Kingdom of Strangers (25 page)

“Everyone knows those guys are nuts.”

“Everyone? Really?”

“Okay, but you know what I mean.”

“People buy into that crap all the time,” Ibrahim said with a little too much heat. “I’m just saying that there are sheikhs who have become so obsessed with virtue that they’ve turned into perverts themselves. They see sexual innuendos in the most innocent things.”

Daher was quiet, thinking.

“Maybe there’s something bigger that we have to stomach here,” Ibrahim said. “Our killer is an extreme person, but as we’re thinking about who he might be, we find we can see him in other people. Innocent people. He’s making perverts out of us.”

“Yeah. That’s exactly what it feels like.”

Just then, the servant returned with two glasses of water.

Charlie sat with her for the rest of the afternoon. As usual, Katya ate a bagged lunch, which today she shared with Charlie. A hummus sandwich, some pretzels, cheese sticks, carrots, and a Diet Coke from the refrigerator in the lab. The apple, which they couldn’t figure out how to split evenly, sat on the desk in front of them.

They hadn’t finished with the files in the boxes on the floor. So far only six of them contained crime scene photos showing full-body shots of the victims, and none of the six bodies looked unnaturally posed.

“Here’s something,” Charlie said. “Maybe.”

She passed Katya a photograph of a severed hand. Katya read the report and discovered that it was not a murder case. Twenty-one years ago, a homeless man had found a severed hand in a drainage ditch near the Kandara overpass. He had called the police, who had opened an investigation. Forensics had discovered that the victim had been alive when the hand was severed. They were uncertain, though, whether the hand had been legitimately severed.

When people were punished for theft, their hands were cut off by the city executioner, who used a smaller sword than the one he used to sever heads. The hands were then buried properly under the auspices of the Jeddah police. Occasionally, a person was given a lighter sentence in which he or she was allowed to have a doctor surgically remove the hand using anesthesia. According to the report, it was possible that the doctors did not always dispose of the hands correctly and that one of the hands found its way into the city’s drainage system. The case itself—which someone had ridiculously labeled
SALEM-I-DEK
, or “God bless your hand,” a common phrase used to praise a fine cook—seemed to be one of those files that didn’t have anywhere else to go. It wasn’t a Homicide case, but it was unsolved.

The officer in charge, Lieutenant Yasser Mu’tazz, had been thorough enough to investigate the route of the drainage pipes and to interview all the doctors whose offices may have had some connection to the pipe system. He’d found nothing unusual at any of the clinics, and none of the doctors had ever amputated a hand. He had also talked to the officers in charge of the disposal of severed hands and found their procedures exemplary. The fingerprints from the hand matched nothing in the national database anyway, and the case had been in limbo ever since.

It was odd that Mu’tazz had gone to such lengths when the hand had been found in what was essentially a runoff ditch for those two times a year when it actually rained in Jeddah. Looking at the photograph, Katya could tell that it hadn’t rained in a while. The ditch was bone-dry and covered in a thick layer of sand.

“This is odd,” Katya said. “This case is over twenty years old. What’s it doing in the recent case files?”

When Katya looked up again, Charlie’s face was grave. “I’ve found something else,” she said. She had been holding all of the photographs from the case, and she passed another one to Katya. It showed the same severed hand from a different angle. The photographer must have gotten down into the drainage ditch to take the shot. The ditch itself was about a meter wide. It looked as if the hand were crawling toward the camera.

“Look on the wall behind the hand,” Charlie said, “or rather, the side of the ditch.”

There was a blood smear there, blackened by the sun.

“Doesn’t that look like a letter to you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Katya said. It was definitely not splatter. The edges of the smear were too uniform, as if they had been painted. “But it’s impossible to tell which letter. It could be half of an
F
or a
Q
.” The camera’s scope wasn’t wide enough to capture the whole thing. She flipped the photograph over. There was a faded name and address on the bottom-right corner in an elegant script:
Hussain Sa’ud
.

