by Steven James
“Yeah. My. Dad. The guy who bailed on you when you were pregnant with me. The guy who’s never shown up even once over all these years to wish me a happy birthday or tell me not to play video games so much or hassle me about my boyfriends or wait up for me when I come back late after my curfew so that he could yell at me in a way that told me he loved me even though he was mad at me. My dad.”
“No. No, it doesn’t. This has nothing to do with him.”
So then, her mom ran through the instructions for her, told her to call Jodie, the FBI agent they were sharing the apartment with, if there were any problems, and then made sure she had enough money for a cab so she wouldn’t have to take the subway to Cherise’s when she was done babysitting tonight.
After picking up her purse, her mom leaned in to give her a kiss on the forehead, but Tessa stepped back before she could.
Now, Tessa went back to trying to brush her stupid, stupid hair, and also figure out how she was supposed to babysit those two kids without being upset about her mom the entire time.
Before leaving for Rachel’s house, she remembered that the girl she would be babysitting was five, and that when she was little, hugging her teddy bear Francesca made her feel safe—okay, so maybe that still worked, but that wasn’t the point.
With Jodie and her mom gone, she really didn’t want to be at their apartment alone right now. Even though it was too early to head over to the lady’s house where she was going to be babysitting, Tessa grabbed her stuff, brought Francesca with her, and left to get a cup of coffee before heading across town.
++++
“Take this exit,” Sharyn told Detective Schwartz.
“Nope. I think it’s the next one,” he said.
“Trust me. Exit here.”
He sighed and grudgingly made the turn.
Inntoit2U Designs would be located about a mile down the road.
“You know what you’re gonna ask ’em?” he said.
“Besides why people who use their app keep showing up dead?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m hoping we can get a master list of everyone who has set up a Hook’dup account.”
Over the course of their drive, she’d discovered that the profiles of the first four victims had been 404’d so now there wasn’t any trace of them, but Jamika’s information was still accessible. Also, she heard the update that there was no DNA from the bed sheets at the scene of Jamika’s homicide and nothing usable from the tunnel where the shrine had been.
“Huh,” Ted said when he noticed they were passing Henry Ruff Road. “Looks like you were right after all. We should be there in a couple minutes.”
50
Ali finished his prayers, returned the prayer mat to the car, and then went to use the men’s toilet before resuming his trip to Dearborn.
He had just finished at the urinal and was washing his hands when the four men he’d seen earlier beside the vending machine entered the restroom.
Two of them walked toward the urinals behind him, one stayed by the door, and the other approached him and began rinsing his hands at the next sink over.
It was the young man who’d been watching him pray.
“Hey, bro.”
“Hello,” Ali replied.
“Saw you kneeling out there. Not feeling good?”
“I’m alright. Thank you.”
“What were you doing?”
“Doing?”
“Kneeling down like that. Thought maybe you were carsick or something.”
“I was praying.”
“Praying.”
“Yes.”
The man finished at the sink and shook his hands dry rather than using the paper towels hanging from the dispenser nearby. “To who?”
Go, Ali. This is not good.
“Have a good day,” Ali told him, but as he turned toward the door, the man stepped in front of him, blocking his path.
“Whoa. Easy. We were just having a little conversation here, right? You’re gonna walk off in the middle of it without answering my question? That’s kind of rude, don’t you think? I was just wondering who you were praying to.”
“Allah. Most Gracious. Most Merciful.”
“Oh, Allah most merciful. Huh. Is this the same merciful Allah who ordered his people to kill the infidels wherever they might be found? You know, Hadith 9:4?” He eyed Ali. “Yeah. You do, don’t you? Or Surah 9:5. The Verse of the Sword, and its command to ‘slay the idolaters wherever you find them.’ That’s always a good one, right?”
“I have nothing against you, sir.”
He turned to his friends. “You hear that, guys? He doesn’t have anything against me. That’s—man—that’s reassuring.” He faced Ali again. “Did I say you did?”
“No. If you’ll excuse me.”
Ali took one step, but the man didn’t move.
“Let me ask you a question—why do you people hate us?”
“I don’t hate you. My people don’t hate you.”
“Oh, I think they do.”
The men by the urinals zipped up and faced Ali.
“I’m Bill.” The man shook more water from his fingertips, clearly unconcerned that some of it landed on Ali. “And you are?”
“My name is Ali.”
“Ali? Like Muhammad Ali?” Bill shadowboxed, threw a couple of fake punches. “Are you a boxer?”
“No.”
“Abrogation. That mean anything to you? How the later verses in the Qur’an trump the earlier ones?” He winked knowingly at Ali. “And those verses Muhammad wrote in Mecca aren’t quite as peace-loving as the ones he wrote in Medina, are they? Come on. You know what I’m talking about, right?”
“I don’t want any trouble. I just want to return to my car.”
“I’m not making any trouble. Are we making any trouble here, guys?”
