Kingdom of Strangers (26 page)

The boy swallowed, got up, and left the small room. Katya stood at the window staring out at a waiting room notable for its emptiness. No tables or shelves. Two chairs in a far corner. The records were stored somewhere behind the locked door to her left.

Finally the manager appeared.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

She handed him two of the solved-case files. “These files were requested for the Angel case for the specific purpose of comparing full-body shots of the victims with the current case. Unfortunately, there are no full-body shots in the files. Could these be copies of the originals?”

The manager frowned and flipped through the files. “No, they’re not copies.”

“The forensics photographers would have taken full-body shots of these victims back in 1989, would they not?” she asked.

“Yes, they would have. And you’re right, they’re not here.” He shut the files and passed them back to her. His face hardened. “You’ll have to request a review.”

“A review?”

“Yes. Specifically, your boss has to approve and request a review and send the forms down to our office. Once we receive the forms, we’ll look into the matter.”

“How long will that take?”

“We’ll get to it as soon as we can.”

“And how long is that?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say.”

“You realize this is an urgent matter,” she said, making an effort to soften her tone.

“I understand,” he replied. “The sooner you can get me those forms, the faster this gets done.”

Aggravated, she turned and left.

Ibrahim found Mu’tazz in his office. It was late afternoon, still sunny outside, but the office had no windows, and the lamp was glowing at his desk. Mu’tazz was focused so intently on his reading that he didn’t notice Ibrahim in the doorway, and when he did, he shut the folder.

“Masa’ al-khayr,”
Ibrahim said. Mu’tazz didn’t reply. Ibrahim laid a file on the desk and explained about the case of the dismembered hand that Katya had found earlier that day.

Mu’tazz opened the file, took a quick look, and shut it again. “We’ve had body-part cases,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

“How many have you had?”

“I don’t keep count.”

“But you’ve had others?”

“Yes. A leg once. An arm.”

“I never heard about any of them,” Ibrahim said.

“That’s because you didn’t work here.”

“They may be relevant to our serial-killer investigation,” Ibrahim said. “So I’ll tell you what. You pull the files for those cases and put them on my desk by tomorrow morning, and I won’t report you for obstructing my investigation.”

Mu’tazz stared at him like a dumb animal.

Ibrahim turned to leave but stopped in the doorway. “By the way, I’ve authorized a review of all the case files from 1988 and 1989. It seems that none of them contain full-body shots of the victims. It would appear that the photographs were removed from the files.”

“Well, that tends to happen,” Mu’tazz said. “It’s called decency.”

“Destroying evidence is about as indecent as you can get in a records room.”

“Not if the case has been solved,” Mu’tazz replied.

Ibrahim left before he could lose his temper. He went back to his office, poured a hot cup of tea from the electric kettle, and tried to forget about Mu’tazz, but it was too late. He’d been caught in the man’s orbit. Resentful, inept, using religion as a passport to gain respect from the higher-ups, even as the higher-ups saw the falsity of it. He had heard whispers that Mu’tazz had never been accepted by his peers because he was odd. That was enough. Men always needed weaklings to remind them of their power. There was indeed something pathetic about the man—and, like all things that looked innocent and weak, he could be dangerous. At what point did a man give up his dream of fitting in and begin to plot against those who rejected him?

Ibrahim opened the folder on his desk, the one he’d bribed Chief Riyadh’s secretary to procure. It was the work history of Lieutenant Colonel Yasser Mu’tazz.

It was no surprise that Mu’tazz’s work history was mediocre. He was thorough and persistent only when it was required, and—as best as Ibrahim could judge from the reports—he wasn’t the sort to trust his instincts, if he even had them. His reports were about as conventional as they could get.

It was also no surprise that Mu’tazz remained the least respected of the officers in the department. The reviews his superiors had written about him over the years pointed delicately to the fact that he had never made much of an effort to fit in and that the other men found him difficult to relate to. As a result, he had been passed over for promotion four times. None of this had had any apparent effect on Mu’tazz’s performance. He continued to work quietly and halfheartedly, no doubt still blindly hoping that someday someone would give him his due.

