Kingdom of Strangers (15 page)

“Was it always the same friend?”

“No, a few different women. She also said that Sabria was always going to the bathroom. At first she assumed she was just drinking too much coffee, but after a while she noticed that the friends would go with her and they’d be in there for a long time—longer than normal, anyway.”

“Did she have any idea what they were talking about?” he asked.

“No, but she said it seemed important. They never seemed to be having fun. And aside from buying coffee, Sabria never did any shopping.”

“So it was obvious that something strange was going on,” he said. “When did the barista notice all of this?”

“She said it took her a while. Sabria usually covered her face, and the barista only recognized her by her shape. She caught
glimpses of her face once or twice. Sabria kept her burqa down, and since she seemed like the super-modest type who didn’t want people looking at her, the barista didn’t stare.”

“And she’s sure that it’s her?”

“I showed her the picture of Sabria’s face, and she felt quite convinced that it was the same person.”

“Okay,” Ibrahim said, thinking. “So she
was
going to the mall.”

“Apparently, yes.”

“And meeting with women.”

“Some of them were Filipina. The barista said they looked poorer than the average shopper, and that Sabria always paid for their coffees.”

“Housemaids.”

“Did you know any of her friends?”

“No,” he said. “Except for the neighbors. She didn’t—”
Tell me any of this
.

So Sabria had lied about what she was doing at the mall, but she’d been at the mall anyway, meeting with friends she never talked about. It didn’t have to be as nefarious as it seemed. Maybe she was helping them.

“There’s something else,” Katya said, “but it’s not about Sabria. It’s about the Angel case.”

“Go ahead.”

She launched into an explanation about the significance of the severed hands and the shots to the backs of the victims’ heads, and the idea of an angel of vengeance.
Nineteen
. This was the inevitability that he’d dreaded from the day they found the bodies. Abu-Musa’s smug smile came back to him as truth.

“That’s a very astute connection,” he said. “I’ll make sure we follow up on it.”

“I take it you’ll be looking into amputation records,” she said, “of people who were punished for theft?”

“Well, yes, I think that’s the place to start.”

“I know it’s not my place to say this,” Katya said, “but it might be useful to look at the execution records for Jeddah over the past thirty years as well.”

“You think the killer might be an executioner?”

“No. Dr. Becker gave me this idea, actually, but it’s possible that the killer lost a relative or someone he was close to, and that this person was executed.”

“You’re assuming that the execution records would give information about family members,” he said. “I don’t think they do.”

She sighed. “Then we’ll have to find the families ourselves. I just think that we need as much information as we can get in order to build a profile of this killer.”

“Yes, you’re right. But that’s going to take an awful lot of work.”

“I’d be glad to go over the case files myself. The lab doesn’t need me standing by the machines all the time.”

“I’ll see what I can do. And I’m glad you think it’s your place to say all of this, Miss Hijazi,” he said. “You’re doing excellent work.”

She was quiet on the other end. He couldn’t quite figure her out. She was bold enough to call him late on a Wednesday night and tell him how to run his investigation, but proper enough to sit in the backseat with her face covered like a cowering Saffanah. Perhaps, just like Saffanah, she was no Saffanah.

“I’ll arrange for those records to be pulled,” he said. “Is there someone else in the lab who can help you look through them?”

“Yes, I’m sure I can find someone.”

“Good.”

He thanked Katya and hung up but was suddenly drained. Every time he forced himself to focus on the killer, he felt the same sense of dread. The whole case was expanding outward like
a cell infected by a virus. Any moment now it was going to explode and send its replicated contents into the whole organism.

As he drove the final mile to the house, he stopped staring at the female pedestrians and wondered about all the places Sabria had gone without him.

T
he desert gravesite was all but abandoned. Two officers sat guard at the turn where the county road made a sharp right onto the stretch where they’d found the bodies. The road was even more overrun with sand than it had been. Crime scene tape marked the perimeter of the graves, and two guards patrolled a newly worn path around the edges.

