Kingdom of Strangers (31 page)

Daher was not in the situation room. He didn’t have an office, only an informal desk in one of the side rooms behind the whiteboards. The desk was empty when Katya peeked in. It was nine in the morning; the place should have been teeming with meetings and rearrangements now that Mu’tazz had taken charge, but only two young officers sat in a cubicle, toying with their cell phones and looking glum. They ignored her.

She went back to the lab and found Charlie Becker waiting outside the door.

“I heard all about what happened,” Charlie said. “Chief Riyadh just pulled me into his office and explained that Mu’tazz is in charge of the investigation now.”

“I need to speak to Daher,” Katya said. “Have you seen him? It’s about Inspector Zahrani.”

“No,” Charlie said. “But I’ll help you find him.”

Charlie led her back downstairs to Chief Riyadh’s office. She poked her head around the door, and the chief looked up from his desk. “Yes, Dr. Becker.” His voice sounded pinched.

“I’m looking for Lieutenant Daher,” she said. “He had some information for me.”

“I believe he hasn’t come in yet.”

They went back to the main hallway. Charlie headed for the front entrance. There was a security door there that most people used to enter the building. They stood behind it and waited.

Men came in, casting curious glances at them but politely looking away from Charlie’s uncovered hair. Fifteen minutes later, Daher arrived with two officers.

“Lieutenant Daher,” Charlie said, “we need to speak to you.”

He was surprised. The other men left awkwardly as Charlie touched Daher’s arm. He cast a disparaging glance at her.

“We need your help,” Charlie said. “It’s about Inspector Zahrani.”

“What about him?”

Charlie motioned to Katya to explain in Arabic.

“Zahrani was arrested last night,” Katya said. “He’s being charged with adultery.”

“I know.” Daher’s face went pale. “What do you want?”

Katya waited for the two men to step out of earshot. “I need to get access to the Briman women’s prison,” she whispered. “I need to speak to one of the inmates there. She knows something very important about what happened to the woman Zahrani was supposedly seeing.”

“What?” he said fiercely, stepping a little closer. “How do you know anything about this?”

“Zahrani knew this woman was missing. They worked together in Undercover. He asked me to do some investigating because she’d worked in a women’s mall and he couldn’t go there himself.” She realized suddenly how feeble this sounded. Ibrahim was conducting a secret investigation? While the Angel case was going on? And he hadn’t told his most trusted officer?

“He never said anything about this to me,” Daher said.

“Can you help me get into the Briman prison or not?”

“No,” he said. “And if you’re smart, you’ll go upstairs to your lab and get back to work before Mu’tazz finds you wasting your time down here—or he may just decide to fire you.”

Giving Charlie a stiff nod, he walked away.

The police car pulled up in front of Ibrahim’s building. None of the neighbors were out, but a few veiled women were talking down the street.

He spotted his brother-in-law’s car parked by the front door. It was a large, white four-by-four with red trim and a dented rear fender. Jamila’s brother, Rahman, was a miserable soul whose single purpose in life was upholding the honor of his family—and that included his sister. The sight of the car made Ibrahim realize how stupid he had been to agree to come back here. This was a prize Rahman would treasure: the wicked sinner returning home in disgrace to face his scorned wife. He would probably have been safer staying at the station.

He had no idea what his family had been told. He wanted to ask Hamida but would have been mortified to hear the truth in front of the other men.

Once they’d all climbed out of the car, Hamida put her arm in his and they went into the building. At least the police hadn’t handcuffed him. The officers followed quietly. He wasn’t sure what he was going to find, but halfway up the stairs, his legs began shaking. Hamida stopped beside him.

He couldn’t focus. All he could think of was a single phrase, far too painful to articulate:
Do they know
? He checked Hamida, but she was looking condescendingly at the officers, who had stopped a few steps beneath them.

Of course they know
, he thought.
How could they not
?

One of the doors opened on the landing above and Aqmar came out. When he saw Ibrahim, his expression said everything.

