Kingdom of Strangers (39 page)

A march down the hall. The women’s restroom. No paper towels. She wiped her face on her cloak and went straight to Chief Riyadh’s office. The door was closed, the light off. Even his secretary’s desk was abandoned. It was probably too early, but the building was alive with voices laughing and elevators dinging. She went straight down to the first floor to find Majdi. Coming out of the elevator, she bumped into Adara.

“There you are,” Adara said. “I heard about the suspension.” She pulled Katya into a nook beside the water fountains. “Abu-Musa told me.”

“How does he know about it?” Katya asked. She was aware that she sounded contemptuous, but she didn’t care.

“I don’t know, but he used it to warn me. If I don’t stay in line, as he put it, I may be next.”

“Bastard.”

Adara raised an eyebrow.
Obviously
. “I suspect this wasn’t Chief Riyadh’s doing. It was probably Mu’tazz. He knows about your
involvement with the Zahrani affair and he’s dismissing you, politely, for improper behavior.”

“I’m not letting this happen,” Katya said.

Adara glanced down the hall at Mu’tazz’s office door. It was shut but a light was glowing inside. “Just put on your burqa,” she said.

Katya pushed past her. Marched off down the hall. She didn’t put on her burqa and she didn’t bother to knock on the door. She simply opened it and walked in.

Mu’tazz was sitting at his desk writing a report with a long, elegant pen. His attention to the task, his careful posture, and the apparent enjoyment he took from the work all collapsed in an instant when he looked up and saw Katya. He laid the pen down.

“I want to know why I’m being suspended,” she said.

“You’re going to have to talk to Chief Riyadh,” he replied. His voice was even. His gaze remained pinned to her face.

“No,” she replied. “He’s not here and I want to know now. This was your doing.”

He blinked and looked down at the desk. “We know you’ve been overstepping your bounds,” he said, “and not doing the work you were actually hired to do.”

“That’s bullshit.”

A faint smile was on his lips.

“I was the one who found the first pattern,” she said. “I am the one who has been looking through all the files, night and day, to find another pattern. I found out about the Osiris case when you hadn’t told Inspector Zahrani anything about it, and I now believe that the cases are connected.”

His cool expression began to slip. She explained about the connection to “The Tale of the Three Apples.”

“I don’t think the Angel killer killed the woman in the box,” she said, “but he was probably the one who dispersed her body
parts in a hexagon pattern throughout the city. He was educated enough to recognize the tale from the forbidden book, and he decided, at some later point, to make two more apples to fit the story. It shouldn’t be too hard to narrow down the suspects who were on the boat with Colonel Sa’ud that day. I know you’ve interviewed them already.”

“Last time I checked,” Mu’tazz said coldly, “you were not an investigator.”

“I would like some more time to look through all the files,” she went on. “I want to find out if there’s a third hexagon of city killings. It may have been going on for some time now, and those files are our only clue. I think figuring out this pattern is our best chance of finding Amina al-Fouad.”

“I’m sorry,” Mu’tazz said, picking up his pen. “You’re going to have to talk to Chief Riyadh.”

“I’m not leaving until we catch this killer.”

What was that look on his face? Was he grudgingly impressed? Catlike, he said, “You have two days to clear out your desk.”

Katya went upstairs with a violent, shuddering feeling in her chest. She took refuge in the women’s restroom and locked the door. She sat on a toilet, which flushed automatically every time she moved, and put her face in her hands.
Breathe
.

A pounding headache was forming. She went to the sink and splashed water on her face, wiped her face on her cloak, and marched into the hallway. She went back into the lab, sat at her desk. Opened a report on her computer. Stared at the screen. It took a few minutes for the decision to arrive, but when it did, she grabbed her purse from its hook and strode out the door.

T
he security guard at the front desk had an annoying habit of spooling out an entire formal greeting every time Mu’tazz went past. “
Salaam aleikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu
. Good to see you’re back from lunch, Lieutenant Colonel.”

