The Missing File by D. A. Mishani Page A

the rectangular-framed glasses when she wasn’t looking at anything in particular, and would remove them when she wanted to study something in earnest. She looked over the pictures of Ofer that were scattered on the desk in front of her. The lateness of the hour dictated that the meeting would be a short one.
    â€œI’m pleased you have different gut feelings,” Ilana said. “It could benefit the investigation. What I’d like to ask of you, however, is not to race ahead with your hunches and get too attached to any one theory, because it’s pretty clear that we don’t have anything solid to go on right now. We are at a very preliminary stage of collecting material and findings, and we cannot approach the matter with any foregone conclusions at this point; we’ll only end up missing certain details and focusing too intently on others. I know it’s the hardest thing for us all to do, but we have to accept the uncertainty, to remain with it and try to understand it. A lack of information can also tell us something—just as Eyal and Eliyahu have seemed to imply—although I am not sure exactly what. I want us to be attentive to both what we have and what we don’t have, and not to lock in on just one option.”
    She was looking at him. Then she asked, “Avi, have you requisitioned the records of the calls made from Ofer’s cell phone over the past weeks?”
    â€œNo, not yet,” Avraham replied. “I’ll do it right away.”
    â€œI already ordered them—from a year back,” Shrapstein cut in. “I spoke this morning to his service provider and, as usual, it will take a day or two, but I have some good contacts there and I’m trying to speed things up. I’ll go over the printouts when they arrive.”
    The mood in Ilana’s office had taken on the energy and decisiveness that typified the start of an investigation, with each member of the team assigned certain tasks and each one eager to fulfill them, and only Avraham feeling a sense of profound weariness—an overall depletion of body and soul that would usually overcome him at the end of a case, or on vacation. He thought he should ask Ilana to take him off the case, and hoped she could sense his waning spirits.
    Shrapstein continued. “Aside from that, this morning I started going through the criminal reports from the area in recent weeks,” he said. “I’d also like to check if any of the residents in the neighborhood has a criminal background. I think, too, that we should check for any criminal reports related to the school. They may turn up nothing, but it’s worth a shot.”
    â€œExcellent, good thinking,” Ilana said. “Just make sure you coordinate everything with Avi so we don’t end up doing the same work twice. And go through the material we get from the IT Division. Make sure they pass on as much information as possible. Just sit yourself down and read through it all. Eliyahu will return to the school and reinterview Ofer’s classmates, and, if need be, we’ll bring in another investigator from Juvenile. Divide up the ongoing questioning of the family among yourselves.”
    Shrapstein asked Eliyahu if it was possible to look into the criminal backgrounds of all the students at the school. Everything’s possible, the veteran investigator replied, jotting down something in a small notebook he had taken out of an inside pocket of his Windbreaker.
    â€œWe should consider what we want to do about the media,” Shrapstein suggested. “It may be worth initiating a report for one of the news broadcasts; they won’t take it upon themselves to approach us.”
    There wasn’t a single member of the police district who was unaware that Shrapstein’s sister was a producer for Channel 10 News , and that he could turn any trivial investigation into an item on television.
    Avraham switched off. He had been