The Butcher of Casablanca

by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

  Hanash’s eyes darkened. There was only thing that could drag them away from home and ruin the holiday with their families.

  Hastening into the house, he went up to the second floor, out of earshot from the others, and rang the station. He listened, without saying a word, to the dreadful news the duty officer had to report.

  He quickly changed his clothes, extracted his gun from its hiding place in the closet, and went back down to the garden. Everyone looked stunned, as though they had been struck by a curse. Hamid looked at Manar pleadingly as though to ask for forgiveness. Manar was in a daze, thinking about the life she’d have if she married a policeman.

  Hanash had never felt as mortified as he did that morning of the first day of the feast. The body or, more precisely, the body parts were in a plastic bag that had been packed in a midsize cardboard box. That box was only three hundred steps away from the front gate of police headquarters, which was located on one of Casablanca’s largest main boulevards.

  Hanash stood glowering, arms folded helplessly in front of him. He was oblivious to forensics as they combed the ground, examined the box, took photos. In their astronaut-like costumes they looked like clowns, too clumsy to wallow through this bog of filthy murders committed by someone possessed by the devil. He stepped unsteadily toward the box and peered inside, then turned around and shouted furiously, “Did this lunatic decide to sacrifice a human instead of a sheep on this holy day?”

  He backed away from the box, a grimace of disgust on his face, and cried, “He’s challenging us! He leaves half a body right at the gate of HQ, in broad daylight on the morning of the feast. It’s a travesty!”

  A crime-scene technician came up and said, “The body’s been severed into several parts. In that box, we have the head and the hands.” He paused, wary of the detective’s reputed sting. “However, the fingers have been cut off.”

  The detective nodded.

  The technician, whose face had a sickly pallor, added, “The face has been so mutilated that its features are unidentifiable.”

  Hanash’s lips curled. “He knows our work well. He’s made sure we don’t have a shred of evidence to work with.”

  His phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and answered without bothering to check who the caller was. It was the duty officer at headquarters. “They found another box at the Boulevard Brahim Rouhani traffic circle, sir.”

  That was only about half a kilometer from where Hanash was standing. He headed over on foot.

  A policeman was guarding the box. Next to him stood an elderly man who obviously didn’t belong to the police. There weren’t enough men on duty today, it being a holiday. Most other members of the force had the day off and were gathered around feast tables.

  Hanash glanced inside the carton and saw the lower half of an adult male. It had been severed from the torso in the same nauseating way as the other victims. He stepped back, his expression a mixture of revulsion and despair. Again, the murderer had left them nothing to go on, nothing to give them hope.

  Just then, the vehicles from CID, CPD, and forensics screeched to a halt in the traffic circle and disgorged their assorted personnel. As the team from forensics got to work, the detective turned and contemplated the old man who was standing next to the police guard.

  “Who’s he?” he asked the guard.

  “He’s the guy who reported this carton. He sells cigarettes by the piece, across the street.”

  Hanash eyed the old man like a hunter who had spotted a valuable prey, and watched the man’s face turn to terror under his gaze. He opted for a courteous tone: “Please tell me what you saw. I’m the detective in charge here.”

  The old man’s face sagged wearily. He had the doleful, sunken eyes of an abandoned child, but his voice was filled with infinite venom against the man who had committed these crimes.

  “I was over there on the other side of the street. A taxi stopped right here and a man got out. I couldn’t make him out clearly. He took two cartons off the roof of the car and set them down on the pavement so that he could pay the driver. He picked up one carton—by the way he lifted it I could tell it was heavy—and headed off, leaving the other box right where it was. After he’d left, this box here began to arouse my curiosity. I thought the guy would come back to get it after delivering the first box. But he was taking such a long time. I crossed the street and sort of circled around this . . . prank of the devil. I was just curious, I swear. I didn’t intend to steal anything. May God be my witness! I stooped down and tore off the tape. When I opened the box I saw the plastic bag. As soon as I opened that, I stumbled backward and fell on my behind and started to scream. Then I got up and ran to the police station and told the policeman there what I saw.”

  Hanash was shocked by the information he’d just received. The killer didn’t own a car. He had the audacity to transport the body on the roof rack of a taxi. But still, that meant he couldn’t live too far away. Or at least not outside the city limits. He’d have to find a taxi and there wouldn’t be many around this Eid al-Adha morning.

  “Did you take down the taxi’s license plate? Did you notice what kind of car it was?”

  “No, sir. I was on the other side of the street and my eyesight’s not good.”

  “So you couldn’t see the face of the guy who took the boxes down from the taxi?”

  “No, sir. And that’s the truth, so help me God.”

  Just as Hanash was about to ask another question, he heard a field technician from forensics clearing his throat to catch his attention. Hanash turned to him.

  “Yes?”

  The technician confirmed what Hanash had already expected.

  “This carton contains the lower half of an adult male. Unfortunately, the genitalia have been amputated.”

  Another technician came over and showed Hanash a piece of folded paper with some bloodstains on it.

  “We found it at the bottom of the box, stuck between the thighs.”

