The Butcher's Theater

by Jonathan Kellerman

  So close.

  “What’s the best way to get there?”

  “I can drive up into the city,” said Afif, “and take you back, retracing on the donkey paths, but it would be quicker for you to climb down the first kilometer or so on foot—to where the slope eases. From there it’s a straight ride. How are your shoes?”

  “They’ll survive. I’m leaving now—meet you there. Thanks for keeping your eyes open.”

  “Nothing to it,” said the Druze. “A blind man couldn’t have missed it.”

  Daniel hung up, put his papers away, and called Forensics.

  CHAPTER

  41

  He parked the Escort across the road from the Amelia Catherine, put on a narrow-brimmed straw hat to block out the relentless Judean sun, tightened the buckles on his sandals, and got out. The watchman, Zia Hajab, was sitting at the entry to the hospital. Slumped in the same plastic chair, apparently sleeping.

  Taking a quick backward look at the gully where Fatma had been found, Daniel sprinted toward the ridge, climbed over, and began his descent.

  Walking sideways on bent legs, he made rapid progress, feeling nimble and fit, aware of, but unperturbed by, dry fingers of heat radiating upward from the broiling desert floor.

  Summer was approaching—twenty-three days since the dumping of Fatma, and the case was snaking its way toward the new season. The rainy season had been brief this year, attenuated by hot easterly winds, but clumps of vegetation still clung to the terraced hillsides, denying the inevitability of summer. Digging his heels in and using his arms for balance, he half-walked, half-jumped through soft expanses of rusty terra rossa. Then the red earth began yielding to pale strips of rendzina—the chalky limestone that looked as dead as plastic but could still be friable if you knew how to work it—until soon all was pale and hard and unyielding—a crumbling, rocky course the color of dried bones. Land that would rather dissolve than accommodate, the emptiness relieved only by the last starved weeds of spring.

  Afif’s jeep was visible as a khaki spot on the chalk, its diameter expanding as Daniel drew near. Daniel removed his hat and waved it in the air, saw the blue Border Patrol light flash on and off. When he was forty meters away, the jeep’s engine started up. He trotted toward it, unmindful of the grit that had lodged between his toes, then remembering that no sand had been found on either body.

  Afif gave the jeep gas and it rocked on its bearings. Daniel climbed in and held on as the Druze made a sharp U-turn and sped off.

  The ride was spine-jarring and loud, the jeep’s engine howling in protest as Afif tortured its transmission, maneuvering between low outcroppings of limestone, grinding single-mindedly through dry stream beds. The Druze’s pale eyes were hidden by mirrored sunglasses. A red bandanna was tied loosely around his neck, and the ends of his enormous mustache were blond with dust.

  “Which Bedouin clan is this?” Daniel shouted.

  “Locals, like I told you. Unrelated to any of the big clans. They run goats and sheep from here up toward Ramallah, come in for the summer, camping north of the city.”

  Daniel remembered a small northern campsite, nine or ten low black tents of woven goat-hair, baking in the heat.

  “Just past the Ramot, you said?”

  “That’s them,” said Afif. He downshifted into a climb, twisted the wheel, and accelerated.

  “How long have they been herding here?”

  “Eight days.”

  “And before that?”

  “Up north, for a month or so.”

  Bedouins, thought Daniel, holding on to his seat. Real ones, not the smiling, bejeweled businessmen who gave tent tours and camel rides to tourists in Beersheva. The most unlikely of informants.

  The Bedouin saw themselves as free spirits, had contempt for city dwellers, whom they regarded as serfs and menial laborers. But they chose to live at bare subsistence level in terrain that had the utmost contempt for them and, like all desert creatures, had turned adaptation into a fine art.

  Chameleons, thought Daniel. They told you what you wanted to hear, worked both sides of every fence. Glubb Pasha had built the Arab Legion on Bedouin talent; without them the Jordanian Army wouldn’t have lasted twenty-four hours. Yet, after ’67, they’d turned right around and volunteered for the Israeli Army, serving as trackers, doing it better than anyone. Now there were rumors that some of them were working for the PLO as couriers—grenades in saddlebags, plastique drop-offs in Gaza. Chameleons.

