Kingdom of Strangers (6 page)

“Maybe,” Katya said. “Or just… a body shape.”

“Excellent. Maybe she’s always petite. Or skinny.”

Riyadh, who had been standing to the side, said: “All of the victims were between one point eight and one point nine meters tall. And all of them were immigrants, mostly from Asian countries.”

“How tall is one point eight meters?” Charlie asked Katya.

“Just under six feet,” Katya said.

“Oh, okay. So they’re pretty tall.” Charlie turned back to the room, but not before giving Katya a secretive smile. “It’s not very common to find tall women among certain racial groups, so you already know one thing about him: he likes tall, Asian women. He’s targeting an unusual type. One of your main problems is going to be determining how your killer found and captured his victims. How he won their trust.

“There’s one more important classification about serial killers that you’re going to want to look at, and that’s organization. How organized is he? Another way to think of this is, how elaborately does he plot and execute his fantasy? Planning a murder takes time and energy. Some murderers kill their victims right away. That’s the disorganized type. They tend to be sloppy. They also tend to be excessively gory and violent. The organized types are different. They make the killing phase—that’s phase five in the sequence—last for days or even weeks. They usually don’t kill the victims right away, and even if they do, they don’t dispose of
the body right away. They want to keep enjoying the thrill of watching their victim being abused. They want the fantasy to last as long as it can. It only ends when they get sick of it. Our Behavioral Science Unit developed this classification, and it extends to crime scenes as well. The disorganized killer will leave, well, a messy crime scene. But an organized killer is elaborate and has usually planned out exactly how to hide every trace of his crime. Except for one thing: the totem.”

“What’s that?” This was Kazaz, the translator.

“A totem is something he’s saved from the kill—usually a body part, but it can be anything. It’s something like a trophy. It reminds him of the experience, and he can go back to it with pleasure or pride.”

“The hands,” Ibrahim said.

Charlie looked at him, her attention like a spotlight. “Yes, he removed the victims’ hands. Both of them, right?”

“That’s right,” Ibrahim replied. “He cut off all of the women’s hands, but just yesterday we found three of them buried by the bodies.”

“Only three?”

“Yes.”

Charlie was thoughtful for a moment. “The hands are probably his trophies. It’s definitely worth asking why he only buried three of them. There may be some evidence on those three that will lead you to understand why he chose to cut hands off in the first place. You may not be able to figure it out until you catch him, but if you understand it, it can be a very valuable clue.

“You’re going to need to find out more, of course, but from what you have learned about this guy, I think you’re dealing with a very organized killer. He took the time to dispose of the bodies. And given their state—the missing hands, the mutilated faces—and the isolation of the locale, he’s obviously been working systematically. The most recent victim was three months dead?”

“No more than six,” Ibrahim said.

“Then I hate to say it, but he will probably kill again soon. He will be, right now, planning his next kill. The real question is, how is he getting access to these women? Where is he finding them and what do they have in common? You obviously have a lot of work to do in terms of identifying them. He’s going to realize that you’ve found where he buried his victims, and he will adapt his methods. He probably won’t go to the same place to find his victims anymore, but he may not be so willing to change his ‘type.’ ”

This was followed by an uneasy silence.

“Well,” Daher remarked in Arabic, “maybe we should start telling our women to stay indoors.”

Charlie looked to Kazaz for a translation, but he frowned.

The room fell silent, full from its intellectual meal. Ibrahim detected a slight shakiness: so many officers unused to taking directions from a woman.

“I think that’s enough for now,” Chief Riyadh said. “Dr. Becker has kindly agreed to be available to answer questions over the next month, so we’ll be able to talk with her in more depth once the medical examiner has finished his reports and we’ve heard from forensics.”

The group broke up slowly. Charlie and Riyadh stood at the front of the room chatting, and Daher made a man-pack with his friends. Katya slipped out of the room.

In the hallway, Ibrahim bumped into Talib, the Murrah tracker.

“You left early,” Ibrahim remarked.

“Well, I knew it wasn’t her.” He tossed his chin in the direction of Dr. Becker.

