'Whores,' said Brickner. 'Who the hell needs them.'
'Which is why you raped her?'
'That was different,' said Brickner. 'His whole family knew about her.'
An hour later, they'd given him nothing that cleared them, but neither had they implicated themselves. During the nights of the murders they claimed to have been sleeping in bed, but both lived alone and lacked verification. Their memories failed to stretch back to the period preceding Fatma's murder, but they recalled delivering parcels to Bet Shemesh the day before Juliet's body had been found. A painstaking check of Ashdod Customs records revealed an early morning pickup; Shmeltzer was still trying to get hold of the bills of lading from the week of Fatma's death.
The timing vis-a-vis Juliet was feasible, Daniel knew. Bet Shemesh was just outside Jerusalem, which would have given them ample opportunity to drop off the packages, then go prowling around. But where would they have killed her and cut her up? Neither had residence nor connections in Jerusalem and the lab boys had found no blood in the truck. They denied ever laying eyes on Juliet or going into the city, and no witness placed them there. As for what they'd done with the afternoon, they claimed to have driven back north, spent the afternoon at a deserted stretch of beach just above Haifa.
'Anyone see you there?' asked Daniel.
'No one goes there,' said Brickner. 'The ships leak shit in the water-it smells. There's tar all over the beach that can gook you up if you're not careful.'
'But you guys go there.'
Brickner grinned. 'We like it. It's empty-you can piss in the sand, do whatever you like.'
Gribetz laughed.
'I'd like for both of you to take a polygraph test.'
'Does it hurt?' asked Brickner in a crude imitation of a child's voice.
'You've had one before. It's in your file.'
'Oh, yeah, the wires. It fucked us over. No way.'
'No way for me either,' said Gribetz, 'No way.'
'It incriminated you because you were guilty. If you're innocent, you can use it to clear yourselves of suspicion. Otherwise you'll be considered suspects.'
'Consider away,' said Brickner, spreading his arms.
'Consider away,' said Gribetz, aping him.
Daniel called for a uniform, had them taken back.
A repulsive pair but he tended to believe them. They were low-impulse morons, explosive and psychopathic, playing on each other's pathology. Certainly capable of damaging another woman if the right situation came up, but he didn't see them for the murders. The cold calculation that had echoed from the crime scenes wasn't their style. Still, smarter men than he had been fooled by psychopaths, and there was still the earlier Ashdod material to be looked at. Perhaps something would be found that refreshed their memories about Fatma. Before he ordered them released, he slowed down the paperwork so that they'd be cooling their heels for as long as possible, assigned Avi Cohen to drive up to Nahariya and find out more about them, keep a tight surveillance on them when they got home.
The Druze, Assad Mallah, was also no genius. One of the peepers, he was a withdrawn, stammering type, just turned thirty, with jailhouse pallor, watery blue eyes, and a history of neurological abnormalities that had exempted him from army service. As a teenager he'd burgled Haifa apartments, gorged himself on food from the victims' refrigerators, and left a thank-you card before departing: a mound of excrement on the kitchen floor.
Because of his age he'd been given youth counseling, which never took place because at that time there'd been no Druze counselors; no one from Social Welfare had bothered to drive up to Daliyat el Carmel to bring him in. But he had received treatment of sorts-severe and regular beatings at the hand of his father-which seemed to have done the trick, cause his record stayed clean. Until one night, ten years later, he was caught ejaculating noisily against the wall of an apartment building near the Technion, one hand gripping the casement of a nearby bedroom window, the other flogging away as he cried out in ecstasy.
The tenants were a married couple, a pair of graduate physics students who'd forgotten to draw their drapes. Hearing the commotion, the husband rushed out, discovered Mallah, beat him senseless, and called the police. During his questioning by Northern District, the Druze immediately con-fessed to scores of peeping incidents and dozens of burglaries, which went a long way in clearing the local crime records.
He was a blade man too. At the time of his arrest, there had been a penknife in his pocket-he claimed to use it to whittle and slice fruit. No forensic evidence had been found to contradict him at the time and Northern District had confiscated the weapon, which had since disappeared. At his trial he had the misfortune of drawing the only Druze judge at Haifa Magistrates Hall and received the maximum sentence. In Ramie he behaved well, got good recommendations from the psychiatrists and the administrators, and was released early. One month before Fatma's murder.
Another penknife had been found on him the day he'd been picked up for questioning. Small-bladed, dull, it bore no similarity to Levi's wound molds. He was also, Daniel noticed, left-handed, which, according to the pathologist, made him an unlikely candidate. Daniel spent two sluggish hours with him, scheduled a polygraph, and made a phone request to Northern District for a loose surveillance: no intrusion into the village; keep track of his license plate; report his whereabouts if he went into town.
At the same time, the Chinaman and Daoud were interrogating other suspects, working with dogged rhythm, going down the list. They agreed to do a good-guy, bad-guy routine, switching off so that the Chinaman would lean hard on the Jews, Daoud zero in on the Arabs. It threw the suspects off guard, kept them guessing about who was who, what was what. And reduced the possibility of racism/brutality charges, though that would happen no matter what you did. A national pastime.
Two days later, ten of the sixteen had been judged improbable. All agreed to be hooked up to the polygraph; all passed. Of the six possibles, three also passed, leaving three refusers-the Nahariya buddies and an Arab from Gaza. Daoud was assigned to watch the Arab.
