City of Veils Read online

  “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.

  11

  Katya 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.

  “I was in the autopsy room,” she said.

  He walked away from the sink and fumbled to put his glasses back on. “Did you see the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” His exhalation said Wow. She felt the urge to tease him; it would have been so easy. You know, Majdi, women do autopsies, too. And he would blush to his collar and fumble to explain his reaction. But she held the impulse in check. He went to the desk, picked up a folder, and handed it to her. “This is what we’ve got on the Eve case. It’s not much. Osama doesn’t think it’s a housemaid.” He took an evidence bag from the table and held it out to her. “Maybe you’d like to take a look at the hijab?”

  She nodded, trying not to seem too eager. The bag contained a black cloak and headscarf, and probably a burqa. “I’d be happy to do it,” she said, smiling. Majdi relaxed somewhat, but she could see that he was still surprised that she’d seen a corpse.

  “So this is Inspector Ibrahim’s case?” she asked.

  “Yeah. And you can call him Osama. He hates it when we say ‘Inspector Ibrahim.’ Anyway, it’s a good thing it’s his case. Al-Khoury hates cases involving women ever since his wife died.” What he left unspoken, but what Katya already knew, was that the other two investigators—she couldn’t remember their names—had reputations as bullies who arrested anyone who was associated with the crime, even the victim’s families and friends, whether there was evidence for it or not. She always felt sorry for the innocent family members who spent time in jail while grieving the loss of a loved one, even if, more often than not, it was one of those family members who had committed the crime. Osama was the only one who seemed to respect his witnesses and suspects. At least he didn’t arrest them half as often as the other cops, and when he did, he made sure they were well taken care of.

  “I’ll get to work,” Katya said, taking the bag and leaving.

  Katya opened the cabinet that held the files for the department’s most recent cases. Zainab hadn’t bothered to alphabetize them yet. Kneeling on the floor, Katya read each of the names. She hadn’t seen any of the bodies, but the clarity that lingers from speculative horror had rendered the details of each case vivid in her mind. Roderigo, Thelma. A skin sample. Shattered iris. Foreign blood beneath her nails. Alvarez, Najwa. A dismembered thumb. Fingerprints on a cell phone. A man’s cell phone. And more sexually transmitted diseases than any person she’d ever seen. Of the twenty-two cases lined up in the drawer already this summer, nineteen were women. Twelve had been housemaids. It didn’t matter how they died, they were represented here out of all proportion to their population in the real world.

  Eve could easily have been a Saudi housewife, so why did she appear so clearly in Katya’s mind as a servant?

  Katya didn’t believe in intuition. She believed what her father said: that the senses absorbed hundreds of thousands of bits of information, very few of which ever made it to the conscious mind. And when the unconscious mind did the thinking for you, things could sometimes go awry.

  She went back to the table where Eve’s cloak was laid out. Katya had already determined that there was a rip in the pelvic area closely matching the bruising pattern on Eve’s hip. It looked as if the c
loak had been caught on something. Perhaps the killer had dragged the body.

  This time, Katya looked at the label. India Fabric. No designer. Something you’d buy for twenty-five riyals at the clothing souq. The lower hem was pale and torn in places, perhaps the natural consequence of an ill-fitting cloak. The fabric was worn around the cuffed wrists, which had no snaps or buttons and looked a little shrunken from washing. The wear was undoubtedly from Eve pushing her hands through the cuffs every time she left the house. The wrists were so worn compared to the moderate wear and tear on the elbows and collar (which did have snaps) that she might have put the cloak on every day. For what—six months? Why not once a week for six years? No, Katya thought, in six years, the cloak would have faded much more than it had. She had owned plenty of cheap cloaks in her time, and her experience was telling her that this cloak had been worn frequently for under a year. Any longer than that and the color would be faded, the seams coming apart.

