Pattern Crimes (4 page)

"It's a pattern crime, Rafi. How can I refuse?"

"You can't." Rafi slapped him gently on the back. "Get the dossiers from Sarah. And give my best to Anna." He shook his head. "I like her, David—very much. What will she think of us when she hears about all of this?"

As he walked back to the Pattern Crimes offices, he turned over Rafi's phrase: "Consistently marred flesh." Of all the possible pattern crimes, he thought, consistently marred flesh was probably the worst. The PC Unit, of which he was commanding officer, was located on the second floor of Jerusalem District
Police Headquarters in a
com
plex of buildings known collectively as the Russian Compound,
a hundred meters up from Bar Kokba Square.

The building was old, its ceilings twenty feet high, and its cavernous tiled corridors, lit by fluorescent lamps suspended from iron chains, echoed and re-echoed with the footsteps of cops, clerks, detectives, prisoners, informers, witnesses, and an occasional lost citizen looking for a place to lodge a complaint. The beaten-up pay telephones and recalcitrant soup, coffee, and candy machines in these corridors were notorious, the interlocking squad rooms a maze. Few outsiders could find their way around this rabbit warren carved out of what once had been the huge intimidating offices of police officials in the period of the British Mandate.

David Bar-Lev did not think anyone would be intimidated by his office, barely wide enough to contain his desk. Dossiers were crammed into bookcases. A bulletin board was crowded with overlapping notes. There were two heavily chipped black metal chairs, two telephones, and a carefully cropped photograph of his daughter, Hagith, with just the left hand of his ex-wife, Judith, showing beside her arm.

Although the walls here had been soundproofed and a false ceiling installed for privacy, David always left his door open to the room where the rest of the PC Unit worked. Here the partition walls were barely taller than a man so that raised voices and ringing phones from the squad rooms of adjoining units swirled together and merged. No single word was ever intelligible out of all this restless sound, but David felt there was an underlying harmony. "Crime and Torment," he called it, as if it were a piece of music, a piece he sometimes struggled to decode and at other times loathed so much he would make up any excuse no matter how absurd to escape it, fleeing the building, taking to the streets, even driving out into the Judean hills ...and sometimes even then it would still ring in his ears.

"Shoshana!"

She appeared almost instantly in his doorway, a short young woman with eager black eyes, tight black curls, and olive skin. "Where's Dov?"

"Working the Rehavia burglary case. A lady came in. Said she saw some of her silverware in East Jerusalem. He went out to check."

"Micha...?"

"With Uri having coffee. My turn next unless things start picking up."

"So you're bored, Shoshana?"

"Not really bored. It's just that here I never get a chance to fight."

She'd been in a narcotics unit when David met her, an unhappy office mascot. She wasn't getting along with her boss and was angry at being assigned to cover the phones while the boys got to work the streets. She had the plump fresh cheeks and guileless smile of a high school girl, but there was cunning behind the facade. David liked her, and when he saw her perform at a police karate competition, all flashing black eyes and short black curls, he was so impressed by her self-assurance he arranged her transfer to Pattern Crimes.

"We don't fight. We investigate. If you like to fight so much, go back into the army." She grinned. "While you're considering it, go downstairs and see if you can find us a halfway decent car."

"Where are we going?"

"We're going to check out a place where an American nun was dumped."

He heard her footsteps as she ran out through the squad room; he was fascinated by her sudden entrances and exits. One moment she was there and the next was gone, yet he could never remember actually seeing her come or go.

He told her to drive, thought that might use up some of her restless energy. The car, a dilapidated white Subaru, had ripped seats and dented fenders. On their way up Jaffa Road, he told her what he wanted her to do.

"Get good photos. Then go with Uri to the Damascus Gate. He stands aside while you talk to the women, as nonthreatening and sympathetic as you can be. Find out who she is. Name, address, everything. Did anyone see her get picked up last night? Does she operate for a pimp? It may turn out the kid was wrong. Maybe she wasn't a prostitute. But talk to them anyway. See if they heard about any guys who like to cut. Tell them about the marks, but not about the breasts—we're going to keep that to ourselves..."

There was a traffic jam in front of the Mahane Yehuda market, trucks and cars stalled, blasting one another with horns. A woman lugging a market basket wove her way across the street. A group of schoolchildren, five- and six-year-olds, waited with perfect discipline at the curb.

"What the hell is this?" Shoshana wiped her forehead; it was eleven o'clock and getting hot. David thought of Anna practicing, her bow cutting across the strings, filling the apartment with dark rich sounds. Every so often she too would wipe her brow.

"I'll put on the siren."

David shook his head. Something was happening in the market. People were pouring in but few were coming out. "Meet me up there on the right," he said. Then he stepped out of the car.

As he made his way down the dark arcade that was the market axis, he heard the shrill whistles of police. He pushed past stands piled with eggplants, onions, Jaffa oranges, past vendors and buyers, through the debris of fruit skins and discarded vegetable greens, then took a shortcut through one of the little cross alleys until he came up against an immobile human mass.

"What is it?" he asked a stooped old lady in black who was grasping her purchases to her chest.

She looked at him, lips tight. "Katzer." And then all around David heard the name. Some whispered it, others hissed it, a few yelled it out like a cheer: "Katzer!" "Katzer!"

Suddenly David caught a glimpse of him, escorted by police, bobbing along behind a phalanx of his supporters, sullen young males in knitted skullcaps bullying their way through the crowd. There was something thug-like, dull and stupid, about this vanguard, but the rabbi's small hard eyes gleamed with calculation.

David watched, fascinated, as Katzer embraced a seller of olives, a seller of fish, an old man with a cane who sewed buttons and hems.

