Survival of the Fittest (3 page)

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.”

“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?”

Chapter

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. 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. Greek columns. The space felt enclosed, an outdoor room.