Quicksand Page 12

  But Nora’s Arabic had the effect of unleashing a dam in Hafsa al-Tanukhi’s mother, who had clearly been trying to figure out how she was going to communicate important information with her very official guests, all in English. She slid to the end of the couch nearest Nora’s chair, seized Nora’s hand, and began speaking in rapid, nearly hysterical Arabic. “Something’s happened to my daughter, I just know it! Never in all her life has she gone out and not returned. How can she not call me when I am sick with worry!? I have asked everyone she knows, and no one has heard from her. Please, please help me find her! Please assure me she’s alright!” As she spoke, tears streamed down her pale cheeks.

  Nora grasped her hand and spoke softly. “We will do everything we can, Mrs. Faraj. But what we can do depends on you. Try to calm down a little and help us sort out some things that will clarify everything, God willing.”

  She glanced over at John, then, who was patiently waiting for the drama to die down. Nora chose her words carefully. “First, I need to see a picture of Hafsa without her hijab, so I have a better idea of what she looks like.”

  Mr. al-Tanukhi tensed. “There’s nowhere she would go without her hijab,” he said. “You don’t need that.”

  “If, God forbid, Hafsa is hurt, she won’t be in a hospital wearing a headscarf. Please, Mr. al-Tanukhi.”

  But Sanaa Faraj had already bustled out of the room. We heard her opening and shutting drawers in an adjacent room, and she returned with a snapshot. The picture was of a high school–aged girl with a wide smile and a tumble of curly black hair. The corpse on B-level had no eyes, and Nora found her gaze lingering on a pair of dancing, cocoa-colored eyes. She looked at the photo perhaps too long, then seemed to awaken, knowing that if she showed it to John at this point, Mr. al-Tanukhi would balk.

  “May I keep this?” Nora asked.

  Mrs. Faraj hesitated, then nodded.

  Nora said, “This picture is of a teenager. Your report to the police stated that Hafsa was twenty-two. Don’t you have a more recent picture?”

  Mrs.. Faraj shook her head, retaking her seat on the couch. “She has worn hijab since she was fourteen. She no longer has her picture taken without it.” The mother was silent a moment, then new tears began sliding down her cheeks. “She is such a good girl…”

  Nora shifted in her seat, going over her options. She had a thought, and she patted Sanaa Faraj gently on the knee. “Do you have any mint tea? It would calm everyone down, don’t you think?” It was an appalling breach of etiquette, asking for the tea instead of waiting to be asked again, but Nora took a chance. She wanted to get the woman alone and let John get Mr. al-Tanukhi’s story.

  Mrs. Faraj was slowly nodding and swiping at her wet cheeks with the edge of her scarf. “Of course, where are my manners?” she said slowly, starting to rise.

  “Let me help you,” Nora said.

  “No, dear, don’t trouble yourself,” the woman answered, squeezing Nora’s hand.

  “I insist,” Nora said, and they walked together toward the kitchen. “We’re going to make some tea,” she said to John as they passed. She ignored Omar al-Tanukhi’s suspicious look.

  She heard him ask, “Is she Egyptian? She speak with Egyptian accent.” John, who knew perfectly well, said, “I’m not sure…”

  Sanaa Faraj was filling a stainless steel kettle with tap water. If she had questions about Nora’s origins, they were obscured by her worry for her daughter. “I just can’t imagine where she would be. We sent her brother out looking all last night and the night before, and he did not find her anywhere…”

  Nora sat at the small, round kitchen table. “How old is Hafsa’s brother?”

  “Twenty, may God protect him,” she replied, pulling glass teacups out of a neatly arranged cupboard. She set them before Nora. “He’s going to be an engineer, in sha Allah.” God willing.

  “Where did you send him to look, Mrs. Faraj?”

  Mrs. Faraj sighed, thinking. “The mosque where we pray the Friday prayer. The homes of her friends. And the mosque where she volunteers sometimes.”

  Nora didn’t want to scare her off by writing anything official-looking on a notepad, so she took very specific mental notes, a trick she’d learned in training; she imagined what these things would look like written down on a notepad, whether she wrote in cursive or block letters, and what words she would have underlined. She even picked blue ink.

