by Zoë Ferraris
“I’ll arrange for those records to be pulled,” he said. “Is there someone else in the lab who can help you look through them?”
“Yes, I’m sure I can find someone.”
“Good.”
He thanked Katya and hung up but was suddenly drained. Every time he forced himself to focus on the killer, he felt the same sense of dread. The whole case was expanding outward like a cell infected by a virus. Any moment now it was going to explode and send its replicated contents into the whole organism.
As he drove the final mile to the house, he stopped staring at the female pedestrians and wondered about all the places Sabria had gone without him.
18
The desert gravesite was all but abandoned. Two officers sat guard at the turn where the county road made a sharp right onto the stretch where they’d found the bodies. The road was even more overrun with sand than it had been. Crime scene tape marked the perimeter of the graves, and two guards patrolled a newly worn path around the edges.
Katya showed her ID badge to the officers and they let her pass. Nayir was driving. She was in the front seat, feeling the heat of the sun on her cheeks despite the Land Rover’s AC. Behind them, the Murrah trackers, Talib al-Shafi and his two nephews, were crammed into the cab of a Toyota flatbed truck that appeared to be older than her.
She had been too flustered to ask Ibrahim for permission to do this. During their phone conversation, she’d felt she’d already been bold enough to suggest opening the execution files. Then she’d run out of steam—or sensed he had run out. She considered this trip of lesser consequence, somehow, and had arranged it with Majdi’s help instead. He’d given her the Murrah tracker’s phone number, and, graciously, Nayir had called on her behalf.
It was Thursday, the first day of the weekend. Nayir had been excited to have a justification for making a desert trip with her, but she had killed it on the way out by telling him about the Angel murders. He’d listened fully, his only reaction a quiet horror. It still patterned his face as they drove up to the site.
They weren’t interested in the gravesites but in the area around them. Far enough around them that, for example, a killer could arrive there without being noticed by the police guards. Because he had been back here. He knew the bodies had been removed.
They drove up to the crime scene tape, which glistened like a pale ribbon in the overbright sun, and got out of their vehicles to have a look around. After careful study, the trackers decided that it would be best to head west, where the terrain was somewhat hillier and where it would be easier for a killer to see the site without himself being seen.
They drove back to the county road and then headed west at a pace that felt slower than the collapse of a civilization. The Murrah’s truck was in front, the two nephews now kneeling in the truck bed, one on each side, gazing down at the marks on the roadway. They even did tire tracks, those bloodhounds. Nayir and Katya watched in suspense.
Finally, they stopped, and one of the men jumped over the fender and prowled the shoulder. They’d found something. He motioned to Nayir to back up and take a right into the desert.
Nayir drove the Land Rover onto the sand and rolled down his window.
“There are tracks here,” the Murrah nephew said, pointing to where the Toyota had stopped. “Someone swept them over but they’re still here.”
“They swept them over?” Nayir asked. “With what?”
“A piece of cardboard. We’ll leave the truck here and lead you on foot so we can keep an eye on the trail.” He glanced very briefly at Katya, a gesture that said We wouldn’t want to disturb the privacy of your woman either. Nayir nodded gratefully. Katya felt herself slipping into that nod, into the version of the world where she would expect to be left alone in a car. Then she reminded herself that this whole trip was her idea—thanks in part to an American woman who didn’t even own a veil—and that in a few short minutes she’d be out in the sand sweating nails like the men.
They followed the Murrah about three-quarters of a mile south. The Rover’s tires made popping noises against the gravel littered here and there. Finally, the Murrah raised his hand and Nayir stopped the car.
Katya got out and slipped her burqa over her nose and mouth, tucking it into her headscarf. She did this partially to put the Murrah at ease but mostly because the sun hit her face with an intensity that suggested it might liquefy her soft tissue. She slid on a pair of sunglasses and followed Nayir, literally stepped into his footprints. One of the Murrah noticed and said to Nayir: “She doesn’t have to do that. We know what her prints look like already.”
“It’s good to be careful,” Nayir replied.
They stood there, waiting for the grandfather, Talib, who was taking his time reading the tire tracks that led up from the road. When he finally reached the group, he said: “He drove a GMC and his right front tire is low. What else have we got?”
It didn’t take long to see the footprints.
Talib didn’t speak for a long time; he simply studied the ground, moving around and nodding as if listening to the wind tell a story.
He motioned Nayir closer, pointed to a smudged area on the ground, and began to explain. “The car stopped here. He got out and went over there, then came back to the truck. He was probably upset; the prints are angry coming back.”
That might have been when he discovered that the bodies were missing, Katya thought.
Everyone followed the prints to the edge of a gently curved dune. From there it was easy to see the gravesites. “He stops here,” Talib said. “This is the lookout.”
Katya took a dozen photos. “Do you have any idea when he might have come out here?” she asked.
“I’d say these prints are about five or six days old,” he said.
“The police were still here,” Katya said, “and forensics too. The place would have been full of people.”
