Pattern Crimes (11 page)

"When you come back we'll make love," she whispered. "And then I'll make us eggs."

Rafi wore a bright orange slicker, like a fisherman, David thought. Micha wore a trench coat, Moshe Liederman sucked on a cigarette beneath a poncho, while Dov Meltzer stood in soaked sneakers holding a pin-up magazine above his head.

"I heard it on the radio," Dov said. His T-shirt was soaked; through the wet fabric David could see dark curls of hair covering his upper chest.

"Peretz?"

"He's home. We spotted him around five going into his building. I've got four guys watching him now. Thought I ought to meet you here."

The dumpster loomed before them like an oversized coffin, huge and black, difficult to see, except when the lightning struck and then it was etched out. Five patrol cars and an ambulance were parked around it at converging angles. The forensic team was waiting for the illumination. A sergeant was setting up portable quartz lights, clipping the lamps to the door frames of a van.

David went up to Rafi. "Female?" he asked.

Rafi nodded, pipe clenched between his teeth. "Found by a couple of teenagers looking to scrounge up some discarded wood. Very young this time, like the third one by the wall. But I have a bad feeling she's not a prostitute. Five is too many, David. We never had a case with five."

"You said it before. Our first serial killer."

"But the scale's wrong. Know what I mean?" Rafi reached under his slicker, brought out a lighter, tried unsuccessfully to light his pipe. "Everyone's always talking about scale. We go to war, lose a thousand guys, and we say that's like the fifty, sixty thousand the Americans lost in Vietnam. So figure it out. Five is like two hundred fifty. Yeah, I know it doesn't work that way, but that's the way it seems." Another lightning bolt. Rafi winced at the thunderclap. Now the rain was slashing down in sheets. "Shit, don't know what they think they're going to find in there. With rain like this there'll just be soup."

"Same blanket?"

Rafi nodded.

Suddenly David was furious. "Pricks!"

Rafi squinted at him. "Anyone I know?"

"Mossad bastards. Their guy spotted Peretz but they had to wait a couple days before they clued me in. Now this. We've only been on Peretz since five o'clock today. He could have done this last night. We'd have seen him approach her. We could have stopped him. You understand, Rafi? If Peretz did this, then the blood's also on their fucking heads."

Big Sur

Six Months Before…

"Oh…Targov…"

She was like that—after she climaxed she always moaned his name: "Targov, Targov ...oh ...oh..." Then, always, she fell asleep.

She was a big girl, this one, taller than Anna, California-grown with a quick smile, a dimpled Irish face, and a Milky Way of freckles across her chest. Strong hard breasts and a ribbon of reddish hair between her legs. She jogged. She took dance class. She lifted weights. Her hair was long and auburn. Her hands were powerful. She was a potter.

He left her on her mattress amid rumpled salmon sheets. There was no bed in the loft, just the huge mattress and her clothing, costumes really, stored in straw baskets scattered on the floor. Smaller baskets, containing underwear and stockings, hung from the ceiling amid her hanging plants. A ladder led down to her studio. He descended it, his cock swinging. A little tired, a little droopy, he thought, but still it swings and rings....

He went to the refrigerator, poured himself a vodka, sat down naked on her sofa upholstered in musty olive corduroy. Then he inhaled the aroma of her freshly made pots sitting on their wheels, still wet and wrapped in towels.

They had a date every Tuesday. He drove up to Palo Alto in the morning, taught his Master Class, met Maureen for a quick pizza near the campus, walked with her to her studio, screwed her brains out until five o'clock, then drove back down to Big Sur, arriving home just in time for dinner.

Irina knew. "Dish him out more soup, Rokovsky. Poor thing's exhausted. Look at the circles beneath his eyes." Then she'd smile her cunning smile and then she'd glower. Later, when she retired for the evening, she'd make sure they heard her throw the latches on her door.

"Targov? Where are you? Come back up here, naughty man!"

