Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  Katya was delighted. She found herself understanding most of what Charlie said, and of course Charlie would know everything about the case. It occurred to her that she had Charlie all to herself for another hour at least.

  “It’s possible that it could be a cabdriver,” Charlie said. “That seems to be the only way a man can get access to a woman around here.”

  Katya nodded. “It is known to happen,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Women in cabs get kidnapped,” she said. She wanted to tell her about the man who came into the station last month because his wife had been abducted. He and his wife had been in a cab and the driver complained that the car wasn’t working. The driver asked the man to get out and help him push, and when he did, the driver leaped back in and drove away with the wife like some Bedouin raider from a time that should have passed into oblivion. As far as Katya knew, the wife was still missing.

  Charlie looked horrified. “How do you get around if you can’t trust cabdrivers?”

  “My cousin drives me,” Katya said. “And a friend of my father’s sometimes too.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “Can I ask you about the case?” Katya said.

  “Go ahead!” Charlie said.

  “This totem that you talk about. We think it is the hands.”

  “Right. The severed hands.”

  “What do you think it means?” Katya asked. “He keeps only some of them?”

  Charlie seemed to relax and gave her a quirky smile. “You know, nobody has asked me that yet. I mean, they’ve asked for a dozen explanations of totems, but they haven’t wanted my opinion. I’ve been thinking about it too. In general, the totem is a tangible reminder of the kill. It’s like a memento, except the killer can choose any memento. I don’t know why he only buried those three by the gravesite. The real question, I think, is, why does he cut them off ? What is the significance of the hand?”

  Katya shrugged, not certain how to explain her ideas in English.

  “Based on past experience,” Charlie went on, “I would guess that the hand is somehow related to a trauma. One of the psychological theories about fantasy is that all fantasy—but especially the sexual kind—is actually a person’s way of dealing with the effects of a trauma. Are you following?”

  “Yes.”

  “For example, one time I had a psychiatric patient who, as a child, hated his best friend’s mother. She was always mean to him and seemed to think he was too poor and too stupid to play with her son. Eventually, she forced the friendship to end. At the time, it was horribly painful for my patient. Years later, he became obsessed—now, he had a clinical disorder, so this is a bit extreme—he became obsessed with a sexual fantasy in which he was sleeping with a man who looked and acted very much like the father of his friend from childhood. And the fantasy always involved the mother walking in on them and discovering that her husband was gay and becoming angry, or getting drawn into the sexual encounter as a submissive. I’m sorry, I can see you’re not totally following.”

  “No, I understand,” Katya said. “Fantasy is to heal the pain of something bad, maybe from when you were a child.”

  “Exactly. So part of this killer’s fantasy involves removing these women’s hands. The hands are especially important to him, so there will be a reason why. Maybe he lost a hand. Maybe someone who abused him had an injured hand. It could be anything like that. I suggested to Inspector Zahrani that he do a medical-records search for criminals with injured hands. It’s a long shot, but in my experience, catching a serial killer can take months, even years. The more you do, the better your chances of catching the guy. I can tell you want to say something.”

  “Yes,” Katya said. Their sandwiches had arrived, and they both began eating. “In Saudi Arabia, when you chop off a hand, it means that the person was a thief.”

  Charlie paused with food in her mouth, a look of amazement making its way onto her face. “You know, I knew that, I just didn’t—God, I’m an idiot. Of course. It’s the punishment for theft. So maybe this killer feels the need to punish his victims. Maybe he thinks of them as thieves.”

  “And more,” Katya said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In Saudi, when you execute a woman, you don’t cut off her head. You shoot her in the back of the head.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. If they chopped off the head, it might roll and the burqa might come off, and you would see her face. So they shoot her instead. They sometimes give her the choice.”

  “My God.” Charlie put her sandwich down. “So this could all connect to an executioner fantasy.”

  “Perhaps,” Katya said, “the killer thinks he is like… an executioner. But how does that help us find him?”

  “Well,” Charlie said, “maybe one of his relatives or someone he loved was executed unfairly. It might be worth looking at execution records. Do you keep those?”

  “We can get them,” Katya said, feeling pleased. “But the hand on Falasteen Street, from Amina al-Fouad. It’s not like the others. Do you think it is also the Angel killer?”

  “What did you call him?”

  “The Angel killer.” Now Katya was surprised. Why would Charlie know everything but that? She explained what she could about the nineteen bodies and the significance of the number nineteen in the Quran.

  Charlie had stopped eating and was listening intently. “So based solely on the fact that you find nineteen bodies, you think this killer imagines himself an angel of vengeance—one of the angels who guard Hell. And he’s punishing those who should go to Hell?”

  “Yes,” Katya said, “something like that.”

  “Well, it fits in with the execution fantasy. Religious ideas do drive some serial killers. Maybe you’re looking for a fundamentalist.”

  “That should narrow it down,” Katya said. Charlie laughed, but Katya hadn’t intended it to be funny. Charlie seemed to realize this and stopped laughing.

