Текст книги "The Butcher's Theatre"

Автор книги: Jonathan Kellerman

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

He threw up on the floor, got into the bed and wet it.

He spent an eternity under the covers, shaking and biting his lips, scratching his arms and his face until he bled. Tasting his blood. Squeezing his thing. Hard.

Hurting himself, to see if you could like it.

You could, kind of.

It wasn't until later, when he heard her come up the stairs, sobbing, that he realized she was still alive.

When the woman opened the door, Shmeltzer was surprised. He'd expected someone older, the same age as the Hagah man, maybe just a little younger. But this one was much younger, in her early fifties, younger than him. A round, girlish face, plump and pretty, though the gray eyes seemed grim. A little makeup applied well, thick dark hair pulled back in a bun, just beginning to streak with gray. A heavy, sagging bosom that took up most of the space between neck and waistline. The waistline well-padded, as were the hips. Small ankles for a heavy woman. Just like Leah. No doubt she fretted over her weight.

"Yes?" she said, sounding wary and unfriendly.

Then he realized he was being stupid, a fine detective. The fact that she'd opened the door didn't make her the wife. A niece, maybe, or a guest.

But when he introduced himself, showed his badge and asked for Schlesinger, she said, "He's not here now. I'm Eva-Mrs. Schlesinger. What do you want?"

"When do you expect him back?"

The woman stared at him and bit her lip. Her hands were small and soft; they started kneading one another.

"Never," she said.

"What's that?"

She started to say something, clamped her lips shut, and turned her back on him, retreating into the apartment. But she'd left the door open and Shmeltzer followed her inside.

The place was simple, bright, immaculately maintained. Lean Danish furniture that had probably been purchased as an ensemble from Hamashbir. Bowls of nuts and candies and dried fruits on the coffee table. Crystal animals and porcelain miniatures, all female stuff-the Hagah man probably didn't give a hoot about decorating. A teak bookcase filled with volumes on history and philosophy. Landscape prints on the walls, but no photos of children or grandchildren.

A second marriage, he told himself: the old guy hot for a young one, may be divorcing the first one, maybe waiting for widowhood. Then he remembered that Schlesinger had been in Dachau and the age difference took on a different context: Wife number one murdered by the Germans, perhaps a couple of kids gone too. Come to Palestine, fight for your life, and start anew-a familiar story; plenty of his moshav neighbors had gone through the same thing.

Were the two of them childless? Maybe that was why she looked so unhappy.

She'd gone into the kitchen and was drying dishes. He followed her in.

"What did you mean by 'never'?"

She turned around and faced him. She inhaled and her bosom heaved impressively. She noticed Shmeltzer looking at her and covered her chest with her dish towel.

What an interview, thought Shmeltzer. Very professional.

"My husband is in the hospital. I just got back from there. He's got cancer all over him-in the stomach and the liver and pancreas. The doctors say he's going to die soon. Weeks, not months."

"I'm sorry." What an inane thing to say. He'd hated it when others head said it to him. "How long has he been ill?"

"For a week," she snapped. "Does that give him a good enough alibi?"

"Gveret Schlesinger-"

"He told me the police suspected him-some Yemenite accused him of being a murderer. A few days later he had cancer!"

"No one accused him of anything, gveret. He's a material witness, that's all."

Eva Schlesinger looked at him and threw her dish down on the floor. She watched it shatter, then burst into tears, knelt, and started to pick up the pieces.

"Careful," said Shmeltzer, getting down beside her. "That's sharp-you'll cut your hands."

"I hope so!" she said and began grabbing at the shards quickly, automatically, like someone batch-sorting vegetables. Shmeltzer saw pinpoints of blood freckle her fingers, pulled her hands away, and brought her to her feet. He steered her to the sink, turned on the tap, and put the wounded fingers under the water. After a few seconds most of the bleeding stopped; only a few red bubbles persisted. Small cuts, nothing serious.

"Here," he said, tearing a piece of paper towel from a wall-mounted roll. "Squeeze this."

She nodded, complied, started crying again. He guided her into the living room, sat her down on the couch.

"Something to drink?" he said.

"No, thank you, I'm fine," she whispered between sobs, then realized what she'd said and started laughing. An unhealthy laugh. Hysterical.

Shmeltzer didn't know what to do, so he let her go on for a while, watching her alternate between tears and laughter, then finally growing silent and covering her face with her hands. She started to mutter, "Yaakov, Yaakov."

