A Possibility of Violence (8 page)

Ofer Sharabi. Maybe also because of seeing Shrapstein at the unit meeting he thought about the dead boy again.

He asked Sara, “When was this?” and Sara said, “When was what?”

A moment passed before Avraham regained his focus.

“Your argument with her.”

“About a week and a half ago.”

“In other words . . . before the bomb was placed,” he said, and Chaim Sara didn't respond.

Avraham asked, “Is it possible that there were other parents who had disputes with the teacher?” and Sara said, “I don't know. Maybe it was only my son who . . .” And, again, he didn't continue with whatever he had intended to say.

“Do you think she hurt your son?”

“The teacher? God forbid. We never thought that it was
her
. We thought that the other children . . . I wouldn't leave Shalom there if . . .” and again he stopped.

Was there a moment during the interrogation when Avraham suspected that Sara was the one who placed the suitcase? If so, that moment had passed. Now he mainly felt an overpowering loathing for Chava Cohen. There were a few more questions that he needed to ask, and he asked them.

“On the morning the bomb was placed, where were you?”

“With my sons.”

“At home?”

“Yes. I brought them to the daycare and school.”

“But before eight in the morning, were you with them the whole time?”

“Yes. No. Actually no. I leave early each morning to get rolls for the business.”

“At what time?”

“Five maybe?”

Avraham looked at the clock in the corner of his computer screen, at his notes, and recalled that he had to get back to Sara's wife who was traveling. The suitcase was placed a long time after five, but if Sara left his children at five, why couldn't he have done this later? He lived a three-minute walk from the daycare, no more. He tried to imagine the older man sitting before him in a sweat suit with a hood and couldn't do it. In addition to this, Sara was a bit taller than average, whereas the man who placed the suitcase was short according to the witness's description. He asked him, “Do you want something to drink?” and Chaim Sara said no. For a moment he debated whether or not to insist that he get up from his spot to pour himself a glass of water.

He imagined Sara entering the daycare center later, to pick up his son. Strange and slow among the young parents. Would he tell Chava Cohen that he was questioned by the police? Safe to assume no, though Avraham would be glad if he did. At exactly 3:00 p.m. a patrol would be stationed across the street from the entrance to the daycare. He didn't ask Sara to conceal his visit to the station.

“Let's continue. Your wife wasn't there that morning?” he asked, and Sara said, “No, she was already gone. I was alone with them.”

“I would be happy to speak with her as well. Where did she go?”

“She left around two weeks ago. To the Philippines. Her family is there.”

“I see. Do you know the exact date on which she traveled?”

“Two weeks ago. I can check the date.”

“And why did she go?”

“To visit her father. He's sick.”

“When is she returning?”

“In another two or three weeks. Depending on his condition. You can call her there if you need to.”

After he parted from Sara, Avraham wrote an additional comment on the sheet of paper:
Check if caller had an accent.

 

IMMEDIATELY AFTER LUNCH, WITHOUT SMOKING A
cigarette, he telephoned Orna Chamo, the mother who had removed her son from the daycare. In contrast to Sara, she was talkative, and it seemed that she was only too happy to be called in for questioning. He didn't have to ask a thing. And like Sara, she didn't hide a thing from him. He told her that he was calling in order to invite her in to give testimony regarding the bomb left next to the daycare on Lavon Street and she said, “You have no idea how much I want to talk about this.” She couldn't report to the station on short notice because she had a month-old baby at home—so she started right in on the phone. She said, “Before I come I just want you to understand that this teacher is a criminal and I could have killed her if I were a more violent person.” She said that from the first day she felt that something wasn't okay. Her son is only a year and eight months old, smaller than most of the children, and since he still doesn't speak he couldn't tell her a thing. A week after the new session began she made a surprise visit to the daycare. With her new baby. The children were in the yard, just thrown into the sandbox with no supervision. She didn't see her son when she went inside either, but she heard him crying. When she opened the door to the bathroom she spotted him in the corner of the small, musty room. He was sitting on a small chair. Chava Cohen arrived from the yard and tried to explain, but from the argument that developed, and which quickly escalated to raised voices, the mother understood that her son spent entire days there on the low chair in the corner of the daycare, or in the small bathroom, without permission to move from his spot, because he cried often and, according to the teacher's claim, had difficulty walking like the rest of the children. “I didn't raise a hand to her, but believe me I wasn't far from that,” she said, and added that in her opinion things were happening at the daycare that the police needed to investigate. And she had no doubt that what was going on there had a connection to the bomb.