David was surprised at how short he was; although he knew his face well from TV, this was the first time he had seen him in the flesh. Now he was struck by his animal magnetism and rabid quality too: moist eyes, sweaty beard, mouth that twisted as he spoke. Nothing otherworldly about him, nothing pious or Talmudic. This was a politician who thrived on touching faces, patting shoulders, grasping extended hands. His supporters needed him, wanted to feel his power, and Katzer eagerly obliged. But then David noticed something else. The rabbi's eyes squirreled up at the sound of a passing airplane, and then again at the pop of a beer can being opened up. A glimmer of fear: He was political meat and knew the passions he unleashed could also put a bullet in his chest.

The cops blew their whistles, the thugs marched past, and Katzer was swallowed by the mob. Making his way back past the butcher's stalls to find Shoshana and the car, David felt his shirt sticking to his back.

I t was a drainage ditch, dusty, overgrown with brambles, separated by bushes from the narrow access road that led up to Mevasseret. Police stakes tipped with orange fluorescent paint marked the place where the body had been found. David circled the site, careful not to walk upon it, then leaned against the car. There was a constant roar of traffic from the highway, a harsh whirling sound of speeding cars and trucks. Just the sort of spot, he thought, you might pull up to if you were starting down to Tel Aviv and then decided to stop and take a piss.

"She was seen getting into a Tel Aviv car," Shoshana said. "Looks like whoever killed her pulled off at the exit, threw her out, then continued on his way."

The sun was beating down full force. David looked up at the white villas glittering on the barren heights. The people who lived up there were wealthy, the kind who owned two cars. They'd drive past where he was standing several times a day. Someone would notice the body
pretty quick.

"If he really wanted to ditch her, he would have taken her into Judea. He didn't care if she was found."

"Why care? He was done with her."

"So just pull in the way we did, drag her out, toss an old blanket on top of her, don't even bother to cover her legs, then zip on down to the sunny coast?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, if he wasn't trying to hide his workmanship. Maybe the best solution, if he wanted it displayed."

"Think that's what he wanted?"

David shrugged. "He couldn't have chosen a better spot. Except for his spot this morning. That was better." He took a last look at the orange stakes, then turned away.

Back at the Russian Compound, he smiled when he saw them, Micha and Uri in sloppy army jackets, Dov Meltzer in striped track pants sporting an oversized submariner's watch. All three wore the beaten-up runner's shoes that were the trademark of Jerusalem plainclothes cops. They were sprawled out in swivel chairs while prim, smiling, orthodox Rebecca Marcus, clerk of Pattern Crimes, sat upright typing reports on her vintage Royal, her legs and arms nicely covered, her head wrapped neatly in a scarf.

"Murder case?"

"Triple," Shoshana said.

"Report says the nun was tortured, but no sign of intercourse."

"Madonna, girl-whore, boy-whore," said Dov. "Sounds like psycho-time."

"It's psycho-time all right."

He looked at them. They were excited. Detectives in other units sometimes called them "David's Dogs." Now they had a new and very disturbing case, perhaps the best they'd gotten in a year.

"Shoshana and Uri work the girl this morning. Micha, you get the Arab boy, and Dov, you take the nun. They say the boy was a drug user, so find out if he dealt. This Sister Susan Mills—was she really a Madonna? How does a woman like that end up in a ditch?"

"What about the marks, David?"

"I'm very interested in those marks."

"Report on the sister says the cutting was done after she was dead."

"Ten to one it's the same with the other two."

"An afterthought?"

"Some kind of ritual?"

"Sarah says you thought it could be some kind of brand," Dov said.

David nodded. "A brand says: 'She's mine.' But this could be more. A signature. Signature says: 'I did this work. My work.' Could be either one."

He ran Pattern Crimes like a small unit in the army—first names, anyone could say what he thought, minimal distinction between commanding officer and men. He felt closest to Dov, whom he considered the smartest, but Uri Schuster was formidable, a tracker, a bloodhound on the streets. Uri, David thought, could have been a criminal, which was why he was so valuable, and why, despite complaints that he was rough, sometimes even brutal, David was determined never to let him go. Micha Benyamani was the unit chess player, sad-faced, gaunt, a thorough paperwork-and-telephone detective. Shoshana Nahon—self-styled fighter, she made up for her inexperience with zest.

He told Rebecca Marcus to telex to the Israeli police liaison in New York. "The U.S. Justice Department has some kind of serial killer clearinghouse. Send them a straight query: Have they ever seen these kinds of marks?"

Rebecca smiled sweetly. "Whenever anything horrible happens, Rafi always thinks it's an American."

"An American Jew."

"
Yes." She giggled. "But never an Israeli. Oh no! Never!"

 
He called in Dov. "What happened this morning?"

"Found a pair of candlesticks. An Arab trinket dealer on Salah el Din."

"Good stuff?"

"Nothing special. That blue-dye-job who was robbed last fall says they aren't worth much."

"How did he get them?"

"Had a story. Flea market in Hebron. But, David, there was other stuff there. Judaica. And that doesn't fit."

"Good Judaica?"

"I don't think so. It's a pretty dumpy place. I saw some Torah crowns. That bothered me. You don't fence stuff like that in East Jerusalem."

"You're thinking...?"

"Our scrolls case. It's been months. I practically forgot about it until I saw those crowns. I didn't say anything. Wanted to tell you first. The Rehavia burglaries and the stolen scrolls. We never put the two together."

David thought about it. He didn't think they belonged together. "Silver is silver," he said. "The people burglarizing fancy houses in Rehavia need a place to unload silver that isn't worth shipping out. Meantime, the people stealing Torahs for resale in America have to get rid of the crowns because the crowns identify the origins of the scrolls. We're talking about items of fairly limited value. East Jerusalem's good for that. What time does this dealer close?"