He waited, looked at the blood-speckled paper towel wrapped around her fingers, the view of the desert from the living room window. A good view, rocky crags and pinhole caves, but architecturally ths French Hill complex made no sense-towers on top of a mountain. Some developer bastard fucking up the skyline

"He had pain for years," said Eva Schlesinger. To Shmeltzer it sounded as if she were accusing him, blaming him for the pain. "He was always hungry-he ate like a wild animal, a human garbage disposal, but was never satisfied. Can you imagine what that felt like? They told him it was in his head."

"Doctors," commiserated Schmeltzer. "Most of them are jerks. How's your hand?"

She ignored the question, leaned her uninjured hand on the coffee table, and tossed out words like machine-gun bullets: "He tried to tell them, the fools, but they wouldn't listen. Instead they told him he was nuts, said he should see a psychiatrist-head doctors, they're the biggest nuts of all, right? What did he need them for? His stomach hurt, not his head. It's not normal to have pain like that. It doesn't make sense, does it?"

"Not at all-"

"All they want is to keep you waiting for hours, then pat you on the head and tell you it's your fault-as if he wanted the pain!" She stopped, pointed a finger at Shmeltzer. "He was no murderer!"

Shmeltzer saw the fire in her eyes. The bosom, moving as if imbued with a life of its own.

"Of course he wasn't-"

"Don't give me your double talk, Inspector! The police thought he was a murderer-they blamed him for the Arab girl. They killed him, put the cancer in him. Right after the Yemenite accused him, the pain started to get worse! What do you think of that? Nothing helped it-even food made it worse! He refused to go back and see more doctors. He was gritting his teeth and suffering in silence-the man's a rock, a shtarker. What he's been through in his life, I won't tell you-he could take the pain of ten men. But this was worse. At night he'd crawl out of bed-he had an iron constitution, could take anything, and this pain made him crawl! He'd crawl out and walk around the apartment groaning. It would wake me up and I'd go out and find him, crawling. Like an insect. If I went to him he screamed to me, told me to leave him alone-what could I do?"

She pounded her fist on the table, put her hands on her temples, and rocked.

Shmeltzer considered what to say and decided to say nothing.

"Such pain, it's not right, after what he'd been through. Then I saw the blood, from all ends-he was urinating it and coughing it up and spitting it. The life was flowing out of him." She unwrapped the paper towel, looked at it, and put it on the coffee table. "That's what happens to people-that's what happens to Jews. You live a good life, work hard; then you fall apart– everything comes out of you. We had no kids. I'm glad they're not here to see it."

"You're right," said Shmeltzer. "You're hundred percent right."

She stared at him, saw that he was serious, and started to cry again, pulling at her hair. Then she looked at him again, shook a fist.

"What the hell do you know! What am I doing talking to you!"

"Gveret-"

She shook her head no, got up from the couch, stood and took a step forward, catching her foot on a leg of the coffee table and reeling.

Shmeltzer moved quickly, catching her before she fell. He put his arms under her armpits and kept her upright. She reacted to the support by punching at him and cursing him, spraying him with saliva, then going all loose and limp, letting her arms fall to her sides. He felt her pressed against him, her soft bulk astonishingly light, like meringue. She buried her face in his shirtfront and cursed God.

They stood that way for a while, the woman sobbing in anticipation of widowhood. Shmeltzer holding her. Confused.

The gag cards on the wall of Fink's Bar were tacky, decided Wilbur. The kind of thing you'd see in a hick-town tavern, back in the States. Combine that with enough Wild Turkey and you could forget where you were. For a moment.

He picked up The Jerusalem Post, read the piece again, and took a sip of bourbon. Another scoop heard from.

He'd been on his vacation-ten days of R and R in Athens-when the murders story broke. The international Trib hadn't carried it-the first he'd heard of it was a page-two item in the Post he'd picked up on the plane back to Ben Gurion.

Like most foreign correspondents, he spoke no Hebrew or Arabic and depended upon native journalists for his information-the Post for the Jewish angle, the English edition of Al Fajr for the Arab side. Both were highly partisan, but that was okay; it spiced up his pieces. Anyway, it was either that or bird-dog the government spokesmen, and Israeli mouthpieces were cagey, paranoiac, always grooming themselves for victim status. Always worried someone was out to get them, invoking military censorship when they didn't want to deal with something.

