Survival of the Fittest

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “If I stay, I turn venomous. What time tomorrow?”

  “At night, ten,” she said.

  I began reciting the Genesee address.

  “No, you come back here,” she said. “My guests depart tomorrow. I want you here. On my bed.”

  “You and me and the stuffed animals?”

  “I'll show you stuffed, all right. I'll show you things you never imagined.”

  “Fine,” I said. “The stage doesn't matter, only the performers.”

  “You bet,” she said. “I'm a star.”

  One long, deep kiss and she was off, a blue flame burning through the crowd.

  I went into the bathroom. Cramped and papered in brown foil printed with silver flowers, cracked white tile atop the vanity. No window; the stench of too many recent visits poorly dispelled by a noisy overhead fan.

  Closing the commode, I sat on the lid and collected my thoughts.

  I'd been here just over an hour and gotten nothing, not even Meta's name. Because what she was interested in was bedding me, not recruiting.

  I could still taste her tongue, and the scent of her perfume stayed with me— I sensed it mentally rather than actually smelled it.

  I rinsed my mouth out with tap water and spit.

  If I went home tonight, Robin would ask how things had gone.

  I'd say boring, the girl was crazy.

  This was probably how female Vice cops felt standing on corners, waiting for hungry, frightened men to drive up and barter. . . .

  But it was wrong to think of her as pathetic rather than dangerous.

  Had Malcolm Ponsico made that mistake?

  Kill the pity. Stop thinking like a therapist.

  Time to get back, call Milo, decide how much further this should be taken.

  I rose, washed my hands, and opened the door. Saw movement to my left. Two people coming up the stairs.

  Zena's bedroom door open. But no lovers emerging from a tryst.

  First came the wheat-bearded crew-cut guy in the gray sweatshirt, still grim.

  He shot me another stare. I pretended not to notice.

  Had we met . . . ? There was something familiar—

  Then I saw the man behind him and turned my back, heart racing. Trying not to show the fear I felt, heading at a normal, but steady, pace toward the front door.

  A split second had been long enough to register the details.

  Older man in a white silk sportcoat. Short brown hair, silver temples. Tan face, gold eyeglasses, athletic gait, solid build.

  Drinks at the marina. Calamari and a fine cigar.

  Sergeant Wesley Baker, Nolan Dahl's training officer.

  And now I knew where I'd seen the bearded man.

  51

  I was out the door now, breath stuck somewhere down in my chest, walking down the black street as fast as I could on ice-cold legs. Forcing myself to take slow, deep lungfuls of the sweet, dirty air.

  I drove the hell out of there.

  At Sunset and Vine, I called Milo's cell phone with the one Daniel had given me.

  “Where are you?”

  “Fifty feet behind you,” he said. “You didn't stay long.”

  I told him why.

  “Baker,” he said, and I knew he was remembering.

  Baker's love of games. The porn-stuffed locker.

  “Sure he didn't see you, Alex?”

  “I can't be sure but I don't think so. It makes some other things fall into place— let's talk somewhere private.”

  “Go home, I'll meet you.”

  “Which home?”

  “Which do you want?”

  “Andrew's place,” I said. “This could take time and there are things Robin doesn't need to hear.”

  At Genesee, I put the Karmann Ghia in the garage and was inside the apartment just before midnight. Past Robin's bedtime but I called her anyway, certain the conversation would be monitored by who-knew-how-many people at the Israeli Consulate.

  “Hullo.”

  “Hi, hon. Were you asleep?”

  “No, waiting,” she said, stifling a yawn. “ 'Scuse me. Where are you, Alex?”

  “The apartment. I may be here for a while. If things stretch too late I may just stay here. By the way, this is a high-tech party line.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So when will you know? If you're coming home?”

  “Why don't you just assume I won't be. I'll call you as soon as I can. Just wanted to say I love you.”

  “Love you, too. If you can make it home, please do, Alex.”

  “I will.”

  “The main thing is you're safe.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  I made instant coffee in the kitchen and sat on the dusty couch.

  Baker. The bearded man. Houseguests. How many others?

  Had Farley Sanger been at the party?

  Vehicle in the garage.

  Chevy van?

  Because I remembered Wilson Tenney's driver's-license photo.

  Mid-thirties, mid-sized, clean-shaven, long, light brown hair.

  Cut the hair, grow a beard. Someone besides me had been aiming for disguise.

  Baker and Tenney and Zena.

  Maybe others.

  A killing club.

  Zena's place a refuge. Their safe house.

  I thought of the atmosphere at the party.

  Eat, drink, make merry; no paranoia, no suspicion. Most of the Meta people had no idea what the splinter group was doing for fun.

  Games . . . Tenney had removed himself from the action, sitting in a corner alone. Reading. As he'd done at the park where Raymond was abducted.

  Your basic loner . . . going downstairs with Wes Baker.

