Kingdom of Strangers

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T
he SUV hit the sand drift, skidded, and stopped in the middle of the road. The Homicide team got out, four men in plainclothes, their shirts wrinkled, faces stung by the sun. Only one man had thought to bring a scarf for his head; the others made do with sunglasses.

The local police pulled up behind them. The Bedouin who had found the corpse could see at once, from the subtle way the men’s bodies showed deference, who was in charge. Lieutenant Colonel Inspector Ibrahim Zahrani did not introduce himself. The Bedouin approached him, anxiously recounting how his truck had jacked off the road, throwing one of his sheep out of the flatbed and forcing him to stop. When he’d gone to retrieve the sheep, he’d found the body. Everyone followed him over a rise in the sand.

It was hard to tell at first whether it was a man or a woman. Five sets of boots stopped in a semicircle around a mutilated face. The cheek and left eye had been ripped away—probably a bullet’s exit wound—and the remaining skin was desiccated gray and coated with sand. From the tiniest sliver of black poking up from the collar, Ibrahim guessed she was female.

His first thought was that some desert boy had shot his sister through the head for a “crime” that involved the family honor. Who else would bury someone way out here? Too far south to be Jeddah, this was a forgotten strip of sand sixteen miles inland from the main road, which was not even a proper freeway itself. They’d
gotten lost twice driving up here and had had to wait for the local police officer to come and get them.

He gave the face another look. It was not a desert face. Even with all the destruction, you could see it was Asian.

Ibrahim glanced at his watch: 1:30 p.m. If they were lucky, they could be done before the most infernal hours of the day. It was early autumn, really just an extension of summer. The heat was already clipping his thoughts like an impatient listener. The local officer, Hattab al-Anzi, didn’t look like a man who worked a desert beat. Pasty-faced, squinting, covered in sweat. He gave a honk and drove off, presumably to fetch the coroner, or perhaps the forensics team, who were no doubt stuck circling the same roads Ibrahim’s men had just cursed to hell.

Behind them, the sheep were bleating in the truck bed. Half the road was covered in sand. Just a few meters ahead of where they’d stopped the SUV, the road was impassable. Such an isolated spot. The drift might have gone unnoticed for weeks.

“Any idea if this happened recently?” Ibrahim asked the Bedouin.

“Yeah, we had a windstorm last night. A bad one. Certainly bad enough to blow a dune over the roadway.”

When he said
dune
, he motioned in the direction of the body. All Ibrahim could see was a great vista of sand broken here and there by outcroppings of rock. It took a loosening of perspective, some stiff stumbling back to the road, before he saw how the area around the body was slightly raised. There had been a dune there—not a very high one, probably a barchan, its back to the east-blowing wind.

He watched his men trample the crime scene and heard his junior officer Waseem Daher admonish them. “Go back to the street! You’re stepping on evidence!” No one listened, but they stood near him, turned to him when he spoke, always eager. Daher hadn’t fully realized his power over other men.

The sun beat down on them like licks from a blowtorch. When
the cars finally arrived, they came funerary style, a procession of Red Crescent ambulances, the coroner’s van, two Yukons with forensics teams. The local cop, Hattab, brought up the rear.

“Stupid guy,” someone said. “Would someone tell him you’re not supposed to lead from behind?”

“He’s just making sure he can get out first, in case we have another windstorm.” This was Daher.

Within minutes, the scene was a maelstrom of men. The forensics guys cordoned off the area around the body with long sticks and a swirl of blue tape. Ibrahim intervened; he wanted the whole dune sectioned off, so they expanded the area, pushing the men farther back. Two younger officers had arrived with the coroner, also named Ibrahim but whom everybody called Abu-Musa, the “father of Musa.” He was actually the father of Kareem and should have been called Abu-Kareem, but at a coffee shop one afternoon he had attempted to explain to Chief Inspector Riyadh that
musa
, which was the name of the prophet Moses, was also the genus classification name for bananas. And they were so named because Moses’s mother had stuffed a banana into the baby’s mouth before placing him in a reed basket and pushing him down the Nile. The banana was nutritious but, more crucially, kept the baby quiet so that the Egyptians wouldn’t kill him. Chief Riyadh, unused to following such convoluted intersections of history and myth, simply sucked on his hookah and grunted. “You know this how, Abu-Musa?” The name had stuck.

Inspector Ibrahim had never worked with Abu-Musa before, but the man’s temper was legendary, as was his overbearing righteousness. Right now Abu-Musa was waiting for forensics to finish excavating the torso. Two Red Crescent men moved in to help set up the vacuums that forensics would use to remove the sand, and Abu-Musa shouted at them: “Get back from there! You don’t touch her!”

