” I said. “Quite a mandate.”

  “It has that smell of futility, Alex. For all I know someone's setting me up for a fall. Lieutenant was sure smiling a lot.” He drummed his fingers on the box.

  I picked out the second file. Page after page of transcripted interviews with family members, teachers. Lots of stiff, wordy cop prose. Lots of pain seeping through but no revelations. I put it down.

  “So,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “A planner, a sneak. Maybe an outdoors type. Physically strong, possibly a history of child molestation, voyeurism, exposure. Smart enough to wait and watch and to sweep up. Maybe meticulous in his personal habits. He didn't assault her, so the thrill of the chase probably did it for him. Stalking and capture.”

  Picking the weak one out of the herd. . . . I said, “If he did choose Irit, why? With all those other kids, what made her the target?”

  “Good question.”

  “You don't think it could be something to do with her father's position?”

  “The father claims no and my feeling is if it was political the Israelis would take care of it themselves.”

  “Being a diplomat's daughter,” I said, “did she have any special security training? Did her disabilities cause her to be especially gullible?”

  “Gorobich said he asked the father that but the guy brushed him off, kept insisting the murder had nothing to do with Irit personally, that L.A. was a hellhole full of homicidal nuts, no one was safe.”

  “And because he was a VIP, no one pushed.”

  “That and basically Gorobich and Ramos agreed with him. It didn't look like anything the kid had brought on herself. More like some twisted fuck watched her and snatched her and dispatched her and cleaned up afterward. Like you said, playing. Big fucking game. God, I hate when it's a kid.”

  He got up and paced, opened the fridge, looked inside, closed it, peered out the kitchen window.

  “Have you met the parents yet?” I said.

  “I put a call in today, waiting for an appointment.”

  “Three months with no progress,” I said. “The grief may have turned completely to rage. It may be even more difficult to approach them.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I'll tackle that later. Meanwhile, trees don't have feelings, so how about taking a look at the scene?”

  4

  It was less than a half-hour drive, a right turn off Sunset, past the Brentwood intersection with Pacific Palisades. No signs. Sometimes people who love nature don't think other people should disrupt it.

  A suburban street lined with middle-sized ranch homes led to a brush-shaded single-lane road that kept narrowing. A school bus would be scraped by branches.

  The gate was steel painted ballpark-mustard yellow, latched but not locked. The first sign, orange city-issue, specified visiting hours. Opening time was an hour away. I got out, released the latch, returned to the unmarked, and we drove through more foliage-banked asphalt. We pressed on, rolling on dirty hardpack, now, as the brush turned to pines, cedar, cypress, sycamore. Trees planted so close together they formed deep green walls, nearly black, just the faintest delineation of branch and leaf. Anyone or anything could hide back there.

  The road ended in a spoon-shaped clearing. Faded white lines marked off a dozen parking spots and Milo slid into one. Behind the lot was a ten-foot strip of dry, clipped grass upon which sat three rickety picnic tables, a U-drive mower, and several fastened lawn bags, stuffed, shiny-black.

  Beyond the grass, more forest.

  I followed Milo over the lawn to two signs, one atop the other, marking the mouth of a dirt path that dipped into the trees. Above: NATURE HIKE, PLEASE STAY ON TRAIL. An arrow pointed left. Below, a picture board behind cloudy plastic displayed leaves, berries, acorns, squirrels, rabbits, blue jays, snakes. A warning under the western rattler that when the days grew long and hot, the serpents came crawling out for action.

  We began descending. The drop was gentle and the trail was terraced in spots. Soon other paths appeared, steeper, skinnier, branching from the side. The trees remained so dense only short portions of walkway resisted the shadows.

  We walked quickly, not speaking. I was imagining, theorizing, and the look on Milo's face told me he was doing the same. Ten minutes later, he stepped off the trail and entered the forest. The pine smell was much stronger here— almost artificial, like room freshener— and the ground beneath our feet was littered with needles and cones.

  We walked for a long time before he stopped at a small clearing that bore no distinction.

  Not even a clearing, just the space between huge old pines with gray, corrugated trunks. Trunks all around, like Greek columns. The space felt enclosed, an outdoor room.

  A crypt.

  Someone's idea of a death chamber. . . . I said so but Milo didn't reply.

  I looked around, listened. Bird calls, distant. Insects scattering. Nothing to see but trees. No backroads. I asked him about that.

  He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “The forest ends about three hundred yards back, though you can't see it from here. There's an open field, then roads, then mountains, and more roads. Some eventually link up with highways but most dead-end. I traipsed around all yesterday, walking and driving, saw nothing but squirrels, couple of big hawks. Circling hawks, so I stopped to check, maybe there was something else dead down below. Nothing. No other predators.”

