Everything that Avraham hoped would be forgotten came back to him while reading.
The spring evening when Hannah Sharabi arrived at his office and said that Ofer hadn’t returned from school. She sat, frightened, before him, and he thought that this was because she feared for her son’s fate. He suggested that she ought not to submit a complaint immediately, and the next morning she appeared in the station with a bag of photos of Ofer. Avraham was in their house later that same day. An investigation was opened. He believed every word she said to him, and everything the father told him later. He was certain that Ofer ran away from home and defended the parents even when Ilana and Shrapstein thought he ought to examine their scenarios and question the parents again.
The cell phone continued ringing in the bedroom. He didn’t intend to respond to Ilana.
Under the heading Work of the Investigation Team—Evaluation, Ilana wrote the following lines, and he read them slowly:
The commanding officer of the investigation team, Inspector Avraham Avraham, committed a few errors that brought about a delay in solving the investigation and made it difficult to gather evidence against the suspects in the case. Yet it is important to point out that the analysis of these mistakes is being done after the fact and in my opinion there is nothing here to indicate concrete negligence in the management of the investigation.
First, it can be said that the commander erred in the interrogation of the mother immediately after she reported her son’s absence. There is a reasonable possibility that a more substantial investigation, and especially an extensive search of the apartment at this stage, would have revealed findings in the apartment arousing suspicion against the parents of the victim that would have contradicted their original version, according to which their son was missing. The backpack of the victim, who, according to the mother’s claim at this stage, had left in the morning for school and hadn’t returned, was still in the apartment and was only thrown away a few days later. Similarly the commander refrained from entering various rooms in the apartment, which, after the fact, it became clear were part of the crime scene. It is possible that had the commander ordered an extensive search of them in the first few days following the incident between the father and his son, various suspicious findings would have been discovered. During the substantial amount of time that passed between the committing of the crime and the solving of the case, the scene was cleaned up, and this made the consolidation of the evidence more difficult.
Second, the commander erred in managing the investigation of the father, who at the time the case was opened was outside Israel. The commander did not call him to return immediately after opening the investigation but instead waited five days for his return, during which time the father disposed of the victim’s corpse at sea and attempted to cover up his guilt in additional ways. In the absence of a body it became difficult for the prosecution to prove the exact circumstances of the death, necessitating the confessions of the parents, who finally spoke of an accident. In retrospect, it was also possible to establish that the first interrogation of the father was not sufficiently thorough, in light of the fact that he broke and admitted to killing his son during the shortest of interrogations, which was conducted by a different investigating officer on the team (Inspector Eyal Shrapstein).
The third mistake was the commanding officer’s decision to ignore the unusual behavior of one of those questioned in the case, Ze’ev Avni, a neighbor of the Sharabi family and the private tutor of the victim. Ze’ev Avni ridiculed the commanding officer over the course of three weeks, and had he not confessed of his own accord it is possible that he would not have been exposed to this day. Two days after the investigation was opened Avni called the police and left a misleading message about Ofer’s location and later on wrote anonymous letters to Rafael and Hannah Sharabi in the name of the victim, letters that eventually led to the case being solved. In my opinion, the investigating team did not devote adequate attention to Avni’s unusual behavior, resulting in a delay in the resolution of the case, a delay that had a material effect on the evidence.
Yet it is my desire to emphasize that in the end Inspector Avraham stood at the head of a team that solved the investigation.
Inspector Avraham is an experienced and promising investigator who has participated in many complex investigations, and I am fully hopeful that the errors in the management of this particular investigation will not have any effect on his advancement or on his future contributions to the police.
Avraham sat in front of the open report for a long time. Marianka stared at him from a passport photo that he’d taped to the plastic frame of his monitor, and he remembered how distant she sounded to him the day before. The cell phone continued to ring, and he went to the bedroom and turned it off, but Ilana didn’t give up and called the house line. He removed the cord from the jack. Silence prevailed in the room, though inside him a cacophony of voices roared. What especially pained him was the inescapable fact that because of his mistakes Ofer’s parents evaded serious punishment. Because of his oversights in the investigation the police did not have a body; because of them the crime scene was cleaned before it was examined, and the prosecution was forced to base the indictment on the confession of the father that Ofer’s death was the result of an accident. The father claimed that he saw Ofer sexually assault his sister in her room and that in his effort to defend the daughter Ofer was injured and died, and there was no way to contradict his version because the mother kept silent. But wasn’t that his fault? Yes, of course it was, and he acknowledged it. More than anything Avraham wanted to respond to Ilana. But what could he write? He didn’t understand who he was most angry with. Ilana? Ofer Sharabi’s parents? Himself? He wanted to ask her who had read the report besides Benny Saban, and when it was written, and why she didn’t send it to him to review. He wanted to explain and accuse and apologize all at the same time.
He opened a new message and wrote Ilana in it. But didn’t continue.
“It’s not important now,” he whispered to himself. “Not important at all.”