  “Most serial killers don’t look crazy from the outside,” Charlie said. “In fact, they look just like everyone else, maybe even a little better. They spend a lot of time trying to blend in.” She picked up her sandwich again. “To answer your question: Yes, I think the dismembered hand is connected to the Angel killer.”

  “But he has never cut off a woman’s hand while she was alive. And he has never left a hand in the city before. And clearly he also left her purse there so we would identify her.”

  “Right. This one was different. Probably something triggered it, and I imagine it was that you guys found and removed the bodies from the site. In a way, those were his trophies too.

  “If you think of it in terms of fantasy,” Charlie went on, “the hand on Falasteen Street could be an evolution of his technique. Most killers’ techniques evolve. They become so good at it they can do it perfectly. They know just how to capture someone, how to keep them alive, how to prolong the torture. They know how to not get caught. That’s what makes them so damned dangerous. But they can also get sick of doing something so well, and maybe they want something more stimulating. So they change their style.”

  “Do you think he will kill Amina?” Katya asked.

  Charlie’s face tightened. “Yes. He’s become bold enough to leave her hand in a public place and risk being noticed. But now you have one advantage. For an organized killer like him, it was a sloppy thing to do. He may have left some evidence behind. Have you found anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Katya said. “I just run samples. They don’t tell me what it means.”

  Charlie studied her. “I’ll try to find out.”

  Katya smiled.

  “In the meantime,” Charlie said, “with an organized killer like this one, there will be patterns.”

  On the way back to the office, Katya checked her phone and saw with pleasure that Ibrahim had sent three full-body shots of Sabria dressed in a cloak, along with a note that said Thank you. She said good-bye to Cha
rlie at the entrance to the building and caught a taxi at once to the mall. Before getting in the cab, she’d inspected the driver carefully and saw what she was certain was only a cheerful, paunchy, middle-aged Pakistani who graciously opened the door for her and turned down the music when she got in the car.

  17

  We do not touch women.” This was Abu-Musa, the chief medical examiner, standing in the morgue with Officer Mu’tazz. Abu-Musa of the swampy brown eyes and cold silences. The odd guerrilla-warfare trousers, one cargo pocket bent out of shape from years of holding a travel Quran. A great pair of shoulders and hands, the strangling kind.

  “So you’ve got only one woman working on nineteen bodies?” Ibrahim asked, deliberately provoking, trying to snap them out of the reverie that they could afford to be virtuous.

  “She’s doing her job.” Abu-Musa said this menacingly, as a man defends his wife.

  “This man is killing women,” Ibrahim snapped back. “You can’t expect that we’ll catch this guy without knowing all the facts. And the faster we get that information, the better we’ll be able to stop him from killing again.”

  “Then start looking for the foreigners who might have killed these women.”

  Ibrahim was disgusted.

  “You haven’t even tried that, have you?” Abu-Musa said. “But goodness, why would a foreigner be killing here? Maybe because the past three serial killers have been foreigners?”

  “We have to identify the bodies,” Ibrahim said coldly. “That is our best chance of finding this man.”

  “You have your sketches of their faces.”

  “We need all the forensic evidence we can get from the bodies. And we need it now.”

  “You will get it when it’s done.”

  And here comes the pomposity, Ibrahim thought.

  “If your values don’t hold up in a crisis,” Abu-Musa said, “then they aren’t worth shit.”

  Maybe they’re not worth shit, Ibrahim wanted to reply, but he saw plainly what he was up against. Here were two men who had already begun to suspect him of indecency, and it would only be made worse by this conversation.

  He went back to the situation room. It was empty, the end of the day. A cool Wednesday night. Tomorrow was the weekend. People would be out with friends, picnicking with their families on the Corniche, perhaps pretending there was no killer stalking the labyrinth. He went to the whiteboard and began taking down the photographs, not out of the distorted sense of propriety that would belong to Abu-Musa but because he didn’t want to stare at them anymore. The brutalized faces contained remnants of Sabria. An eye. A cheekbone. His mind knew it was just the angle, but the adrenaline proved to him that his body did not.

  He went back to her apartment, as he had every night since she’d disappeared, crazily half expecting that she’d be there. Before the disappointment could truly stab him, he left again quickly and drove around the city, welcoming the evening gridlock, trying not to stare at every woman on the sidewalk.

  He had often had the experience with Sabria that when he took her somewhere he knew well and attempted to share what he knew about the area, she grew tense and distant. It had come out at some point that she felt intimidated by his knowledge of the city. It had taken even longer for her to admit that she was angry about it. Not at him, but at the situation. The only reason she didn’t have that knowledge herself was that she didn’t have the free access to places that he did. Even doing undercover work, she’d spent most of her time posing as a housemaid, trying as hard as she could to blend seamlessly with the world around her, which meant acting as most women did.

  He’d started taking her to the same few places over and over. Safe spots, like the floating mosque and a private beach down the coast where no one would see them. How much he’d wanted to take her to so many other sights in the city! The al-Tayibat City Museum and Rayhanat al-Jazeera Street to see the city’s sprawling history crammed into three hundred rooms. Or to Khayyam al-Rabie for her sweet tooth. Or to Yildizlar for the hopelessly romantic dinner he had always wanted to buy her. But the fear of being recognized was greater than desire.

