The Missing File (23 page)

Shrapstein and Ilana returned from the district court in the early afternoon with an easily attained green light for a wiretap and an arrest warrant. They must have come up with the idea on their way to court, or on their way back, and the next day, too, when they each sat in their offices at the station and waited, Avraham still didn't know whose it really was. Ilana was sufficiently shrewd to let Shrapstein present it to him.

“The idea is to wear Avni down without arresting him, to have him stay here as late as possible, the whole night if need be. To scare him. He doesn't look like a hard nut to crack. If you like, we can do it in shifts; you stay with him now, and I'll keep him company through the night. We'll let him stew awhile alone in the interrogation room, too. Occasionally, we'll stand outside the door and I'll say something like, ‘I'm sure it's him; let's just arrest him now.' We want him panicking. And when he's ready, we'll hint that he can help himself by cooperating with us.”

Avraham wasn't sure he understood. “Cooperate with us how?” he asked.

“We'll subtly imply that we're willing to forget his confession and will return the letters and ignore all he's done, because of lack of public interest, if he makes a call to Ofer's parents and tells them that he wrote the letters and knows where Ofer is,” Shrapstein replied.

Avraham was stunned. His eyes rested on Ilana. “What will that give us?”

“The call will be recorded. And if, within a few hours, they don't report an anonymous call from someone who says he knows where Ofer is, we won't need to think twice about arresting them.”

“The only question is, how are you going to imply something like that subtly to him?” Ilana said, and Shrapstein smiled. “We'll find a way. Mark my words, after a night at the station, without his family, convinced that he is going to be arrested and won't see his wife and child for who knows how long, and then given a chance to go home, he'll do whatever we want. He said he wanted to help with the investigation, didn't he? Okay, we'll give him the chance to do that.”

Avraham recalled the panic he had seen in Avni's eyes at the mention of his wife and son during the interrogation. Would he do whatever they wanted? Most people would behave exactly as Shrapstein had said. “Is that even legal?” he asked, and Shrapstein said, “Why not? Besides, do you think he's going to tell anyone?”

Ilana looked at a tall man passing through the parking lot outside the window of Shrapstein's office.

A policewoman entered. “The guy you put in the interrogation room won't stop banging on the door and calling for Avi,” she said. “What should we do with him?”

A
vraham sat in his office and turned on the recording device to listen once again to the conversation between Avni and the parents. Avni was speaking directly to him alone now. “I put Ofer's letters in the mailbox. I know where Ofer is,” he said.

Where was Avni right now? Avraham assumed the teacher had locked himself up at home. When they sent him out on his mission from the station early that morning, they told him he was free to do anything he pleased, but that wasn't entirely true. Ilana had requisitioned a team of detectives to keep an eye on him until the case was solved. “The fact that the parents have held back information doesn't mean we know what has happened to Ofer,” she had said. “And until we do, I want to keep the teacher in our sights.”

Meanwhile, they just waited.

And each of them waited differently.

Shrapstein was likely hoping that the parents wouldn't phone in to report the anonymous call and that his suppositions would be proved right. Avraham heard each second crash down, and with each thud it was more difficult to keep his eyes open. And Ilana? He didn't know what she was waiting for.

He needed to prepare for the questioning of the parents in the event that they failed to call and were brought into the station the following day to be confronted. He made a note of the dates on which the letters had been sent, and read through them again to select the fragments he would read out during the questioning. There were lines that made his blood run cold.
“No longer yours, Ofer.”
They had decided that if the parents failed to report the call, they'd be brought in together and questioned separately. They'd do it the following morning, after the children were dropped off at kindergarten and school. Shrapstein would take the father and he the mother. But they may have had countless reasons not to call right away! Perhaps they weren't sure who to contact first? Or maybe they were waiting for the next call because the anonymous caller had promised to contact them again? Avraham repeatedly checked to ensure his cell phone was on and the reception was good. He listened for the sound of any ring coming from the front desk or one of the other offices. The door could open at any minute. Everything could still change.

He removed various documents from the case file and spread them out over his desk. His attention was drawn to the list of items found in Ofer's backpack, just as it had been the first time he saw it, two days earlier, in Ilana's office. He also came across the copy of Ofer's class schedule. He stared at both documents. His eyes almost closed. And suddenly they opened.

