Jonathan Kellerman - Survival Of The Fittest

A vehicle that hadn't been seen since Tenney's firing from the park. Shortly after Raymond's abduction.

Bloody shoes…

He'd said nothing about Tenney to Zev Carmeli.

The deputy consul had taken to calling him every day, between 5:00 and 8:00 P.M., getting irritated when Daniel was out, even though he knew Daniel was working on Irit and nothing else.

Tonight, Zev had caught him just as he sat down to a tuna sandwich, the police scanner going in the kitchen. “Are they giving you what you need, Sharavi?”

“They're being cooperative.”

“Well, that's a switch. So… nothing, yet?”

“I'm sorry, no, Zev.”

Silence on the line. Then the same question: “Sturgis. You're sure he knows what he's doing?”

“He seems very good.”

“You don't sound enthusiastic.”

“He's good, Zev. As good as anyone I've ever worked with. He takes the job seriously.”

“Is he taking you seriously?”

About as seriously as could be expected. “Yes. No complaints.”

“And the psychologist?”

“He's doing his best, as well.”

“But no brilliant new psychological analysis.”

“Not yet.”

He didn't mention Petra Connor or Alvarado or any of the other detectives. Why complicate things?

“All right,” Carmeli finally said. “Just keep me fully informed.”

“Of course.”

After Zev hung up, Daniel bolted down the sandwich, said grace after the meal, then the ma'ariv prayers, and resumed reading The Brain Drain. Some of the details flew over his head- graphs, statistics; a very dry book, but maybe that was the point.

Dr. Arthur Haldane trying to obscure facts with verbiage and numbers. But the message came through:

Smart people were superior in every way and should be encouraged to breed. Stupid people were… during good times, a nuisance. During bad times, an unnecessary obstruction.

Dry, but a best-seller. Some people needed others to lose in order to feel like winners.

He'd looked into Haldane's background.

Yet another New Yorker.

The book listed him as a scholar at the Loomis Institute, but Sharavi's Manhattan operative hadn't traced any calls from Haldane to Loomis's office. Haldane's apartment was in Riverdale, in the Bronx.

“Decent place,” the operative had said. “Healthy rent, but nothing that special.”

“Family?”

“He's got a wife and a fourteen-year-old daughter and a dog. A mini Schnauzer. They go out to dinner twice a week, usually Italian. One time they had Chinese. He stays in a lot, doesn't go to church on Sunday.”

“Stays inside,” said Daniel.

“Sometimes for days at a time. Maybe he's working on another book. He doesn't own a car, either. The one phone we know about, we've secured, but he could be using E-mail and we haven't found any password yet. That's it, so far. Nothing more on Sanger and that sour-faced woman, either. Helga Cranepool. They both go to work, they go home. A boring bunch.”

“Boring and smart.”

“So you say.”

“So they say.”

The operative laughed. She was a twenty-eight-year-old Dutch-born woman whose cover job was photographer for The New York Times. No connection to the Israeli government except for the cash that was deposited for her each month in a Cayman Islands bank.

“Any pictures?” said Daniel.

“What do you think? Coming right through. Bye.”

The snapshot that slid through the fax machine was of a slight, bearded, gray-haired man in his late forties or early fifties. Curly hair, bushy at the sides, eyeglasses, pinched face. He wore a tweed overcoat, dark slacks, and open-necked shirt, and was walking the little Schnauzer.

Wholly unremarkable.

What did he expect, monsters?

Hannah Arendt had called evil banal and the intellectuals had all jumped on that because it fit in with their disparage-the-bourgeoisie philosophy.

But Arendt had maintained a long-term, pathetic, masochistic relationship with the anti-Semite philosopher Martin Heidegger, so her judgment, in Daniel's opinion, was questionable.

From what he'd seen, crime was often banal.

Most of it was downright stupid.

But evil?

Not the evil he'd experienced in the Butcher's dungeon of horrors.

Not this, either.

This was not humanity-as-usual.

He refused to believe that.

Gene tapped on the passenger window and Daniel unlocked the Toyota. The older man slipped in. In the darkness, his ebony face was nearly invisible, and his dark sportcoat, shirt, slacks, and shoes contributed to the phantom image.

Only the white hair bounced back some light.

“Hey,” he said, shifting around in the small car, trying to get comfortable.

The bowling alley would close soon but there were still enough cars in the lot for cover and Daniel had chosen a poorly lit corner. And a neighborhood where a black man and a brown man could talk in a car without the police swooping down.

Gene's big Buick was parked across the asphalt.

“Seems you're right, Danny Boy,” he said. “Sturgis has sleuthed me out. Asking about me a few days ago at Newton. But what can he do? I'm out of there.”

“He probably won't do anything, Gene, because he's busy and knows how to prioritize. But if the case goes completely sour, who knows? I'm sorry if this ends up complicating your life.”

“It won't. What's the felony, pulling a file?”

“And the shoes.”

Gene grinned. “What shoes- hey, I was Newton captain for seven years, always took an interest in unsolved cases, everyone knows that. Anyway, in answer to your question, Manny Alvarado is a very good detective. No fireworks, a plodder, but thorough.”

“Thanks.”

“You like this Tenney as a suspect?”

“Don't know yet,” said Daniel. “He's all we've got so far.”

“I like him,” said Gene. “At least from what you've told me- the timing, the whole disturbed loner thing. Anything at the conservancy, yet?”

“Tenney definitely never worked there or applied for a job under any name. No other parks, either.”

“Ah… too bad. Still, he could have held on to his old city uniforms and used them to lure the kid. Believe me, the city's sloppy when it comes to that kind of thing, and a naive kid like Irit, what would she know about the different uniforms?”

“True,” said Daniel. “We'll keep looking.”

Not mentioning the other depressing fact: Tenney was nondescript; medium-sized, fair-haired, forgettable. Literally. The gang members from the park where Raymond Ortiz had been abducted hadn't recognized Tenney's snapshot. None of the park-goers had, and Tenney had worked there for two years.

Just another bland white face in a uniform.

Even reading on the job, he hadn't drawn anyone's attention.

“So,” said Gene, “you're okay working with Sturgis, so far?”

Daniel said, “I'm fine with it, Gene. I think he's good.”

“So they say.” Gene stretched his feet. He'd put on weight and his belly extended past the lapels of his sportcoat.

“You have doubts?” said Daniel.

“No,” Gene said quickly. “Not in terms of doing the job. They all say he's good… excellent, actually. Want me to be honest? The gay thing. I'm from a different generation, it puts me off. When I was a rookie, we used to bust gay bars. Which was wrong, no question about it, but the things I saw- I was just wondering about you, being religious.”

Same thing Zev had said. Belief in God made you an ayatollah.

“What I mean,” said Gene, “was with this kind of thing, you need a cohesive team. Top of everything else, Sturgis is a cowboy.”

“I'm fine,” said Daniel. “He's professional. He concentrates on what's important.”