Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 12 - Survival of the Fittest

by Survival Of The Fittest(Lit)

  'Let's get back to the uniform angle,' said Milo. 'In addition to it helping him snag victims, he could also like it because he's a man on a mission. Maybe someone with a military background or a military wanna-be.'

  'If he served, he may very well have a dishonorable discharge,' I said.

  Sharavi smiled weakly. 'Uniforms can be valuable.'

  'Being Israeli,' Milo asked him, 'would Irit relate in a special way to someone in uniform?'

  'Hard to say,' said Sharavi. 'In Israel, we have a citizens'

  army, almost everyone goes in for three years and returns for reserve duty. So the country's full of uniforms, Israeli children see that as normal. Irit has actually lived outside of Israel for most of her life, but being around embassies and consulates she was accustomed to guards... it's possible. I don't really know much about her psychological makeup.'

  'The Carmelis didn't fill you in?'

  'They told me the usual. She was a wonderful child. Beautiful and innocent and wonderful.'

  Silence.

  Milo said, 'We could also be talking cop wanna-bes - like that asshole Bianchi.' To Sharavi: 'The Hillside Strangler.'

  'Yes, I know. Bianchi applied to many departments, got turned down and became a security guard.'

  'Which is a whole other angle,' said Milo. 'No one screens security guards. You get ex-cons, psychos, all sorts of fools walking around looking official, some with guns.'

  'You're right about that,' I said. 'I had a case a few years ago, child-custody dispute. The father was a guard for a big industrial company out in the Valley. Turned out to be flagrantly psychotic - paranoid, hearing voices. The company had issued him pepper spray, handcuffs, a baton, and a semiautomatic'

  'Let's hear it for personnel screening.... Okay, so what do we have so far: Joe Paramilitary with high-IQ fantasies and weird ideas about survival of the fittest, a sex drive that goes out of whack every so often, maybe photographic equipment. By taking pictures for later usage and arranging the bodies in a way that throws us off, he has his cake and...'

  He cut himself off, gave a sick look, rubbed his face. Hard. Rosy patches appeared on the pale, scarred skin. His eyelids were heavy and his shoulders sloped.

  'Anything else?'

  Sharavi shook his head.

  'What I can do,' I said, 'is see if any eugenic-related murders come up in the psychiatric literature. Who knows, maybe DVLL will crop up there.'

  Sharavi's fax machine began spitting paper. He collected a single sheet and showed it to us.

  Paragraphs in Hebrew.

  Milo said, 'That sure clarifies it.'

  'Headquarters wants my weekly time-log. Precise accounting of my time.'

  'Been a bad boy?' said Milo.

  'Tardy.' Sharavi smiled. 'One needs to prioritize. Perhaps I should go to Disneyland, bring the chief superintendent back a Mickey Mouse hat.'

  Crumpling the paper, he tossed it into the trash basket.

  'Two points,' said Milo. 'You love basketball in Israel?'

  Sharavi nodded, managed to smile. He looked exhausted, too, eyes sinking even deeper.

  'Basketball but no sex killers, huh? What, you pick and choose what you borrow from us?'

  'I wish,' said Sharavi. 'If only we were that smart.'

  Milo got up. 'I'll take those bugs out myself, if it's only the four you said.'

  'Only those.'

  'Then I can handle it.' He stared down at the smaller man. 'You stay here and talk to Interpol, Nazi hunters, whatever.'

  Once they were gone, Daniel locked the house, activated the alarm, and went to his bedroom, where he sat on the edge of the mattress.

  He indulged himself in a few minutes of loneliness before pushing away thoughts of Laura and the children and assessing how it had gone.

  Sturgis didn't trust him one bit, but still the situation was not bad, considering his own stupidity.

  The psychologist. Those active eyes...

  He'd had to notify Zev about being found out, but Zev had been decent about it. Bigger things on his mind. Since Irit's murder everyone said he was a different man.

  Daniel understood the difference: craving only one thing.

  What was the chance of delivering?

  Listening in on Sturgis and Delaware had produced one good outcome: He'd learned that Sturgis was bright and focused, exactly the type of detective he enjoyed working with. He'd known a few guys like that. One with a brilliant future, but he'd died horribly for no good reason...

  Sturgis's history -his LAPD file full of complaints, striking out at the superior - had prepared Daniel for an outburst. But no fireworks tonight.

  Delaware had remained very quiet, the eyes going constantly.

  The quintessential psychologist. Though he had spoken up from time to time.

  Asking about Daniel's accent, wanting to know about Daniel's family.

