by Zoë Ferraris
He looked taken aback. “Yes, I was an investigator. This was my case. Where did you get this?”
“From the chief inspector at the Central Precinct. The file stated that the investigator in charge of the case was Detective Yasser Mu’tazz.”
“Oh, Mu’tazz was just a small piece of the puzzle,” Sa’ud said, smiling. “Come in, come in. We’ll get you some tea.”
Retired Colonel Sa’ud led them through a sequence of rooms that grew more and more untidy as they progressed to the garden at the back of the house. Here was an arbor of grapevines providing shade, a sitting room of sorts on a concrete patio littered with ornate floor cushions and small settees. The air was cool. Three large pipes led from the house and draped over the arbor, blowing cold air down into the space. Outdoor AC. The ripe smell of shisha wafted around them. They were invited to sit. Hussain lowered himself slowly and slid back into his spot, a series of cushions that looked to have permanently molded to his preferred position: lying on his left side within arm’s reach of the tea set, the hookah rope, and a facedown leather-bound book.
Katya sat beside Nayir on one of the cushions and wondered how long it would take Sa’ud to realize that she had no importance in the department, that Nayir was not a cop, and that Sa’ud didn’t have to tell them anything.
But even before the tea was served, Sa’ud made it clear that he considered them a welcome audience. “You didn’t know I was in Homicide for fifteen years,” he mused. “I am seventy-five now, if my mother is to be believed. They didn’t always do birth certificates back then. I’m from Mecca, but my work brought me to Jeddah and I’ve always preferred it here, Allah forgive me.”
Tea arrived with a plate of dates arranged in a flower pattern. Sa’ud began to talk about his life, and they found it impossible to interrupt. He had situated them on this strangely quiet patio with no evidence of the modern world in sight, only felt from the air ducts above their heads. It was easy here to slip back to 1934, when his father had bought his first wife at the slave market in Mecca. It was easy to visualize the pirate gang who had raided a small village in eastern Saudi Arabia and brought back the most beautiful woman they could find—Oubaya, Sa’ud’s mother, who was all of thirteen when she gave birth to him. He pulled them even farther back, to his grandparents who were Turkish, tall, and blond (his green eyes were some mutation of their own sapphire ones) and who had made their fortunes transporting spices across the desert on caravans.
Katya, who normally had no patience for the dragging conversations that were a necessary precursor to doing business with anyone over the age of sixty, found herself perversely lulled into a wonder world of history. It was Nayir who brought them back to the present.
“Times have changed,” he said with a hint of regret. “But the hospitality of men has not.”
“No, no.” Sa’ud chuckled. “And neither has their brutality. What was it you wanted to ask about the photograph, my friends?”
“I was wondering if you might have saved the negatives,” Katya said. “I would like to see a wider view of the drainage ditch where they found the hand.”
“Oh?” Sa’ud set down his cup. “And why is that?”
“I believe there may be something written on the side of the ditch.”
“Yes?”
“A single letter, written in blood.”
Sa’ud was quiet for a moment, his face unreadable. Katya felt a twinge of fear, worried that she had offended him.
“No,” he said. “That is not a letter.” Those strange green eyes flooded with interest. “It was just a smear of some paint or something. I am curious what makes you think this about a partial stain?”
“We have another case,” she said, “in which we found a dismembered hand.”
“Are you working on that case?”
“Yes,” she said. “Under Inspector Ibrahim Zahrani.”
Sa’ud studied her a moment longer and seemed to come to a conclusion. “Well, then I guess I’d better tell you. The dismembered hand you see here was part of a bigger case. As I mentioned, it was one of my unsolved cases. I am not proud to admit the number of unsolved cases I still have, but in fifteen years in Homicide, I suppose that’s to be expected. I used to call this one the Osiris case.”
“Osiris?” Nayir asked. “The Egyptian god?”
“Yes. If you recall, Osiris was dismembered by Set, the god of the desert. He was cut into fourteen pieces and scattered over Egypt. His devoted lover, Isis, went looking, found the pieces, and reconstructed them for a proper burial. Only one part was missing.” Sa’ud gave a smirk, from which Katya gathered that the missing part would be indelicate to mention.
“The Osiris case began in late 1988. I was about to retire from police work. I’d spent most of my time doing traffic patrols and working a desk job. I’d had a good career, but I was reluctant to give it up completely because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself. I felt I had missed something, some opportunity to be excellent at my job.
“My boss recommended that I take part in a community service project to help young men who were trying to mend their ways. The police had a program where we took these boys fishing. They were various young criminals who’d been jailed for one reason or another but who were too young to give up on. Most of them were teenagers. The idea was to give them something constructive to do, to get them out of the city to appreciate nature and all that. So a friend of mine, Jameel, and I used to take them fishing every weekend.
“They were a very rough bunch, I have to say, but generally we had no problems on the boat. They liked fishing and sailing. Sometimes we even did a little snorkeling. I really believe that it was good for them, that it kept them out of trouble and gave them a basis for being good men.
