Kingdom of Strangers (24 page)

He had the feeling that Halifi wouldn’t be there, that he was about to walk in on some lesser office of Halifi’s operations. Ibrahim was so full of rage that he had to sit in the car for five minutes and remind himself that he was only there to find Sabria, not to do anything foolish.

The front door was off its hinges. When he pushed it, it fell against the wall behind it, and he had to step over the lower half to get into the foyer. It was dark, a long passageway with two doors at the end, both of them open. There were noises inside but nothing to indicate that the residents had heard an intruder.

He entered the apartment on the right. The first room held only a sofa and a TV. The sofa had been gutted. In the second room he found Halifi. He was sitting cross-legged on an old mattress in the corner. A young woman was sitting on a cinder block beside him, taking a hit from a crack pipe. She was naked, her ass and lower back marked with red welts.

“Mahmoud Halifi,” Ibrahim said.

The woman turned. She was a migrant, probably Filipina. She blinked and looked back at Halifi, handed him the pipe, and stood up. She left the room just as a modest Muslim housewife might leave once her husband’s guests arrived. As she went past Ibrahim at the doorway, she grabbed her left breast with one hand and jiggled it happily in his direction.

Ibrahim had planned all kinds of clever tactics to get Halifi to talk, but seeing the man’s state of consciousness, he knew they were useless.

“I need to find Sabria Gampon,” he said.

Halifi didn’t look alarmed, not even when Ibrahim dragged him to his feet and threw him against the wall. When Ibrahim asked, “Where is she?” Halifi let out a surprised laugh, a choked guffaw that said
Oh yes, I remember her, that long-ago whore
. Ibrahim
delivered a punch that broke Halifi’s nose and sent him crashing into the wall, but he still didn’t seem to understand the severity of it. He simply rolled onto his stomach, climbed to his knees, and watched the blood dribble from his mouth to the cement floor. He looked up at Ibrahim.

“Where is Sabria?” Ibrahim growled, although his gut was already telegraphing that this had been a mistake, that he was wasting his time.

“How should I know?” Halifi drooled another clump of blood and sat down on his haunches. “Haven’t seen her in
years
.”

Ibrahim wanted to kill him. Even now, after all the silence that Sabria had used to bury the man, Ibrahim’s disgust and hatred were still right there. It would have been easy. Take one of the empty syringes lying on the floor and inject an air bubble the size of a
halala
into his neck. Even if the police decided to investigate the death of yet another Karantina junkie, they wouldn’t get farther down the suspect list than all the other junkies on the block. But he couldn’t risk it. There must be nothing to tie him to this man or this place.

“If she’s gone,” Halifi said, “then she ran away. That’s what she always did.”

Ibrahim kicked him to the floor and left.

O
n Monday, Katya spent her whole lunch break at Chamelle Plaza’s café. Ibrahim couldn’t risk driving her there himself, so he offered her money for a cab. Instead, she’d called Ayman, who was glad to pick her up.

She ordered a latte and sat at a table with a newspaper open in front of her. She was drawing a bit of attention sitting there alone—most women came here with friends—but that was the idea. She wanted someone to notice her. Someone to think she was odd and look at her twice, maybe pause for a good study. And she wanted that person to know something about Sabria.

It began to feel idiotic, so she got up to talk to the barista, the same young woman who had identified Sabria from the full-body shot. Her name was Amal and she recognized Katya.

“Have you found her yet?” Amal asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Katya said. “You remember seeing her with other women, right?”

“Yes.”

“Would you recognize any of the women if you saw them again?”

“Yes. In fact, one of them keeps coming in here. She sits at that table in the corner and waits, but your friend doesn’t show up. She seems disappointed.”

“Do you know her name?”

“No. But I would know her if I saw her.”

“When did you see her last?”

“This morning. She comes around ten o’clock. Maybe she’ll come tomorrow.”

“Would you tell her I have something for her?” Katya said. “It’s important.”

