The Missing File (18 page)

“Look at me, I'm fine,” she said. “Forget about my reaction. They can't hurt me or Elie. I'm only afraid for you, and I'm trying to understand what you have been going through, Ze'evi.”

So he told her—almost everything, almost from the very beginning. He told her about his realization that this was the story he'd been waiting for, and about the moment when he knew the letters would be the way he'd achieve it. He didn't mention the call to the police.

On Friday night, during one of the disturbing moments in their long conversation, she again asked him, “And you're sure that nothing happened between you and Ofer?” and he almost shouted, “Enough! Stop asking me that! I can't take hearing you interrogate me that way. Is that why you left Elie with your parents?”

“Don't be crazy! I just don't want him to be here now.”

“Why?”

“Maybe because I'm afraid that the police will show up. And maybe because I can't be a mother right now. I just can't think about being one. I need to be with you alone.”

He thought these words from her were wonderful.

“Thank you for coming back,” he said quietly, and let his body soften to fold up in her arms.

“I couldn't bear to think of you here all alone. And I was afraid of what you might do.”

“I'll never again do anything without talking to you first, I promise,” he said, and smiled.

On Monday, at the appointed time, they went to the police station together.

11

H
e returned to an entirely different investigation.

In fact, from then on, right through to its resolution, the case was no longer his—though officially he was still in charge of the team and in the end signed his name to the final summation before it was handed over to the state prosecutor. He even played an important role in the actions that led to the resolution, but he no longer managed the investigation, and he wasn't quite sure who did—if anyone at all.

He sat in Ilana's office at the precinct headquarters on Sunday morning, after three hours of sleep, trying to comprehend what she was implying. “In fact, we've come to the conclusion that this investigation has been based on just a single working assumption thus far, and that we can't be sure it's correct,” Ilana said, and he listened to her, puzzled and exhausted.

T
he El Al flight from Brussels to Ben-Gurion International was delayed, and then Avraham had to wait close to forty minutes for his luggage, and didn't get back to Holon before 2:00 a.m. The apartment was cleaner than he remembered it, and in the refrigerator he found a carton of fresh milk and an unopened tub of cottage cheese; the sparkling vegetable drawer also contained a bag of ripe tomatoes and another with six cucumbers. There was a loaf of bread on the dining table. He turned on the TV just to hear its sound and unpacked his suitcase. In his absence, his mother had also organized his closet, and had placed his neatly folded blue police uniform shirts on a separate shelf. Only the green bed linen, which she hadn't changed, still smelled of him.

“I'm not sure I understand what you mean,” he said to Ilana as he took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.

Ilana stood up and opened the window overlooking Salame Street. It was a muggy morning and the open window did nothing to freshen the air in the room. She sat down facing him again. “I mean that, contrary to the things that were said here at the first team meeting, we didn't allow for uncertainty. I'm sure you're aware of that. We were too quick to turn our theory of the case into a given fact, when it should only have been a hypothesis—namely, that Ofer went missing on Wednesday morning.”

“What do you mean? What should we have done?”

She had forgotten to put the ashtray on the desk.

“I'm saying it was a mistake because we don't know for sure that it's true. We have no physical evidence to back it up and no corroboration from any other source. To the contrary. For the past two and a half weeks, we've been looking for someone, aside from his mother, who saw him on Wednesday morning—and we've come up with nothing. We don't have the faintest idea about what happened on Wednesday morning, and it doesn't make sense to any of us any longer. If you assume that something happened to him on the way to school on Wednesday, or that he decided to skip school and go elsewhere, or that someone persuaded him to do so, you should be able to find evidence or testimony to support this. Yet we haven't been able to locate anyone who saw him—not going down the stairs in the building, not leaving the building, not getting onto a bus, nothing. His picture has been distributed to all the bus and taxi drivers in the area, along with all the residents and shopkeepers, and no one has come forward to say they saw him on Wednesday. You made a television appearance, we ran ads, and still we got nothing from anyone who could swear to seeing him going in one direction or another on Wednesday morning. Do you see what I mean? We've been treading water since the investigation began, Avi. Time is running out. It may even be too late. And we've been forced to admit this to ourselves. We haven't been able to reconstruct the events of Wednesday from the moment he allegedly left the apartment. And so now we think we at least need to reevaluate this paradigm, to question it, or to add others and see where they take us. We have nothing to lose.”

