Quicksand (10 page)

“But he could have gotten involved after his return?”

Nora shrugged. “It occurred to me. Maybe all his concern with gang violence was a sham, and he's busy trying to pick up where Kevin left off?”

“Hmm.” Wansbrough lapsed into silence. “We would need to connect this woman somehow to the JBM for it to be a possible act of vengeance for Kylie. Does Dewayne have any siblings we don't know about?”

Nora shrugged, then jotted the question into the file.

He said, “What if I told you I think there's something about these killings that's connected.”

Nora shrugged again. “I'm just the PPD interloper.”

“Okay, PPD interloper,” he said, pulling the Suburban onto the rim of the curb that ran in front of the Cairo Café. He turned to look at her. “Then see what you can find out about all the houses in the neighborhood there. Who owns them, who inhabits them … If she was dumped there for a reason, let's see who might have been meant to see her. We can meet up Monday morning early.”

“I want to try to talk to the other hooker tomorrow,” she said, opening the car door but not yet descending.

John shrugged. “I got an e-mail last night that she's still not talking.”

“But I can try, right? Nothing says I can't try.”

“Nothing says you can't try, Nora. It's your Sunday.”

As he said these words, Ragab emerged from the Cairo Café with a plastic bag filled with to-go boxes. Nora sighed as she watched her father make his way to the driver's side of the Suburban.

John winked at her, then descended to greet him.

She watched the two men shaking hands warmly. In twenty-five years of dealing with Americans, Ragab had learned not to embrace men and kiss them on both cheeks. But she could tell he still had to remind himself.

She gathered her stuff and got out of the car as John was accepting the bag full of rice and kabob.

“Only reason I give you to-go is I know Mrs. John Wansbrough loves my cooking. Otherwise I insist you stay and eat with me,” Ragab was saying.

“You're a good man, Ragab. I don't know how to thank you,” John replied, grinning.

“You do enough, keeping my Nora safe,” Ragab said sincerely.

John nodded gravely. “I do my best,” he replied.

Nora rolled her eyes at him, and Ragab caught her. “You giving that look to John Wansbrough? Your expert FBI partner, and you just a police officer?”

John laughed loudly, winking at Nora again as he got into the Suburban. “Exactly my point, Ragab. You keep her in line, now.”

Ragab held the front door of the café as he shooed his daughter inside. “
Yalla
, learn some manners, Girl,” he was saying in an exaggerated tone so John could hear him.

Nora fantasized about a roundhouse kick that would take out both of them simultaneously, but entered the café in silence.

*   *   *

“Hey, Nora,” she
heard Ahmad call out, as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the restaurant. Her brother and father had been sitting together at the dessert bar, tasting; Amr Diab was singing over the stereo system.

It was a ritual with them. Every few months, Ragab would order in three or four new cakes, and the two of them would sit and taste. It was Ragab's concession to the fact that not all of his customers had the refined palate necessary to appreciate his konaffa or baklava. He could satisfy his sweet tooth while bonding with Ahmad, not that Ragab would ever have used the word “bonding.”

Nora just wanted to walk up the stairs and vanish, but she sank down into the chair next to Ahmad. “What's the best one so far?” she asked, trying not to sound tired or shell-shocked.

Ahmad dinged his fork a few times against a plate holding a layer cake. “This one,” he said enthusiastically. “It's
sick
.”

Nora peered at a vanilla cake with about six layers of what looked like buttercream interspersed with raspberry ganache.

Ragab rejoined the tasting session and pushed a fork in her direction, but she pushed it back.

“No cake? Nora, you aren't eating. I'm worried about you.”

“Baba, I eat all the time. But I was just snacking at work,” she lied.

Ragab tsk-tsk'd anyway. “No, you look thin. Doesn't she look thin,
ya Hammudi
?”

Ahmad made a show of looking at Nora, then grinned at her. “Hmmm—thin … dark circles under her eyes … Perhaps she's in
love
!”

Nora slapped the top of his head. “I have a
gun
, boy. When are you gonna figure that out?”

