Survival of the Fittest (15 page)

The alarm buzzer still going.

The keypad by the door flashing red.

Probably less than a minute before the alarm bells kicked in, but no worry, there. Police response in Los Angeles was slow, sometimes nonexistent, and in a remote area like this, with no close neighbors to complain, there was nothing to worry about.

Things had gotten to the point where only blood brought the police out and even then, not with much enthusiasm.

He walked around the house, quickly but calmly, able to block out the noise, smelling lemon wax, looking for a target.

The more he thought about it, the greater was his conviction that choosing the psychologist was the way to go. Whether or not the guy could do any direct good, he had access to Sturgis and was, thus, a conduit.

Two birds with one shot.

Now the bells were clanging. Very loud but it didn’t bother him.

The alarm company would be phoning soon. If no one answered, they’d call the police.

In this case, the West L.A. station, but Sturgis, up in the detective office, would be unaware. Some uniformed officer would take the call, jot down the details. Eventually, maybe, someone would drive by.

Crime and denial.   .   .   . What he had to do wouldn’t take long, anyway.

He wasn’t without some guilt—breaking and entering wasn’t part of his self-image. But priorities were priorities.

When he was finished, he let the dog out of the bathroom.

Chapter

17

We never got to dance.

The call came just as we were thinking about dessert and I took it behind the bar of the restaurant.

“This is Nancy from your service, Dr. Delaware. Sorry to bother you, but your alarm company has been trying to reach you for a while and they finally figured to call us.”

“The alarm went off?” I sounded calm but was feeling a needle-stab of panic: not-distant-enough memories of intrusion, the old house reduced to cinders.

“Around an hour ago. The company records it as a circuit break at the front door. They’ve called the police but it might be a while before anyone gets there.”

“An hour and the police haven’t gotten there, yet?”

“I’m not sure. Would you like me to phone them?”

“No, that’s okay, Nancy. Thanks for letting me know.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing, Doctor. We get this kind of thing all the time. Mostly they’re false alarms.”

Before I returned to the table, I reached Milo, back at West L.A.

“Going to take advantage of our friendship,” I said. “How about getting a patrol car to go by my house?”

“Why?” he said sharply.

I told him.

“I’ll go myself. Where are you?”

“Melrose near Fairfax. We’ll leave in a minute, meet you there.”

“Get any dinner down?”

“All of it. We were just about ready to order dessert.”

“Order it. I’m sure it’s a false call.”

“Probably,” I said. “But no, even if I could eat, Robin couldn’t. Spike’s there.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But who’d steal
him
?”

Robin didn’t relax fully until we pulled up to the front and she saw Milo standing outside on the landing giving the okay sign. Spike was next to him and Milo looked like a dog-walker. An absurd notion. It made me smile.

The front door was open, the interior lights burning.

We rushed up the steps. Spike tugged, Milo let go of the leash, and the dog met us halfway.

“You’re okay,” said Robin, sweeping him up and kissing him. He returned the affection and let me know with a look who was top dog.

We entered the house.

“When I got here the front door was locked,” said Milo. “Bolted, had to use my key. No windows jammed. Nothing messed and that safe you keep in the bedroom closet hasn’t been touched. So it looks like a false. Contact the company tomorrow and have them come out and check the system. Only thing out of sorts is this guy.”

I rubbed Spike behind the ears. He harrumphed, turned away, and resumed licking Robin’s neck.

“Muscling in on your lady?” said Milo. “You going to stand for that?”

We drifted into the kitchen. Robin’s eyes were all over the place. “Seems fine to me,” she said. “Let me just check the jewelry I keep loose in my drawer.”

She was back in a moment. “Still there. Had to be a false alarm.”

“Good thing,” I said. “We didn’t exactly get quick protection from the department.”

“Hey,” said Milo, “count yourself lucky you didn’t get a false-alarm citation.”

“Protect and cite?”

“Anything that brings in revenue.”

Robin said, “Let’s have dessert here. You up for ice cream, Milo?”

