Survival of the Fittest Read Online Free PDF Page A

everywhere.
    Focused.
    Quicker and smaller than the detective—five ten or so, which still put him three inches above the dark man. Restless, he moved with a certain grace. A cat.
    He’d gotten out of the car before the detective turned the engine off.
    Eager—achievement-oriented?
    Unlike the detective, the psychologist appeared to take care of himself. Solidly built, curly dark hair, a little long but trimmed neatly. Clear, fair skin, square jaw. The eyes very pale, very wide.
    Such active eyes.
    If he was that way with patients how could he calm them down?
    Maybe he didn’t see many patients.
    Fancied himself a detective.
    With his blue sportcoat, white shirt, and pressed khaki pants, he looked like one of those professors trying to come across casual.
    That type often faked casual, pretending everyone was equal, but maintaining a clear sense of rank and position.
    The dark man wondered if the psychologist was like that.
    As he drove toward Brentwood, he thought again of the man’s rapid, forward walk.
    Lots of energy, that one.
    All this time and no one had even gotten close to figuring out what had happened to Irit.
    But the psychologist had forged forward—maybe the guy was an optimist.
    Or just an amateur, too ignorant to know better.

Chapter
    6
     
     
     
    Milo dropped me off and returned to the West L.A. station. As I headed up the stairs to the front entrance, I heard the whine of Robin’s table saw from out back and detoured through the garden to her studio. Spike, our little French bulldog, was basking near the door, a mound of black-brindled muscle melting into the welcome mat. He stopped snoring long enough to raise his head and stare. I rubbed his neck and stepped over him.
    Like the house, the outbuilding is white stucco, compact and simple with lots of windows and a tile roof shaded by sycamore boughs. Lateral sunlight flooded the clean, airy space. Guitars in various stages of completion were positioned around the room and the spicy resin smell of crisply cut wood seasoned the air. Robin was guiding a hunk of maple through the saw and I waited to approach until she finished and turned off the machine. Her auburn curls were tied up in a knot and her apron was filmed with sawdust. The T-shirt beneath it was sweaty, as was her heart-shaped face.
    She wiped her hands and smiled. I put my arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek. She turned and gave me her mouth, then pulled away and wiped her brow.
    “Learn anything?”
    “No.” I told her about the park, the leafy vault.
    Her brown eyes got huge and she flinched. “Every parent’s nightmare. What next?”
    “Milo asked me to look over the files.”
    “It’s been a while since you got involved in something like this, Alex.”
    “True. Better get to work.” I kissed her forehead and stepped away.
    She watched me go.
       
    By the end of three hours I learned the following:
    Mr. and Mrs. Zev Carmeli lived in a leased house on a good street in Beverlywood with their now only child, a seven-year-old boy named Oded. Zev Carmeli was 38, born in Tel Aviv, a career foreign-service officer. His wife, Liora, was four years younger, born in Morocco but raised in Israel, employed as a Hebrew teacher at a Jewish day school on the West Side.
    The family had arrived in L.A. a year ago from Copenhagen, where Carmeli had served for three years as an attaché at the Israeli Embassy. Two years before that he’d been assigned to the embassy in London and had obtained a master’s degree in international relations at London University. He and his wife and Oded spoke English fluently. Irit, said her father, had spoken “very well, considering.”
    All the quotes were from the father.
    The girl’s health problems had followed an influenza-like illness at the age of six months. Carmeli referred to his daughter as “a little immature but always well-behaved.” The term retarded never came up in the files, but an educational summary report supplied by her