Kingdom of Strangers (38 page)

Katya was amazed. “Does Mu’tazz know about this?”

“I have no idea and I don’t care,” Charlie said briskly. “I keep telling these guys that they should be looking for patterns because this killer is obviously in love with his little structures and secret messages, but you know what?” She looked up, her face red from the effort of carrying so many files. “I don’t think they really want to hear what I have to say. So I say screw it, we can do this ourselves.”

Katya smiled at her stubbornness. “I’m glad you’re here. Sit down.”

Charlie pulled up a swivel chair and sat at the side of Katya’s desk. The other women in the office cast a few curious glances their way, but Katya ignored them.

Charlie was right: all of the files contained photographs. The problem now was that there were so many of them, and each one could be viewed as one letter of the alphabet or another.

An hour later, Katya opened her file drawer and took out the
familiar bagged lunch. Charlie laughed. “Let me guess—hummus, carrots, pretzels, and cheese sticks?”

Katya laid the bag’s contents on the desk with a certain defensive pride.

“And don’t forget the apple and the Diet Coke,” Charlie said.

Katya handed her the apple. “Since we never share it, I want you to eat it today.”

“I can’t, remember? I feel guilty that
you’re
not eating it.”

“Oh yes, I forgot.”

So the apple sat between them and they split the rest.

The desk was too small and cluttered for Katya to lay out the maps of the crime scenes, so she had taped them to the side of her computer and to the narrow slice of wall space just beside it. The city map showed the location of the body parts from the Osiris case. The desert map showing the mass gravesite was a simple hexagon near a road in the wilderness. She had drawn a third hexagon on a transparency and placed it over another city map with a giant question mark printed on top. The only mark on it belonged to Amina al-Fouad’s hand.

“I wonder what the men really think of this,” Katya said, motioning to the folders that were open on the desk.

“They’re probably glad we’re doing all the grunt work,” Charlie replied; then, more seriously: “I get the feeling they think it’s possible that Amina is part of a bigger series of murders but they don’t think it’s likely, so they can’t afford to waste their time on it right now.”

“Amina al-Fouad has to be connected.”

“Now, don’t lose faith yourself,” Charlie said. “Riyadh isn’t saying that she’s not connected. The severed hands make that obvious. He’s just saying that she was a one-off, you know? He thinks there’s no bigger pattern.” Charlie motioned to the maps. “But I think you may be right, and that’s why I’m here, helping you look for that third apple.” She motioned to the maps.

“It’s a hexagon,” Katya said.

“Yes, well, if it had a stem, it would be an apple.”

Katya gave a half smile and went back to eating but something flitted at the edges of her consciousness.
Apple
. She looked at the maps hanging there. They did look like apples. Three apples.

She set down her carrot.

“What is it?” Charlie asked.

“
Ya majnoun
. I…” She spun to the computer, opened the browser, and ran a search. “The Tale of Three Apples” popped up immediately.
“Alhamdulillah!”
she cried. The Internet censors weren’t fast enough to catch every version that appeared on the Web.

It was one of the stories from
One Thousand and One Nights
. She had read it as a child. It was complicated, but she remembered the beginning well enough. The caliph Harun al-Rashid, who suffered from the worst insomnia known to man, was traveling the streets one night when he stumbled upon a fisherman who caught his fancy. He told the fisherman that he’d give him two hundred dinars in exchange for whatever he happened to catch that night. The fisherman gleefully agreed and threw out his net and came up with a monstrously large trunk. The caliph brought it back to his palace. When he opened it, he discovered the body of a woman.

As far as she remembered, the story stood alone among all of the tales. It was the only one in which a woman was killed and someone actually went out to look for her killer.

She read the story while Charlie watched with impatience. A few paragraphs into it, Katya clapped a hand to her mouth.

“What
is
it?” Charlie asked.

Katya explained about the story. “I will show you what the caliph finds in his box. Just a moment.” She turned back to the computer and found the story in English. She scanned through it until she found the right part. “Somewhere here.”

Charlie leaned over and read:

Charlie gasped. “Are you kidding me?” She read the passage again. “They cut her into nineteen pieces?”

“Yes,” Katya said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this.”

Charlie slumped back into her chair. “This changes everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he’s not just a religious fanatic anymore. We thought that nineteen meant some magic number from the Quran, remember?”

“Yes, you’re right.”

“Now it means something else. Nineteen could be a reference to this story. I mean, how many women get chopped into nineteen pieces in your folktales around here? Is this common?”

“No. I can’t think of any. In fact, this is the only murder case in the
One Thousand and One Nights
. Yes, people die, but in this story, it is due to a crime. And there is an investigator. I think it is the only story in the book like that.”

“Good Lord.” Charlie looked dumbfounded.

“This is the reference to the Osiris case,” Katya said.

“Yes.”

“I think it means that there are three apples. And we have only found two.”

Charlie nodded. “What else happens in the story?”

Each read it in her own language. It was, as Katya remembered, a bit winding and archaic. Essentially a man travels for thirty days to find three apples to please his sickly, beloved wife.
After a long saga, he kills her in jealousy and then discovers tragically that his wife had been faithful, Desdemona-like, and that he had been misled by a deceitful slave.

Katya and Charlie sat in silence for a while.

“I don’t think we should ignore the religious component completely,” Charlie said finally.

“I agree. In both of the two cases, the killer left a religious quote.”

“This just changes how we think about him,” Charlie said. “Let me ask you, is it acceptable to read the
Arabian Nights
here? I mean, how do religious people feel about this book? It is kind of racy, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it has been forbidden here.”

“It’s banned?”

Katya nodded. “We are not allowed to read it, but we do anyway. Many people are proud of it. It is part of our history. Like Shakespeare for you.”