He patted his middle. “Aw shucks, I shouldn’t—no more than three scoops and only a quart of chocolate sauce.”

She laughed and left, Spike trotting along.

Milo scuffed one shoe with the other. Something in his eyes made me ask if he’d learned anything in East L.A.

“The victim was a kid named Raymond Ortiz. IQ of seventy-five, overweight, some coordination problems, very bad eyesight, Coke-bottle glasses. He was on a school outing in a park at the east end of Newton Division. Tough place, known as a gang hangout, drugs, the usual. The theory is that he wandered away from the group and got grabbed. Never been found but two months later his blood-filled sneakers were left near the front door of the Newton station, resting on top of an old newspaper clipping about the disappearance. Raymond’s blood was on record at County Hospital because he’d participated in a retardation study and they got a perfect match.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Poor, poor kid .   .   . in some ways it’s so much like Irit, but in others—”

“It’s nothing like Irit, I know. With Irit—and with Latvinia—we had the body but no blood, with this one, blood and no body. And the blood implies something other than strangulation. At least not gentle strangulation.”

“I hate that term, Milo.”

“Me, too. Pathologists are such dispassionate bastards, aren’t they?”

I thought about what he’d told me. “Even with the differences, we’ve got two retarded kids, snatched out of a school group in a park.”

“What better place to snatch a kid, Alex? Parks and malls are favorite stalking zones. And this park was nothing like the nature conservancy. No trails, no surrounding wilderness. Your basic inner-city place, poorly kept up, bums and junkies on the grass.”

“And they took kids there for a field trip?”

“An outing, not a field trip. The school was being painted and they wanted to get the kids away from the fumes. The park’s a few blocks away. They were taking them there every day.”

“The entire school went?”

“They brought them a few grades at a time. Raymond was with the special-ed kids and they were grouped with the first and second graders.”

“So there were lots of smaller children and the killer chose Raymond. Without wilderness, what did he use for cover?”

“There are some big trees behind the public rest rooms. The most logical scenario is Raymond went to the john and got dragged into a stall. Either killed right there or incapacitated. They never found any of his blood in the john, but he could have been killed cleanly, the blood for the shoes taken later. Whatever happened, no one saw it.”

“None of
his
blood? Does that mean someone else’s?”

“Like I said, it’s a drug place, junkies use the stalls to fix. There were blood-specks all over the place. At first they thought it would be a lead, but no match to Raymond. The samples are on file if they ever get a perp but why should the
perp
have bled? They also dusted for prints, found matches to a few local bums with sheets, but all of them had solid alibis and none of them had a history of pedophilia or sex crimes.”

Thinking of the boy trapped in a fetid stall, I felt my stomach knot up. “What’s the theory about how the killer got him out of the park?”

“The parking lot’s about thirty feet behind the bathrooms with the trees in between, a nice green barrier. If the asshole’s car was nearby, he could have carried Raymond, tossed him in, driven off.”

“What time of day did this take place?”

“Late morning. Between eleven and noon.”

“Broad daylight,” I said. “Same as Irit—so damned brazen.   .   .   . You said Raymond was chubby. How much did he weigh?”

“Hundred and ten or so. But short. Four seven.”

“Heavier than Irit,” I said. “Once again, a strong killer. How’s the case classified?”

“Open but very cold, not a single lead the entire year. The main Newton D on the case is an older guy named Alvarado, very good, very methodical. He began the same way we did on Irit: hauled in and interviewed sex offenders. He also grilled all the gang bangers known to hang out at the park. They said they’d never hurt a poor little kid—which is bullshit, they kill poor little kids in drive-bys all the time. But Raymond was actually a popular kid because his older brothers were bangers in Vatos Locos and Dad had been, too. VL rules that area and the family was well-respected.”

“But couldn’t that be a possible motive?” I said. “Some internecine gang thing and Raymond was used to get a message across to the Vatos? Had the brothers or the father gotten on anyone’s bad side? Were they involved in the drug trade?”