  I stared in the direction he'd indicated. No breaking light, not even a suggestion of exit.

  “What happened to the body?” I said.

  “Buried in Israel. The family flew over, stayed for a week or so, came back.”

  “Jewish mourning rituals take a week.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  I said, “I worked the cancer ward.”

  He paced around the clearing, looking huge in the dark, vaultlike space.

  “Secluded,” I said. “Only a mile from the bus but secluded. It had to be someone who really knew this place well.”

  “Problem is, that doesn't narrow it down very much. It's public access, there are always hikers.”

  “Too bad there were none around that day. On the other hand, maybe there were.”

  He stopped pacing. “What do you mean?”

  “The news blackout. How would anyone have known to come forward?”

  He thought about that. “Gotta talk to the parents. Though it's probably too late.”

  “Maybe you can get them to compromise, Milo. Report the murder without identifying Irit by name. Though I agree, it's unlikely to pay off after all this time.”

  He kicked a tree hard, muttered, walked around some more, looked in all directions, said, “Anything else?”

  I shook my head and we retraced our steps to the parking lot. The U-drive mower was in use now, a dark-skinned man in a khaki uniform and pith helmet riding back and forth on the grass strip. He turned briefly and kept riding. The brim of the helmet shaded his face.

  “Waste of time?” said Milo, starting up the unmarked and backing out.

  “You can never tell.”

  “Got time to read some of the files?”

  Thinking of Irit Carmeli's face, I said, “Plenty of time.”

  5

  The Observer

  They hadn't paid him any attention, he was sure of that.

  Waiting until the unmarked car had been gone for twenty minutes, he got off the mower, tied off the last of the leaf bags, got back on, and coasted down toward the park entrance. Stopping a short distance behind the yellow gates, he pushed the machine back to the side of the road. The park service had never missed it. Loose procedures.

  Very loose. The girl's misfortune.

  Good find, the mower a bonus added to the uniform.

  As always, the uniform worked perfectly: Do manual labor in official garb and no one notices you.

  His car, a gray Toyota Cressida with false plates and a handicapped placard in the glove compartment, was parked
three blocks down. A nine-millimeter semiautomatic was concealed in a box under the driver's seat.

  He was lean and light and walked quickly. Ten feet from the vehicle, he disarmed the security system with his remote, looked around without appearing to, got in, and sped off toward Sunset, turning east when he got there.

  Same direction they'd gone.

  A detective and a psychologist and neither had given him a second's notice.

  The detective was bulky, with heavy limbs and sloping shoulders, the lumbering trudge of an overfed bull. The baggy, gnarled face of a bull— no, a rhinoceros.

  A depressed rhinoceros. He looked discouraged already.

  How did that kind of pessimism square with his reputation?

  Maybe it fit. The guy was a pro, he had to know the chance of learning the truth was slim.

  Did that make him the sensible one?

  The psychologist was a different story. Hyperalert, eyes everywhere.

  Focused.

  Quicker and smaller than the detective— five ten or so, which still put him three inches above the dark man. Restless, he moved with a certain grace. A cat.

  He'd gotten out of the car before the detective turned the engine off.

  Eager— achievement-oriented?

  Unlike the detective, the psychologist appeared to take care of himself. Solidly built, curly dark hair, a little long but trimmed neatly. Clear, fair skin, square jaw. The eyes very pale, very wide.

  Such active eyes.

  If he was that way with patients how could he calm them down?

  Maybe he didn't see many patients.

  Fancied himself a detective.

  With his blue sportcoat, white shirt, and pressed khaki pants, he looked like one of those professors trying to come across casual.

  That type often faked casual, pretending everyone was equal, but maintaining a clear sense of rank and position.

  The dark man wondered if the psychologist was like that.

  As he drove toward Brentwood, he thought again of the man's rapid, forward walk.

  Lots of energy, that one.

  All this time and no one had even gotten close to figuring out what had happened to Irit.

  But the psychologist had forged forward— maybe the guy was an optimist.

  Or just an amateur, too ignorant to know better.

  6

  Milo dropped me off and returned to the West L.A. station. As I headed up the stairs to the front entrance, I heard the whine of Robin's table saw from out back and detoured through the garden to her studio. Spike, our little French bulldog, was basking near the door, a mound of black-brindled muscle melting into the welcome mat. He stopped snoring long enough to raise his head and stare. I rubbed his neck and stepped over him.

  Like the house, the outbuilding is white stucco, compact and simple with lots of windows and a tile roof shaded by sycamore boughs. Lateral sunlight flooded the clean, airy space. Guitars in various stages of completion were positioned around the room and the spicy resin smell of crisply cut wood seasoned the air. Robin was guiding a hunk of maple through the saw and I waited to approach until she finished and turned off the machine. Her auburn curls were tied up in a knot and her apron was filmed with sawdust. The T-shirt beneath it was sweaty, as was her heart-shaped face.

