Land, Jon

by [Kamal

  Amal closed the door part of the way. “There’s nothing he or any of us can say that would help you.”

  “Why are you afraid?”

  She left the door open a crack. “We cannot cooperate with you.”

  “Then the murderer of your sister remains free.”

  “Not in the eyes of God.”

  “What about your eyes, Amal?”

  Ben wished he could have seen if they registered any emotion. Hoping he’d get the chance, he continued before she could close the door.

  “Either of your parents may know or have seen something that is very important without them realizing. I will come back and speak to all of you again another time. Please accept my condolences.”

  She snorted. “Forgive me if I don’t.”

  * * * *

  B

  en waswalking backto hiscar whena Volvosedan pulledalongside him, the rear passenger side door easing open.

  “Give you a lift, Inspector?” offered Major Nabril al-Asi.

  Ben kept walking. “My car’s just up here.”

  “I know. Get in anyway.”

  Ben knew he had no choice and climbed in next to al-Asi. “Nice suit. Christian Dior?”

  “No. Henry Grethel. I have an Armani coming any day. Let me know if you’re ever interested.”

  “Only if the Authority changes our uniform.”

  “You won’t be in uniform forever, Inspector.”

  “Or tomorrow, if some people had their way.”

  That drew a brief smile from the head of the Protective Security Service. “You must be careful of the company you keep, Inspector.”

  “If you’re speaking of my Israeli liaison . . .”

  “I was speaking of the American you met with earlier today. Now, I’m not going to ask you who he is; you have the right to do your job any way you choose, just as I have the same right to do mine. Speaking of which, I was hoping you had had time to reconsider.”

  “Reconsider what?”

  “The subject of our last discussion: Dalia Mikhail. It would be a great help if you could answer some questions about her.”

  “I’ve told you everything I intend to.”

  “Nothing . . .”

  “And that was probably too much.”

  Al-Asi leaned a little closer to him. “We’re running our own detainment camps now, you know. Picked up what knowledge and supplies we could from the Israelis, but we haven’t quite gotten to human rights yet. A woman Dalia Mikhail’s age, well, let’s just say such a camp is not the place I’d want a friend of mine spending the rest of her life.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I told you: answers to a few simple questions.” Al-Asi paused. “Maybe something more tangible later.”

  “Why are you even bothering with her?”

  “Routine, just like I said.”

  “What if I get her to stop writing the editorials, to back off her inflammatory challenges to the Authority?”

  Al-Asi reached across Ben and thrust open the door. “If you change your mind, I think you know where my office is.”

  * * * *

  B

  en’s phonewas ringingwhen hegot backto hisdesk inthe old police building. He rushed in and snatched it up quickly.

  “Where the fuck have you been this whole day?” the voice of medical examiner Bassim al-Shaer roared. “I’ve been calling and calling, for hours.”

  Ben rummaged about the top of his desk. “There’s no message here.”

  “I didn’t leave one, just kept hanging up when they told me you were out. Goddamn it! You drop something in my lap and just forget about it?”

  The dead woman from the Jalazon refugee camp, Ben remembered: Shanzi. “It’s just that I’m not used to such wondrous service.”

  “The body arrived just after one o’clock. Took me all of five minutes to make the determination.”

  “That she was shot.”

  “She was shot, all right,” al-Shaer acknowledged. “But that’s not what killed her. This girl was strangled to death hours before someone put a bullet in her skull.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 22

  Y

  ou certainly earned your salary today, Pakad,” Rav Nitzav Hershell Giott said after Danielle had completed her summary of the day, settling back in a desk chair that threatened to engulf him. “It seems we made a wise choice in selecting the American to be your liaison.”

  “He’s Palestinian as well,” she reminded him.

  “All the more reason to be leery of trusting him,” cautioned Moshe Baruch of Shin Bet, “never mind wasting your time reviewing the individual crime scenes.”

  She looked at her superior, confused. “I thought that was what I was supposed to do.”

  “Waste your time?” Baruch challenged.

  “Catch a killer.”

  Baruch sat there fuming, unable to respond before Giott beat him to it.

  “It is unfortunate you were put in this position on such short notice.”

  “In fact, I had none.”

  “We had no choice if we wanted to preserve the operation.”

  “You mean, joint operation, don’t you?” she asked Giott.

  As she watched Giott and Baruch glance at each other, her father’s warning on his laptop screen flashed through her mind:

  DON’T TRUST THEM.