“Alvarado looked into that. The father served some time years ago, but he’s straight now—works as an upholsterer downtown—and the brothers are low-status punks, not particularly aggressive. Sure they use, like all their buddies, but they’re not kingpins and as far as Alvarado could learn, they hadn’t pissed anyone off big-time. Plus, if it had been a gang message, some sort of revenge would have been taken. Alvarado’s feeling right from the start was a sex crime because of the park setting, the john, the shoes left at the station. To him that was a taunt—a power-trip sicko trying to show how smart he was at the police’s expense. Make sense?”

“It makes a lot of sense,” I said, remembering the business-world adage Dr. Lehmann had quoted this afternoon:

It’s not enough that I succeed. You have to fail.

“Yeah, he was brazen, all right,” he said. “Arrogant bastard. To me, sending the clipping also meant he got off on the publicity, was hoping to stir things up.”

“How much publicity did the abduction create?”

“Couple of small articles in the
Times,
couple of larger ones in
El Diario.
More than Latvinia Shaver’s gotten, by the way. All those media leeches came up with was a thirty-second story on the late news that night, no follow-up.”

“Which raises a question,” I said. “I can see him killing Irit to get publicity, but then why do Latvinia?”

“Exactly. I don’t see enough of a match to consider these anything but three separate cases.”

“Did the shoes stir up the case again?”

“Nope. Alvarado never released anything to the press.”

“Why not?”

“To hold something back, in case the asshole ever gets caught. I asked about the DVLL thing and Alvarado said it didn’t ring any bells. So that scrap of paper probably was just trash.”

“Three separate cases,” I said.

“You disagree?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet. But the similarities do bear consideration: the choice of retarded teenagers, picking them out of a crowd in Raymond’s and Irit’s cases and in Latvinia’s, from plenty of other girls working the street. I keep picturing the same kind of psychopath for each: smug, meticulous, confident enough to spirit a victim away in broad daylight or leave her in a public place like the schoolyard. Leaving the body out in the open in two instances, and a body-surrogate—bloody shoes—in another. Sneaky, but an exhibitionist. A show-off. Taken with himself. Which isn’t profound because every psychopath is self-obsessed. They’re like cookies out of a cutter: same power lust, same extreme narcissism, same need for excitement and total disregard for others.”

“Seen one psychopath, seen ’em all?”

“In terms of their inner motivation that happens to be true,” I said. “Psychologically, they’re flat, banal, boring. Think of all the creeps you’ve put away. Any fascinating souls?”

He thought about that. “Not really.”

“Emotional black holes,” I said. “No
there,
there. Their crime techniques differ because of individual quirks. Not just M.O., because the same killer can change his method if it’s not
psychologically
important to him yet still have a
trademark.
”

“Yeah, I’ve seen that. Rapists who’ll switch back and forth from a gun or a knife, but always talk to their victims the same way. You see any trademark, here?”

“Just retarded kids with various disabilities,” I said. “I suppose that could indicate some twisted notion of eugenics—culling the herd. Though his basic motive would still be psychosexual. Give me a sheet of paper and your pen.”

Sitting down at the breakfast table, I drew a grid and filled it in as Milo watched over my shoulder.

“The asterisks are matches?” Milo said.

“Yes.”

“Where’s the ethnicity match?”

“All three were minorities,” I said.

“A racist killer?” he said.

“It also fits with the eugenics thing. As does the fact that all three were only mildly retarded, functioning very well. Teenagers. Meaning capable of reproduction. He tells himself he’s cleansing the gene pool, he’s not just some lust killer. Which is why he doesn’t assault the victims.”

“Him,” he said. “One killer?”

“Hypothetically.”

“Usually lust killers prey on their own race.”

“The conventional wisdom used to be
always
until cross-racial serial killers started showing up. And murder and rape have been used for years as part of racial and ethnic warfare.”

He scanned the chart again. “Park and schoolyard.”

“Both are public places where kids congregate. I can’t help thinking leaving Latvinia on that yard had some kind of meaning. Maybe to terrify the schoolkids the next morning—expand the violence.”

“Culling.” He shook his head.

“Just presenting another perspective, for argument’s sake.”