“Thank God for that. But you said you didn’t have a footprint of the killer.”

“Oh, we had something,” Talib said. “Not clear enough for a photograph, but good for our purposes. Enough to get a sense of him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this at the crime scene?”

“It took a long time to eliminate all the other men who were at the scene.”

“All right,” Ibrahim said. “It’s definitely a man, then?”

“Yes.”

“And where does he live, this killer?”

Talib smiled. “What a funny question. What makes you think I can answer it?”

Ibrahim shrugged.

“He lives in the city. Nothing wrong with his back. He’s much taller than me, probably heavier.” With a small pair of hands, Talib cupped a gesture around his gerbil-size paunch.

“And are you going to tell me how you came to this?” Ibrahim asked.

“He uses his right foot differently than his left. And the way that he uses it differently means he either has an injury or drives a car. The right is more flexible, all the way along the bottom of the foot and even the ankle. Twists side to side a little when he walks. It’s the stronger leg too. He’s probably right-handed.”

“And he’s a man because?”

“Only men drive cars.”

Ibrahim smiled, then let out a laugh. “Yes, sorry. Glad someone’s using logic.”

The Bedouin waved his hand in a courtly gesture that said
I’m quite certain you’re better at logic than I am
.

Ibrahim unlocked his office door and said good-bye to Talib. He barely had time to switch on the lights before the other men came in: first one of the junior cops, Shaya, then Daher and his followers. He saw a flash of black in the hallway and wondered if Katya had wanted to speak to him as well.

The office was small—two tables and a desk, the best the department could come up with for now. It was totally inadequate
for meetings. The men sat on the stools, perched on his tables. They wanted direction, he realized. He sat down.

“Well, the American was helpful,” Daher said. “Nothing like a woman’s face to focus the mind.”

“It wasn’t your mind being focused,” one of the others said.

“No, no,” Daher replied. “I now have a very clear sense of what we should be doing. We should be sitting in a conference room staring at a white shirt.”

The men had been pushing the boundaries since Ibrahim started at Homicide. They had realized that he wouldn’t take offense at their joking. In the car riding out to the desert, before they had found the bodies, Daher, who had been reading something on his cell phone, boomed out: “Gentlemen, it’s time to move to Malaysia!”

“Oh no.” Shaya had rolled his eyes.

“Oh
yes!
And do you know why? Because Malaysia has taken the remarkable step of
banning bras
. Yes, indeed. They are—and I quote the sheikh who made the ruling—‘devil’s cushions.’ And no good Muslim woman should wear one, because they exaggerate the shape and curvature of the breast.” He tossed his phone on his lap with satisfaction. “Imagine, please, a whole nation without bras!”

It had made Ibrahim laugh then, but now he was beginning to get fed up.

“We ought to be ashamed,” he said. “This man has been killing for over a decade and we haven’t found out about it until now.”

The room fell silent.

“I’m sure someone noticed these women were missing,” he went on, “but whoever they were, they didn’t nag us. No one’s been showing up at our office for ten years running. That’s because they probably live on the other side of the world and they
can’t
show up. They don’t have the means.”

He hoped he wasn’t going too far—or revealing his own angst. They had to find a killer; he was supposed to coordinate these overgrown boys with intelligence and a knowledge he didn’t really possess, yet the only thing he could think of was Sabria. Nothing like a woman to focus the mind.

“So basically it’s our job to find out every single thing that we can, because someday we’re going to meet all those people who noticed and we’re going to have to tell them what happened.”

He looked around. They all knew the situation: the Homicide Department had a 90 percent success rate in capturing and prosecuting murderers. Never mind that the figure might have been a little bloated by those zealous officers who “encouraged” confessions by any means possible. The fact remained that the department had a lot to live up to. And right now, Ibrahim was ten years out of practice.

“Do you think they’ll keep us on this case?” Daher asked.

“Until I hear otherwise, it’s our job to find the man who did this.”

