A Possibility of Violence (11 page)

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 unfolded.

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.

“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 like 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.