Kingdom of Strangers (10 page)

“Right.”

He sat in his car for twenty long minutes staring at the wheel. Sabria wasn’t Sabria? Yes, she was. She had always been Sabria. They had vetted her thoroughly in Undercover before hiring her. Of course, she’d posed as someone else on her assignments, but as far as he knew she’d never hired anyone to pretend to be her—and that’s what this had to be. Because his Sabria would never have taken a job at a boutique and stolen handbags and got herself fired within six weeks, and then failed to tell him about it. And Katya’s new evidence supported this: no one at the boutique had recognized her picture. Surely Sabria knew about this other woman who was going to the job she was supposed to be going to and doing the work she was supposed to be doing.

It suddenly seemed possible that Sabria hadn’t run away at all, that she was part of an undercover operation of her own—so deep undercover that she was hiding it even from Ibrahim—and that, for some reason, something had gone terribly wrong.

T
hey scanned every missing-persons database in the country and came up with one hit that matched one of the sketches of the remaining eighteen victims’ faces. One hit wasn’t bad. Maria Reyes. She had gone missing in Jeddah. Three years ago, she had come in on a Hajj visa, and she had apparently overstayed the two-week limit, because they had no record of her leaving the country. She arrived on a guided Hajj tour made up exclusively of women from the Philippines. For most Muslim women coming from overseas and traveling alone, tours like that were the only way they could do Hajj. According to the tour guide, Reyes disappeared two days before the end of the tour. The tour company suspected that she’d run away to find illegal employment. No one had ever heard from her again.

Three years was a long time to go back. Ibrahim suspected that the tour company would have changed its staff by now, but the man who was in charge of the Hajj tours, Benigno Dimzon, remembered Reyes. It was unusual for a woman to disappear from his tour. The company, Dar el-Hijaz, was diligent about keeping an eye on the single women: staff members walked each of them to her hotel room at night and a guard was posted outside the entrance of the hotel to make sure that none of them left.

“Then how could she have run away?” Ibrahim asked.

They were sitting in Dimzon’s office, a small, well-lit room that smelled like car deodorizers. It was Tuesday morning, just after the second call to prayer. Bright sunlight slanted through the
blinds onto the man’s face. “I am still not sure how it happened,” Dimzon said. “There is one point on the tour when we allow the women to do some basic shopping—for personal needs, of course. We escort them into the shopping center and stay with them the entire time. We have never had a problem, not in seven years of doing this—except for Miss Reyes. Most of the women on the tours are not poor people. They’re not coming here to find work. They are good Muslims and they come to do the Hajj and then they go home. We charge a lot of money, and we require each of them to put down a large deposit that they can get back once they return to the Philippines. So you see, we don’t normally have a problem.”

“I’m sure you have an excellent record,” Ibrahim said. “I’d just like to know exactly what happened when Miss Reyes disappeared.”

“Ah, well.” Dimzon sat back. He was a compact man with a lively face and bright eyes that were shining now with an old frustration. “The women at the shopping center were all covered except for their faces. You see, we want to be able to identify them in public, so we ask them to please keep their faces showing. If any of them have a problem with that, we give them a little ribbon that they can pin to the shoulder here.” He pointed to his left shoulder. “That way we can identify who is in our group and who is not. Maria was wearing one of the pins. I was keeping an eye on her myself, and furthermore, she was standing very close to me. I turned to talk to one of the cashiers and when I turned back, she was gone.”

“And you noticed right away?”

“Yes. I thought she had moved into the crowd of women. They were all standing in line, waiting for the cashier. But I went down the line and she wasn’t there. She must have taken off her ribbon and sneaked away. She must have been planning it.”

Ibrahim felt that the man was telling the truth.

Dimzon went on. “I immediately asked everyone: Have you
seen Maria? Nobody had noticed her walk away. One woman said maybe she saw her heading for the back of the line, but it could have been someone else, because Maria’s face was covered. But the women were talking, looking at the things in the checkout line. Should they buy this? Isn’t that cute? You know how it is. Nobody really noticed.”

