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
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.
Tugging him down for a kiss, then stopping herself.
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
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.
28
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
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
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.
