City of Veils (22 page)

“Do you have any other suspects?” he forced himself to ask.

She shook her head. “Whoever killed her felt a significant rage. I mean, they desecrated her body in almost every way they could. Knife wounds, physical beating with an
‘iqal
, and then the burns on the hands and face…”

“How do you know it was an
‘iqal?
” he asked.

“I tested the fibers from her wounds and found goat hair.”

Nayir remembered as a boy confusing the word
‘iqal
with
‘aql,
intelligence. He thought that this was why men wore the cords around their heads, that somehow the black band bestowed a halo of wisdom. It was only recently that he had told Uncle Samir about his boyhood confusion. Typically, Samir had deflated the moment by explaining that the two words were actually from the same root, which meant they were related in a subtler way: fostering intelligence was much like hobbling a camel; you had to teach focus and restraint.

“They’re not exactly scarce,” Nayir said, referring to
‘iqals,
“but isn’t it unusual that she was beaten with one?”

Katya shook her head. “A lot of bodies come in having been beaten with
‘iqals
. It’s the easiest and quickest weapon most men have.”

“More proof that the killer acted in the heat of the moment,” he said.

“Yes. And the hot oil could have come from anywhere. I have this idea that Leila was in a kitchen, maybe cooking something. The guy comes in, they fight, it gets violent, and he starts beating her with his
‘iqal
. Maybe she fights back and he gets so angry he throws hot oil in her face. At this point she’s beaten and bruised, burned from hot oil, but she’s still fighting furiously because he grabs a knife and starts slashing at her legs. Maybe he did it before the hot oil. But all these things happened to her while she was still alive, and they happened in quick succession. It had to be someone strong enough to overpower her, and someone vicious enough to keep going at her even though he’d already disabled her. Someone enraged. The question is why.”

“Is it possible she was drugged?” Nayir asked.

“We’re still waiting for the lab results on what was in her blood, but yes, she could have been drugged. Let’s say that she was, and that whoever did this did it just out of viciousness. Being drugged, she probably wouldn’t have felt as much pain. Maybe she wasn’t even conscious. But if that’s true, then we’re dealing with a psychopath, because the killer kept going at her
without provocation
. In other words, she wasn’t fighting back. The killer was just…”

“Enjoying the kill.”

She nodded. “But he didn’t just throw hot oil in her face, he covered her whole face in it, and then he did her hands. What’s so disturbing is that he seemed to have done it to erase her identity, so the police wouldn’t be able to get her facial features or fingerprints. Yet the killer did this to her while she was still alive. It feels calculated, like he knew he was going to kill her.”

“Maybe he’d already realized how badly he’d beaten her, so he knew it was inevitable?” Nayir asked, cringing at the thought.

“But think about it—the attack was so full of rage. People usually come down from that at some point. That’s when your brain starts to function again, when you start
thinking
. That’s when the calculation comes in, and the killer starts to get worried. He tells himself,
Oh no, look what I’ve done. I’d better erase her identity, so the police will think she’s just another housemaid.
”

“All right,” Nayir said. “So at that point he kills her out of fear. He’s afraid she’ll survive to tell the police his identity.”

“Right,” Katya said, suddenly alert. “It’s possible the killer just finished it off by snapping her neck.”

“So you’ve got a killer in a rage,” Nayir said. “Maybe a psychotic person—someone with a history of mental instability?”

“We’ve checked into that. No one in her family has a history of mental illness, and neither does her ex-husband, and he’s our primary person of interest right now. But only because he had a temper.”

“So she probably didn’t know any psychotics,” Nayir said.

“No, she probably didn’t. Which raises the possibility that it was a stranger who killed her.”

“But how would it happen?” he asked. “The scenario you described had to occur in a kitchen. If she was in her kitchen —”

“Her brother’s,” Katya put in. “She lived with her brother.”

“Even then,” he went on. “How could someone do all those things to her in her brother’s house? She would have had to know him to let him in the door. Although I suppose it could have been a burglar, or someone who broke in.”

“Or a friend of the brother,” Katya said. “The day she was reported missing, the police went to the house and interviewed the brother. They also interviewed the neighbors, and nobody heard anything out of the ordinary—no screaming or banging around. And when my boss went to talk to the brother after we identified Leila’s body, we had full access to his house. It was clean. She didn’t die there.”

Nayir nodded. “So the question is, what other kitchens did she visit?”

Katya gave a grim laugh. “Women are always in kitchens,” she said. “I don’t know. According to her brother, she didn’t have many friends.”

It hadn’t occurred to him until now how the discussion of the case had made his nervousness vanish. But he’d heard the darkness in her tone that came with the words
women are always in kitchens
.

“What about someone she might have known through her job?” he asked, trying to stay on the subject.

“The police talked to the news station. The woman who hired her told us that she hadn’t seen Leila in months. Apparently, Leila worked freelance. She did all her work with them over the phone and the computer. She wasn’t filming things that needed to be broadcast right away, she was only filming filler, so she uploaded everything to the station’s website. When they wanted something from her, they communicated by e-mail or called her on the phone. She had never even been to the station.”

“Then how did she get hired?”

“She responded to a newspaper ad. The woman who hired her came to her house—well, the brother’s house—to do the interview. I’m thinking she also wanted to find out if Leila had all the film and computer equipment she needed to do the job.”

“That makes sense,” Nayir said. He wondered briefly if Katya could ever take a job like that, where she could work from home.

“But I don’t think Leila was exactly modest,” Katya said. “I mean, I get the impression that she was comfortable being out in the world with a video camera. I told you she was attacked once, according to her brother.”

“I remember,” he said.