There was no indication in the files that the man was excessively devout or that he was the type who would dare to break into the records room and systematically censor all of the department’s solved murder cases that involved pictures of naked women. Ibrahim hoped to catch some subtle whiff of Mu’tazz’s personality, at least enough to judge whether Mu’tazz was devious and perverted enough to do something like that. Instead, the thing that stood out in the files was the pure beauty of Mu’tazz’s penmanship. It was humbling to compare it to his own scrambled writing. Could you hate a man whose hand wrote such consistently elegant and symmetrical letters? The calligraphy pointed to something much finer in Mu’tazz than he realized, a striving for purity beneath the laziness that was fouling his work life.

A
fter a quick stop at Chamelle Plaza, where for the second time Katya failed to meet Sabria’s friend, they were in the car again, shooting down the freeway’s fast lane. Nayir was watching closely for the hazards there—drivers cutting in without signaling, bored young men pulling whatever stunts they could think of, hanging from car doors, their feet skimming asphalt. The worst, in Katya’s opinion, were the cars of young men who pulled so close beside you that they’d take off your side mirrors if you weren’t quick enough. They only did it when there was a woman in the car, her window was open, and it looked like they might have a chance to toss onto her lap a weighted slip of paper containing the vital ingredient to any man’s future: a cell phone number where the woman could reach him, should she find him attractive at 120 kph from the chest up. Katya had been hit by these nuggets before. With Nayir, she kept the windows shut.

Nayir, who didn’t believe in using the air-conditioning, probably for reasons of borrowed Bedouin purity, obligingly turned it up when she was in the car, almost to the point of freezing. During the last month she’d been in his car twice and both times had to ask him to turn it down. She imagined her nipples protruding exuberantly through the thin fabrics of her shirt and cloak—a horror, should he notice. Nayir’s gaze was well managed, but that didn’t stop the eye from seeing.

It wasn’t getting any easier to be alone with him. They should be eagerly discussing their wedding plans, but they had already
agreed to the details. Now the quiet in the car was heavy with worry and awkward glances. Katya’s thoughts were consuming her. She worked ten to twelve hours a day, even weekends, with barely enough time to do the shopping, cooking, or laundry that her father still couldn’t be bothered to do, so much did it offend his manhood. The house was a mess. Ayman would do the dishes once a month, if forced, but for the most part he cleverly avoided Katya’s father, who was the only one capable of putting him to work.

What free time she had had mostly been spent hunting down Sabria, processing evidence from her apartment, and scrambling to hide the evidence that might implicate Ibrahim. She was still concerned with tracking down Sabria’s friend at Chamelle. And although she was grateful that she was working on the Angel case from the comfort of her mews in the situation room, she had not been relieved of her other responsibilities in the lab. She was still in charge of coordinating the work of the four female technicians, who were, by a generous estimation, suffering from the incompetence and lack of motivation that went hand in hand with a job that promised no advancement.

While this mental cacophony was reaching its crescendo, Katya heard the lone strains of self-doubt crying from the distance: she was not fit to be a wife and mother. She and Nayir had already discussed that they would live with her father until they found a suitable apartment of their own, his boat being too small for the two of them. So the marriage was effectively adding the burden of another person to her already frazzled home life. Even once the chaos died down at work, she would still be putting in nine-hour shifts every day. She would probably be sleeping less at night. She might even become pregnant. She tried not to believe that this would ruin her career, but sometimes the thought terrified her.

A series of wedding stores had brought her face-to-face with young brides—pretty, sweet, cherubic things made even more
beautiful by the electric mix of fear and excitement in their faces. They gave off the promise that they’d do anything for their husbands. They didn’t have jobs. They’d hardly finished school. They were children who were ready to plunge into lives where their husbands’ needs came first and nothing else mattered. By comparison, Katya felt like an outlier, one of those women she’d read about in the occasional newspaper article glorifying the Saudi woman’s push for independence by showcasing a successful businesswoman or philanthropist.
Look at this rare specimen who has enough energy to be married, have six kids, and a full-time career
. She had often thought that her outlier status might be acceptable to a liberal man—apparently there were some—but was uniquely unsuited to a traditional man like Nayir. And it was only a matter of time before he found that out.