Katya had half of the files for the department’s unsolved murders. They were sitting in boxes on the floor behind her. Records had promised her the rest when she was ready for them. She also had all of the files for the current case—the photographs, sketches, and thin reports on the nineteen victims by various officers working under Ibrahim, plus the file for Amina al-Fouad. She’d spent so much time over the past week finagling to get her hands on these files, it was funny now to think that they had been the easiest ones to acquire.

She was unable to get access to any of the solved murder cases. Katya imagined that they were locked in cabinets in the records room. What she didn’t have to imagine—what was made plain to her from a conversation with Ibrahim—was that the real obstacle to reaching those files would be convincing Chief Riyadh that they were vital to the case. Ibrahim had briefed him on Katya’s discovery, and Riyadh had approved the temporary change in her work duties, but he had said nothing about releasing the files. Perhaps he wasn’t convinced that Katya’s theory was correct.

Then there was the technical problem: there were more solved cases than unsolved ones, and Katya and Ibrahim would have to come up with some system for selecting the ones that were most relevant. That is, if Riyadh agreed to release them. Katya knew very little about the chief, but a hunch told her he wouldn’t be offended by the suggestion that some of those old murder cases had been wrongly prosecuted. However, he might feel that all the extra work involved in assembling and sorting the files was a complete waste of time.

By Tuesday, they had set up the office space downstairs, and she plunged into the files on her desk. Every time she thought of “her desk,” she made an effort not to smile. It wasn’t actually a desk, just a large Formica table with folding legs. Around it were six standard-issue metal police chairs with ripped leather cushions, one or two usually occupied by female officers. The whole setup was surrounded with heavy black curtains, but they had two table lamps and part of one window, so there was enough light. The curtains simply blocked them from seeing anything of the room around them. It could have been a stool and a cardboard box, and she would have sat there with the same quiet pride of a falcon.

That morning, two female officers came to help read through the cases. They worked earnestly at first but had not noticed any patterns, so they had gossiped away for a few hours. Katya had previously been in awe of these women—trained officers from the police academy. She had to marshal the nerve to tell them to read the files again, and then again, however many times it took before they noticed something.

Once the women left, no one came into the purdah except Ibrahim. He was delivering a few stray files. He rapped lightly on one of the metal poles that held up the black fabric screens, a cue for whoever was inside to prepare for his entrance. Katya knew that sooner or later she would begin to feel that she had only managed to move her confinement downstairs. But there was no dampening her satisfaction yet. She had even allowed herself to fantasize about becoming a detective and having her own office—God protect her and forgive her vanity.

She spent the rest of the morning reading files but found nothing of interest. She was sitting alone in the purdah when she heard a light tap on the metal pole. The curtain parted to reveal Dr. Becker. She was carrying a box, which she set on the table.

“One shipment of solved-murder files,” she said happily. “As requested.”

“How did you get these?” Katya asked, standing up.

“I convinced Chief Riyadh that I wanted to do some work comparing murders in America with murders here.”

Katya was amazed. However, it turned out that the box contained thirty-eight case files from the late 1980s. Not as useful as she would have wished.

“I thought I’d sit with you awhile and do what I can,” Charlie said.

“I’m sorry.” Katya motioned to the papers on the table. “None of it is in English.”

“I can always look at pictures,” Charlie said.

Indeed she could. Katya drew a graph of the letters of the Arabic alphabet and asked Charlie to put aside any files where the position of a victim’s body resembled any of the letters. Charlie dug into her box and set to work eagerly, but ten minutes later, she stopped in exasperation.

“None of these files have photos,” she said.

“What?”

Charlie motioned to the ones she’d just riffled through. “No photographs in any of them. I’m getting a bad feeling about the rest.”

There were only three files with photographs, and those were partials showing a foot, a bloody arm. Katya was baffled. The department had used forensics photographers since the very advent of cameras. Why were these cases missing photographs?

“Someone took the pictures out,” she said. “We always take photographs of the victims.”

“Even of women?” Charlie asked.

“Ye-es,” Katya said uncertainly. “Even of women.” That was true now, but had it been true twenty-five years ago? She was more inclined to think that someone had nabbed the photographs in the name of decency.

