hikers seeking shelter and by narcotics dealers as places to stash supplies of dope. David saw the beam of Uri's flashlight play upon a narrow passage of old stone stairs. Third house from the end, Peretz had said. When he and Dov reached the third house they found both walls were open. They walked through, then followed Uri to the house below, the one with the smashed-in roof.
Charred beams hung above them, black bars cutting across the gray night sky.
'In here,' Uri said. 'Doesn't smell too good.' Dov probed the ruin with his flashlight, fixed it on a doorway.
'He mentioned a couple rooms left intact,' David said. Then he moved forward, afraid of what he was going to find, part of him wishing he wouldn't find it, hoping Peretz was wrong.
Immediately he heard the flies, hundreds, thousands, he thought. The buzzing stunned him, angry, like a roar; he wanted to shut it out, press his hands against his ears. The smell was bad too, sweet putrescence, a rot both luscious and corrupt. Uri and Dov played their flashlights upon the walls, then their beams converged in one of the corners. The flies were there, clustered, picking and licking at splash marks on the stones and an old decaying mattress half torn up and stained.
'David!' It was Shoshana calling from the outer room. 'Don't come in,' he warned her.
'See the clothing,' Dov whispered. Some soiled garments were piled haphazardly near the corner. Dov swung his flashlight back to the mattress. Something metallic gleamed. 'Could be a knife.' He moved closer, lifted one edge of the mattress with his foot. The blade of a commando knife was caught in Uri's beam. 'He did the cutting here,' Dov said.
Uri fled the room. David could hear him retching outside, then being comforted by Shoshana. Sickened by the noise and smell, David struggled to suppress his rage. Susan Mills had died here; these walls had echoed with her screams. She and Schneiderman and Ora Goshen, Halil Ghemaiem and Yael Safir had been forced into this room, pushed down into this corner, slashed, bled, then stripped and laid out on this horrible mattress to be marked. This was the killing room, the scene of suffering, where pain had been endured and flesh had been rent and blood had flowed-blood which, now congealed, was food for flies.
He sent the others home, except for Liederman who asked to stay up on the road to man the barricade. Now he waited outside, sitting silent on a low stone wall while the forensic specialists went about their work. Every so often one of them would come out, pull off his surgical mask, breathe deeply, and stare at the hills. Then after several minutes he would grimace and return to the gruesome task.
Just before dawn the unit chief appeared, a lanky middle-aged American-born immigrant known around the Russian Compound as 'Tex.' He squatted down and lit a cigarette. David had known this gentle man since he'd joined the police; now for the first time he found him unnerved.
'We found the clothes of four of them. We don't know what the Arab boy wore. Blood's mingled but we'll sort it out. Tissue cells all over the place so, unfortunately, we can't spray and kill the flies. We'll work on the knife at the lab. Probably do that myself. It may take us all day to get this place cleaned up.'
Tex stubbed out his cigarette, then shook his head. Moisture filled his eyes. 'Worst crime scene I've seen in twenty-five years. You find caring at a murder site sometimes, David-even when a man rips up his wife. But there was no caring here. Nothing here but butchery.' He shook his head again and looked away.
Peretz called a little after seven. This time he spoke rapidly.
'I'll make this fast, Bar-Lev. I'm on only for a minute so don't bother to try a trace.'
Rebecca had already alerted the police operators; on the old-fashioned Jerusalem telephone system a trace took four minutes at least.
'Okay, it was the place. Victims' clothes were there.'
'So he was telling the truth…' Something almost lethargic now in Peretz's tone.
'Can I have him?'
'Won't do you any good. He's been terminated. The interrogation was harsh.'
Terminated!
'…signed him, too. Seemed appropriate. He was nothing but an animal. Claimed to the end he didn't know who hired him. If he knew I think he would have squawked.' A pause. 'I'll have to hide him now. If they find him dead they'll know we've gotten close. The closer we come the more dangerous we are to them and the more vigorously they'll retaliate. You and I need each other now…'
David's fury suddenly broke loose. 'Hell we do! No alliances! You're the animal, cocksucker. And I'm going to nail you-'
Click!
'He's off,' Rebecca said.
David spun around his chair and faced the wall.
Rafi's large sad eyes sparkled with incredulity. 'He spent the night torturing the guy? You don't know who he is?'
'Don't even know what city they were in. Somewhere on the northern coast.'
Rafi leaned back. 'David, this is getting out of hand.'
'You're telling me. I've felt helpless for a week.'
'Sooner or later Peretz has got to show.'
'He doesn't 'got' to do anything, Rafi. He's a law unto himself. He knows how to live off rough terrain. He can bury himself in wilderness. Way beyond fruitcake now. He's a sadistic murderer. I told you that before.'
'Yes,' Rafi nodded, 'so you did.' He reached beneath his glasses and rubbed his eyes. 'So, okay, now that you know where the killing was done, what are you doing about it?'
'Canvassing for witnesses. Look, Rafi, the time's come. I want to confront Ephraim Cohen.'
Rafi shook his head. 'I'm not going into an inter-service thing, not until you come up with something hard. Go in on a bluff and we're certain to lose the case. Shin Bet takes over and we're out of it for good. We'll be lucky to read about it ten years from now when some former cabinet minister sneaks it into his memoirs. There'll be a Knesset investigation and a whitewash, so even then we still won't know what it was about…'
At least, he thought, walking out of Rafi's office, Rafi now acknowledged that the case might have roots in some rogue bureau of the government.
At noon, returning home for a shave and a change of clothes, he paused just outside his door. He could hear Anna and Yosef talking inside. Yosef 's voice was patient but Anna's sounded petulant.
'I'm very concerned,' Yosef said. 'And I don't understand. It's not all that difficult.'
'It's difficult for me,' she said.
'Why don't you try that part again.'
She played several bars on her cello, then Yosef stopped her.
'What's the matter now?'
'You're playing notes, not music.'
'Damn, damn, damn…'
'Listen, Anna-why don't we quit for the day? This tension isn't doing us any good.' He paused. 'Perhaps it's not my place, but still I must ask you: Is there some trouble you're having now in your personal life? With David maybe? Or someone else?'
Distressed at the silence that followed, David withdrew down the stairs. It was best to leave them alone to work it out, he thought. He wouldn't shave today.
It was Moshe Liederman who pointed the way to the young vagabond threesome who lived in the broken deserted house across the gorge from the abattoir. No road led down there. It was a mile and a half by twisting path from the gas station on the heights. Like the killing house it was a ruin but most of its rooms were roofed. No outward sign of habitation; illegal to live there anyway. But Liederman was thorough, for the first time in his police career he was working a case with cops who cared, so he checked out every building in Mei Naftoah and at three that afternoon found the bedrolls and water bottles and remnants of a fire.
He radioed this news to David, who brought along the rest of the team. When David sniffed the embers he recognized the fire he'd smelled the night before.
The contents of the bedrolls indicated two males and a female. David called for Shoshana, then sent Micha to replace her as guard and back-up on the road. The five of them split into two teams-David and Shoshana; Liederman, Uri, and Dov-then took refuge in broken outbuildings on either side and waited patiently for the night.
