by Chris Culver
“You have no idea who my husband was, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Wait here,” she said, taking a step back into the house. Before I could say anything, she pulled the door shut and disappeared. With everything else going on, I didn’t have a lot of time, so I hoped whatever she was about to show me was worth it.
I pulled my jacket around me tight as a cool breeze blew off the wet road behind me. A minute passed, and then another. I was about to knock on the door again when Ms. Collier opened it. She looked at me up and down.
“Come in, but take off your shoes.”
She held the door open and stepped back. I hesitated but then walked inside. The entryway was warm and clean. A TV blared from somewhere in the house. It smelled as if she were making spaghetti sauce. Before she could change her mind, I slipped my shoes off and smiled.
“Thank you. It’s getting a little chilly out there.”
She nodded and then shut the door before walking deeper into the house to an eat-in kitchen. There, displayed on a granite countertop, were half a dozen photographs of a man in a military uniform. There were also display boxes with medals. In the formal pictures, Jacob Ganim wore a green beret adorned with a US Army major’s oak leaf. I had never been in the military, so I didn’t know what the ribbons on his uniform meant, but he had a lot of them.
“Jacob was a soldier,” she said, holding up a wooden display case that held a bronze cross. “This is a Distinguished Service Medal. It’s only been given out a couple dozen times in the past twenty years. He couldn’t tell me how he earned it, but people respected him for it. It’s given for extraordinary heroism in combat. The only higher honor is the Medal of Honor.”
She picked up another display case with three medals inside.
“He earned the Silver Star three times for gallantry in combat,” she said. “My husband was one of the most intelligent, capable soldiers in the United States Army. He spent years in combat zones. No one snuck up on him and killed him from behind. He was murdered by someone he trusted.”
I didn’t know whether I bought that completely, but it potentially explained a few things.
“As I said earlier, there are indications from his autopsy that he was tortured in 2014. Was he in the Army then?”
She hesitated, but then nodded. “Yes. Jacob was a clandestine officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
“So your husband was a spy,” I said, narrowing my brow.
Ms. Collier smiled wistfully.
“Jacob was a lot more than that.”
Chapter 25
A woman pushing a stroller passed their car without looking inside. Her blonde hair bounced on her shoulders, while her baby kicked his feet in the air and grabbed his toes. Butler al-Ghamdi shifted on his seat. Kamil Salib, Daniel Hakim, and he were in Daniel’s Volvo station wagon. The air smelled pungent, like a locker room after a big football game. Hockey gear lay strewn about the back of the car.
Butler hadn’t done anything like this before, but he had seen enough movies and read enough books to know how it worked. Ideally, he would have watched the house for several days. He would have known when his target arrived and left for work, when her boyfriend got up in the morning, when they went to sleep…everything about their lives.
Instead, he had spent the past twenty-four hours at a summer camp owned by a fool. Nassir Hadad and his friends thought Butler needed help. They thought they could persuade him to turn his back on God. They thought they could “fix” him.
He wasn’t broken.
The world was at war, and Butler had decided to become a soldier. He was tired of sitting on the sidelines. What’s more, God had already shown Butler that he had made the right choice. While Nassir and his friends sat in prisons operated by the federal government, Butler sat in a car outside Kim Peterson’s home.
The FBI had come to the camp while Butler was at a lumberyard twenty miles away. If Butler had doubts before, they were quashed then. God wanted him to complete the mission Hashim Bashear had given him. He wanted Butler to become a soldier like the men he was with. That was exactly what Butler planned to do.
Daniel stretched in the driver’s seat and then turned and reached to the backseat to pat Butler’s leg.
“Stay awake, brother,” he said. “This is your day.”
Butler didn’t need the reminder. He knew what he had to do. Daniel turned forward again to watch the house. They had been there for over an hour, watching and talking through their plan. Butler knew it well enough now that he could have recited it in his sleep. They still needed to steal a car—preferably a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord—but that was the easy part. The hard part would come this afternoon.
Butler was more than ready.
Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades and down his back. He felt every breath he took. His revolver bulged from his right hip pocket. He hadn’t wanted to carry a pistol, but Daniel had insisted on it. Butler’s rifle—a Bushmaster M4A2 Patrolman AR-15 semiautomatic—was in a hard case beneath the hockey gear. After losing most of their gear to a fire the night before, they had scrambled to buy new weapons from collectors on the Internet.
The AR-15 was one of four rifles they had purchased that afternoon. It was smoother and more powerful than any weapon Butler had ever held. Combined with its thirty-round magazine, the rifle made him a formidable fighter. His revolver felt like a toy in comparison.
He watched the apostate’s house from the street. Kim Peterson, his target, had red hair and thin lips. When he had seen her earlier, her hips had swayed like a prostitute’s when she walked. She was probably ten years older than him, and she lived with a man who wasn’t her husband. In nearly every picture he had seen of her, she wore a low-cut blouse that showed the entire world her breasts. She should have been ashamed, but women like her had no shame.
