by Zoë Ferraris
“That makes sense as well,” Ibrahim said. “So would you say that most of your supplicants are especially devout?”
“There are varying levels.” Arsheedy always seemed to be speaking frankly and openly, no matter what he was saying. “I think that mental disturbances can make people much more receptive to faith. They are in a state of higher need, you might say, and so faith is especially important for them. It is a way of healing the suffering they experience.”
“And what if the supplicant is not, say, possessed by a djinni,” Ibrahim said. “What if he has schizophrenia?”
“All suffering is a kind of evil,” the sheikh replied calmly. “And Allah is available to cure all suffering. Perhaps the cure works best in conjunction with medical science, but there are certainly cases where medicine cannot do anything and an exorcism alone has the power to relieve the spirit of its pain.” He set his teacup back on the tray, crossed his hands on his lap, and studied his guests. “Am I wrong to assume that you are here on police business?”
“No, that is correct,” Ibrahim said. He glanced at Daher, who looked the very picture of an earnest schoolboy. “We are trying to understand the pathology of a particular criminal we’ve encountered. He’s been killing women, and there are religious references in the way he is killing them.”
The sheikh nodded sternly. “I am afraid I cannot help you with pathology per se, but I can testify that when a man is truly stricken by evil—either a djinni or by the evil eye—he becomes capable of the most depraved acts you can imagine.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Ibrahim said. “Presumably even if those acts defile the very name of religion?”
“Especially then,” Arsheedy said. “I sometimes think that it’s the only way evil can truly express itself—that is, by distorting religion. It doesn’t surprise me that your killer is using Islam in his perversions. Evil tries to destroy that which is most sacred—and it always fails.”
There was something cold in the man’s unwavering belief. “This may seem a very odd question,” Ibrahim said, “but do you happen to have any supplicants—either now or in the past—who have lost a hand? Or who were affected by someone who lost a hand?”
Arsheedy considered this and slowly shook his head. “Nothing comes to mind,” he said. “I do have supplicants who have lost a hand, but they do not come to me for exorcism.”
“I’d like a list of those supplicants, if you don’t mind.”
The sheikh frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t simply give away names,” he said. “You understand.”
“I’m afraid I can’t simply turn the other cheek when a man practices magic in an Islamic society,” Ibrahim replied casually. The sheikh opened his mouth—no doubt to defend himself—then seemed to think better of it. He reached into his desk drawer and took out a sheet of paper and a pen.
“Do you ever get scared?” This was Daher. Despite his previous silence, his words provoked no surprise from their host.
“Yes,” Arsheedy said, glancing at Ibrahim, “it is difficult not to when confronted with evil.”
“So you think of that evil as something separate from the person himself,” Daher went on. “It must be hard to make that distinction when you’ve got someone in your office who is losing his mind, who maybe becomes violent.”
“Funny enough,” the sheikh admitted, “the violent ones don’t scare me. Usually physical violence is the purging of something, or the body’s attempt to rid itself of something wicked. The ones who truly frighten me are quiet, austere, but you can see the vast hatred in their eyes. You can feel it, even if they do nothing. You can sense it the moment they walk into the room. Those are the ones who frighten me. It’s almost as if they have made an effort to take control of the evil themselves, and in doing so, they have bonded with it.”
Daher sat back, looking uncomfortable. Ibrahim sensed that the sheikh had something else to give them.
“There was a man once who frightened me more than the others,” Arsheedy said, setting down his pen. “He came into my office with a clinical history of anxiety and depression. His family had always treated him as if he were normal, but his parents were dead and he hadn’t married. His siblings lived in Najran, but he worked in Jeddah. I think he felt very alone. He had a job as a Red Crescent responder and he told me that he had been in the back of an ambulance one day with a person who was possessed by a djinni. He believed that his problems started that day, that somehow the djinni had passed from the first victim into him. He came to me and requested an exorcism. He didn’t seem possessed by a djinni, but I trusted his word, and I gave him an exorcism. It was a strangely calm affair. But the whole time I had the darkest feelings about the man. I felt that everything he told me was a lie. I can’t tell you why; it was simply a feeling. I prayed about it for months, asking for forgiveness, clarity, and mercy, but I had nightmares on and off for weeks. The man came back a few weeks later to assure me that I had successfully exorcised the spirit, but I didn’t believe him. It still bothers me now, I think because I don’t understand it.”
“What was this man’s name?” Ibrahim asked.
“Sheikh Rami Hajar.”
The Records clerk looked about fifteen years old. He greeted Katya with a nervous nod and glanced twice at the ID tag hanging from her neck. The photo on the tag showed the same black headscarf and face he saw before him, but he seemed disbelieving anyway.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like to speak to the Records manager,” she said. “I believe evidence is missing from some of the files I’ve received.”
The boy swallowed, got up, and left the small room. Katya stood at the window staring out at a waiting room notable for its emptiness. No tables or shelves. Two chairs in a far corner. The records were stored somewhere behind the locked door to her left.
