“Can I make copies?”
“No. Everything is password protected. Only the officers’ computers have USB ports or CD drives. Nothing ever leaves here.”
“Defense secrets, of course. Fine, we’ll make do with what we’ve got.”
Sharko opened the file. He plunged his hand into the sleeve of photos and hesitated before laying them out. He wasn’t in top form, and Nahed seemed disturbed.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
She nodded without answering. The inspector arranged the photos before him. The young woman forced herself to look and brought her hand to her mouth.
“This is monstrous.”
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”
Dozens of photos depicted death in all its guises. Someone had surely photographed the bodies only a few hours after they’d been killed, but the heat had accelerated the damage. Sharko peeled away at the horror. The corpses had been dumped in the open, lacerated, mutilated with a knife, with no particular concern for staging the scene. The cop snatched up the identification sheets, studied the victims’ photos that their families had supplied. Poor-quality photos, shot at school, in the street, at home. They showed the girls as lively, smiling, and young, with things in common—their age (fifteen or sixteen), eyes, and black hair. The inspector handed the sheets to Nahed and asked her to translate. At the same time, he contemplated the map of Cairo pinned to the wall, with all the street names in Arabic. The city was a monster of civilization, ripped open north to south by the Nile, bordered to the east and southeast by the Mokattam mountain range, gnawed to the south by a vast, sandy space littered with the ruins of the ancient city.
The cop planted further pushpins in the key spots the young woman indicated. The victims’ bodies had been discovered roughly ten miles apart, on a circle peripheral to the city’s main agglomeration. The garbage collectors’ area to the northeast, riverbanks where the Nile widens to the northwest—just a few miles from the police station—and the white desert to the south. Schoolgirls from poor or modest families. Nahed knew Cairo like the back of her hand. She was able to pinpoint each girl’s school and home neighborhood. Sharko was interested in the incredible amount of space occupied by the Tora cement factories, the largest in the world, near which one of the victims had lived.
“Earlier, you mentioned a makeshift neighborhood near the cement factories. What did you mean?”
“They’re homestead communities made up of temporary shelters built by the poor, with little regard for city regulations and no access to public services. No drinkable water, no street cleaning, no trash collection. There are a lot of them in Egypt, and they’re making the size of the city explode. The state provides about a hundred thousand lodgings a year, when they’d need seven times that much to absorb the population growth.”
The cop took notes as she went on. Names of the girls, places where discovered, geographic locations…
“What are these, like slums?”
“Cairo’s slums are worse. You have to see them to believe it. The second victim, Boussaina, lived near one of them.”
The inspector looked closely again at the photos, their faces and distinguishing marks. He refused to believe it was just coincidence. The killer had intentionally moved from neighborhood to neighborhood. Poor girls, not especially pretty, who wouldn’t draw attention. Why those three in particular? Was he used to being around poverty, perhaps for his work? Had he already met them? Something in common—they had to have something in common.
For the next hour, Nahed struggled to highlight the salient points of the autopsy report; it was technical and difficult work for a translator. She revealed that traces of ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, had been found in all three bodies. Estimated times of death showed that the attacks had taken place in the wee hours of the night. As for the actual cause of death, this was the most disturbing of all. The mutilations were due to knife wounds, but all were postmortem. It seemed the deaths themselves resulted from damage caused by the opening of the skulls and, apparently, from the removal of the brain and eyes.
In all likelihood, the skulls had been cut open while the girls were still alive, and the multiple stab wounds had been inflicted afterward.
Sharko mopped his brow with a handkerchief, while Nahed sank into silence, her eyes vacant. The policeman could easily imagine the scene. The killer had first kidnapped these girls after dark, anesthetized them, then taken them someplace out of the way to practice his horrors, armed with his instruments of mayhem: the medical saw, scalpels for enucleation, a broad-bladed knife for mutilation. He surely had a car; most likely he knew the city and had done some exploring. Why the posthumous mutilations? An irresistible need to dehumanize the bodies? To possess them? Could he be filled with such hatred that he could get it out only by an act of ultimate destruction?
In the heavy, stifling air of the office, the inspector labored to link the MO to the one used in France. Here, despite everything, there was a ritual, organization, and no particular effort to hide the bodies. In addition, the killer had opened his victims’ skulls while they were alive. But in France, most of them had died of gunshot wounds, fired randomly, judging from the different impact sites of the projectiles. And they’d taken pains to render the corpses anonymous: hands severed, teeth extracted.
Was there really a link between them? What if he’d been mistaken all along? What if chance was finally having its say in all this? Sixteen years… sixteen long years…
And yet, Sharko still felt an impalpable connection, the same diabolical will to attain and harvest two of the human body’s most precious organs: the brain and the eyes.
Why these three girls in Egypt?
Why the five men in France, including one Asian?
The cop guzzled down the glasses of water that Nahed regularly brought him and sank still deeper into the shadows, while Ra’s emanations tortured his back. He was dripping with sweat. Outside was an inferno of sand, dust, and mosquitoes, and he already longed to be in his air-conditioned room, huddled under the netting.
Unfortunately, the rest of the paperwork was just fluff. None of it had been handled very thoroughly. A few scattered sheets, handwritten, stamped by the prosecutor, bearing the depositions of relatives or neighbors. Two of the girls were returning from work, and the third from a place where she often went to swap cloth for goat’s milk. There was also the long list of seals—useless. In this country, they seemed to expedite murder cases the way they would the theft of a car radio in France.
And that was precisely what didn’t ring true.
Sharko looked at Nahed.
“Tell me, have you seen the name Mahmoud Abd el-Aal anywhere in these reports? Have you noticed any notes signed by him, other than these few pages?”
Nahed quickly glanced through the handwritten pages and shook her head.
“No. But don’t be too shocked by the flimsiness of these files. Here, they go for action over paperwork. Repression over reflection. Everything’s biased, tainted by corruption. You can’t imagine.”
Sharko took out the copy of the Interpol telegram.
“See here, Interpol received this telegram more than three months after the bodies were discovered. Only a persistent and committed cop would have sent it. A cop with integrity, values, who wanted to see this thing through to the end.”
Sharko picked up the pages and let them fall in front of him.
“And they want me to believe there’s no more than this? Just formalities? Not a single personal note? Not even a copy of the telegram? Where did the rest go? Inquiries at pharmacies or hospitals about the ketamine, for instance?”
Nahed contented herself with shrugging her shoulders. Her face was serious. Sharko shook his head, one hand on his brow.