He went out to smoke another cigarette.

A few minutes after returning to his office, he checked his e-mail, which he hadn't done since the morning of the day before. He had more than twenty new messages, most of which were junk mail.

But there was a message from Marianka.

The phone in his office rang just as he started reading her message, making him jump to his feet. Someone from the state attorney's office asking about the evidentiary material in the Igor Kintiev case. He had completely forgotten about him.

Marianka had written to him in English:

Avi, you promised to update me about your investigation, but you probably haven't had time since you got back. Did you find him? I've been thinking a lot about what you told me about the missing boy, and about you too. I'm sure you will find him and pray together with you that nothing has happened to him. My thoughts are with you. Write to me when you have a chance. Marianka.

The line “
My thoughts are with you
” may have meant she was thinking only of him, or of both him and Ofer, he couldn't tell.

He promised himself he would reply.

Ilana called to ask if there had been any developments and to see how he was feeling.

But there were no developments, and how did she think he was feeling?

“You're taking a vacation when this case is over,” she said. “It was really hard for me to see you like that yesterday and today,” and he said only, “Yes.”

“And you must go home to get some sleep. You've been at the station since yesterday morning. Do you know what the time is?”

It was 5:30 p.m.

“Nothing's going to happen now, Avi. They aren't going to call. And that means tomorrow's going to be a long and exhausting day. The interrogation of Ofer's mother won't be easy for you. You'll need all your strength for it.”

He took her advice, because he was used to doing so, and too tired to think. And again he stopped on the way home outside that damned building on Histadrut Street, which he was drawn to as if it were an old childhood haunt one returns to without really understanding why. The apartment in which Ofer had lived up until just a few weeks ago was shrouded in darkness. He'd be entering it the following day accompanied by three or four other policemen, and asking Rafael and Hannah Sharabi to come with him to the station for questioning. If they refused, he'd pull out the arrest warrant.

It was unbelievable—Ze'ev Avni was walking down the street.

At first Avraham thought that his eyes were playing tricks on him, that his exhaustion was messing with his mind. But it was indeed Avni, walking back to the building, pushing a stroller. His wife was by his side.

When, in the early hours of that morning, Avni understood their offer and was persuaded that he was not being framed for a crime he hadn't committed and that nothing he said on the telephone would be used against him, he asked to be left alone for a few minutes in the interrogation room to think about it.

They waited for him in the corridor and entered when he knocked on the door.

“I'll do it,” he said, “although I'm not exactly sure what you're after.” He looked Avraham directly in the eyes when he added: “I want you to know that I am doing it for you, because I trust you, and because you are asking me to do it. Until now I have hampered your investigation, and if you are asking me to, I am willing to help. And also because of my family. I think it's what my wife would want me to do. Nevertheless, I get the feeling that of all the allegedly improper things I have done until now, this is the worst.”

Now he could see Avni at the entrance to the building, undoing the straps of the stroller, lifting up his son in his one arm and folding the stroller with the other. He hadn't spotted any detectives in the area but assumed someone was watching them.

No one could hear him whisper in the car, “I'll be seeing you again, Ze'ev.”

H
is cell rang at 11:00 p.m. He woke up startled, with his clothes on, in the armchair in front of the TV.

It was Ilana again. She wanted to make sure everything was ready.

“I'll be at the station tomorrow morning at six thirty,” he said. “We'll be in front of their building at seven and will wait for the children to leave.”

“Do whatever you can to get them to come in without using the warrants,” Ilana instructed.

He turned out the lights.

The following day, a little after 7:00 a.m., exactly three weeks since that Wednesday morning when the mother had entered his office, two white police cars pulled up a short distance from the building. Farther down the street, outside the convenience store, a dairy truck was unloading.

Hannah Sharabi came out to the street at 7:25. A girl walked beside her, clumsily, hesitantly, heavily. It was Danit, and he was seeing her for the first time. She was taller and broader than her mother, and her eyes were fixed on the sidewalk. They waited together in front of the building, their hands constantly clasped. Then a yellow minibus pulled up and the driver stepped out to help Danit get on. Hannah waited for her daughter to take her seat and waved good-bye to her.

