by Liad Shoham
The girl turned and looked their way for a moment before picking up her pace and heading quickly into a building. The man glanced apprehensively at Yaron again. Yaron looked directly into his eyes and knew for sure. This was the man who had raped his little girl. It all fit: his build, the cap, the hour, the way he tried to hide, the girl, the frightened look on his face when he realized he’d been caught red-handed.
Yaron could feel the rage roiling up inside him, threatening to burst out. That monster had attacked Adi in the dark, molested her. Because of him she was now home alone crying, as she had been for so many days. My beautiful daughter, my sweet baby, he mouthed to himself. My Adinka. If only he had a gun, he’d put a bullet in his head right now. His hand clenched in a fist. If only he were a few years younger, he’d finish him off with his bare hands. But he wasn’t young, so he had to be smart.
The man started walking away. Yaron followed. In the morning he’d get in touch with Eli Nachum, the lead detective on the case, and hand him the rapist on a silver platter.
The man turned into a side street. Yaron hurried to keep up with him. He couldn’t lose him now.
By the time he reached the corner, the man was at the end of the block. How had he gotten so far ahead of him? Was he running? Did he know Yaron was tailing him?
He had to move faster. He was breathing heavily and was already covered in sweat, his shirt sticking to his back. The strain and exhaustion of the last few weeks were getting to him. “You’ll give yourself a heart attack,” Irit had warned, “or else you’ll go crazy from lack of sleep.” He wasn’t a kid anymore. He was sixty years old, a grandfather with two grandkids. Adi was his middle daughter and already twenty-four. Irit might turn out to be right. In the end, his heart would give out here in the middle of Tel Aviv. So what? He wasn’t ready to give up. If Adi knew that the man who raped her was behind bars, maybe she could get on with her life, maybe she could put the atrocity behind her.
By the time he made it to the end of the block, there was no one in sight, no sign of the mysterious man. Had he disappeared into one of the buildings? Did he have enough time? Yaron stood there, panting, his heart pounding. He retraced his steps a few yards to a bench he’d just passed. He sat down and leaned his head back, waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal. The smell of cat urine pounded his nose and made him sick. He was overcome by frustration. He’d been so close!
But he was wrong. It wasn’t over yet. All of a sudden he saw the man come out of a yard and stand still for a minute looking in both directions. He stared at the street intently, checking it out. The location of the bench gave Yaron a clear view of the rapist, but Yaron couldn’t be seen by him. Silently, he lowered himself until he was lying flat on the bench, taking advantage of the lucky hand he’d been dealt. There was no doubt in his mind that the man had seen him tailing him and had taken diversionary tactics. He’d obviously been hiding behind the bushes in the yard.
The man started in Yaron’s direction. There was less than a hundred yards between them. If he sees me, it’ll all be over for me, he thought, crawling off the bench as silently as possible. He had to get to the end of the block before the rapist. He could hide behind a hedge and then follow him from there. It was only two yards to the corner. You can do it, he urged himself on, envisioning his army days.
He crouched down and started moving forward, just as he’d been trained to do in the infantry. He couldn’t tell if the man saw him or not, but he forced himself not to turn around. Then he slipped into the yard of the corner building and waited. The man passed right in front of him. He was striding rapidly and confidently, heading for the main road. Yaron took up a position at a safe distance and looked to see which way he had gone. He caught sight of him standing at a bus stop. Yaron remembered reading that Tel Aviv operated a late-night bus service on the weekend. What would he do if the bus came? He was going to lose him!
A minibus pulled up and the man got on. Yaron ran into the road. In less than ten seconds, a taxi stopped beside him. He had to admit the city had its advantages.
“Follow that bus,” he ordered the driver, like a character in some action movie.
The driver gave him a puzzled look.
“Just go! Fast!” he commanded brusquely.
WHEN he got home the adrenaline was still rushing through his veins. He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee, and then a second, and a third. There was no chance he’d be able to get any sleep tonight in any case. He didn’t wake Irit. The situation was hard enough for her as it was. Adi’s rape had dealt her a heavy blow, drowning her in rivers of guilt and a numbing sense of helplessness. He had to put an end to it. For Adi. And for Irit and himself too.
He counted the minutes until dawn, until he could contact Nachum. The last time they met, the detective had told him to feel free to call at any time, but the middle of the night seemed to be taking that a little too literally.
At six o’clock he picked up the phone and then stopped before he could dial the number. It’s still too early, he decided. Turning on the computer, he looked up the procedures for police lineups in rape cases. There were cops and lawyers present. It was very stressful for the victims. He read one woman’s story about how traumatic it was for her, how it made her relive the rape.
He couldn’t do that to Adi. He wasn’t willing to have her go through such an ordeal, to have so many people examining her, documenting her reactions in minute detail. And later some slimy defense attorney would start grilling her about why she hesitated for a second or two before pointing to the rapist. He’d seen it in the movies, how they use any dirty trick to cast doubt on the victim’s testimony. He couldn’t allow that.
