Survival of the Fittest (28 page)

“Or,” said Milo, “Big Bro identifies the mutations and kills off the carriers   .   .   . was PlasmoDerm involved in that kind of research?”

“No, just skin grafts, but even if they were, it doesn’t explain why Ponsico would kill
himself.
”

“Maybe he found out he had some incurable disease.”

“Nope, the coroner said he was perfectly healthy.”

Milo pulled out his pad. “Meta. Sounds like Greek.”

“It is,” said Petra. “I went over the file before I came here and looked it up. Means change, transformation. Something that breaks new ground.”

“Brave new goddamn world?” said Milo. “A bunch of arrogant geeks sit around theorizing about improving the species and one of them decides to put it into action?”

Both of them looked at me.

“Sure,” I said. “If you thought you were that superior, you might start figuring the rules didn’t apply.”

Out in the parking lot, Connor said, “I spoke to Stu this morning. He won’t be back from Maui for another week, says to give you all our data.”

She produced a file from a huge black bag and handed it to Milo.

“Thanks, Petra.”

“No problem.” She flashed an abrupt white smile. “Just promise that if
I
send around a memo,
you’ll
read it.”

We watched her drive away in an older black Accord.

“Fairly new on the job,” said Milo, “but she’ll go far.   .   .   . So I guess the next step is for me to go over this, then give you a look. Then have a talk with Ponsico’s two girlfriends.”

“It’s the best lead we’ve gotten, so far,” I said. Saying nothing about Nolan because I was still bound by confidentiality and there was no reason to violate.

We walked to the Seville. “Thanks for the library work, Alex. Have time to go back there and look up this Meta outfit?”

“First thing in the morning. Sharavi’s well-equipped in the computer department. Planning to update him?”

“Haven’t decided. Because anything I tell him goes straight to Carmeli and how much do I want a grieving high-powered father to know at this point   .   .   . not that I can put him off too long—hell, if I
don’t
cue him in, he’ll probably start bugging the phones again.”

He laughed, cursed. “Distractions   .   .   . by the way, I think I figured out how Sharavi got Raymond Ortiz’s shoes. Same way he got the file—remember how the first time Manny Alvarado looked for it he couldn’t find it? Seems a former Newton captain just happened to drop in to visit the station a couple days before. Guy named Eugene Brooker, one of the highest-ranked blacks in the department, they used to think he was on his way to deputy chief. But his wife died last summer and he retired. And guess what—he was a biggie on the same Olympics security Sharavi worked on. So the Israelis are connected to the department, who knows where else. No matter how aboveboard Sharavi acts, I’ll always figure he’s holding something back. You think his computers can help substantially?”

“I can get academic references from the library, material that’s been in the English-language press. But if Meta’s an international group, or if it’s been implicated in anything criminal overseas, he could be useful.”

He thought about that. “All this assumes Meta’s some big deal. For all we know, it’s just a group of nerds getting together for chips and dip, patting themselves on the back because God gave them smarts. Even if the killer’s one of them, how’re we going to pick him out of the group?”

“If there’s a membership roster and we get it, we could cross-check with the sex-offender and M.O. files. We can also see if any members present a clear opportunity or motive for the three killings. Like working at the park where Raymond was abducted and/or the conservancy.”

“Park worker with a high IQ?”

“Underachiever,” I said. “That’s the way I’ve seen it all along.”

“Ponsico’s second girlfriend—the Lambert woman—sounds like an underachiever, too. Clerking. Not that she’s any big suspect, because our boy’s definitely male and strong—the way he carried Irit and Raymond, trussed up Latvinia.”

I got in the car. He said, “What do you think of that gene project Connor talked about?”

“Just what we need in the age of kindness, Milo. Some map that determines whose life is worth living.”

“So you’re not willing to depend upon the good graces of intellectuals and insurance companies, huh?”

I laughed. “Gang bangers and dope smugglers and back-alley junkie muggers, maybe. But no, not them.”

Chapter

31

At 6:00
A.M.
after working since midnight, Daniel opened the shutters on the computer room’s windows and breathed in light.