Finally the manager appeared.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
She handed him two of the solved-case files. “These files were requested for the Angel case for the specific purpose of comparing full-body shots of the victims with the current case. Unfortunately, there are no full-body shots in the files. Could these be copies of the originals?”
The manager frowned and flipped through the files. “No, they’re not copies.”
“The forensics photographers would have taken full-body shots of these victims back in 1989, would they not?” she asked.
“Yes, they would have. And you’re right, they’re not here.” He shut the files and passed them back to her. His face hardened. “You’ll have to request a review.”
“A review?”
“Yes. Specifically, your boss has to approve and request a review and send the forms down to our office. Once we receive the forms, we’ll look into the matter.”
“How long will that take?”
“We’ll get to it as soon as we can.”
“And how long is that?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say.”
“You realize this is an urgent matter,” she said, making an effort to soften her tone.
“I understand,” he replied. “The sooner you can get me those forms, the faster this gets done.”
Aggravated, she turned and left.
Ibrahim found Mu’tazz in his office. It was late afternoon, still sunny outside, but the office had no windows, and the lamp was glowing at his desk. Mu’tazz was focused so intently on his reading that he didn’t notice Ibrahim in the doorway, and when he did, he shut the folder.
“Masa’ al-khayr,” Ibrahim said. Mu’tazz didn’t reply. Ibrahim laid a file on the desk and explained about the case of the dismembered hand that Katya had found earlier that day.
Mu’tazz opened the file, took a quick look, and shut it again. “We’ve had body-part cases,” he said. “What’s the problem?”
“How many have you had?”
“I don’t keep count.”
“But you’ve had others?”
“Yes. A leg once. An arm.”
&n
bsp; “I never heard about any of them,” Ibrahim said.
“That’s because you didn’t work here.”
“They may be relevant to our serial-killer investigation,” Ibrahim said. “So I’ll tell you what. You pull the files for those cases and put them on my desk by tomorrow morning, and I won’t report you for obstructing my investigation.”
Mu’tazz stared at him like a dumb animal.
Ibrahim turned to leave but stopped in the doorway. “By the way, I’ve authorized a review of all the case files from 1988 and 1989. It seems that none of them contain full-body shots of the victims. It would appear that the photographs were removed from the files.”
“Well, that tends to happen,” Mu’tazz said. “It’s called decency.”
“Destroying evidence is about as indecent as you can get in a records room.”
“Not if the case has been solved,” Mu’tazz replied.
Ibrahim left before he could lose his temper. He went back to his office, poured a hot cup of tea from the electric kettle, and tried to forget about Mu’tazz, but it was too late. He’d been caught in the man’s orbit. Resentful, inept, using religion as a passport to gain respect from the higher-ups, even as the higher-ups saw the falsity of it. He had heard whispers that Mu’tazz had never been accepted by his peers because he was odd. That was enough. Men always needed weaklings to remind them of their power. There was indeed something pathetic about the man—and, like all things that looked innocent and weak, he could be dangerous. At what point did a man give up his dream of fitting in and begin to plot against those who rejected him?
Ibrahim opened the folder on his desk, the one he’d bribed Chief Riyadh’s secretary to procure. It was the work history of Lieutenant Colonel Yasser Mu’tazz.
It was no surprise that Mu’tazz’s work history was mediocre. He was thorough and persistent only when it was required, and—as best as Ibrahim could judge from the reports—he wasn’t the sort to trust his instincts, if he even had them. His reports were about as conventional as they could get.
It was also no surprise that Mu’tazz remained the least respected of the officers in the department. The reviews his superiors had written about him over the years pointed delicately to the fact that he had never made much of an effort to fit in and that the other men found him difficult to relate to. As a result, he had been passed over for promotion four times. None of this had had any apparent effect on Mu’tazz’s performance. He continued to work quietly and halfheartedly, no doubt still blindly hoping that someday someone would give him his due.
There was no indication in the files that the man was excessively devout or that he was the type who would dare to break into the records room and systematically censor all of the department’s solved murder cases that involved pictures of naked women. Ibrahim hoped to catch some subtle whiff of Mu’tazz’s personality, at least enough to judge whether Mu’tazz was devious and perverted enough to do something like that. Instead, the thing that stood out in the files was the pure beauty of Mu’tazz’s penmanship. It was humbling to compare it to his own scrambled writing. Could you hate a man whose hand wrote such consistently elegant and symmetrical letters? The calligraphy pointed to something much finer in Mu’tazz than he realized, a striving for purity beneath the laziness that was fouling his work life.
27
After a quick stop at Chamelle Plaza, where for the second time Katya failed to meet Sabria’s friend, they were in the car again, shooting down the freeway’s fast lane. Nayir was watching closely for the hazards there—drivers cutting in without signaling, bored young men pulling whatever stunts they could think of, hanging from car doors, their feet skimming asphalt. The worst, in Katya’s opinion, were the cars of young men who pulled so close beside you that they’d take off your side mirrors if you weren’t quick enough. They only did it when there was a woman in the car, her window was open, and it looked like they might have a chance to toss onto her lap a weighted slip of paper containing the vital ingredient to any man’s future: a cell phone number where the woman could reach him, should she find him attractive at 120 kph from the chest up. Katya had been hit by these nuggets before. With Nayir, she kept the windows shut.