They drove in silence for the last few minutes of the journey, dismayed to see that the neighborhood they were entering was on the dingy side. Bags of trash lay scattered on the sidewalk. Two men leaning against a rusted-out Toyota gave the Rover an appraising look, but when the Rover slowed down, the men turned their backs and began walking away.

The block was a mishmash of old apartment buildings, some of them leaning precariously over the street, others covered with graffiti and grime. Nayir parked in front of the building.

“This doesn’t seem like the kind of place an art collector would live,” Katya said.

He silently agreed. The foyer door was unlocked but its hinges were so rusty that it was difficult to open, and when they did manage to move it, it gave a shriek loud enough to alert the neighbors. He heard rustlings behind apartment doors, indications of women peering through spy holes. The foyer stank of old cooking smells, curries and beans in an airless room. The linoleum floor felt tacky against the bottoms of his shoes as he led the way up the stairs.

They found apartment number six on the third floor. Before knocking, Nayir turned to her. “In case this man—what’s his name?”

“Wahhab Nabih.”

“In case Mr. Nabih doesn’t want to speak to a woman, what should I…?”

“Just ask him what he knew about Leila, what she was doing for him, that kind of thing,” Katya said. “He probably won’t mind talking to women,” she added. “He was working with the victim, remember?”

“Right.” Nayir tapped on the door. They heard a stirring within, then a thump like a book falling to the floor. A woman’s voice cried out a muffled curse. Footsteps came toward them.

“Who is it?” the woman asked. To their surprise, she spoke English.

“We’re sorry to disturb you, Miss Nabih,” he said in English. “But we’re here on police business.”

This was met by silence.

“Miss Nabih?”

“You have the wrong address,” the woman said. “I’m not Miss Nabih.”

“What did she say?” Katya asked. He translated. “Well, tell her that this is about the murder of a young girl and that I’m a female investigator. If she’s home alone, I’ll come in by myself. I just need to ask a few questions and find out why we have the wrong address.”

“But you don’t speak English,” he said.

Katya slumped. “Just tell her what this is about.”

Nayir did and translated the response: “She’s never heard of anyone named Nabih.”

Katya looked crestfallen. “This is the only address we could find for him. If this woman can’t help us, we’ve reached a dead end.”

“I don’t think she can help us,” he replied, but he translated Katya’s words anyway. They were met by more silence.

They waited. Something screeched at the bottom of the stairs—probably the front door. Katya was staring in a pleading way at the spy hole.

A minute later, he heard the clack of a bolt. The door opened a few inches and a woman peered out. Even if he hadn’t heard her voice, he would have known that she was foreign. Her burqa was pulled so tightly to her nose that she might as well not have been covering her face at all. Her eyes and forehead were completely exposed, which was probably convenient for vision but it made her eyes pop. They were large and a startling, clear blue.

“I think Nabih may be the name of my landlord,” she said.

Nayir kept his gaze on the door frame. “Do you have his address?” he asked.

The woman nodded and swung the door wide, motioning them into the apartment.

N
ayir entered the foyer, trying not to stare. When he’d first heard her curse, he’d expected—well, he wasn’t sure, but someone larger, rounder, and less covered up. Yet the woman who opened the door was short and slender, and even if her cloak was three inches too short and sticking a little to her sweaty arms, there was an air of modesty—even awkwardness—in the way she moved, staying close to the door, her eyes searching nervously for a safe place to rest.

Walking in, Nayir turned at once for the men’s sitting room. It was easy to spot, located right by the entrance. But the woman said, “No, no, come on in.” There was no doubt she was American. She didn’t have the same concepts of space. “Come in” meant come all the way in. Make yourself at home, enter any room, follow me into the kitchen, sit at the table,
both of you
, man and woman. Let’s all sit in the same room.

She was clearly upset about something, and Nayir suspected that it had nothing to do with their arrival. In the glimpses he managed to steal of her eyes, he could see something bigger. Those eyes, which were a blue he’d never seen before, at least not on a human, momentarily distracted him. They were large and, he discovered with a jolt, capable of gazing at him with an astonishing frankness.

Peripherally he noticed that Katya was frowning.

Reluctantly, he followed the women into the apartment. They entered a central room that might have been a women’s sitting room, except that it held only a small, ratty sofa and an end table. There were no decorations on the walls and no windows in the room, so the only light came from a feeble lamp on the end table. There was a book on the floor, and while stepping over this, the American woman stumbled against the table and cursed again. Frustrated, she took off her burqa and turned back to Nayir and Katya. “Watch out for the table.”

Nayir quickly averted his gaze, but he had already seen her face. It was small featured and precise. Her profile had the delicately rounded edges of a line of script cut into a marble wall. Against the paleness of her skin, her lips were bright red and he wondered, so fleetingly it might have been a spasm, what it would be like to kiss a mouth that small.
Allah clean my mind and forgive my sins.

Katya was staring at him, and he did everything he could not to meet her gaze.

They entered a small kitchen. The woman invited them to sit at a table pressed into a corner, which they did simply to get out of her way. Standing, the three of them took up the whole space. The woman opened the pantry door, knelt down, and began rummaging.

Katya lifted her burqa, which left him even fewer safe places to rest his gaze. He studied the empty chair until he realized that Katya might think he was staring at the woman’s rear, which was protruding in plain view. So he glanced at Katya’s hands. And that’s when he saw it: the engagement ring was still on her finger. Trace memories of Othman rose ghostlike in his mind, all the times he’d imagined them together. Apparently, Nayir’s being back in her life hadn’t changed her feelings about her thwarted engagement. The glittering diamond was like a needle in his eye.