Baba chewed on a mouthful of cake. “
Ya Noora
, you know, your aunt Madiha called me last week. Her coworker at the ministry has a son who just finished medical school here in the States. In Dallas.”

“Really?” Nora said, feeling queasy. “Tell her I said, ‘
Mabrouk
, Congratulations.'”

“Sarcastic, always. He saw your picture—”

“Baba!”

He threw up his hands, without releasing his fork. “—I didn't give it to him, Aunt Madiha gave it to his mother.”

“With your permission?”

“She didn't ask me! She worries about you—”

Nora put her head on the tiled surface of the bar. “
Ya Hammudi
, please tell Baba something…”

“
Ya Baba
 … Nora has a gun,” Ahmad offered.

“Your gun doesn't scare me, girl. Not having grandchildren scares me.”

Nora rose, kissed her brother's cheek and then her father's. “I'm going upstairs,” she said. “Neither one of you is allowed to follow.”

Both were too busy chewing to respond.

*   *   *

Google Maps was
one of the most convenient and dastardly programs ever invented, as far as she could tell. Nora stayed up most of that night, printing up detailed close-ups of the alley, and she began charting the row houses and twins that clustered around it. She hated the feeling that they could be way off, that the body left on the weedy bricks was only thrown there randomly. But trying to determine who lived there was the only good direction they could go in at this point.

A total of ten homes were in eyeshot of the corpse that had been left there. Mrs. Chambers's house was one of four single-family homes, and three twins rounded out the number. Nora drew in the body's location and figured the angles relative to each home. She got current names for the owners of each place, and made a chart with whatever demographics she could locate in the municipal databases to which she had access.

The next morning she struck out early, before Baba and Ahmad had arisen.

Nora showed her badge to three separate sets of security guards, and then sat waiting for more than thirty minutes. Finally, “Jane Doe”—Nora forced herself to stop mentally referring to her as “the not-dead hooker”—was brought into the interview room of the Alternative Detention Center.

Nora regarded her curiously. In her orange jumpsuit, and with an elastic tying back her hair, she looked very different from the hysterical, mostly naked girl Nora had first seen next to a pile of meth.

The girl did not look at Nora.

Nora intercepted the guard, asking if the cuffs could be removed, but the guard shook her head. “We're used to the drugs here, but this one has an extra measure of instability somewhere in the mix. Lot of hair-pulling, self-abuse. The cuffs are as much for her own safety as for yours.”

Left on her own with Jane Doe, Nora found herself unsure of how to begin. “I'm Officer Nora Khalil,” she said. “We've been trying to find out your name, but it seems you aren't talking.”

The girl shrunk in on herself, not looking up.

Nora studied her. She realized Jane Doe was much younger than they had thought. Perhaps she was no more than sixteen, and Nora's stomach immediately began to twist anxiously. “I know we found you in a difficult situation.” Nora paused, carefully watching the girl's expression. “But I'm going to recommend you be transferred out of here, to a hospital. We can help you, if you'll let us. Get you medical help. Rehab. Help you get back on your feet…”

Nora started doubting if the girl even understood what she was saying. “You do speak English, right?” She squatted, looking up at the girl where she sat. “Right?”

Jane Doe glanced at Nora, then looked away. It seemed to Nora that the girl's whole body was trembling.

“Yes? Is that a yes?”

Silence.

Nora sighed. “We are trying to find out information about Dewayne Fulton. Can you tell me how you ended up in that loft with him and Lisa Halston?”

Silence.

Nora rose to standing again. “How about if you just tell me your name? How old you are? We can try to find your family.”

Silence.

“How about…” she backed away from Jane Doe and went to sit on the bench across from her. “How about if I just sit here with you for a little bit then. And maybe … maybe you'll talk if you feel like it?”

The girl flicked a glance at Nora again, in what she was starting to accept as acknowledgment. And so they sat.

