Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  “I don’t know,” Ibrahim said. “You’d be surprised what people fail to notice. We’ve got men talking to the shop owners nearby. Maybe someone saw something.”

  “It would be good to get a description of our killer,” Daher said.

  “You’re already assuming this is connected to the serial-killer case?” Katya asked.

  Daher looked at her sharply. Her previous bafflement, although irritating, was at least understandable. But how dare she criticize him?

  Katya ignored him, a calculated bait. “Our serial killer never left a hand on a street before,” she said. “He buried them in a secret gravesite.”

  “Of course it’s him!” Daher said. “He’s telling us to screw off ! This is an angry shout from our man.” He motioned to the hand. “He’s saying he’s in control and that he can do whatever he likes, and there’s nothing we can do to stop him. I’m surprised. That message should be obvious.”

  Katya unzipped her duffel with an angry yank. “This could be the hand of someone who was punished for theft.”

  Daher snorted.

  “It could also be a copycat crime,” Katya said.

  “Sure,” Daher said, “except that no one knows about the bodies in the desert except us.”

  “Why couldn’t it be one of us?” Katya asked.

  Daher guffawed. “Yes, of course! And I vote for the American. She came here with her own angels of death to wreak vengeance on the terrorists.” One of the junior officers who’d been listening gave a wan smile.

  “What?” Daher asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You know what I’m going to say, right?” Daher asked.

  “Something about Charlie’s Angels?” the junior officer said.

  Daher froze. “Man, how can you make jokes at a time like this?”

  “It’s not a joke. It’s just what they’re saying.”

  “I was going to say that the first rule about serial killers—one that Dr. Charlie forgot to mention—is that they’re American. White males in their thirties. Normal-looking guys.”

  “He’s probably not American,” Katya said, standing up.

  “Oh?”

  “Someone would have noticed an American.”

  “Not if he was in an abaaya,” Daher shot back.

  She barely glanced at him as she followed Majdi out of the alley. Ibrahim motioned Daher out. He was flushed, but at least he’d managed to get in the last word.

  Stopping at the van, Katya turned to Ibrahim. “In order to establish a connection to the serial-killer case,” she said, “we’re going to have to figure out a couple of things. First, whether this hand was severed postmortem. All of the hands at the gravesite were cut off after the victims were dead. It looks like a female hand, but we have to be sure. Also, we’ll have to find out when the woman”—she looked into the purse, found the ID card—“Amina al-Fouad went missing. Or if she is missing. It could be her hand, but that needs to be checked.”

  Ibrahim was about to reply when Daher cut in with what he felt was a lame attempt at grabbing his attention.

  “Boss,” he said, “we checked the consulates for that name you gave us. The woman’s name?”

  “Mahal,” Katya said.

  Daher was startled and looked at Ibrahim as if to say How does she know?

  “She was at Sitteen with me,” Ibrahim said.

  Daher didn’t respond, but Ibrahim saw the look of betrayal in his eyes. Why had he taken Katya and not Daher to Sitteen?

  “Did you learn anything at the consulate?” he asked Daher.

  “There were no missing persons named Mahal,” Daher said in a brittle voice.

  Ibrahim saw no gloating in Katya’s face as she walked away, but he worried anyway about the feelings between her and Daher and where those particular agonies might lead.

  He’s simply not qualified,” said the voice of Yasser Mu’tazz.

  Ibrahim was standing in the hallway outside the office of Chief Riyadh, hoping to give him a briefing on the crime scene. He’d been just about to go inside when he heard the sharp tones, felt the prickly sense that Mu’tazz was talking about him.

  “Inspector Zahrani is a senior officer with over ten years’ experience in one of the roughest divisions in Jeddah.” Riyadh was standing up for him. That was a surprise. “I realize he’s never worked a serial-killer case before, but neither has anyone else in this department.”