At 7:45 a.m., Rafael Sharabi drove their younger son to kindergarten. Shrapstein's car followed him. The father returned home some twenty minutes later, and shortly thereafter came the knock on the door.

There was no need for the arrest warrants.

Rafael Sharabi asked, “But why like this? We were waiting for your call—we would have come in whenever you liked.” Though disconcerted, neither refused to accompany the police to the station for questioning.

Did they realize that the interviews would be different from the previous talks to which they had been summoned? Even if they did, they didn't show it—not then, and not when the policemen asked them to get into separate cars.

Avraham sat in the front seat, the mother behind him. Not a word was spoken between them during the short drive, and he refrained from studying her face in the rearview mirror.

They were brought into the station via the back entrance, through the parking lot, and taken to separate interrogation rooms.

14

A
cross the desk from him sat a mother. But this time she was no longer just another mother.

Three weeks earlier, Avraham had tried to get rid of her. He had asked if she knew why no one wrote detective novels in Hebrew, and she had not understood. He had sworn since never to repeat that question. He had sent her out to look for her son by herself, despite the fact that she had been alone. Her husband was on a ship bound for Trieste. And he had regretted what he had done that very same evening. The following day, he had seen her entering the station and had frozen in his tracks. She hadn't spoken much. She had placed the photographs of her son, in a nylon bag, on his desk. That same day, he had gone to her home. He had tried to have a quiet conversation with her, to no avail. The following day, his birthday, he had sat beside her on a bed in the room of her missing son. They had opened his drawers together. But then this was also the mother who had received three letters written in her son's name and had said nothing about them. The mother who was told in an anonymous telephone call that someone knew where Ofer was, and she did not report it to the police.

Did he now know a lot more about her than he had at the start of the investigation?

She served in the navy and married Rafael Sharabi at the age of twenty-one, and sometimes she would not see him for a month or two when he was at sea. She worked at a kindergarten. A few years later she had her first son, and soon after a daughter, who was severely handicapped. Had they discovered it immediately or did it take them a few months to notice? Earlier that morning, Avraham had seen them standing together on the sidewalk, holding hands, the daughter a head taller than the mother but frozen and helpless. Hannah Sharabi raised the two children alone. Her husband was at sea. And having no choice, she accepted it. She quit her job to protect her daughter from the violence or indifference that surrounded her, and refused to send her away to an institution even when she grew up and her husband wanted her to do it. During the investigation he had perceived her to be submissive and meek. She never raised her voice; she hadn't demanded anything of him or criticized him. Her refusal to send Danit away was the only evidence of her ability to stand her ground. Not to break. When her daughter had grown up, Hannah had another child, perhaps thanks to advances in medical technology.

“Do you know why you are here?” he asked her. “Do you know why we brought you both in for questioning?”

The conversation was being videotaped by a camera mounted on the ceiling of the interrogation room. He rested his elbows on the desk, clasped his hands together, and covered his mouth when he wasn't speaking. Her chair was a foot or so away from the desk. Most of the time, she didn't look directly at the investigator sitting opposite her. Her gaze went through him and focused on the door, as if she were waiting for someone to open it and put an end to the interrogation, or perhaps as if planning an escape.

“No,” she said, and because no response came from him, she asked, “Have you discovered something about Ofer?”

Avraham said, “Yes,” and nothing more.

This was the first interrogation since the start of the investigation that he had planned down to the last detail, just as he liked to do. His strategy had unfolded clearly the moment he started working on it the previous afternoon, and he had meticulously thought through every word. Also the silences.

Realizing he wasn't going to add anything, she asked, “Why aren't you telling me what you've found?” and he said, “I want to give you the chance to tell me first.”

A look of confusion appeared on her face. “Tell you what first?”

“If you know anything new about what happened to Ofer.”

It was her last chance. But she said, “No, other than the bag you found.”

He tried to catch her eyes and then gave her yet another chance.

“Hannah, I want you to think hard before you answer me. I'm asking you if, since the search for Ofer began, you have informed me, or the police, of everything you know. Take your time. Think about my question.”

