The Missing File Page 22
“That’s it. That was an hour ago,” Shrapstein said. “He did it—that lunatic. Now it’s just a waiting game.”
And they waited.
It all started the day before—the moment that lunatic, to use Shrapstein’s words, knocked on his door.
Ze’ev Avni was wearing black trousers and a light-blue collared shirt, as if he had dressed up for an important work meeting. Only later did it occur to Avraham that his attire resembled a police uniform. He was sure the teacher was there to speak about a different matter, as he had indicated when they’d spoken during his trip to Brussels. It fitted the man’s character, or at least what Avraham could make out of it. He’d probably want to speak about himself. Perhaps he suspected one of his students was using drugs.
And then Avni told him about the call to the police.
He confessed in a flowery tone, as if he were reciting an item on a news broadcast. Avraham left the office to inform Ilana and to check when exactly the call had come through and what had been said—although he hadn’t forgotten. It was on his birthday, while he was at his parents’ house, the last time he had visited them.
“What do you think it all means?” Ilana asked.
“That I was right,” Avraham replied with an air of confidence. “That my gut feeling was right. He’s involved far more than he has let on until now.”
He felt scared by the thought of where it all might lead, but he also felt a sense of exhilaration. He had been right all along. Now the investigation was his again and a safe distance away from Ofer’s parents.
“What are you going to do with him?” Ilana asked, and he said, “I don’t know yet. I’ll continue with the questioning, and then I think we should book him—for obstructing a police investigation, to begin with—and get a search warrant for his apartment and computer. He may also have an office at the school. I’ll check.”
“Keep me posted on your progress and let me know if you need anything,” Ilana said.
Avraham returned to his office to find Avni standing in front of the shelves on the wall and staring at the cardboard files. The teacher turned to face him, surprised. Ofer’s case file wasn’t on the shelves. Avraham had taken it home the day before, and had placed it in his desk drawer that morning.
He switched on the recorder and asked Avni to repeat his confession.
What exactly was he thinking at this stage of the investigation? He tried not to let his hopes get ahead of the information he now had, but it was impossible not to after two and a half weeks of barren inquiries and countless small failures, coupled with the sense that the case was slipping away and with his ever-increasing concern for Ofer’s fate. He needed to continue questioning Avni without jumping to conclusions; the investigation had to remain open to every possibility, but he believed he now had the end of the thread that would lead to Ofer, that it was in his grasp, between his fingers—and it was stronger than him. Had Avni helped Ofer to hide somewhere? That was the first possibility. The second was more disturbing. He looked at the teacher sitting in front of him, examining his posture, his eyes, but could not yet see anything definitive in them.
Avni’s interrogation unfolded in various directions, taking sharp twists and turns that were designed to rattle the teacher and undermine his self-confidence. Avraham tried to surprise him with a question about Ofer’s backpack, and scared him with short, direct questions about his family. But he got the impression that frightening Avni wasn’t the way to go; it would be better to make him feel appreciated and understood. Without planning to, he asked if Avni thought Ofer loved him, and the teacher appeared taken aback. He kept pounding into him that Ofer had insisted the private lessons stop, and felt that Avni was losing his confidence, that he was about to say something he had not planned on confessing. He was on the threshold of victory, on the verge of confirming his intuition, just about to prove that Shrapstein and Ilana were wrong, that he was right—when Avni told him about the letters.
It took a while to sink in.
He left the room again and called Ma’alul, to ask if he had heard anything about anonymous letters sent to Ofer’s parents while he was in Brussels. Ma’alul knew nothing about them. “Why do you ask? What letters?” he asked, but Avraham had already hung up and walked into Shrapstein’s office without knocking. It was panic rather than understanding that he was feeling. “Did Ofer’s parents try to contact you while I was in Brussels?” Shrapstein said no. He had never heard of any letters. Avraham stood outside the station and smoked a cigarette. After two hot days, the morning was fresh, almost cool. He spotted a young woman at a distance, near the entrance to the Technology Institute, who turned around when she saw him and walked off. Was it Avni’s wife?
He thought about what he should tell Ilana over the phone.
“What do you make of it?” she asked, as if she wanted the words to come from his mouth and not hers, and he said, “That apparently Ofer’s parents have concealed the letters, God knows why. But they’ve kept information from us.”
“And you believe that he put the letters in their mailbox?”
He hesitated before replying. “I think so. Why would he confess to something like that if it wasn’t true?”
Ilana was at the station within half an hour. She took the letters from him.
Because Avni was waiting in his office, they crowded into Shrapstein’s cool room. Ilana insisted on including him in the decision.
