Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  She was unable to get access to any of the solved murder cases. Katya imagined that they were locked in cabinets in the records room. What she didn’t have to imagine—what was made plain to her from a conversation with Ibrahim—was that the real obstacle to reaching those files would be convincing Chief Riyadh that they were vital to the case. Ibrahim had briefed him on Katya’s discovery, and Riyadh had approved the temporary change in her work duties, but he had said nothing about releasing the files. Perhaps he wasn’t convinced that Katya’s theory was correct.

  Then there was the technical problem: there were more solved cases than unsolved ones, and Katya and Ibrahim would have to come up with some system for selecting the ones that were most relevant. That is, if Riyadh agreed to release them. Katya knew very little about the chief, but a hunch told her he wouldn’t be offended by the suggestion that some of those old murder cases had been wrongly prosecuted. However, he might feel that all the extra work involved in assembling and sorting the files was a complete waste of time.

  By Tuesday, they had set up the office space downstairs, and she plunged into the files on her desk. Every time she thought of “her desk,” she made an effort not to smile. It wasn’t actually a desk, just a large Formica table with folding legs. Around it were six standard-issue metal police chairs with ripped leather cushions, one or two usually occupied by female officers. The whole setup was surrounded with heavy black curtains, but they had two table lamps and part of one window, so there was enough light. The curtains simply blocked them from seeing anything of the room around them. It could have been a stool and a cardboard box, and she would have sat there with the same quiet pride of a falcon.

  That morning, two female officers came to help read through the cases. They worked earnestly at first but had not noticed any patterns, so they had gossiped away for a few hours. Katya had previously been in awe of these women—trained officers from the police academy. She had to marshal the nerve to tell them to read the files again, and then again, however many times it took before they noticed something.

  Once the women left, no one came into the purdah except Ibrahim. He was delivering a few stray files. He rapped lightly on one of the metal poles that held up the black fabric screens, a cue for whoever was inside to prepare for his entrance. Katya knew that sooner or later she would begin to feel that she had only managed to move her confinement downstairs. But there was no dampening her satisfaction yet. She had even allowed herself to fantasize about becoming a detective and having her own office—God protect her and forgive her vanity.

  She spent the rest of the morning reading files but found nothing of interest. She was sitting alone in the purdah when she heard a light tap on the metal pole. The curtain parted to reveal Dr. Becker. She was carrying a box, which she set on the table.

  “One shipment of solved-murder files,” she said happily. “As requested.”

  “How did you get these?” Katya asked, standing up.

  “I convinced Chief Riyadh that I wanted to do some work comparing murders in America with murders here.”

  Katya was amazed. However, it turned out that the box contained thirty-eight case files from the late 1980s. Not as useful as she would have wished.

  “I thought I’d sit with you awhile and do what I can,” Charlie said.

  “I’m sorry.” Katya motioned to the papers on the table. “None of it is in English.”

  “I can always look at pictures,” Charlie said.

  Indeed she could. Katya drew a graph of the letters of the Arabic alphabet and asked Charlie to put aside any files where the position of a victim’s body resembled any of the letters. Charlie dug into her box and set to work eagerly, but ten minutes later, she stopped in exasperation.

  “None of these files have photos,” she said.

  “What?”

  Charlie motioned to the ones she’d just riffled through. “No photographs in any of them. I’m getting a bad feeling about the rest.”

  There were only three files with photographs, and those were partials showing a foot, a bloody arm. Katya was baffled. The department had used forensics photographers since the very advent of cameras. Why were these cases missing photographs?

  “Someone took the pictures out,” she said. “We always take photographs of the victims.”

  “Even of women?” Charlie asked.

  “Ye-es,” Katya said uncertainly. “Even of women.” That was true now, but had it been true twenty-five years ago? She was more inclined to think that someone had nabbed the photographs in the name of decency.

  Katya leafed through the files herself. Charlie was right, the crime scene photos had been carefully neutered. They showed only a single body part or shots of the objects that were found at the scene. A gun. A bloody hammer. There were no full-body shots of the victims.

  “Could this be a virtue thing?” Charlie asked.

  “Maybe,” Katya replied. It certainly could have been a virtue concern. Someone like Abu-Musa could have gotten access to the records, gone through all of the female murder victims, and destroyed the photographs that showed a whole body, a face, an indecent amount of skin. In the strictest version of Islam, it was forbidden for a person to appear in a photograph. Exposing the awrah, the intimate parts of the body that required covering, to the camera was even more taboo.

  But Katya had a cold prickling at the back of her neck. There were darker reasons for someone to excise a photograph from a case file.

  I just kept asking myself, what do we really know about this guy?” Daher was repeating himself to reassure them both that his thinking was sound. “We know nothing. But what can we reasonably presume to know? Two things for sure. One, he’s got a religious hang-up. And two, he’s a nutcase. So if you put that together in the most obvious way then of course he’s going to wind up at an exorcist sooner or later. Right?”

  Ibrahim nodded. “It makes sense.”

  “Then why do none of these quacks have anything useful?”

