“I know that you were avoiding me this morning, and I also know why.”
Suddenly Avraham noticed that another thing in the room had changed. The photograph on her desk, surrounded by a black frame. Ilana appeared in the picture with her husband and four children at the foot of Sacré-Cœur Basilica, on the top of Montmartre, in Paris. It was taken a few weeks before her oldest son was killed in an army training accident and stood on the desk ever since, facing her. Now it wasn’t there. “What did you think about the report?” she asked, and he tried to evade the question: “Wouldn’t it be best to talk about that another time?”
“It would be best to talk about it now, precisely because we’re about to work together again. We’ll get to the case in a bit.”
He forgot that the questions she asked could be as direct as her gaze.
She said, “Explain to me what you were insulted by,” and he said, “I wasn’t insulted, Ilana.”
“So what made you mad?”
Was it so hard to guess? The fingers of his right hand stretched out over the investigation file. He knew her well enough to know that there was no hope of him postponing the conversation.
“It’s quite clear, no? It made me mad that you wrote a report about my last investigation without saying a word to me. That you blamed me for destroying the evidence in the case and for the parents of Ofer Sharabi eluding the punishment that they probably deserved and you didn’t even tell me. And we were in touch, Ilana. We even spoke on the phone a few times when I was in Brussels.”
“Are you mad because of what I wrote or because I didn’t tell you?”
Avraham couldn’t answer that question. He lit a cigarette and was surprised when she took the pack from his hand and removed a cigarette for herself. “You’re back to smoking again?” he asked, and she said, “Not exactly. I’m back to smoking with you.”
When they first met, Ilana smoked more than he did, and staff meetings in her previous office in the Ayalon District took place in a cloud of smoke. She quit on the day her son was killed. Standing beside the grave, she held out a half pack of Marlboro Lights to Avraham and said to him, “Here, take these.”
Ilana asked, “Can I explain to you what happened exactly?” He nodded and for the first time raised his eyes to hers. He never smoked those cigarettes, and the pack of Marlboro Lights that she gave him at the cemetery was still in one of the drawers in his office.
“A few weeks after the case was closed, when you were already in Brussels, a complaint arrived from the attorney’s office. As you know, they settled on a plea agreement with Rafael Sharabi, claiming that they had no choice because there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him owing to our negligent investigation. It reached the commissioner, and he asked for an external probe. The district commander suggested that I write the probe’s report. He knows that we’re close, and I told him that I was involved in the investigation, but he persuaded me that I should write the report so that the investigation wouldn’t go to someone from outside. What I’m saying is, it could have been worse. His stipulation was that you were not to be involved in the writing and that I was not to inform you of the report.”
She stopped for a moment in order to check his expression and again searched out his gaze. He remained silent. She had actually protected him, that was what she was trying to tell him. This was a conversation between two people who were close and who had known each other for many years, but also between two seasoned police detectives who knew what to say and how and when to say it in order to realize an objective.
“Therefore I had to write what I wrote, Avi. It wouldn’t have gone through if I covered up the mistakes that were made in the investigation. And you know very well that we made mistakes. So I put it down in black and white, and in the same breath I wrote that you solved the case and that you have an excellent record. And this reassured everyone.”
In the report she hadn’t written, “We made mistakes.” All of them were attributed to the “investigation team’s commander.” But maybe that’s what she had to do. And maybe that indeed is what happened.
He lit another cigarette and looked out the open window. He wanted to ask her why the family photo had disappeared from the desk. Ilana said, “Avi, thanks to that report no one in the police talks anymore about Ofer Sharabi or the plea bargain with his father. It’s over. And when we solve this assault case we’ll go right to the media with it and no one will remind you of Ofer. Now you have to put it behind you—and I know that you haven’t done this, I know you—and to concentrate on the investigation. Let’s lock it up by Yom Kippur, what do you say?”
He still didn’t say a thing.