Still, God was merciful. Had all else been equal, she’d have to account for her wicked decisions at the end of her life, but it wouldn’t have been Butler’s place to punish her for those sins. Unfortunately, she had done far worse than live a life of immodesty. She had hidden six female apostates in her basement, each of whom threatened a community Butler loved.
Hashim Bashear had tracked the women from Raqqa, Syria, to their final destinations in the United States. Their own families had shipped them away so they could live sinful, wicked lives without the guiding influence of men like Hashim Bashear and other rightly directed clerics. More than anything else, it was sad. Had they stayed in Syria, they could have had husbands and children and a household to run…everything a good woman should want.
They threw away this precious gift so they could spread malicious lies about the men, women, and community they left behind. These women had known God’s commands. That, above all else, bothered Butler.
Circumstances had forced him to seek the straight path, to fight for it, to find those rightly directed teachers to lead him. These women, though, had received perfect instruction inside the Islamic State and ignored it. Even that, he could have forgiven. Had they merely run, had they stayed silent about the world they left, perhaps they would have been allowed to live.
But they did more than run.
Kim Peterson made documentary films. Hashim Bashear had shown him the trailer online for her newest movie. Supposedly, it was a feature-length exposé of life within the Islamic State before it fell. In actuality, it had no more truth than the popular novels his English teachers had forced him to read in school. That was why she and the women in her care had to die. She and the women hidden in her basement could not be allowed to besmirch God and His people with impunity. He relished the thought of killing them.
Though he had never shot a human being, Butler had killed before. He had grown up in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio. On the coasts, hunters may have been looked down on as backward, but in the Midwest, hunting was a part of life and a rite of passage for a lot of young men. He knew what it felt like to take a life. He’d feel that again ve
ry soon.
Butler drew in a breath and felt a calm stillness as righteousness flowed through him. He had been a boy when he first met Hashim Bashear online. In many ways, he still was. Today, though, he would truly become a man. He leaned forward, his voice hard.
“She’s not coming back,” he said. “We have work to do. Let’s go.”
Daniel nodded and turned the car on. As they left, Butler looked over his shoulder at Kim Peterson’s house again. When he saw it next, he would bring God’s righteous anger with him and leave only after having completed his holy mission. Kim Peterson and the apostates she hid would die by his hand.
It filled him with pride.
Chapter 26
From the very start, I had been in the dark about critical details of this case. Unfortunately, now that I was starting to learn some of those details, I was just as confused as ever. I looked at the photos on the table, and then I looked at Ms. Collier.
“What happened in 2014?”
She blinked and looked down. “I don’t know precisely.”
“What do you know?”
She looked up and then brushed a stray lock of blonde hair behind her ear. “Jacob was born in Baltimore, but his mother and father were from Iraq. He spoke Arabic fluently, and he grew up in an Islamic household. His superiors at the DIA used him. They helped him infiltrate an insurgent group in Iraq. I didn’t know what he did there, but eventually he ended up in Syria. That was when everything fell apart.”
I waited a moment as she gathered herself to speak. She looked down and touched his picture as tears began to spring from her eyes.
“I don’t know how it happened, but they figured out he was an American. They held him captive and tried to ransom him to the highest bidder. Before they could sell him, a Syrian rebel group freed him. They smuggled him to Turkey, and then he made his way to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.”
That must have been why he had anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants in his room at Nassir’s camp. The man probably had severe PTSD. Unfortunately, everything she had just told me reinforced my belief that he had no business in the field. Jacob Ganim had deserved to retire in peace. Instead, he was undercover again. This time, he didn’t make it home.
“I’m very sorry for what happened to him,” I said. “That was 2014. What was he like today?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Ms. Collier?”
She looked at me and blinked before looking down again.
“Jacob and I were together since I was in college and he was in the Army. He took a consulting job with the FBI, and we eventually moved to Indianapolis. We got married in 2015 when I found out I was pregnant.”
She smiled wistfully. “I thought he’d settle down.”
“But he didn’t,” I said, encouraging her to keep speaking.
“No, he didn’t,” she said. “Even when he worked for the FBI, he would disappear for months at a time on assignment. When he was home, he had a psychiatrist at the VA. He was getting help. Every now and then, he’d come home, and he’d joke and smile and be a good daddy. Then there were days when he’d be moody and angry all the time. He never hit me or our daughter, but he scared me sometimes.
“Then, one day, he told us he had to leave for good. I signed the divorce papers two weeks later and never saw him again. That was a year ago. I haven’t talked to him since.”
I nodded to myself, thinking. I had a much clearer picture of my victim, but it didn’t get me closer to his murderer. Ms. Collier was probably right, though: This was not a man murdered by a stranger. He would have been too well trained for that. He let somebody into his life, and that somebody killed him.
“I understand he was likely limited in what he could tell you, but did your husband ever mention anything about human trafficking to you?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Did he have any siblings? Maybe a sister?”
Again, she shook her head. Unfortunately, that left me nearly back where I started. A man like Jacob probably made enemies while working for the DIA. He could have been killed by any of them. At the same time, he probably made more than a few enemies working for the FBI. They could have killed him. Or maybe he was killed for the freelance investigation he was clearly running. Or maybe he was even killed for his involvement with Nassir and his group.