Maureen wanted him again; he obeyed her summons, ascended, and then paused on the ladder so she could see him only from head to waist. Her fiery green eyes focused on his navel. He took another step. She stared and moaned. Yes, he thought, the lusting lion is back to mount the rutting sow.

After his birthday he ordered Rokovsky to collect the mail early so Irina would not be able to intercept. It was torment waiting to hear from Sergei again, but perhaps torment was what he had in mind. How could he write just once from Vienna and then not a second time? But, of course, that was his method; he would torture his betrayer slowly by degrees. Men in camps fantasized such things, used fantasies of vengeance to keep themselves alive.

Anna had written from New York. She was so grateful for all the contacts he'd helped her make, and too for all the loving memories. Her agent had introduced her to an Israeli pianist, they'd played together, there was instant rapport, and then they'd given a hastily prepared recital at the prestigious YMHA.

One critic praised her "expressive clarity"; another described her tone as "dark and sensuous" and her phrasing as "limpid and full of nuance." There were some reservations: a wish for a little better balance and a little less
"
Russian imperative." But the reviews were excellent and now the agent was booking them into small halls all over Europe.

There was something else in her note that saddened him, the delicate suggestion that as lovers they were finished. He accepted that, had known, even as she was leaving, that she was probably departing forever from his life. At least now he had Maureen, not so silken as Anna, nowhere near so refined, but much more exotic, an American primitive and insatiable. God only knew how much longer he would be able to keep her satisfied....

A week before, there'd been a tremor. Outside the sea was wild. A winter storm was battering the peninsula. The coast had been gouged and now mud slides blocked the road.

This morning he knew, even as he unlocked his studio, that his hands were ready to work. He grasped up some clay, took it to his bench, closed his eyes, began to work it between his palms. Yes, he felt something—there
was
something there. He tried to discover what it was.

A subtle curve across the top. A ridge down the center with shallow recesses on either side. Like a back perhaps, bent in supplication, the spine exposed, the head bowed to the ground.

No! Impossible! Targov's figures never bowed. They suffered but didn't plead. But still he found something moving in the curve. Forced to bend, the head twisted to one side perhaps, but the face, the features, the posture would repudiate. Yes, that was it, the suffering body would resist.

He worked through the morning, playing with the clay, and then, in the afternoon, the work turned serious. Outside he could hear the wind. Through the big window he caught glimpses of trees thrashing in the storm. He started on a larger model, one as wide as his own chest, roughing out a wire skeleton, piling the clay on quickly, chopping out an image, then using a wide knife to carve and cut and smooth.

By nightfall he had something. He took it to the platform, placed it on a dolly, turned it beneath the spotlights, studied it some more. Something powerful about it, which surprised and almost frightened him. To be naked like that, bent over, struggling against a merciless power—he didn't know why but he identified that posture with something important in his life.

He slept in the studio. In the morning the storm was over. The sea was rough, not wild, and the trees swayed in a gentle breeze. He looked at his model, circled it once, and then, suddenly, he saw it clear. Hurrying to the main house to eat and bathe, he didn't give the sea a glance. He must instruct Rokovsky—he would move into the studio and from now on take all his meals there. Now, at last, he had what he'd been seeking, a work into which he could fling himself. A vision to be wrested. A shape to be released. He would sculpt a martyr.

Her name was Yael Safir, she was nineteen years old, and she was everything Rafi had feared: pretty, smart, well-liked, a soldier girl working in the computer room at the IDF Command Center in Tel Aviv. She was, moreover, the daughter of a national hero, Captain Asher Safir, killed and posthumously decorated for bravery on the Golan in '73. She'd been last seen hitchhiking her way home to Kibbutz Hulda for the Passover holidays.

The outrage in the country was immense. Yael Safir was a member of the Israeli elite. She left behind a mother, two sisters, two brothers, a pilot boyfriend, and a large circle of grieving and angry friends.

As the story hit the press a great outcry was heard. The old lady who lived upstairs stopped Anna in the hall. "What kind of an Israel do we have," she asked, "that a soldier girl can be picked up like that, then mutilated, and killed?"

