Pattern Crimes Read Online Free Page A

buses grinding their way up Jaffa Road, and in the courtyard patrol cars revving up. He could also hear phones ringing unanswered in other offices, and echoes from the hall beyond the door, people striding, talking, cursing the coffee machine, and the quick high-heeled steps of the Moroccan girl who worked in Superintendent Latsky's office, who wore tight sweaters and used henna on her hair and fought with her fingernails and for this had been dubbed "The Claw."
    Rafi sat back, his eyes watery and sad. The sun made a halo around his balding head. He held the headset of his phone between his cheek and shoulder and drummed his fingers on his desk. Every so often he nodded at Sarah Dorfman, who sat at her little table across the room listening on the extension and taking notes.
    Finally, when Rafi put down the phone, the stripes on the floor compressed. David looked up; the back of Rafi's chair was crushing the blinds against the sill.
    "So?"
    "Nasty marks. Unusual."
    "That's all you have to say?"
    "Well –"
    "What?"
    David glanced back at Sarah Dorfman, then down at the floor. "Maybe whoever killed her marked her to say 'She's mine, belongs to me.' "
    He looked up at Rafi, saw his eyes enlarge behind his glasses. Since the day David had met him, he'd been aware of the sadness in his eyes. Rafi was only five years older, but his remaining hair was graying above his ears and he had developed the pale complexion and growing paunch of a ranking officer who now, to his great regret, was forced to work behind a desk.
    "Marks of ownership. Interesting, David. You've always had an interesting kind of mind."
    Rafi stared at him a moment, then leaned forward. From the clutter on his desk he picked out a pipe. Pipes and orchids: Rafi liked Turkish tobacco and bred air orchids in his greenhouse after work. Though David considered him a friend, he was aware of the methods by which Rafi distanced himself: hiding at work behind clouds of aromatic smoke, performing his solitary hobby behind a wall of glass.
    Rafi lit his pipe, then selected a file folder. He pushed it across the desk. There were photographs inside. As David examined them, he felt his stomach tighten. When Rafi spoke again, it was in a hoarse whisper that filled the little room.
    "Same marks. Cheeks, breasts, lips. Found ten days ago in a wadi on the side road that leads up to Mevasseret. A nun from St. Louis, U.S.A. Staying at the Holyland Hotel. Doorman saw her get into a car, thinks it had Tel Aviv plates. No one else saw her after that."
    Rafi pushed across another folder containing another set of photos. The same marks, except this time they were on the face and body of a boy.
    "…Halil Ghemaiem. Arab street kid. Drug user. Male hustler. Sometime transvestite prostitute. Worked the beach in Tel Aviv. Picked up about one A.M. last Tuesday by a well-dressed gentleman. Driven away in a foreign car. Found dumped up here five days ago behind the Augusta Victoria Hospital at a construction site."
    David heard a snap. Rafi's chair was crushing the blinds again. "You see what we have here, David? Marred flesh, consistently marred flesh. We have a pattern crime and," Rafi paused, "perhaps our first Israeli serial murder case."
    Rafi accompanied him to the hall, stood with him as he fed coins into the coffee machine, getting half of them back, trying different ones from his pocket. The machine finally delivered scalding coffee with a hiss; it overflowed David's plastic cup.
    "...kind of thing that happens in America. So maybe if we're lucky it'll turn out the killer's an American." Rafi started banging on the machine; he hadn't gotten his coins back and hadn't gotten any coffee either. "But suppose he's Israeli? Wouldn't surprise me much, the way things are going these days. A suburban housewife in Haifa feeds rat poison to her husband. A nice South African-born gentleman, technician at the Weizman Institute, injects his aging mother with kerosene. Beautiful kibbutz kids refuse to