  “I just don’t think he’s cut out for it.” Mu’tazz made no effort to soften his tone or even tack a polite sir onto the sentiment. He was clearly furious. Ibrahim knew why. Mu’tazz had worked in Homicide the longest and he had more experience than anyone, but he had no connections. His father was a peasant laborer from Yemen who had made a bit of money developing a textile business in Jeddah—but not enough money to be invited to the homes of the elite. Ibrahim’s family, although not wealthy, were Bedouin with friends in the ministry and a particularly close friendship with Princess Maddawi, one of the elder cousins of the king. When he’d decided to transfer out of Undercover, he had done the legwork but Maddawi had secured him the position.

  “I’m keeping an eye on him,” Riyadh said.

  “I saw him leave the parking garage yesterday with one of the female lab techs.”

  Ibrahim’s chest constricted.

  “I know,” Riyadh said thinly. He hadn’t liked the idea at the time, and apparently he liked it even less now. “I sanctioned that because it was necessary.”

  “Where were they going?”

  “To follow some leads on the case that required a woman’s presence.”

  “And he couldn’t take one of the female officers along?”

  “No one was available that day.”

  “One of the male officers then?”

  “I try to avoid sending a male officer to interview a woman,” Riyadh said dryly, “to avoid contradicting our virtue policy.”

  There was a rustle as Riyadh stood up, probably hoping to bring the conversation to an end. Ibrahim quickly turned and went down the hall.

  15

  Fingerprint and DNA analysis indicated that the severed hand belonged to Amina al-Fouad, the woman whose purse had been found at the scene. They also determined that the hand had been cut off while she was alive.

  Amina didn’t fit the profile: She was a Saudi housewife, age thirty-nine, who lived in the Corniche district with her husband and six children. She had never had a job outside the home, and although the family was wealthy enough to have two housemaids, Amina wasn’t much of a shopper, the favored pastime of most other women like herself. She only left the house with her husband’s explicit permission.

  “She would not have gone to Jamjoom by herself,” her husband said angrily for the fifth time.

  Ibrahim was sitting across from Mr. al-Fouad in the family’s majlis. The sofa felt as if it had never been sat on before. Everything he had seen of the house so far gave him the idea that it was a showroom for Pottery Barn. He thought of his own house, its ragged furniture and decades-old decor, and decided that he preferred his way.

  Al-Fouad was clearly upset. He had reported his wife missing seven days ago, the same day she had disappeared. Now he was struggling with the kind of shock and amazement that would have been extremely difficult to fake. Ibrahim hadn’t mentioned the serial killer. They couldn’t establish the connection for certain yet, so why make the husband worry more? What bothered Ibrahim was al-Fouad’s insistent sense of honor, which had been growing more pompous by the minute. The son Jamal had already told Daher that his mother had taken a cab by herself to Jamjoom. He said he’d had a voice-mail message from her, but he’d deleted it. Jamal was supposed to have picked her up at Jamjoom, but he didn’t make it on time. He suspected she’d left Jamjoom in a taxi as well.

  “Mr. al-Fouad,” Ibrahim said, “in order to do everything we can to find your wife, it’s essential that we know exactly where she was and what she was doing there. In cases like this, it’s important to put one’s
honor aside, because the fate of your loved one may hinge entirely on the smallest, most uncomfortable detail. You have to trust us to be discreet, and we have to trust you to tell us the absolute truth.”

  Al-Fouad wasn’t having it. He shook his head stubbornly and said once again, “She would not have gone—”

  To ensure that he didn’t explode, Ibrahim pretended to make a note on his pad. He wrote: Husband is a pompous donkey’s ass.

  “Okay,” Ibrahim said. He was angrier than he should have been and he knew his professionalism was slipping, but he didn’t care. “We also need a photo of your wife.”

  “I’m going to tell you what I already told the police: I don’t want her face all over the nightly news!” al-Fouad cried, his voice rising sharply.

  Who was this man, this throwback to barbarianism? How could he not do absolutely everything in his power to ensure that his missing wife was brought home safely? Ibrahim’s fury was boiling over. What filthy scum let his honor stand in the way of a woman’s life?