  “Why’d they come forward?” Daniel asked.

  “They didn’t,” said Afif. “We were on patrol, circling southeast from Al Jib—someone had reported suspicious movement along the Ramot road. It turned out to be a construction crew, working late. I was using the binoculars, saw them, decided to go in for a close look.”

  “Ever had any trouble with them?”

  “No, and we check on them regularly. They’re paupers, have enough trouble keeping their goats alive long enough to get them to market without getting into mischief. What caught my eye was that they were all gathered in one place. It looked like a conference, even though their camp was a good kilometer north. So I drove over and found them huddled around the mouth of the cave. They started to move out when they heard us coming, but I kept them there while I checked it out. When I saw what was inside, I had them pull up camp and regroup by the cave while I called you.”

  “You don’t think they had anything to do with it?”

  The Druze twirled one end of his mustache. “How can you be sure with the Bedouin? But, no, I think they’re being truthful. There weren’t any signs of recent activity in the cave. Old dried dung—looked like jackal or dog.”

  “How many of them actually went into the cave?”

  “The kid who found it, his father, a couple of others. We got there fairly soon after they did, kept the rest out.”

  “I’ll need fingerprints and foot casts from them for comparison. Forensics should be here within the hour. It’ll be a long day.”

  “I’ll handle it, no problem.”

  “Good. How many men do you have with you?”

  “Ten.”

  “Have them do a search within a one-and-a-half-kilometer radius from the cave. Look for anything unusual—other caves, clothing, personal articles, human waste—you know the routine.”

  “Do you want a grid search?”

  “You’ll need reinforcements for that. Is it worth it?”

  “It’s been weeks,” said Afif. “There was that strong khamsin eleven days ago.”

  He stopped talking, waited for Daniel to draw the conclusion: The chance of a footprint or clue withstanding the harsh easterly heat-storm was minimal.

  “Do a grid within half a kilometer from the cave. If they find another cave, tell them to call in and wait for further instructions. Otherwise, just a careful search of the rest of it will be enough.”

  The Druze nodded. They dipped, traversing a network of shallow wadis strewn with rocks and dead branches, the jeep’s underbelly reverberating hollowly in response to an assault of dancing gravel. Afif pushed his foot to the accelerator, churning up a dust storm. Daniel pulled down the brim of his hat, slapped one hand over his nose and mouth, and held his breath. The jeep climbed; he felt himself rise out of his seat and come down hard. When the particles had settled, the Bedouin camp came into focus along the horizon: dark, oblong smudges of tent, so low they could have been shadows. As they got closer, he could see the rest of the Border Patrol unit—two more jeeps and a canvas-top truck, all of them sporting revolving blue lights.

  The truck was pulled up next to a ragged mound of limestone and surrounded by a mottled brown cloud that undulated in the heat: goatherds shifting restlessly. A single shepherd stood motionless at the periphery, staff in hand.

  “The cave’s over there,” said Afif, pointing to the mound. “The opening’s on the other side.”

  He aimed the jeep at the flock, came to a halt several meters from the goats, and turned off the engine
.

  Two Bedouins, a boy and a man, stood next to the canvas-topped truck, flanked by Border Patrolmen. The rest of the nomads had returned to their tents. Only the males were visible, men and boys sitting cross-legged on piles of brightly colored blankets, silent and still, as if tranquilized by inertia. But Daniel knew the women were there, too, veiled and tattooed. Peeking from behind goatskin partitions, in the rear section of the tent, called haramluk, where they huddled among the wood stoves and the cooking implements until beckoned for service.

  A single vulture circled overhead and flew north. The goats gave a collective shudder, then quieted in response to a bark from the shepherd.

  Daniel followed Afif as the Druze pushed his way through the herd, the animals yielding passively to the intruders, then closing ranks behind them, settling into a mewling, snorting pudding of hair and horns.

  “The family is Jussef Ibn Umar,” said Afif as they approached the pair. “The father is Khalid; the boy, Hussein.”