They studied the rest of the photographs but none of the others showed the blood. And for all Katya knew, it could have been a smear of something else. She read through the file again. Mu’tazz made no mention of the blood at the scene. Had they taken a sample of it? Tested it for a blood-type match to the hand? Katya’s frustration competed with her distrust. It seemed odd that Mu’tazz would assume that the hand had come sailing down the ditch when it clearly hadn’t rained in a while. Odder still that there may have been blood evidence at the scene and they hadn’t collected it. She saw Charlie watching her and explained what she could about the case and Mu’tazz’s behavior.

“Maybe he was a rookie?” Charlie asked.

“What’s that?”

“A beginner.”

“Ah, perhaps,” Katya said. “But he was a lieutenant. I wonder why he hasn’t said anything about this now.”

“The case
is
twenty-odd years old,” Charlie pointed out. Seeing the look on Katya’s face, she added, “But I know what you’re going to say: It’s not every day you find a severed hand.”

Imam Abdullah Arsheedy looked like the most normal imam in the world. He had a plain face surrounded by what must have been the religious insiders’ secretly-agreed-upon respectable proportions of beard, hair, and headscarf. Only his eyes brought the face any distinction. They were slightly too small and sunken, almost ugly, but shining with curiosity.

The men sat in his office, a dark, cool room stuffed with religious textbooks. The air was heavy with dust and the smell of incense. Over tea, they exchanged pleasantries and discussed trivial things, winding their lazy way to the vital parts of the conversation. It was only when they veered into the subject of exorcism that the sheikh revealed what Ibrahim considered to be a touch of madness.

“Magic is real,” Arsheedy said plainly. “The Prophet himself—peace be upon him—said ‘the evil is a true reality.’ He was referring to the evil eye. It is accepted in the Quran that magic exists and that it has its own powers, and that those are real. What the Quran does not accept is the
use
of magic. That is forbidden.”

“And how is what you do any different than magic?” Ibrahim asked. He already knew the standard answer to the question, but he wanted to hear Arsheedy’s response.

“With the permissible methods of the Quran and Sunna, it is possible to extract magic from a person after the magic has occurred.”

The sheikh seemed to recognize that Ibrahim was skeptical. He spoke to Ibrahim alone, ignoring Daher completely, and he used the tone that a father reserves for a child when explaining common sense.

“The thing to remember,” Arsheedy went on, “is that magic only affects a person by Allah’s will. It is wrong to believe that something can happen to you and that there is some force greater than Allah and which He cannot control. Therefore, when someone is afflicted with evil magic, it makes sense that the only refuge from it is with Allah. What I do has no benefit in itself; all of its power comes from Allah.”

Ibrahim had to admit that the sheikh seemed rational enough, except for the small matter of his believing in magic. But arguing about the words of the Quran with a sheikh was never a good idea, especially if you wanted information from him.

“That’s very interesting,” Ibrahim said. “So you must see a number of people who have been afflicted by various types of magic. They may seem, on the outside, to exhibit the characteristics of schizophrenia, for example, or some other psychosis. Do you ever refer them to medical clinics?”

“Yes, occasionally,” he replied. “Although most of the supplicants come to me after medical science has failed them. They have
already tried Western drugs and therapies and those have been ineffective, so they seek direct help from Allah instead. One of the other requirements for
ar-ruqyah ash-shar’eeya
is that the supplicant be a believer and that he or she believe, as I do, that everything they are asking for is coming directly from Allah Himself.”

“That makes sense as well,” Ibrahim said. “So would you say that most of your supplicants are especially devout?”

“There are varying levels.” Arsheedy always seemed to be speaking frankly and openly, no matter what he was saying. “I think that mental disturbances can make people much more receptive to faith. They are in a state of higher need, you might say, and so faith is especially important for them. It is a way of healing the suffering they experience.”

“And what if the supplicant is not, say, possessed by a
djinni
,” Ibrahim said. “What if he has schizophrenia?”

“All suffering is a kind of evil,” the sheikh replied calmly. “And Allah is available to cure all suffering. Perhaps the cure works best in conjunction with medical science, but there are certainly cases where medicine cannot do anything and an exorcism alone has the power to relieve the spirit of its pain.” He set his teacup back on the tray, crossed his hands on his lap, and studied his guests. “Am I wrong to assume that you are here on police business?”

