The Butcher of Casablanca

by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

  He thought back to his study of previous serial murderers and the like. If there was one element they had in common it was that they all claimed at least five victims. Police were only led to the “Monster of Taroudant,” the child molester and murderer, after he had struck for a ninth time. Some killers committed so many murders that they lost count of their victims. But never before had a murderer left a letter to the police or destroyed the remains of his victims in order to conceal their identity. All previous incidents were driven by rage and revenge, in contrast to the systematic dismemberment in the current cases. The grim reality was that, with so little to go on, the police might have to wait for yet another homicide, in the hope that the perpetrator would slip up as he grew cockier and more reckless. It occurred to Hanash that this new-style Moroccan serial killer had been influenced by Seven or The Silence of the Lambs or other such films. In fact, anyone could read online about the many real-life American serial killers who would send the police either a part of their victim’s body or coded letters or, in some instances, would even call up the police in person. Such ruses were all part of a demonic cat-and-mouse game the killer played with the police in order to prove his superior intelligence. The notorious “Zodiac Killer” made Hanash’s blood run cold. He claimed thirty-seven victims, yet his identity remained unknown and he remained at large even though he sent coded letters to the police after each murder. Despite all the advanced technology and advances in cryptology at their disposal over the years, American law-enforcement agencies had been unable to crack the Zodiac Killer’s codes. Then there were the spine-chilling Donald Henry “Pee Wee” Gaskins, who was only apprehended after having committed eighty to ninety murders, and Harold Shipman, aka “Dr. Death,” who murdered over two hundred patients under his care. Less prolific but more grisly was Ted Bundy, kidnapper, rapist, and necrophile, who went on killing sprees in seven states in the US.

  The more Hanash read about serial killers abroad the more he suspected that the guy who was eluding him belonged to that category. Previous cases in Morocco were all simple illiterates. Some murdered members of their own families, while others were vagabonds. A few were highway robbers, like Abdelali Amer, aka “the Savage,” who beat his victims to death with a rock after robbing them. In all these cases, the killers remained in hiding or on the run; none intended to defy and play games with the police. But the culprit Hanash was dealing with was of a different order. He was educated and intelligent, and used more sophisticated methodsO. At the same time, he was probably driven to fulfill some psychopathic compulsion; he may not have even been personally acquainted with his victims.

  This possibility led Hanash to consider other cold files in areas outside his jurisdiction. Could they have been committed by this guy using different methods? Could they have contained coded messages that the investigating officers had not caught on to?

  Naeema was woken again by her husband’s tossing and turning. He was babbling incoherently in his sleep.

  Unable to calm him with words, she stroked his head and recited Quranic verses to ward off evil: “Say: I seek

  refuge with the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the God of

  mankind . . .”

  He seemed feverish. She laid a hand on his forehead.

  “From the evil of the sly whisperer who whispers evilly into the hearts of men . . .”

  Suddenly, Hanash shot out of bed and began to rummage through the closet. Naeema sat up in alarm. He’s delirious, she thought. He looked over his shoulder and told her in a natural, fully awake voice, “Calm down, dear, I just remembered something.”

  Fishing his notepad out of his jacket pocket, he flicked through it until he found the page where he’d copied down the ciphers he’d seen in the lab.

  Naeema came up behind him, put her arms around him, and placed a kiss on his shoulder. “These murders are going to drive you mad. Why don’t you ask to be taken off this case?” she pleaded.

  He removed her hands gently. “I’m going to take a stroll around the garden,” he said as he hastened out of the room holding the notepad.

  In the hallway, he noticed the light from beneath Tarek’s bedroom door. As usual, his son was up at all hours fiddling about on his laptop. He knocked on the door and slipped into the room quickly, as though afraid his wife might be at his heels.

  Tarek craned his neck to look behind his father to ensure he wasn’t fleeing some danger. His father was wheezing and his face was dark and brooding. He looked like he’d been punched. Hanash set his notepad on Tarek’s desk and said wearily, “Take a look at these. Can you make anything out of them?”