Did no one else remember Ofer Sharabi anymore? Was he the only one who still hadn’t put Ofer behind him? He recalled Chava Cohen shutting down the red Justy’s engine in the dark parking lot at 1:36. Showed no fear as she got out of the car and looked around. Someone waited for her beyond the camera’s range. Didn’t rush to attack her, just waited. And between 1:36 and 3:00 in the morning he beat her in the head with a rock. Avraham said, “I’m sorry about this morning,” and Ilana replied, “Forget it, nothing happened. And I’m happy you’re here again. Shall we get started?”
HE UPDATED HER ON THE DETAILS that had accumulated in the case before the assault.
She knew about the fake bomb, because they had spoken about it a few days before, but she didn’t know the details of the warning call that Chava Cohen had hidden during her interrogation. She listened to him with interest and wrote a few sentences down on a piece of paper. Afterward she added information about what took place that night—from the son’s interrogation and from analysis of findings at the scene. Chava Cohen didn’t inform her son that she had planned to go out. Too early to tell if that was because she hadn’t planned to go out or because she didn’t include him in her plan. He was fifteen years old and had lived with his mother since her divorce. And she never went out without telling him. Her cell phone was not found in the apartment, nor was her wallet. Apparently she carried them in the cloth purse she held in her hand when she got out of the car. They were not found at the scene, and the cellular company was unable to locate the device. But a list of her most recent calls was expected any moment. Her debit card had not been used since the previous afternoon. The amount that was taken out was normal—two hundred shekels—and it’s fair to assume that this was all the money she had on her at the time she was assaulted. Avraham asked, “Does the son remember when he went to sleep?” and she said, “Between eleven and eleven thirty.”
If so, Chava Cohen left her house for the meeting with the assailant between eleven thirty and one fifteen at the latest. She waited for her son to fall asleep before leaving—unless she arranged the meeting with the assailant only after he went to sleep.
Ilana asked him to stop. She said, “Are you sure there’s a connection between the suitcase and the warning call and her arranging to meet with the assailant? In a second you can convince me. But let’s first ask if there’s any chance that this was an assault during the course of a random mugging.”
How well he knew her. This was the first rule of Commander Ilana Lis, the first female officer in the history of the Tel Aviv District’s Investigations Unit: One must leave all possibilities open, especially when one of them appears more likely than the rest. And tell as many stories as possible about every incident. The story richest in details will usually be the correct one, but only usually, and not necessarily. He said to her, “No chance, Ilana. At one thirty in the morning she voluntarily arrives at a completely deserted place far from home. There’s nothing for her there at a time like that, unless she had arranged to meet with the assailant,” and Ilana said, “Why? Maybe she went to look at the sea. To meet a girlfriend or a boyfriend. The assailant sees her and can’t resist the temptation—a lone woman in the middle of the night, in an empty parking lot. He tries to snatch her purse and she resists. A struggle ensues. He picks up a rock, beats her, flees. You know things lik
e that happen every day.”
“But not every day does the person assaulted receive threatening calls—and hide them. And not every day is a fake bomb put outside their workplace. There are too many details missing in your story. Where is the boyfriend or girlfriend with whom she was supposed to meet? Why haven’t we heard from them? And why didn’t she tell her son that she was planning on going out? Beyond that, I think that she went to the meeting with a recording device.”
Avraham suddenly thought of the Hotmail account from which Ilana sent him the report: rebeccajones21.
Did Ilana also sometimes go out in the middle of the night by herself for a meeting with a boyfriend or girlfriend, as she supposed that Chava Cohen could have done? He recalled that a few days earlier Ilana had told him that she needed to tell him something when they met—before he heard it from someone else.
“Why do you think that?” she asked, and he said, “Because I found a cassette case for a tape recorder in her trunk. And the cassette was missing. I think that the assailant arranged a meeting with her and that she intended to record it, because he blackmailed her or threatened her. And then something happened.”
Ilana studied him. “He didn’t plan to hurt her in advance,” she said.
