Kingdom of Strangers

by Zoë Ferraris

  She snatched the phone from Nayir and called the station.

  “Put me through to Mu’tazz.”

  It took a minute to do this. In that time, she saw the owner pulling down the metal grille, shutting his store for prayer time. He was locked inside.

  “This is Mu’tazz.”

  “This is Katya Hijazi. I think I’ve found the killer.”

  She couldn’t tell if his silence was opprobrium or interest.

  “On what basis do you make this claim, Miss Hijazi?”

  “He works at Rayhan Jewelers at the Jamjoom Center. He made a set of jewelry for Amina al-Fouad that she purchased shortly before her disappearance. I’m at the center right now. The owner is about one point nine meters tall, balding. He has a strangely shaped head and big ears.”

  “How big?” Mu’tazz sounded interested now.

  “They really stick out. He’s also missing a hand. He wears a prosthetic.”

  “We have a team nearby,” he said.

  She was frankly surprised at Mu’tazz’s compliance.

  “I’ll send them to Jamjoom immediately.”

  “He just shut his store for prayer time,” she said, “but there may be a back entrance.”

  “Don’t do anything,” Mu’tazz said harshly, “until the police arrive.”

  She heard sirens immediately. It couldn’t be them.

  The phone went dead. She stuffed it back into her purse and saw Nayir staring at her in frank amazement.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

  “You stay here where people can see you,” he said. “I’ll go check for a back entrance.” And he was gone.

  She stood, too scared to move. But she had to get closer. She had to see if he was there. She moved forward slowly, saw that the lights behind the counter were out. Only the display lights were on. The shop was empty.

  On instinct, she started walking toward the far entrance. Nayir had left the building. She would exit through the east entry, swing back, and meet him coming the opposite way.

  Outside it was dusk, but lights filled the parking lot. She saw Nayir at once. He was moving along the front side of the mall at a slow jog. She walked toward him, scanning the parking lot and the various private entrances to the building. The lot was busy. There were crowds of young men loafing around their cars, listening to music and looking bored. A large family was climbing into a minivan. Some mall workers were gathered around an ashtray stand.

  Suddenly, movement.

  Nayir had spotted him and was running across the parking lot. She hitched up her abaaya and took off. The jeweler saw Nayir chasing him and began to run. He was faster than them both, his long legs pumping, unencumbered by a robe. He headed east across the lot, two hundred yards from Katya, farther from Nayir. Even sprinting, she wouldn’t be able to cut him off.

  She ran anyway, gave it everything she had, dropping her purse and yanking her skirts well above her knees. Halfway between her and her quarry was a group of young men.

  “Thief !” she shrieked.

  The boys needed no prodding; they saw where she was pointing and took off after him.

  “The one in the green shirt!” she screamed.

  Shouts echoed around the parking lot.

  “Thief !”

  “Stop him!”

  One of the young men caught him. Katya realized too late that the jeweler might have a weapon. There was a tussle. A young man went down. Blood on his shirt. But there was another man behind him. Three more coming from the other side. All these boys, their young lives wasting in mall parking lots, were waiting for an opportunity to prove themselves. To take down a thief who was also a killer. To save a woman from shame. To civilize society when the police could not. They took him like a pack of wild dogs, throwing him to the ground, falling on him, tearing at his limbs. It was savage and beautiful. She’d forgotten what it felt like to see human justice, to see a man who preyed on innocents being taken down.

  44

  Tawfiq Zhouri had worked the Red Crescent night shift for five years and was always grateful when the first call of the night didn’t involve the usual traffic fatality. This one took him to the area around Jamjoom, to an old, regal-looking home, somewhat shoddy on the outside and easy to miss, tucked away as it was between all the apartment buildings.

  They’d arrived in eight minutes and found six police cars waiting at the scene. Two officers hustled them into the house, and Tawfiq, the back half of a stretcher team, felt an immediate sense of unease.

