by [Kamal
“Don’t you remember my file?”
“But you had thought about it before, hadn’t you?”
Ben shrugged, not bothering to deny it.
“Maybe you discussed it with your wife. Maybe you didn’t, because you knew she would never go along with it, that it wouldn’t be fair to your sons.”
“And it wouldn’t have been.”
“Would you have left them?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“Your father left you and your mother.”
“I think he would have returned to America,” Ben said, trying to sound sure.
“Why did he leave Ramallah in the first place?”
“He saw the writing on the wall, was frustrated by the fact that no one would listen.”
“He saw the Six-Day War? Occupation through the territories?”
“That was the one thing he did not see. If he had, we never would have left. That, I’m certain of. He came back to rectify his mistake, then tried too hard and paid for it with his life.”
“You think we killed him.”
“That’s what everyone thinks. He was a leader, a disruptive influence. He would have caused problems for you eventually. Some say it would have been he, and not Arafat, who eventually became leader of our people.”
Danielle waited a long moment before responding. “Would you like me to find out?”
Ben snickered. “I doubt you’d find mention of his assassination in any file.”
“Not written anyway.”
Ben looked at her closely. “Your father was shot too, wasn’t he?”
“A sniper’s bullet caught him in the head while he was making rounds two years ago. They called his recovery a miracle. Then he suffered a stroke. No miracle this time.”
“The sniper ...”
“Never caught. No group bothered to claim credit for it. After all, it was just a single man and he had the nerve not to die.”
“I’m sorry.”
A sad smile crossed Danielle’s face. “He was like your father, Ben. He also tried to make a difference. Do you know what the gush emunim are?”
“Private armies from the settlements that terrorized West Bank villages, often while the Israeli army looked on.”
“My father took a stand against them. He recruited a platoon of soldiers who were as disgusted by their actions as he was and arrested the gush emunim whenever he could catch them. Not surprisingly, the charges never stuck, but at least he could live with himself.”
“Your father was only one man. Think of the thousands who were involved in the administrative detentions, the torture, the terrorizing of our young, the closing of our schools. You tried to deaden us, make us numb and scared. But it didn’t work out that way because too many of us already had nothing to lose. You wanted drones and instead you got the intifada.”
Danielle looked at him defiantly. “Strange hearing such criticism from someone who spent the entire occupation, as well as the intifada, in America.”
“And America has seen its share of tyranny as well. The internment of the Japanese in World War Two, McCarthyism. Forcing others to live in fear— that seems to be the credo of free-world democracies.”
“That’s the point!” she insisted. “The Red Scare, the horror of Pearl Harbor and the war that followed. People were frightened by the times. Even though in retrospect the choices they made seemed so wrong, at the time they were the only choices they had. That’s the way it has always been for us.”
“Black and white. No gray.”
“But plenty of red. Let’s not forget that, Ben,” she countered, using his first name without thinking about it.
“No, let’s not. But let’s not underestimate the power of fear, either. We are a people who has lived in fear so long that we know no other way to live. If it wasn’t the Jordanians and then you, it was our own people, and they were the worst because they scared us the most.”
“Like those three police officers you arrested.”
“Not terrorists but, yes, exactly like them because they relied on fear. You think they tortured and killed that cabdriver for justice? They did it to set an example for anyone who dares turn to the Israelis for anything, because they don’t want any Palestinian to realize he has somewhere else to turn. Did you know what happened when Israel refused to install air raid sirens in the West Bank during the Gulf War? It was Israelis in the West Bank who phoned their Palestinian friends to alert them when Scud missiles were flying. The Palestinians would then go into the streets and blow whistles, not as loud as your sirens but just as effective. Have you ever heard of Zaid Jabral?”
Danielle nodded. “His newspaper wasn’t very flattering in its reporting about you.”
“But he told me a story once, about one of the times the Israelis came and shut down all our schools. An elaborate house-to-house system of replacement classrooms was enacted, either by grade or sometimes by subject. After all that, the people still needed books if the classes were to work.” Ben turned back to her. “It was the Israeli soldiers on patrol who unlocked the schools so they could go in and get them. Men like your father.”
“But what do we do about those who leave us no choice in how we deal with the rest? You saw my file, too, Inspector. You read about my brothers.”
“More tragedy,” Ben frowned.