Now a new investigation was waiting for him, and it was an opportunity to prove, mainly to himself, that the failures of the previous case were accidental. He deleted the message with the attachment from his in-box to the trash. Had he managed to commit any fresh errors since the new case was opened? Had someone again ridiculed him, as Ofer’s parents had done?
Chava Cohen’s lies he identified from the first moment. His eyes were open and he didn’t believe a word of what she said.
He got dressed quickly. Perhaps precisely because Ilana urged him not to disappear he didn’t turn on his cell phone even when he entered his office, late, with no one noticing him. There were sentences in her report he already knew by heart: The commander erred in the interrogation of the mother immediately after she reported her son’s absence. In retrospect, it was also possible to establish that the first interrogation of the father was not sufficiently thorough, in light of the fact that he broke and admitted to killing his son during the shortest of interrogations, which was conducted by a different investigating officer on the team.
Benny Saban opened the door to his office hastily, without knocking, at eight thirty. He was surprised when he saw Avraham sitting behind his desk, immersed in the investigation file open before him. Saban said to him, “You’re actually here? Ilana Lis has been looking for you since six this morning. Have you forgotten that your vacation is over?” Avraham looked at him in amazement.
Did Saban know that Ilana sent him the report to read? He was still convinced that that was why she called.
Avraham said, “I didn’t notice that the phone was off. Sorry. Did she tell you why she’s looking for me?” and was astounded to hear the answer. Saban said, “Your teacher. Chava Cohen. They beat her almost to death. She’s been hospitalized, unconscious at Wolfson. Ilana’s been at the scene since seven this morning, and she wants you there ASAP.”
THE STREETS TO TEL AVIV WERE jammed
, and for the first time in a while Avraham turned on his siren. He drove quickly and against the direction of traffic on Kugel Boulevard and from there to Jaffa, via the rundown neighborhood of Kiryat Shalom. Ilana picked up immediately. And didn’t say a thing about his disappearance during the morning hours. She heard the wail of the siren and asked, “You on your way?” And he said, “I’ll be there within five minutes.” She had already returned to her office at the Tel Aviv district headquarters.
She checked to see if he had received a preliminary report and he said that Saban had updated him verbally. Chava Cohen was found shortly after 3:00 a.m. She was lying in a ditch under a pedestrian bridge on the boardwalk, precisely on the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, not far from the Etzel Museum. She had trauma to the ribs and chest—but worse to the head. Three Sudanese men found her unconscious and called the police. Saban had no idea how long she lay in the ditch or what her condition presently was. The Sudanese men were interrogated and were being detained even though they weren’t suspected in the attack. Avraham asked, “And we know with certainty that this is the same woman?” and Ilana said, “Yes. Neither cell phone nor any identification was found on her, but we identified her from her car. At five this morning.”
“What do you mean, ‘from her car’?”
“Her car’s in a parking lot. The patrol officers called the guard and went over the images on the security cameras. They identified her arriving and getting out of a red Subaru Justy at 1:30 a.m. We called her at home and woke up her son. He didn’t know that she had gone out at all. He checked the bedroom and saw she wasn’t there. A patrol vehicle took him to Wolfson and he identified her in surgery.”
Why was he surprised when he heard that Chava Cohen had a son? Perhaps because until this moment in the investigation she was only a teacher who, apparently, abused children. She blew up at him during her questioning and concealed the threatening telephone call. He didn’t ask her if she was married or if she had children. He also didn’t ask Ilana how old her son was. He asked, “Will she come out of it?” and Ilana said, “Hard to know, she’s still in surgery. But she received very serious blows to the head. With a rock. I understand that the entire left side of her face was smashed in.”
Chava Cohen’s stern face appeared in his imagination covered in blood. And her son, looking at her over the doctors’ shoulders. Every time he recalled that face he was filled with hatred. Ilana said, “Avi, I understand from Saban that there were threats made to her. Did we do anything about them?” And a moment passed before he understood what she was actually asking.
Benny Saban had referred to Chava Cohen as “your teacher.”
He said, “No, Ilana, that’s not correct. She received one threatening call and she concealed it and insisted that the bomb had no connection to her. I questioned her for hours and I asked her if she received any threats, and she denied it. And we’ve had patrol units around the school area since yesterday.” From afar he saw the small wooden bridge and the ditch beneath it. Patrols blocked the street. He asked, “So what now? Do I continue with the investigation?” and Ilana said, “I want to hear what you’ve got and then we’ll proceed. Forensics has been working in the area for a few hours already, but you’re familiar with the background and the threats and perhaps you’ll see something we didn’t see. I want you to come here afterward and tell me what you know. And we’ll analyze the findings from the scene together. Can you be in my office at eleven?”
THE FIRST THING HE WANTED TO do was see Chava Cohen at the scene of the attack.