  Impromptu conference of the club within a club.

  A tight little murderous cell.

  Baker and Tenney in Zena's bedroom, behind a locked door. Zena had been angry but she hadn't protested.

  Knowing she was outranked.

  Baker, the leader. Because of his charisma and his police experience.

  A teacher, a trainer in police technique.

  Who better to subvert the police?

  Teacher and students . . .

  Baker and Nolan?

  Code 7 for hookers? Something worse?

  Two cops in a park.

  A young girl strangled and left stretched out on the ground.

  Sweeping up.

  Easy job for two strong men.

  Could it be?

  I thought of Nolan's suicide, so public, so self-debasing, executing himself in front of the enemy.

  Like every suicide, a message.

  This one said soul-rotting, strangulating guilt. The ultimate atonement for unredeemable sin.

  A law-and-order guy. A smidgen of conscience had remained and the magnitude of his violation came to haunt him.

  He'd passed sentence on himself.

  But something didn't fit: If Nolan was aiming for expiation, why hadn't he gone public, exposed the others, prevented more bloodshed?

  Because Baker and the others had some kind of hold on him . . . the photos? On-duty liaisons with teenage hookers.

  Polaroids left in a family album.

  Placed there deliberately for Helena to find. Not by Nolan. By people who didn't want her to probe further.

  Break-ins at Nolan's place and Helena's house, days apart. Now, it seemed ridiculously coincidental. Why hadn't it bothered me then?

  Because burglaries in L.A. were as commonplace as bad air. Because Helena was my patient and I couldn't talk about what went on in therapy unless lives were at stake. So I'd denied.

  It had worked so well— shutting my mouth, driving Helena out of therapy. Out of town.

  But, no, it still didn't make sense. If Nolan had been consumed by guilt over murder, dirty pictures wouldn't have stopped him from incriminating the others.

  I was still struggling with it when Milo rang the bell.

  He was carrying his vinyl attachÉ and sat right down next to me.


  “There's something I need to tell you,” I said.

  “I know. Dahl. When you told me about Baker, my mind went on overdrive.”

  He unzipped the case, removed a sheet of paper, and gave it to me. “Here's why it took me an hour to get here.”

  Photocopy of some kind of chart. Horizontal grid on the upper three-quarters, several columns below a ten-digit numerical code and the heading DAILY FIELD ACTIVITIES REPORT. At the bottom, a series of boxes filled with numbers.

  The top columns were labeled SPEC. SURVEY, OBS., ASGD ACT., TIME OF DAY, SURVEY SOURCE AND CODE, LOCATION OF ALL ACTIVITIES, TYPE OF ACTIVITY, SUPERVISOR AT SCENE, BOOKING, CITATION. Baker's name in every SUPERVISOR slot.

  “Baker and Nolan's work log,” I said.

  “Daily report— the D-FAR,” said Milo. “They're handed in at the end of each shift, stored in the station for a year, then moved downtown. These are Baker and Dahl's for the day Irit was murdered.”

  Everything in perfect block letters, the time notated militarily: 0800 W L.A. ROLL CALL TO 1555 SIGN-OFF.

  “Neat writing,” I said.

  “Baker always printed like a draftsman.”

  “Compulsive. The type to sweep up.”

  He growled.

  I read the report. “First call's a 211 suppression— armed robbery?”

  He nodded.

  “Wilshire near Bundy,” I went on. “It lasted nearly an hour, then a 415 call— disturbing the peace, right?”

  “It could mean anything. This one was near the Country Mart, but see here where it says “no 415 found' under TYPE OF ACTIVITY? And no booking data in column 7? It didn't pan out.”

  He stabbed the paper with his index finger. “After that, they did traffic stops, ten of 'em in a row— Baker was always one for giving lots of tickets— then another no-arrest 415 in the Palisades, then lunch.”

  “At 1500,” I said. “Three P.M. Late lunch.”

  “They list no Code 7s all day. If it's true, they were due for a break.”

  My eyes dropped to the final notation before checkout.

  “Another no-action 415 at 1530,” I said. “Sunset near Barrington. Are false calls that common?”

  “Common enough. And it's not only false calls. Lots of times 415s end up just being an argument between two citizens, the officers calm 'em down and move on, no arrests.”

  I scanned the sheet again. “There are no details on any of the calls beyond the street location. Is that kosher?”

  “On a no-arrest it is. Even if it wasn't kosher, with Baker being a supervisor, there'd be no one looking over his shoulder unless something iffy happened— brutality complaint, that kind of thing. Basically, D-FARS are stashed and forgotten, Alex.”

  “Wouldn't the calls come in through the dispatcher?”

  “For the most part, but cruisers also get flagged down by citizens or the blues see things on their own and report to the dispatcher.”

  “So there'd be no way to verify most of this.”

  “Nope— anything else about it catch your eye?”