“If he came in the midmorning,” Nayir said, “they might not have noticed him here. The sun would have been behind him.”
Talib nodded.
“But how did he get past the police cars on the road?”
“From the south.” Talib pointed. “There’s another road leading around the site, and his tire tracks turned in from the opposite direction as ours.”
“He may have had a habit of coming here,” Katya said. “Maybe he always checked the site from afar before driving closer.” She thought back five or six days. That was when they’d found Amina’s hand on Falasteen Street. It was possible that the killer had come here to check on his site. His discovery that the bodies had been found could have triggered a rage that prompted him to cut off Amina’s hand before he had originally planned to do it. Yet if Amina was indeed one of his victims, there was still the question of why she didn’t resemble his previous type.
Katya continued taking photos. The other men moved away, except for Talib. He stood looking out at the graves, studiously avoiding her gaze.
“You don’t need to do that,” he said. “I’ll remember the prints.” As he turned away, he said over his shoulder: “And don’t worry, it will hold up in court.”
Her friends had long ago stopped asking her when she was going to get married. She was twenty-nine now, far too old to catch a good husband. It became impolite to ask. Her few good friends had tried for years to find a husband for her. She was always on the top of their guest lists for weddings, since that was where most matchmaking occurred. But after her failed engagement to Othman, even her good friends had stopped talking about marriage, perhaps thinking that she needed some time to recover, or perhaps believing that she never would. As this silence ensorcelled her, she had grown cynical about her own prospects without even realizing it.
Nayir’s proposal should have broken the spell. Instead, it had cast a new spell of its own.
The drive back was tense. She compared Nayir to her cousin. Ayman had grown up in Lebanon and spent an unnatural amount of time watching satellite television, so had a great deal of knowledge
about the world. He’d known exactly what a serial killer was and had even conjured instant trivia from his memory. Did she know that John Gacy had raped thirty-two men and buried them in his basement? And that Jeffrey Dahmer had been trying to turn his victims into zombies? (And that scientists had saved Dahmer’s brain for their own studies?) She had found Ayman’s easy recollection of facts disturbing, but not more so than Nayir’s gravitas.
“We’ve never had one before,” he said. “This type of shaytan. He exists in other countries, but not here.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “Or maybe we’ve just never noticed. It took them years to find out about this one.”
It seemed to make him angry. “How do so many people go missing and nobody notices?”
“They were foreign workers,” Katya said. “Probably they’d run away, and nobody knew where they were to begin with.”
“And now the killer knows that the police have found the bodies,” he said. “What do you think he’ll do next?”
“I think he already has his next victim.” She was tired. The heat had sapped her, and the discoveries of the day had only made the whole situation more disturbing. She wanted him to tell her how strong she was, how brave.
“There is a chance he could find out about you,” he said. “About who is working on this case.”
“There’s always a chance of that.”
She could feel him trying to be careful in his reply, but in the end nothing came out and they spent the rest of the ride home in uneasy silence.
19
Thursday morning, the first day of the weekend, Ibrahim went in to work anyway. He couldn’t face a day sitting at home, worrying helplessly about Sabria.
He was surprised to find Majdi and Daher in the forensics lab. Daher was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, not his usual black suit. He was sitting at the desk beside Majdi, texting someone.
Ibrahim’s phone vibrated and he took it out of his trousers. Daher had been texting him. The message read: Majdi found something.
“That was fast!” Daher said when he saw Ibrahim. He got up, looking vaguely embarrassed to be seen in his street clothes. It reminded Ibrahim how young he was.
“What did you find?” he asked.
Majdi stood up and motioned to the computer screen. “We’ve identified the other victim whose hands were found at the gravesite,” he said. “Her name was May Lozano. She was twenty-five years old. She went missing over a year ago.”
“Excellent,” Ibrahim said. “Why did this take longer than the ID on Cortez?”
“I had to do it the old-fashioned way, compare her prints manually to a bunch of files we received from the consulate for missing housemaids.”
“That had to have been a lot of work,” Daher said.
“I was able to narrow it down based on Adara’s report that May Lozano died about a year ago. She was the second-to-last victim, and the only one for whom we found both hands.”
“Very good,” Ibrahim said. “Was she here as a housemaid?”
“Yes. She lived with a family in Jeddah. It’s in the report.”
Ibrahim went to talk to Lozano’s employers. Like Cortez, Lozano had been recruited in Manila, but she had worked in Jeddah as a housemaid for five years. When she went missing, her employers filed a missing-persons report, and the police followed up. According to the report, friends of hers said that although Lozano missed her family in the Philippines, she’d been happy in Jeddah. The family who employed her had paid the headhunter fee and she received a decent wage. They treated her well.
According to the family, she hadn’t run away from them; she loved them almost like her own family. They had been distraught when she disappeared. It had happened on her birthday—they’d been planning to take her to Jollibee, her favorite restaurant—and they suspected foul play, although they had no idea who would have kidnapped her. She had no enemies, not even in the Philippines. They reported her disappearance to the police and the embassy, but no one could find her.