“Very bad for my family, since my father’s brothers are both dead and none of them had sons. You know what this means? The family line dies and, worse, it dies with my father. And even on his less lucid days he knows that.”
“It’s a terrible thing to lose your family, Pakad.”
“It’s a fate all too familiar in Israel. That is why we must have peace.” She looked once more down into the valley. “Whatever it costs.”
“Not all lost families are casualties of war.”
“Yes, they are, Ben,” Danielle said with as much compassion as she could muster. “Just different kinds of wars. The war that took your family, the war that took mine.”
“Did you ever think of quitting?”
The question took her aback. “No more than you,” she lied.
“What makes you think I haven’t, Pakad?”
“Because what would you be left with?”
Ben looked away from the settlement’s slow death. “I suppose we have more in common that I realized.”
“Then let’s go,” she called to him, “and make it worthwhile.
* * * *
T
he first victim Shin Bet had formally investigated had been found in Ramallah by an Israeli patrol on a mountain road just before dawn over a year before. A man named Abu Bakkar, a local merchant over forty years of age, the oldest of any of the victims. As Ben and Danielle made their way through the last town before coming to Ramallah, young children tossed rocks at their car from school playgrounds, screaming with glee each time one connected.
Inured to this sort of harassment, Danielle didn’t so much as flinch behind the wheel.
In most of the other cases, it was at least conceivable that the victims had been innocently en route to a friend’s house or some late-night establishment. But in this case, the hillside offered no doors to knock on or establishments to visit. Abu Bakkar had simply come up here for a walk, something he did on a regular basis, according to investigators.
“The wounds were the same again,” Danielle reported, the open case file in her hand, battling the wind as she led Ben along the hillside. “Mutilation too. In this case, apparently, the Wolf severed the jugular vein, resulting in an arterial spray that showered both the trees and the ground in the vicinity where the body was found.”
“The killer couldn’t possibly have escaped being bloodied in this instance.”
“Exactly.”
“Yet he walked away, returned to his vehicle. The problem of blood again; it must have been all over him, all over his vehicle. Still, not once in all the months and all the killings has anyone seen him.”
“Perhaps he
wears something over his clothes,” Danielle theorized. “Strips it off when he’s finished. Stuffs it in the same pack he carries the knife in.”
Ben wondered if al-Shaer had gotten to work yet on the collection of knives he had sent over. “You were never able to identify the type of knife used in the killings either.”
“No, but the autopsy reports indicate wounds identical in radius and degree of penetration to those your medical examiner found.”
“What about the lubricant he found coating the wounds of the first Jericho victim?”
“My people are checking if any samples were preserved they can still test.”
The final stop for the day was Bethlehem, and here conditions made it impossible for them to reach the murder site behind a Greek Orthodox church in Manger Square. The Palestinian force now responsible for security was having trouble quelling the third major disturbance in as many days, leaving them no choice but to close Bethlehem off. The Israelis resorting to the same tactic in the past had been met by cries of protest. Now similar cries fell on similarly deaf ears.
Danielle pulled off near the roadblock where they’d been turned away, still close enough to the town center and Bethlehem’s ancient streets for her and Ben to catch glimpses of the protesters clashing with Palestinian security personnel outfitted in full riot gear.
“Anything special about this one?” Ben asked, as the muffled clacking of gunfire echoed through the hills.
Danielle consulted her file. “She was the youngest, only eighteen.”
“The one who snuck out to be alone with her boyfriend.”
“Yes.”
“Any chance he—”
“No. He found the body. No one’s that great an actor.”
“The first victim in Jericho, Leila Khalil, followed a similar pattern.”
Danielle nodded, recalling the file. “The Khalil girl never got inside the house after she was dropped off by a group of friends.”
“According to their statements, none of them saw anything that can help us.”
Ben reached into the backseat for the files piled there, and flipped to the one on Leila Khalil.
“A boy she was quite close to was driving. According to his statement, he went straight home afterward. ‘I left the car in the street and went to bed,’ he says.”
Danielle’s mind veered in a different direction. “Interesting, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“That all of the victims were killed outside, often in public places. Makes it even more mystifying how our killer gets away. How no one ever notices him, even though he must be bloodied. Any ideas?”
“Short of his really being a wolf, Pakad, not a one.”
* * * *
I
t was five o’clock before they reached the old police building in Jericho.