  He handed their identification cards to Daniel, walked up to the Bedouins, and performed the introductions, calling Daniel the Chief Officer and making it clear he was someone to be respected. Khalid Jussef Ibn Umar responded with an appropriate bow, cuffed his son until the boy bowed too. Daniel greeted them formally and nodded at Afif. The Druze left and began instructing his men.

  Daniel inspected the ID cards, made notes, and looked at the Bedouins. The boy was ten, small for his age, with a round, serious face, curious eyes, and hair cropped close to the skull. His father’s head was wrapped with wide strips of white cloth held in place by a goat-hair cord. Both wore loose, heavy robes of coarse dark wool. Their feet were blackened and dusty in open sandals, the nails cracked and yellow. The smallest toe on the boy’s left foot was missing. Up close, both of them gave off the ripe odor of curdled milk and goat flesh.

  “Thank you for your help,” he told Ibn Umar the elder. The man bowed again. He was thin, stooped, sparsely bearded, and undersized, with dry, tough skin and one eye filmed by a slimy gray cataract. His face had the collapsed look of toothlessness and his hands were twisted and crisscrossed with keloid scars. According to the card he was thirty-nine, but he looked sixty. Stunted and damaged, like so many of them, by malnutrition, disease, inbreeding, the ravages of desert living.

  At forty, it was said, a Bedouin was old, approaching uselessness. Not exactly T. E. Lawrence’s noble desert conqueror, thought Daniel, looking at Khalid, but then again, most of what the Englishman had written was nonsense—in high school he and his friends had laughed at the Hebrew translation of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom until their sides ached.

  The boy stared at the ground, then looked up, catching Daniel’s eye. Daniel smiled at him and his head snapped back down.

  Clear eyes, clear complexion, a bright-looking kid. The short stature within the range of normalcy. Compared to his father, the picture of health. The result, no doubt, of ten summer weeks camped outside the Ramot. Forays by social workers, tutors, mobile health units, immunizations, nutritional supplements. The despised ways of the city dweller . . .

  “Show me the cave,” he said.

  Khalid Jussef Ibn Umar led him to the other side of the ragged limestone mound. Hussein followed at his heels. When they reached the mouth of the cave, Daniel told them to wait.

  He stepped back, took a look at the mound. A nondescript eruption, fringed with scrub. The limestone was striated horizontally and pitted, a decaying layer cake. Ancient waters had run down the north wall for centuries and sculpted it into a snail-shell spiral. The mouth of the shell was slitlike, shaped like a bow hole. Daniel’s first impression was that it was too narrow for a man to enter. But as he came closer, he could see it was an optical illusion: The outer lip extended far enough to conceal a hollow in the stone, a dishlike depression that afforded more than enough space for passage. He slipped through easily, motioned the Bedouins in after him.

  The interior of the cave was cool, the air stagnant and heavy with some musky, feral perfume.

  He’d expected dimness, was greeted by mellow light. Looking upward he found the source: At the apex of the spiral was an open twist. Through it shot an oblique ray of sunshine, softened by refraction and dancing with dust specks.

  The light was focused, as surely as if it had been a hand-held torch, spotlighting the center of a low, flat loaf of rock about two meters long, half as wide, then tapering to blackness in all directions.

  On the rock was a rusty stain—a stone guitar. A woman-shaped stain. The outer contours of a female body, vacant at the center and delineated by reddish-greenish borders that ended in starburst fringes in some places, spreading in others to the edge of the rock and over. Fanning and flowing in lazy dribbles.

  A silhouette of human sacrifice, stretched out on some altar. Etched in relief, as if by some lost-wax process.

  He wanted to go closer, take a better look, but knew he had to wait for Forensics and contented himself with observing from a distance.

  The legs of the outline were slightly apart, the arms positioned close to the trunk.

  Etched. The lost-blood process.

  Blood deteriorated fast. Exposure to the elements could turn it gray, green, blue, a variety of nonsanguinary colors. But Daniel had seen enough of it to know what this was. He glanced at the Bedouins, knew they would have recognized it too. They slaughtered their own animals, got blood on their clothes all the time; when water was lacking they went weeks without washing. Even the boy would have known.