  “Unfortunately,” Ibrahim snapped, “the best chance we have of finding your wife right now involves showing her face to as many people as possible. Someone will have seen her. And that person will call us. And thanks to the kindness of our fellow Muslims, it might be possible to bring your wife back alive. But only if we can get a photo of her.”

  Al-Fouad looked as if he were going to leap off the sofa.

  Ibrahim’s next words came tumbling out with an anger much more savage than al-Fouad’s. “We also need a full-body shot of your wife.”

  “What?”

  “We need to see her whole body, preferably in a cloak, because when women are in public, sometimes they don’t show their faces, so all people see is the figure. I’ll give you five minutes to come up with these photos or I’m going to arrest you myself.”

  Al-Fouad’s face was gray and trembling. He stood up from the sofa and marched out of the room.

  Five minutes later, Ibrahim was standing outside the al-Fouads’ front door handing two photos to Daher.

  “Get these to the press,” he said. “Don’t mention the serial killer or the severed hand, just say that this woman has gone missing.”

  “Aren’t you going to clear this with Riyadh?” Daher asked.

  “Just do it.”

  Daher looked scared as he walked away. Ibrahim felt shaken. He sat down on the top step and tried very desperately not to think about Sabria and all the things he should be doing right now to find her, but it was no use pretending that his anger was all about al-Fouad.

  16

  The next few days were rough. The serial-killer case—or what had come to be referred to as the Angel case—had top priority, which meant that every significant piece of evidence, every important interview and crucial meeting, was handled by the men, and that Katya, consigned to an upstairs lab, was made to do the lowest of grunt work, once again without understanding its relationship to the case. It was merely “Get me the DNA results on this blood work” and “Tell me what kind of fiber this is” while the clothing itself remained in Majdi’s lab downstairs, and the bodies that once held the blood in question remained in the overcrowded freezer room.

  She felt like one of the grunts who had built the Pyramids, a slave shoving a gigantic stone across the desert, never seeing the great structure it was meant to build. No one had the time to stop and explain anything, least of all to a woman who worked in forensics. She had heard, indirectly from a very frazzled Majdi, that the officers were investigating every cab company in town. They had an idea that the killer might be a cabdriver, although why, she could only guess. Her single, tenuous connection to the developments of the case was Ibrahim, and he was too busy.

  She put aside a bit of time every day to process the evidence from Sabria’s apartment. This was harder than it sounded because she had to disguise it as a fictional case. At the same time, she had to appear to be working diligently on the Angel case, the only one they were allowed to be handling at the moment, and so she found herself juggling unmarked files, vigilantly watching over the lab’s machines, and even openly lying to the other lab techs, who seemed to sense that she was hiding things. In all of the evidence she’d collected at Sabria’s apartment, nothing significant had emerged. She was still waiting for the DNA results from the blood swipe she’d taken from the nail in the hallway.

  She would have given anything to have an excuse to go down to Ibrahim’s office, and once or twice she had walked past, hoping to appear casual, but he was never there, and she didn’t want to call him until she had some news. A previous Katya might have marshaled the nerve and gone down anyway, but now there were the dual hurdles of Daher having a reaction every time he saw her and this being an enormously important case—one that was still drawing envoys from the mayor’s office and the ministry itself. On top of that, getting engaged to Nayir had begun to make her paranoid about the smallest things. She wasn’t sure if it was simply that she was afraid of Nayir finding out just how much she interacted with strange men or if there was more going on inside her, some reflexive fear of the whole situation, marrying a man who was still something of a mystery, and not in a good way.

