Kingdom of Strangers (2 page)

He bent over body after body, the heat like hooks cutting into his back. Sweat dripped so freely that his shoes were wet. Even the Murrah began to look wilted.

The scene unfolded like an archaeological dig, sprawling out toward the desert, growing up over surfaces decorated with canvas blankets, stakes, lights brought in as the sun grew red and dipped to the edge of the Earth’s plain. Nineteen bodies in all. He dreaded the number when he heard the coroner say it. Abu-Musa came to talk to him, the first time he’d done so all day. The sunset made his grizzled face almost pretty.

“Did you hear what I said? Nineteen bodies,” Abu-Musa said. “Nineteen. You know what this means?”

“ ‘And over it is nineteen?’ ”
Ibrahim recited.

Abu-Musa nodded, looking quietly pleased. That verse from the Quran, mysterious out of context, had prompted men over the centuries to conjure wild fantasies about the importance of the number nineteen. The most recent incarnation came from Tucson, Arizona, where an Egyptian biochemist, Rashad Khalifa, claimed that the archangel Gabriel had revealed to him in the text of the Quran a hidden mathematical code that could be unlocked using the number nineteen.

But the subsequent verse in the Quran was a simple explanation of it:
And we have set none but angels as guardians of the fire, and we have fixed their number
.

It meant there were nineteen angels guarding Hell.

“Could be a coincidence,” Ibrahim said.

“Are you sure about that?” Abu-Musa smiled, a cold gesture. “I believe you won’t find any more bodies out here. Whoever did this has his reason.”

“All the same,” Ibrahim said, “maybe it just happens to be nineteen.”

K
atya Hijazi was carrying the latest batch of files down to Inspector Zahrani’s office when an explosive round of laughter from the situation room drew her attention. She crept down the corridor, wanting to know what was so funny at a Homicide meeting.

The crowd was dispersing, and she watched them through the doorway, the men talking, conversations erupting here and there, laughter, nods of agreement. No one looked her way, they were too busy staring at Waseem Daher, one of the junior detectives whom Katya had met twice and already counted as among the few people she would gladly shove into an industrial meat grinder. Last week, Daher had accused her of being a hotshot who fancied herself the centerpiece of every investigation, thanks to growing up watching
CSI
and believing that forensics officers actually did all of the investigative work. If he noticed her in the doorway, he didn’t let on.

Pictures of the victims’ faces filled most of the whiteboard at the front of the room. Katya had been so busy in the lab that she hadn’t seen the bodies yet. Every time she went downstairs, the examiner’s office was crowded with senior officers and Ministry of Interior agents. They had never had so many bodies at once. In fact, they didn’t have enough freezer space in the women’s lab, so they had put the overflow in the men’s side of the laboratory and prayed that no one else in Jeddah died until they finished processing the evidence.

It had taken three days to remove the bodies from the site. They had even brought in an archaeologist in the desperate hope of establishing that the bodies were historical. But from what forensics now knew, the most “historical” of them had died ten years ago.

Katya had spent the past four days bagging and labeling the clothing of the dead and running blood and fiber samples like a drone, disconnected from any greater knowledge of what she was doing. Information about the murders had to be ferreted out through hasty conversations with Majdi, one of the male forensic pathologists, or by some old-fashioned investigating of her own: eavesdropping and “borrowing” the reports that never managed to circulate to her desk. She had a few reports in her arms right now, but they’d turned out to be duds.

She did know that the investigators still hadn’t identified any of the women. They were mostly immigrants: Filipinas, Sri Lankans, Indonesians, most in their early twenties. All of their faces had been torn apart, and there were no fingerprints. The facial-reconstruction specialists had just produced some sketches, and these were what Katya was after.