  “Can you tell me a little about her friends, and share with me some of their names so I can visit with them?” She asked this as she held out her hand for the canister of tea bags, smiling at her hostess who reluctantly gave them to her as she considered her request.

  “I suppose…” Sanaa looked worried, and Nora sensed she didn’t want to scare Hafsa’s friends by having a police officer, even a female one, show up at their houses.

  “When we’ve finished our tea,” Nora said, trying to put her at ease.

  Sanaa nodded. “Of course.”

  Nora placed a bag in each waiting glass mug, as she asked, “Where was she volunteering?”

  Mrs. Faraj made a tsk-tsk sound with her tongue. “At a mosque all the way across town. In the black section.”

  “And what does she do there?”

  Sanaa shrugged as she placed a few mint leaves in each glass. “Whatever she can. She went because she wants to teach immigrant women to read and write English. She has a friend there, they are close, so she is often there, but it takes up far too much of her time, if you ask me.”

  “What kind of immigrants is she teaching??” Nora pressed.

  Mrs. Faraj shrugged again. “Africans, I think. There are a few Arab women there, although how they can stand to live in that part of town, I don’t know.” She caught herself then, as though just remembering the very black man in the other room. “I don’t mean…”

  Nora kept her features still, trying to encourage Hafsa’s mother to talk. The woman looked slightly flustered. “It’s just, you know … all the crime…”

  Nora tried a different tack. “Can you show me Hafsa’s room, Mrs. Faraj?”

  She had been about to pour the boiling water. “Her room? Why do you need that?”

  “Any clues I can get about Hafsa’s habits and personality can help me figure out where she is now.”

  Mrs. Faraj glanced at the kitchen wall, as though her gaze could reach through into the other room where her husband sat. She poured the water over the tea bags, then slowly nodded. “Of course. While the tea steeps.”

  Nora followed her down a short, dim hallway to a small, colorful room. Hafsa al-Tanukhi had stenciled flowers on the white walls of her room. A twin bed was pushed against one wall; the bedspread was a kaleidoscope of color, and it was decorated with bright throw pillows. A desk sat next to the bed, with a notebook and a few ballpoint pens in a mug bearing the familiar T for Temple University.

  “Does Hafsa attend Temple University?” she asked, reminding herself urgently to keep to the present tense.

  Mrs. Faraj shook her head. “No, no. Her brother.”

  “Where does Hafsa go? Or has she already graduated from somewhere?” asked Nora.

  The mother frowned slightly, then said softly, “We only had enough money to send one of the children.”

  Nora processed this. “So Hafsa has not attended college at all?”

  “No, not yet,” repeated Mrs. Faraj. She could not seem to meet Nora’s eyes as she said, “Her brother’s prospects were brighter, so it seemed right to let him go first, even though he is the younger. When there is more money in the future, when God makes it easier, perhaps Hafsa—”

  It was at this moment that Mr. al-Tanukhi appeared at the door, with John on his heels. “What you doing?” he demanded in English, his face pinched and flushed.

  Nora frowned. “You called in a missing persons report—how are we supposed to help you without gathering information—”

  But he began shouting at her in Arabic. “Yes, the information I give you—me! Not informatio
n you steal from behind my back! I knew this was some kind of investigation. FBI comes here, instead of police, what, you think we’re stupid? This is just some trick to get the Muslims—well I won’t have it! You get out of my house. I know my rights, you need a warrant to go snooping through my house. I asked you to find my daughter, not go snooping through my house. Get out, get out of here!”

  Wansbrough looked furious; he could figure out the content of that diatribe without understanding a word. “Nora, that’s our cue.”

  She looked at Mrs. Faraj, who had begun crying again. “I can’t help you if I can’t learn more about Hafsa.” She pressed several business cards into the hand of Sanaa Faraj, then brushed by Mr. al-Tanukhi and followed John to the door.

  The shoe issue made for an exit with little flourish. John jammed his feet into his shoes, leaving them untied, and stomped toward the car, all to Omar al-Tanukhi’s invectives.