Katya showed her ID badge to the officers and they let her pass. Nayir was driving. She was in the front seat, feeling the heat of the sun on her cheeks despite the Land Rover’s AC. Behind them, the Murrah trackers, Talib al-Shafi and his two nephews, were crammed into the cab of a Toyota flatbed truck that appeared to be older than her.

She had been too flustered to ask Ibrahim for permission to do this. During their phone conversation, she’d felt she’d already been bold enough to suggest opening the execution files. Then she’d run out of steam—or sensed he had run out. She considered this trip of lesser consequence, somehow, and had arranged it with Majdi’s help instead. He’d given her the Murrah tracker’s phone number, and, graciously, Nayir had called on her behalf.

It was Thursday, the first day of the weekend. Nayir had been excited to have a justification for making a desert trip with her, but she had killed it on the way out by telling him about the Angel murders. He’d listened fully, his only reaction a quiet horror. It still patterned his face as they drove up to the site.

They weren’t interested in the gravesites but in the area around
them. Far enough around them that, for example, a killer could arrive there without being noticed by the police guards. Because he had been back here. He knew the bodies had been removed.

They drove up to the crime scene tape, which glistened like a pale ribbon in the overbright sun, and got out of their vehicles to have a look around. After careful study, the trackers decided that it would be best to head west, where the terrain was somewhat hillier and where it would be easier for a killer to see the site without himself being seen.

They drove back to the county road and then headed west at a pace that felt slower than the collapse of a civilization. The Murrah’s truck was in front, the two nephews now kneeling in the truck bed, one on each side, gazing down at the marks on the roadway. They even did tire tracks, those bloodhounds. Nayir and Katya watched in suspense.

Finally, they stopped, and one of the men jumped over the fender and prowled the shoulder. They’d found something. He motioned to Nayir to back up and take a right into the desert.

Nayir drove the Land Rover onto the sand and rolled down his window.

“There are tracks here,” the Murrah nephew said, pointing to where the Toyota had stopped. “Someone swept them over but they’re still here.”

“They swept them over?” Nayir asked. “With what?”

“A piece of cardboard. We’ll leave the truck here and lead you on foot so we can keep an eye on the trail.” He glanced very briefly at Katya, a gesture that said
We wouldn’t want to disturb the privacy of your woman either
. Nayir nodded gratefully. Katya felt herself slipping into that nod, into the version of the world where she would expect to be left alone in a car. Then she reminded herself that this whole trip was her idea—thanks in part to an American woman who didn’t even own a veil—and that in a few short minutes she’d be out in the sand sweating nails like the men.

They followed the Murrah about three-quarters of a mile south. The Rover’s tires made popping noises against the gravel littered here and there. Finally, the Murrah raised his hand and Nayir stopped the car.

Katya got out and slipped her burqa over her nose and mouth, tucking it into her headscarf. She did this partially to put the Murrah at ease but mostly because the sun hit her face with an intensity that suggested it might liquefy her soft tissue. She slid on a pair of sunglasses and followed Nayir, literally stepped into his footprints. One of the Murrah noticed and said to Nayir: “She doesn’t have to do that. We know what her prints look like already.”

“It’s good to be careful,” Nayir replied.

They stood there, waiting for the grandfather, Talib, who was taking his time reading the tire tracks that led up from the road. When he finally reached the group, he said: “He drove a GMC and his right front tire is low. What else have we got?”

It didn’t take long to see the footprints.

Talib didn’t speak for a long time; he simply studied the ground, moving around and nodding as if listening to the wind tell a story.

He motioned Nayir closer, pointed to a smudged area on the ground, and began to explain. “The car stopped here. He got out and went over there, then came back to the truck. He was probably upset; the prints are angry coming back.”

That might have been when he discovered that the bodies were missing
, Katya thought.

Everyone followed the prints to the edge of a gently curved dune. From there it was easy to see the gravesites. “He stops here,” Talib said. “This is the lookout.”