  Sensing his father’s anguish, Tarek bent toward the notepad while Hanash took a seat at the edge of his son’s bed.

  “As long as you spend all your time on the internet,” Hanash said, “have a look to see if it comes up with anything about those numbers and letters. They were written on the carton in which we found half a body. The technicians at the crime lab dismissed them as nonsense but I’m not convinced. It might give us a lead.”

  Tarek spelled out the cipher in an awestruck voice: “Cla – d oss ier b-t-45pes . . . What could it mean?”

  He looked over at his father, who sat bent forward, his head resting on his hands, staring blankly in the direction of his feet.

  “They’re just numbers and letters, Dad. Maybe they were torn off from something else. Or maybe the perp means to challenge us with a riddle.”

  Hanash stood up with a dismissive flick of his hand as though to say he had changed his mind and tell his son not to bother.

  “Hey, Dad, I’ll give it a go,” Tarek called out as his father left.

  Tarek swiveled back to his computer. He created a new document, typed in the mysterious letters and numbers, and gave it a title in a large bold font in red: “The Butcher of Casablanca.”

  Beneath this he wrote: “Investigation assigned to: Tarek, son of Head of CID Detective Mohamed Bineesa, aka “Hanash.”

  In addition to studying for the police academy entrance exam, which he planned to take after law school, Tarek was an avid reader of detective novels and an addict of TV crime serials and films. He was also saturated with the investigative climate at home. Often he’d question his father about his work and his father wasn’t stingy with information. In fact, when he had the time, Hanash enjoyed explaining to Tarek certain legal procedures or clarifying points his son found confusing. Occasionally, he’d lay out the details of a case and have his son marshal the evidence that could convict the defendant.

  The late-night hours were Tarek’s favorite time for surfing the net. He liked to keep up to date with the latest criminal investigative methods and try to solve crimes. Sometimes he’d get distracted and might even sneak the occasional peek at a porn site. But the task his father had given him was a kind of game and it set a challenge he could not resist tackling. He was prepared to spend the whole night at it, face to face with his computer. He had no plan to start with, being in totally unmarked territory. He merely began rearranging the letters haphazardly.

  As he burned the midnight oil wrestling with this puzzle, he felt he caught a glimpse of his what his father was dealing with: looking for a needle in a haystack. His dad was always so hard on himself and spent hours at his office working until late at night, depriving himself of any pleasure or relief as he banged his head against a brick wall.

  Tarek found it thrilling that the number 45, plus those random letters, might lead to the killer who’d been terrifying the city. Once in a while he’d get exasperated, ready to throw in the towel and climb into bed, but some sense of urgency spurred him on and kept him awake. His mind was ticking, his senses were primed, and he was determined to win a prize that he could hand his father over breakfast.

  A plan of action formed in his head. He discarded the 45 and studied the remaining letters. Surely they couldn’t all form a single word or a meaningful sentence. He decided to try his luck with fewer letters. After a number of unsuccess
ful tries, seven letters gave him a real word: “dossier,” the French for file or a folder containing files, though it could also mean backrest or the back of a chair.

  Now, what about the rest of the letters—b, t, es, p, cla—plus the 45? He arranged and rearranged them in numerous meaningless combinations. Just as he felt he’d reached a dead end, another idea occurred to him: perhaps two or more of these letters formed an abbreviation.

  He passed his tongue over his parched lips and began to separate and reorder the letters again. After a few more tries, he placed the “p” after the “es,” giving “esp”—the abbreviation for Spain: Espagne.