“No. She was attacked with a rock that was in the ditch. An argument developed that boiled over into violence. Maybe the assailant discovered the recording device.”
“And why did he take the wallet and cell phone with him?”
“Why? Either so it would look like a mugging or because she had something in her purse that might expose him. It’s likely there was an exchange of text messages or phone calls between them. They had to have coordinated the meeting somehow.”
Ilana wasn’t yet convinced. Perhaps she just wanted to be hard on him. “I think you’re going in the right direction but are running too fast. And there are two details in your story that are hard for me to accept. The first is that the phone threat she received at the daycare was from a woman while the assailant, apparently, was a man. And the second is actually connected to this. It’s hard for me to believe that Chava Cohen would go out in the middle of the night to meet with someone who threatened or blackmailed her. Unless it was a person she knew well. We checked—her ex has an alibi, and there seems to be no conflict there. And I don’t believe that it could have been her son, although if there’s one person she would go to meet regardless of the time or place, it would definitely be her son.”
He looked at her amazed: that was exactly the detail that was tough for him as well. The only detail in the story that didn’t sit well with the rest of the details.
He was searching for a woman’s voice. And Chava Cohen hadn’t been afraid of coming to a late-night meeting perhaps because she thought that she was about to meet with a woman and not a man. But her assailant was a man, without a doubt.
Ilana looked at the wall clock sitting on the floor and called the hospital.
Chava Cohen was in surgery, and it was too early to know when she would get out, or in what condition. Avraham lit another cigarette and paced around the room while Ilana spoke with the forensics lab. “And there’s another possibility,” she said after she put down the receiver. “I understand that the main direction of your investigation before the assault was parents of children at the daycare? So perhaps we’re looking for a man and a woman. The man placed the suitcase and the woman made the phone call. And Chava Cohen planned to meet the woman but ended up meeting the man.”
The exchange of thoughts and words with her always caused something in him to come alive.
He looked at her and smiled. “That’s a brilliant idea,” he said. It had crossed his mind too since the investigation was opened.
She asked, “Do you have someone in mind?” and he said, “Perhaps.”
And it was exactly then that the list of phone calls arrived.
A young cop Avraham didn’t know entered the room and Ilana introduced Avraham to him as the commander of the investigation. Sergeant Lior Zaytuni shook his hand and extended the fax to him. “There are no incoming or outgoing calls near the time of the attack, but look here—from ten at night she had more than ten calls from the same number that went unanswered. But at eleven thirty she answers that number and speaks with it for four minutes.”
Avraham immediately knew that he had seen the number before.
He opened the notepad and leafed through it but Zaytuni beat him to it. “The number belongs to a man by the name of Chaim Sara, who lives on Aharonovitch Street in Holon,” he said, and Ilana looked at Avraham. He nodded but wasn’t able to add any details because Natalie Pinchasov returned his call just then.
He asked if she knew what had happened during the night and she said she did. When Chava Cohen didn’t arrive at the daycare she called her and didn’t get an answer. Afterward she called her son and he told her about the assault. In the meantime the daycare was still open, because there were parents who insisted that they couldn’t drop everything to come get their children, but she hoped that by noon everyone would come and she’d close it. Avraham asked, “Did Chaim Sara’s son come to the daycare?” And the assistant said, “No. Maybe I should have called you but I forgot. The father already told me yesterday that the boy wouldn’t be coming because they’re going out of town.”
WHEN THEY WERE AGAIN ALONE IN the room, Ilana asked him to tell her about Sara, and Avraham went over the details of the testimony he’d collected in his office.
Actually he didn’t know much about him. Yet.
An older father of two young children, fifty-seven years old. No criminal record. Presented himself during questioning as the owner of a catering business. There were signs of anxiety evident in Sara throughout their conversation. His answers were brief and clipped, as if he had difficulty speaking.