She had admitted to herself, just the night before, that she might have made a mistake in saying yes to this marriage proposal. It was a crushing realization. At least she still had the chance to stop it before it got any further. Yet of all the horrors she could imagine perpetrating, disappointing Nayir ranked among the highest. It was now a matter of choosing which disappointment would hurt him less. Last night, she had sat by the phone and pondered her options. End it now, a gunshot wound of disappointment. Don’t end it now, and bleed him slowly for the next few years. And find yourself boxed in, overworked, dreams slipping through the cracks of a fractured life.

Instead, she had called him and asked for a ride.

Now they arrived at the home of Hussain Sa’ud, the name that was stamped on the back of the photograph of the dismembered hand. They got out and stood facing an ugly house. It was modeled on a Bavarian castle, with sunken windows, brick turrets, and a front door that looked more like a drawbridge. The house itself was too small to capture any of a castle’s grandeur. The whole building was painted a blinding white, offset with light
blue roof tiles. It reminded Katya of the notoriously tacky Disneyland-castle house on Iskandareya Street.

Nayir knocked. A few minutes later, a girl no older than six answered the door. Katya introduced herself and asked to speak to Hussain, and the girl went tearing off into the darkened house shouting for her grandfather. Two young boys poked their heads out from a room where a television was flickering, the sounds of a video game blaring. A woman dashed across the hallway holding a scarf over her head. They waited while cool air billowed out the doorway.

An eternity seemed to pass before Hussain came to the door. He was a tall man, old but energetic, with a thinning yet still handsome face. He shouted at someone to refresh his tea in the garden then turned his attention to Nayir and Katya. As he came into the light, Katya saw that his eyes were green.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

Preempting Nayir, Katya introduced herself. “I was hoping to talk to you about a photograph.”

“A photograph?” he asked.

She fished it from her shoulder bag and handed it to him. He took it and smiled. “Ah yes. This is from one of my unsolved cases.” He flipped the photograph over and saw his stamp in the corner. He smiled wistfully. “I used to stamp everything,” he said. “This was before people became terrified of their addresses being known. Back when the city felt safe.”

“You said this was one of your cases,” Katya said. “You’re an investigator?”

He looked taken aback. “Yes, I was an investigator. This was my case. Where did you get this?”

“From the chief inspector at the Central Precinct. The file stated that the investigator in charge of the case was Detective Yasser Mu’tazz.”

“Oh, Mu’tazz was just a small piece of the puzzle,” Sa’ud said, smiling. “Come in, come in. We’ll get you some tea.”

Retired Colonel Sa’ud led them through a sequence of rooms that grew more and more untidy as they progressed to the garden at the back of the house. Here was an arbor of grapevines providing shade, a sitting room of sorts on a concrete patio littered with ornate floor cushions and small settees. The air was cool. Three large pipes led from the house and draped over the arbor, blowing cold air down into the space. Outdoor AC. The ripe smell of
shisha
wafted around them. They were invited to sit. Hussain lowered himself slowly and slid back into his spot, a series of cushions that looked to have permanently molded to his preferred position: lying on his left side within arm’s reach of the tea set, the hookah rope, and a facedown leather-bound book.

Katya sat beside Nayir on one of the cushions and wondered how long it would take Sa’ud to realize that she had no importance in the department, that Nayir was not a cop, and that Sa’ud didn’t have to tell them anything.

But even before the tea was served, Sa’ud made it clear that he considered them a welcome audience. “You didn’t know I was in Homicide for fifteen years,” he mused. “I am seventy-five now, if my mother is to be believed. They didn’t always do birth certificates back then. I’m from Mecca, but my work brought me to Jeddah and I’ve always preferred it here, Allah forgive me.”