Kingdom of Strangers (34 page)

He set a folder on the table and looked down at Ubaid.

“No matter what the judges eventually decide about the rape charges,” Mu’tazz said, “they’re going to give you a lighter sentence if it looks like you’ve been cooperating with us.

“We know you were linked to a woman named Sabria Gampon. We know she was blackmailing you. She’s been missing for
over three weeks and, as you know, Undercover is anxious to find her.”

Ubaid was staring stubbornly at the one-way mirror.

“We think you might have some idea what happened to her.” Mu’tazz was now circling Ubaid’s seat, studying him from every angle. “If you know anything, we’d appreciate hearing it now.”

“I know nothing.”

With a speed that startled Katya, Mu’tazz smacked Ubaid on the back of the head. It humiliated him; you could tell from the fierce blush creeping up his cheeks. Mu’tazz continued pacing behind him. “What did you say?”

“I know nothing,” Ubaid said.

Mu’tazz smacked him again, harder this time. It knocked Ubaid’s head halfway down to the table.

“What did you say?”

Ubaid was quiet.

Smack
! Mu’tazz hit him harder.
Smack
! Each time Ubaid raised his head, he looked more humiliated. There were tears in his eyes from the sting of each blow.

“Did you say you know where to find Sabria Gampon?”

“No, I—”
Smack
!

“I don’t know!”

Mu’tazz’s face was expressionless. He even looked a little bored, as if he’d done this before, knew how it would evolve, and didn’t much care what came of it.

Smack-smack
!

Katya suddenly felt scared. Why had no one else come into the viewing room? People must have known this was going to happen. She probably shouldn’t have been there herself, just in case someone started asking questions later. This was how it happened: the torture of men was surrounded by complicit silence. And she found that, as much as she wanted to see Ubaid suffer, in reality she was horrified by it, and by the cold apathy on Mu’tazz’s face.

Mu’tazz liberated the camel whip. He took a step back from his victim and said, “What do you have to say about Sabria Gampon?”

Ubaid shook his head in despair.

Crack
! The whip tore across his back. Ubaid cried out in pain. His face was horrible to see.

“What do you have to say?”

“Nothing!”

Crack
!
Crack! Crack
!

“Please stop! I don’t know anything about her!” Those were the final words Katya heard before rushing out of the room.

Katya spent the rest of the morning working quietly in the lab, riddled with feelings of fear and guilt. She kept telling herself that Ubaid deserved to be punished. That Mu’tazz had punished him—under a general conspiracy of silence, including her own—because everyone knew that the law was never going to do so properly. But she couldn’t stop seeing the apathy on Mu’tazz’s face as he struck another blow. She had seen men strike each other before. She had even been struck herself, in that same interrogation room during an interview. But Mu’tazz’s expression had suggested an utter lack of feeling, and frankly, it had opened a pit of fear inside her. The Angel case was his now, and as much as she wanted to find this killer, she did not want to interact with Mu’tazz.

It was obvious that Mu’tazz was trying to keep her out of the case. He had not only moved her out of the situation room but he had also taken back all of the solved-case files. What was left was useless: two small boxes of unsolved cases from the mid-1990s. Another blow was struck when her boss, Zainab, came into the lab and cautioned Katya about the new situation.

“They’re really cracking down,” she said. “So we can’t let
anything get behind schedule. They’ve threatened to fire some of the lab workers if we do, and I have the feeling that you’re at the top of their list.”

Katya wanted to say how ridiculous it was. They were still waiting for DNA test results, but most of the evidence from the Angel case had been processed already or was being handled by the men downstairs. The work in the lab had trickled to barely nothing, and they’d started working on the backlog of evidence from other cases.

In frustration, she went downstairs to the forensics lab, where she found Majdi and Osama going over some evidence. She had worked with Osama on a previous case and knew him to be the sort of liberal-minded man who wouldn’t find it inappropriate that she was working on the Angel killings.

“Hello,” Majdi said, making an effort to smile. It relieved her. For the past three weeks, he’d been so stressed he could barely look up from his work when she entered the room.

