Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  He overheard someone whisper “Do you think he’ll talk about Ed Bundy?”

  “Ted Bundy!” Daher corrected sharply, slapping the officer on the back of the head.

  It had been a long weekend. Ibrahim had spent the whole time worrying about Sabria, but now, watching the situation room fill up, he tried to put her in the back of his mind and focus on the case.

  A few officers weren’t there, and half of forensics was still out at the gravesites. They had finished removing the bodies, which had all been brought to the examiner’s, but in the past twenty-four hours forensics had uncovered something else: the killer had buried one of the severed hands near the body it belonged to. This had prompted the forensics and excavation teams to widen the area around each of the bodies in search of more artifacts. They had found another two hands buried near another body, but that was it.

  Ibrahim was surprised that he was still in charge of the case. Riyadh had sent him to the desert because he’d been out of practice with Homicide cases for ten years. Now he suddenly found himself sitting on top of what might be the biggest case of the decade. He figured he could expect to hold on to it for another hour at the most. At the back of the room, the department’s other detectives were forming a group: Osama, Abu-Haitham, and the tall, bluff Yasser Mu’tazz, plus two others whose names he couldn’t remember.

  As soon as the American appeared, all expectation collapsed. Ibrahim could almost hear the Shit! in mental unison followed by an intake of breath when Dr. Charlie Becker walked into the room. Her face was a clean porcelain, her button-down shirt almost a mockery of Saudi manhood: white and loose, but clinging in just the right places. She wasn’t even wearing a headscarf, and her long auburn hair had a springy quality that made it seem alive whenever she moved her head.

  She looked momentarily confused, as if she’d walked into the wrong room in the wrong country. She glanced back at her guide, Chief Riyadh, who strode forward, nodding paternally at her before taking up position in front of his men with a careful sternness on his face.

  “Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to our FBI specialist in serial killers, Dr. Charlie Becker, who has graciously flown in from a conference in Dubai.” It was clear from Riyadh’s voice that he’d had no idea that Dr. Becker was a woman until she’d arrived at his office. “Dr. Becker does not speak Arabic, but Officer Kazaz has offered to translate.” Everyone looked at Kazaz as if he were a newly anointed king.

  Ibrahim caught sight of the old Murrah grandfather Talib al-Shafi who had been responsible for most of the tracking at the gravesites. He was standing by the door, a slight man, his thick gray hair braided and tucked up beneath his headscarf. As Charlie walked into the room, he studied her walk, looked at her feet, seemed to find them acceptable, then turned and left.

  “Thank you so much for having me,” Charlie said, surprising everyone. She could not have known that the crisp, high notes of her voice broke against walls that had not rebounded a female sound for years. She noticed the effect of her words on the men’s faces and blushed ever so slightly before pressing on. “I’m a psychiatrist by training but I got involved with the FBI as a specialist in certain kinds of deviant behavior, and now I focus exclusively on serial killers. I understand you have one on your hands right now.”

  A few men nodded, but the rest were dumbstruck by her manner, both vulnerable and confident, by the fact that her hair announced its presence by glittering in the fluorescent lights. Most men in the room had a good enough grasp of English to understand what she was saying. The translation was merely a backup. Ibrahim stepped forward.

  “Dr. Becker,” he said, “thank you for coming. I’m Inspector Ibrahim Zahrani and I’m in charge of this case. We do appear to have a serial killer and we’d appreciate anything you could tell us.”

  “I understand you’ve never had one before?”

  This triggered a discussion once it had been translated. “Of course we’ve had serial killers before,” Daher remarked in Arabic. “Does she think that we’re completely backward?”

  “Tell her about Yanbu,” someone else said.

  “She already knows about that,” the translator replied. “She’s asking about this department specifically. Has anyone in this room ever dealt with a serial killer before?”

  “Sure,” Osama said from the back of the room. “The warehouse killer.”

  Kazaz translated this.

  “That’s a spree killer,” Charlie said, promptly ending the discussion. “Spree killers are different. They get carried away with bloodlust. A serial killer is someone much more thorough, and generally more careful.”

  Ibrahim noticed Katya Hijazi slip into the room. She stood just inside the doorway and tried to look as if she belonged there. Charlie noticed too, smiled at her, and fumbled whatever she was saying, causing the rest of the room to turn and stare at Katya. Finally Charlie gave up and said “Hello” with a vague expression of pity on her face. Katya looked as if she wanted to slap her.

  “Anyway,” Charlie went on, “the most important step in these types of investigations is to identify what you’re dealing with. And you’re halfway there. You already know he’s a serial killer. Until you start identifying some of the victims, there’s not much anyone’s going to be able to tell you about your killer specifically—such as where he might have met these women, what sort of neighborhood he lives in, what sort of job or family or other public façade he might have. So I’ll tell you what we know about serial killers, and then I’ll speak generally about yours, given what we do know about the patterns of his killings.”

  Once the translator had finished, the only sound in the room was the low whir of air coming through the air-conditioning vents.