Katya leafed through the files herself. Charlie was right, the
crime scene photos had been carefully neutered. They showed only a single body part or shots of the objects that were found at the scene. A gun. A bloody hammer. There were no full-body shots of the victims.

“Could this be a virtue thing?” Charlie asked.

“Maybe,” Katya replied. It certainly could have been a virtue concern. Someone like Abu-Musa could have gotten access to the records, gone through all of the female murder victims, and destroyed the photographs that showed a whole body, a face, an indecent amount of skin. In the strictest version of Islam, it was forbidden for a person to appear in a photograph. Exposing the
awrah
, the intimate parts of the body that required covering, to the camera was even more taboo.

But Katya had a cold prickling at the back of her neck. There were darker reasons for someone to excise a photograph from a case file.

I just kept asking myself, what do we really know about this guy?” Daher was repeating himself to reassure them both that his thinking was sound. “We know nothing. But what can we reasonably presume to know? Two things for sure. One, he’s got a religious hang-up. And two, he’s a nutcase. So if you put that together in the most obvious way then of course he’s going to wind up at an exorcist sooner or later. Right?”

Ibrahim nodded. “It makes sense.”

“Then why do none of these quacks have anything useful?”

“We’ve gotten some names.”

They got out of the car. They were in Kandara, just a few blocks from the Sitteen Street Bridge, about to visit their fifth exorcist of the day. Daher was probably right—and even though it didn’t look like the idea was going to turn into a viable lead, he was clever to have put it together.

Ibrahim couldn’t stop thinking of the welt on Farrah’s back, of Jamila’s smug pride. It still angered him. Even if Farrah never had another back pain in her life, he refused to accept that some quack exorcist had pulled a
djinni
from her body. He had simply delivered a placebo effect with a very ugly scar and the potential for infection. As long as the remedy remained effective, they had every reason to be grateful, except that he didn’t like his children buying into that crap, especially when it was connected to religion.

They made their way through the narrow alleys. Jeddah had a dozen big-name exorcists and probably hundreds more who performed in their basements or living rooms and whose fame was local to a neighborhood or even a street. The important thing was that the practitioners only performed
ar-ruqyah ash-shar’eeya
—Sharia incantations based on Islamic prayers. Anything else would get them a death sentence and a public beheading.

“Did you tell this guy we were coming?” Ibrahim asked.

“Yes. I made an appointment. And I told him we were cops.”

The house was modest on the outside, a simple wooden door with wooden shutters on the windows on both sides. They rang the bell and a servant let them in, leading them into a small courtyard. Thanks to a fountain and some overhanging plants, the air was cool. They sat on a pair of wooden chairs to wait. It was certainly nicer than anywhere else they’d been that day. At least the exorcist was well mannered enough to let his guests wait in the shade, even if he didn’t offer them anything to drink.

“Something’s been bothering me,” Daher said. He still had that nervous look on his face. “If you consider all of the religious stuff going on in these murders, our killer obviously has to be some kind of religious person.”

“And you’re thinking, what if he’s an imam?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“It bothers me too,” Ibrahim said. “He’s twisted something sacred, which puts him about as far from an imam as you can get.”

“I have trouble imagining it,” Daher said. “I think back on all the imams and scholars I’ve ever known, and I can’t see any of them committing murder. So I can’t see our killer as an imam, no matter how hard I try.”

Ibrahim wasn’t sure how far he could go with this conversation, but he decided, since they were on a good footing right now, to take a risk.

“Most imams are not perverts,” he said, “but whenever you take anything too far, you spoil it. Think about these imams who are completely preoccupied by virtue, so much that they can find a crime in anything. The guys who issued fatwas outlawing women eating ice cream cones in public because of the ‘connotation.’ Or the sheikh who said that it was unacceptable for a man to sit on a chair that a woman had recently vacated because her residual warmth on the seat might be arousing. Even if something like that were to happen, does the sheikh really think that pointing it out, making everyone aware of it, is going to control it or make it go away?”