  He stared at that “esp” as though he finally had something valuable in his grip. “Spain” had to be the meaning. But he couldn’t take it further without figuring out what the rest of the letters meant. True, he had “dossier,” but that had various meanings. He took the remaining letters—cla b-t—and tried rearranging them. Then he added the 45 and tried to affix them all to what he already had. He produced the following permutations:

  CLA-DOSSIER B-T-45ESP

  B-T-CLA-DOSSIER-45ESP

  CLA B-T DOSSIER 45ESP

  DOSSIER CLA-B-T-45ESP

  That, he thought, would be enough for starters. He typed the first two combinations into Google. No hits. He typed in the third. Before pressing “search” this time, he closed his eyes, muttered a brief prayer, and then clicked the mouse. A whole page unfolded on the screen before him with information about the Agencia Limitada Commercial Buzón. He opened a new tab in the browser, opened Google Translate, selected Spanish to French, copied and pasted in the Spanish text, and came up with: Agence commerciale limiteé des boîtes à lettres. He mouthed the words, his lips trembling in excitement. He discarded “DOSSIER” since it bore no relation to anything and must have been inserted as a kind of decoy. He called out to his father.

  When his father came back into the room, Tarek pointed at his screen and said, “This is a Spanish company that exports mailboxes.”

  Hanash’s eyes widened. He pulled up a chair next to Tarek and the two began to search for everything they could find about that Spanish firm. At last Hanash’s morale began to pick up. The murderer had taken his game of toying with the police to a higher level. He had given them a kind of anagram. They were now left with the letter “T” and the “45.” They were unable to make sense of them yet, but perhaps their significance would emerge later.

  Tarek stood up, yawned, and stretched. He felt dizzy and unable to concentrate any more. He needed to sleep. But Hanash had a sudden flash of inspiration.

  “Send them an email and ask who they deal with here in Morocco. Ask them if there’s a particular firm that they’ve franchised to distribute their products.”

  “Do you think they know French? The Spanish are famous for speaking only Spanish.”

  “All Spaniards who invest in Morocco know French. Let’s give it a try. We got nothing to lose.”

  Tarek applied himself to the task, vowing to get his fill of sleep afterward, and wrote the company an email asking who they worked with in Morocco. Despite the late night, he was up early to check his emails—and to his surprise, they had already replied. It was essentially a form letter, in precise and courteous French, that opened with an expression of gratitude for the confidence the recipient had placed in the company’s products. It concluded with the name and address of the sole distributor of their products in Morocco: al-Saada Co., Ltd., in Casablanca.

  Hanash fetched his phone from his bedroom and dialed, his eyes fixed on the computer screen. “Good morning, Hamid. Are you at work yet? On your way. Good. Turn around and pick me up at home. You’ll find me waiting at the gate.”

  Tarek thumped his chest proudly and said, “Confess! Confess! I helped you out!”

  Hanash smiled as he hastened out the door and said, “You spend all your time at the computer doing nothing productive. At least this time you did something useful.”

  Tarek rushed after his father, caught hold of his arm, and shouted, eyes glistening with a glee he hadn’t felt in years.

  “You got to pay up!”

  Naeema rushed into the hallway, eyes wide in alarm.

  “What’s going on?”

  Hanash winked to reassure her and said, “You stay there, Naeema. This is between men.”

  Tarek made more demands: “You owe me one pair of sneakers in exchange for the services I performed for your department.”

  “Hah!” his father scoffed. “The department doesn’t even pay us for overtime, so why should it pay you? Anyway, what do you think happens next? It’s not as though the perp’s going to be waiting to greet us at that company’s front door.”

  As Tarek turned to return to his bedroom, he cocked a finger at his father and said, “We’ll see about this later.” He gave a loud yawn and shut the door behind him.

  Hamid’s enthusiasm flagged as he listened to Hanash relate his early-morning discovery. As the detective spoke, Hamid kept his eyes on the road and refrained from comment. He suspected that a good part of the detective’s excitement stemmed less from his conviction in his new lead than from his pride in his son who’d discovered it.

  They had no trouble finding the company. It was located in the industrial zone in an unremarkable building with a no-frills façade and a utilitarian entrance. They were received by a person who introduced himself as Aziz Habbab, head of personnel. He could tell they were high-ranking police officials before they introduced themselves. He led them into a large meeting room because his office was too small, and tried to check the trembling in his hand as he gestured to them to have a seat. They remained standing.

