Oh? Carella thought.
“...you are mistaken. Ali was a pious young man who lived with another man his own age, recently arrived from Saudi Arabia. In their native land, they were both students. Here, one drove a taxi and the other bags groceries in a supermarket. If you think Ali’s friend, in revenge for his murder, bombed that theater downtown...”
Oh? Carella thought again.
“...you are very sadly mistaken.”
“We’re not investigating that bombing,” Meyer said. “We’re investigating Ali’s murder. And the murder of two other Muslim cab drivers. If you can think of anyone who might possibly...”
“I know no Jews,” the imam said.
You know one now, Meyer thought.
“This friend he lived with,” Carella said. “What’s his name, and where can we find him?”
The music coming from behind the door to the third-floor apartment was very definitely rap. The singers were very definitely black, and the lyrics were in English. But the words weren’t telling young kids to do dope or knock women around or even up. As they listened at the wood, the lyrics the detectives heard spoke of intentions alone not being sufficient to bring reward...
When help is needed, prayer to Allah is the answer... Allah alone can assist in...
Meyer knocked on the door.
“Yes?” a voice yelled.
“Police,” Carella said.
The music continued to blare.
“Hello?” Carella said. “Mind if we ask you some questions?”
No answer.
“Hello?” he said again.
He looked at Meyer.
Meyer shrugged. Over the blare of the music, he yelled, “Hello in there!”
Still no answer.
“This is the police!” he yelled. “Would you mind coming to the door, please?”
The door opened a crack, held by a night chain.
They saw part of a narrow face. Part of a mustache. Part of a mouth. A single brown eye.
“Mr. Rajab?”
“Yes?”
Wariness in the voice and in the single eye they could see.
“Mind if we come in? Few questions we’d like to ask you.”
“What about?”
“You a friend of Ali Al-Barak?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know he was murdered last...?”
The door slammed shut.
They heard the sudden click of a bolt turning.
Carella backed off across the hall. His gun was already in his right hand, his knee coming up for a jackknife kick. The sole of his shoe collided with the door, just below the lock. The lock held.
“The yard!” he yelled, and Meyer flew off down the stairs.
Carella kicked at the lock again. This time, it sprang. He followed the splintered door into the room. The black rap group was still singing praise to Allah. The window across the room was open, a curtain fluttering in the mild evening breeze. He ran across the room, followed his gun hand out the window and onto a fire escape. He could hear footsteps clattering down the iron rungs to the second floor.
“Stop!” he yelled. “Police!”
Nobody stopped.
He came out onto the fire escape, took a quick look below, and started down.
From below, he heard Meyer racketing into the backyard. They had Rajab sandwiched.
“Hold it right there!” Meyer yelled.
Carella came down to the first-floor fire escape, out of breath, and handcuffed Rajab’s hands behind his back.
They listened in total amazement as Ishak Rajab told them all about how he had plotted instant revenge for the murder of his friend and roommate, Ali Al-Barak. They listened as he told them how he had constructed the suitcase bomb...
He called the Gucci dispatch case a suitcase.
...and then had carefully chosen a movie theater showing so-called art films because he knew Jews pretended to culture, and there would most likely be many Jews in the audience. Jews had to be taught that Arabs could not wantonly be killed without reprisal.
“Ali was killed by a Jew,” Rajab said. “And so it was fitting and just that Jews be killed in return.”
Meyer called the JTTF at Fed Square and told them they’d accidentally lucked into catching the guy who did their movie-theater bombing.
Ungrateful humps didn’t even say thanks.
It was almost ten o’clock when he and Carella left the squadroom for home. As they passed the swing room downstairs, they looked in through the open door to where a uniformed cop was half-dozing on one of the couches, watching television. One of cable’s most vociferous talking heads was demanding to know when a terrorist was not a terrorist.
“Here’s the story,” he said, and glared out of the screen. “A green-card Saudi-Arabian named Ishak Rajab was arrested and charged with the wanton slaying of sixteen movie patrons and the wounding of twelve others. Our own police and the Joint Terrorist Task Force are to be highly commended for their swift actions in this case. It is now to be hoped that a trial and conviction will be equally swift.
“However...
“Rajab’s attorneys are already indicating they’ll be entering a plea of insanity. Their reasoning seems to be that a man who deliberately leaves a bomb in a public place is not a terrorist — have you got that? Not a terrorist! Then what is he, huh, guys? Well, according to his attorneys, he was merely a man blinded by rage and seeking retaliation. The rationale for Rajab’s behavior would seem to be his close friendship with Ali Al-Barak, the third victim in the wave of taxi-driver slayings that have swept the city since last Friday: Rajab was Al-Barak’s roommate.
“Well, neither I nor any right-minded citizen would condone the senseless murder of Muslim cab drivers. That goes without saying. But to invoke a surely inappropriate Biblical — Biblical, mind you — ‘eye for an eye’ defense by labeling premeditated mass murder ‘insanity’ is in itself insanity. A terrorist is a terrorist, and this was an act of terrorism, pure and simple. Anything less than the death penalty would be gross injustice in the case of Ishak Rajab. That’s my opinion, now let’s hear yours. You can e-mail me at...”
The detectives walked out of the building and into the night.
In four hours, another Muslim cabbie would be killed.
The police knew at once that this wasn’t their man.
To begin with, none of the other victims had been robbed.
This one was.
All of the other victims had been shot only once, at the base of the skull.
This one was shot three times through the open driver-side window of his cab, two of the bullets entering his face at the left temple and just below the cheek, the third passing through his neck and lodging in the opposite door panel.
Shell casings were found on the street outside the cab, indicating that the murder weapon had been an automatic, and not the revolver that had been used in the previous three murders. Ballistics confirmed this. The bullets and casings were consistent with samples fired from a Colt .45 automatic.
Moreover, two witnesses had seen a man leaning into the cab window moments before they heard shots, and he was definitely not a tall white man dressed entirely in black.
There were only two similarities in all four murders. The drivers were all Muslims, and a blue star had been spray-painted onto each of their windshields.
But the Star of David had six points, and this new one had only five, and it was turned on end like the inverted pentagram used by devil-worshippers.
They hoped to hell yet another religion wasn’t intruding its beliefs into this case.
But they knew for sure this wasn’t their man.
This was a copycat.
So read the headline in the Metro Section of the city’s staid morning newspaper. The story under it was largely put together from details supplied in a Police Department press release. The flak that had gone out from the Public Relations Office on the previous three murders had significantly withheld any information about the killer himself or his MO. None of the reporters — print, radio, or television — had been informed that the killer had been dressed in black from head to toe, or that he’d fired just a single shot into his separate victims’ heads. They were hoping the killer himself — if ever they caught him — would reveal this information, thereby incriminating himself.