Pattern Crimes (15 page)

"Say two freaks get together, they agree to use an identical method and arrange airtight alibis for the murders they don't commit."

Shoshana said that sounded like a movie she'd seen,
Strangers on a Train
.

"How do they get together? Answer an ad in the
Jerusalem Post
?"

"Great try, Micha."

"It was just an idea."

"So now what do we do?"

"Forget about Peretz. Start tracking down guys from his unit," David said.

"You didn't 'fail,' " Rafi said. Hard mid-morning light striped his office floor and walls. "The symposium idea was good. You developed a suspect. No break-ins, no wiretaps. From a technical point-of-view, your investigation was a model."

"He's crazy, Rafi. You know that. He
could
have done it. He's crazy enough."

"Maybe, but he didn't. So now—"

"Yeah. The investigation-must-go-on."

Rafi nodded. "Go back to it. Less pressure now since the killings stopped, and Horev-Isaacson hit the news."

Aaron Horev and Ruth Isaacson: adulterous lovers found murdered in their love nest. This new murder case, assigned by Rafi to his regular homicide team, had fascinated the public. People couldn't get enough of it; it rang true to them, was imaginable, a crime of passion, not crazy like the serial case.

David asked for a last meeting with Peretz, a final go at him before they sent him home. Rafi agreed. "But be gentle, David."

"Of course. What do you think? I'm going to hang him by his heels like a Turk?"

Rafi laughed. "Watching the two of you I got the feeling you didn't like each other very much."

"So we don't. So is that any reason we can't do a little business? He knows who was in his unit. I need a list. That way I don't have to track down every fuck-up who's ever been in a military prison."

The final go-around took place in a corner booth at Fink's, a small, cozy, dark, and very middle-European restaurant-bar, a hang-out for politicians and up-scale foreign journalists.

Waiting for their table, David and Peretz bantered lightly about who was going to be the guest of whom. They struck a bargain, Peretz would pay for the drinks and David would buy the dinner.

After they sat down and ordered goulash, Peretz planted his elbows aggressively on the table.

"You hate my guts."

"Hate may be too strong a word."

"Cut the crap. I don't even care."

"So why do you bring it up?"

"Ah, the analyst's son." A mocking smile.

"Should I be impressed you checked me out?"

"Didn't have to. I knew your brother. Quite the handsome fellow was Gideon Bar-Lev. He and I used to play tennis. Well—are you surprised?"

"Since you ask, I wouldn't have thought you'd have been quite each other's type."

"Oh, we were each other's type all right. He just had a lot of trouble admitting it."

David said nothing.

"What's the matter?"

"What are you driving at, Peretz?"

"How much do you know?"

"I don't know anything."

"Really?"

"Are you telling me you went for him and, poor you!, he didn't give in?"

"Who says he didn't?"

"Who cares?"

"You care all right. You hate the thought."

"Oh, I get it. Now that he's dead you can smirk around about how he was a queer." David shook his head. "You're fucking impossible to talk to, you know."

Peretz seemed to make an effort to calm himself. When he spoke again the hostile edge was gone. "Maybe you're right. Talking's not my thing. Fighting is. But now I can't do that anymore." He took a long swig of beer. "You know why they got rid of me?"

"Way I heard it, they thought you played a little rough."

 
Peretz shook his head. "Wasn't that. It was my...proclivity. They couldn't handle it. Not in their manly army." He laughed.

"So, you see yourself as quite the tragic figure."

"More like a first-rate officer who served his country well and then got screwed." Peretz shook his head again. "Know something, you're not like Gideon. You don't even look like him. He was delicate and you're kind of burly. The difference, I guess, between a pilot and a cop."

"Why are you so contemptuous, Peretz?"

"I'm not—at least not of everyone. But I am, I admit, contemptuous of you. You should be in the army not the police, out in the field where the real murderers are running loose." He made a sweeping motion. "Oh, I know what you think, that I'm some kind of psychopath, that we're all the same, terrorists and counter-terrorists, bunch of nuts running around blowing each other up. I know your type. Don't believe in reprisals. Think it's self-defeating. Think the way to end the cycle is to sit down, talk it out, nobody gets too little or too much. That's the kind of bullshit you hear in the soft elite circles where nobody puts anything on the line. 'We all have to live together here on this Holy Land, nod good morning to each other, be polite, ask after each other's wives, make the desert bloom, blah-blah, blah-blah.' Meanwhile, of course, we hate each other's guts. But never mind that, just share the blessings and respect each other's precious faiths. The old bullshit. See, we're enemies, Bar-Lev. I'm contemptuous of you, and now that you know my views I'm sure you feel the same." He started to eat. "Incidentally, a very attractive lady at the bar keeps looking over this way."

David turned. It was Stephanie Porter, seated on a stool between two standing American newsmen. She mouthed "Hi." He did the same. She smiled, then turned back to her friends.

"Who is she?"

"A free-lance journalist."

"Been giving you that look, the kind that says 'I'd like to get inside his pants.' "

"You're vulgar."

"Yeah, sorry about that."

"Look, I still have a case to solve. I could really use your help."

"I knew we weren't here on account of our shared political beliefs. So what do you want?"

"List of the guys who were in your unit."

"Don't have a list."

"You could write one up."

"Tell me why I should."

"Because of the marks."

"A lot of people knew about those marks."

"Sure, but your old unit's the place to start. You say you're pissed off because someone forged your signature. Now here's your chance to get even, help catch the forger and bring him in."