H
e was glad that no one was watching, or would ever watch, the video of Hannah Sharabi's interrogation. The film would go into the archives along with the rest of the case evidence and eventually would probably be destroyed or erased; he wasn't an expert on police storage procedures.

Interrogators are supposed to extract incriminating information from their suspects, but anyone watching the interrogation video would know that this was not what Avraham tried to do. When he watched it a few days later, he realized that some of the things she had said were unintelligible—one of the drawbacks of videotaped documentation. But that particular conversation he would always be able to reconstruct.

She told him she had informed the police of all she knew, and on film he looks like he is mulling over her answer, pondering. He opens the closed cardboard case file lying on the corner of the desk and removes sheets of paper wrapped in plastic.

“You didn't tell me that you received these letters,” Avraham said, though he hadn't yet handed them to her.

“What's that?” she asked.

“Letters that were put in your mailbox. Actually, these are not the original letters; those you removed. These are copies. Would you like me to tell you the exact dates on which they were in your mailbox?”

She didn't respond. Fixed her gaze on the door more fiercely. “Would you like me to tell you how the letters are related to Ofer or do you already know?” he asked, and she said, “I don't know. How did you find them?”

Disregarding her question, he began reading the first letter.
“ ‘Father and Mother, I know you've been looking for me for a few days now, but I suggest you stop looking because you won't find me, and neither will the police, not even with tracker dogs. The notices you posted in the streets say I disappeared on Wednesday morning, but all three of us know that isn't true. We all know that I disappeared long before then, without you even noticing, because you didn't pay attention, and that I didn't disappear in a single day either, but it was a gradual process of disappearing, at the end of which you thought I was still at home only because you never even tried to look.' ”
He stopped reading. The remainder of the letter horrified him. He tried to read the look on her face, and, even later, upon review, he didn't see any sign of astonishment. The thought that crossed his mind shook him.

He was right. Avni, the lunatic, was right.

With every passing moment, it became more possible that Ofer hadn't disappeared on Wednesday morning.

“What is that?” Hannah Sharabi asked again, and Avraham composed himself. “You know whose name is on the letter. Here, read it: ‘
No longer yours, Ofer.
' ” He put the letter in front of her.

“That's not Ofer's handwriting,” she said, and he responded immediately with a question that he had not planned: “Why would Ofer write such a thing—that you all know he didn't disappear on Wednesday morning but before?”

“That's not his handwriting,” she repeated. “He didn't write it. Where did you get that letter from?”

“We didn't get it, Hannah. You got it,” he said quietly. “We only received a copy. Come now, explain to me why you didn't inform us.”

She was silent for a few moments and then said, “I never saw that letter. And Ofer didn't write it.”

Was it possible that she hadn't seen the letter? He had never run into such a situation during an interrogation. He tried to make her slip, break down and confess, say she had seen the letter, but inside he also hoped she would continue to deny it. While watching the videotape of the interview later, he thought that had he continued to ask her about the content of the letters, as if he didn't know that Ofer hadn't written them, had he thrown the accusations of the teenager at her, she would have broken. But instead he said, “I know Ofer didn't write them. And I know that they were in your mailbox, and that they are not there now. Could your husband have found them and not told you?” That possibility had only just then crossed his mind. Not that Rafael Sharabi had kept them from his wife—he had thought of that already—but that the father was not familiar with his son's handwriting and may have thought that Ofer had really written the letters. He couldn't picture Rafael Sharabi checking his son's homework or reading through his tests. And if that was what he had thought, then perhaps he kept them from his wife to protect her.

“No, he would give them to me,” Hannah said.

“Perhaps the children?”

“The children don't open the mail. Even Ofer didn't.”

Avraham looked at his watch and left the room.

S
hrapstein was waiting for him in the old interrogation room at the far end of the corridor. “Well?” he asked as Avraham entered.

He shook his head. “She hadn't seen the letters, she hadn't heard about them, she knew it wasn't Ofer who wrote them,” he said.

“Same with him,” Shrapstein replied.

“And do you believe him? How does he look to you?”

“He's frightened. And I don't believe a word he says. I'm telling you, the moment I drop the phone call on him, he'll crack.”

Avraham hesitated for a moment before he said, “I have almost no doubt now that they got the letters,” and Shrapstein asked, “Why? Did she let something slip?”