“The religious authorities have banned it, then?”

“Yes.”

“So it doesn’t make sense that our killer would be a religious fanatic but also someone who reads the
Arabian Nights
,” Charlie said.

“No,” Katya said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Okay, here’s an idea,” Charlie said. “We don’t know who the Osiris victim was—and chances were that the Angel killer wasn’t the one who killed her. He just placed her body parts around the city. It was probably satisfying for him; it fulfilled some urge. He only started killing later. He killed the nineteen women.

“If he was in his teens or early twenties back in 1989, then he would have been about thirty when he started killing the desert victims, which fits the classic profile of a serial killer. They start in their thirties. Over the past ten years, he’s been killing women.
We can assume he’d be about forty now. That’s one piece of information we didn’t have yesterday.”

“Okay,” Katya said.

“What was the quote from the Osiris case?” Charlie asked.

“It said,
We have created all things in order
.”

Charlie nodded. “That is his fundamental preoccupation—order. I think it’s a way of controlling himself and justifying his actions. Tell me, is there anything about Islam that encourages structure?”

Katya shrugged. “It is not… it is not preoccupied with it.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “What about all your artwork? I’m thinking of elaborate mosaics and stuff. That’s very geometrical.”

“Yes, you’re right. There is also a structure to the day with the five prayers based on the movement of the sun.”

“Right,” Charlie said. “Let’s assume that he scattered the Osiris body parts because he recognized the box as a reference to the
One Thousand and One Nights
. That just means he’s relatively well educated. He knew the story. He thought he was being clever spreading the parts in an apple pattern. God, he’s probably been waiting for decades for someone to recognize it. Anyway, later, when he starts his own killings, he repeats the pattern with the victims in the desert. Only now he is really expressing himself. He’s trying to impose a certain order on the world. Not just on his victims and the way they’re buried. I think he may also be trying to impose some kind of moral order—and that’s where the religious component comes in.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s targeting mostly foreign women. If you view them through the eyes of a strict Muslim, you might argue that these women are acting inappropriately. They are living in houses, living intimately with strange men. Most of them aren’t Muslims, right? They’re from the Philippines and Sri Lanka.”

“Some of them may be Muslim,” Katya said. “But most are probably not.”

“They probably even help raise children here, don’t they? They’re having some influence on Muslim children, but they’re not Muslims and they probably don’t follow the rules of society as well as Saudi women.”

“Yes.” Katya nodded. “I see what you mean.”

“Are there any organizations here that protest the use of all these foreigners in menial-labor positions? I’m thinking that in America we have the Ku Klux Klan, which is a group of people who want society to be a certain way and who are often willing to commit racist acts to achieve their goals. These sorts of secret societies might draw people like our killer. Do you have anything like that here?”

“No.” Katya frowned. “Most people feel that these workers should be here. Saudis don’t think of work as necessary for them. It is for someone else to do.”

Charlie sighed. “Right. I think I knew that.”

“Then what about Amina?” Katya asked.

Charlie sat back. “I think we both believe the killer is writing a new message. We just don’t know what it is.”

Katya was trying to imagine what it would be. He was a madman driven by his own perverse sense of meaning. He was an executioner. An angel guarding hell. The only thing that all of his murders and the Osiris case had in common was that he was writing messages. He wasn’t just obsessed with order; his madness found its expression in words and letters. He was obviously literary—perhaps even a calligrapher. But what did it mean? That they should hunt down every artist and writer in Jeddah?

She was exasperated. The case was growing more bloated by the day, always dangling a new lead that would mean weeks of tedious work.

“Don’t give up,” Charlie said. “We’ll find him. We just need to narrow down who had access to the Osiris box the day it was stolen.”

“Yeah,” Katya said. “But it could have been anyone who was at the marina.”

“Yes.” Charlie gave a grim smile. “But chances are, it was one of the boys who were on the boat with Colonel Sa’ud.”

K
atya was wretchedly tired. Three hours of sleep the night before and even that had been broken by worries. When she did sleep, it was no reprieve, only a dark space in which her fears were allowed to proliferate. She got up before the first call to prayer and drank coffee in the car with Ayman while they were stuck in traffic, choking on the fumes of a diesel truck that they couldn’t seem to pass. She was grateful that he was quiet.

She was sitting at her desk staring dumbly at her computer when Zainab came in. Her boss was a severe and commanding woman, the sort who would never cover her face at work. The other women in the lab sometimes whispered that with a face like that, her husband didn’t have to worry that another man might snatch her away. Katya hated that they were probably right. This morning, her expression was darker than usual, furrowing her already prominent brow so that her small eyes were almost lost in the folds of skin.

Two of Katya’s lab mates had just arrived and were hanging their purses at the back of the large room and discussing their work. Zainab approached Katya’s desk.

“The department is cutting its budget,” she said in a quiet voice, “and I’m afraid they’re going to have to let you go.”

Katya stared at her. She was having trouble absorbing this news.

“I’ve managed to convince them to make this temporary, so it’s only a suspension—”

“Why?” Katya asked, her voice angrier than she’d expected.

“It’s just until they can sort out the budget.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Katya said. Her hands felt cold and she could hear her voice shaking. Inside she felt a strange numbness about it all, but her body was reacting. “I’m the head pathologist in this lab. I have seniority. Are they letting everybody go?”

Zainab frowned at her.
Please don’t make me reprimand you
. “As I said, this is just until the budget gets sorted out. Please don’t take it personally.”

But it was personal. Deeply. She watched Zainab talking, heard her mention details about the shifting of workloads. The continued discussion at the back of the room told her that her lab mates hadn’t overheard anything. But Katya was certain they would see it on her face. She stood up, pushed past Zainab, and left.