“Was anyone else around? I mean, were there any strangers nearby? Anyone you remember who didn’t belong to the group?”

“Nobody in particular. There were a lot of people at the mall. It was crowded.”

It was as easy as that. All she would have had to do was cover her face and her hands; the
abaaya
and headscarf would cover the rest. A woman cloaked in black could disappear like a shadow blending into the darkness of an alley. Even if Dimzon had spotted her, it would have been hard for him to chase her down. He might mistake someone else for her, and if anyone believed that he was harassing strange women in public, there would be a furor.

From the moment Maria Reyes left the mall, she became anonymous and free. Was it liberating? Did she seize it greedily? She could transform into any other overseas Filipino worker, albeit an illegal one; OFWs were in huge demand. Or was the sudden break fraught with fear and desperation? According to the medical examiner, Reyes had died roughly six to eight months after her disappearance. It didn’t seem likely that she’d been kidnapped on the same day she’d disappeared, but it was possible. The killer could have nabbed her and held on to her for months before killing her. The mall itself was nowhere near the area where Cortez, the other ID’d victim, had disappeared. Ibrahim knew it would be difficult to find a connection between the two cases. The only thing that was clear was that they needed more information.

M
aybe because she had just agreed to marry Nayir, Katya felt absolutely paranoid getting into the SUV with Ibrahim. The fear had a different tang than before when she’d climbed into taxis or in the rare instance when she’d been in a patrol car with Osama. It was no longer just
What if my father finds out?
but now also
What if my fiancé finds out? What if he gets angry or suspicious and calls off the marriage?
And there was the added bonus of
What if Ibrahim finds out that I’m not really married? What if he reports me to Chief Riyadh? Will I lose my job like Faiza did last month?

So she kept her veil down and climbed into the backseat before Ibrahim could protest. She would have considered that behavior ridiculous a week before, not least because she was relegating herself to an inferior status and permitting segregation of a sort. But now it was necessary. If anyone caught her, at least she could say she was in the backseat and properly covered.

Ibrahim looked surprised when he got in the car. He spun around and stared at her. “I don’t mind if you sit in the front,” he said.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

He motioned to the parking garage around them. “No one’s watching.”

“It’s all right.”

She could tell that it upset him. It figured that the person she pulled this stunt with would be the most liberal-minded man in the department. He started the car and drove out of the garage.

“I worked with women in Undercover,” he said. “It’s hard to find women to hire. They need to have police experience, and most women who do also happen to have husbands who don’t like the idea of their wives pretending to be someone else for a few months and putting themselves in danger. Plus, the husbands get stuck with the kids. We actually had to pull a woman off an assignment one time because her husband couldn’t handle taking his son to the doctor.”

Katya gave a soft snort. “Is that how you met Sabria—in Undercover?”

“Yes.” He studied Katya in the rearview mirror, stared straight into her eyes. “We worked together. Our relationship developed later, after she quit.”

Ibrahim had called Katya early that morning to ask if she would be willing to lift whatever forensic evidence she could find from Sabria’s apartment. It was Wednesday, and he was eager to do it before Thursday, the beginning of the weekend, when most of Sabria’s neighbors would be home.

She told herself she was going along because if something bad had happened to Sabria, she would feel terrible knowing that she’d done nothing to help. But she was really doing this because Ibrahim was in charge of the serial-killer case, and if this was what it took to get in on the investigation, then she’d do it.

On the seat beside her was a duffel bag that held a mobile forensics kit. She’d tended to the black bag lovingly for weeks, filling it with new stackable plastic containers, baggies, syringes, all the gear she could pilfer from the lab. She’d been anticipating using it for an urgent situation when the department finally called her into the field. Instead, this morning was its debutante ball.

“Did you have a chance to look at Sabria’s employment application? The one I left in your box?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It looks like her handwriting.”

“So she filled out the form,” Katya said, “but someone else took the position?”

“That’s my best guess,” he replied, “although I couldn’t tell you why.”

From the way he pulled into the spot beneath Sabria’s building, Katya had the feeling he’d done it a thousand times before. He offered to carry the kit but she held on to it herself, and they took the elevator to the fourth floor.

