A Possibility of Violence (25 page)

“Can you hear me better, Inspector Avraham? You said she was murdered by her husband?” he asked, and Avraham confirmed this. Jennifer Salazar was asphyxiated, in her sleep, in the bedroom of the apartment where she resided for eight years, since she had married Sara.

“So why did he plan to enter the Philippines?”

“In order to murder the two children there. One of the children was a witness to the mother's murder, and he discovered this. He denied that this was his plan, but we think that he planned to murder them and then return to Israel without them. To say they stayed with her.”

Again there was silence. From the other end of the line the sounds of a match lighting and the rustle of tobacco burning in a pipe could be heard. Garbo blew his nose a few times. Was he crying? Avraham said, “I can send you the summary of the case in another day or two, if you want, in English,” and Garbo suddenly asked, “Did you identify the body with certainty? Did you see it?”

For some reason he said that he saw it himself.

“What will you do with it?”

He hadn't thought about this before. The body had been moved to the Institute for Forensic Medicine, but he had no idea what would be done with it after that. Was the Philippine detective offering to transport it to Manila for interment?

Garbo said, “I will nevertheless give you the sister's details. Her name is Grace Ilmaz and she resides in Berlin. Perhaps she can help you with the children. And besides this, I succeeded in speaking with Jennifer's first husband. Andreda. They divorced in 1994, after four years of marriage, because he traveled to work in Qatar, but they kept in touch by telephone and mail for some years because they still loved each other. So he said. Her most recent visit to Manila, in 2005, was the last time they met; she learned then that he had married again and had children, and since then they didn't speak anymore. He did not know that she married in Israel and had two children.” Avraham didn't understand why he was telling him all this now, when the investigation was over. Before they got off the phone, Garbo said to him in an official tone, “Inspector Avraham, I would like to thank you in the name of the Philippine police for your efforts. In the Philippines we say, ‘Wherever there is life, there is still hope.' But I believe that even when life comes to an end, we must continue to hope. Do you not think this way?”

They promised each other that they would keep in contact in the coming days.

Avraham decided to put off transcribing the tape of the interrogation until the evening and went off by himself to Ilana's office at the Tel Aviv district headquarters. The car windows were closed, and the traffic in the streets on the Sunday after Yom Kippur was sparse, and for a moment he drove in complete silence. He opened the window and a dry wind came inside. Ilana was wearing her rectangular glasses and had her uniform on when he arrived at her office. She rose slowly from her chair in order to close the door behind him instead of asking him to close it. “How are you?” she asked him, and he said, “Tired, mainly.”

She said further, “You need to celebrate, no?” And he answered, “This is how I look when I celebrate.”

Ilana laughed.

 

THAT DAY OFFERED MORE THAN A
few sights and sounds that would stay with him afterward, but he would never forget this conversation with Ilana. They sat across from each other and she removed her glasses, and he didn't notice the spots around her eyes. She glanced at him with her painful look and said immediately, “I owe you an apology,” and he asked, “For what?” even though he well knew.

“For doubting your gut.”

He had imagined this moment differently.

He was waiting for her to apologize, but when it happened he didn't feel happy. Three days earlier he sat in her office and she insisted that he was fabricating another missing-persons case and another father who planned to harm his children, and for a moment she succeeded in shaking his confidence. And now he had returned to her office, victorious. She looked tense to him, and he thought that this was because it was hard for her to acknowledge her defeat and his victory, and later on he would be ashamed to have thought this.

He tried to avoid her stinging gaze and told her that it didn't matter, and Ilana said, “It actually does matter, Avi. And I'm glad you went with your instincts against what I asked you to do. You conducted this investigation alone, and at times behind my back. I know I should be angry with you, but this means that you've grown as a detective. And mainly it means that you've gotten past the trauma of the Sharabi investigation.”

After their conversation, Avraham didn't understand why he felt that these words had crushed something inside him. It was then that he remembered Sara's meeting with his children in the interrogation room at night.

He had reviewed the meeting over and over again in his office while he ate lunch. And knew the words by heart, though he still hadn't written them down.

The children stood in the entrance to the interrogation room but didn't dare enter until Avraham gestured his permission. And then the younger son ran toward Sara. The older one remained in the entrance to the room, next to Ma'alul, and didn't move.

He didn't know what Sara wanted to say to them and warned him that if he said anything that might hurt the children or affect the investigation, Avraham would remove them from the room immediately. Sara breathed heavily and stroked the hair of his younger son, who burrowed in between his knees. But when he spoke, he spoke to the older son, the one far from him, as if he were the only one in the room. Sara said to him, “Ezer, they're going to tell you all sorts of things, don't believe them. Believe me only. You know I had no choice, right? Shalom doesn't understand because he's still small. And from now on you'll have to protect Shalom. You'll be like a father and a mother for him now, okay? Like I was . . .” and then he crouched on his knees in front of his smaller son and a strange sound emerged from his mouth, deep and unintelligible, and Ma'alul called out, “Enough, Avi, that's enough,” and Avraham pulled the boy's hand and removed the two of them from the room.

Ilana felt that something was a little out of balance with him and asked, “Avi, are you okay?” and he answered her without thinking, “Something's not sitting right, Ilana. Something's missing.” He hadn't planned to talk to her about this, but he was so used to this sort of exchange with her over the years, here in this room, and before that in her old office on the second floor of the Ayalon district station.

“Do you mean with the case?” she asked, and he nodded.

“You have the suspect's full confession and a video of the re-creation and a body, no?”