Ibrahim did find out that Lozano had been noticed missing almost immediately. She had left the house at 5:15 p.m. to head to Jollibee to meet a friend. It was a six-block walk from her employer’s house to the restaurant on al-Khalidiya. She was supposed to have met her friend Mary at 5:30. They were going to talk for a while before the family came to join them at about six o’clock. But when the family reached the restaurant, they found that Lozano wasn’t there. Her friend was sitting at a table, waiting.
Ibrahim and Daher walked the six blocks themselves.
“I guess she didn’t take a taxi,” Daher said.
The restaurant was brightly colored, a variation of McDonald’s, with a large plastic bee and bowl of honey out front.
None of the workers in the building had been there longer than a few months, but the manager, Arnel, remembered May’s disappearance. He was a clean-cut thirty-something Asian man in a pale blue shirt and black trousers. A red lanyard around his neck carried an ID tag. If he’d taken off the blue baseball cap that seemed to be part of the uniform, he could have been mistaken for a medical intern or some other young professional.
“Yeah,” he said, looking upset at the memory. “The family came in looking for her. Her friend was here, waiting. We knew May. She came here with her family a lot. That was horrible. She wasn’t the type to run away.”
“You thought she ran away?” Ibrahim asked.
“That’s what they always say. These women, sometimes they get abused.”
“Did she look abused?”
He shook his head.
“Tell me, did you notice anything unusual that night? Anything outside, or in the street? Any odd people?”
“Yeah, one thing. I told the police about it back then, but they didn’t seem to think it was important. There was a woman across the street who collapsed. She got carried away in a Red Crescent van. The police said they’d check it out but I never heard back about it.”
“Could that woman have been May?”
Arnel shrugged. “It’s hard to see out of the front windows sometimes, and it was down the block. One of my workers was outside and he saw it. I didn’t get a good look at the woman. I went outside and saw the man putting her into the back of the van. The van drove away pretty quickly after that.”
They thanked him and walked out to the street.
“It’s going to take some time to hunt down this friend of hers,” Daher said, flipping open his notepad. “They said she left the country.”
Ibrahim stared down the street, trying to imagine an ambulance there. It would have double-parked, stopping traffic in one direction.
“What are you thinking?” Daher asked.
“Our killer could have used a taxi to kidnap his women, but he could also have used an ambulance.”
Daher blew out his cheeks. “Yeah, I guess. But then he’s only getting women who’ve been injured?”
“Maybe he injures them himself,” Ibrahim said. “It wouldn’t be impossible. He comes up behind them, kind of like a mugger. Sticks a gun in their backs, tells them if they make a noise, he’ll shoot. He injects them with something that knocks them out. They collapse into his arms, and he carries them to his van. By the time anybody notices—which is probably when the woman collapses—they don’t think there’s anything wrong with a paramedic carrying a woman to his ambulance. Maybe they’re worried about her, but they’re going to be looking at her, not the killer.”
Daher nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
“But you’re not convinced.”
“Well…”
“Go on.”
“I just think it would be so much easier if he was posing as a cabdriver. He wouldn’t have to risk one of the women screaming for help or somebody noticing him.”
Ibrahim nodded. “Maybe you’re right, but I think we’d better keep the paramedic angle in mind.”
20
Friday morning, the building was empty. Everyone would be back to work on Saturday, filling the polished
hallways with voices, laughter, the smack of Daher’s hand meeting a younger man’s head. Now the only noise to break the silence was the clunk of the central AC kicking into gear, and, in a few hours, the call to prayer. It always clanged through the local mosque’s loudspeakers with a jolt.
Ibrahim slid into the building, clutching a cup of coffee and feeling dead. He had spent the rest of Thursday arranging for copies of the execution files as well as the amputation-for-theft files showing the cutting off of hands and feet. Daher had offered to deliver them this morning, even though it was the day of rest, even though his job didn’t pay him nearly enough to encourage such loyalty. Ibrahim wondered idly if Daher’s home life was as miserable as his.
Farrah was still at the house, waiting for her husband to return. She was a welcome presence in that she and the twins kept Jamila busy, and that kept Jamila’s nagging to a minimum. The problem now was that they were in a concocting mood. Bored, with no more medical drama, they were poised to become the agents of someone’s undoing. Ever since Farrah had visited the exorcist, the household had had an underlying hint of lunacy to it.
At his office, he discovered that Daher had already delivered half the files, probably the night before. He had arranged the boxes in a neat row on the table. Ibrahim set his coffee on the desk, pulled up a chair, and cracked open the first file.
He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he went through the files anyway, trying to avoid reading too much detail. A man was found guilty of killing his wife and children. A woman was found guilty of killing her mother. Another man: murder of a stranger in a convenience store. He went through most of the files for 2003 and found nothing but murder. That was a little surprising.