  “We’ve gotten some names.”

  They got out of the car. They were in Kandara, just a few blocks from the Sitteen Street Bridge, about to visit their fifth exorcist of the day. Daher was probably right—and even though it didn’t look like the idea was going to turn into a viable lead, he was clever to have put it together.

  Ibrahim couldn’t stop thinking of the welt on Farrah’s back, of Jamila’s smug pride. It still angered him. Even if Farrah never had another back pain in her life, he refused to accept that some quack exorcist had pulled a djinni from her body. He had simply delivered a placebo effect with a very ugly scar and the potential for infection. As long as the remedy remained effective, they had every reason to be grateful, except that he didn’t like his children buying into that crap, especially when it was connected to religion.

  They made their way through the narrow alleys. Jeddah had a dozen big-name exorcists and probably hundreds more who performed in their basements or living rooms and whose fame was local to a neighborhood or even a street. The important thing was that the practitioners only performed ar-ruqyah ash-shar’eeya—Sharia incantations based on Islamic prayers. Anything else would get them a death sentence and a public beheading.

  “Did you tell this guy we were coming?” Ibrahim asked.

  “Yes. I made an appointment. And I told him we were cops.”

  The house was modest on the outside, a simple wooden door with wooden shutters on the windows on both sides. They rang the bell and a servant let them in, leading them into a small courtyard. Thanks to a fountain and some overhanging plants, the air was cool. They sat on a pair of wooden chairs to wait. It was certainly nicer than anywhere else they’d been that day. At least the exorcist was well mannered enough to let his guests wait in the shade, even if he didn’t offer them anything to drink.

  “Something’s been bothering me,” Daher said. He still had that nervous look on his face. “If you consider all of the religious stuff going on in these murders, our killer obviously has to
be some kind of religious person.”

  “And you’re thinking, what if he’s an imam?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “It bothers me too,” Ibrahim said. “He’s twisted something sacred, which puts him about as far from an imam as you can get.”

  “I have trouble imagining it,” Daher said. “I think back on all the imams and scholars I’ve ever known, and I can’t see any of them committing murder. So I can’t see our killer as an imam, no matter how hard I try.”

  Ibrahim wasn’t sure how far he could go with this conversation, but he decided, since they were on a good footing right now, to take a risk.

  “Most imams are not perverts,” he said, “but whenever you take anything too far, you spoil it. Think about these imams who are completely preoccupied by virtue, so much that they can find a crime in anything. The guys who issued fatwas outlawing women eating ice cream cones in public because of the ‘connotation.’ Or the sheikh who said that it was unacceptable for a man to sit on a chair that a woman had recently vacated because her residual warmth on the seat might be arousing. Even if something like that were to happen, does the sheikh really think that pointing it out, making everyone aware of it, is going to control it or make it go away?”

  “Everyone knows those guys are nuts.”

  “Everyone? Really?”

  “Okay, but you know what I mean.”

  “People buy into that crap all the time,” Ibrahim said with a little too much heat. “I’m just saying that there are sheikhs who have become so obsessed with virtue that they’ve turned into perverts themselves. They see sexual innuendos in the most innocent things.”

  Daher was quiet, thinking.

  “Maybe there’s something bigger that we have to stomach here,” Ibrahim said. “Our killer is an extreme person, but as we’re thinking about who he might be, we find we can see him in other people. Innocent people. He’s making perverts out of us.”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly what it feels like.”

  Just then, the servant returned with two glasses of water.

  Charlie sat with her for the rest of the afternoon. As usual, Katya ate a bagged lunch, which today she shared with Charlie. A hummus sandwich, some pretzels, cheese sticks, carrots, and a Diet Coke from the refrigerator in the lab. The apple, which they couldn’t figure out how to split evenly, sat on the desk in front of them.

  They hadn’t finished with the files in the boxes on the floor. So far only six of them contained crime scene photos showing full-body shots of the victims, and none of the six bodies looked unnaturally posed.

  “Here’s something,” Charlie said. “Maybe.”

  She passed Katya a photograph of a severed hand. Katya read the report and discovered that it was not a murder case. Twenty-one years ago, a homeless man had found a severed hand in a drainage ditch near the Kandara overpass. He had called the police, who had opened an investigation. Forensics had discovered that the victim had been alive when the hand was severed. They were uncertain, though, whether the hand had been legitimately severed.

  When people were punished for theft, their hands were cut off by the city executioner, who used a smaller sword than the one he used to sever heads. The hands were then buried properly under the auspices of the Jeddah police. Occasionally, a person was given a lighter sentence in which he or she was allowed to have a doctor surgically remove the hand using anesthesia. According to the report, it was possible that the doctors did not always dispose of the hands correctly and that one of the hands found its way into the city’s drainage system. The case itself—which someone had ridiculously labeled SALEM-I-DEK, or “God bless your hand,” a common phrase used to praise a fine cook—seemed to be one of those files that didn’t have anywhere else to go. It wasn’t a Homicide case, but it was unsolved.