After hours of not smoking, Avraham lit a cigarette on the stairs of the station.

His telephone conversation with the mother weighed on him. The thought of her son being closed up in a small bathroom, without permission to leave. He also thought about Sara's son. The dark spots, and the open wound on his forehead. From moment to moment his suspicion of Chava Cohen transformed into loathing, and he had to remind himself that she wasn't the one he was looking to trap but rather whoever placed the suitcase. Though he might ask Saban for permission to open a criminal investigation into the teacher as well.

And there was also that meeting in the morning with Shrapstein, who sat so relaxed next to him in the conference room. As if nothing had happened between them in the last investigation. And his smile when Avraham mentioned the warning call and then asked for the investigation to be treated as very urgent. Since their meeting he had felt an irritation that he tried to suppress.

He wasn't able to control himself. If he had spoken with Marianka, she certainly would have convinced him not to do this, but Marianka was visiting her parents, and they had agreed to talk only in the evening, after she got home. When Avraham heard the feminine voice he only said, “Ilana,” and she said, “Hi, Avi, how are you? How was the holiday?” He tried hard for his speech to sound casual when he said to her, “Peaceful. Hey, do you have a minute? I wanted to ask you something.”

A few days before this it seemed to him there wasn't a person in the police he trusted more. She was Ilana Lis, his “rabbi,” the woman who welcomed him into the Investigations Unit, who guided him through his first investigations, who taught him almost everything he knew. If there was a person in the world from whom he shouldn't hide something, it was her. He told her that by chance he heard about a report she'd written regarding the Ofer Sharabi murder investigation. He didn't ask why she didn't tell him about it, or why she didn't forward it to him. She was silent for a moment, and then said, quietly, “Yes, I wrote a report. You know that when the case blew up it made noise and questions were asked.” There was no embarrassment in her voice. She didn't answer immediately when he asked if he could read the report. Finally she said, “I'm not supposed to do this, but I'll send it to you. No problem. But I want you to talk to me after you read it, Avi. I know you, and I'm not ready for you to disappear on me without us talking.”

He returned to the office immediately and checked his e-mail.

Then he read his notes from the Chaim Sara interrogation and the summary of the interrogation of Natalie Pinchasov from the evening of the holiday. When an investigation into child abuse at the daycare opens, Natalie would be the first to be questioned, and he had no doubt she would cooperate. His eyes stopped on something she had said regarding the previous assistant, who
quit a few days before the start of the year
. Perhaps this former assistant would know more about the goings-on at the daycare? If children were being harmed, it's fair to assume that it didn't just begin this year. And perhaps whoever placed the suitcase was a parent of a child who was hurt at the daycare last year?

It was four thirty when he called Natalie Pinchasov. He caught her on the bus on the way home, and she was alarmed to hear his voice. And she didn't know the name of the previous assistant. He said, “I have another question. Regarding the woman who called the daycare on the day when the fake bomb was placed. Do you remember if she spoke with an accent?”

Natalie Pinchasov wasn't sure. “I don't think she had an accent. You mean Russian? No, I don't think so. But maybe there actually was something odd about her voice, I'm not sure.”

He hadn't thought about this before but suddenly asked, “And, today, did you notice anything unusual?” and she said, “Don't think so. There were police cars outside, but I didn't see anything happen.”