  “Of course it is a joint operation,” Giott conceded. “But each side has different priorities.”

  “Ours,” Baruch picked up, “is to stay updated on how much the Palestinians know, what they have learned.”

  “How much do we know, sir?”

  “Not enough to do us any good, I’m afraid. Why don’t you tell us about your counterpart?”

  She shrugged. “He’s persistent and clever, reaches conclusions even though he probably would rather not.”

  “What do you mean?” Giott asked her.

  “I think he would prefer not to catch this killer.”

  “That would be fine by us,” Baruch said without hesitation.

  Danielle looked at him, baffled. “But I thought the purpose of this joint venture was to—”

  “You thought wrong. The purpose of this venture is to protect ourselves.”

  “Against what?”

  “The possibility of the killer’s identity coming back to haunt us.”

  “An Israeli? You think the killer is an Israeli?”

  The two men looked at each other again, maddening in their silent exchange of information.

  “We think,” Giott began, “the government thinks, that we would suffer greatly in the eyes of the world if the killer turned out to be one of us.”

  “Then you chose the wrong man to be my counterpart because, according to our case files, he’s already figured out more than we have.”

  “More?” Giott raised.

  “He is following some leads that never occurred to us to check. Or that we didn’t bother to check.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Pakad.”

  “He has the advantage of knowing what he is facing from our case files, Rav Nitzav. Beyond that, the state of the bodies discovered in Jericho was far fresher.”

  Baruch rose. “Make no mistake about the reason we sent you to Jericho, Pakad. You are to monitor and assist in this investigation every step of the way, toward determining whether we have anything to worry about.”

  “And if the evidence points toward an Israeli suspect?”

  “Then you are to squash it, Pakad,” Giott ordered softly but firmly, leaving no room for question. “Using whatever means are necessary.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 23

  A

  l-shaer’s office still showed the effects of the break-in when Ben arrived. The only visible difference was a vast collection of knives lined up neatly atop the laboratory’s largest counter.

  “Your officer delivered these this afternoon,” al-Shaer explained. “The side of beef is hanging in the cold locker. Oh, and
he left a message for you. Apparently I’m not the only one who’s had trouble tracking you down.”

  “What was the message?”

  “He said to tell you there was a lead he needed to follow up.”

  “He didn’t say what?”

  “Do I look like your secretary? It was something about a car. I didn’t write it down.”

  “A car?”

  “That’s what he said. Now, if you’ll accompany me . . .”

  Ben followed al-Shaer into the lab where the prostitute Shanzi’s body lay covered by a sheet up to her face. That face looked sad and puzzled, eyes turned upward as if to look at the blackened wound just above the center of her forehead.

  Al-Shaer patted his pockets in a search for cigarettes. When the search turned up nothing, he lifted a half-smoked stub from a specimen jar he was using as an ashtray and lit it.

  “This one was easy,” the fat man reported, puffing away contentedly.”Let me show you.”

  Ben noticed that al-Shaer donned gloves this time before proceeding, smoke still rising from the cigarette wedged in his mouth. He tilted the corpse’s head upward and lifted her eyelids so Ben could get a good look.

  “Notice the lines of broken capillaries and red splotches of hemorrhage? Clear evidence of death due to asphyxiation.”

  “Then she was shot so the killers might cover their tracks.”

  “They must not have realized that the fact she was dead already meant there would be no pooling of blood in the wound,” al-Shaer said, holding the corpse’s head up for Ben to see. “Or perhaps they did not expect a true professional to take an interest.”

  “Professional enough to estimate the time of death?”

  “Between eleven a.m and two p.m. yesterday.”

  Ben nodded. Reports from the camp claimed Shanzi had been shot dead between four and four-thirty. Clearly, someone had first silenced her and then tried to conceal the truth about her killing. Any number of people could have known she was a potential witness to the latest murder by al-Diib; after all, even the woman who had accosted Ben last night had heard Shanzi boast about being on Jaffa Street the night of the murder. The real question was why anyone would bother silencing her, even if she did know something. Ben could pass her death off as coincidence. There were numerous other potential explanations for why she had been shot after being strangled, most notably a simple random murderer trying to cover his tracks.

  But what if it wasn’t?