Yasser Mu’tazz did not like greetings any more than he liked all the other fluff of language:
please, thank you, thanks be to God
. He didn’t bother replying to the guard; he simply strode into his office and shut the door.

He had long ago realized that he worked best alone, quietly researching away on a computer or in a library or pawing through old files in forgotten corners of records rooms. He had never liked the human component of his job. It was surprising what you could find out from a small sheaf of papers. He had become quite good at drawing conclusions about people from the barest facts. It was extremely satisfying, almost artistic.

In a similar way, you could sum up the entire emotional content of a word in the shape of the letters that formed it. Just last night he had spent two whole hours drawing the word
fitna
. It used to be a metallurgic term referring to the removal of dross, but now it meant “chaos, tribulation.” At some point it had evolved into a description of the destructive charms of a woman. It was one of those words that didn’t have spaces, where one single line flowed together, its bumps and grooves uniform. All of the dots that indicated letters were clustered on top like sprinkles on a cupcake. It was so easy to make words like that look elegant. But
it wanted destruction. He had drawn a thick, ugly word in blackest ink on white parchment. The dots looked like smallpox, the line itself a scar. He’d cut into the paper and let the ink bleed onto the desk, staining the rest of the parchment and a nearby book. And he’d left the whole thing there. His only dissatisfaction was that there was no one to appreciate his art.

After talking to Colonel Sa’ud that day three weeks ago, Mu’tazz had gone looking for the boys from the boat. He had found and interviewed all but two of them: Ali Dossari and Mohammed Wissam.

The ones he had interviewed had solid alibis for the day that Amina al-Fouad disappeared, so he had ruled them out. But it seemed Dossari and Wissam didn’t exist anymore. There was nothing on either man since the early nineties. No passports, no IDs, no driver’s licenses (of course, the last was not exactly a requirement in this country). No marriage or death certificates. The last known photos of the boys were from juvenile detention—Wissam with a small ratlike face, and Dossari with a strange melon-shaped head and a pair of flapping ears. According to the visa office, employment records showed that Wissam, who was Egyptian, had worked in Jeddah as an assistant chef in a small restaurant for three years in the late eighties. Mu’tazz managed to track down the restaurant owner and discover that Wissam had gone back to Alexandria fifteen years ago. The owner had never seen him again.

Dossari was different. He was a citizen, and although it was possible that he had also left the country, it would have shown up on police records. There was no record of him ever applying for a passport. Mu’tazz had even called the Ministry of the Interior’s secret service to beg some information. The Mabahith kept tabs on people, and maybe they had something on Dossari. Dossari could even have become a Mabahith or a Mukhabarat agent himself. But Mu’tazz’s contact at the agency came back with a frank
explanation that they had no record of the guy and that he didn’t work for them. From all of this, Mu’tazz had concluded that Dossari had gone underground and changed his name.

So he tried a different tack. He still believed that Dossari had stolen the box from the marina warehouse back in 1989. When body parts began showing up around the city, the police had gone straight for Dossari. He had been arrested in the Osiris case, but the confession seemed to have been coerced and they had not come up with enough evidence to convict him. He was eighteen at the time. Eventually, they’d let him go. Technically, they hadn’t had to, but the chief had been a merciful man.

Mu’tazz’s research into serial killers had taught him that they showed early signs of cruelty and lack of empathy and were often noted in schools and sometimes on police records for crimes like pyromania and animal abuse. And indeed, that’s why Dossari had been on the boat that day: he’d been found guilty of killing a neighbor’s donkey. But he hadn’t just killed it: he had burned half its backside with cigarettes, then cut out its eyes, cut off its ears and tail, and skinned it—all while it was still alive. Back in the eighties, most parents would have taken a boy like that straight to an exorcist. Of course he had to be purified, but he also needed a good doctor, which only the police rehabilitation program provided. He was assigned to a counselor, one Dr. Saleh.

Mu’tazz had looked for Saleh and found that he had died in a house fire in 1992.