Nayir, who didn’t believe in using the air-conditioning, probably for reasons of borrowed Bedouin purity, obligingly turned it up when she was in the car, almost to the point of freezing. During the last month she’d been in his car twice and both times had to ask him to turn it down. She imagined her nipples protruding exuberantly through the thin fabrics of her shirt and cloak—a horror, should he notice. Nayir’s gaze was well managed, but that didn’t stop the eye from seeing.
It wasn’t getting any easier to be alone with him. They should be eagerly discussing their wedding plans, but they had already agreed to the details. Now the quiet in the car was heavy with worry and awkward glances. Katya’s thoughts were consuming her. She worked ten to twelve hours a day, even weekends, with barely enough time to do the shopping, cooking, or laundry that her father still couldn’t be bothered to do, so much did it offend his manhood. The house was a mess. Ayman would do the dishes once a month, if forced, but for the most part he cleverly avoided Katya’s father, who was the only one capable of putting him to work.
What free time she had had mostly been spent hunting down Sabria, processing evidence from her apartment, and scrambling to hide the evidence that might implicate Ibrahim. She was still concerned with tracking down Sabria’s friend at Chamelle. And although she was grateful that she was working on the Angel case from the comfort of her mews in the situation room, she had not been relieved of her other responsibilities in the lab. She was still in charge of coordinating the work of the four female technicians, who were, by a generous estimation, suffering from the incompetence and lack of motivation that went hand in hand with a job that promised no advancement.
While this mental cacophony was reaching its crescendo, Katya heard the lone strains of self-doubt crying from the distance: she was not fit to be a wife and mother. She and Nayir had already discussed that they would live with her father until they found a suitable apartment of their own, his boat being too small for the two of them. So the marriage was effectively adding the burden of another person to her already frazzled home life. Even once the chaos died down at work, she would still be putting in nine-hour shifts every day. She would probably be sleeping less at night. She might even become pregnant. She tried not to believe that this would ruin her career, but sometimes the thought terrified her.
A series of wedding stores had brought her face-to-face with young brides—pretty, sweet, cherubic things made even more beautiful by the electric mix of fear and excitement in their faces. They gave off the promise that they’d do anything for their husbands. They didn’t have jobs. They’d hardly finished school. They were children who were ready to plunge into lives where their husbands’ needs came first and nothing else mattered. By comparison, Katya felt like an outlier, one of those women she’d read about in the occasional newspaper article glorifying the Saudi woman’s push for independence by showcasing a successful businesswoman or philanthropist. Look at this rare specimen who has enough energy to be married, have six kids, and a full-time career. She had often thought that her outlier status might be acceptable to a liberal man—apparently there were some—but was uniquely unsuited to a traditional man like Nayir. And it was only a matter of time before he found that out.
She had admitted to herself, just the night before, that she might have made a mistake in saying yes to this marriage proposal. It was a crushing realization. At least she still had the chance to stop it before it got any further. Yet of all the horrors she could imagine perpetrating, disappointing Nayir ranked among the highest. It was now a matter of choosing which disappointment would hurt him less. Last night, she had sat by the phone and pondered her options. End it now, a gunshot wound of disappointment. Don’t end it now, and bleed him slowly for the next few years. And find yourself boxed in, overworked, dreams sli
pping through the cracks of a fractured life.
Instead, she had called him and asked for a ride.
Now they arrived at the home of Hussain Sa’ud, the name that was stamped on the back of the photograph of the dismembered hand. They got out and stood facing an ugly house. It was modeled on a Bavarian castle, with sunken windows, brick turrets, and a front door that looked more like a drawbridge. The house itself was too small to capture any of a castle’s grandeur. The whole building was painted a blinding white, offset with light blue roof tiles. It reminded Katya of the notoriously tacky Disneyland-castle house on Iskandareya Street.
Nayir knocked. A few minutes later, a girl no older than six answered the door. Katya introduced herself and asked to speak to Hussain, and the girl went tearing off into the darkened house shouting for her grandfather. Two young boys poked their heads out from a room where a television was flickering, the sounds of a video game blaring. A woman dashed across the hallway holding a scarf over her head. They waited while cool air billowed out the doorway.
An eternity seemed to pass before Hussain came to the door. He was a tall man, old but energetic, with a thinning yet still handsome face. He shouted at someone to refresh his tea in the garden then turned his attention to Nayir and Katya. As he came into the light, Katya saw that his eyes were green.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
Preempting Nayir, Katya introduced herself. “I was hoping to talk to you about a photograph.”
“A photograph?” he asked.
She fished it from her shoulder bag and handed it to him. He took it and smiled. “Ah yes. This is from one of my unsolved cases.” He flipped the photograph over and saw his stamp in the corner. He smiled wistfully. “I used to stamp everything,” he said. “This was before people became terrified of their addresses being known. Back when the city felt safe.”
“You said this was one of your cases,” Katya said. “You’re an investigator?”