Katya took a dozen photos. “Do you have any idea when he might have come out here?” she asked.

“I’d say these prints are about five or six days old,” he said.

“The police were still here,” Katya said, “and forensics too. The place would have been full of people.”

“If he came in the midmorning,” Nayir said, “they might not have noticed him here. The sun would have been behind him.”

Talib nodded.

“But how did he get past the police cars on the road?”

“From the south.” Talib pointed. “There’s another road leading around the site, and his tire tracks turned in from the opposite direction as ours.”

“He may have had a habit of coming here,” Katya said. “Maybe he always checked the site from afar before driving closer.” She thought back five or six days. That was when they’d found Amina’s hand on Falasteen Street. It was possible that the killer had come here to check on his site. His discovery that the bodies had been found could have triggered a rage that prompted him to cut off Amina’s hand before he had originally planned to do it. Yet if Amina was indeed one of his victims, there was still the question of why she didn’t resemble his previous type.

Katya continued taking photos. The other men moved away, except for Talib. He stood looking out at the graves, studiously avoiding her gaze.

“You don’t need to do that,” he said. “I’ll remember the prints.” As he turned away, he said over his shoulder: “And don’t worry, it will hold up in court.”

Her friends had long ago stopped asking her when she was going to get married. She was twenty-nine now, far too old to catch a good husband. It became impolite to ask. Her few good friends had tried for years to find a husband for her. She was always on the top of their guest lists for weddings, since that was where most
matchmaking occurred. But after her failed engagement to Othman, even her good friends had stopped talking about marriage, perhaps thinking that she needed some time to recover, or perhaps believing that she never would. As this silence ensorcelled her, she had grown cynical about her own prospects without even realizing it.

Nayir’s proposal should have broken the spell. Instead, it had cast a new spell of its own.

The drive back was tense. She compared Nayir to her cousin. Ayman had grown up in Lebanon and spent an unnatural amount of time watching satellite television, so had a great deal of knowledge about the world. He’d known exactly what a serial killer was and had even conjured instant trivia from his memory. Did she know that John Gacy had raped thirty-two men and buried them in his basement? And that Jeffrey Dahmer had been trying to turn his victims into zombies? (And that scientists had saved Dahmer’s brain for their own studies?) She had found Ayman’s easy recollection of facts disturbing, but not more so than Nayir’s gravitas.

“We’ve never had one before,” he said. “This type of
shaytan
. He exists in other countries, but not here.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “Or maybe we’ve just never noticed. It took them years to find out about this one.”

It seemed to make him angry. “How do so many people go missing and nobody notices?”

“They were foreign workers,” Katya said. “Probably they’d run away, and nobody knew where they were to begin with.”

“And now the killer knows that the police have found the bodies,” he said. “What do you think he’ll do next?”

“I think he already has his next victim.” She was tired. The heat had sapped her, and the discoveries of the day had only made the whole situation more disturbing. She wanted him to tell her how strong she was, how brave.

“There is a chance he could find out about you,” he said. “About who is working on this case.”

“There’s always a chance of that.”

She could feel him trying to be careful in his reply, but in the end nothing came out and they spent the rest of the ride home in uneasy silence.

T
hursday morning, the first day of the weekend, Ibrahim went in to work anyway. He couldn’t face a day sitting at home, worrying helplessly about Sabria.

He was surprised to find Majdi and Daher in the forensics lab. Daher was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, not his usual black suit. He was sitting at the desk beside Majdi, texting someone.

Ibrahim’s phone vibrated and he took it out of his trousers. Daher had been texting him. The message read:
Majdi found something
.

“That was fast!” Daher said when he saw Ibrahim. He got up, looking vaguely embarrassed to be seen in his street clothes. It reminded Ibrahim how young he was.

“What did you find?” he asked.

Majdi stood up and motioned to the computer screen. “We’ve identified the other victim whose hands were found at the gravesite,” he said. “Her name was May Lozano. She was twenty-five years old. She went missing over a year ago.”