  Who wears a cloak every day? Rich women went out whenever they liked, but their worn cloaks were quickly replaced by new ones. A working woman went out, someone like Katya, but not someone with a professional job where a cloak like this would be an embarrassment. A factory worker? A grocery store employee, someone hidden in the back room, stocking the shelves only when the store was closed? A single mother with no family might have to go out every day to walk her children to school or do the shopping. For that matter, a married woman would go out, if her husband was too busy to take her. But an abused housemaid? She would probably not be allowed to leave the house. She would be isolated, locked in her room at night, or even during the day when she wasn’t needed.

  Katya bent over the cloak again, running gloved fingers slowly over every inch of the fabric like an instrument waiting to register a seismic event. Eventually she took off her gloves and began to feel with her fingertips. It was the not-feeling that finally occurred to her. There, around the knee, the fabric was smooth.

  She moved her fingers to the right, shutting her eyes, feeling for irregularities. Slowly, her touch encountered a softer spot. She wanted to open her eyes to check if this was true, but she squeezed them shut and kept feeling until the worn area became an imperfect circle with a definite boundary enclosing an area in the shape of a knee. Bent to what? Who prayed on one knee?

  Katya opened her eyes and held the cloak to the light. It was difficult to see at first, but there it was, a spot where the fabric was slightly thinner. But only on one side.

  She switched tables, focusing now on the clothing. Eve’s jeans, which had been laid out on the table, had dried stiffly. Katya studied the knees. Again, it looked as if the left knee was slightly more worn than the right.

  She went to the phone and called Adara.

  “The Eve case,” she said. “Were there calluses on the left knee?”

  Adara put the phone down with a clunk. Katya heard her walk across the room, heard the hiss as the freezer door opened, the metal screech of a table being pulled from its frozen nest. Adara came back to the phone. “It’s hard to say,” she said. “Neither knee is very calloused.”

  Katya was disappointed, but it didn’t mean anything. The robe and jeans could have protected the knee from developing a callus.

  Eve had an old wound in her lower right leg, but that wouldn’t have caused her to pray on one knee. The wounded usually prayed in a chair. But what if she did try to pray on one knee, desperate to show some sign of her subservience to Allah? If she were that desperate, she might have bitten back the pain in her right leg and just gone ahead and prayed on both knees.

  “The wound in her lower right leg,” Katya said. “Would that have prevented her from kneeling on it?”

  Adara thought for a moment. “It might have caused her some soreness, but I don’t think it would have made her immobile.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  “By the way, Katya, the Syrian woman I told you about is here. She’s working on the facial sketch now. I’ll have her bring up the picture when she’s done.”

  Katya was surprised. “You’re not sending it to Majdi?”

  “I thought you’d like to see it first. Whenever you’re done with it, just give it to Zainab or Majdi.”

  Katya smiled. “Thanks, Adara.”

  She went back to the tables, her mind abuzz. So when Eve left the house, she didn’t go to the mosque, or she would have worn down both knees. Katya herself had never felt entirely comfortable in a mosque. It was a formal place for prayer. Her own spiritual comforts belonged to the back porch of the house, a room enclosed by shutters and cool shade where she and her mother had always done evening prayers before dinner.

  But what reason would a woman have for getting on one knee when she left the house? It was possible, of course, that she hadn’t left the house. That she lived in a household where she was required to wear a cloak so that she could serve a roomful of strange men. Bring them dinners. Kneel before them to set a coffee service on a low table. But why not bend over or squat? Getting down on one knee raised the frightening possibility of stretching the cloak in such a way that the other leg was exposed.

