City of Veils (10 page)

Katya was already feeling light-headed. “Why is there blood on her face?” she asked, desperate to stay focused. “Shouldn’t it have washed away in the water?”

“Perhaps,” Adara said. “Corpses usually float facedown in the water, which causes some blood congestion in the head. It’s seepage. It had to have happened postmortem.”

It was Adara who had first drawn back the sheet and touched the naked body, taking hold of the woman’s forearm and turning it gently. Eve’s hands were also burned so badly that it looked as if there was no chance of fingerprints. The wounds extended up her arms in splotches.

“Let’s take a few fiber samples from this,” Adara said, pointing to a spot on the lower left arm.

Katya pulled a few fibers from the skin and slipped them into a jar. She was having trouble controlling her shaking hands. She tried desperately not to look at the burns, but when she shifted her gaze her eyes fell on the large black autopsy scars on Eve’s chest, and she felt a wave of nausea.

“There are a couple of things I’d like you to notice. First, the slight bruising on the upper right arm. It’s circular. Premortem.” Adara moved around to the left arm, pointing out more bruises of a similar type.

Katya had to look away to collect herself.

“Katya.” Adara locked her gaze. “Why did you agree to come here?”

“Well, you asked me and I —” She stopped short, aware suddenly that Adara wanted—or perhaps needed—the truth. “I wanted to come.” Seeing that Adara wasn’t going to interrupt, she forced herself on. “I want to do more. I’m sick of just sitting in the lab and trying to imagine what happened to all the dead. We only get little bits of information, you know.”

“I know, I used to be a lab technician, too.”

This surprised Katya; she had somehow imagined that Adara had emerged fully formed from the womb of medical school. “How did you come to be an examiner?”

“They needed a woman to handle some of the more sensitive matters for certain female victims.” She motioned gracefully down to the body but didn’t let her eyes follow the gesture. “They told me it was for the victims whose families requested it. The people who didn’t want a strange man touching their beloved daughters or wives. But the truth is that I get to handle the cases that the male examiners don’t want to bother with. Housemaids, mostly.” She looked down at the corpse now. “I’m not saying she’s a housemaid. But on the important cases there’s always a male examiner standing by. They don’t trust us to do our jobs, and that’s the problem. One little mistake on my part justifies all their biases against me. The good news is that the pressure has turned me into the best examiner in the building.” She said this proudly, without a trace of shame, and Katya admired her fiercely for it.

“I’m not sure I’d want to trade jobs with you,” Katya said, looking down at the victim’s bruised arm and thinking about the pressure Adara was under.

“I like my job,” Adara said. “I was placed here by Allah, but staying here has been a constant jihad. You know what the Prophet, peace be upon him, said:
The rights of women are sacred. See that women maintain the rights granted to them
.”

Katya nodded respectfully. Adara’s face was firm and determined, clean of all makeup and never hidden behind a burqa. She wore no jewelry. She was pregnant more often than not, but she had never grumbled about her long hours at work, not at three months when she couldn’t eat, nor at seven when her ankles looked like pears. Even in her gestures, nothing spoke of complaint. Her practical walk, her efficient movements from one part of a room to another, revealed the solid determination of a lone shrub in the desert. Katya felt like an untested schoolgirl.

“I can’t sit still anymore,” Katya said with a sudden impatience. “I can’t look at these people’s lives through tissue samples and biopsies. I want to be
out
. I want to know who they knew. Where they lived. Where they died. I want to be an investigator.”

Adara regarded Katya in the same way her mother used to when she was forced to admit that the reason for Katya’s refusal to marry was that the prospective groom was in fact a donkey.

“Then you will be,” Adara said. “If you keep at it.” She returned her gaze to the corpse.

“What do you think about the bruises?” Katya asked. “Abuse?”

“I’ve seen housemaids with similar bruises on the upper arms. That’s where people grab them and jerk them around. However, these don’t look like grab marks, they’re more like wounds. I would guess that these came from fighting her attacker. They’re still very light colored. They must have been made right around the time she died.

“Back to the face and hands,” Adara said. “These are the kinds of burns you see with hot oils. Maybe acids. It wasn’t from fire.”

“Kitchen oils maybe?” Katya was surprised by the calm in her voice. She glanced at Adara, who was looking bleak. “Can I get a skin sample?”

“Yes, I’ll do it.” While Adara removed a portion of the burned skin, Katya studied Eve’s legs. There were a series of cuts on the thighs. There was no pattern in the placement of the wounds. It didn’t look as if they’d been made by a fish; the cuts were too clean.

“Do you think a knife made these wounds?” Katya asked.

“Yes,” Adara replied. “I’ve already checked the back of the legs, and there are no marks there, only on the front and just on the side here. I did look at her clothing and saw that they had cut through her jeans.” She pointed to a particularly large wound on Eve’s left thigh. “Anyway, whoever did this was standing in front of her. She didn’t turn her back to him.”

Going to the wall, Adara switched on the display lights, revealing X-rays of Eve’s legs. Adara pointed to her right leg. “This is an older wound. A fractured tibia, probably half a year old.”

“They may be able to search hospital records to identify her then?” Katya suggested.

“Yes, and good luck with that!” Adara gave an empty smile. “You can try, but I don’t think you’ll find anything. This injury didn’t heal properly, so I’m guessing she never made it to a decent doctor.”

“What about this large bruise on her hip?” Katya asked. The bruise was pale, large and splotchy, beginning at the waistline and extending down to the top of the thigh.

Adara returned to the table. “I would say she fell right before she died. Another injury from the attack. I think you should focus on the tibia. They’ll want to know what made that fracture.”

They
. The real investigators.