As the men started coming through the door, she drew to the side. She didn’t want to go up to her lab and sit in front of a machine for the rest of the day. She wanted to interview people, scour the streets for potential witnesses, do all of the things that would most contribute right now and that these men were gearing up to do, or doing easily, without worrying about what it would mean for their virtue. But she couldn’t interview people. Maybe they would find it improper to talk to a woman. She would have to have a male chaperone. She would have to have some authority to force them to talk. She could always shove her way through the door, but there were more subtle obstacles than a door. There were gateways in the mind, blind alleys and narrow passages, labyrinths that made up whole cities of thought, whole
worlds from which people would never make an exit, surrounded as they were by heavy stone walls from the era of the Rashidun Caliphate.

She went to the end of the hallway, dropped the files in Zahrani’s box, and went straight downstairs to the medical examiner’s office. There were two entrances to the lower floor of the building—one for men and one for women. She took the appropriate door and wound her way to the front of the building, where she found Adara in the female autopsy room.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” Adara said. “Put on some gloves and come over.”

Katya did as she was told and braced herself to look at the five bodies lined up on stretchers against the wall.

“They originally numbered the victims in the sequence in which they were found, but it turns out that was haphazard, and now they want to renumber them according to the chronology of their deaths, which makes this one the most recent.” Adara motioned with a needle to the chest she was currently stitching closed. “They just brought her in this morning.”

“How long has she been dead?”

“It’s difficult to say, but no more than six months.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Katya said. “I’ve just been running blood samples and looking at the photos of their faces.”

“Well, their faces pretty much tell the whole story. Every one of them was shot through the back of the head at point-blank range. Bullet exit wounds damaged most of the faces, but it’s still possible to see some facial characteristics.” She motioned to the woman on the table. “What else I can tell you is that she was between twenty and twenty-five years old. There is a broken tibia, a broken femur, no evidence of rape. And then, of course, her hands.”

Katya looked at the woman’s arms and nearly fell over. The hands were missing—both of them. That explained why there were no fingerprints.

“They’re all like that,” Adara said.

“All?”

“Yes. Each one was cut off with a single stroke after the victim was killed.” Adara’s hands were making rough work of the stitching. She threw down the needle, went to the sink, and threw up.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “Pregnant.”

“Oh. Congratulations.”

Adara wiped her mouth and rinsed it with some water before coming back to the table.

“Do they still have their feet?” Katya asked.

“Yes.”

“I know the investigators have just gotten some facial-reconstruction sketches,” Katya said. “They’re planning on showing them to the consulates.”

“And you think…?”

“That that’s going to take a few years. The consulates won’t know anything. Look how bad they are with the living.”

“Well, yes,” Adara said. “I think they’re right to presume that most of these women were foreign laborers, probably housemaids.”

The biggest shock to the department was the possibility that one person had done this, that one person, over the course of many years, had been silently killing women and no one had noticed. Katya had already begun assembling missing-persons files, but it was likely that these women had never been reported missing. Their employers probably assumed that their housemaids had run off, like many of them did, in search of a better job or to get away from an abusive situation. The housemaid wouldn’t want to be found—she might be sent to prison.

It was possible, too, that whoever killed these women had hired them as housemaids himself. That he kept them in seclusion, tortured them slowly, one at a time, before killing them. That from the very moment these women entered the country, no one but the killer knew they existed.

“What do you know about serial killers?” Adara asked.

Katya shook her head. “Not much.”

“Well, I just heard that they’re bringing in a man from the American FBI, someone who specializes in serial killers.”

“That seems excessive,” Katya said. “I mean, we’ve had them before.”

Adara looked at the bodies lined against the wall. “I guess they figure that this one is different. A new breed, perhaps. He’s been working for at least ten years. Chief Riyadh is ashamed. Everyone is feeling humiliated. They didn’t know this was happening. They’re ten years late. It took the police four years to track down that serial killer in Yanbu. Riyadh’s not going to let this case last that long.”