  From what he could see from the entrance hall, the house was normal enough. A bit sparsely decorated, but clean and neat. He was led almost immediately to a basement door. The air coming up the stairs smelled of bleach and hospital cleansers, which was probably why he felt sick as they made their way down into a subterranean room.

  It was stark and brightly lit. A concrete floor, white stone walls, a bank of stainless steel cabinets, and an enormous freezer at the far end of the room. That combined with the smell and the fluorescent lighting reminded him of a hospital morgue.

  In the farthest corner was a smaller room made completely of Plexiglas. The police officers were gathered there, and as Tawfiq drew closer, he saw a woman inside. She was unconscious, lying on the metal floor of the Plexiglas chamber. Beside her head was a drain, and from that came the unmistakable odor of blood. There was a chair beside the woman. It had been welded to the metal flooring. It looked as if she had been in the chair and the officers had released her. From each armrest hung a broken handcuff. There was still a metal cord around her legs. They were cutting it away now.

  “She’s alive,” an officer said.

  Tawfiq and his partner put her on the stretcher and rushed her to the van, driven as much by their own need to escape as by the urgency of her condition.

  Tawfiq climbed into the back to assist the other responder and began covering her with blankets. She was in shock. He wondered wildly what had happened; his sick, involuntary visions merging horribly with the smell of bleach left over from the basement. He had the sense of touching an evil he’d never encountered before, and he began to whisper a prayer against dark magic. O Allah, I surrender myself to You, I direct myself toward You, I entrust my affairs to You, so keep me safe, with the preservation of belief, from in front of me, from behind me, from my right side, from my left side, from above me, from below me, and repel evil from me with Your strength and power, because, verily, there is no strength and no power save with You…

  45

  Ali Dossari was doling out information. One piece of the puzzle came every day, usually after about nine hours of frustrated interrogation. The detectives were getting fed up, but Katya suspected that Dossari would continue playing this game even if Mu’tazz decided to use the whip. He had nothing to lose.

  They had already gathered a serviceable picture of the man from files they’d found in his house, from his medical history, and from legal documents. They’d also interviewed the jewelry store’s customers and Dossari’s neighbors. But what they wanted was a confession: Yes, I killed those women.

  In the disgusted silence of the observation room, the men talked about his missing hand. Funny that a jeweler was missing a hand. Had he stolen his own goods? No, he’d told his customers, it only meant that he knew how to spot a thief. People respected him at Jamjoom. He was a bit off, never speaking above a whisper. An accident with nitrates when he was a child had damaged his larynx. It made him seem soft and kind.

  They had found a white GMC sport-utility vehicle in his garage. In the trunk were two large magnetic strips, the kind you could adhere to a car door, both imprinted with a false taxi company’s logo. They also found a broken taxi meter and a placard identifying him as an employee of the fictitious company.

  Yesterday, they had been able to squeeze one vital fact from him: he had used the SUV—in the guise of a taxi—to pick up women from beneath the Sitteen Street Bridge. He liked Filipina girls, he said. They climbed so eagerly into his c
ab when he offered a discount. If he got sick of Sitteen, he went to Asian restaurants in different parts of the city. When they pressed him about May Lozano, he gave a smug little smile and said, “She needed convincing.”

  They weren’t sure how he had managed to “convince” her on a crowded street without anyone noticing, but the minute they started asking questions, he clammed up and gave them nothing else.

  The woman in his basement was not Amina al-Fouad. Amina was dead, he said, and he wouldn’t say where she was. The room had been cleaned, but they found her other hand in a freezer. It had been cut off postmortem. Traces of her blood had been found in the drainpipe of the small Plexiglas room where she had probably also been held.