The vacation had been a good one. He'd met up with an Italian photojournalist named Gina, a skinny, bleached-blond free-lance with an appetite for sauteed calamari and cocaine; they'd met on the beach, traded meaningful looks, puffed-up bios, and shared a line from a vial that she carried in her beach bag. She had a room in his hotel, checked out of it, and moved in with him, living off his expense account for a week and a half of fun and games, then woke him up early one morning with a blow-job and breakfast, left him eating dry toast as she tossed him a ciao and was out the door, back to Rome. Wild girl, not pretty, but adventurous. He hoped she hadn't given him a dose of anything.

He took another swallow of Turkey, motioned for a refill. Two murders-potential start of a serial. It just might play back home, the kind of thing the wire services sometimes went for. No doubt the Times men-New York and L.A.-had gotten hold of it, but they usually stayed away from crime stories, milked the political stuff, which was always in heavy supply. So maybe there was still something to work with.

Being out of the country when it broke bothered the Jimmy Olsen part of him, but after six months in Israel he'd needed the time off. The country was hyperkinetic; the pace could drive you crazy.

Stuff never stopped coming at you, but most of it was noise. Grabowsky had loved it-he was a certified information junkie, firing off pieces right and left, breaking productivity records before he'd ventured too far into the Bekaa and gotten his arm blown off. The day after he'd been certified a cripple, the wire service had called Wilbur in from Rio. Farewell to a beautiful assignment. A little boring-how much could you write about favelitos, generals, and sambas, and Mardi Gras was a once-a-year thing-but my, my, what a culture, white sand, all those women sashaying topless along Ipanema, caramel asses hanging out of G-string bikini bottoms.

After three fat years under the Brazilian sun, Manhattan seemed poisonous, unhealthily clamorous, a headache machine. Welcome home, Mark. Home. Backslapping and speeches from the boys in the New York office, kudos to old Grabowsky, drink to the one-armed Hemingway (could he, Wilbur wondered, learn to type with that prosthesis?), and keep the fire burning in the Holy Land, Mark. Rah, rah.

Not his style. He'd laid his Front Page fantasies to rest a long time ago, wanted to take things easy, enjoy life. The wrong man for the Israel bureau.

The pace.

A story that was milkable for a week anywhere else faded in a day here, crowded out by something new before the ink was dry. Crazy coalition government, had to be at least twenty political-parties-he was a long way from knowing all of them-constantly taking shots at one another, clawing for little smidgens of power. Knesset meetings turned invariably to shouting matches; last week there had been a fist fight. They couldn't talk softly; a real Brooklyn deli scene-the constant charges and countercharges of corruption, virtually all of it noise. The Arabs were no better, always whining, buttonholing him, wanting to see their names in print. Cries of oppression from guys driving Mercedes and living off the U.N. dole.

Everyone had an axe to grind; in the six months he'd been there, a week hadn't gone by without some kind of major political demonstration. Usually there were two or three. And the strikes-the doctors, the nurses, the postal workers. Last month the taxi drivers had decided they wanted more money from the Transportation Ministry, blocked the main thoroughfares of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with their cabs, burned an old jalopy in the middle of King George Street, the tires stinking to high heaven. Wilbur had been forced to leave his car at home and walk everywhere, which inflamed his corns and heightened his antipathy toward the country, the obstreperousness-the Jewishness of it.

He finished his drink, put the glass down on the bar, and looked around. Six tables, five empty. Two guys in a corner: Margalit from Davar, Aronoff from Yediot Aharonot-he hadn't gotten close to either of them. If they'd noticed him come in, they didn't show it, eating peanuts, drinking ginger ale, and talking in low voices.

Ginger ale. Another problem. Newshounds who didn't take their drinking seriously. No one did. The country had no drinking age-a ten-year-old could waltz into a grocery and buy hundred-proof-and yet, no one went for it. A kind of snobbery, as far as he was concerned. As if they considered sobriety some sort of religious virtue, regarded booze as a goy weakness.

He called for another Turkey. The bartender was the owner's nephew, quiet kid, not a bad sort. In between orders, he studied from a math book. He nodded in response to Wilbur's call and brought the bottle over, poured a full measure without comment, asked Wilbur if he wanted something to eat.

"What do you have?"

"Shrimp, lobster cocktail."

Wilbur felt himself grow irritated. Patronized.

"What about soup?" He smiled. "Chicken soup. With matzo balls."

The kid was impassive. "We've got that too, Mr. Wilbur."

"Bring me a shrimp cocktail."

Wilbur looked across the bar as the kid disappeared into the kitchen, read the gag cards again. An eye chart that spelled out TOO MUCH SEX MAKES YOU GO BLIND if you read it the right way; a placard announcing ONCE A king, always a KING, BUT… ONCE A KNIGHT IS ENOUGH!