Did he arouse suspicion in Avraham? Maybe for a moment, as when he prolonged his answers of all things. What disturbed Avraham was the gap between the stammering in his answers to seemingly simple questions and the fluent and complete story he told about the incident with Chava Cohen. As if only that answer had been prepared in advance. “But most of my suspicions at that stage were directed toward Chava Cohen’s lies, and it could be that I wasn’t attentive enough,” he conceded. If Sara was indeed the assailant, his motives were clear: He suspected that Chava Cohen hurt his son. Sara claimed that his wife wasn’t available for questioning because she had traveled to the Philippines and he didn’t know when she’d return, and this response also disconcerted Avraham. After all, she didn’t fly to the Philippines on a one-way ticket. But Sara also inspired trust in him, perhaps even pity, and perhaps it was exactly because of this feeling that Avraham was now quite certain that they had to arrest him immediately.
Ilana put down the pen in her hand.
For a few moments they didn’t speak. They looked at one another in silence, which he was also very familiar with. The silence before a decision. The report was no longer a barrier between them, but were it not for Avraham reading it this morning, he might not have seen what he saw. Finally Ilana said, quietly, “I want to locate him but I don’t want to arrest him yet,” and Avraham said, “Come on, Ilana, he called her more than ten times before the attack. And she left home after a conversation with him, or with his wife. Give me a few hours with him and the investigation will be over.”
Ilana smiled. “I see that your confidence has returned. That’s good. But we have time, Avi, and we have a lot to do before then. This time I want us to be prepared for the arrest and interrogation so we can submit a perfect case to the attorneys, without a single loose end. Let’s wait for the results from the lab. The scene was very messy, and it’s likely we’ll have finger- and shoe prints and DNA. And don’t forget that if we’re lucky Chava Cohen could regain consciousness at any moment and simply tell us that he was the assailant. I’m with you on your feeling, but to arrest him on circumstantial evidence would be to shoot ourselves in the foot. I’ll request a sweeping gag order. Not
only on the name of the victim but on the attack itself as well. And in the meantime we’ll locate him and put him under surveillance. Look into this information that he plans to go away. And check what vehicle he owns and if he moved it during the night. Go over all the cameras on the way from Holon to Tel Aviv. I want to see his car on the way to the scene of the assault. And try to find out if his wife went away or not. If he lied and she’s in Israel, then another detail in our story lines up and we’ll be able to assume that Chava Cohen arranged the meeting with her. When we have direct evidence we’ll arrest him. Only, in the meantime let’s make sure he doesn’t escape, okay?”
8
HE THOUGHT ABOUT JENNY FROM THE moment he woke up in the morning, and in his thoughts she had unexpected vitality.
He must have dreamed about her—that was the only explanation—but Chaim didn’t remember the dream or what happened in it. Blurred shards of memory floated in his body: the thick soles of her feet, her brown thighs, the line of hair running from her navel down her abdomen. Her face was hidden by a pillow. It seemed to him that in the dream he saw the smiling face of Agapitos, the driver. And one other dull memory retrieved from the night: a wide rectangular window, with a wooden frame, looking out on a small courtyard from beyond which came screaming voices.
Did he already know when he woke up that the reason for the trip wasn’t only to avoid the police’s interrogation? The questioning at the station scared him less the day after. When he had left the station, his hands trembled on the car’s steering wheel, but since he started carrying out the plan, the shaking had ceased. He was frightened not because of the questions the detective posed to him but rather because of those he did not. And he had no reason to panic. At night he’d spoken with Chava Cohen and the conversation had gone well. The investigation had certainly turned away from him, or would do so in the days to come. He could have canceled the trip—and in retrospect, if he had canceled it, it’s possible he wouldn’t have been caught—but he already wanted to get away for other reasons. He wanted to get away for the sake of Ezer and Shalom, in order to bring Ezer back to him, and to let him understand what really happened. And in some way that wasn’t entirely clear to him he also wanted to get away in order to prove something to Jenny, or in order to bury her once and for all.
A Possibility of Violence Page 11