“Anyway, one weekend we were out on the sea and we were using nets to catch fish. We’d made the nets ourselves, and we threw one out and brought up a whole school of wrasse. We pulled in the net and threw half of the fish back into the sea—we weren’t going to eat that many. We sailed for a while and threw the net out again, only this time it got stuck on something. We had a hell of a time dragging it up, and when we did, we found a large wooden box. The bottom of the net was tangled around it. We hauled the box onto the deck. It was very heavy. We had even damaged the net in pulling it up. When we opened the box, we found something horrible. A dead body. It was a smaller person, probably a woman, judging from the robe that had also been put into the box. She had been cut into pieces.
“Naturally, we were horrified. We sailed straight back to shore and called the police immediately. This was before cell phones. We had to wait quite a while for the officers and the forensics team to arrive. We set the box in the shade of a warehouse right by the marina. It was a big, open warehouse, and all of us were standing around, tired and in shock. We must have waited for two hours before the police arrived.
“In that time, one of the boys fell ill. He’d been slightly ill when we left the dock that morning, but the combination of sun exposure, heat, and activity had made his condition worse, and he collapsed. I saw that he’d become dehydrated. We carried him into the marina’s office, where they gave him water and called for an ambulance. While all of that was going on, the police arrived to inspect the box. But when they got to the warehouse, the box was gone.”
“Someone stole it?” Nayir asked.
“Yes, apparently. Although we could never be sure when. With all of the drama going on with this boy, nobody had noticed the box. We assumed that’s when it had disappeared. The thing was, it was a heavy box. It’s possible but not likely, that one man could have carried it away, but he would have had to carry it to a car or truck. Twenty people searched the warehouse for the rest of the evening and all the next day, and the box was not there. It had left the premises.
“Over the next few days, the police interrogated every one of the eight boys who’d been on the boat. Each of them had a criminal record, of course, but all of them had an alibi. None had gone mis
sing. None had access to a vehicle with which they could have driven the box away. It occurred to us as well to search the water of the harbor. Perhaps someone had thrown the box back in the sea. It took a few days to get the equipment together to do that, but the box was not there either. Eventually, the police dropped the entire matter.”
“But you found a hand,” Katya prompted, pointing to the photograph.
“Six months later,” Sa’ud said. “The hand showed up in a drainage ditch in Kandara. Then another hand showed up a short distance away. Mu’tazz was involved in the case at that point. Now, Mu’tazz was no expert, but he was young and eager and trying to be thorough. The best evidence of that is that he managed to find me. He discovered that I’d had a similar case, and he contacted me. We linked the body parts, and I took control of the Kandara investigation from Mu’tazz. I explained the story to him. It appeared that whoever had stolen the parts had spread them throughout Jeddah. We found the right foot in al-Balad, a part of the lower torso in al-Aziziya, and so on. Over the next few weeks, we found other parts in different places. We didn’t recover all of the missing parts. In fact, we only found thirteen of the original nineteen pieces that had been in the box. At that point, everyone began calling it the Osiris case, because of the number thirteen, although I always pointed out that Osiris’s body was not complete. Still, the name stuck.”
“Were there any letters attached to any of the body parts?” Katya asked.
“No, but there was a message written at the very end. It was written in ink near the left foot. It quoted the Quran: We have created all things in order.”
“Did you test the ink it was written in?”
“Yes, it was standard calligraphy ink, the kind you can buy at any art-supply store.”
“Did the police ever come up with any suspects?” Katya asked.
“Well, I’m sure you can see the complexity of the situation. On the one hand, they were looking for a thief who had stolen a boxful of body parts and directly interfered with a murder investigation. On the other hand, they were looking for a murderer. They did find a thief, or so they believed. There were fourteen boys in the group, but only eight went out on the boat that day. Some officer decided that it had to have been one of them, primarily because nobody else knew about the box. I argued, unsuccessfully, that it couldn’t have been one of the boys because they couldn’t have taken the box without me, Jameel, or one of the other boys noticing. And the warehouse was open, so anyone could have walked through and seen the box and decided to steal it. We could have an opportunistic thief on our hands, a total stranger.
“But the head of Homicide at the time, Colonel Ghamdi, came up with their only working theory, which was that one of the boys had dumped the box into the water of the harbor and then come back the next day with a net to dredge it up and take it home for himself. And indeed, the net we had made for the fishing trip had gone missing the next day.” Sa’ud leaned back and sighed. The cool air from the pipes washed over his face, and he shut his eyes.
“So on that basis, the police arrested one of the boys who had been on the boat with us that afternoon. His name was Ali Dossari. The police said they had evidence against him, but I think it was scanty. They claimed they’d found a partial fingerprint on a watch that was with the dead body. They matched this fingerprint to Dossari’s. But I always believed that the fingerprint could have gotten there before the box was stolen, when we first opened it on the boat. Dossari was right next to me when we opened it.
“All the police really had was a confession,” he went on. “I say that loosely. You know how that goes. Anyway, they charged him with stealing the box and spreading the body parts over the city.”
“And you think he was innocent?”
“I’m not sure what to think. But he was eventually found innocent and let go.”
“What do you think really happened?” Katya asked.