“No, that is correct,” Ibrahim said. He glanced at Daher, who looked the very picture of an earnest schoolboy. “We are trying to understand the pathology of a particular criminal we’ve encountered. He’s been killing women, and there are religious references in the way he is killing them.”

The sheikh nodded sternly. “I am afraid I cannot help you with pathology per se, but I can testify that when a man is truly stricken by evil—either a
djinni
or by the evil eye—he becomes capable of the most depraved acts you can imagine.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Ibrahim said. “Presumably even if those acts defile the very name of religion?”

“Especially then,” Arsheedy said. “I sometimes think that it’s the only way evil can truly express itself—that is, by distorting religion. It doesn’t surprise me that your killer is using Islam in his perversions. Evil tries to destroy that which is most sacred—and it always fails.”

There was something cold in the man’s unwavering belief. “This may seem a very odd question,” Ibrahim said, “but do you happen to have any supplicants—either now or in the past—who have lost a hand? Or who were affected by someone who lost a hand?”

Arsheedy considered this and slowly shook his head. “Nothing comes to mind,” he said. “I do have supplicants who have lost a hand, but they do not come to me for exorcism.”

“I’d like a list of those supplicants, if you don’t mind.”

The sheikh frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t simply give away names,” he said. “You understand.”

“I’m afraid I can’t simply turn the other cheek when a man practices magic in an Islamic society,” Ibrahim replied casually. The sheikh opened his mouth—no doubt to defend himself—then seemed to think better of it. He reached into his desk drawer and took out a sheet of paper and a pen.

“Do you ever get scared?” This was Daher. Despite his previous silence, his words provoked no surprise from their host.

“Yes,” Arsheedy said, glancing at Ibrahim, “it is difficult not to when confronted with evil.”

“So you think of that evil as something separate from the person himself,” Daher went on. “It must be hard to make that distinction when you’ve got someone in your office who is losing his mind, who maybe becomes violent.”

“Funny enough,” the sheikh admitted, “the violent ones don’t scare me. Usually physical violence is the purging of something, or the body’s attempt to rid itself of something wicked. The ones who truly frighten me are quiet, austere, but you can see the vast
hatred in their eyes. You can feel it, even if they do nothing. You can sense it the moment they walk into the room. Those are the ones who frighten me. It’s almost as if they have made an effort to take control of the evil themselves, and in doing so, they have bonded with it.”

Daher sat back, looking uncomfortable. Ibrahim sensed that the sheikh had something else to give them.

“There was a man once who frightened me more than the others,” Arsheedy said, setting down his pen. “He came into my office with a clinical history of anxiety and depression. His family had always treated him as if he were normal, but his parents were dead and he hadn’t married. His siblings lived in Najran, but he worked in Jeddah. I think he felt very alone. He had a job as a Red Crescent responder and he told me that he had been in the back of an ambulance one day with a person who was possessed by a
djinni
. He believed that his problems started that day, that somehow the
djinni
had passed from the first victim into him. He came to me and requested an exorcism. He didn’t seem possessed by a
djinni
, but I trusted his word, and I gave him an exorcism. It was a strangely calm affair. But the whole time I had the darkest feelings about the man. I felt that everything he told me was a lie. I can’t tell you why; it was simply a feeling. I prayed about it for months, asking for forgiveness, clarity, and mercy, but I had nightmares on and off for weeks. The man came back a few weeks later to assure me that I had successfully exorcised the spirit, but I didn’t believe him. It still bothers me now, I think because I don’t understand it.”

“What was this man’s name?” Ibrahim asked.

“Sheikh Rami Hajar.”

The Records clerk looked about fifteen years old. He greeted Katya with a nervous nod and glanced twice at the ID tag hanging
from her neck. The photo on the tag showed the same black headscarf and face he saw before him, but he seemed disbelieving anyway.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, I’d like to speak to the Records manager,” she said. “I believe evidence is missing from some of the files I’ve received.”