You’ve disappointed us
.

“Auntie,” Aqmar said, giving a smile.
“Ahlan wa’sahlan.”

She left Ibrahim then, moved past him to greet Aqmar and give him a meaningful look. Two runners passing a torch. She continued upstairs to Jamila’s lair.

Aqmar couldn’t meet his father’s gaze. “You’ll stay with me,” he said.

“I’d better go up and speak to your mother,” Ibrahim replied.

“Uncle Rahman’s up there,” Aqmar said.

“Then I’ll talk to him too.”

“They’re talking about chopping off your head.”

Their eyes met, and Ibrahim saw his son’s fear.

“All right,” he said, motioning Aqmar into the apartment. “Then we wait.”

V
erily, We have created all things in proportion
.

According to Colonel Sa’ud, that was what the delinquent had written in blood back in 1989. It had been bothering Nayir. Sa’ud had quoted the phrase as being
We have created all things in order
. But he should have said
proportion
, because that was what was written in the Quran. Once they left the colonel’s house, Nayir had looked at the photographs from the file the colonel had given them. And indeed, the killer had written
order
. He had misquoted the Quran, not to mention perverted Islam in general, but he had also shown something crucial about himself.

Order
.

Nayir had been having strangely unorthodox thoughts. He told himself that this was no doubt normal for a man deeply stressed by an upcoming wedding. He was thinking about God’s will. The Quran was clear, again and again, that nothing happens that is not a part of God’s will. The obvious question always followed: How could you explain evil? Why would God let a serial killer occur?

In whatever form He will, doth He put thee together
.

And the answer most imams would give you was that God had chosen to let some people stray from the path of good.

We broke them up into sections on this earth… some that are righteous and some that are the opposite
.

But that wasn’t really an answer. It was simply a logical extension of the idea that God was all-powerful.
Why
had He chosen to
let some people stray? The only answer Nayir could come up with these days was that God had never been interested in creating a perfect world because He preferred its imperfections. It was much more interesting. But how could He let something like this come into being? Why, for that matter, did God put up with the devil?

And yet this killer, who took pleasure in ripping away a person’s safety, honor, and, finally, her life in the most grotesque way, was preoccupied with order.

He pulled to the curb in front of the station and saw Katya standing in a thin slice of shade made by the building’s concrete awning. Her face was showing. It looked pained.

She got into the Rover. “Thanks for coming,” she said.

“It’s no problem. Where are we going?”

“You’re not going to like it,” she said. “I need to go to the Briman women’s prison. I can show you how to get there.”

Prison
? he thought. Some part of him still insisted on believing that she could be a police officer who sat at a desk, wrote reports, and had coffee with other female officers, without ever leaving the station. He didn’t like the other images that crashed the party: Katya riding in a car with a male officer all day, Katya putting on body armor and loading a gun, Katya sitting across from a brutal killer in an interrogation room. Katya facing down the devil by herself.

Relax
, he told himself. They didn’t let female officers own guns or drive cars or even ride bicycles, so what kind of trouble was she really going to get into?

“Is this about the serial-killer case?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s about something else.”

He waited, but she was fishing in her purse.

“You look a little stressed,” he said. She stopped fishing. “Would you like to stop for some coffee?”

She looked at him wearily. “No, thanks.”

Was he being paranoid? Every time he’d seen her, she’d been
more and more anxious, and he couldn’t help thinking that it was about the wedding. That perhaps she was having second thoughts.

“How are things going on the case?” he asked.

“They’ve got one suspect in custody.” She looked as if she were going to say more but then stopped herself.

“Did you find out if Mu’tazz was really hiding the information from the chief investigator?”

“Yes, he was.”

Her clipped answers were making him more nervous by the second. “And…?”

She sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”

A few minutes later they arrived at the prison. “Would you mind waiting here?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“Thanks.” And with that, she was out the door.