He wanted her to walk into the lineup and point directly at her attacker. No hesitation, no stress. In and out in one minute. And then it would all be over. At last, it would all be over.
Chapter 5
INSPECTOR Eli Nachum hated reporters. Especially crime reporters. And most especially assholes like Amit Giladi. If it were up to him, he’d have nothing to do with him. But it had been a month since the rape in the old north, and the investigation was going nowhere. After making headlines for a couple of days, it had soon disappeared from the pages of the national press. But the local paper kept at it. Week after week they printed a story decrying the lack of an arrest, the ineptitude of the police force, his own incompetence as the lead detective. In his opinion, the whole crusade was nothing but yellow journalism, a sleazy way to sell papers. But it was stressing out the higher-ups, and when they were stressed out, they leaned on him.
So he’d had no choice but to give in to the district spokesman’s demand that he meet with Giladi. He was forced to sit opposite him for an hour, put up with his insolent questions, and do his best to convince him that although it might seem otherwise to the public, they were making progress and working the case every minute of every day. What’d the asshole know, anyway? He was just a kid, barely over twenty—a kid pretending to be a man. He sat there looking serious, waving his pen around like a sword, patronizing him. He wouldn’t last more than five minutes as a cop, that idiot.
Nachum watched Giladi walk away down the corridor, and he went back to his desk, drained. They’d moved here only three years ago as part of a general face-lift for the police force. They were now in the heart of the Tel Aviv high-tech area. He preferred the old station house, the shabby, dilapidated building that was there even before the state was declared. Every one of its rooms reeked of history. He missed the small diners, where the food was so spicy it sharpened his mind. Here everything was modernized, computerized, sanitized, with plasma screens everywhere, and instead of real food, they ate sushi. The police force was trying to be something it wasn’t.
He didn’t think the reporter had bought his story. People thought that if they didn’t make an arrest within twenty-four hours, they’d bungled the case. They didn’t know what they were up again
st, how complicated their job was. They expect it to be like the movies where it’s all tied up with a bow in just ninety minutes.
He’d been honest with Giladi about one thing, at least. Ever since he’d caught the case, it had occupied all his time and was never out of his mind. It had been that way from the very beginning.
He’d shown up at the hospital within minutes after getting the call. The right side of Adi’s face was covered in bruises from being dragged on the ground, she had a cut on her chin that needed stitches, and her eyes were swollen from crying. She sat there hunched up, withdrawn, chewing on her hair like a little girl. It was hard to get the facts from her. Mostly, she just responded to his questions by nodding her head or shrugging her shoulders. She didn’t want to be there. That was one of the few things she actually said. But when her parents turned up on Saturday night, worried that she hadn’t answered her phone all weekend, and found out what had happened, they’d talked her into going to the hospital and reporting the rape. It had taken them half the night to convince her. Her father stood next to her bed throughout the interview, urging her to answer his questions. Her mother just held her, not saying anything.
NACHUM had a lot of years on the job. Before that he’d been a guard in a military prison. When he left the army, it seemed natural to join the police force. He started out in logistics, but all he ever wanted was to be a detective. He’d put in one application after another, undeterred by repeated rejections. He never gave up, even though everyone else gave up on him. Finally, after making sergeant, they let him take the detective test and he got his gold shield.
He’d seen almost everything in his long career: homicide, rape, domestic violence, child molesters. He’d worked nearly every crime on the books. Over the years, his daily encounter with human malevolence and atrocious acts of violence had blunted his sensitivity. But there were still cases that broke through the wall he’d been forced to build around himself in order to do his job, cases that gripped his heart and wouldn’t let go. The sight of Adi Regev, barely more than a child, whose joy in life had been stolen away from her in an instant, touched him at the very core of his being. His daughter was just a year and half younger than Adi. At the moment Adi looked like the complete opposite of his strong, independent, ambitious daughter, but he couldn’t help imagining his own child in the same situation, as the victim of such appalling brutality.
Adi had arrived at the hospital almost seventy-two hours after the rape. He was well aware that after so much time had elapsed, there was little chance of finding any of the attacker’s DNA on her, especially when she’d scrubbed herself all over.
He thought they’d have more luck with the crime scene. It wasn’t fresh, but it was so isolated that it hadn’t been contaminated. However, it didn’t give them much to go on. In her short struggle with the rapist, Adi hadn’t drawn blood, and there were no signs of semen on the ground. Nor did they find the knife or any usable fingerprints. The only evidence the scene yielded were partial shoe prints—Nike runners, size 10.
His team had been working the case hard in the past month. They started by looking for witnesses, going from door to door, talking to all the neighbors. No one had seen or heard anything. They’d all been closed up in their apartments, sleeping or watching TV.
Even though Adi said she didn’t recognize her attacker, they still questioned all her ex-boyfriends and anyone she’d dated even once. And she dated a lot, that girl. But every lead was a dead end. They had her look over mug shots of known rapists and other sex offenders, hoping she could identify him from a photo. Nothing came of that either.