She entered the parking lot in a red Justy at 1:36 and circled the deserted lot a number of times before parking the car close to the empty guard booth. Was she looking for another car? Waiting for someone? No other cars entered the lot between 1:00 and 2:30. The time of Chava Cohen’s arrival seemed strange to him, because it wasn’t a round number. Was she early for a meeting, or maybe late? She wore jeans and a short green shirt and was carrying a small cloth bag in her hand. She locked the car and looked around, and afterward looked at the watch on her wrist. She did not appear anxious. Avraham had no doubt it was her: her steps were small and quick as she walked toward the boardwalk and left the camera’s range. Avraham circled the old car and didn’t see anything exceptional. An old beat-up car that hadn’t been washed in a long time. In the dust on the rear window a finger had drawn a crooked heart with two arrows through it. Even though she drove in it alone the Subaru was part of the crime scene, and he entered it carefully, his shoes covered in plastic booties and his hands enveloped in gloves. The smell permeating the car’s interior seemed familiar to him. On the passenger’s seat was a plastic bag with a pair of Adidas, size 10, inside, probably the son’s, and at the foot of the seat a blue towel had been thrown. In the glove compartment were old road maps, gas station receipts, two CDs, and a Yellow Pages booklet.
He moved to the backseat, where he discovered nothing of value. In the trunk he found an old crate with tools, a large, half-filled bottle of water, as well as a cardboard box with objects that appeared to be related to the daycare: packages of paper, new boxes of paint, and a few jars of glue. Under the boxes of paint he discovered something that drew his attention: a small Philips cassette case without the cassette in it.
His brief phone call with Ilana on the way to the scene increased his unease. Had she implied that he should have done more to protect Chava Cohen? Since the attack occurred in Tel Aviv it was fair to assume that the investigation would be conducted by the District Investigations Branch under her command. And if Ilana decided that he should stay with the investigation, he’d need to work closely with her again. Despite the report. He measured the distance from the parking lot to the ditch. About three hundred meters. The meeting place could have been the old structure of the Etzel Museum, which was lit at night as well. Ilana asked him to look, and he looked. And it seemed to him that he had already seen everything. From moment to moment the story of the attack was written out in his thoughts. He wrote a few details with a black pen in his notepad while an officer from the forensics team walked him carefully through the scene of the attack. The rock with which Chava Cohen was beaten was found next to her in the ditch and taken to the lab. It weighed nine pounds. And the place where Chava Cohen was found was apparently the place where she was attacked. There were bloodstains on the stones at the bottom of the ditch and no signs of dragging. In two of the bloodstains the investigators identified partial shoeprints, and they hoped that they didn’t belong to any of the Sudanese men who found her. The cloth bag that she carried from the car had disappeared.
A few meters away, a surprisingly tall wave exploded on the rocks and Avraham suddenly understood that, once again, he was by the sea. He went up on the small wooden bridge above the ditch, to take in the entire scene in a single glance, as he always did.
Just last evening he had sat by himself on the sandy beach, two or three kilometers north of here, and thought that the sea was of no importance to this investigation.
The ditch led to the beach. At night the beach provided an excellent escape route. Dark and empty. It was possible to walk its length, north to the center of Tel Aviv, or south, to Jaffa, without being seen.
He recalled the man who walked with a suitcase before morning a week ago on Lavon Street. He placed the suitcase with a fake bomb inside it next to the daycare and fled. The same man attacked Chava Cohen at night and again fled, perhaps along the beach. Chava Cohen came to a meeting with a man she said she didn’t know. The man with the suitcase. What was strange was that she wasn’t afraid of meeting him in the dead of night in a dark, empty place. Perhaps because it was a woman? The forensics officer argued that this possibility was inconceivable. “No way,” he said. “When you see her you’ll appreciate how brutal it was. They shattered her jaw with a rock, like an animal.”
PERHAPS BECAUSE ILANA DIDN’T MENTION THE report during their brief phone call on the way to the scene, Avraham was surprised by the way their conversation unfold
ed.
He froze before knocking on her office door. And waited. Heard a chair’s movement from inside the room, and then the door opened.
This was the first time they had met since he returned, but they settled on a handshake. Ilana opened the window facing the street and placed his glass ashtray on the table. “It waited for you in the drawer,” she said. Like every other time he saw her, it seemed to him that her red hair had grayed a tiny bit. She wore dark overalls and a black shirt underneath, and around her neck was a string of small pearls the color of ivory. At first glance it seemed to him that nothing in the room had changed, other than the placement of the round Seiko wall clock, which had been hanging over the door and now stood on the floor in a corner of the room at a strange oblique angle, as if it had been punished and demoted. Avraham put the investigation file on the table and she said to him, “In a moment, Avi. Do you want coffee or something to eat? I haven’t managed to drink a thing all morning.”
Actually that’s how it always is, he thought.
Every meeting began with an enormous distance between them, which only working together was able to undo. This time it was different, because the work itself now created a distance between them—that is, the report did. Ilana returned with mugs of coffee and he opened the investigation file, but again she sought to stop him. “How are you? We haven’t seen each other in over three months, no?” she said, and her blue eyes looked at him with such directness that he had to lower his gaze. He answered, “I’m okay,” and she said, “Okay? You’re getting married. Has your girlfriend arrived yet?”
He didn’t answer. And wondered why she didn’t say Marianka’s name.
A Possibility of Violence Page 10