You’ll have to forgive me, we’re redecorating some of the rooms.” The prison head was a woman named Latifah Matar. She was short, compact, all swift movement, self-assurance, and a sensible, confident manner. She reminded Katya of long-ago grade-school teachers, women as comfortable being punitive as they were exposing their tender sides. There was a large splash of gray paint on Matar’s forearm; it had smeared onto her cloak, and she was now attempting to scrub it clean with a wet paper towel.

“Good enough,” she said, rolling down her sleeve and motioning Katya briskly out the door. “Come with me.”

Once Katya had explained that she worked in Homicide and was there about a minor forensics matter on one of their old cases, she had had no trouble getting permission to speak to one of the prisoners. In fact, Matar had welcomed the opportunity for a prisoner to interact with a woman “who had her life together.” At a security station they encountered a female prison guard whose
name tag read
WARDA
. She was over six feet tall and built square enough to pass as a man. She nodded phlegmatically as Matar led Katya through the gate.

The corridor was full of wonders. On the left was a giant studio littered with easels, palettes, and dirty smocks, walled in by large paintings of flowers, machinery, and strange humanlike forms. There was a reading room there, with books and tables where women could write. On the right they encountered a beauty studio. Through the window in the door Katya saw a row of empty hair dryers and six women painting nails and cutting hair.

“I didn’t know you had a salon,” she said.

Matar seemed to find her reactions vaguely childish. “Yes,” she said. “We believe it’s important to give the women skills they can use when they get released.”

Katya was now doubly impressed.

“I tell the ministry all the time that you can’t put a woman back into society unless she can take care of herself,” Matar said. “Most of these women need rehabilitation. They’ve been neglected. They have no education. And frankly, work keeps them out of all kinds of trouble. Aside from the salon, and the literacy and art classes, we run a whole nurses’ training school here as well.”

Suddenly the wail of a baby broke through the air.

“And of course there’s the nursery.” They had stopped at a windowless door. “This is where we’ll find Miss Rizal. I’m going to ask you to wait here.”

Katya nodded mutely.

She wondered if whoever organized this place hadn’t read the sign out front stating that this was a prison.

Shortly, the door opened and Matar came back out. “Miss Rizal will be happy to talk to you,” she said.

“Oh,” Katya said. “Well, that’s very nice of her.”

“Miss Hijazi,” Matar said sharply, “we like to give our women
a sense of responsibility. Most of these women have made moral mistakes. They’re not defective, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them. If they believe that about themselves, then it’s only because someone else made a mess of their heads. So we try to teach them to respect themselves and others.”

“Yes,
sa’eeda
,” she said sheepishly. She hadn’t meant the comment to be sarcastic.

“Very good. Now, let me take you to the interview room.”

Mu’tazz would have giggled gleefully to see it: Ibrahim locked in his son’s sitting room with the sounds of his wife’s wailing coming through the ceiling. The imprisonment was just as strict as it had been at the interrogation facility. He was not allowed to use a cell phone. Anyone who came into the house was searched. Poor Constance was so intimidated by the guards at her front and back doors that she refused to leave the apartment. Aqmar, on the other hand, had left and not returned. Ibrahim felt ruined.

It was just before
dhuhr
prayer. He was sitting on the sofa, listlessly watching Al-Jazeera, when he heard a noise outside the front door. The guard was saying something. Ibrahim looked through the peephole and saw Saffanah in the hallway. She was standing a mere foot from the guard, her head tilted slightly down and to the left, like an animal indicating its intention to move in one direction.

“No one is allowed in or out unless they’ve been searched,” the guard said for what must have been the third time, judging from the strains of annoyance in his voice. Yet Saffanah inched closer. The guard was trying to make it plain that she was not allowed inside because there was no way he was going to pat down a woman, and Saffanah was making it equally plain that she was heading into Aqmar’s apartment and that there was absolutely
no way she would let a strange man touch her. She wouldn’t even speak to the man. A pat-down would be unthinkable.

Ibrahim opened the door. The guard turned. And Saffanah darted into the apartment.