Nachum rubbed his eyes in exhaustion. He had glorious achievements on his record, but some resounding failures too. In the end, he thought, it’s the failures that stay with you. Even after all these years, he could still list every one of them. And he didn’t need anyone to remind him. Most definitely not some slimy reporter like Amit Giladi. He knew what people were saying behind his back. They said he was getting old, that he was losing his touch, that he spent too much time on each case, that it took him too long to put his cases to bed, if he was lucky enough to solve them.
Detectives used to be applauded for solving complicated cases. Today it was all about tables, statistics, arrest rates. Fucking CompStat had taken over their lives. Detectives were assessed solely by their output, as if they worked on a production line. He knew all the gimmicks his colleagues used to sweeten their figures. They looked out for easy cases, closed cases by the truckload supposedly for lack of evidence, and persuaded people to withdraw their complaints. He could easily do the same and get a pat on the back. It might even earn him a promotion. But he was too old for that sort of thing, and maybe, like his wife said, he was too proud to play those games. In any case, at his age he wasn’t going to change. And he wasn’t ready to start taking shortcuts.
He closed his eyes. He had a headache. If he thought his detractors were right, he’d leave the force. But they were wrong. He still had a lot to give. And he had to solve this case. He’d do whatever it took to put the rapist behind bars.
It wouldn’t be easy. Most of the time, when the victim didn’t know her attacker, the sonofabitch was never caught. And a lot of incidents went unreported or were reported too late, after precious time had been lost. Throw in the fact that most rapes by strangers were carefully planned and the perps were typically clever and calculating, and it made it even harder to catch the bastards.
He looked over the files of all the recent rapes in and around Tel Aviv. None of the attackers fit the description Adi had given. It was almost impossible to draw up the profile of a rapist on the basis of one incident. He could be a loner or a man who sought out human contact, he could have a record or be a first-time offender. But since sex crimes were an addiction, there was every chance he’d do it again. If that happened, they’d have more to go on. And if they were really lucky, he might make a mistake the next time. In Nachum’s experience, that’s how most rapists were caught. They let someone get a look at them. It’s their arrogance, their extreme narcissism, that often leads to their undoing.
So he could sit back and wait until he raped another girl, until he made a mistake. That would probably be the best tactic. There were plenty of other unsolved crimes for him to work on, and the list just kept getting longer. Some of them were no less horrendous. But he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t give himself time or permission to wait for the next rape before he nailed the pervert. Just the thought of another girl suffering like that drove him on and kept him from putting it aside. His job was to prevent another rape. He was here to serve and protect, like the Americans said. Not to twiddle his thumbs and invent excuses. That wasn’t why he’d fought so hard for the gold shield.
To an outside observer it might look like he wasn’t doing anything, just sitting and staring into space. But that’s how he worked—he turned it all over in his mind, reviewing the facts of the case in his head again and again. “You’re old-school,” his commander, Superintendent Moshe Navon, had said recently. He didn’t know if that was meant to be a compliment or not.
His phone rang.
“Eli . . . it’s Yaron Regev, Adi’s father,” a trembling voice said, followed by bitter sobbing. A cold sweat broke out on Nachum’s forehead at the sound of the man breaking down. Please, not that. The trauma of rape led some victims to commit acts of desperation. Adi was definitely the fragile type who was capable of such a thing. Her parents had coddled her all her life, given her whatever she wanted. She’d never been forced to cope with anything on her own. And then the rapist had shown up and extinguished her spark.
“Yaron, what happened?” he asked, worried.
The sobbing continued.
“Is Adi okay?” He felt the bile rise up and form a ball in his throat.
“I found him,” Yaron moaned. “I found the rapist.”
Chapter 6
THE knock on the door start
led her. She was sitting in front of the computer, bursting the bright-colored bubbles that floated onto the screen. Ever since the rape she hadn’t slept, just sat at the computer for hours playing mindless games. Trying to empty her head. To forget. She hadn’t been outside for ages. She’d tried last Saturday. She got her bike and rode along the Yarkon River down to the sea. She loved the sea. But the sight of so many half-naked, sweaty men running along the promenade made her sick, and she quickly returned home.
“Adi, Adinka, it’s Dad,” she heard through the door. Just like that Saturday night after the rape, when she hadn’t left her house or answered the phone for two days. It was only because of his persistence that she’d gone to the hospital and reported the crime. He’d kept at her all night and the whole of the next day, not letting up until late in the evening, when she finally gave in and agreed to go with him.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, walking straight in as soon as she opened the door. Her parents’ love and concern were stifling. They wouldn’t leave her alone, especially her dad. They called to check up on her every hour: How are you feeling? Are you okay? Did you sleep? Did you eat? Their questions gnawed at her. She wasn’t okay, she barely ate, she lay awake all night. But she answered yes to everything, hoping to allay their concern and convince them to back off a little.
“I was just about to take a nap,” she lied. Maybe he would take the hint and go. It was better when she was alone. She’d see him later anyway when she went to her parents‘ house for Friday-night dinner. Ever since it happened, it had become a sacred ritual for the whole family to be in attendance. They’d all sit there watching her, following her every move, falling silent whenever she opened her mouth.