Osama looked disheartened. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“I just came to see what was happening with the Angel case,” she said.

Both men sighed in frustration.
“Nothing,”
Osama said. “Nothing is going on.”

“What happened to the suspect?”

Majdi shook his head. “It turns out that the blood and hair we found on the inside of his Red Crescent van was from a male. Then we discovered that the van had been sold because it had been in an accident. One of the paramedics had hit his head on the wall when the van turned over, and apparently Hajar had just never bothered to clean it.”

Osama leaned against the desk. “There was nothing in the van that connected Hajar to any of the murders.”

“Or in the taxi,” Majdi went on. “We went over every inch of his cab. The problem with taxis is that they have too many hairs and
samples. So far, not a single strand matches any of the victims. And it doesn’t look like Hajar cleaned it—he doesn’t clean anything.”

“Did they let him go?” Katya asked.

“No, not yet,” Osama said. “Mu’tazz hasn’t made the decision. He’s in charge now.”

“I know,” Katya said. “What do you think he’ll do next?”

“I’m pretty sure he’ll do what he usually does,” Osama replied. “He’ll think about it for a while. He’s a pretty slow mover.”

Majdi said rather defensively, “Some people are like that.”

“You’re not,” Osama said.

“No, but I respect people who take the time to think about what’s right. Sometimes it’s not obvious.”

“Well, I think you’re wrong,” Osama said. “He needs to face the fact that we’ve reached a dead end. And the sooner he realizes that, the sooner this case will move forward.”

On Wednesday, a man came into the lab and introduced himself as Jalal Taleb, the lawyer representing Ibrahim Zahrani. Because of the curious looks she got from her lab mates, Katya took him into the hallway to talk.

“Ibrahim asked me to come here today,” Taleb said, “to look for some files that he had left in his office. I couldn’t find them. I’ve been told by the chief of Homicide that Ibrahim’s office was cleaned out when he was arrested and that all of his files were put into boxes and sent down to Records for sorting. I went down to Records, and they were unable to give me any information about the files.”

“Which files does he want?” Katya asked.

“They were old case files from Undercover that all had some relation to Sabria Gampon. Ibrahim thinks it’s possible she may have known the other two men on the videotapes—or at least learned about them—from her work in Undercover. He was eager to look at the cases again.”

“Has he talked to his brother about this?”

“Yes, it was his brother who had sent him the files in the first place and who told him yesterday that the files had not yet been returned to Undercover.”

“So they’re still here,” Katya said.

“Apparently so.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

“Ibrahim said that if I was unable to track down the files in his office, I ought to come to you and explain the situation. It’s possible that the records were turned over to another inspector in the department by accident. Ibrahim said he’d put them in the same drawer as the files he was keeping on the serial-killer case. So perhaps those files are in someone’s office here in Homicide.”

Before Katya could ask her next question, Taleb raised his hand and said, “What do you know about Ibrahim’s case so far?”

“You mean the charges of adultery?”

“Yes.”

“Very little,” she said. “Why?”

Taleb sighed. “Things have taken a bad turn.” He proceeded to explain that, thanks to a court order, Ibrahim had been forced to clarify his relationship to Sabria. And he had done the only thing he could do in light of the evidence being presented against him: he had declared that he was officially, although secretly, married to her. He said they had signed a legal certificate called a
misyar
, a marriage document that was presigned by a sheikh. Inappropriate though it was, it was not illegal.

Ibrahim had also stated in court that they had married quietly so his first wife wouldn’t find out. If that could be shown to be true, then the worst he’d face was a lawsuit from his in-laws. His wife would file for divorce because he had married someone else without telling her. (Although their own marriage contract, written twenty-odd years ago, had said nothing about whether or not he was required to notify her of his plans to take a second wife.)
Unfortunately, Ibrahim was unable to procure the paperwork to prove that he was actually married to Sabria. She had had the paperwork in her purse when she went missing, he said, and he had no idea what had become of it.