The door to the street swung open, letting in heat, and Rappaport from the Post walked in. Perfect. It was Rap-paport's byline on the murder story, and he was an American, Princeton grad, a former hippie type who'd interned at the Baltimore Sun. Young, Jewish, and fast-talking, but he didn't mind a tipple once in a while.

Wilbur motioned toward the empty stool on his left and Rappaport sat down. "Steve, old boy."

"Hello, Mark."

The Post man was wearing a short-sleeved safari shirt with oversized pockets, denim walking shorts, and sandals without socks.

"Very casual," said Wilbur appraisingly.

"Got to beat the heat, Mark." Rappaport took a bulldog pipe, tobacco pouch, and matches out of one of the big pockets and placed them on the bar.

Wilbur noticed that the other two Israeli journalists were also informally attired. Long pants, but lightweight sport shirts. Suddenly his seersucker suit, button-down shirt, and rep tie, which had looked natty when he'd dressed this morning, seemed out of place, superfluous.

"Righto." He loosened his tie and pointed to the rolled-up Post. "Just finished reading your piece. Nice chunk of work, Steve."

"Routine," said Rappaport. "Straight from the source. The police covered up the first one, fed us a false quick-solve, and we swallowed it, but there were rumors that it was too easy, too cute, so we had our feelers out and were ready for them the second time.around."

Wilbur chuckled. "Same old bullshit." He picked up the newspaper, used it for a fan. "Nasty stuff, from the sound of it."

"Very. Butchery."

Wilbur liked the sound of that. He filed it away for future use.

"Any leads?"

"Nothing," said Rappaport. He had long hair and a thick handlebar mustache that he brushed away from his lips. "The police here aren't used to that kind of thing-they're not equipped to handle it."

"Amateur hour, huh?"

The bartender brought Wilbur's shrimp.

"I'll have some of that too," said Rappaport. "And a beer."

"On me," Wilbur told the bartender.

"Thank you much, Mark," said Rappaport.

Wilbur shrugged it off. "Gotta keep the expense account going or the main office gets worried."

"I won't tell you about my expense account." Rappaport frowned. "Or lack thereof."

"Police beating their meat?" asked Wilbur, trying to get the conversation back on track. It was a little too obvious and Rappaport seemed to have caught it. He picked up the pipe, rolled it in his palm, then filled it, lit it, and regarded Wilbur over a rising plume of smoke.

"Same thing back home," said Wilbur, backtracking casually. "Stepping over each other's feet and snowing the press."

"No," said Rappaport. "That's not the situation here. Major Crimes is a fairly competent unit when it comes to their specialty-security crimes, bombs left in trash bins, et cetera. The problem with this kind of thing is lack of experience. Sex murders are virtually unknown in Israel-I went into the archives and found only a handful in thirty years. And only one was a serial-a guy last year, cutting up hookers. They never caught him." He shook his head, smoked. "Six months in Baltimore, I saw more than that."

"Last year," said Wilbur. "Could it be the same guy?"

"Doubtful. Different M.O.'s."

M.O.'s. The kid had been reading too many detective novels.

"Two in a row," said Wilbur. "Maybe things are changing."

"Maybe they are," said Rappaport. He looked concerned. The sincere worry of a good citizen. Unprofessional, thought Wilbur. If you wanted to be effective you couldn't be part of it.

"What else you have been up to, Steve?" he asked, not wanting to sound too eager.

"Sunday puff piece on the new Ramat Gan mall-nothing much else."

"Till the next pseudo-scandal, eh?"

Before Rappaport could reply, his shrimp and beer came. Wilbur slapped down his American Express card and called for another Turkey.

"Thanks again," said Rappaport, tamping his pipe out and laying it in an ashtray. "I don't know, maybe we are changing. Maybe it's a sign of maturity. One of the founders of the state, Jabotinsky, said we wouldn't be a real country until we had Israeli criminals and Israeli whores."

We. The guy was overinvolved, thought Wilbur. And typically arrogant. The Chosen People, thinking they invented everything, turning everything into a virtue. He'd spent four years on a midtown Manhattan beat for the New York Post, could tell the kid plenty about Israeli criminals.

He smiled and said, "Welcome to the real world, Steve."

"Yup."