  Finally, Katya turned to Eve’s burqa and headscarf. The scarf was plain black polyester, the kind most women wore. There was no label, but one side of the fabric was lighter than the other, suggesting that it had been exposed to the sun on a regular basis. The scarf hadn’t been checked for fibers yet, so Katya went over it with a magnifying glass. When they had found Eve’s body, the scarf had been scrunched up and wrapped around her neck like a cord, so it was possible that there were still foreign fibers in the fabric that hadn’t been loosened by her long stay in the sea. Katya found a long black hair on the inside of the scarf. It probably belonged to Eve. In the same spot, she found two shorter, paler hairs. She quickly slid them into a baggie and labeled them. They were blond. Male hairs, she guessed. This was interesting. Where would Eve encounter a blond? Where would anyone encounter a blond? And why were the hairs on the inside of the scarf?

  She nearly picked up the phone to call Zainab at home, but she knew that her boss would not be thrilled, no matter how good the news. Zainab was all business, all the time. Her first question would be Did you finish looking at everything?

  Reluctantly, Katya went to the last item of clothing: the burqa. It was just like any other face covering, a plain black rectangle of fabric with Velcro to fasten it at the back of the head and a slit for the eyes. She scanned it for hairs and found none. Two pale beige patches on the inside looked like makeup stains. Eve’s face powder might have rubbed off on the fabric. Katya decided to take a sample of the stain, to double-check that it was makeup. Using scissors, she began to cut a small square at the edge of the stain, but something in her revolted against the idea of damaging the burqa. She picked up a swab instead. Suddenly, her cell phone chimed. She looked at her purse.

  Forcing herself to stay on task, she scraped some of the makeup from the fabric onto a microscope slide. Her cell phone chimed again.

  Katya set the burqa on the table and went to her purse. There were two Bluetooth messages, both the same. When she opened them, a picture appeared. It showed a woman’s face, completely veiled except for a pair of smiling black eyes. Beneath the picture was the caption Smile, you’re on camera!

  Katya snorted in disgust. Even here, she thought, in my office. The lab’s windows were too high to see out of, but she was certain that if she climbed on a chair, she would see a group of young girls on the sidewalk below, making ridiculously slow progress down the street, hands working the cell phones beneath their cloaks. One of them would be sending this message.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d been Bluetoothed by passing strangers. It was the preferred method of communication between flirtatious teens on the street—and sometimes the only way for a man to get a woman’s attention. There was nothing like a jangling cell phone to make a girl stop what she was doing and look around, even raise her burqa if she was wearing one. For Katya it was an e
mbarrassment. Sometimes so many messages came while she was in public that she had to turn her phone off. But no one had ever sent a picture of themselves in a burqa before. What a stupid idea! She tossed the phone in her purse and went back to the burqa.

  The minute she picked the burqa back up, her cell phone chimed again. At the very same moment, her fingers encountered something stiff. She looked down at the burqa, not sure she could believe it.

  Had the Bluetooth message come from this?

  She quickly laid the fabric flat and, feeling the edges, picked up the magnifying glass. Then she spotted it. A small silver wire woven into the side seam. The wire led to a tiny black metallic patch at the lower corner of the burqa. She touched the patch gently with a finger, and on cue, her cell phone chimed.

  She dropped the burqa. “Bluetooth?” she said, gaping in astonishment. She grabbed the cell phone from her purse. There were two more messages, both the same as the first ones.

  This time she couldn’t stop herself from picking up the phone to call Zainab. A Bluetooth burqa! She’d read about them in fashion magazines but thought they were only for runways. Who, after all, would be ridiculous enough to wear a burqa for modesty while Bluetoothing her picture to every stranger she passed? Ah, but not this one. Eve had sent only a picture of her covered face. Katya had to laugh at the mockery of it.

  She touched the burqa again. The fabric was nothing fancy, but maybe that was the point. No one would ever guess that this little piece of sartorial modesty could transmit a flirtatious message to any passerby.

  Zainab wasn’t answering, so Katya set the phone down. What was she going to tell her, anyway—I found a picture of the victim’s face, but unfortunately it was veiled? She slumped into her desk chair, staring in frustration at the messages on her phone. What was the point of sending an image of yourself that any stranger could already see? Was it only mockery, or was there something more?