“Was she raped?” Katya asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“No,” Adara said with kindness in her voice. Grimly exposed in the fluorescent light, the body looked like a wax doll with bright red mittens. Katya experienced none of the weird sense of imminent awakening-of-the-dead she’d felt when gazing down at Nouf’s body. Now she was afraid that the person who did this would walk into the room and do it again.

“How did she die?”

“Well, this is where it gets tricky. First of all, her neck was broken.” Adara motioned to the X-rays. “Actually, she was burned first, stabbed, and beaten. Then she was thrown in the water. But it’s going to be difficult to determine
when
her neck was broken. It’s a very clean break. If it happened while she was still alive, she would have stopped breathing and died almost immediately. It could also have happened as a passive, postmortem injury while she was in the water. She could have knocked into a piece of debris. Also, her headscarf was wrapped around her neck when they found her, but it wasn’t tight enough to choke her and there were no loose ends that could have become caught on something and broken her neck that way.”

“Can’t you tell if she was dead when she entered the water?”

Adara gave a wry smile. “I’m sure you know from your own work that things are never as easy as they might seem on TV shows. Here’s the problem: I found traces of foam in her lungs, which is characteristic of drowning. If she was alive when she entered the water, she would have inhaled and swallowed a good quantity of water. This produces a white froth in the airways. I did find that, but not a lot. If she had a lot of seawater in her stomach, I would feel more convinced that she drowned, but again there was only a little. The truth is, this foam in the lungs, or what we call pulmonary edema, can just as easily indicate other causes of death: a drug overdose, heart failure, or head injury. I’ve ruled out heart failure, but we’re still waiting on blood tests for drug overdose. Given the contusions on the back of her head and the fact that her neck was broken, head injury is a distinct possibility.”

“Essentially, you think that the killer threw her body into the sea after she died?”

“It’s not as clear-cut as I’d like it to be, but yes, I’m going to write in the report that she didn’t drown. My primary reason for this, though, is the presence of all the other injuries. I will say there’s a strong likelihood that her neck was broken after the injuries but before she was dumped into the sea.”

It took all of Katya’s will to avoid imagining what the last hours of Eve’s life must have been like.

“Can you establish a time of death?”

“Not precisely, but it’s been a few days at least. It takes a little less than a week for a corpse to rise to the surface, given the temperature of the seawater. It could be more like five or six days. I’m sorry, I know that’s not a good answer, but in a case like this, where the cause of death isn’t totally clear, it’s going to be up to the investigators to figure out the circumstances.”

“And no identification was found with the body?” she asked.

“Right. And obviously fingerprints are out of the question. But I have contacted a woman who specializes in facial reconstruction, based on these clever skeletal molds she does. She’s Syrian; she said she’ll come in this afternoon. We may be able to get some idea of what the victim looked like.”

They both looked down at the face, a mass of unidentifiable flesh. Katya quickly looked away. She had meant to congratulate Adara on her new baby boy, but she felt it would cast a pall over the child to mention him here, to send his mother home with the memories of this body mixed with thoughts of her newborn.

“They’ve obliterated her identity,” Adara said. “I’m guessing that her face was burned, too.”

DNA testing? If the killer had considered that, he would have known that there was no database against which they could compare this woman’s identity. But he probably hadn’t considered it at all. Given all the injuries, it was more likely that the violence had been done in a fit of rage. Katya was determined to find the victim’s identity anyway, although she had the sinking feeling that to the state, Eve would be as anonymous in death as she had been in life.

K
atya stood in the hallway outside the downstairs forensics lab and caught Majdi’s eye. He smiled at her and waved her inside, but he was on the telephone and she didn’t want to interrupt, so she waited. A man walked past her. Her burqa was up, her face exposed, but the man pointedly avoided looking at her face.
All the better,
she thought. Her previous boss had taught her not to wear her burqa unless she absolutely had to, so Katya kept it resting on the top of her head, ready to drape down when the next pious bureaucrat chastised her with sharp words or a withering look.

“Do you think you are so ugly,” the last one had said, “that no man will find your face appealing? Is that why you expose it?”

No,
she wanted to retort,
I just mistakenly thought that when it came to sexuality, you had some self-control.
But that had been at her last job. Since coming to this one, no one had bothered her.

There were three other cases on her desk right now—armed robberies and a suicide—and she knew she ought to be working on those, but the image of Eve’s body had not left her mind. She watched Majdi through the glass.
Please, please
, she thought,
let this be one of his cases.
She could always rely on him to bring her into an important case, but until now, nothing had seemed this important.

Majdi was dressed in his usual jeans and wrinkled T-shirt. His sister must have cut his hair again, because the tight curls had been shorn to a thin layer that rested on his scalp like baby hairs, and the bushy goatee had been trimmed to a neat V. Even while on the phone, he buzzed happily between his workstations, completely at home. She would have loved to be his lab mate—his jittery, coffee-fueled, boyish excitement was a nice contrast to her organized and thoughtful style. But she was a woman, so she had her own lab. How anyone could think he would be a danger to her chastity, she would never know.

“Katya!” he said when he got off the phone. “Good afternoon.”

“Hello, Majdi.” She went inside. The lab was about the same size as her own upstairs, and although the machines here were newer, there were no windows and the overhead lighting gave the place a morguelike feel. It was a good thing that Majdi wasn’t one to care. There was a smudge on his glasses that looked like fingerprint powder. He noticed her eyeing it and took his glasses off to wash them.

“Were you working on that new case this morning?” Katya asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “and I was looking for you.” He turned from the sink, his face beaming. Majdi tended to oscillate between two states: the first was an irrepressible, giddy enthusiasm, and the second a state of intense, almost painful concentration the likes of which she had only ever seen in children.