They drank and ate shrimp, talked about women and bosses and salaries, finally got around to the murders again. Wilbur kept a running tab going, cajoled Rappaport into having anothershrimp cocktail. Three more beers and the Post man started reminiscing about his student days in Jerusalem, how safe it had been, everyone keeping their doors unlocked. Paradise, to listen to him, but Wilbur knew it was self-delusion-nostalgia always was. He played fascinated listener and, by the time Rappaport left, had filed away all his information and was ready to start writing.

Ten days since the discovery of Juliet's body, and nothing new, either good or bad.

They'd narrowed the sex offender list down to sixteen men. Ten Jews, four Arabs, one Druze, one Armenian, all busted since Gray Man. None had alibis; all had histories of violence or, according to the prison psychiatrists, the potential for it. Seven had attempted rape, three had pulled it off, four had severely beaten women after being refused sex, and two were chronic peepers with multiple burglary convictions and a penchant for carrying knives-a combination the doctors considered potentially explosive.

Five of the sixteen lived in Jerusalem; another six resided in communities within an hour's drive of the capital. The Druze's home was farther north, in the village of Daliyat el Carmel, a remote aerie atop the verdant, poppy-speckled hills that looked down upon Haifa. But he was unemployed, had access to a car, and was prone to taking solitary drives. The same was true of two of the Arabs and one of the Jews. The remaining pair of Jews, Gribetz and Brickner, were friends who'd gang-raped a fifteen-year-old girl-Gribetz's cousin-and also lived far north, in Nahariya. Before going to prison they'd shared a business, a trucking service specializing in picking up parcels from the Customs House at Ashdod and delivering them to owners' homes. Since their release they'd resumed working together, tooling along the highways in an old Peugeot pickup. Looking, Daniel wondered, for more than profit?

He interviewed them and the Druze, trying to make some connection between Juliet Haddad's Haifa entry and home bases near the northern border.

Gribetz and Brickner were surly, semiliterate types in their mid-twenties, heavily muscled louts who smelled unwashed and gave off a foul heat. They didn't take the interrogation seriously, nudged each other playfully and laughed at unspoken jokes, and despite the tough-guy posturing, Daniel started perceiving them as lovers-latent homosexuals perhaps? They seemed bored by discussion of their crime, shrugged it off as a miscarriage of justice.

"She was always loose," said Gribetz. "Everyone in the family knew it."

"What do you mean by 'always'?" asked Daniel.

Gribetz's eyes dulled with confusion.

"Always-what do you think?" interceded Brickner.

Daniel kept his eyes on Gribetz. "She was fifteen when you raped her. How long had she been… loose?"

"Always," said Gribetz. "For years. Everyone in the family knew it. She was born that way."

"They'd have family parties," said Brickner. "Afterward everyone would take a drive with Batya and all the guys would have a go at her."

"You were there too?"

"No, no, but everyone knew-it was the kind of thing everyone knew."

"What we did was the same as always," said Gribetz. "We went for spin in the truck and had her good, but this time she wanted money and we said fuck you. She got mad and called the cops, ruined our lives."

"She really fucked us up," confirmed Brickner. "We lost all our accounts, had to start from scratch."

"Speaking of your accounts," Daniel asked him, "do you keep a log of your deliveries?"

"For each day. Then we throw it out."

'Why's that?"

'Why not? It's our personal shit. What's the matter, the government doesn't give us enough paperwork to store?"

Daniel looked at the arrest report Northern Division had written up on the two. The girl had suffered a broken jaw, loss of twelve teeth, a cracked eye socket, ruptured spleen, and vaginal lacerations that had needed suturing.

"You could have killed her," he said.

"She was trying to take our money," protested Brickner. "She was nothing more than a whore."

"So you're saying that it's okay to beat up whores."

"Well, ah, no-you know what I mean."

"I don't. Explain it to me."

Brickner scratched his head and inhaled. "How about a cigarette?"

"Later. First explain me your philosophy about whores."

"We don't need whores, Hillel and me," said Gribetz. "We get plenty of pussy, any time we want."

"Whores," said Brickner. "Who the hell needs them."

"Which is why you raped her?"

"That was different," said Brickner. "His whole family knew about her."

An hour later, they'd given him nothing that cleared them, but neither had they implicated themselves. During the nights of the murders they claimed to have been sleeping in bed, but both lived alone and lacked verification. Their memories failed to stretch back to the period preceding Fatma's murder, but they recalled delivering parcels to Bet Shemesh the day before Juliet's body had been found. A painstaking check of Ashdod Customs records revealed an early morning pickup; Shmeltzer was still trying to get hold of the bills of lading from the week of Fatma's death.

