by Chris Culver
“Any other questions?” asked Baker. No one else had anything, so he nodded and looked to the six supervisory agents in the room. “Okay, then. You guys know what to do. Do your jobs and get everyone home safely. Let’s roll.”
Chapter 8
Nassir dropped me off in front of our mosque, and I immediately got in my car. Jacob Ganim lived near Broadripple Park on the city’s northeast side of town. It was a middle-class neighborhood full of bungalows built in the thirties and forties on tree-lined streets. I had always liked that part of the city.
I parked about a block from his house and grabbed a pair of polypropylene gloves from the evidence collection kit in my trunk. Ganim owned a single-story bungalow with a big front porch and elaborate flower beds full of hostas and other shade plants. The yard was trimmed and neat, so someone was caring for the house while he was away. A faded red baby swing hung from a low-hanging limb on a tree out front. He had a family, evidently. Hopefully someone would talk to me.
I walked up the asphalt driveway to the front door and knocked hard. The air smelled like freshly cut grass. In the distance, a lawnmower droned. I waited for twenty or thirty seconds before knocking again and listening for voices from inside.
Nobody came to the door, so I peered through the front window at a cozy living room with a couch, a loveseat, and a coffee table. Despite his having a family, none of the pillows on the couch were out of place, the books on the coffee table were precisely stacked atop one another, and there were no toys on the floor. It looked like a home that had been staged for sale.
I knocked hard again and then watched through the window to see whether anyone was coming. Nothing inside moved, though, so I followed the driveway down the side of the home to the back. None of the doors or windows had visible sensors on them for an alarm system. Even more important than that, the neighbors all had single-story homes, none of which provided a vantage over Ganim’s privacy fence. I was good to go.
I snapped on my gloves and took out my lock pick set from the plastic holder in my wallet. If this had been a normal homicide investigation, I would have secured a warrant for the victim’s house and searched it without a problem. According to all official records, though, Jacob Ganim was still alive. That wouldn’t change until Havelock got his head out of his ass and let me do my job. Based on all I had seen of the man, that could take a while. This job was off the books.
I picked the deadbolt on his rear door and stepped inside. The air smelled stale, and the room was warm. The back door led directly into a modern, clean kitchen with stainless steel appliances, stark white cabinets, and gray granite counters. A thin layer of dust covered everything.
I slipped out of the kitchen and into the hallway that connected the front and rear of the house. The decor was clean and modern. The oak hardwood floors creaked under my weight. I popped my head into rooms off the hallway, first into a bathroom and then into a bedroom with a toddler bed. Dust covered the flat surfaces in both rooms.
I followed the front hallway past another small branching hallway that led to two additional bedrooms and then to the front living room. It looked just as it had from the front porch, only now I could see pictures that hung on the walls. I had seen pictures of Ganim’s body, but I hadn’t seen pictures of him alive before. He was a light-skinned Arab man with straight black hair, dark eyes, and slightly inset cheeks. In nearly every picture, he held a little girl who looked just like him. They looked happy. I snapped a picture of one of those pictures with my cell phone.
A woman accompanied the two of them in many pictures. She had blonde hair, green eyes, and pale skin. She and the little girl had the same nose, although that little girl had clearly gotten her olive skin tone from her father. Whether the blonde woman was his wife or girlfriend, I didn’t know. Based on the dust covering everything in the house, clearly neither she nor the girl lived here.
Though I had gotten a better picture of who Ganim was while walking through the house, nothing told me why he was dead. Maybe Havelock was right. Maybe I did need to focus on Michael Najam, Ganim’s undercover alter ego.
Before leaving, I went back to the main hallway and started opening doors I hadn’t yet tried. One opened to a linen closet, but the second opened to a stairwell into an unfinished basement. I couldn’t find a light switch, so I took out my cell phone and held it in front of me like a torch as I descended.
The basement walls were bare concrete. Casement windows along the ceiling let in pools of light that did little to alleviate the gloom. It smelled just slightly damp. I flicked a light switch at the foot of the steps, and six bare-bulb light fixtures immediately bathed the room in harsh white light. Where the rooms upstairs looked like something in a magazine, the basement looked like a teenager’s hangout. On the far end of the room, there was a threadbare rug over the concrete floor, a desk pushed against the wall, a bright orange sofa, and a coffee table. There was a beer bottle on the coffee table and an ashtray on the desk.
More interesting than any of that, there was a corkboard on an easel near one wall. I walked toward it and caught a whiff of marijuana as I did. Ganim had the remnants of a joint in the ashtray and a small Ziploc bag full of weed in the desk’s bottom right drawer. In addition, there was an empty pill container in the trash can. The label said it was Vicodin 10/300. This guy was a walking pharmacy.
I put the pill container back in the garbage and took out my cell phone to snap pictures of everything down there. Then I looked at the corkboard. There were dozens of pictures, each of which was numbered. A few were taken at spots around Indianapolis, but most had been shot outside a familiar two-story motel. There was a man and at least one woman in hijab in every picture. I didn’t remember the man’s name, but he was the imam of a small mosque on the east side of town and had a seat on Indianapolis’s Interfaith Council. I didn’t remember seeing any of the women before.