Rafi walked into David's office holding a letter. "This just came into the superintendent's office. Latsky's pissing blood."

David read the letter aloud: "'What's wrong with you people? While a madmen kills our children, you're writing out tickets on Bezalel Street.' "

"Anonymous, of course. One of half a dozen or so that came in today. There were more yesterday and there'll be more tomorrow."

"What are you telling me, Rafi?"

"That the pressure's on."

"You don't think I feel that?"

"Of course you do." Rafi sat down. "Watch TV last night?"

"Katzer?" Rafi nodded. "I feel ashamed a man like that is even listened to. Anna was astonished; she couldn't take her eyes off the screen."

"Sure. Katzer's magnetic, and this is just the kind of situation he knows how to exploit. The worst of it is that he only repeats what ordinary people say: 'It's got to be an Arab. No Jew would do such a thing!'" Rafi shook his head. "An Arab transvestite prostitute and a Moroccan Jewish whore—no one gave much of a shit. An American nun—that was trouble, but we were coping with it. Schneiderman was bad, but this Yael Safir is something else. To quote Latsky: 'Now we got ourselves a capital-M Murder Case.'

"If it does turn out to be an Arab, Rafi, you know what a field day the reprisal groups will have. Can't you just see them barging into some pathetic Arab village bristling with self-righteous anger and freshly sharpened kitchen knives?"

Rafi gazed at him. "Yeah, and I can hear them too. 'You cut our girls, we cut yours.'" He shook his head and left.

Shoshana retraced Yael's movements. She had left the Command Center at 4 P.M., then waited with other soldiers at the hitching shelter just beyond the gate. She and a girl friend had gotten a lift to Ben-Gurion Airport where a couple hundred more soldiers were also waiting for rides. The scene was chaotic with drivers stopping every few seconds, picking the young people up, then speeding off into the hills. Yael's friend left first—she was heading for Jerusalem. The cars were coming fast, she said, and she doubted Yael waited ten minutes more. Later a male soldier thought he saw Yael get into a dark blue American-type van with Jerusalem plates. Kibbutz Hulda was about a twenty-minute ride from Ben-Gurion. Yael never arrived and was reported missing. She was found twenty-two hours later in the dumpster in Bloomfield Park.

"Passover eve," Shoshana explained. "Kids desperate to get home and the drivers desperate too. Everyone wants to get to his Seder. Yael's friend's family was a little religious, so Yael pushed her to take the first ride. 'My people don't care all that much,' she said. They kissed and then her friend took off. Yael just waited her turn."

"Can't anyone remember the driver?" David asked.

"Van had those kind of windows you can't see in. Even under hypnosis my witness can't recall the digits on the plates."

"Didn't anyone else get a fix on the car?"

"David, you've forgotten what it's like. When you go on leave all you think about is getting home. You're so wrapped up in that you don't pay attention to anything else. The man who picked her up probably knew that too. He chose the perfect time when those hitching stops are wild."

And now Shoshana has a favorite victim too
, David thought.

The tan Renault that had carried Ora Goshen was stolen, so there was reason to believe the blue van with the one-way windows had been stolen too. David put out an all-Israel alert. No reports came in. Then he had Rebecca Marcus forward a request to the police computer unit. He wanted a printout on every dark-colored van in the country, broken down first by city, then by make. If necessary, he would have every owner checked.

Peretz:
Dov had him thoroughly covered now. Five teams were on him, watching him day and night, and Dov didn't think Peretz was aware of them—he'd made no visible alterations in his routine.

"He's a strange guy, David. Doesn't go out much. Stays home most of the day. Doesn't seem to have a job. But then he takes a long walk around five, six in the afternoon. No particular direction or destination, but there's a manner he has that bothers me. Couldn't put my finger on it at first. Then I realized what it was. The way he moves —like a certain kind of dog. A hunter. A tracker. He moves around