  Hanash’s eyes lit up at this unexpected tidbit. “Take care of the prints, if there are any. I want the results from the lab ASAP.”

  Hanash heard his phone in his pocket just as he was about to enter the meeting room. As he’d suspected, it wasn’t the chief. Alami had been using his own sources to keep up to speed. He had been avoiding Hanash because he knew the first thing he’d hear was the detective repeating that the last homicide was different from the others, yet the police had gone ahead and pinned the whole lot on Fatma and Maasoul anyway.

  The caller was Naeema. She searched for words that she hoped would sound more sympathetic than reproachful. “The grill’s ready. I just wanted to know if you and Hamid were going to make it for lunch.”

  Hanash gave a bark of laughter. “Ask Manar if she still wants to get married to a policeman,” he said wryly.

  Naeema winced because Manar was standing right next to her. In the same wry tone, she said, “Ask her yourself. She’s right here.” When Manar refused to take the phone, Naeema added, “Why should she turn down what I accepted?”

  Keeping up the sarcasm, Hanash said, “Who’s the one who had to accept all this?”

  Softening her voice, she said, “I’m not as sorry for myself as I am for you, who was torn away from your family on the day of the feast.”

  He appreciated her effort to strengthen their bond but still, from the tone of her voice, he sensed the tears in her eyes.

  Hanash was the type of man to keep his feelings to himself. But in the past few days, as he worked up to give his consent to his daughter’s engagement, he’d begun to feel that his ideas and attitudes were changing and to regret how gruffly he’d treated his wife at times.

  As Hamid watched Hanash enter the meeting room, head bowed and lost in thought, he knew his boss was troubled and that it didn’t all have to do with work.

  The room was packed, as all officers had been ordered to report in. Hanash took his place in front of them and spoke with compassion.

  “I know that your
place—and mine—should be with our families today, on this first and holiest day of Eid al-Adha. We should be gathered around our dining tables with our loved ones, feasting on grilled meat and drinking copious amounts of tea.”

  He paused as he turned to the business at hand. “As I have believed from the start, the homicide committed by Fatma and Maasoul had no connection to the three previous ones. As we know from their testimony, Fatma and Maasoul deliberately copied the MO of the others in order to mislead us. Today, we’re looking at the fourth murder by the original perp. This time, he’s openly taunting us. He’s laughing in our faces. He brought his victim right to our doorstep. He deposited it virtually gift-wrapped at the entrance of the biggest police station in town. That was his Feast Day gift to us.”

  He observed the bitter smiles on the faces of his audience. They too were stung by the insult. He resumed, in a stern voice, “The killer is familiar with our methods, as we know. But this time, he presented us with some information. First, he took a taxi, so he might not own a car. Second, we have a witness who at least saw the killer from afar. Accordingly, we can be fairly certain that he is indeed male and that he works alone. Third, we have a taxi. If we can identify it, we have a potential witness in the driver. Fourth, forensics found a piece of paper in the second carton. They’re analyzing it at the lab as I speak. Let’s hope it yields something useful. Fifth, chief medical examiner Dr. Amrani has volunteered to try to reconstruct the face of the last victim from what’s left of it. Hopefully it will serve as a facial composite to ID the victim. Last, there’s the matter of the psychological profile of the murderer. What were his motives? Why did he carry out these murders in this particular way? Is this a serial killer driven by some thirst for revenge? Or is this a multi-victim murderer who just kills as a kind of hobby? Every team knows what it has to do. We’re in a race against the clock. The killer must have overlooked something. Our mission now is to find it.”

  The hunt for the taxicab proved a letdown. Without a license number or even a description of the car model, it was an almost impossible task. Hanash had his own views about taxi drivers when it came to the police. They never came forward with useful information because they feared constantly being dragged back to the police station to be questioned in connection with a case or to be asked to identify a culprit of some sort. Worse, they could end up being summoned to appear in court as a witness and end up losing many days of income. So they adopted an “I-know-nothing” attitude to preempt such headaches.

  Because of the unprecedented spate of homicides, Hanash had been in frequent contact with Dr. Amrani, the chief medical examiner. In fact, by now he’d spent so much time at the morgue that he found he could stay focused on the remains of the victim without feeling queasy while she discoursed on the nature of the injuries and how they were inflicted. After she’d invited him to the morgue to demonstrate how systematically the murderer had destroyed the facial features of the last victim, he was doubly impressed at her explanation of how she had begun to reconstruct the face using a type of sculpture technique, building outward from the shattered skull, aided by forensic photography and computer graphics.

  This is not to suggest that he abandoned his long-held skepticism on the value of forensic science—he continued to favor the old-fashioned gumshoe approach of tracking villains clue by clue. But he still held out hope that the forensic evidence technicians—the “FETs,” was that what they called themselves now?—would come up with something useful. Therefore, the moment they called, Hanash raced over to their premises, praying for a lead connected with that folded piece of paper they’d found in the second carton.

  The forensic graphologist was a short man in blue overalls that made him look like an automobile mechanic. Hanash had never met him before. He had never needed a handwriting expert in his previous cases. Holding the paper with a pair of tweezers and extending it toward Hanash so that he could see it, the graphologist said, “It’s torn out of a school notebook . . . a handwritten letter, unsigned.”