  The woman who was in the basement when the police arrived was named Bassma Gilani. Her hands were still intact. She was a Saudi, and young—only seventeen. Her parents had been notified, and a search of her bedroom had produced a jewelry box much like the one Amina had purchased. Bassma’s first name fit with Katya’s alphabet theory: that Dossari’s new project was to kill women based on their first names, in alphabetical order. Katya suspected that he had already buried Amina somewhere after posing her body in a straight line—the shape of an A.

  There were two large freezers sitting in his basement. The investigators had found Amina’s other hand in one of them. In the other, they had found eighteen hands. Although not all the lab work was finished yet, there was little doubt in Katya’s mind that the DNA from those hands would match the DNA of the desert victims. The killer had kept one hand as a totem from each of his kills—except for one. Both of May Lozano’s hands had been found at the gravesite. In the freezer where her hand ought to have been, they found only a small ring. Dossari had needed both of Lozano’s hands to form the diacritic marks beneath the second-to-last letter in his desert message, so he had kept the ring as a totem instead.

  Lieutenant Daher had brought the ring to Lozano’s employers, who had identified it as something she had bought a month before she disappeared. They remembered the ring because it held her birthstone, a peridot. She hadn’t known anything about birthstones before she bought it, but green was her favorite color, and she’d been delighted with the discovery. She’d bought it from a jeweler at Jamjoom.

  Katya suspected that there had been something else unusual about Lozano’s killing. She was the only victim from the desert whom Dossari had found at his jewelry store. And she was one of the last victims from that group. Perhaps killing her had given him the idea to begin choosing victims from among his customers instead. Once he realized that Lozano’s disappearance had not gotten him into trouble, he began to plan his next series of kills with an even bolder stroke. He would choose women from a place that could be tied directly back to him. That was certainly more risky than picking them up off the street. It would also explain why his type of victim had changed. Instead of killing immigrants, he had turned to killing Saudi women. It was probably more common to see the wealthier Saudis in his store.

  But no matter how much evidence they had against him, no matter what DNA and fingerprints they found, no matter the woman imprisoned in his basement—the detectives still strove to get a confession. The system prioritized it. And Dossari was making it hard for them.

  Anybody who entered the observation room and stood for five minutes to stare at the man felt that no judge in Jeddah could fail to sentence him. Judges were more gentle to those who repented. It might mean they allowed the prisoner a Valium before the beheading, to calm him in his final moments. But Dossari didn’t seem to care about that. He was enjoying the dual benefits of exasperating the interrogators and building up suspense and interest about his crimes. Charlie Becker, who spent some time with Katya in the observation room, said grimly that Dossari seemed proud of his work.

  Back in 1996, he had opened a silversmith shop at the Souq al-Bado under the name Zeddy al-Munir. Three years later, he had stolen a body from the city morgue and was caught with it in the trunk of his car. The body had been that of a nine-year-old girl who’d died of leukemia. The victim’s family was powerful. Appalled by what he had done, they arranged to have him punished severely for the theft, and the city executioner had removed his hand.

  Because of the stigma that goes along with such a punishment, he had changed his name to Asif Dakheel and started afresh. Using the new alias, he had leased a property in the Jamjoom Center and opened a jewelry store, which was not as lucrative but much more reliable.

  Ten years ago had been a busy time for him, Katya mused. He’d opened Rayhan Jewelers; killed his first victim, Amelia Cortez; and realized how easy it was to make an immigrant disappear. The police were less inclined to follow up on the immigrants’ cases, given the sheer number of them and the difficulty of keeping track of visa infractions and Hajj overstayers. Dossari’s escapade of killing had gone unnoticed for a decade.

  Watching him now, Katya felt a violent disgust filling every part of her body. She prayed to God with a slow-burning, silent thought: If You’re listening to me, grant me this wish: Remove this sick person from the world and cast him into the farthest reaches of Jahannam.

  She left the observation room when Mu’tazz came in to talk to Dossari. She didn’t want to watch another beating, didn’t want to risk feeling any pity for the killer. But as she was exiting, Mu’tazz left the interrogation room again. He was riffling through his folders as if he had forgotten something.