  “For most serial killers, it starts with a fantasy,” Charlie said. Someone had offered her a bottle of water, and she cracked it open, took a sip. “Everyone has them, right? You fantasize about being the boss at work, about your wife loving you more than anyone else in the world. Whatever it is, it’s probably normal.”

  Somewhere beside him, Ibrahim heard a long, low whispered “Ayyyyyyyywa.” Yeeeees. He suspected Daher.

  “Most killers kill for obvious and intelligible reasons—greed, anger, revenge—but for serial killers, the reasons are personal, internal, and not fully comprehensible. They are more like compulsions. Their murders satisfy a deep inner need, the playing out of some fantasy that they’ve nurtured, usually for a very long time. Since childhood. Their fantasies are brutal. They commonly involve sadistic sexual violence and disfigurement. You’ve seen disfigurement here.” She glanced at the whiteboard, where photos of the nineteen shattered faces hung in neat rows. “But the important thing to know about the fantasies is that they’re like addictions. I know you don’t have a whole lot of gambling or alcohol or even drugs here. But you do know about them, and I’m sure you’ve seen them.

  “Typically, alcohol medicates a problem or a pain, and so does fantasy. So the killer is relying on his fantasies to make himself feel better. He’ll nurture his fantasies for many years, and like all addictions, it gets to the point where he needs more in order to sustain the buzz. One beer doesn’t get a man drunk, so an alcoholic will start to need ten, or twenty. For the killer, he reaches a point where he needs to make his fantasy real.”

  Charlie looked out over the room. She was more confident now, no traces of self-consciousness. She noticed Daher, something in his face, and said: “You have a question?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, go ahead,” she said. “Mr….?”

  “Daher.” He cleared his throat. “Waseem Daher.” It was funny to see him so uncomfortable. “I was just wondering. He’s crazy, right? He thinks it’s okay to kill someone for his sick fantasy. Why is that?”

  “Good question. Psychologists used to call these people psychopaths or sociopaths, depending on certain factors. But it’s more common these days to think of them as having what we call antisocial personality disorder, or ASPD. Briefly, i
t means that they don’t have a conscience like you or me. They are often incapable of love, which means they don’t develop lasting relationships unless there’s an obvious cause for it, like sex or money. They are impulsive and aggressive. But the most defining aspect really is that they have absolutely no sense of guilt.”

  “So they don’t understand how to treat people?”

  “We-e-e-ll,” she said, “they don’t feel what normal people feel, but they do understand people to an amazing degree. They are capable of deceiving even those who are closest to them—family members, coworkers—and they can do that precisely because they understand them. They’re usually very good liars. And highly intelligent.”

  Daher nodded uncomfortably.

  “Should we be looking at old criminal files for our killer?” Ibrahim asked.

  “Yes,” Charlie said, “you should absolutely check, but you may not find anything. In some cases, serial killers have a history of violent crime, but it’s more true to say that they’re very, very good at not getting caught. And if you do look at criminals, look for pyromaniacs and stalkers. Those are the most common early crimes for this type of individual.”

  Ibrahim nodded.

  “Specialists talk about six phases of killing,” Charlie went on. “These are psychological phases that were identified back in the eighties that most serial killers go through. The killer begins with a fantasy. Phase one. He withdraws into his inner world and develops the fantasy. Phase two begins when he starts actively looking for a victim. Most killers will start in a place that’s familiar to them, somewhere they’re comfortable. Their favorite street, a neighborhood café. This could take weeks or months. The victim has to match the fantasy.

  “The next few phases can happen very quickly. Phase three, the killer tries to win the victim’s trust. Four, the killer captures the victim and reveals who he is. Five, he murders her. Six, he crashes from the high of living out his fantasy. So let’s make up an example: a killer sits next to a woman at a bar.”

  Daher shook his head with a frown.

  “Oh, right,” Charlie said, “not a bar. You don’t have them. Maybe a restaurant then.”

  Daher shook his head again.

  “Yes, Mr. Daher?”

  “That’s unlikely to happen here. Men and women sit in different parts of restaurants.”

  Charlie nodded. “Okay. How could a man encounter a woman here? In public.”

  The men looked at one another. Did this woman not understand anything about Saudi Arabia?

  “He could talk to her on the street,” a voice said. It was Katya, still near the doorway. Everyone turned to look. “But that doesn’t mean she would talk back. She probably wouldn’t.”

  “Under what circumstances would she talk back?” Charlie asked.

  “If she knew him.”

  “Most likely, she wouldn’t know him. The killer would want her to be a stranger.”

  “Okay,” Katya said. “She wouldn’t talk to him unless, perhaps, he needed her help.”

  Daher, who had been watching this exchange with a dark look on his face, put in: “Like Ted Bundy.”

  “Good point,” Charlie said, still looking at Katya. “So maybe he lured her with a false vulnerability. Where else could he find a woman?”

  “Well, she could have been his housemaid,” Daher said.