I took pictures of the board and then looked around for a legend that would explain what I was looking at. I found it on the rug beneath the coffee table.
1. Fatima Jaffari
2. Milana al-Amin
3. Aisha Shalhoub
The list went on, but they were all names of women, presumably those in the pictures. He had six names on the list, although some of the women were in multiple pictures. I went back to the corkboard and took pictures of each individual picture in case I had to reference them later. Then I took a step back.
Before becoming a detective, I had spent a couple of years as a patrol officer. In that time, I had broken up fights at just about every dive bar in town. I had also been to more than my share of seedy hotels. I recognized this one from the tattered orange awning over the office. It was on the southeast side of town near the Marion County Fairgrounds. At one time, hookers used to hang out in its lobby and ply their services to truckers who stopped by for the night.
I didn’t know who these ladies were, but Ganim watched and photographed them for a reason. He was studying them—stalking them, practically. This was an investigation, but I doubted it made it to any report that went to the FBI. More than that, it had nothing to do with Nassir and the men at his camp.
More and more, I wondered what game Ganim was actually playing.
I stared at the pictures for another moment before my cell phone rang. I almost picked it up without thinking, but then I stopped myself.
I had dumped my actual cell phone into a storm drain that morning. By now, it had probably floated to the White River or the Geist Reservoir. Nobody knew the number on this phone except Special Agent Havelock—and now Nassir. I didn’t expect a call from either of those men, though.
I hesitated and then reached into my suit coat for the phone. According to the caller ID, it was my sister. I furrowed my brow before answering.
“Hey, Rana,” I said. “How’d you get this number?”
My sister’s voice, normally strong and confident, trembled as she responded.
“Please get out of that house, Ashraf.”
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I blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice on the edge of tears. “There’s a man here. He’s got a gun. He told me to call you on this number.”
A cold shot of adrenaline passed through me. The basement around me disappeared.
“Is he still there?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Hand him the phone.”
Nothing happened for a moment, but then someone bobbled the phone, and my sister’s voice came back on.
“He won’t talk to you. Get out of the house, or he’ll kill me.”
“Did he say that?”
It took Rana a five count before she responded. When she did, her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Yes.”
“Give him the phone. I want to talk to him directly.”
“He won’t talk to you,” she said, her voice nearing hysterics. “He’s got a gun to my head, Ashraf. Please.”
“All right,” I said, standing. “I’m leaving now. Ask him what he wants.”
Rana paused. I heard her say something, and I thought I heard a voice respond, but I couldn’t be sure. Then she came back on the phone. Her voice was shaky.
“He said that you’re already giving him what he wants. In exchange, he’ll leave here shortly.”
Her voice trailed off just as I ran out the back door.
“Tell me you’re all right, Rana,” I said.
I could practically hear the tears in her voice when she spoke.
“He says that if you go to the police, he’ll kill Hannah and the kids.”
My heart thudded against my breastbone, and I could feel waves of cold sweat begin to form on my brow.
“Tell him I understand.”
Rana hung up, and I sprinted to my car, my stomach churning. When I took this case, I had a voice in my mind telling me Kevin Havelock had held back on me, that he hadn’t told me the whole truth. Like an idiot, I ignored it because I thought I could trust him. I didn’t plan to make that mistake again. When I reached my car, I jumped inside, looked over my shoulder, and floored it out of there.
Along the way, I took my phone out and dialed Havelock. He answered after three rings, but I spoke before he could say anything.
“Havelock, we need to talk.”
“You sound angry,” he said. “Why do you sound angry?”
“Ask me again in a few hours. In the meantime, I need you to put a strike team together.”
“You found out who killed Michael Najam?”
I gritted my teeth before speaking. “No. The guy who killed Michael Najam found my sister. Get a team together. We’re taking him down. And send a car to my house. He threatened my wife and kids.”
Chapter 9
I got to Rana’s neighborhood a few minutes later and parked about a block away from her cul-de-sac. I wanted to rush onto her street and kick her door down, but I didn’t know who I’d be going up against in that house or what he was capable of. He wasn’t just some average guy off the street, though. He must have had Jacob Ganim’s house under surveillance. Maybe he had even installed a silent alarm.
So I sat and waited outside, gripping my steering wheel hard enough that my knuckles turned white. The more I sat, the angrier I got. Aside from Nassir, my wife, and Kevin Havelock, no one should have known that number. Somehow, this guy did. And not only did he know the number, he knew my family. This never should have happened. There should have been safeguards in place.
About ten minutes after I arrived, a full-sized black SUV pulled up behind me. Havelock was in the driver’s seat, and he rolled his window down as I approached his car.
“I asked for a team,” I said.
“Your sister’s alone,” said Havelock, stepping out. “A helicopter from Homeland Security buzzed over the house with an infrared camera.”