  He brought the letter beneath the concentrated light of a magnifying lamp and recited with a quiver of excitement in his voice:

  “To whom it may concern,

  “I avenged myself against him in this way because he exploited my harsh circumstances, destroyed my honor, and ruined my future. That is the reason for what has occurred.”

  The expert then embarked on a discourse about how useful handwriting was in character analysis. “It provides the best documentation of a person’s nervous constitution,” he said.

  He spoke confidently, as though giving Hanash a lecture. “I can tell by the rounding of the angles of certain letters and the more exaggerated loops in others that the writer is mimicking a more feminine style of writing, probably to make it seem like the letter was written by a woman. It is inconsistently done, lending further weight to the premise that the writer is actually male. Moreover, he is aggressive, introverted, and quite well educated. Note how he pressed so hard on the paper that you can see some of the letters in relief on the back. He was clearly anxious and the pen did not have enough ink.”

  The graphologist then digressed into a lengthy and abstract discourse on the spiritual aspect of writing and the art of calligraphy in Arab culture.

  Hanash closed his eyes as anger welled up. He burst out, interrupting the expert: “This letter is just a decoy. He wants to trick us into thinking the killer’s a woman! He’s doing everything he can to mock and ridicule us. He must have known how he inspired Fatma to stage a copycat crime. Now he’s taking advantage of Fatma’s crime just as she’d taken advantage of his. He’s giving her a wink of recognition.” Hanash added, as though stating the obvious, “Of course, he left no fingerprints or identifying marks on the letter.”

  At that moment, another technician appeared and, in a voice raspy from excitement, said, “Please come with me. I found something of interest on one of the cartons.”

  They hurried after him to another lab, equipped with microscopes, computer consoles, and other scientific instruments and machinery. Indicating the carton in which the torso of the last victim was found, the technician spoke, taking care to assume the appropriate scientific detachment.

  “According to our analyses, one bloodstain on this carton doesn’t match the blood type of the victim.”

  “It must be the killer’s blood,” the first technician said.

  “Pursue this matter further. You’re doing great work.”

  Hanash could hear the hollowness in his own voice as he said that. This discovery did nothing to encourage him. He was not belittling the work of the technicians or the forensics department as a whole. In his experience, however, their work was painstakingly slow. Then, in the absence of a suspect, what good was a drop of blood or a specimen of handwriting? With what could they compare them so as to yield a definitive deduction? He needed the beginning of a thread to grasp, and he needed it now so he could figure out what steps to take next. He felt like shouting at them: “You should be thinking of the woman whose handwriting the killer faked. Maybe she played a part in his life.”

  He began to review the letter in his mind. It mentioned “vengeance” outright. It talked about a motive: “exploitation” of circumstances, “harsh” position, violation of “honor.” It blamed the victim. Hanash had copied the text of the letter, and he read it over a few more times. Then, as though speaking to himself, he said, “The author of the letter is definitely male. He is introducing himself to us, telling us his motives and explaining the part the victim had to play. But the victim this time is a man and the ‘honor’ the letter speaks of refers to the killer’s honor. Could it be that the victim had betrayed the killer in some way? Had an affair with his girlfriend or wife? We know now that we’re looking at a dish whose main ingredients are vice and vengeance.”

  He put on a pair of gloves, picked up the carton in which the letter was found, and examined it closely. He turned it over and over. It was a midsize carton made of thick cardb
oard. He noticed some Latin letters and numbers affixed to the carton here and there. Taking out his notepad and pen, he copied them:

  cla – d oss ier b-t-45pes

  One of the technicians noticed what he was doing and said, “We’re still working on what those letters mean. It looks like they’re taken from different stickers and affixed randomly, in no particular order.”

  8

  Not a day went by without Hanash working long overtime hours at the station. Not a night went by without him tossing and turning in bed, fretting about the case. The murderer had intentionally left them some fragments of clues this time. He had even brought the body virtually to the door of police headquarters. It was pure audacity. But that may have been his way of saying that he was tired of killing and that he longed for the police to catch him now that he had shown how his superior intelligence could outwit them.

  In that letter he left, he offered them a rough sketch of what had driven him to such brutality: love and betrayal. Why divulge that?

  Yet, despite his generosity in giving them this information, he still took sufficient precautions to keep them off his scent. He’d left nothing that investigators could really take hold of. He chopped his victim into pieces. He savaged the face so brutally as to make any visual identification impossible. He cut off the fingers, so no fingerprints. How long did all that take him? Where did he perform these vile acts? Was he high on drugs or alcohol? Or clearheaded and alert? In his letter, in the voice of a woman betrayed, he established that he had a right to avenge himself in this manner, which was even more brutal than his previous crimes, with a mutilated face delivered to their door. How was he related to the victim? Was he a relative? A friend? Or was it just bad luck that threw the victim in his path?

  He also knew that, with every day that the killer remained at large, the case grew more impenetrable and the perpetrator grew more elusive, like a bird flying into the distance until it vanished from sight.