He was silent, and lit up another cigarette—despite the stuffiness in the room and the absence of an ashtray. Ma'alul hadn't said a word to him about reevaluating the paradigm when they spoke after the bag was found, or the next afternoon, during his last conversation with him from Brussels. When exactly had the paradigm changed? And on whose initiative? The bottom line was that behind Ilana's professional speech lay a direct accusation: You failed to conduct the investigation as you should have, particularly the questioning of the parents.

He saw the mother sitting in front of him that first evening in his office at the police station. And he recalled the photographs of Ofer she had taken out of the small plastic bag and placed on his desk the following morning.

Ilana's barrage against him continued: “Avi, all we know for certain is that he was at school on Tuesday. Eliyahu has reviewed the footage from the security cameras in the schoolyard and by the gate. He's there. You can see him walking out of the gate. And we know, too, that he returned home on Tuesday afternoon. We have statements from three people, aside from the mother—two students from the school who were behind him on the way home, and a neighbor who saw him entering the building before two p.m. And that's it. In fact, that's the last time we know his whereabouts based on testimony from a number of different people. Ofer went home, and that's where we need to start looking for him.”

It was the first time he had heard Ofer's name since Thursday, although it seemed to him that he hadn't heard it uttered for weeks.

“So where would you like us to look for him, Ilana?” he asked, unable to restrain himself. “Do you think maybe he's hiding under the bed?”

H
e'd sensed uneasiness between them the moment he arrived at her office, at 9:30 a.m. She was waiting for him at the door, dressed in her uniform. There was no emotion in their embrace. She invited him to sit down as if he were a first-time guest, and he took his usual seat, the blue chair, the one on the right as you come in—but still couldn't feel comfortable there.

Ilana's first words seemed to travel across a wide expanse before reaching him. Different faces looked down at him from the old pictures on the walls. Though it wasn't the first time, it was different. An air of alienation that needed to be dispersed always existed between them whenever they would meet again after a long while. And it always did disperse. But on previous occasions, Avraham had always blamed only himself for this alienation, because it took time for him to feel at ease in her presence. Now the alienation came from Ilana. She too was responsible for the distance between them.

“Well, tell me about the trip,” she opened, and he countered, “A waste of time. I shouldn't have gone.”

“Well, you definitely look good. You simply can't admit to having a good time.”

Perhaps that was true.

She asked him to tell her about Jean-Marc Karot and if he had run into a senior officer from the Brussels Police Division Centrale whom she had once met at a conference in Madrid. It was one of the two officers leading the Johanna Getz murder investigation, the one who had solved it, most likely. Avraham told her that his meeting with him had been canceled because of the murder. He wanted to tell her about the investigation that had interfered with his visit and had ended on the day of his departure.

“Wait, maybe you should tell Eliyahu and Eyal too, when they get here,” she said. “You and I have other things to talk about.”

She then asked if he had met Jean-Marc's wife and if she was truly as beautiful as he had said. Surprised at the question, he answered that she was. He hadn't been present at the meeting between Jean-Marc and Ilana in Tel Aviv and didn't know what they had spoken about.

“And did you get a chance to see the city?” she asked, and he replied, “Barely. Only on my last day.”

And all this while he felt that she was holding something back from him—and then learned that he was right. He, too, struggled to talk. His presence in the familiar office felt oddly foreign, despite an absence of just a few days. He asked Ilana to bring him up to speed on the progress in their investigation, and told her that he had maintained contact with Ma'alul during the course of the week. It was then that she dropped the bombshell regarding the change in the theory of the case.

At 10:00 a.m., Shrapstein and Ma'alul arrived, together.

Shrapstein settled naturally in the vacant chair, as if it were reserved for him, and Ilana left the room to look for a third chair for Ma'alul. Avraham stood up and Ma'alul shook his hand, saying, “Our man in Belgium. You look much better.”

Despite the muggy morning, Ma'alul was wearing the gray Windbreaker again and Avraham thought for a moment that perhaps he was hiding his arms from them. Was there a teasing tone in Ma'alul's voice when he asked Avraham if he had had a good time in Brussels? Shrapstein completely ignored all reference to his trip, as if he hadn't gone and come back. They exchanged mute greetings, and then Shrapstein waited in silence for Ilana to return. He began speaking without waiting for her to open the meeting.