  * * *

  Traffic was even more intense on the way back to Center City. Sade filled the silence and Nora was grateful for the music to calm her furiously thumping pulse. She glanced over at John, then out the window, before finally saying, “That went well.” When John responded only with silence, she continued, “Seriously, we do not get to rough people up enough in this line of work. I hated that guy.”

  “Man, so did I,” he admitted. John was silent for a moment, and then looked over at her. “Do you think it’s the right family?”

  “It would be very hard for the hair in this snapshot to be anyone else’s.” She pulled it from her blazer pocket and handed it to John.

  He glanced between the photo and the road for some time before saying, “And do you think al-Tanukhi had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance?”

  Nora hesitated. “Maybe.”

  “Honor killing?”

  She hated that term. “What does that even mean?” she demanded.

  “Hey, easy,” said John, holding up a hand. “It isn’t just Arab cultures who engage in that kind of thing, I’m not implying anything. Objectively, what do you see? Does that guy look like the kind of guy who would kill his daughter if she was sleeping around? To save face in front of his community?”

  Nora inhaled deeply, considering. The father had anger issues. Nora found herself nodding slowly. “It’s not impossible. There was just so much wrong with the story I got.” Nora related to him all that Sanaa al-Faraj had told her, down to the scene in Hafsa’s room in which her mother had explained how Hafsa had been denied her university education.

  “Dust?”

  Nora smiled. “It looks like Sanaa has nothing better to do on the planet than to clean that house. Like, rabidly.”

  “So you think Hafsa might have been using the teaching as a cover to be meeting someone? Dad got wind of it?”

  “Maybe. Her mom said she had a close friend, and she spent too much time over there.”

  “It is, after all, the bad part of town,” John said.

  Nora felt a twinge of remorse for having related that part to him.

  “Are you gonna ask me what I got outta the dad?”

  Nora snapped out of it. “What did you get out of the dad, Special Agent Wansbrough?”

  He arranged his thoughts. “They came as refugees during the first war with Kuwait. He works as a school maintenance man, a job someone thought he was qualified for because he’d studied engineering in Iraq. His English was never good enough to work in his own field. He’s a little bitter because he could never get anything better. Apparently he’s seen stuff, though, which is why he insisted on sending his kids to Islamic school.”

  “Seen stuff?”

  “High school kids fucking in the bathroom. Drugs. Alcohol. Bullying.”

  “Oh, you mean he works at my old high school?”

  “No, mine, apparently.” The two exchanged wry glances. “Actually it’s up here in Northeast, Goodman High.”

  “So what did he say about Hafsa?”

  “That she’s a good girl who wears the hijab. He said that at least twice. That she does what she’s told. Her one flaw is that she is not yet married, but he has been working on it.”

  “I’m sure he has,” Nora said. “He had a potential suitor? Did you get a name?”

  “No, that was about when he realized that the tea was a long time coming, and he went looking for you and the mama. And then you insulted him by intruding where he didn’t want you. So I’m thinkin’ we won’t be getting much more info out of the al-Tanukhi family until we get Schacht to get us a warrant and a summons.”

  “Yeah, I wanna talk to her brother really bad. See what’s up there.”

  “Well, phone it in, then.” He glanced at her, smiling. “What’s that thing your dad always says? ‘Yellow’? Doesn’t it mean, ‘get a move on’?”

  Nora laughed. “Yalla,” she corrected as she pulled out her phone, and was about to tap Special Agent-in-Charge Schacht, when it rang.

  It was her father.

  Her brow furrowed as she recalled their altercation of the night before. She dismissed the call and went ahead and called Schacht. As succinctly as she could, she gave him the details of their conversation with Mr. al-Tanukhi. Schacht said he’d work on a warrant to search the home as well as summonses for the father, mother, and brother.

  She was preparing to hang up when Schacht stopped her. “Nora. Put me on speaker. The latest is that Dewayne Fulton’s claiming that he and Kylie Baker had consensual sex. He dropped her off after that near her home. What happened after that, he says, had nothing to do with him.”

  “That’s crazy!” she found herself shouting. “She was just a little girl!”