  The officer in charge, Lieutenant Yasser Mu’tazz, had been thorough enough to investigate the route of the drainage pipes and to interview all the doctors whose offices may have had some connection to the pipe system. He’d found nothing unusual at any of the clinics, and none of the doctors had ever amputated a hand. He had also talked to the officers in charge of the disposal of severed hands and found their procedures exemplary. The fingerprints from the hand matched nothing in the national database anyway, and the case had been in limbo ever since.

  It was odd that Mu’tazz had gone to such lengths when the hand had been found in what was essentially a runoff ditch for those two times a year when it actually rained in Jeddah. Looking at the photograph, Katya could tell that it hadn’t rained in a while. The ditch was bone-dry and covered in a thick layer of sand.

  “This is odd,” Katya said. “This case is over twenty years old. What’s it doing in the recent case files?”

  When Katya looked up again, Charlie’s face was grave. “I’ve found something else,” she said. She had been holding all of the photographs from the case, and she passed another one to Katya. It showed the same severed hand from a different angle. The photographer must have gotten down into the drainage ditch to take the shot. The ditch itself was about a meter wide. It looked as if the hand were crawling toward the camera.

  “Look on the wall behind the hand,” Charlie said, “or rather, the side of the ditch.”

  There was a blood smear there, blackened by the sun.

  “Doesn’t that look like a letter to you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Katya said. It was definitely not splatter. The edges of the smear were too uniform, as if they had been painted. “But it’s impossible to tell which letter. It could be half of an F or a Q.” The camera’s scope wasn’t wide enough to capture the whole thing. She flipped the photograph over. There was a faded name and address on the bottom-right corner in an elegant script: Hussain Sa’ud.

  They studied the rest of the photographs but none of the others showed the blood. And for all Katya knew, it could have been a smear of something else. She read through the file again. Mu’tazz made no mention of the blood at the scene. Had they taken a sample of it? Tested it for a blood-type match to the hand? Katya’s frustration competed with her distrust. It seemed odd that Mu’tazz would assume that the hand had come sailing down the ditch when it clearly hadn’t rained in a while. Odder still that there may have been blood evidence at the scene and they hadn’t collected it. She saw Charlie watching her and explained what she could about the case and Mu’tazz’s behavior.

  “Maybe he was a rookie?” Charlie asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “A beginner.”

  “Ah, perhaps,” Katya said. “But he was a lieutenant. I wonder why he hasn’t said anything about this now.”

  “The case is twenty-odd years old,” Charlie pointed out. Seeing the look on Katya’s face, she added, “But I know what you’re going to say: It’s not every day you find a severed hand.”

  Imam Abdullah Arsheedy looked like the most normal imam in the world. He had a plain face surrounded by what must have been the religious insiders’ secretly-agreed-upon respectable proportions of beard, hair, and headscarf. Only his eyes brought the face any distinction. They were slightly too small and sunken, almost ugly, but shining with curiosity.

  The men sat in his office, a dark, cool room stuffed with religious textbooks. The air was heavy with dust and the smell of incense. Over tea, they exchanged pleasantries and discussed trivial things, winding their lazy way to the vital parts of the conversation. It was only when they veered into the subject of exorcism that the sheikh revealed what Ibrahim considered to be a touch of madness.

  “Magic is real,” Arsheedy said plainly. “The Prophet himself—peace be upon him—said ‘the evil is a true reality.’ He was referring to the evil eye. It is accepted in the Quran that magic exists and that it has its own powers, and that those are real. What the Quran does not accept is the use of magic. That is forbidden.”

  “And how is what you do any different than magic?” Ibrahim asked. He already knew the standard answer to the question, but he
wanted to hear Arsheedy’s response.

  “With the permissible methods of the Quran and Sunna, it is possible to extract magic from a person after the magic has occurred.”

  The sheikh seemed to recognize that Ibrahim was skeptical. He spoke to Ibrahim alone, ignoring Daher completely, and he used the tone that a father reserves for a child when explaining common sense.

  “The thing to remember,” Arsheedy went on, “is that magic only affects a person by Allah’s will. It is wrong to believe that something can happen to you and that there is some force greater than Allah and which He cannot control. Therefore, when someone is afflicted with evil magic, it makes sense that the only refuge from it is with Allah. What I do has no benefit in itself; all of its power comes from Allah.”

  Ibrahim had to admit that the sheikh seemed rational enough, except for the small matter of his believing in magic. But arguing about the words of the Quran with a sheikh was never a good idea, especially if you wanted information from him.

  “That’s very interesting,” Ibrahim said. “So you must see a number of people who have been afflicted by various types of magic. They may seem, on the outside, to exhibit the characteristics of schizophrenia, for example, or some other psychosis. Do you ever refer them to medical clinics?”

  “Yes, occasionally,” he replied. “Although most of the supplicants come to me after medical science has failed them. They have already tried Western drugs and therapies and those have been ineffective, so they seek direct help from Allah instead. One of the other requirements for ar-ruqyah ash-shar’eeya is that the supplicant be a believer and that he or she believe, as I do, that everything they are asking for is coming directly from Allah Himself.”