“First of all, the bag,” Shrapstein declared. “We have the initial findings. There are no traces of blood or any other foreign substances on it or inside it. It's covered in fingerprints, some of which we can use and others not. It'll take at least two or three days to complete the lab tests on the contents.”

Shrapstein handed out a sheet of paper with a list of all the items that had been found in the bag, which Avraham, still stunned by the conversation about the altered theory of the case, had almost forgotten about. He asked Shrapstein if he had photographs of the bag and the Dumpster in which it had been found and Shrapstein said, “Not here with me.”

Avraham wanted to go to Jerusalem to hold the bag in his hands. Again he regretted not having been the first person to receive it and examine its contents, item by item. He was familiar with most of them from his phone call with Ma'alul—the ID, the pen, the two twenty-shekel notes. Shrapstein's records also included precise details of the school textbooks and folders that they had found inside the bag. Avraham read through the list. It included a civics textbook,
Being Citizens in Israel—A Democratic Jewish State
, one called
Sociology: Social Circles
, Sophocles'
Antigone
, in Hebrew translation, and a compilation of grammar exercises. The bag had also contained two A4-size spiral-bound notebooks, one lined and the other squared. Following the forensic testing at the lab in Jerusalem, all the items were to be returned to the investigation team. He read through the list of books twice—and something about it caught his attention.

Shrapstein continued. “The bag doesn't appear to be offering us any leads at this stage. And the forensic examinations in and around the Dumpster don't help much, either. There's nothing that looks like it belongs to Ofer. We're still looking for someone who may have seen the person who dumped the bag there. The problem is—and we may want to give this some thought—that we requested, and received, a gag order, following Avi's directions. That may have been a mistake, and perhaps we should go public with the information in the hope that it will lead us to someone who saw whoever threw the bag away. That aside, I spoke this morning with the legal department and there's no way a court will approve a wiretap at this stage because we don't have sufficient evidence. We'll have to come up with something more concrete. The question is, how do we get our hands on something more concrete without arousing their suspicions?”

Avraham lifted his head from the piece of paper, looking first at Shrapstein and then at Ilana. “I don't get it,” he said. “A wiretap on whom? Whom do we suspect?”

Ilana felt uncomfortable; there was something else she hadn't told him. “A wiretap on the parents' telephones,” she said, and Shrapstein added, “Their landlines and cell phones.”

“The parents? What for?”

The look on Shrapstein's face was one of pity. He didn't say a word; Ilana spoke for him. “Earlier, I informed Avi of our decision over the weekend to reevaluate our working assumption regarding Wednesday morning,” she said. She turned back to Avraham. “As I told you, we want to make sure it's correct—or, more precisely, to rule out the possibility that it may be wrong.”

“That I got already. But what do the parents have to do with it? Do you think they're lying and that they're going to say as much to someone over the phone?”

Sensing the anger that was rising in him again, Ilana tried to soften her tone.

“We don't think anything,” she said. “We are reevaluating our initial theory of the case, that the parents revealed all in their interviews and that they don't know anything more than what they've said in their statements and aren't holding anything back from us. In order for us to work systematically, we have to rule out the possibility that they haven't informed us of everything they know—that's all.”

“But where does this come from all of a sudden?” Avraham raised his voice. “If you want to rule out the possibility—whoever may have raised it—I'll call them in for questioning and we'll rule it out. Why do we need to tap their phones?”

“It came up because we've been stuck for two and a half weeks now. And every second that goes by without any progress in the investigation scares me. And because I'm having to answer questions like: Why is it that after two and a half weeks, we haven't the faintest idea of what happened to Ofer? And also because after finding the bag, it is even more likely that we are dealing with a crime and not a runaway. Do you agree? But primarily because until now we have been working without examining other alternatives, despite stressing at the outset the need to refrain from restricting ourselves to a single working theory. I think it's time to put this into practice—before the case is handed over to a different team.”

Despite her definitive tone, Ilana sounded insecure to him. Shrapstein spoke up, as if to lend his support. She watched him as he spoke, like he was the divisional investigations officer and she his subordinate. He said, “Another reason it came up is because I'm uncomfortable with the fact that Ofer's bag turned up in a Dumpster in Tel Aviv only after his father returned from abroad.”