  Mu’tazz saw her in the hallway and stopped. They hadn’t spoken since the phone conversation at the mall.

  “Thank you, Miss Hijazi, for your work.”

  She regarded him steadily. He wouldn’t meet her eyes so he talked to an invisible spot above her head.

  “Your suspension has been revoked,” he said, “pending a full investigation.”

  She still didn’t like him, but if she wanted to keep working in Homicide, she was going to have to come to terms with him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Mu’tazz turned and went off down the hall.

  Ibrahim and Saffanah were sitting in front of the TV when the guard opened the door and Osama came in.

  “Salaam aleikum,” Osama said. He wore the kind of look Ibrahim had seen on his brother’s face a few days before. Ibrahim stood up. “I’ve come to take you down to the courthouse,” Osama said. “Your lawyer wants you to make a formal statement in front of the judge. This might take a few hours.”

  Now that Sabria was dead, it was going to be difficult for Jamila’s family to win the adultery case against him, but they were going ahead anyway. Ibrahim’s lawyer had assured him that he didn’t need to worry, he wouldn’t get the death penalty without eyewitnesses to his sexual liaisons with Sabria. But the process was going to humiliate him nonetheless, which was just what Jamila and her family wanted.

  Saffanah got to her feet at once. Ever since they’d had the discussion about the father of her child, she hadn’t gone far from his side. They even slept in the living room on opposite sofas. He’d wake at night and see her face in the flickering lights of the TV. She would always open her eyes then, as if somehow by sitting together in the same room for so many hours, their rhythms had intertwined and she could sense when he woke. She would regard him silently for a moment. Her gaze had a message in it, but he could never tell if it was a fearful plea not to reveal her secret or a silent exhortation for him to be strong, to go back to sleep and store up his energy for the approaching battle. Then she’d turn over and go back to sleep.

  In those dark, sacred hours of night, he remembered Sabria, the way he used to wake and find her staring at him, waiting patiently for him to open his eyes so she could wrap herself around him in a different way, adjusting their bodies for another round of sleep. Even now, he could smell the fruity tang of her skin. He spoke to God, the one he believed in, and asked for information, clarity, advice. God answered him with tortured dreams of dark places that filled him with an even deeper sadness.

  Ibrahim slid into his shoes
and grabbed his jacket from the back of the door. Saffanah came over and stood defiantly beside Osama, as if daring him to make her stay.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t—” Ibrahim began.

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  Osama made no response, so Ibrahim followed the detective to the car, and Saffanah followed them. Lieutenant Shaya was there, looking quietly pleased to see his old boss. He waved through the window and shot a curious glance at Saffanah before they took off.

  Ibrahim was surprised when they turned south on Medina Road, heading in the wrong direction. He said nothing. If Osama didn’t know his way around, then he wasn’t going to correct him. Beside him, Saffanah was quiet, staring out the window.

  Looking out at the sprawling suburbs, the jumble of apartment buildings, business towers, and warehouses, he was surprised by how beautiful it suddenly seemed, how messy and unstructured and neglected, a whole city of concrete growing as rapidly as weeds but taking some quiet dignity in its own chaos. Surely, he thought, there were a thousand other men like him who’d made mistakes enough to ruin their lives, their careers, and their families, and yet surely those men had carried on, as had their families. There was room for everything in this vast, disordered place.

  “What’s happening with Ubaid?” Ibrahim asked.

  Osama glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “He didn’t kill anyone.”

  “I know,” Ibrahim said. “I know he didn’t kill her. It was the other guy, al-Adnan. But Ubaid must have known about her. This whole time I thought he was going after me, but he wasn’t. He was going after her.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s no maybe,” Ibrahim said. “From the moment he heard about her disappearance, he was trying to find her guilty of something. I could feel it. He had to have known. You’re telling me it was just a coincidence that the man she was blackmailing got put in charge of finding her?”