“I wasn’t really a friend, not really,” Muna Lufti told Dean. “Kenan — he was kind of strange, you know?”
“Did you ever go to a mosque with him?”
The girl made a face, then glanced at Elsa Williams before turning back to Dean, as if she thought the black police detective was somehow on her side. “First of all, women and men are usually, you know, separate. Right? And second, it’s masjid. Mosque is a Western word. It comes from mosquito. It’s like, a slur.”
“Which masjid did he belong to?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did he become a Muslim?” Detective Williams asked.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. He wasn’t born one?”
“A white boy like that?” said Williams. “No way.”
The girl, a very light-skinned Arab-American, looked at the FBI agent as if she had used a four-letter word.
“How often did he go to class?” asked Dean.
“Couple of times. Kenan kind of blows in and out. You wouldn’t see him for weeks, then all of a sudden he’d be there. Like a ghost. He always aces tests. He’s like a genius nerd.”
“When did you last see him?” asked Dean.
Muna shrugged. “First or second week in September, around there. In class. We talked about my trip.”
“Where’d you go?” asked Dean.
“Mexico City. I’d been, like, planning it for years. Months. He was pretty interested — we probably talked about it for two or three hours. Longest I ever talked to him about anything.”
“Was he trying to hit on you?” asked Williams.
“Kenan? Are you kidding? Like, me and Kenan?”
“What interested him about Mexico City?” said Dean.
“I don’t know. How I got there. What the taxis are like, the airport, hotels, buses.”
“Not the mosques?” asked Williams.
The girl made a face and rolled her eyes. “It was just — it was stuff like how to get around, did I have to talk in Spanish, that kind of stuff.”
“Did you give Kenan any Mexican money?” Dean asked.
“Why would I do that?”
“Charlie, we need you to go to the airport,” said Marie Telach as Dean and Williams got into the detective’s car a short time later.
“Excuse me just a second,” Dean told Williams, taking out his cell phone. He pretended to punch the buttons, then held it up to his ear. “Hi, it’s Charlie. You have any news for me?”
“Muna gave us some good leads,” said Telach in his implant. “We’re pretty sure Kenan took a flight to Mexico City earlier today.”
“He had a Mexican coin in his room.”
“Oh? So he’d been there before?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in September.”
“Okay, we’re going to check into that. In the meantime, I have a Gulfstream that should land at the airport in about an hour. Can you get there?”
“Yeah.” He snapped the phone closed and found Williams staring at him.
“I have to go to the airport.” he told the detective.
“Why?”
“Catch a plane.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t think I can say.”
“No,” said Telach.
Williams shook her head. “Which agency are you working for again?”
“Marshals Service.”
“Right. And I’m the Queen of Sheba.”