“But if something unusual happens, will you please let me know? Any little thing, okay? It's important for me to know if Chava Cohen speaks to you about the warning call or if one of the parents at the daycare mentions the suitcase, okay? And let me know if any of the children suddenly stop coming to the daycare, or if you see someone suspicious in the area, anything that seems unusual to you.”

Orna Chamo also didn't know the name of the previous assistant, but got back to him a short time later with the information.

 

INSTEAD OF TRAVELING HOME HE AGAIN
went to the sea before sunset. Stopped at a stand on the boardwalk and bought a cold bottle of Corona. He took off his shoes and socks and sat down, in his clothes, on the beach. Not far from him, a bald, half-naked man danced a slow, strange dance, even though no song could be heard anywhere, and two older women did yoga exercises. Joggers passed him by.

Before leaving his office he'd dialed the number he got from Orna Chamo and a girl answered. He asked to speak with Ilanit Hadad, and the girl said that she was out of town. He asked when she would return, and the girl didn't know. Couldn't say where her sister had traveled to. “If you need her right away, you can talk to Mom. She gets back this evening,” she said. And no e-mail from Ilana Lis had arrived.

The sea was dark and choppy. Pinpricks of light flickered on the horizon from a cargo ship.

Just open your eyes and look, he thought. In the end, all the points will connect.

In every investigation there's a moment when it seems that the confusion before your eyes will never become clear. That the details are too numerous, too strange, distinct from one another like the people sitting on the beach. Everything is sunk in darkness or fog. But after some time the connections are clarified and the picture always grows clear. In the darkness a new point of light suddenly turns on, and it illuminates the others as well; details look different, take on meaning, connect. What looked strange turns out to be familiar. This time it was a small suitcase containing a pretend bomb without explosive material inside. And a man fleeing with a limp. A sweat suit with a hood and a warning call in the voice of a woman. A teacher who concealed the warning call and perhaps abused children, or perhaps did not. And there were strange details that perhaps had no connection between them: a suspect who since he was released from custody had left his home only to go to the hospital to visit his mother, and a foreign woman who traveled to the Philippines to see her dying father. Actually, two women had traveled: one to her home in the Far East, and the other to an unknown destination.

In contrast to his previous investigation, this time the sea was of no critical importance. But if so, why was he returning here almost every day? The half-naked dancer stopped dancing and approached the two women doing yoga, and Avraham observed the three of them from far away.

But the sea did have importance, and suddenly he understood it.

The sea continued to be important because Ofer Sharabi was still somewhere deep inside it, drowned and unseen.

Do you want to rescue Ofer from the sea?
Avraham whispered to himself. And smiled.

You're a fool. Four months ago, Ofer's father tossed the boy's dead body, folded up inside a suitcase, from a cargo ship in the middle of the Mediterranean. What's the chance that the body could be found now?

At night he didn't tell Marianka that he had asked Ilana to send him the report about the previous investigation. Nor about Ofer and the sea. He told her about the long day, about the first unit meeting. It was late for her when she called him and she was anxious to get off the phone, but she did want to hear what he had to say. “So do you have a clearer direction?” she asked, and he said, “Don't know. Maybe not.”

“And the father you questioned?”

“I don't think he's capable of placing a fake bomb, but possibly. Seems to me that he's too tall and too old. In any case, after the last time I don't intend to trust anyone. And in the meantime, he's almost all I've got.”

She was silent, and he added, “If you saw him, you'd understand.” Actually, the only reason he didn't cross off Sara after interrogating him was his wife. She had gone away and was not available for questioning. And he was looking for a woman's voice.

Afterward he told Marianka how from moment to moment the antipathy he felt toward the teacher was growing, and about his intention to open up an investigation on her when the case of the bomb was closed, and she cautioned him that this antipathy wouldn't help him in the investigation. That was strange, the sort of thing Ilana might say—but in English, and from the mouth of Marianka, but he didn't say anything about it. It was impossible to convince him that Chava Cohen didn't know who placed the bomb and who threatened her.