  She wiped her hands and smiled. I put my arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek. She turned and gave me her mouth, then pulled away and wiped her brow.

  “Learn anything?”

  “No.” I told her about the park, the leafy vault.

  Her brown eyes got huge and she flinched. “Every parent's nightmare. What next?”

  “Milo asked me to look over the files.”

  “It's been a while since you got involved in something like this, Alex.”

  “True. Better get to work.” I kissed her forehead and stepped away.

  She watched me go.

  By the end of three hours I learned the following:

  Mr. and Mrs. Zev Carmeli lived in a leased house on a good street in Beverlywood with their now only child, a seven-year-old boy named Oded. Zev Carmeli was 38, born in Tel Aviv, a career foreign-service officer. His wife, Liora, was four years younger, born in Morocco but raised in Israel, employed as a Hebrew teacher at a Jewish day school on the West Side.

  The family had arrived in L.A. a year ago from Copenhagen, where Carmeli had served for three years as an attachÉ at the Israeli Embassy. Two years before that he'd been assigned to the embassy in London and had obtained a master's degree in international relations at London University. He and his wife and Oded spoke English fluently. Irit, said her father, had spoken “very well, considering.”

  All the quotes were from the father.

  The girl's health problems had followed an influenza-like illness at the age of six months. Carmeli referred to his daughter as “a little immature but always well-behaved.” The term retarded never came up in the files, but an educational summary report supplied by her school, The Center for Development, indicated “multiple learning problems, bilateral hearing impairment, including total deafness in the right ear, and mild to moderate developmental delay.”

  As Milo had said, Carmeli was adamant about having no enemies in Los Angeles and brushed off all questions about his work and the political situation in the Middle East.

  Detective E. J. Gorobich wrote:

  “V.'s father stated that his job is “coordinating events' for the consulate. I asked for an example and he said he'd organized an Israel Independence Day parade last spring. When I inquired about any other events he'd coordinated, he stated there were lots of them but that the parade was a main one. When I inquired about possible connections between what had happened to his daughter and his occupational/political position and/or activities, he became noticeably agitated and stated: “This wasn't political, this was a madman! It's obvious that you have many madmen in America!' ”

  The Center for Development was a small private school in Santa Monica specializing in children with mental and physical handicaps. Tuition was high and student-teacher ratio was low.

  A school bus had picked Irit up each morning at 8:00 A.M. and dropped her off at 3:00 P.M. Mrs. Carmeli taught mornings only and was always home to receive her daughter. Younger brother Oded was enrolled at the school that employed his mother and attended classes til four. Before the murder, he'd been taken home by car pool or a consulate employee. Since the murder, Mr. or Mrs. Carmeli picked him up.

  Irit's academic records were skimpy. No grades, no quantitative testing, an assessment by her teacher, Kathy Brennan, that she was “making excellent strides.”

  Brennan had been interviewed by Gorobich's partner, Detective Harold Ramos.

  “Witness stated she feels “all torn up' and “guilty' about what had happened to V. even though she'd gone over the events of the day over and over and hadn't found anything she could have done differently except watch V. every second of the day, which would have been impossible because there were forty-two children at the park including some who needed extra-special care (wheelchairs pushed on the paths, etc.). Ms. Brennan also stated that going to the park was a regular thing for the school, they'd been doing it for years, it was always considered a safe place where “kids can just run around for a while and be kids, without being watched every second.' As to whether or not she'd seen anything suspicious, witness stated she hadn't, even though she'd been “racking her brain.' Witness then stated that deceased was a “really nice kid, so sweet, no problems ever. Why do the nice ones always have to suffer!' Immediately following this Ms. Brennan broke down and was tearful. When asked if she was aware of other nice ones suffering, she stated, “No, no. You know what I mean. All the kids are nice, they all have problems. It's just not fair that someone would do this to a child!' ”

  Next came face-to-face meetings with every teacher and aide present at the field trip, as well as the teachers who'd remained at school; the principal, a Dr. Rothstein; the bus driver, Alonzo Burns; and
several of Irit's classmates. No transcripts of the talks with the children were included. Instead, Gorobich and Ramos offered forty-two nearly identical summaries:

  “Witness Salazar, Rudy, nine y.o., blind, interviewed in presence of parents, denies any knowledge.”,

  “Witness Blackwell, Amanda, six y.o., braces on feet, not retarded, interviewed in presence of mother, denies any knowledge.”

  “Witness Shoup, Todd, eleven y.o., retarded, in wheelchair, interviewed in presence of mother, denies any knowledge . . .”

  End of that folder.