  Khalid shifted his weight. His eyes were restless with uncertainty.

  Daniel turned his attention back to the rock.

  The outline was headless, ending at the neck. He visualized a body splayed out helplessly, the head tilted back, the neck slashed open. Draining.

  He thought he saw something—a patch of white—stuck to the upper edge of the rock, but the light evaded that part of the altar and it was too dark to be sure.

  He scanned the rest of the cave. The ceiling was low and curved, arched as if by design. On the side of one wall he saw some spots that could also have been blood. There were footprints near the rock/altar. In one corner he made out a jumble of detritus: balls of dried dung, broken twigs, crushed rock.

  “How did you find this?” he asked Khalid.

  “My son found it.”

  He asked Hussein: “How did you find this cave?”

  The boy was silent. His father squinted down at the top of his head, poked the back of his neck, and told him to speak.

  Hussein mumbled something.

  “Speak up!” ordered the father.

  “I was . . . herding the animals.”

  “I see,” said Daniel. “And then what happened?”

  “One of the young ones ran loose, into the cave.”

  “One of the goats?”

  “A baby. A ewe.” Hussein looked up at his father: “The white one with the brown spot on the head. She likes to run.”

  “What did you do then?” asked Daniel.

  “I followed it.” The boy’s lower lip trembled. He looked terrified.

  Just a kid, Daniel reminded himself. He smiled and squatted so that he and Hussein were at eye level.

  “You’re doing very well. It’s brave of you to tell me these things.”

  The boy hung his head. His father took hold of his jaw and whispered fiercely in his ear.

  “I went inside,” said Hussein. “I saw the table.”

  “The table?”

  “The rock,” said Khalid Jussef Ibn Umar. “He calls it a table.”

  “That makes sense,” Daniel told the boy. “It looks like a table. Did you touch anything in the cave?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you touch?”

  “That piece of cloth.” Pointing to the shred of white.

  A forensics nightmare, thought Daniel, wondering what else had been disturbed.

  “Do you remember what the cloth looked like?”

  The boy took a step for
ward. “Over there, you can pull it off.”

  Daniel restrained him with a forearm. “No, Hussein, I don’t want to move anything until some other policemen get here.”

  The terror returned to the boy’s face.

  “I . . . I didn’t know—”

  “That’s all right,” said Daniel. “What did the cloth look like?”

  “White with blue stripes. And dirty.”

  “Dirty with what?”

  The boy hesitated.

  “Tell me, Hussein.”

  “Blood.”

  Daniel looked at the cloth again. He could see now that it was larger than he’d thought. Only a small portion was white. The rest had blended in with the bloodstained rock. Enough, he hoped, for a decent analysis.

  Hussein was mumbling again.

  “What’s that, son?” asked Daniel.

  “I thought . . . I thought it was the home of a wild animal!”

  “Yes, that would make sense. What kinds of animals do you see out here?”

  “Jackals, rabbits, dogs. Lions.”

  “You’ve seen lions? Really?” Daniel suppressed a smile; the lions of Judea had been extinct for centuries.

  Hussein nodded and turned his head away.

  “Tell the truth, boy,” commanded his father.

  “I’ve heard lions,” said the boy, with unexpected assertiveness. “Heard them roaring.”

  “Dreams,” said Khalid, cuffing him lightly. “Foolishness.”

  “What,” Daniel asked the boy, “did you do after you touched the cloth?”

  “I took the ewe and went out.”

  “And then?”

  “I told my father about the table.”

  “Very good,” said Daniel, straightening himself. To the father: “We’re going to have to take your son’s fingerprints.”

  Hussein gasped and started crying.

  “Quiet!” commanded Khalid.

  “It won’t hurt, Hussein,” said Daniel, squatting again. “I promise you that. A police officer will roll your fingers on a pad of ink, roll them again on a piece of paper, making a picture of the lines on your fingertips. Then he’ll wash them off. That’s it. He may also take a picture of your feet, using white clay and water. Nothing will hurt.”