The timing vis-a-vis Juliet was feasible, Daniel knew. Bet Shemesh was just outside Jerusalem, which would have given them ample opportunity to drop off the packages, then go prowling around. But where would they have killed her and cut her up? Neither had residence nor connections in Jerusalem and the lab boys had found no blood in the truck. They denied ever laying eyes on Juliet or going into the city, and no witness placed them there. As for what they'd done with the afternoon, they claimed to have driven back north, spent the afternoon at a deserted stretch of beach just above Haifa.

"Anyone see you there?" asked Daniel.

"No one goes there," said Brickner. "The ships leak shit in the water-it smells. There's tar all over the beach that can gook you up if you're not careful."

"But you guys go there."

Brickner grinned. "We like it. It's empty-you can piss in the sand, do whatever you like."

Gribetz laughed.

"I'd like for both of you to take a polygraph test."

"Does it hurt?" asked Brickner in a crude imitation of a child's voice.

"You've had one before. It's in your file."

"Oh, yeah, the wires. It fucked us over. No way."

"No way for me either," said Gribetz, "No way."

"It incriminated you because you were guilty. If you're innocent, you can use it to clear yourselves of suspicion. Otherwise you'll be considered suspects."

"Consider away," said Brickner, spreading his arms.

"Consider away," said Gribetz, aping him.

Daniel called for a uniform, had them taken back.

A repulsive pair but he tended to believe them. They were low-impulse morons, explosive and psychopathic, playing on each other's pathology. Certainly capable of damaging another woman if the right situation came up, but he didn't see them for the murders. The cold calculation that had echoed from the crime scenes wasn't their style. Still, smarter men than he had been fooled by psychopaths, and there was still the earlier Ashdod material to be looked at. Perhaps something would be found that refreshed their memories about Fatma. Before he ordered them released, he slowed down the paperwork so that they'd be cooling their heels for as long as possible, assigned Avi Cohen to drive up to Nahariya and find out more about them, keep a tight surveillance on them when they got home.

The Druze, Assad Mallah, was also no genius. One of the peepers, he was a withdrawn, stammering type, just turned thirty, with jailhouse pallor, watery blue eyes, and a history of neurological abnormalities that had exempted him from army service. As a teenager he'd burgled Haifa apartments, gorged himself on food from the victims' refrigerators, and left a thank-you card before departing: a mound of excrement on the kitchen floor.

Because of his age he'd been given youth counseling, which never took place because at that time there'd been no Druze counselors; no one from Social Welfare had bothered to drive up to Daliyat el Carmel to bring him in. But he had received treatment of sorts-severe and regular beatings at the hand of his father-which seemed to have done the trick, cause his record stayed clean. Until one night, ten years later, he was caught ejaculating noisily against the wall of an apartment building near the Technion, one hand gripping the casement of a nearby bedroom window, the other flogging away as he cried out in ecstasy.

The tenants were a married couple, a pair of graduate physics students who'd forgotten to draw their drapes. Hearing the commotion, the husband rushed out, discovered Mallah, beat him senseless, and called the police. During his questioning by Northern District, the Druze immediately con-fessed to scores of peeping incidents and dozens of burglaries, which went a long way in clearing the local crime records.

He was a blade man too. At the time of his arrest, there had been a penknife in his pocket-he claimed to use it to whittle and slice fruit. No forensic evidence had been found to contradict him at the time and Northern District had confiscated the weapon, which had since disappeared. At his trial he had the misfortune of drawing the only Druze judge at Haifa Magistrates Hall and received the maximum sentence. In Ramie he behaved well, got good recommendations from the psychiatrists and the administrators, and was released early. One month before Fatma's murder.

Another penknife had been found on him the day he'd been picked up for questioning. Small-bladed, dull, it bore no similarity to Levi's wound molds. He was also, Daniel noticed, left-handed, which, according to the pathologist, made him an unlikely candidate. Daniel spent two sluggish hours with him, scheduled a polygraph, and made a phone request to Northern District for a loose surveillance: no intrusion into the village; keep track of his license plate; report his whereabouts if he went into town.

At the same time, the Chinaman and Daoud were interrogating other suspects, working with dogged rhythm, going down the list. They agreed to do a good-guy, bad-guy routine, switching off so that the Chinaman would lean hard on the Jews, Daoud zero in on the Arabs. It threw the suspects off guard, kept them guessing about who was who, what was what. And reduced the possibility of racism/brutality charges, though that would happen no matter what you did. A national pastime.