“I still think you should report her missing,” Katya said. “Anonymously, that is.”

“The police won’t do anything I can’t do.”

“Why not get some help with it then?”

“I am getting help,” he said.

Ibrahim let them in with his own key. Sabria’s apartment was small, with bright white carpets and simple furnishings. The first thing Katya noticed was an almost complete lack of anything that seemed personal or nostalgic. No photos of family members or friends. No books or knickknacks. Nothing but a pair of two-seater sofas and a television on a cabinet. Some empty cups littered the coffee table. Katya wandered into the kitchen, the bedroom, and bathroom. That was the extent of the household, and aside from a few toiletries and the clothing in the closet, there was nothing distinct about the apartment at all. Anyone could have lived there.

“Didn’t she have any photographs or personal items?” Katya asked.

They were standing in the kitchen. Ibrahim looked around as if the absence of these items had only just occurred to him. “She doesn’t own a lot of things,” he said. “She keeps all of her photos on her computer.”

“And where is that?”

He led Katya back to the living room and opened the doors on
the cabinet beneath the television. There was a folded-up prayer rug, a bottle of perfume, and some old videocassettes.

“It’s gone.”

“Was it a laptop?”

“Yes.” He stood up, looking shaken.

Katya sat on the sofa and began dusting the coffee table for fingerprints.

“Sabria didn’t come to Jeddah with a lot of stuff,” Ibrahim said. “And everything she did have was lost when she left her first employer.”

“Who was that?”

“She worked as a housemaid for a year. It was an abusive situation, so she ran away.”

“But that was a few years ago, yes?”

“About five years ago.”

“She’s had plenty of time to accumulate more stuff since then,” Katya said.

“She wasn’t much of a shopper.”

“How was she paying for the apartment?”

“I pay for it,” Ibrahim said. “I pay for everything. Including the phone and food and… whatever she wants, which isn’t much.”

Katya nodded.

“What are you thinking?” he asked. “Why was she working if I was taking care of her?”

“Something like that. The problem is, she wasn’t working. At least not where she said she was. But you assumed it was true, so what did you think she was doing with the money she was supposedly making? She never spent it on anything. Didn’t that make you wonder?”

He shrugged. “I just assumed she was saving it.”

“Did you ever ask her about it?”

“Not really.” He went back into the kitchen. Katya dusted some of the cups on the coffee table for fingerprints and thought
of her father, whose signature move when confronted with difficult questions was to retreat to the kitchen and find something to eat.

“There’s still milk in the refrigerator,” he said, coming back into the room.

She looked up.

“A whole liter of it. She drank it every day. If she were planning on leaving, she wouldn’t have bought milk.”

“Nobody in your family had any idea you were seeing her?” Katya asked.

She saw a flicker of hesitation. “That’s right.”

“Are you absolutely certain?”

“Yes.” Now he put on a look of paternal agitation. “Believe me, if anyone knew about it, the rest of my life would have fallen apart by now.”

“What about friends or coworkers?”

“We were incredibly careful to hide this from everyone.” He gave her a dour look. “It’s not exactly legal, you know.”

“What about the neighbors?” Katya asked.

“They don’t care in the least.”

“How long had you been seeing her?”

“Two years.”

“Why didn’t you marry her?”

“Because she’s already married, to a man who used to rape her and whom she never wants to see again.”

Katya nodded slowly.

Ibrahim sat down on the sofa. “I know you’re thinking,
What if she just walked away?
”

“You have to admit, it’s possible, even with the milk. Sometimes people make spontaneous decisions.”

“Sure.” He couldn’t seem to get comfortable on the couch, so he stood up and went to the front window. He stood at the very edge and peeked through the gap where the wooden screen didn’t
quite make it to the window frame. “We never even opened the windows,” he said, motioning to the screen. “We had these installed and they stayed shut all the time. We almost never went out to eat, but sometimes we’d go to a private beach. We tried not to call each other too much, and we used aliases when we did. On my phone, she’s listed as Muhammed. Not even a last name. We were
careful
.”