  Like an intake at a therapy session. In the Rehab Center, after his first injuries, he'd spent time with psychologists and hated it less than he'd expected. Years later, on the job, he'd consulted them. On the Butcher case, Dr Ben David had proved of some usefulness.

  It had been a while since he'd been analyzed, though.

  Those active blue eyes, pale, appraising, yet not as cold as they might have been.

  Sturgis's were green, almost unhealthily bright. What effect would they have on a suspect, so much intensity?

  The two of them, so different, and yet they had a history of working together efficiently.

  Friends, too, according to reports.

  A homosexual and a heterosexual.

  Interesting.

  Daniel knew only one gay policeman, and not well. A sergeant major working out of Central Region. Nothing effeminate or overt about the man but he'd never married, never dated women, and people who knew him from the Army said he'd been spotted one night going onto the beach in Herzliyya with another man.

  Not a brilliant policeman, that one, but competent. No one

  bothered him, but the other officers shunned him and Daniel was certain he'd never advance.

  Sturgis was shunned, too.

  For Daniel, the issue was a religious one, and that made it an abstraction.

  For Daniel, religion was personal - his relationship to God. He cared nothing about what others did, if their habits didn't infringe upon his liberties or those of his family.

  His family... in Jerusalem it was morning, but too early to call Laura. Like many artists, she was a nocturnal creature, stifling her internal clock for years to raise babies and coddle her husband. Now that the kids were older, she'd permitted herself to revert: staying up late sketching and painting and reading, sleeping in until eight or nine.

  Feeling guilty about it, too; sometimes Daniel still had to reassure her he was fine making his own coffee.

  He drew his knees up, closed his eyes, and thought about her soft blond hair and beautiful face, swaddled in topsheet, puffy with sleep, as he stopped to kiss her before leaving for headquarters.

  Oh... I feel like such a bum, honey. I should be up cooking your breakfast.

  I never eat breakfast.

  Still... or I should give you other things.

  Tugging him down for a kiss, then stopping herself.

  My breath stinks.

  No, it's sweet.

  Pressing his lips upon hers, feeling her mouth parting, the wedding of tongue with tongue.

  He opened his eyes, looked around the bare room.

  In his Talbieh apartment, the walls were alive with color. Laura's paintings and batiks and the creations of her friends.

  Her artsy friends, whom he seldom spoke to.

  Painting with blood...

  What would Laura say about that kind of art?

  He never told her anything beyond the most general facts.

  For twenty years of marriage, that had worked fine.

  Twenty years. By today's standards, longevity.

  Not mazal. Or the result of some amulet or chant or bless
ing from a hakham.

  God's grace and hard work.

  Submerging your ego to be half of a pair.

  Doing the right thing.

  He wished he knew what that meant in this case.

  The following morning as I drove to the U, I realized Helena still hadn't called.

  Put Nolan's suicide to rest. I had plenty to do.

  Snagging a Biomed computer terminal, I logged into Medline, Psych Abstracts, the periodicals index, every other database I could find, pulling up references on eugenics but finding none with any relationship to homicide.

  Collecting handfuls of bound journals, I went looking for The Brain Drain. The book was filed under Intelligence, Measurement, three copies, two checked out. The one left was thick, re-bound in crimson, squeezed between manuals on IQ testing. A few books down the shelf I noticed a slim softcover entitled Twisted Science: The Truth Behind The Brain Drain, and I took that, too.

  Finding a quiet corner desk on the tenth floor, I searched every source for a DVLL citation.

  Absolutely nothing. But what I was learning kept me turning pages.

  Because the idea that some lives were to be nurtured and others eliminated for the good of society hadn't begun with the Race Hygiene Program of the Third Reich.

  Nor had it died there.

  Selective breeding had appealed to the elite for centuries, but it had earned scientific respectability in the Europe and America of the late nineteenth century after being championed by a very respectable figure: British mathematician Francis Galton.

  Unable to produce children himself, Galton had strong beliefs about survival of the ethnically fittest. Qualities such as intellect, zeal, and industriousness, he reasoned, were simple traits, much like height or hair color, and governed by basic rules of inheritance. In order to improve society, the state needed to collect detailed mental, physical, and racial information on every citizen, issue certificates to the superior and pay them for breeding, and encourage inferiors to remain celibate. In 1883, Galton coined the term eugenics, from the Greek meaning 'well-born', to describe this process.

  Galton's simplistic theories of intelligence were undermined by a rebirth of the works of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who bred thousands of plants and found that some traits were dominant, others recessive. Later research showed that most defective genes were carried by outwardly normal parents.