Everything I found just brought me more questions. It was getting frustrating.
Ms. Collier didn’t need to hear that, though. She had lost her husband. Her daughter had lost a father. She needed support. Even if I couldn’t give much, she deserved everything I had.
“Jacob had a house in Indianapolis,” I said. “He has pictures of the two of you together in his hallway. He’s got a lot of pictures of your daughter. He may not have talked to you, but he cared about you.”
Her lower lip trembled, and she nodded.
“We used to live there together. I moved here after the divorce,” she said. “Thank you for telling me about him. But I think I need you to leave now.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I’m going to do my best to find out who killed him.”
She nodded and gave me a weak smile that didn’t reach past her lips. I put on my shoes in the entryway and walked back to my car.
I had spent almost two hours to find out my victim worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency and that his ex-wife still loved him. As much as I appreciated being able to tell her about her husband, I had wasted time I didn’t have to waste. With a forty-eight-hour deadline, I had to move.
Once I got back in my car, I put on my seatbelt and immediately began heading back to Indianapolis. If Ms. Collier couldn’t tell me why her husband was taking pictures of young Islamic women, I’d ask the man who was hiding them. I didn’t remember his name, but I knew him. He had a seat on Indianapolis’s Interfaith Council. More than that, he was the imam at a mosque I had once visited. That was more than enough to track him down.
I drove toward the interstate but pulled into the parking lot of a gas station before getting on. There, I used my phone to begin searching the websites of mosques around town. I found the man within about five minutes. His name was Omar Nawaz, and he looked like he was about thirty years old in his pictures. I put his mosque’s address in my phone’s GPS and headed out.
The drive was easy and quick. Omar Nawaz’s mosque was in a residential neighborhood full of single-story homes, most of which were sided with rough clapboard. Its parking lot was about half-full with congregants on their way to maghrib, the fourth of five daily prayers performed by devout Muslims. I parked and unclipped my badge from my belt and put it in the front breast pocket of my jacket so people inside could see it. Then I called my dispatcher for some backup.
The nearest patrol vehicles were just two or three minutes away, so I didn’t have to wait long. I told the officers that I planned to speak with a man who had a history of running from the police and requested they wait in the parking lot in case he tried to escape. Hopefully they wouldn’t be needed.
The mosque had a heavy wooden door. Warm air rushed out at me the moment I opened it. There were a couple of people in the lobby. Several looked at me nervously at first but then relaxed, probably because I had the same light brown skin and black hair they did. My parents had come from Egypt. This group was my community, and they knew it.
All but one of them, at least.
Omar Nawaz stood ramrod straight and looked at me from the center of the room with the stunned, terrified gaze of a teenager caught trying to buy a keg of beer with a fake ID. I walked to him and smiled.
“I hope I’m not too late for maghrib,” I said, looking around at the other men and women. There were six or seven of them, and they were starting to move toward the prayer hall. I smiled to a few people. Most of them smiled back. “It’s been a couple of years, but I had fajr with your congregation a while ago. They’re a good group.”
“They are,” he said. He took a deep breath and plastered a
fake smile on his lips. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get ready.”
I gave him a matching fake grin and lowered my voice so no one else around us could hear.
“You’re going to run again, aren’t you?”
The smile left his face.
“Please do the right thing,” I said. “Lead your congregation in prayer, and then come talk to me.”
He looked down as if he were thinking. Then he nodded and took a step to join his congregants in the prayer hall. I watched him walk for about ten feet. He wore a loose-fitting tan thobe—a flowing tunic that reached to his knees—a matching pair of slacks, and a navy blue coat. On his feet, he wore the same tennis shoes he had worn when I saw him at the motel southeast of town.
Before reaching the door to the prayer hall, he turned to look at me. The lizard part of my brain, that unevolved remnant of humanity’s hunter-gatherer past, saw him lower his center of gravity; it saw his skin flush just a little, and it saw the fear in his eyes. I knew instantly he was going to either attack or run. Either way, he’d have a bad day.
“I just want to talk,” I said.
As if those were the magic words, he sprinted toward the front door. I sighed.
“Asshole.”
Chapter 27
The officers outside would grab Nawaz before he could get too far, so I wasn’t too worried about catching him. That he would run rather than talk to me, though, didn’t bode well for my interview. Most of the congregation had moved to the prayer hall, but a few people remained with me in the entryway.
I looked at a man and a woman nearby. The man put his arm around his wife and turned so that he stood between the two of us. His eyes were wide open, and his body was stiff. He didn’t know I had chased Nawaz from a hotel, or that Nawaz might have been involved in a crime. He only knew that his imam was scared of me. That made him see me as a threat. I hated that this job sometimes made innocent people afraid of me, but I couldn’t back down now.
“Where’s Omar’s office?” I asked. The man hesitated and then pointed to a hallway behind me. His hand trembled. “Thank you.”