“Fine,” I said, already turning and walking. My sister lived in an old Arts and Crafts home built when the twentieth century was still new. Over the years, she and Nassir had spent a small fortune restoring the home to its original state. In the process, they turned a drafty, dilapidated mansion into a comfortable modern home with accurate historical features. I wished their daughter had gotten to see it finished.
As I stepped onto the porch, I noticed the oak front door was open a crack. I reached to my ankle holster for my firearm and found Havelock behind me unholstering his own weapon.
“You sure she’s the only one in there?” I asked.
“Aerial scan indicated only one person was inside.”
Of course that didn’t mean much. That person could have been my sister, but it just as easily could have been a bad guy with an assault weapon. I kept my pistol pointed at the ground and pushed the door open with my foot.
“Rana?” I called. “It’s your brother.”
Immediately I heard light footsteps upstairs. Havelock and I stepped into the foyer. The home’s woodwork had a rich patina, and comfortable reproduction pieces of period furniture decorated the front room. My sister must have been in her bedroom because it took her a moment to come down the stairs. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were puffy, but she didn’t look hurt.
Rana was nine years older than me. My father died before he even knew my mother was pregnant with me, leaving my mother to raise two children alone. My mom worked two jobs to keep my sister and I clothed and fed, which meant she wasn’t around a lot when we were young. That left Rana to take care of me after school. She cooked, she cleaned, and she wiped my nose when I fell. She even learned to forge my mom’s signature on school forms so I could go on field trips and other school events. She was as good a sister as anyone could ask for, and it hurt to see her upset.
“Are you alone?” I asked. She nodded. Havelock started to put his weapon away, but I kept mine out.
“I’m going to check the house,” I whispered. My sister shut her eyes and shook her head. She wore a white, long-sleeved blouse and black pencil skirt, but she hadn’t yet put on her makeup.
Rana rarely wore hijab. She was still a devout woman, but she argued that if men could dress modestly without covering their heads, so could she. A lot of Muslims—men and women—criticized her for going out without her head covered, but I admired her for it. Rana was strong enough to look graceful and elegant while weathering the misdirected criticism of her peers. I hoped my own daughter would grow up to have that kind of strength.
“There’s no one here, Ashraf,” she said. “He left. I’m fine. You don’t need to play hero.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “He’s gone. If he weren’t, I’d tell you.”
I nodded and slipped my firearm into the holster on my ankle.
“What happened?” I asked.
Rana started to say something, but then she stopped and closed her eyes as she drew in deep breaths. She tried to keep it from showing, but she was terrified. I softened my voice.
“He’s gone,” I said. “He’s not going to hurt you.”
“No, he won’t,” she said, opening her eyes. She swallowed and then looked to Havelock. “I was in my room getting ready for an appointment with my attorney when somebody knocked on the door. He wore a brown uniform, and he was carrying a package, so I thought he worked for UPS—"
“Was he driving a UPS truck?” I asked, interrupting her.
“You always interrupt me, Ashraf. Even when we were kids. You asked me to tell you what happened, and I am.”
“I don’t always interrupt you. It’s an important question.”
She took a breath and then crossed her arms while shaking her head. “Fine. No. I didn’t see a truck, but I thought he had parked up the street and dropped off packages for multiple houses. They do that.”
“Have you seen any unfamiliar cars on the street lately?” I asked.
“There are always unfamiliar cars on the street. Across the street, Beth can’t keep a housekeeper to save her life, so w
e have a new car there at least every other week. Down the street, Melanie sleeps with a new personal trainer every time she goes to the gym, so there’s always someone new there. The man next door is a psychiatrist in private practice, and he’s started meeting clients in his home office. I don’t even know if that’s legal, but there are always cars there. And then Kathy—”
“I got the picture,” I said, interrupting her. “You didn’t see a new car.”
“I was talking, Ashraf,” she said. “That’s twice you’ve interrupted me. How do you expect me to answer your questions if you keep interrupting me?”
I started to tell her I was just doing my job, but Havelock cleared his throat, getting my attention. He looked from her to me.
“Why don’t I question Mrs. Hadad from here on out, Lieutenant? It might save us some time.”
“Sure, fine,” I said, taking a step back.
Havelock took over the questioning. According to Rana, a man pretending to be a delivery person had knocked on the door. When she opened it, he handed her a box, which she took. He then pointed a gun at her and told her to take a step back. It was a smart move, really. By giving her a box, he both distracted her while he took out his gun and tied up her hands momentarily to prevent her from fighting back. I had the feeling this guy had done that before.
She didn’t recognize the intruder, but she said he had black hair, olive colored skin, and dark eyes. He was approximately thirty-five to forty years old, a little under six feet tall, and of a medium build. When she finished answering our questions, she asked to be alone for a few minutes, so Havelock and I walked to the front porch.
Once Rana closed her door, I crossed my arms and looked to the FBI agent.
“Who’s Jacob Ganim?”
“You know who he is,” said Havelock.
“No, I don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ve only been working this case for a couple of hours, and already I’ve found enough pills and weed connected to Ganim to make me suspect he might have been dealing. He’s freelancing a case, too. He had surveillance pictures of a lot of women.”