“She’s dead,” one of the RC responders replied.

“No one should touch her! Now get out of here.” Abu-Musa
pushed the man aside. He wasn’t worried that someone might disrupt the evidence; he was watching out for virtue crimes, a man touching a woman’s body, defeating her honor even in death.

The familiar crackling of tires on asphalt and a small explosion of dust announced the arrival of another SUV, this one carrying Detective Inspector Osama Ibrahim.

Osama got out, surveyed the scene, and went straight to Ibrahim. The two men shook hands, and Osama offered an apology for not having welcomed him to the department before this.

Everyone was acting deferential. Ibrahim had been in the department for two weeks now, a transfer from Undercover. He had seniority only because, at forty-two, he was older than most of the other officers; because he had worked Homicide many years ago; and because he had royal-family connections. He was sure that soon the cracks would start to show.

“Local Bedouin found a woman’s body in the sand,” he said. “Have a look.”

Osama went off.

The Red Crescent responders were grumbling about Abu-Musa and discussing an incident that had been in the news. A female student at the Teachers’ Education College in Qassim had fallen ill. The college had called the Red Crescent, but when they arrived, the authorities had forbidden the paramedics from touching her. They’d been afraid she would die but apparently more afraid that, touched by strange men, she would lose her dignity. Amid all the arguing, the girl had died. Fortunately, these two RC responders seemed appalled by the whole event and were wary of the same thing happening to them.

“The
fuck
he thinks we are—a pack of pimps?” one spat.

Osama came back looking shaken. Ibrahim recognized the look. You believed you were immune to death, having seen whole rooms splattered in human fluids—and then one woman’s face struck you down again. “Local trouble, you think?”

“Maybe.” Ibrahim studied the scene. “Is your coroner always so aggressive?”

“Yeah, but only when female victims are involved.”

“Naturally.”

There was a sudden crack. It was a small sound but it provoked a wave of curious silence. One of the Red Crescent men had stepped into a soft part of the sand, and his foot had encountered something hard, which had splintered. Ibrahim went over, shouting: “Nobody move!” Surprisingly, everyone obeyed.

The man had already lifted his foot out of the sand, and Ibrahim could see from his face what he’d found.

“That sounded like bone.”

“It was.” The depression where the man’s shoe had been was filling with sand. Ibrahim caught sight of what might have been another face.

They were five meters away from the original body.

“Everyone stay exactly where you are,” Ibrahim boomed. “Except for you.” He pointed at the forensics photographer. “Take photos of everyone, exactly where they are now.” The man scrambled into action. Then Ibrahim pointed to Daher. “Get the local guy to radio in a request for some trackers. Murrah, if you can get them. As fast as possible.” Daher jogged to the cop car, where Hattab was enjoying the AC.

Ibrahim stood guard, his gaze challenging anyone to move so much as a millimeter. Like children in a game, they stood awkwardly frozen, their faces throwing off the burden of heat and now alive with expectation, the strange delight of being told what to do when it actually counted.

His men had trampled the area well, but by the third body they could still find no pattern.

The Murrah trackers who arrived—a grandfather and his
nephews—spent hours going over the site, memorizing boot prints, sandal prints, eliminating the men who were there with such deftness it seemed magical. They didn’t even need to consult the photographs the forensics guy had taken. Then they started again, looking for the things that didn’t belong. They probed the ground, bending over with hands on knees, squatting, kneeling, staring at the same spots in the sand for whole minutes at a time, following subtle trails. They found the next six bodies with hands like divining rods, feeling mysterious geometries in the air above the sand, and only then did a pattern of sorts begin to emerge.

The bodies were all female. They had all been buried at the back of what had been a crescent dune. There was an underlying rock formation that gave the area some stability, that made it possible, for example, for a murderer with a penchant for returning to the same burial site to actually find that site in the case of a sandstorm blowing his dune across the road. A slight depression leading down from the road meant that no matter how many windstorms came through, the sand would reaccumulate at this spot. Over the course of months it would rise up into a dune, blown by steady winds. In a storm, it would topple onto the road, like a slow-motion wave crashing onto a beach. The road would be cleared and eventually the sand would rise again.

As the body count grew, Ibrahim kept returning to a single thought:
Why here?

They had to bring in water trucks, and a local restaurant (only thirty-two kilometers away) prepared huge plates of rice and lamb, wedding style, which the men ate distractedly, if at all. The blasting waves of heat began their killing spree by stealing the men’s appetites. Two men collapsed and had to be driven back to Jeddah in a Red Crescent van.