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Both youth officers were on the phone, talking to bureaucrats. Both wore pastel short-sleeved blouses over jeans.
Otherwise, physically and stylistically, they were a study in contrasts.
Ha
A few feet away, Alice Yanushevsky hunched over her desk, jabbing her pencil in the air and smoking like a chimney. Tall and moon-faced, with straw-colored hair cut in a Dutch-boy, she demanded fast action from a recalcitrant pencil-pusher in a voice tight with impatience.
"This is a girl in jeopardy! We'll have no more delays! Am I understood?" Slam.
A sweet smile for Daniel. A drop in vocal pitch: "Good morning, Dani." She picked up a cardboard tube, opened it, and unfolded the contents. "Like my new poster?"
It was a blowup of the American rock band Fleetwood Mac.
"Very nice."
"Avner gave it to me because he says I look like one of them"-she swiveled and pointed-"the English girl, Christine. What do you think?"
"A little," he conceded. "You're younger."
Alice laughed heartily, smoked, laughed again.
"Sit down, Pakad Sharavi. Just what is it that you need?"
"Photographs of missing girls. Brunettes, probably fifteen or sixteen, but let's play it safe and go twelve to nineteen."
Alice's green eyes jumped with alarm.
"Something happened to one of them?"
"Possibly."
"What?" she demanded.
"Can't say anything right now. Laufer's put a gag on."
"Oh, come on."
"Sorry."
"All take, no give, eh? That should make your job easy." She shook her head scornfully. "Laufer. Who does he think he's kidding, trying to keep anything quiet around here?"
"True. But I need to humor him."
Alice stubbed out her cigarette. Another shake of the head.
"The girl in question has dark skin, dark hair," said Daniel. "Roundish face, pretty features, chipped teeth, one missing upper tooth. Anyone come to mind?"
"Pretty genera! except for the teeth," said Alice, "and that could have happened after the disappearance." She opened one of her desk drawers, pulled out a pile of about a dozen folders, and thumbed through them, selecting three, putting the rest away.
"All our open cases are being entered into the computer, but I have a few here that just came in recently. All runaways-these are the ones in your age range."
He examined the photographs, shook his head, gave them back.
"Let's see if she has any." said Alice. Rising, she stood over Ha
Ha
"If you haven't convinced them yet, you never will," said Alice. She ran her fingers through her hair, stretched. "Come on, enough."
Ha
"Finally," said Alice. "Take out your recent files. Dani needs to look at them."
"Good morning, Dani," said Ha
"He can't tell you but you have to help him anyway. Laufer's orders."
Ha
"What do you need?" she asked.
He repeated the description of the murdered girl and her eyes widened in recognition.
"What?"
"Sounds like a kid I processed two weeks ago. Only this one was only thirteen."
"Thirteen is possible," said Daniel. "What's her name?"
"Cohen. Yael Cohen. One second." She went into her files, talking as she sorted. "Musrara girl. Fooling around with twenty-two-year-old pooshtak. Papa found out and beat her. Next day she didn't come home from school. Papa went looking for her, tried to beat up the boyfriend, too, got thrashed for his efforts. Ah, here it is."
Daniel took the file, homed in on the photograph, felt his spirits sink. Yael Cohen was curly-haired, bovine, and dull-looking. A missing tooth, but that was the extent of the resemblance.
"Not the one," he said, giving it back to Ha
"In the process of being entered," said Alice.
"How many cases are we talking about?"
"Missing girls in that age range? About four hundred nationally, sixty or so from Jerusalem. But the files are classified alphabetically, not by age or sex, so you'd have to go through all of them-about sixteen hundred."
Tedious but workable.
"How can I get hold of them?"
"Go down to Data Processing and pull rank."
He spent the next two hours on the phone, phoning Dr. Levi at Abu Kabir and being told by an assistant that the pathologist was out of the office; requesting a copy of Schlesinger's service record from Civil Guard Headquarters; getting a records clerk to search for any sort of priors on the Amelia Catherine staff; attempting, without success, to find out if any of the three detectives had received his message. Letting Data Processing know that someone would be down to examine the missing-juvenile files. Filling out the mountain of requisition forms that legitimized each of the requests. Hampered at every step by his inability to satisfy the curiosity of the people whose cooperation he needed.
At twelve-fifteen, Levi called.
"Shalom, Pakad. I've finished the preliminary on the young one from this morning. I know it's priority so I'll read from my notes: Well-developed, well-nourished mid-adolescent female of Eastern descent. Multiple stab wounds, shock from voluminous loss of blood-she was drained."