Putting on his phylacteries, he prayed without feeling, looking out at the tiny backyard clad in concrete.

He’d spent most of the night on the phone, accommodating the European and Asian and Middle Eastern time zones. Making police-officer small talk in four languages, calling in favors, making his way through the various law-enforcement bureaucracies that somehow never changed from city to city.

Searching for DVLL references, murders with racial and ethnic overtones, any hints of serial crimes linked to genetic cleansing, any major changes in the policies of neo-Nazi and nationalist groups and others who thought themselves superior.

Quantity wasn’t the problem. Plenty of information—as democracy spread over Europe, more and more lunatics crawled out of their holes and gorged themselves on free speech. But in the end he was left with no connections to the L.A. murders, nothing even close to a lead.

He cut his prayers short, apologized to God, wrapped up the
tfillin,
and went into the small, dark bathroom where he turned on the shower, stripped, and stepped in, not waiting for the water to turn hot.

It took exactly two minutes forty-one seconds for the old pipes to kick in. He’d timed it yesterday, arranged his morning schedule accordingly.

But this morning he endured the cold needles.

Flogging himself for the futile night?

He’d begun with Heinz-Dietrich Halzell at the Berlin police, who’d informed him the racist presses continued to churn out the nasty stuff; the moment the
polizei
got an injunction, the slime just moved and started up again. And stupid punks kept beating up Turks and anyone else with a dark skin, starting brawls, desecrating graveyards.

Apology in his voice.
Deeply
sorry, the way only a German could be. Daniel had hosted him at a security conference in Jerusalem, last year. A really decent guy, but weren’t they always the ones who let themselves feel?

Murders of retarded kids? No, Heinz-Dietrich hadn’t heard of anything like that. DVLL? Not in any of their files, but he’d ask around. What was going on in L.A.?

When Daniel told him, sketchily, he sighed and said he’d ask around seriously.

Uri Drori at the Israeli Embassy in Berlin did some double-checking and verified everything Halzell had said. Daniel called him not because he didn’t trust the German, but because sometimes what you learned depended on who you were.

Drori reported a slowly escalating rate of low-level incidents, repeated almost word for word Heinz-Dietrich’s lament about the idiots popping up like toadstools.

It will never end, Dani. The more democracy you have, the more you get this shit, but what’s the alternative?

Same story with Bernard Lamont in Paris, Joop Van Gelder in Amsterdam, Carlos Velasquez in Spain, all the others.

No murders of defectives, no DVLL.

Which didn’t really surprise him. These crimes seemed American. Though he couldn’t explain why.

A wonderful country, America. Huge and free and naive; big-hearted people always willing to grant the benefit of the doubt.

Even after the Trade Center bombing, you didn’t see large-scale anti-Muslim feelings. The Israeli Embassy in New York tracked that kind of thing.

Free country.

But what was the price?

Last night, taking a coffee break, he’d heard police sirens, loud, close, looked out the same rear window and saw a helicopter circling low, beaming down on backyards, like some giant mantis scouting for prey.

His police scanner told him they were searching for an armed-robbery suspect—holdup at Beverly Drive and Pico.

A mile away, right near Zev Carmeli’s place.

Not far from the house on Monte Mar where Laura had grown up. Her parents had sold it and bought two tiny condos. Beverly Hills, and Jerusalem, where they were now.

Before he’d left for the States, his father-in-law had warned him: Be careful, things have changed.

Gene said,
Total breakdown, Danny Boy. Going to school can be hazardous to a kid’s health.

Which was one reason Gene had sold his big house in Lafayette Park. Heading for Arizona   .   .   . no real reason for Arizona, except that it was warm and “I’m not exactly worried about melanoma, right?”

Gene looked old. Since Luanne’s death, his hair and mustache had turned snow-white and his skin bagged.

An untimely death, the poor woman had been only sixty when the massive stroke had knocked her to the floor of her kitchen. Gene discovering her, another reason to sell the house.

High blood pressure. A doctor friend of Daniel’s told him blacks had more of it. Some said it was their diet, others genetics. His friend thought racism had a lot to do with it.