  “Undoubtedly you know who we are?” Hamid asked, his eyes fixed intently on Habbab’s face.

  “You’re police, sir. Who wouldn’t recognize Detective Hanash, whose photographs appear frequently in the newspapers and on the internet?”

  Hanash smiled as though detecting a familiar ruse. “Your company imports products from Spain. Could you tell us what they are?”

  Habbab knitted his brow. “Our company is the only company exclusively licensed to import mailbox units from the Spanish firm Agencia Limitada Commercial Buzón.”

  Hanash gave Hamid a nod that indicated “You see, Tarek was right,” then turned back to Mr. Habbab. “And who are your customers here in Casablanca?”

  The man took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket and began to fidget with it. “We have a lot of customers,” he said, stammering slightly. “Most of them are building contractors. But we have some ordinary customers, too.”

  “Could we see a sample of those mailboxes?”

  Habbab noticed the strange gleam in Hanash’s eyes and was deeply intrigued to know what the purpose of this visit was, but was too afraid to ask. He nodded and led them down a long corridor that opened onto a huge warehouse stocked with hundreds of cartons. Hanash moved past the manager and examined one of the cartons. It looked exactly like the one in which they had found the last body. He turned to Hamid, eyebrows raised.

  Hanash noticed that every carton had the characters “T45” printed on them. Now that was interesting. “What does this T45 signify?” he asked Habbab.

  Looking back and forth between the two officers, the manager replied, “T means unit. So each of these cartons contains forty-five mailboxes of the sort you find in the foyers of apartment buildings.”

  So that was the last piece of the puzzle solved, thought Hanash.

  Officer Hamid narrowed his eyes at the man and said, “Open the box.”

  Habbab quickly did as asked. He pulled back the flap to reveal the mailboxes stacked inside. The inspector took one out and examined it from different angles. They were well made, elegantly finished, and clearly designed for upmarket apartment blocks. He exchanged glances with Hanash, then glared at Habbab again.

  “Did you give empty cartons to anyone?”

  “No, sir.” The personnel manager was visibly trembling.

  “I w
ant an empty one of these boxes,” Hanash commanded.

  The company employee removed the mailbox units from one of the cartons and set them to one side.

  “I also want a list of your customers here in Casablanca.”

  “In my office . . . I’ll give you whatever you need.”

  They returned through the corridor and stopped before the frosted-glass windows of Habbab’s office. As Habbab opened the door, he asked, “Don’t I have a right to know the reason for this search?”

  “Did you hear about the murder that happened on the first day of the Eid?”

  Habbab’s eyes widened and his hand went to his chest. “Dear Lord! Of course I heard of it. The whole town’s talking about nothing else!”

  “The body was severed into two halves. Each half was cut up and put into one of these boxes.”

  The man gasped and the color drained from his face. His pale lips worked as though trying to say something, but nothing came out. Hanash pinned him with a probing stare and asked, “How did these cartons fall into the hands of the killer?”

  “It’s impossible for one of these cartons to leave the premises empty.” Habbab’s terrified eyes rapidly shifted back and forth between his interrogators.

  Reading his boss’s mind, Hamid pressed his face closer to Habbab’s face, let a few seconds tick by, and then fired: “Perhaps you know the killer.”

  The man jumped, but he fired back angrily: “I don’t know anyone who could kill!”

  Hanash shot out, “Or maybe it was you.”

  Habbab laughed. The two officers were trying frighten and confuse him. That much he knew. He smiled feebly, shook his head as though to say he’d never heard anything so absurd, and muttered, “God protect me from the accursed Satan.”

  Hanash had not seriously suspected the man. It was part of his technique to rattle people in order to keep them on the defensive.

  Hanash took the list of customers and started to read it, starting from the last entry.