The other men told him that no, they were not. No one was making any trouble here.
Bill said, “My brother was in Maiduguri on January tenth. You recognize that?”
“I’ve never heard of Maiduguri.”
“Oh, well, it’s in Nigeria. What about Kaheesha Youssef? Do you know that name?”
“No.”
“Yeah. Makes sense. It was never released to the public. With child suicide bombers, the media doesn’t usually share their names. But I did some digging. I found out hers.”
“I—”
“January tenth. That was the day she blew herself up. You know how old she was? Ten. She killed twenty-nine other people in the market that day. My brother was a news correspondent covering the upsurge of violence in Nigeria. The girl’s bomb ripped him in half. The survivors said the girl was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’ right before she did it.”
Ali felt bile rising in his throat.
Yemen.
The scimitar.
All the hatred.
All the death.
“I am very sorry for your loss.”
“Right,” Bill said. “Well, but it’s not just mine, though, is it? More than twenty families lost people in the market that day. Are you a jihadist, Ali?”
“Those people are extremists. They do not represent all Muslims.”
“Yeah. Right. No, I get it. They’re the violent ones. You follow Muhammad instead.”
“I follow the Qur’an, which he introduced into the world.”
“So what about Jesus? Oh wait. You call him Isa, don’t you? Well, wouldn’t it make more sense to follow the teachings of a man who was born of a virgin, a man who never sinned, than those of a pedophile who married a nine-year-old-girl?”
“Aisha was nineteen when she married Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.”
“Peace be upon a pedophile, but not upon us, huh? Not upon the rest of the world? Not upon those people in the market that day?”
“Islam is a religion of peace.” But even as Ali said the words, he knew it was a misleading statement. Islam is not about love or about hate, about peace or about war, it is about submission. Islam is about submitting to Allah above all else. That might result in peace. It might result in war, but neither of those mattered as much as following Allah. But that was too much to explain.
“A religion of peace. Over the last fifteen years, 99.5% of suicide bombings in the world have been committed by Muslims. If you hear about a suicide bombing and you just happen to venture a guess that it was a Muslim who did it, you’re gonna be right 99.5% of the time.” He turned to his friends. “That sound like a religion of peace to you?”
They shook their heads. The one closest to the door said, “Doesn’t sound peaceful to me.”
“Me neither.” Once again he addressed them rather than Ali. “There aren’t too many things in this life that you can be 99.5% sure of, are there, guys?”
No, they agreed. There weren’t too many things you could be that sure of.
The men tightened their circle around Ali.
Get out.
Now!
Ali shoved one of them aside and rushed for the door, but Bill grabbed him before he could escape, threw him against the wall, and punched him brutally in the jaw.
The force of the blow whipped Ali around, but on the way to the floor, he smacked his forehead against the sink.
A deafening crack.
A jolt that shot through him.
He collided with the floor.
A whirl of pain pounded against the inside of his skull, a deep, throbbing, tightening vise that seemed to grow thicker and harsher with each beat of his heart.
From somewhere in the fog descending around him, Ali heard one of the men say that they should kick him once for each of the people who died that day in the market, and they may have, he had no way to tell. He lost track of the number of times their shoes and boots slammed into his face, his stomach, his ribs.
Get up!
Fight back!
But no, he did not.
Someone deserved to be punished for the innocent people who’d died in that Nigerian marketplace, for every innocent person who’d ever died at the hands of those who claimed to follow a God, by any name.
He lost track of everything, of pain, of conscious thought, until he knew only darkness, even as he prayed for forgiveness for himself and what he was doing this week, and for the men who were now making him pay for the sins of his people.
51
Christie still hadn’t called, but she did text me: I’m going to be out of town for a couple days. I’ll be in touch.
I wasn’t sure if I should forward the text to Tessa, but in the end, I figured I would leave the issue of communicating her plans to Christie. However, I did send Christie a message that I was here if she wanted to talk.
Regarding the case, there was a lot to process.
Rather than head back to the motel, after I’d grabbed a sandwich from the federal building’s cafeteria, SAC Kennedy gave me the keys to an empty office on the twenty-third floor, and I spent some time analyzing the data in order to pull the geoprofile together, and also trying to discern what Maria’s words meant.
Through it all, however, the images of her locked in that cage, the suffering she went through, and that final, brutal footage of the man with the sword hacking off her hands kept haunting me.
Why Russian women? Did she mention Russian women just because of the scientist?
Or maybe she was delusional after all?
No, I didn’t buy that.
We had a portion of a shipping manifest in Dr. Kuznetsov’s things. Maybe that tied in with this somehow? A shipment from Russia? Human trafficking or under-the-radar travel, but why would the mannequins matter?
“Listen to what the ladies say.”
But how do the silent speak?