“No. Because of you. I mean, because of the father. I don't believe the father would know Ofer's handwriting. If he knew that Ofer didn't write them, it's only because she told him before.”

Shrapstein looked at him in surprise. “You're forgetting there could be another reason,” he said.

“What other reason?”

“That he knows that Ofer couldn't have written them.”

There were things he preferred not to think about.

They decided that Shrapstein would update Ilana, and Shrapstein told him, “Avi, I'm moving on to the phone call the moment I go back in.”

Cars passed by slowly as he went out to have a cigarette. Drivers always slowed down on Fichman Street, near the station. There wasn't a street in Holon with fewer accidents. He lit his cigarette. The skies above were a spotless blue. That first evening, he had described to Hannah Sharabi what may have happened to Ofer. Perhaps he forgot to prepare for an exam and decided not to go to school, he had said. By the following day already, it was clear that this wasn't the case. He recalled that on his way home that evening, he had imagined Ofer all alone in a dark public park somewhere, putting his black backpack down on a bench and preparing for sleep. Was he still allowed to have some hope? Or perhaps he should pray, as Marianka had written?

Avraham, too, moved on to the phone call as soon as he returned to the interrogation room. And Hannah Sharabi's eyes again avoided his when he said, “Look, Hannah, let me explain to you why it's so difficult for me to believe that you haven't seen those letters before, and why I find it difficult to believe that you aren't concealing any information from me. It's because of the phone call, which you didn't report to us, either.”

“What phone call?” she immediately answered—and something in her voice changed. Now she did look at him, and he saw alarm in her eyes. She placed her left hand on the desk.

“The call you received yesterday morning. Do you recall?”

She pretended to be trying to remember. “Yes,” she finally said.

“And can you explain why you didn't report it?”

She didn't respond, and he asked, “Can you tell me what was said in the call?”

“Someone said he knew Ofer. And that he would call later to tell us where he is.”

He chose to remain silent for a long minute, to give her a chance to understand for herself the significance of her statement. His next words were spoken in a voice that became louder, ending in a scream of true rage, no pretenses. “We've been looking for your son for three weeks with I don't even know how many policemen, turning over every rock. I myself go to sleep with Ofer Sharabi in my head and I wake up with him in the morning—and you get a phone call from someone who tells you that he knows where Ofer is and you don't report it. And then you come here and continue to hide things from me and tell me that you've given me all the information you have. Have you completely lost your minds? Over and above the fact that you're putting your son at risk, do you realize that what you are doing is a serious criminal offense? Have you ever heard of obstructing a police investigation? Do you know that I could arrest you both?”

He expected she would not respond.

He stood up and began pacing back and forth in the narrow room, from one side to the other, over and over. He lowered his voice again, almost to a whisper, and wasn't sure she heard him when he said, “Nothing you say could explain it. Nothing at all. But I want you to try anyway. Why didn't you tell us?”

His pacing was effective. Hannah Sharabi tried to track his movements, making it simple for him to catch her eyes. And for the first time he saw fear. He almost felt sorry and thought about leaving the room again, precisely at that moment, to allow her to compose herself. She, too, looked like she hadn't slept for three weeks. Rafael Sharabi had told him during his interview that she was plagued by nightmares. The small purse she was carrying with her that first evening, and the following day, was nowhere to be seen—as if from the moment her husband returned, she no longer needed a wallet or keys or a cell phone.

“We didn't think he really knew Ofer. We thought someone was harassing us—a lunatic,” she said quietly, echoing Shrapstein's words, as if she had been listening in on the conversations of the team of investigators, not just the other way around.

“I don't believe you.” He continued to pace through the room—now in ever tighter circles, around the desk, and around her, such that some of his words were spoken behind her back. “I don't believe that a mother whose son has been missing for three weeks gets a call from someone who says he knows where this child is and she doesn't take it seriously. That would never happen. There's no such mother in the world. All you had to do was call me and say, ‘Some lunatic just called us to say he knows where Ofer is. Make of it what you will.' He said he'd call in the evening to tell you where Ofer is, didn't he? And what if he really does know something? We'd be able to trace the call and locate him. Do you know a mother out there who would give up on a chance like that?”