  I studied the form one more time. “It's not balanced. All the activity's in the morning. You say Baker liked giving tickets but he issued ten before lunch and not a single one afterward . . . no real documentation for their activities for a solid hour prior to sign-off. More than an hour, if you include the Country Mart call. Even more if Baker bogused the entire afternoon log.”

  I looked at him. “During the time Irit was being stalked, abducted, and strangled, Baker and Nolan had the perfect alibi: doing police work. No way to disprove it— no reason to doubt it. Two with uniforms, a team. Watching the kids get off the bus, selecting Irit, grabbing her— both of them were strong and with two working together, it would have been a snap. Baker probably chose gentle strangulation because he wanted to pretend he wasn't just another psychopath. Wanting to set it up as a sex crime, yet discriminate it from sex crimes.”

  “God,” he said in a voice that burst out of him like a wound. Looking closer to tears than I'd ever seen him. “The fucking bastards. And they— I'm sure it was Baker's idea, that calculating fuck— did more than set up a one-day alibi. They prepared for weeks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He got up, made a move to the fridge, stopped, sat down. “I looked through a whole bunch of their D-FARS. The pattern— busy mornings, quiet afternoons— began two weeks before Irit's murder. Prior to that they had an even workload: calls throughout their shift, Code 7s at normal times, normal lunch breaks. Two weeks before Irit was murdered, they altered it, and they continued altering for three weeks after. That's how calculating they were. Jesus!”

  “Three weeks after,” I said. “At which point, Baker headed over to Parker Center and Nolan transferred to Hollywood. Distancing themselves. Now we know why Nolan was willing to give up a plum assignment.”

  “Covering his ass, the fuck.”

  “Maybe something else, too, Milo. He could have been distancing himself from the murder because the guilt started seeping in. I'm sure that's why he killed himself. I'm also sure Baker and the others took steps so Helena wouldn't look into it too deeply.”

  I told him about the break-ins, the snapshots in the Dahl family album.

  “Hookers,” he said. “Dark-skinned street girls like Latvinia.”

  “Maybe Baker introduced him to Latvinia. Maybe Baker, by himself or with a friend, came back and finished Latvinia off. But what I still don't get is what kept Nolan from going public.”

  “Helena,” he said. “Baker threatened to kill her if Dahl squawked.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Makes perfect sense. It would have intensified Nolan's conflict, led him closer to total escape.”

  “So who are the others?”

  “Zena, maybe Malcolm Ponsico, til he changed his mind and received a lethal injection. Maybe Farley Sanger, though I didn't see him at the party. Definitely Wilson Tenney. Because he was there.” I described the park worker's altered appearance.

  “You're sure it was him.”

  “Do you have his DMV shot?”

  He produced it from the attachÉ.

  “Yes,” I said, handing it back. “No doubt about it.”

  “Unreal— a goddamn psycho club.”

  “Club within a club,” I said. “Meta offshoot. A bunch of eugenics freaks sitting around over their three-dimensional chess boards, telling themselves how smart they are, griping about the decay of society and one of them— probably Baker— says why don't we do something about it, the police are idiots— believe me, I know from experience. Just use different techniques, clean up the physical evidence, and distribute the murders one per district. Detectives from different districts never talk to one another. Let's have some fun with it. Or maybe it started off theoretically— one of those murder-mystery games— committing the perfect crime. And at some point, they took it further.”

  “Fun,” he said.

  “At the core, these are thrill crimes, Milo. They can't seriously think they're creating any societal impact. This is Leopold and Loeb taken a step further: pleasure-kill under a veneer of ideology. Pleasure at showing how brilliant they are, so just to be extra-cute, they leave a message. DVLL. Some coded in-joke the police are sure never to notice. Maybe an insult to the police, like Raymond's bloody shoes left at the Newton station. And even if the letters are discovered, they know the message will be impossible to figure out.”

  “Baker,” he said. “That's exactly his style. Esoteric. Leader of the pack, sucking everyone into his goddamn games.”

  A vein, thick and knotted, was throbbing at his temple, and his eyes burned. “Killers in blue. Oh shit, Alex, you know the department and I don't have a perfect marriage, but this! Just what LAPD needs after Mr. Scumbag Rodney King and the riots and Mr. Scumbag O.J. Just what this city needs!”

  “Which leads me to another question,” I said. “Is Dr. Lehmann doing some butt-covering? He told me Nolan had problems Helena really didn't want to know about. I got a cle
ar message to back off. If he knew Nolan had committed murder, he'd be under no obligation to report it unless another potential victim was in clear danger. I can see him wanting to keep the fact that his patient was homicidal quiet, for his sake and the department's— he gets lots of business from the department. But then why say anything at all? Why bother to meet with me in the first place? And now that I think about it, when I was there he tried to turn the tables. Asking me about Helena. Trying to figure out how much she knew.”