“I think one of the boys at the marina that night decided to be a nuisance and steal the box. I can’t tell you who it was. The sad fact is that we’ll never know what happened to the box after that. It was never recovered. Maybe the boy dispersed the body parts, maybe someone else did. It could have been anyone, really. In any case, it ruined our investigation.”
“Did you ever find out who the victim was?”
“No. We were missing the head, so we had no facial reconstruction to go on. We tried matching the victim’s fingerprints to some of the missing-persons cases at the time but we came up with nothing. I knew that it would be a hard case to solve, but with the evidence corrupted like it was, it became much harder. It bothers me still, this one. I feel responsible for not safeguarding the evidence as well as I should have. But I also feel frustrated. I’ve gone back to this case many times and found nothing. The only good thing to have come out of it was that I felt so responsible and was so annoyed by the actions of the Homicide team that I started working on the investigation myself. It was the whole reason I got into Homicide in the first place. I spent another fifteen years working in the service, and I can safely say it was the best part of my career.”
Katya digested this quietly. “Did you stamp all of your photographs?”
“Yes.” Sa’ud smiled. “You think it’s odd now, but we were responsible for all of our work. I liked to keep everything labeled and organized.”
“Do you happen to have any other photographs from the Osiris case?” she asked. “This is similar to a case we’re working on now.”
“Yes, I do have the photos. But if you’re thinking that one of those boys may be connected to the crime, you’re a few steps behind. I gave the photographs in question to one of the detectives at Central.”
“Oh,” Katya said. “Who was that?”
“Inspector Mu’tazz. He came to me a little over a week ago.” Seeing Katya’s surprise, he added: “Fortunately, I do keep extra copies of all my photos and files. He didn’t need the file—he keeps copies of some of his own unsolved cases. But he wanted photographs. They must have been missing from the file. Help me up.”
They assisted and followed him into the house, through the kitchen, where a young woman scrambled to cover her face, and up a long flight of stairs to the second floor.
Katya was still reeling from the news that Mu’tazz had come to see Sa’ud and apparently not told Ibrahim about it. Surely he must have learned something from the old man, and if Ibrahim knew about this, he would have told her. Wouldn’t he?
They entered a clean, well-lit room. The metal desk and chairs, some file cabinets, and a pair of city maps hanging on the wall were its only furnishings. Sa’ud opened the lower drawer of one of the cabinets and withdrew a thick file. Inside were photographs of all the body parts from the Osiris case, and he laid these on the desk. While Katya studied them, Sa’ud went to the map and, with Nayir reading the locations from an old list, placed pins in the spots where each of the parts had been found.
“How much did Mu’tazz tell you about the case?” Katya asked.
“Not much,” Sa’ud said. “Only that they’d found a woman’s dismembered hand on Falasteen Street.”
“We also found a burial site in the desert with women’s bodies posed as letters that spelled a message,” Katya said. She told him the message.
He stared, disbelieving. “You found nineteen bodies in the desert?”
“Yes. And the women were all missing hands.”
“And what was the shape of the site?”
“They were buried in a hexagonal pattern similar to that one.” She pointed to the map. “Except you only found thirteen parts.”
“That bastard Mu’tazz,” Sa’ud said. “He never told me anything. You know, I think it bothered him that I took his case, and he’s never forgiven me for it. What an old donkey. I take it he’s not in charge of this hand case either?”
“Is that what he said?” Katya asked.
“Yes.”
“No, he’s not in charge. And I’m fairly certain he hasn’t told the o
fficer who is in charge anything about his visit here.”
Sa’ud gave a hard laugh.
He gave them a copy of the Osiris case file. He didn’t want to part with his last Osiris photographs, and he’d already given the spare set to Mu’tazz, so he made photocopies for her. The file itself contained fingerprint analyses from the two hands and reports on the other eleven body parts found. Katya had a feeling that the case file she’d come across at the office had been a copy of Mu’tazz’s original.
“You’ll keep me apprised on the developments, of course?” he asked.
“Yes,” Katya said. “I will. But let me ask you one more thing. The boys who were on the boat that day, has anyone—?”
“Oh, Mu’tazz said he was going to interview them, but I haven’t heard back from him yet.”
Once they were back in the car, Katya burst out talking. “I can’t believe Mu’tazz didn’t tell Zahrani. This may be really important to our case and he’s hiding information!”
“That’s suspicious, don’t you think?”
“Yes, very. I mean, I don’t think he’s the killer. It’s more likely that he just wants to solve the case himself.”
“You know him well?”
The question was posed naturally, but she knew there was a trip wire beneath it. “I don’t know him at all—I’ve never spoken to him, in fact. But I hear things from the other workers, and apparently he’s one of these men who’ve been passed over for promotion more times than anyone can count, and he’s bitter about it. Maybe he thinks that this is his chance to solve a big case because he knows about the old one. He may even assume that he has a right to it.”
Silence fell. Nayir was struggling with traffic. This time, the only hazard was a man riding closely on their right and attempting to position his car so that Katya could see the placard stuck to his rear window. On the placard was a telephone number in large print and the words My name is Khaled, call me if you like me! When Khaled winked at her in his side-view mirror, she ignored him. Nayir honked and the man drove away.