  “She probably wouldn’t have been,” Charlie said, “at least not consistently. In phase two, when he’s trolling for the perfect victim, he’s looking from afar. He’s studying the victim for signs that she’ll be like the woman in his fantasy—and the more you get to know someone, the less like fantasy they become. So the killer looks for superficial things, usually physical characteristics. For example, Ted Bundy preferred women with their hair parted in the middle.”

  “Well,” Daher said with a dry laugh, “our killer won’t be looking for a particular hairstyle.”

  Charlie gave him a wry smile and turned back to Katya. “Right. He might be looking for facial features, then?”

  “Maybe,” Katya said. “Or just… a body shape.”

  “Excellent. Maybe she’s always petite. Or skinny.”

  Riyadh, who had been standing to the side, said: “All of the victims were between one point eight and one point nine meters tall. And all of them were immigrants, mostly from Asian countries.”

  “How tall is one point eight meters?” Charlie asked Katya.

  “Just under six feet,” Katya said.

  “Oh, okay. So they’re pretty tall.” Charlie turned back to the room, but not before giving Katya a secretive smile. “It’s not very common to find tall women among certain racial groups, so you already know one thing about him: he likes tall, Asian women. He’s targeting an unusual type. One of your main problems is going to be determining how your killer found and captured his victims. How he won their trust.

  “There’s one more important classification about serial killers that you’re going to want to look at, and that’s organization. How organized is he? Another way to think of this is, how elaborately does he plot and execute his fantasy? Planning a murder takes time and energy. Some murderers kill their victims right away. That’s the disorganized type. They tend to be sloppy. They also tend to be excessively gory and violent. The organized types are different. They make the killing phase—that’s phase five in the sequence—last for days or even weeks. They usually don’t kill the victims right away, and even if they do, they don’t dispose of the body right away. They want to keep enjoying the thrill of watching their victim being abused. They want the fantasy to last as long as it can. It only ends when they get sick of it. Our Behavioral Science Unit developed this classification, and it extends to crime scenes as well. The disorganized killer will leave, well, a messy crime scene. But an organized killer is elaborate and has usually planned out exactly how to hide every trace of his crime. Except for one thing: the totem.”

  “What’s that?” This was Kazaz, the translator.

  “A totem is something he’s saved from the kill—usually a body part, but it can be anything. It’s something like a trophy. It reminds him of the experience, and he can go back to it with pleasure or pride.”

  “The hands,” Ibrahim said.

  Charlie looked at him, her attention like a spotlight. “Yes, he removed the victims’ hands. Both of them, right?”

  “That’s right,” Ibrahim replied. “He cut off all of the women’s hands, but just yesterday we found three of them buried by the bodies.”

  “Only three?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie was thoughtful for a moment. “The hands are probably his trophies. It’s definitely worth asking why he only buried three of them. There may be some evidence on those three that will lead you to understand why he chose to cut hands off in the first place. You may not be able to figure it out until you catch him, but if you understand it, it can be a very valuable clue.

  “You’re going to need to find out more, of course, but from what you have learned about this guy, I think you’re dealing with a very organized killer. He took the time to dispose of the bodies. And given their state—the missing hands, the mutilated faces—and the isolation of the locale, he’s obviously been working systematically. The most recent victim was three months dead?”

  “No more than six,” Ibrahim said.

  “Then I hate to say it, but he will probably kill again soon. He will be, right now, planning his next kill. The real question is, how is he getting access to these women? Where is he finding them and what do they have in common? You obviously have a lot of work to do in terms of identifying them. He’s going to realize that you’ve found where he buried his victims, and he will adapt his methods. He probably won’t go to the same place to find his victims anymore, but he may not be so willing to change his ‘type.’ ”

  This was followed by an uneasy silence.

  “Well,” Daher remarked in Arabic, “maybe we should start telling our women to stay indoors.”

&nb
sp; Charlie looked to Kazaz for a translation, but he frowned.

  The room fell silent, full from its intellectual meal. Ibrahim detected a slight shakiness: so many officers unused to taking directions from a woman.

  “I think that’s enough for now,” Chief Riyadh said. “Dr. Becker has kindly agreed to be available to answer questions over the next month, so we’ll be able to talk with her in more depth once the medical examiner has finished his reports and we’ve heard from forensics.”

  The group broke up slowly. Charlie and Riyadh stood at the front of the room chatting, and Daher made a man-pack with his friends. Katya slipped out of the room.

  In the hallway, Ibrahim bumped into Talib, the Murrah tracker.

  “You left early,” Ibrahim remarked.

  “Well, I knew it wasn’t her.” He tossed his chin in the direction of Dr. Becker.

  “Thank God for that. But you said you didn’t have a footprint of the killer.”

  “Oh, we had something,” Talib said. “Not clear enough for a photograph, but good for our purposes. Enough to get a sense of him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this at the crime scene?”

  “It took a long time to eliminate all the other men who were at the scene.”

  “All right,” Ibrahim said. “It’s definitely a man, then?”