I followed up with DeYoung to have the team redouble their efforts at identifying the contents of the manifest, and analyzing the composition of the mannequins. “Maybe we can find a lot number or serial number that can help us track where they were before they ended up in Dr. Kuznetsov’s house,” I told him.
Then I checked my messages.
Three had come in.
(1) The autopsy confirmed Jamika Karon’s time of death and that she’d died as a result of a single gunshot wound to the chest.
(2) Mimi’s texts to Canyon were benign and fit what he’d told us.
(3) Canyon Robbins had died.
The shock of that last message hit me hard.
I tried to let it sink in. It’s so hard when you see someone, speak to him, and then soon afterward, find out he’s passed away. It’s like a punch in the gut, a stark reminder of the brevity of life and the inevitability of death.
We live.
We die.
The ripples pass away.
And then, all too quickly, the surface becomes smooth once again.
Canyon’s father was the medical examiner. I wondered if he would do an autopsy or have his assistant take care of it. I expected that either way, they would want specific answers regarding how he’d died from complications related to that stab wound.
Assumptions are just too easy to make and too often wrong.
Kennedy’s story of the biting worms came to mind.
Death often follows on the heels of not quite getting the facts straight.
++++
“Hey, buddy, you alright?”
To Ali, the words seemed to be liquid, dripping onto him, seeping into him, landing and—
Someone was nudging his shoulder now. “Buddy?”
Ali opened his eyes but immediately had to squinch them shut again because of the unyielding light staring down at him from the fluorescents on the bathroom ceiling.
Turning to the side, he tried opening them again and found that his vision was smeared, especially through his left eye, making it hard to see anything clearly.
“Yes?” he muttered in a faraway, distant voice that seemed to come from someone else, a bit like it had sounded when he first spoke to Fayed after being left in that room in Yemen for four days at the start of his training.
“You alright?” the man asked worriedly.
Ali tried to sit up, but the blazing fire in his side sent him dropping to the floor again. He’d never had a cracked rib before, but the sharp pain in his side with every breath made it pretty clear what had happened.
The man, who was obese and wore khaki shorts and flip-flops, had his phone out. “I’ll call an ambulance for ya.”
Ali shook his head. “No, no. I’m okay.”
“What happened?”
“I slipped.”
“You—?”
At last, Ali found a way to sit up, masking the pain the best he could. “I just slipped.”
“You don’t look so good.”
“Really, I’m okay, sir. Thank you.”
The man continued to insist that he help him up, and in order to avoid making a scene, Ali finally accepted his offer.
When he was on his feet at last, even though the guy continued to fret over him, Ali simply thanked him and assured him, as convincingly as possible, that he was fine.
Before turning toward the door, Ali caught sight of his reflection in the mirror.
His face was a mess of blood and bruises, his upper lip split in half, his left eye swollen nearly shut.
“You really don’t look good.” The man who was trying so hard to be helpful lamely handed him a crumple of damp paper towels. “Maybe this’ll help?”
Ali thanked him once more, took the paper towels, and then quickly escaped out the door and made his way to the car.
The four men who’d beaten him were nowhere to be seen.
As he stumbled up to the rental, t
he pain in his stomach tightened, and he found himself crumpling to his knees and throwing up. Finally, he made his way into the driver’s seat and locked the doors.
With his side raging against him, he used the paper towels to wipe some of the vomit out of his mouth and some of the blood off his face, but he didn’t want to wait around here too long, so as soon as he could, he pulled out of the parking lot and merged onto the highway.
Thinking about Azaliya.
And about that ten-year-old girl who’d blown herself up and killed all those people.
Kaheesha Youssef.
He didn’t like knowing her name. It made it harder to accept what she’d been sent into that market to do.
52
Sharyn stepped out of the car while Schwartz answered his phone.
Inntoit2U Designs was located in a strip mall that contained a sub shop, a furniture rental store with one of those tall, wobbly, blowy balloon men outside, and a yoga studio—with yin-yang symbols painted on the glass of the front window.
Schwartz said, “This call might take a few minutes. I’ll be in as soon as I can.”
Sharyn went inside. A blast of overly conditioned air breezed into her face from a vent directly above her head.
In the corner, a basset hound lounged near the wall and lazily tilted his head her way without bothering to lift it from his paws. A wan young man, who looked twenty-five at the oldest, smiled at her from behind a stand-up desk. His hair was short-cropped, but his Amish-style beard was not. Glasses. Jeans. A plaid shirt. He looked like he might be auditioning for the part of Quintessential Millennial Computer Geek in a sitcom.
“Can I help you?” he asked amiably.
“I’m looking for the person who developed the Hook’dup app,” Sharyn told him.
“For?”
“For?”
“What are you looking for him for?” He was still smiling.
The door opened behind her and Schwartz came in. The hound gave him the once-over as well.
“I’m Agent Weist with the FBI,” she told the man. “This is Detective Schwartz. We’d like to ask the developer a few questions.”
“Oh.” He swallowed slightly.