She asked if it was the testimony that Sara's mother gave that was bothering him and he said no. In the morning hours, when the backhoe operator was disinterring the body, Ma'alul had questioned the mother in her home and she testified that her son killed his wife in his sleep. Or at least that's what he told her when he brought the body to her house after the murder. Sara had been a sleepwalker since he was a child, she said, getting up at night and doing things without knowing it, in his sleep. But this wasn't what was bothering him, because they didn't believe her story. And Sara explicitly confessed to premeditated murder and made no attempt to imply that he killed his wife accidentally. And the new testimony from the son about the “first father” wasn't the problem, either. The child repeated that he saw his first father take his mother down from the apartment with a suitcase, but he insisted that the first father wasn't Sara and that Sara was asleep in bed the whole time. After Sara's detailed confession they had no need of his testimony, and, anyway, it was clear to everyone that the child was having difficulty dealing with what he'd seen and therefore was transferring the responsibility for the murder to an imaginary father and clearing his real father of blame. According to the report he submitted, Ma'alul asked the child, “Do you know where your father took your mother?” and the child said, “Yes, to her country
.
” And when he asked him why his father took her there, the child said, “Because she missed it. She wanted to live in her country with our first father and have new children.”

Ilana didn't understand.

“So tell me what's not sitting right,” she said.

What bothered him wasn't only the photograph of Jennifer Salazar that had disappeared from the investigation file, or the letter that wasn't found in the suitcase.

“I just can't understand him,” he said.

“Who?”

“I don't understand Sara. Why did he do what he did?”

“Didn't he explain it to you?”

He tried to explain. But the more he explained the less Avraham felt he understood. The confession Sara gave was detailed, but something in it remained unclear, and Avraham had a sense that the more details they added to it the blurrier the picture of the murder actually became. “He said that he did it in order to protect the children. Because she didn't love them.”

According to the tape from the interrogation, that first, spontaneous confession was spoken at 10:38 p.m. Avraham repeatedly questioned him about his intentions to murder the children in Manila, and Sara vehemently denied this and suddenly erupted and screamed, “Don't you understand that I killed her for them? To protect them?” Avraham was shocked when he observed that he was smiling in the video upon hearing Sara's confession. He smiled because this was the confession he had been trying to pry out of him, because his investigation plan had proved itself, because this was the moment when it finally became clear he wasn't mistaken; but perhaps he smiled because something scared him as well.

And then Sara fell silent once more.

Ilana asked, “So tell me, what's not clear?” and Avraham said, “I don't know. That explanation sounds reasonable to you?”

“Why not?”

“So why did he plan to murder them afterward? And why is he denying it now, after he already confessed to murder? And why does she have pictures of the children in her wallet?”

Ilana didn't understand who he meant.

“Jennifer Salazar. That's what we found in her wallet that he hid in the shed.” From the case file he removed Ma'alul's notes from the scene where the body was found. Sara's mother showed Ma'alul where her son hid the suitcase, and in it he found a lot of clothes, two pairs of tennis shoes, and some inexpensive jewelry, bracelets, and plain necklaces. At the bottom of the tool drawer in the shed Ma'alul found the wallet and the passport and the cell phone.
In the wallet there were neither credit cards nor cash
,
Ma'alul noted.

In it were receipts and business cards and an elliptical wooden coin, perhaps a foreign amulet, and a dog-eared photograph of a young man, apparently a picture of the murdered woman's father, and two passport photos of the children.

Ilana looked at him puzzled.

“Avi, I don't understand what you're trying to do.”

“I'm trying to understand why he did what he did”—and as he spoke, the following questions formed in his mind. “Do you know that he explained to me that he loved her? He even sometimes misses her, but he had no choice because she'd hated the children ever since they were born and didn't want them. Does that sound like an explanation to you?”

“That is not what you want to do, Avi. You're trying to cast doubt on the findings in your case.”

“Not true, Ilana. I know that we caught the right man. And that we caught him in time. I'm just trying to understand him. He could have confessed to killing her in his sleep, let's say, but he chose to confess to premeditated murder and wanted to explain to his children that that was what he did. And now he's trying to convince me that he planned to take them to the Philippines in order to stage some kind of farewell. And I don't understand her, either. I don't get what kind of person she was. If what he says about her is correct, why did she marry him at all? Or have kids with him?”

If he hadn't lost that old picture that Garbo sent him he would have placed it on the desk and asked her to look at the wide, young face that so much resembled the face of her son Ezer. Ilana spoke to him like she always did, as if nothing had happened between them before this and as if nothing was about to happen afterward. “But that's not your job, Avi. Your job is to understand
what
happened, not
why
. To prove what happened with the help of evidence. And that's exactly what you did. Sara murdered his wife. And planned to kill the children because one of them was a witness to the murder of the mother. There can be a thousand reasons for the words that come out of his mouth in an interrogation after the fact, and you know it. It could be that he says he murdered her for the sake of the children because he's trying to convince you that he didn't plan on harming them, right? He's ready to confess to the murder of his wife in order to evade blame for his intention to harm the children, that's my best guess.”

He hadn't thought about this, but it seemed to him that Sara wasn't so sophisticated. Was he mistaken?

Even when he questioned him the first time, about the suitcase that was placed next to the daycare, he was disturbed by the gap between his short, clipped answers and the complete and organized story he told about the argument with the teacher. And last night as well, Sara was mainly silent, and it seemed like he'd never open his mouth, until after the meeting with his children he suddenly told the story about his wife, in a quiet voice, as if he were reading it from a script. And continued to deny, vehemently, that he planned to harm his children. But his explanation for the trip to Manila was absurd and unconvincing: he said he wanted to take his children there in order to say farewell to their mother, in order for them to understand that she didn't love them; and he insisted that a letter would be found in the suitcase proving what he intended to do on the trip, but the fictitious letter hadn't been found.