He didn’t report any of this to Ibrahim because it wasn’t going to help anyone. He had quietly notified one of the younger men, Shaya, that he had his own ideas about the investigation and that he was searching for a kid from a twenty-year-old case. Shaya promised to keep an eye out for the name Dossari, but he hadn’t been that interested in hearing about him. Apparently the name had never come up since Shaya hadn’t gotten back to him. Mu’tazz had no idea what Ibrahim was actually doing with his time—aside
from ordering shakedowns of Sitteen and cavorting not so privately with the girls in forensics.

Ever since he’d been put in charge of the case, he’d been miserable. Now all the work of coordinating the team—and keeping fires lit under a hundred bureaucratic asses all over the city—had become his responsibility. There was no more time for thinking creatively. That was someone else’s job. They would bring their creative ideas to him, and he’d get to tell them how sharp they were and then make sure that the ideas were executed. It was all a bunch of grunt work, really. Not to mention that being at the center of attention went against all his instincts of modesty.

Riyadh had assured him that it was only temporary, so he’d agreed. He tried not to complain to anyone. He tried not to lose his temper or start secretly hating the whole office. He kept his mind focused on getting things done. If there was one thing he believed in, it was that when you set yourself on the path of righteousness, God would help. You just had to pay attention to His signs.

Majdi had given him a large photo showing an aerial view of the desert site with the women’s bodies posed in the shapes of the letters. The photo took up his entire desk, leaving only a little room for the lamp and the telephone. After Miss Hijazi’s discovery, Mu’tazz had been furious with himself. He’d spent enough time thinking about the case, looking at photographs, reading reports, that he should have noticed the pattern himself. That’s what he excelled at—seeing things on paper. But he’d missed it, dumb fool. He finally decided that the sheer depravity of such a thing would not normally have occurred to him, and he forgave himself. Then he got down to the business of studying the photos.

Two things were obvious. First, the killer thought he was an artist. One of those modern guys like Baldaccini who couldn’t just stick to canvas and ink but had to impose his artistic vision on public spaces, like roundabouts or buildings or that fountain in
the Red Sea, the one they jokingly called “the king’s bidet.” In this case, it was the desert. It put the killer in that class of self-important pricks who, unfettered, would someday start manipulating clouds to resemble phalluses, or tear down whole forests to draw women’s naked bodies. Thank God the government kept a handle on those guys.

Second, even though the message was religious and people kept saying he was a religious fanatic, clearly he was nothing of the sort. He was the opposite: an apostate. Mu’tazz would bet a whole month’s salary that this killer had given up on religion long ago. Never mind the obvious cruelty and evil of the murders; if the desert site was his canvas, then it was blasphemous for one big reason: it depicted the human form. Any rendering of the human body was treacherously close to idolatry, and therefore forbidden. It had been that way since the inception of Islam.

So they were looking for a blasphemous artist, nothing else.

A week ago he’d started making phone calls to art institutes, galleries, metalsmiths. There were no doubt plenty of blasphemous artists hiding in various crannies in the city, but there wouldn’t be that many who were self-important and twisted enough to do something blatant like this. People like that tended to want to be noticed, and he was counting on that flaw. He was trusting in God. A prayer ran through his head all hours of the day:
Praise be to Allah. He will show you His signs and you will recognize them
.

Sighing, he opened a folder and got to work.

A
mina al-Fouad’s house was a testimony to the determination of its housemaids. It was spotless, its polished stone floors and clean white furniture showing no trace at all of the children who lived there.

A housemaid met her at the door. Her face was drawn with grief, and when Katya explained that she was with the police, the woman’s eyes began to well with tears. She invited her in and took her into the main room before she excused herself for a moment.

Katya stood in the quiet space and tried to gather her thoughts before being assaulted by every last detail of Amina’s world. The killer targeted immigrant women. Amina was the exception. She was a Saudi housewife with six children and an overprotective husband who claimed that she never left the house without his permission and that when she did leave the house, she went to women-only shopping malls. If shopping for her niece’s birthday was the only time she had gone to a mall that was open to men and women, it seemed improbable that she had just happened to walk right into the killer and that he had kidnapped her on the spot. Malls were crowded places. Someone would have noticed.