"Don't sweet-talk me."

"Please consider what I said."

"I have considered it."

"And?"

"I can't see any reason I should help."

"Why not?"

"You think it's all a joke, don't you? 'My signature'—you think that's cute. But, see, to me it
isn't
cute. I invented it, just like I chose the guns we carried and the boots we wore and everything else. I decided everything. I handpicked every man. I was feared from Beirut to Damascus. I loved that work, loved the sport of it. That unit was my life."

"Look, Peretz, I never said—"

"Let me finish, Bar-Lev. The way I look at it, the person who killed those people tried to set me up. He carved my name onto them to try and pin his crimes on me. So now I'm going after him. If he was one of my old boys, I'm going to find him, too. When I do, I'm going to punish him. And when I'm done doing that, I'm going to break his head."

Five victims in four and a half weeks, then, suddenly, the killings stopped.

Rafi was right: the serial case, so incomprehensible to the Israeli mind, had been replaced in the public imagination by the double murders of Aaron Horev and Ruth Isaacson.

For David, Horev-Isaacson came as a welcome relief; the enormous pressure that had been on Pattern Crimes was now transferred to the Jerusalem homicide squad. While the Israeli press and public feasted on the extramarital scandal, the PC Unit went quietly about its business, assembling lists of violent men who'd been in military prisons.

He called in Shoshana. As always, she appeared in his doorway in an instant.

"What's new on Gutman?"

"Refuses to say a word. He's got himself a first-class lawyer, Abramsohn. They're going to make a motion for bail."

"He's still in the lock-up then?"

"Prosecutor told the judge he's got lots of money and there's reason to believe he might try and flee."

"Plus, I suppose, the 'heinous nature of the crime.' "

Shoshana nodded. "They put him in a cell by himself. Worried he might get hurt. Meantime, most of the scrolls have been identified. I've been talking with Netzer, who's going to try the case. As the arresting officer I'll have to testify. He says even with Abramsohn, Gutman doesn't have a prayer. The evidence is strong, he won't get any sympathy, and about the only things he's got going are that he's old and doesn't have a record."

David phoned his father. "What does it mean: 'A man who has been wronged'?"

"You arrested him."

"Did I wrong him?" Silence. "He calls us Nazis."

"Well?"

"You think that's what we are?"

"Let me ask you something, David: Do you think Gutman's nothing but a shrewd old crook?"

"Tell me about him."

"Talk to him."

"He won't talk."

"No, of course not. Stupid of me. Of course he won't." A pause and then a change of tone, as if Avraham wanted genuinely to help. "Think of it this way: there's a colored translucent screen between you and Gutman. Don't mistake the colored light that passes through for the hard white light that burns behind."

Anna called from Strasbourg. The recital series was going well. So far the reviews were good, and now there was a chance the tour would be extended to Amsterdam.

"I'm always thinking of you, David. I love you very much."

"I love you too."

"How is Jerusalem?"

"Beautiful. There're flowers everywhere."

"Your father?"

"We're getting on better now." He paused. "I miss you, Anna. Coffee together in the morning, you in your white robe, the light streaming in. And at night when I come home. And watching you practice. And in bed, holding you, kissing you, tasting you, whispering. Listening to you breathing in the night...."

"I've been thinking about Micha's theory."

"It's nonsense."

"Yeah. But there's a germ of something, especially when I put it together with something my father said to me the other night."

He had taken Dov to lunch at the Mei Naftoah, an arcaded Iraqi-Jewish restaurant on the edge of Jerusalem. Below the sunlight glittered upon the ruined roofs of an abandoned Arab village. Beyond the gully lay the stony Judean hills.

"Forget a conspiracy between two killers, but keep the notion of two classes of victims, 'easy' and 'hard.' Easy victims are whores and hustlers and soldier-girls hitching rides. Easy to pick up. Young and sexual. You stop, exchange a couple words with them, they get into your car, and you've got them. Right?"

Dov nodded.

"Okay, up till now we've been thinking of this as a serial murder case. That's what it looks like. That's the pattern. And it fits with the easy victims—no problem there. But it doesn't fit with Schneiderman and Mills. They're hard. They're not the kind you can get into your car. They're not sexual either. It's as if ... there are two different things going on at once."

"The marks are always the same, David. The blankets, the method. Everything."

"Forget all that. I'm talking victims. Ever hear the expression 'hidden symmetry'?"

Dov shook his head.

"Particle physicists use it, biologists too, to describe a situation where two totally different results derive from one unseeable source. For example, the crab that has two claws, one big one small. That kind of crab looks unbalanced, but there's symmetry—it's just not visible. Both claws derive from a single gene. You have to understand genes and the purposes behind them before you can recognize the symmetry in what at first you think is just a weird lopsided crab. So, okay, we have two classes of victims. The symmetry's concealed because we don't know the killer's purpose. So suppose we forget serial murders. Let's ask ourselves what other purpose he might have had. Start by throwing the easy victims out. Then what have we got? Schneiderman and Mills. So why were the others killed exactly the same way? Maybe to make it look more complicated than it is, give it a shape, a pattern that disguises what was really going on."

"Three innocent people killed just to throw us off?"

"It's a possibility. All I know is that when I throw out 'serial killer' I get a whole new angle on the thing. Look, suppose we've got a pattern that conceals another pattern? Suppose we've been so blinded by what we've been shown that we haven't looked at what we've really got?"