“I’d better be getting back to Jerusalem,” Danielle said. “I need to follow up on the leads we’ve come up with today.”
“They’re not much.”
“It’s only the first day. We may get a break once the latest victim from Jericho is identified. If your medical examiner was correct in his assumption that the victim was not Palestinian—”
“Which he is.”
“—then our killer may have broken his pattern as well as shortened the lag between killings. We should start on that track tomorrow.” She continued to stand next to him on the granite steps, not ready to leave. “One of the oldest places in the world, Jericho. So much tradition, so many legends. Like the walls Joshua toppled with trumpets when he took the city.” She paused and turned to look at him. The breeze blew some stray strands of hair onto her face and she brushed them off before resuming. “They’re coming down again, you know. Maybe that’s what the two of us working together means.”
“Too bad it took murder to do it,” said Ben.
* * * *
B
en phoned Zaid Jabral as soon as he was inside his office.
“It’s Kamal,” Ben announced in greeting. “You find anything on Brickland?”
“I’m having trouble accessing his file. Are you certain you gave the right name?”
Ben spelled it for him again, just to make sure he had it right. “Colonel in the United States Special Forces until six months ago, when he retired.”
He heard Jabral sigh. “Until six months ago is correct, but not because he retired. Colonel Franklin Brickland’s career ended in a helicopter crash, Inspector. He’s dead.”
* * * *
Chapter 21
A
s soon as his conversation with Jabral had ended, Ben drove out to the home of the first victim found in Jericho, Leila Khalil. According to her file, she had been killed just a few days short of her twenty-second birthday; her body was found in the weed-riddled garden of an abandoned, dilapidated house not far down the street.
If the windows had been open in her home at the time, her family might have been able to hear her screams.
The girl had lived with her parents on a residential street lined with trees away from the gas stations and shops that clutter the commercial district of Jericho. The Khalil home was set comfortably back and lay partially hidden by dense, ten-foot-high shrubs. Large olive trees shaded the front yard and a picnic table was set on a terrace. The home was typical of those Jericho had been known for when the town had served as the winter home for wealthy and prestigious Palestinians, a respite from the harsh winds and chilling temperatures in the less temperate areas west of the Jordan Rift Valley, where a difference of twenty miles can mean a thirty-degree temperature change.
Like the villas further to the east, some of the homes in the area showed evidence of abandonment and neglect. Properties like the one where Leilah Khalil had been found were choked off by a wild, rampant growth of vegetation, the houses decaying.
Ben parked in front of the Khalil home and headed up the front walk, imagining that he was retracing the last steps of Leila Khalil’s life. He rapped lightly on the door. A few seconds later it opened just wide enough for a woman in black to see him.
“Mrs. Khalil?”
The woman nodded her veiled head.
“I am Inspector Bayan Kamal of the Palestinian Authority. I would like to speak to you about your daughter.”
The woman shook her head slowly.
“I believe the investigation into her . . . passing was not handled as well as it might have been. I would like to offer my help to correct that error, to bring justice to your home and your family.”
She shook her head again, seemed ready to close the door when another woman’s voice sifted through it.
“She is not interested in speaking to you.”
A woman in her early twenties appeared in the doorway, between Ben and Mrs. Khalil.
“I am—”
“I know who you are, Inspector. I have read all about you.”
“Then you have the advantage of me.”
“I am Amal. Sister and daughter.”
“The file said nothing about a sister.”
“That’s because I wasn’t here. I came home for the funeral . . . and the mourning period.”
Ben could barely see Amal through the shadows, but her beauty was evident even so. Her face was a perfect oval tightened by sorrow, her skin stunningly bronzed. And, unlike her mother, she was not wearing the traditional Palestinian mandila, or headdress. Auburn hair framed her face.
“May I come in?”
“Against the rules.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a foreigner.”
“You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
Amal made no move to open the door all the way. “Yes, I do.”
“Then you should know I am quite capable of bringing the man who killed your sister to justice.”
“Our justice is in the eyes of God. A Palestinian would know that.”
Ben knew arguing was pointless. “You said you came home.”
“From Jordan. I live ther
e. I didn’t change my visa after the border was opened. It took me an extra day.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“For your sister’s death, I am. If your mother can’t speak to me, then let me talk to your father.”