He tried to conjure up protocols from long ago, but the decade between then and now had eroded most of his memory, and anyway the rules had changed. They had better forensics now. They had computers for everything. And the job of an investigator was to oversee the machinations of it all. But one thing hadn’t changed: the dread.

“Why is it always the housemaids?” Shaya asked. He was the same age as the other men but had none of their youthful energy and more than his share of naïveté.

“Look around, man,” Daher said. “We have too many foreigners. Pakistanis, Indians, Africans. And with this many, you get the bad ones too.”

“They’re certainly responsible for more than their share of crime,” Shaya replied.

“That’s because they’re poor,” Daher said. “Do you ever see a
fat foreigner? No. Most of them don’t make enough money to eat. Of course they’re going to start stealing and killing each other—”

“They do commit crimes,” Ibrahim interrupted. “But stealing and killing are two totally different things. Most of the time, it’s their employers who commit the crimes. And those would be Saudis.”

No one replied.

“Now, what’s the latest word from forensics?”

“Nothing interesting yet,” Daher said.

Ibrahim looked at his men and thought of Sabria’s hair, much thicker and shinier than Charlie Becker’s. It had a weight to it. She would climb on him and drape it over his face and fill his nostrils with the smell of shampoo and sex.

“We know the heights, weights, and presumed ages of our victims. We also have the pictures from the sketch artist, so let’s start with that. Daher and Ahmad, I want you two at the Filipino and Indonesian consulates today. Go over their records yourselves if you have to. Shaya, you’re in charge of contacting Missing Persons. Same drill: do it yourself if you have to. The rest of you go down to Records and start looking through the computer files on missing persons. The national database.”

“What about profiling the killer?” Shaya asked.

Ibrahim rubbed his face and wondered if the boy had understood a single thing that Dr. Becker had just said. “That is what we’re doing,” he replied.

Groans, sighs, some friendly slapping and shoving got them out. Ibrahim shut the door behind them, switched off the light, and sat down at his desk. Maybe Riyadh wasn’t taking him off the case because he was too busy dealing with his higher-ups. It was only a matter of time before the ministry’s Special Investigations shouldered their way into it. There was no telling what would happen then. It might get taken out of police hands entirely.

More important to him now was finding Sabria. He needed
his own plan. There was no battalion of men who would go charging forward on her behalf. She wasn’t in any of the hospitals he had called, although it was possible she had been admitted anonymously. The only way to find out was to go to every clinic and show her picture around, but even then, a doctor could see a female patient without ever seeing her face. Checking them all would be a monumental task.

He looked at the phone, thought of dialing Missing Persons himself and reporting her, but he knew what they would do: protocols. Once they found out she’d worked in Undercover, Omar, assistant chief of Undercover, would be notified, and he would undoubtedly open an investigation, which meant that they would search her apartment with some of the finest forensics technology in the world. They’d find out about Ibrahim. He’d be an adulterer, at least until they took off his head. Undercover would close down the investigation. No sense wasting energy searching for a prostitute. And while all of that was going on, it could turn out that she’d been unconscious in a hospital the whole time. Or maybe she’d just run away. It wasn’t worth the risk of reporting her yet. He had to find her himself.

C
lutching her cell phone, Amina al-Fouad stepped onto the third-floor balcony overlooking the street. It was bright, and out of habit she wrapped a plain scarf over her nose and mouth. She scanned the street for any sign of Jamal’s GM but all she saw were the neighbor’s children tearing into the alley and a few stray cats. She shut her eyes, listening for the giant rumble of the new SUV her husband had foolishly bought for their son Jamal. At last she heard a familiar sound and watched expectantly as a truck turned onto the street. It wasn’t his.

She flipped open her phone and tried calling him a second time. No answer. If she had bothered to listen to her daughter’s instructions, she would know how to text him, but it was too complicated. 10:40 a.m. She had to go to the grocer’s, the florist’s, the art-supply store, and she still had to pick up a birthday present for her niece. The party was at one o’clock. She had promised to bring soda, napkins, streamers, and balloons. She tried calling Jamal again and got the same response.