At Ilana’s request, Avraham gave them a brief rundown on Avni—thirty-five years old, married with a baby, and living in the building on Histadrut Street for just over a year; before then in Tel Aviv, where he taught English at a high school. Tutored Ofer for four months in the winter and claims to have developed a close relationship with the boy. May have a somewhat distorted view of reality. The investigation revealed that Ofer asked to end the lessons. He claims to have felt an uncontrollable urge to intervene in the investigation from day one. He therefore called the station two days into the inquiries and passed on false—or so he says—information about the location of Ofer’s body. He began writing the letters for the same reason. He also participated in some of the searches. All the above made it obvious why Avraham became suspicious. Avni came across as not completely stable, so his statement required verification, but it did not seem he was lying. He had confessed to both the phone call and the letters voluntarily.
They then spoke about the parents.
Shrapstein opposed Ilana’s suggestion—that they get a search warrant for the Sharabi apartment in order to find the letters and other evidence of their efforts to impede an investigation. “If they’ve destroyed the letters, we’ll have a problem,” he said, “because they’ll know we doubt their stories and will become even more cautious. Perhaps we should just detain them and bring them in for questioning for forty-eight hours?”
Avraham wanted to voice a protest but felt he had lost that right. Ilana was of two minds. She said, “It’s too soon. I can’t detain the parents of a missing youth so easily—even if they did receive the letters. We have no proof other than what we’ve been told by that teacher, and he’s fed false information to the police once before. I can’t imagine why they didn’t report the letters either. Maybe just stupidity and nothing more.”
Ilana’s words gave him hope. “Perhaps they didn’t receive them?” he suggested. “Someone may have taken the letters out of their mailbox, right?”
The other two didn’t respond. Standing on Shrapstein’s desk was a framed photograph of his wife and two small children. Ze’ev Avni’s letters, written in black ink, lay next to it.
“I suggest we go back to the idea of the wiretap,” Shrapstein said. “We have enough evidence now to get an okay from the court.”
“What will that give us?” Ilana asked, and Shrapstein said, “You never know. If they failed to report the letters, there’s a chance they may be concealing more information.”
Shrapstein couldn’t hold back. “Perhaps he’s fallen in love with you, too,” he quipped.
Avraham went out to smoke another cigarette.
Ilana returned to the office after him, and she sounded decisive again. “Okay, Eyal, there’s been a decision. You and I are going to the district court because I need to be there in order to file a request for a wiretap. We’ll set it up immediately. We’ll also request an arrest warrant for the parents, but we won’t use it just yet. We’ll wait to see what else comes out of the interrogation of the teacher. You’ll continue with that, Avi. Get the exact dates on which he put the letters in the mailbox, and find out if he saw either the father or the mother take them out. And send Ma’alul over to have a look at the mailbox.”
He suddenly remembered that Rafael and Hannah Sharabi had arranged to come to the station that afternoon. “Cancel it,” Ilana ordered. “I don’t want them here right now. We need to prepare for that interview. For now, continue with the teacher.”
“But what do I do with him? Should I arrest him?”
Ilana looked at Shrapstein again.
“I think not—not just yet,” Shrapstein said. “He came in of his own accord, and as long as he isn’t asking to leave, it’s best not to arrest him. An arrest means a lawyer, and the entire building would soon know, including Ofer’s parents. It wouldn’t be in our best interest for them to know he’s been arrested, right?”
No. Not now.
Ze’ev Avni was still waiting in his office.
Avraham’s conversation with Rafael and Hannah Sharabi was the most difficult part of that day. There was no reply from their home line and he got hold of the father on his cell phone. He told him something about a meeting that was running late and asked that they not come down to the station, and he promised to be in touch to schedule their talk for another time. “We haven’t heard anything new,” the father replied in a steady voice to his question, adding, “Have you received the results of the tests on the bag yet?”
He stopped himself from saying anything and ruining the investigation. How could you have concealed the letters? Why the hell did you do that? What are you afraid of? Why are you complicating things for yourselves for no reason? How could you not have told me about letters written in Ofer’s name and placed in your mailbox, even if you thought he didn’t write them? He said, “The results haven’t come back yet. I’ll let you know the moment they do, but it won’t be before tomorrow.”
To have his office back, Avraham moved Ze’ev Avni to an empty interrogation room and then ordered a tray of lunch for the teacher. He ate alone while waiting for Shrapstein and Ilana, as if he were afraid to continue the questioning without them. At one point, he went into the interrogation room and sat silently facing Avni for a minute or two. “I’d really like to tell you why I wrote those letters in Ofer’s name—how the idea was born and why I didn’t think it was such a terrible thing to do,” the teacher began. “Can you listen to me now?” Avraham left the room because he could not bear to hear Avni’s voice, and maybe also to put more pressure on him. He still believed Avni would break down and confess that he never sent the letters.
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?”
Avraham 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.