It was very, very still; almost immediately, Nora became hyper-aware of her own breathing. Only seven minutes passed before she choked on her own silence and started chattering. “I bet the food is pretty nasty here. My dad has a restaurant, you know.”

The girl was unmoved. She would not surrender over food.

“Really good stuff,” Nora continued, undaunted. “Chicken kabob and lamb curry and these giant Greek salads with his own secret dressing. And then there's the baklava. He has an awesome baklava. Kill you straight up if you have a nut allergy.”

No reaction. Nora went on, trying to make her voice sound chatty and friendly instead of pestering. “He came from Egypt before I was born. He didn't know a thing about cooking before he came. Used to call his mother from the kitchen, asking her how to do things. When my mom moved over from Egypt to marry him, he'd call her at work.” Nora stopped and tried hard to get the girl to meet her eyes.

But Jane Doe closed her eyes as if to shut Nora out. She leaned her head against the wall. Nora sank into a sitting position in front of the girl, and remained there in silence another few minutes.

Finally she stood and fished a card out of her Windbreaker's breast pocket. She left it on the bench next to the girl. “You can ask them to call me when you change your mind. We can help you.”

Nora walked to the door and rapped on the glass, angry at herself for having come all this way without a solid idea of what to say or how to say it. The guard appeared and escorted her through the maze of hallways and back down to the lobby.

The air on 7th Street was biting. She quickly walked the single block over to the field office, determined to match Jane Doe's face to a missing persons report.

*   *   *

It was midafternoon
when she made her way back to the apartment over the Cairo Café. Ahmad was seriously angry with her.

“You have studied with me, like, not at
all
. Not even a little. What the heck, Nora? How many times did I help you train for a race? You made me ride my bike all over this city with you. Made me hurl insults at you so you'd run faster. You warped my entire childhood. And now you can't even ask me a few terms from some flash cards?”

Nora kissed his head, then sat down at the kitchen table. “I'm sorry. Forgive me. Hand over the flash cards.”

“What was so important?” he demanded.

“Nothing is more important. I'm sorry,
habibi
.
Dissimulation
.”

He put his head down on the kitchen table. “I have no idea.”

“False appearances. Pretense
.
”

He jerked his head up, still irritated with her. “Yeah, you know the worst part, is that I totally couldn't concentrate because Baba was on the phone with Aunt Madiha for like an hour this morning talking about this doctor from Dallas. Like, talking all loud the way he does.”

Nora felt queasy. “
What
about the doctor from Dallas?”

Ahmad shrugged, “I don't know, Nora. What his father does in Egypt, and where they live in Cairo and all that stuff. How many bedrooms his apartment has and what part of town
that's
in. How he feels about his wife working. If he could come here for a weekend, and where he would stay.…”

Nora shot back in her chair and took the stairs down to the restaurant by twos. As the door closed behind her, she heard Ahmad shouting, “I thought we were studying!”

*   *   *

Her father was
standing over a huge pot that bubbled with rice pudding.

“What is going on with this kid from Dallas?” she asked, working to keep her voice low. “I thought this was just some joke, that you were teasing me.”

He looked up, startled, then he frowned and went back to stirring. “I'm pretty sure when someone enters a room he or she should say,
As-salaam alaykum
. That's what I know about that.”

Nora said, “Are you really thinking I'm going to marry some man I don't know from Dallas?”

“He's from Cairo,” her father corrected calmly.

Fifteen different faces flashed before her, girlfriends saying the same sentence, voices swimming in and out of unison: “A suitor came last night for dinner…”

She searched for words she could not even formulate. She'd known this conversation was coming, known it to be inevitable, but had somehow been sure it was far off in some murky future, not now, today, here, in front of a pot of rice pudding. Her brain flailed about for words that refused to emerge in either language.

Her father spoke gently. “Nora, this is the way we marry. This is how I met your mother, God rest her beautiful soul,” he took a moment to mop at his brow, in what seemed to Nora like a purely dramatic pause. “This is what works. You know it works better than the system here—look at the divorce rate in America.” He gestured to the kitchen, as though it encompassed the entire country.