  “Well,” Schacht said slowly, choosing his words carefully. “This version of the story has Kylie lashing out against her brother and trying to put herself in Dewayne’s path every chance she could. He finally gave in and had sex with her—on more than one occasion, he says.”

  “At the very least that’s statutory sexual assault—”

  “Which means a fine and less than ten years.”

  “Oh my God.” Nora felt sick.

  “Just thought you should know. The AUSA is very pissed off at all of us right now.”

  “Okay. Should we go back to Mrs. Baker’s?”

  “Yes. Burton and Calder have spent the day looking for the murder weapon again and working their contacts. You need to see if you can find any truth to this version of the story. And if the mother doesn’t say much, see if you can track down some of Kylie’s friends.”

  After they hung up, Nora looked at John.

  “What do you think of all this?”

  He shook his head. “We have to admit the possibility. But it would mean we have a lot more work to do.”

  “Who else would have motive to kill a fourteen-year-old girl?”

  John answered her with silence. He guided the car onto the 676 to head once more toward West Philadelphia.

  Nora’s stomach felt tight. “Mrs. Baker’s gonna slap us for hitting her with a story like that.”

  “It’s not our story, it’s Dewayne’s.”

  “She’s not gonna like it.” Nora stared out the window. “I’m gonna need some tea on the way. And to think, I was this close. The mint leaves were really fresh.”

  “All I can offer you is the Starbucks at Thirty-fourth and Walnut.”

  “Reeks of coffee in there,” Nora complained. “You come out and it’s, like, all in your clothes…”

  Wansbrough shrugged. “Life is hard, what can I tell you?”

  She looked over at him. “John, if this case isn’t open and shut, then maybe the killing that started all this isn’t either?”

  “It was a drive-by in broad daylight. Kevin Baker’s car. Open and shut, Nora.”

  She nodded. “Open and shut.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Baker was not happy to see them.

  “Did they find Kevin?” she asked, as she pulled open the door.

  The agents shook their heads. “I’m a
fraid there’s a new wrinkle in our investigation,” John said.

  Mrs. Baker invited them in, silencing a late-morning talk show with the remote in her apron pocket. “What?”

  John didn’t try to sugarcoat things. “The DNA tests came back, and they match with the samples provided by Dewayne Fulton. The problem is, Dewayne is going to claim in court that he had a consensual sexual relationship with Kylie.”

  Mrs. Baker sagged in her chair. “My God. That monster.”

  Both agents were silent, neither wanting to press on. Finally John began, “Mrs. Baker, if we could interview just a few of Kylie’s friends…”

  But she was shaking her head, giving herself over to a fit of coughing, then said, “What kind of monster would say such a thing? How could he defile my baby girl’s memory that way, suggestin’ she went to him.…”

  Nora looked at the floor. “Did Kylie have a boyfriend?” she asked softly.

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Baker sputtered. “It was strictly forbidden for Kylie to date, she’s just a baby herself. She has a strict curfew of sunset, and she’s asleep by nine every night. Every night without exception.” Mrs. Baker was shaking with anger, and didn’t seem to realize that her speech had shifted into the present tense.

  John Wansbrough waited for Mrs. Baker to stop talking, then he said, “Could we take a look at her room?”

  Mrs. Baker stared at them in disdain. “Top of the stairs,” she muttered, waving them off. “I can’t do stairs anymore. Just, just go on…”

  The agents walked in silence up the stairs. They could hear Mrs. Baker talking under her breath and stifling a few coughs as they ascended. And then they heard the television spring back to life, and the living room filled with the sound of a couple in the midst of a talk-show paternity dispute.

  Kylie’s room was adorned with several posters—mostly rappers, and one country scene with a jet-black stallion grazing in a sun-dappled meadow. She and John exchanged glances, then Nora pulled plastic gloves from her backpack and handed a pair to John. “All this feels backward to me. We should have started here a long time ago.”

  John nodded. He crossed to the window and carefully raised it, then looked out. The window opened onto the roof of the back porch. He climbed out and walked to the edge, then looked down. Slowly, he ducked back in.