“But at that point,” Taleb said, “someone in Undercover pointed out that Sabria was already married to a man by the name of Halifi and that the two of them had never divorced. As you know, the law is pretty flexible about divorce—for example, sometimes it’s done privately and not made official—so this investigator found Halifi, who told them that yes, he was still married to Sabria as far as he knew. We have tried to discredit his statement on the grounds that the police found him high on heroin, but his testimony was taken by the court nonetheless.”

“This is horrible,” Katya said.

“Yes, and it gets worse. At my suggestion, Ibrahim then countered that Sabria had been forced into the marriage, and it had been abusive. After leaving, she hadn’t seen Halifi in five years. The judge seemed to think this didn’t matter. A marriage is a marriage. As long as they hadn’t got divorced, she was still Halifi’s wife, thus making Ibrahim an adulterer even if he was genuinely married to her.”

“So let me guess,” Katya said, “everyone’s saying that Sabria lied to both of them.”

“Exactly,” Taleb replied. “The judge assumed that Halifi and Ibrahim might be telling the truth and that Sabria lied to both of them. In other words, she married Ibrahim without telling him about Halifi. Now, I’ve let the situation stand, because it serves my client, but he’s absolutely panicked about it. He has been since the beginning. It took quite a bit of work to convince him that this was the only way he could save his own neck and that Sabria, who is missing, has a lot less to worry about than he does. But he’s more afraid than ever that the police are going to find her and charge her with adultery. No matter how the situation plays out, she’s going to be found guilty of one crime or another.”

“And that’s why he wanted you to come to me,” Katya said. “We have to find her before the police do.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Taleb said. “He trusts you more than anyone else in the department. You’ve done a great deal to help find Sabria, and you seem to care what happens to her. He feels very strongly that one of the men from the videos had something to do with her disappearance. His brother has kept him updated on the situation with Ubaid, and at this point, the police aren’t ruling him out, but they’re not inclined to think that Ibrahim was the cause of her disappearance, since he was actively looking for her.”

“I agree that we should look for those other men,” Katya said. “But what exactly does Ibrahim expect me to do? Go pry in the chief’s office?”

Taleb pursed his lips. “I don’t know that he had any specific plan in mind, just the idea that when you want something, you often manage to get it.”

Katya’s first decision was a spontaneous one: she took a cab back to Briman Women’s Prison. If anyone would know more about the men on the tape, it was Carmelita Rizal.

Miss Rizal was once again kind enough to meet with her. They sat in the same meeting room, this time without Rizal’s son, who was playing in the nursery. Rizal was supposed to be in a ceramics class. Her tunic was spotted with paint, and she smelled like wet clay.

When Katya explained Ibrahim’s legal decisions and the fact that the police were now searching for Sabria so that they could charge her with adultery, Rizal became tense.

“Have you seen the videos yourself ?” Katya asked.

Rizal shook her head. “No. Sabria asked me to keep the password to the site for exactly this kind of situation. But I never saw the footage. She wasn’t going to bring it into a prison, believe me!”

“I need you to tell me everything you know about the people involved,” Katya said. “It’s really important that I find Sabria before the police do.”

“I don’t see how I can help you,” Rizal replied.

“Would you mind looking at the videos now, to see if you recognize anyone?”

Rizal shuddered and shut her eyes.

“It may be our only way to find Sabria,” Katya said.

Reluctantly, Rizal held out her hand. Katya gave her the phone and waited, watching as Rizal’s face grew red, the muscles in her jaw tensing under the strain of clenched teeth. During the second segment, she blurted: “Oh my God, that’s Jessica!”

“Jessica?”

“Yes.” Rizal looked stunned. “Jessica Camerone. She was a friend of ours.”

Katya took notes. “Was?”

“Well, we lost track of her a while ago. I did, at least.”

“Did Sabria not mention her in relation to this?”

“No, not about this.”

“And you’re sure it’s her?” Katya asked.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“How did you know her?”

“We all worked for the same employer. Halifi.”

“Jessica was also abused by him?”

Rizal nodded. “She disappeared before Sabria did. We were all so messed up back then. It was only later that Sabria found her. She’d been telling me all about Jessica’s new life. I didn’t know she was part of this.”