Daniel understood that. He couldn’t count the times he’d been called a dirty Jew by Arabs and, because of his skin, a nigger by all sorts of people.

When it happened, he didn’t react visibly but his heart pounded in his ears   .   .   . he wondered if Gene was taking care of his diabetes. Cookies on the counter when he’d gone there to pick up the Ortiz file and the boy’s shoes said otherwise.

His friend had come through for him and Daniel liked to think the favor had been good for Gene, too.

Nothing but time on his hands, poor guy. He’d called three times since returning the stuff, offering to do whatever Daniel needed.

But Daniel wouldn’t go to Gene for any more favors. The man was ill, no reason to draw him in deeper.

If
Sturgis cooperated.

He’d said he would, but hard to tell.

Sturgis would never score high on the Trust Index.

He stepped out of the shower just as the water warmed up, dried off, goose-bumped, amazed he hadn’t felt any discomfort.

America.

Democracy had begun in Greece but its real home was here. Birthplace of official compassion, too—no country had been as kind as America. Now Americans were paying for their compassion in drive-by shootings, the breakdown of rules and values, child-murderers let out on parole.

Same thing back home. For all his country’s image as a tough little fighter state, Daniel knew Israel as one big, soft heart populated by survivors and rooters for the underdog with a reluctance to punish.

That’s why victory doesn’t sit well with us, he thought. Why we end up the first country in history to voluntarily give back land won in battle in exchange for an ill-defined peace with people who hate our guts.

He’d watched, during the intifada, as the Palestinian Arabs made the most of Israeli democracy: staging rehearsed events masquerading as spontaneous shows of protest, exaggerating the very real brutality of the occupation with hyperbole, kids with rocks playing for the camera. The press, of course, gobbled it up like a rich dessert. Day after day of photo-op baton-to-skull and rubber-bullet hailstorm broadcast worldwide, while Assad executed tens of thousands of potential enemies in Syria and got maybe two lines of newsprint.

Still, who ever said life was fair. He’d rather live in a free society   .   .   . though sometimes   .   .   .

And now he was thinking of Elias Daoud again, resolutions tossed to the wind.

The ginger-haired Christian Arab from Bethlehem had been his best homicide detective, playing a major role in the Butcher investigation, never letting the divided-loyalties thing get in the way though it hadn’t been easy—no one but Daniel had trusted
him.

The closing of the Butcher file got everyone on the team promotions, but Daoud’s had taken a bit more prodding of the pencil pushers.

Daniel had been obdurate and finally Daoud ended up a
mefakeah,
Southern Division’s first Arab inspector. The raise in pay for a guy with seven kids had made it more than just another ribbon.

Daoud was kept on Daniel’s squad and Daniel assigned him to the few nonpolitical homicide cases that came up: Old City gang stuff, the drug and watermelon rackets, nothing with any security overtones. For Daoud’s protection as well as for the brass. Daniel didn’t want him branded a collaborator.

Then the intifada heated up. More rhetoric, more audacity, more violence—the wall of fear broken down, vermin scurrying through the rubble.

Religious militancy found new life, too, and Christians in Bethlehem, and Nazareth, and everywhere else Christian, remembered Beirut and grew less vocal, many of them bribing their way across the border to Jordan and onward to families in Europe and the States.

One morning, in the midst of a serious investigation into the Ramai gang’s role in the hashish trade, with Daoud scheduled to give a progress report, everyone waiting in a restaurant on King George Street, the guy didn’t show.

Right away Daniel knew something was wrong. The man was a walking wristwatch.

He dismissed the griping detectives, called Daoud’s house, got a disconnected line.

The usual twenty-minute drive to Bethlehem took him less than fifteen. Before he got to the city outskirts he saw the military jeeps and the police Ford Escorts, blue lights flashing, people milling around, the simmering feel of an impending riot.

He showed his badge and made his way past grim faces to Daoud’s house. Police tape had been wrapped around the little limestone cube and chickens circled the muddy ditch that passed for a yard. No more olive-wood crucifix in Daoud’s window—when had that changed?