  Even vegetables didn't follow Galton's simplistic model.

  But Mendel's ability to measure patterns of inheritance spurred on Galton's disciples, and eugenics took hold of the academic mainstream, so that by the twenties and thirties nearly all geneticists assumed mentally retarded people and other 'degenerates' should be actively prevented from breeding.

  These views made their way into public policy on both sides of the Atlantic, and by 1917, a Harvard geneticist named East was actively promoting the reduction of 'defective germ plasm' through segregation and sterilization.

  One of East's main influences was someone I'd considered a sage of my chosen field.

  I'd been taught that Henry H. Goddard, of the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, had been a pioneer of psychological testing. What I hadn't known was that Goddard claimed 'feeblemindedness' was due to a single defective gene and enthusiastically volunteered to administer IQ tests to thousands of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in order to weed out undesirables.

  Goddard's bizarre finding - that over eighty percent of Italians, Hungarians, Russians, and Jews were mentally retarded - was accepted without question by a wide range of intellectuals and legislators, and in 1924 the U.S. Congress approved an immigration act curtailing the entry of Southern and Eastern Europeans. The bill was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, who declared, 'America must be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.'

  And Goddard wasn't alone. Chasing down footnotes and citations, I came across the writings of another giant of psychology: Lewis Terman of Stanford, developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Though the French Binet test had been developed to help identify children with learning problems so they could be tutored, its American modifier declared his major goal to be 'curtailing the reproduction of feeblemindedness' with a subsequent reduction in 'industrial inefficiency'.

  According to Terman, intellectual weakness was 'very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial... children of this group should be segregated in special classes... They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers... from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.'

  But the prime mover of the U.S. eugenics movement was University of Chicago professor Charles Davenport, who believed that prostitutes chose their profession because of a dominant gene for 'innate eroticism'.

  Davenport's method of preserving the future of white America was castration of males of inferior ethnic groups.

  Castration, not vasectomy, he emphasized, because while the latter prevented breeding, it also encouraged sexual immorality.

  Davenport's views influenced the law well beyond immigration statutes, embraced as they were by many social-welfare groups, including some pioneers of the family-planning movement. The term final solution was first used by the National Association of Charities and Corrections in the 1920s, and between 1911 and 1937, eugenic sterilization laws were passed in thirty-two American states, and in Germany, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark.

  Most enthusiastic among the self-appointed genetic janitors was the State of California, where in 1909, an order to compulsorily sterilize all inmates of state hospitals judged 'sexually or morally perverted, mentally ill or feebleminded' got scalpels clicking. Four years later, the law was broadened to include non-institutionalized people suffering from 'marked departure from normal mentality'.

  In 1927, forced sterilization reached its highest sanction when a young unwed mother named Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will in Virginia, by virtue of a U.S. Supreme Court decision, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes's decision not only allowed the procedure to be carried out, but also praised it 'in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence... the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.'

  Carrie Buck's baby - the 'third generation of imbeciles' in question - grew up to be an honor student. Carrie Buck, herself, was eventually paroled from the Virginia Colony for Feebleminded and Epileptics, and lived out her life quietly as the wife of a small-town sheriff. She was later found out not to be retarded.

  The Buck decision sped up the pace of forced sterilization and more than sixty thousand people, mostly residents of state hospitals, were operated on all across the U.S., as late as the 1970s.

  In 1933, the Carrie Buck opinion was adopted as law in Germany and within one year, fifty-six thousand German 'patients' had been sterilized. By 1945, under the aegis of the Nazis, the number had climbed to two million. For as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, 'the right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race. The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.'

  After World War II, the tide began turning. Revulsion at the Nazi atrocities - but more important, the demands of wartime service upon surgeons - slowed down the rate of eugenic sterilization, and though the practice continued for decades, most eugenics laws were eventually reversed in the face of scientific debunking.

  But the cause hadn't been abandoned.

  Far from it.

  And sterilization seemed tame compared to some of the ideas being tossed about now. I found myself swimming in an ethical cesspool.

  Calls for assisted suicide sliding quickly into recommendations that those with
nothing to live for be put out of their misery.

  A report from Holland, where physician-assisted suicide had been liberalized, that as many as one-third of euthanasias - 'mercy killings' - had been carried out without patients' consent.

  An Australian 'bioethicist' proclaiming religion no longer the basis for making moral judgments and the sanctity of human life no longer a valid concept. His alternative: fellow ethicists should assign numerical 'quality of life' measurements to people and parcel out health care based upon scores.