  That was the idea behind Katya’s request, he figured, a full-body picture of Sabria in a cloak and scarf. Maybe no one at the women’s shopping mall had recognized Sabria’s photo because they hadn’t paid much attention to her face. But they might recognize her shape.

  He wanted to tell Katya that he knew exactly what she was doing. It was something he had practiced since he was a child, small and scared and running through the souqs and shopping malls, always terrified of losing his mother, his burqa-clad, not-very-affectionate mother. She was shaped like a lot of women, he’d realized rather quickly, and she always covered her whole face, always wore a robe that cloaked her ankles and shoes, which left him little to go on. She moved quickly through the crowds, as if afraid of being seen, afraid of getting stuck somewhere. Omar was always comfortable running off. If he couldn’t find his mother, he didn’t panic. He was as independent and quick-moving as she was. But Ibrahim had nightmares for years about losing her in the market. He came to recognize the smallest things. At seven, he had already worked out how the curve of her shoulders was different from other women’s—she had a strangely sloping back and funny rounded shoulders that were just a tad too thin. It was probably where Farrah got her back problems. He learned the shape of her head, the details of the pins in her headscarf—always worn the same way, simple black safety pins around the crown of her head. He knew her walk: the quick little jolts, the energy of it. He came to know her form so well that sometimes when she met him after school, he could pick her out of a crowd from fifty yards.

  He was heading home, finally, when Katya called.

  “I’m glad you phoned,” he said. “It’s late and I wasn’t sure it was appropriate to bother you.”

  “I did discover something interesting,” she said. “Although I’m not sure what to make of it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “One of the women who works at the mall café recognized her immediately from the photos. She said that Sabria used to sit at the café and she would meet other women there. They would talk for a while, and then the friend would leave.”

  “Was it always the same friend?”

  “No, a few different women. She also said that Sabria was always going to the bathroom. At first she assumed she was just drinking too much coffee, but after a while she noticed that the friends would go with her and they’d be in there for a long time—longer than normal, anyway.”

  “Did she have any idea what they were talking about?” he asked.

  “No, but she said it seemed important. They never seemed to be having fun. And aside from buying coffee, Sabria never did any shopping.”

  “So it was obvious that something strange was going on,” he said. “When did the barista notice all of this?”

  “She said it took her a while. Sabria usually covered her face, and the barista only recognized her by her shape. She caught glimpses of her face once or twice. Sabria kept her burqa down, and since she seemed like the super-modest type who didn’t want people looking at her, the barista didn’t stare.”

  “And she’s sure that it’s her?”

  “I showed her the picture of Sabria’s face, and she felt quite convinced that it was the same person.”

  “Okay,” Ibrahim said, thinking. “So she was going to the mall.”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  “And meeting with women.”

  “Some of them were Filipina. The barista said they looked poorer than the average shopper, and that Sabria always paid for their coffees.”

  “Housemaids.”

  “Did you know any of her friends?”

  “No,” he said. “Except for the neighbors. She didn’t—” Tell me any of this.

  So Sabria had lied about what she was doing at the mall, but she’d been at the mall anyway, meeting with friends she never talked about. It didn’t have to be as nefarious as it seemed. Maybe
she was helping them.

  “There’s something else,” Katya said, “but it’s not about Sabria. It’s about the Angel case.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She launched into an explanation about the significance of the severed hands and the shots to the backs of the victims’ heads, and the idea of an angel of vengeance. Nineteen. This was the inevitability that he’d dreaded from the day they found the bodies. Abu-Musa’s smug smile came back to him as truth.

  “That’s a very astute connection,” he said. “I’ll make sure we follow up on it.”

  “I take it you’ll be looking into amputation records,” she said, “of people who were punished for theft?”

  “Well, yes, I think that’s the place to start.”

  “I know it’s not my place to say this,” Katya said, “but it might be useful to look at the execution records for Jeddah over the past thirty years as well.”

  “You think the killer might be an executioner?”

  “No. Dr. Becker gave me this idea, actually, but it’s possible that the killer lost a relative or someone he was close to, and that this person was executed.”

  “You’re assuming that the execution records would give information about family members,” he said. “I don’t think they do.”

  She sighed. “Then we’ll have to find the families ourselves. I just think that we need as much information as we can get in order to build a profile of this killer.”

  “Yes, you’re right. But that’s going to take an awful lot of work.”

  “I’d be glad to go over the case files myself. The lab doesn’t need me standing by the machines all the time.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. And I’m glad you think it’s your place to say all of this, Miss Hijazi,” he said. “You’re doing excellent work.”

  She was quiet on the other end. He couldn’t quite figure her out. She was bold enough to call him late on a Wednesday night and tell him how to run his investigation, but proper enough to sit in the backseat with her face covered like a cowering Saffanah. Perhaps, just like Saffanah, she was no Saffanah.