  Her father had been overjoyed when she’d told him she’d accepted the proposal. He’d gone straight out to crow about it to his friends, and before long she was receiving gifts. He would bring them home after his long nights at the café. A delicate gold bracelet from Qasim. A bag of gourmet Indian tea and a real British teapot from Awad Mawjid. An elegant, leather-bound copy of the Quran from Imam Munif. The gifts pleased her father more than anyone else, and he went around generally beaming with pride and being generous to his nephew Ayman by letting him have the car whenever he liked. It was fine to be around Abu when he was in this state, but more and more she found herself worrying about the marriage at work. What if she and Nayir were unable to reconcile their different ways? What if Nayir, so struck with love for her, didn’t really mean what he’d said: that they’d find a way to work things out? What if he turned into a beard, some old ayatollah who would never truly change his rigid ideas about the proper behavior of women? And how would all of this affect her elderly father?

  In the middle of these worries, she stumbled suddenly on the answer to her Ibrahim dilemma. She called his cell but he didn’t answer, so she left a message explaining that she needed a full-body picture of Sabria, preferably in a cloak. He could e-mail it to her or leave it on her desk. His phone cut her off before she could explain why she needed the picture, and she was afraid to call back in case he thought she was pestering him.

  Annoyed, she threw the phone back in her purse.

  It was something of a relief when Charlie Becker came into the lab, her auburn hair swinging like a flirty giggle. The other women stared at her, but Katya, whose workstation was closest to the door, stood up and said hello.

  Charlie greeted her, came up to her desk, and leaned in for a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m here for most of the day answering questions, but it’s lunchtime and I was wondering if you could tell me where I could find a safe place to eat.”

  “A safe place?” Katya said. Her English, such as it was, came from college courses and, more recently, her cousin’s large stash of banned movies. She could understand what Charlie said, even if she tended to take everything literally.

  “You know,” Charlie said, “somewhere the men won’t watch me eat.”

  “Ahh.” Katya nodded and stood up, grabbed her purse from the counter, and motioned Charlie to the door. “I know a safe place.”

  It was a thrill to leave the building, even if it was with the clumsy American who had made Katya feel both pathetically repressed and self-consciously exposed when they’d first met in the situation room. Now Katya was worried that her English would sound like something from a B movie.

  They wound up at Cilantro’s near Le Château. Charlie found it disconcerting that they had to go in through the back entrance for women and that they had to crowd into a tiny e
levator to reach the second-floor family section, where women were allowed to dine without men. Once they’d taken their seats at a quiet corner table near an ugly but modern-looking brown slate wall, Charlie let out a shivery sigh and sat back. Katya realized with some surprise that she was upset.

  “I’m sorry I don’t speak Arabic,” Charlie said. “There’s a lot I wish I could tell you right now.”

  “You can tell me in English,” Katya fumbled out.

  “Okay, well, I hope this doesn’t offend you, but how can you stand working in that place? The men are like animals!”

  Katya smiled politely. “It’s because you’re not wearing a veil.”

  “I know!” Charlie sat forward. “That’s what bothers me, frankly. I’ve seen other Western women on the streets here, and they’re not wearing veils.”

  Katya shrugged, wanting to point out that perhaps those other women had the same problem.

  “The men at the office keep asking me out,” Charlie said. “I mean, I thought this was a country preoccupied with virtue. The blatant come-ons surprise me. It’s hard to get any work done when you’ve got to field the sex stuff all the damn time. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to criticize. I’m just—I’m getting sick of it already.”

  The waiter arrived and they ordered Reuben sandwiches. Katya was beginning to wonder if she could survive a whole meal listening to this woman complain in English. She was already feeling defensive.

  “Just say no,” Katya said. “They will leave you alone.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said with a sigh. “Thank God they’re so busy hunting down the cabbie.”

  “The cabbie?”

  “The cabdriver—you know they’re looking into the cab companies?”

  Katya nodded uncertainly.

  “Have they not told you? Good Lord.” Charlie took a sip of her water. “Well, first of all, the Bedouin tracker guy told Inspector Zahrani two weeks ago that the killer used his right foot more than his left and that he probably drove a car, maybe for a living. I mean, most men drive cars, but apparently this was a significant difference. So they thought the killer could be a cabdriver, and they started investigating. Then it turns out that Amina al-Fouad probably got into a cab when she disappeared. Now they’ve amped up the investigation of cabdrivers.”