Free Lineup by Liad Shoham Page A

knows? But that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was whether he was guilty or not, and Nachum had no doubt about the answer to that one.
    He’d even asked Ohad and the other members of the unit. He wasn’t the type who’d never admit he could be wrong. But everyone’s gut was saying the same thing. They had the right man.
    Ohad tapped lightly on the door and walked in. Nachum made an effort to shake off the thoughts gnawing at him. Ohad was a good cop. A little too political for his taste, a little too concerned with what other people would say, but all in all he did good work and got results.
    “We gotta get a move on,” Ohad said, gesturing with his head toward the clock on the wall. In a few short hours Nevo would have to be brought before a judge. That was the law. They couldn’t hold him for more than twenty-four hours without an initial arraignment.
    That didn’t worry him. He was confident the judge would remand Nevo into custody as soon as he saw the evidence they had against him and the procedures they still needed to perform to move the investigation along. And the judge was the only one who’d get a look at that material. Not Nevo and not his attorney. As usual, they’d list procedures from here to Timbuktu, all of them requiring that Nevo remain in custody. Most judges didn’t even bother to read it. They had too many arrests to handle and very little patience for them, so they were very generous with remand orders. Especially at this early stage in the investigation of a serious crime.
    No, it wasn’t the arraignment that was weighing on Nachum’s mind, it was what would happen afterward, when all their investigation reports and warrant applications were no longer confidential. Nevo and his attorney would get copies of every piece of paper pertaining to his arrest. Nachum knew only too well that if he revealed that Adi had seen pictures of Nevo before the lineup, it would eventually be thrown out. It didn’t conform with any of the legal requirements, and they didn’t get a do-over. So he’d just have to risk keeping that information to himself. There was a good chance that if they kept at Nevo for a few more days, they’d either get their confession or find new evidence. But there was also a chance they wouldn’t.
    What would happen if they didn’t dig up anything new or if Nevo took his lawyer’s advice and kept his mouth shut? Once Adi’s identification was thrown out, they’d be left with nothing.
    Ohad handed him the documents for the judge. Nachum went over and over the description of the lineup. It wasn’t good enough. He had to think ahead, to consider how things were going to play out later.
    With a sigh, he started rewriting the report. Ohad came to look over his shoulder, gave him a pat on the back, and left.
    They had arrested Ziv Nevo, he wrote, in the wake of a phone call from the victim’s father, who had seen a man answering his daughter’s description of the rapist loitering late the previous night on the street where she lived and displaying suspicious behavior: he was hiding between parked cars and stalking another woman. A squad car was sent to the suspect’s address and he was taken into custody. A lineup in the presence of the victim had yet to be conducted and was planned for Monday morning. Since Nevo had been arrested on Friday night, at the start of the weekend, they had been unable to arrange for it earlier.
    Nachum reread what he’d written. He wasn’t born yesterday. He knew plenty of cops who played fast and loose with the facts. But that had never been his way. Just as he’d never doctored the numbers to improve his chances of a promotion, he’d never submitted a false report to the court. But that’s precisely what he was doing now. In order to get Nevo remanded into custody, he was claiming they hadn’t done a lineup even though they had, inventing a story about plans for a lineup that was never going to happen. What’d gotten into him?
    It