  Ben shifted his imagination into park. The one thing here that remained grounded in absolute reality was the existence of a second witness: the boy identified only as Radji. Shanzi’s fate made it all the more imperative that Ben somehow locate him. A daunting task to say the least, and one he was ill-suited to undertake without a decent night’s sleep.

  Admitting to himself how tired he still felt, Ben left his official reports to file another time and headed straight home, leaving al-Shaer sorting through the specimen jar for another stub worth lighting. He arrived just after dark, opening the door to his apartment building with considerably more caution than he had the night before.

  “Bad idea to trust the Israelis, Benny,” said a voice as he stepped in, and Ben felt the breath wedge tight in his throat.

  A familiar shape emerged from the shadows. “If it isn’t Colonel Frank Brickland,” Ben said. “What are you today, Colonel? Retired ... or dead?”

  The throaty laugh Brickland let out in response surprised Ben. “Did some checking up on me, eh, hoss?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Congratulations. I gave you a little test. You passed.”

  “Send me to the top of the class after you tell me what the hell you mean.”

  “Look, Benny, I need men who can think, not just listen. If you had bought into everything I said without checking further, I would figure you’d probably buy into whatever anybody said. If you hadn’t checked things out, you never would have seen me again.”

  “And me thinking you wanted to help me ...”

  “Get used to it, hoss, because I’m the only one who can guide you through this brave new, fucked-up world.”

  Ben looked Brickland over.”Why does your file list you as having died six months ago?”

  “You’re an enterprising man, Benny. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Because you never retired—”

  “Very good.”

  “—but they wanted people to think you were out.”

  “Man like me, being dead’s the only way people would buy that one.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  Brickland’s granite jaw unbent a little. “Tough times these, hoss. Hot spots popping up all over the world like summer bug bites on the back of a hound. U.S. can’t enter them all officially, but we can go in secretly and try to head off any more Haitis and Somalias. American blood’s been spilled in too many places where we didn’t understand what the fuck we were doing there, pissing away plenty of tax dollars while we get ourselves shit on. Me and my cohorts, we’re the U.S.’s version of a kind of preemptive savings plan. Lives and dollars, Benny, spared because we went in first.”

  “But that’s not what brought you to Jericho.”

  “You know what brought me to Jericho.”

  “I know what you told me.”

  “And it’s the truth. You’re the only man who can help me on this one, hoss. What you don’t know or believe is that I’m also the only one who can help you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Brickland pursed his lips and frowned. “I know about the real cause of that woman’s death, Benny.”

  Somehow Ben wasn’t surprised. “You really are a remarkable man, Colonel.”

  “I just use what’s available to me. Good lesson for you. Here’s another: don’t trust the Israelis.”

  “Why?”

  “My kid was sleeping with them, and look what happened to him. They’ve got too much tied up in this investigation, too much to lose.”

  “Like all the rest of us.”

  “Some more than others. I’m going to give you some advice, hoss: forget about this whole case now, drop it like somebody handed it to you hot off the stove.”

  “And then who would be here to help you, Colonel?”

  Brickland’s soft smile acknowledged he’d been taken. “I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.”

  “So am I.”

  “I’m starting to get that feeling. Problem is, this time the deck is stacked against you. You can’t win. They want you to fail, they’re rooting for you to fail so they’ll have someone to blame. Trouble is, you might succeed.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “Because if the killer’s an Arab, he’ll be made a martyr. And if he’s not an Arab, well, use your imagination.”

  “I’m not permitted to over here.”

  “Then use mine.”

  “I could have used you a couple of nights ago.”

  “Main reason why I thought I’d stake your place out, ‘case the fucks decided to come back.” Brickland paused. “Also, figured I could pick up those fingerprint records you promised me.”

  “Funny, I don’t remember that.”

  “Expect the channels you sent them through to tell you the truth, if they tell you anything at all?”

  Ben removed an envelope from his jacket, but stopped short of handing it over. “Why should I expect anything different from you?”

  “If it’s my son, you’ll know.”

  “And if it’s not, will you tell me anyway?”

  “Shit, you want me to help dig your grave for you, just get me a shovel.”

  Ben held out the envelope to Brickland. “Some in Jericho would say I’ve already got one foot in it.”

  “I been there, hoss,” Brickland said knowingly, tucking the envelope inside his coat. “And it’s the second foot that counts.”

  * * * *

  B

  en was sound asleep when the phone rang, how many times he w
asn’t sure before he groped for it in the dark.