On her way back to the women’s lab, Katya stopped at Majdi’s office, but he was on the phone, and ministry agents were milling about. She quickly ducked back into the corridor and took off down the hall. Just this week the religious establishment had issued a fatwa against female cashiers, saying it was sinful for women to work in public positions where they might come into contact with men. It might have become yet another ridiculous fatwa that Saudis would allow themselves to feel guilty about but would roundly ignore, except that the grand mufti in charge of validating the fatwa actually extended its reach by banning women not only from cashier positions but from every other kind of job that would bring them into contact with men. The first line of battle on these things was in government positions, and especially those in law enforcement. She hoped the king’s brothers or the king himself might do something to overturn it, but until then all the women in the lab were holding their breath.

I
t was only to be expected that at the worst possible moment, his son’s life would implode. Zaki’s marriage had been a disaster from the beginning. Ibrahim had watched the pressure build for three grueling months. Even the shocking appearance of nineteen dead bodies was not enough to alter this inevitable motion toward the deep, dark, inward-sucking force of his failed family.

His favorite son, Zaki. Ibrahim sat in the courtroom and listened as the boy tried to explain himself to the judge once again. He had made a mistake. It was all too easy when you didn’t know the bride before you married her. They—both of them—were just asking for a divorce.

The judge made no sign that he’d heard but something in his eyes told Ibrahim that he wasn’t buying it, that he heard men say this sort of thing all the time. But what was Zaki supposed to say? That he had never meant to marry a woman like Saffanah: righteous, religious, praying five times a day, and asking him to take her to Mecca once a week? The judge would kick him out of the courtroom for his disrespect to Islam.

The way Zaki told it, when he woke in the morning, he’d find his robe, his
‘iqal
, and his
ghutra
neatly laid out on the bed. And socks—she always put a pair beside the robe, on the off chance that he was one of those idiots who actually wore them. In the kitchen, he’d find his breakfast on the table, his coffee poured and sugared, his bread fresh from the oven. After breakfast, he’d find
his wallet and keys on the table by the front door. He would only see Saffanah once he’d climbed into his car and looked back at the apartment. She’d be standing behind the half-shuttered window looking out at the street. At least he assumed it was her behind the burqa; there was no one else at home. He had no idea what she did all day. She was too pious to own a cell phone. She said they were tools of moral ruination. When he came home in the evenings, his dinner was waiting for him. His prayer mat was laid out with a clean change of clothes. She did such a good job of taking care of him while the whole time refusing to give him the one thing a husband expected. At night, in the bedroom, she wouldn’t touch him. He had never seen her naked. He knew it was his right to demand it, but he didn’t want to force her. In fact, he wasn’t sure he wanted it at all.

Just a few days after the wedding, even before Zaki had started to complain about it, Ibrahim had sussed out the situation. Though Saffanah was never in his way, her distance, silence, and pitch-perfect obedience were going to start getting in the way.

“This,” Zaki had shouted one night, “is why I hate religion!”

“Don’t say that,” Ibrahim said, shocked. “She is not Islam. She is not even a good version of Islam.”

They had already told the judge that they hadn’t consummated the marriage and that Saffanah was still a virgin. Delicately, Zaki had suggested that a doctor could confirm it. Saffanah’s father, Jibril, had shot out of his chair, shouting in protest. The judge had quieted him with a wave of his hand and then turned to Zaki with a look of deep skepticism.

“But it’s true!” Zaki said.

Jibril was quick to respond. He argued that it didn’t matter what had happened in the bedroom. Saffanah had been married for three months now. No man was going to believe she was a virgin, even if she was. Ibrahim hated to admit that the bastard had a point. It was going to be difficult for Saffanah to remarry.

She was sitting on the other side of him. Not a single piece of skin was showing anywhere on her body; her burqa was an impenetrable slab of black, and she was wearing socks and gloves. But her posture said everything. She slunk down in her chair, arms curled around her torso, head bowed. Saffanah—“pearl.” She was awkward, clumsy, painfully self-conscious. Her face was misshapen, lumpy like bread dough. Nothing glimmering. Pearl-like only in that she had become the hidden wound in Zaki’s soft interior.