Prayers for the assassin

CHAPTER 18

Rakkim sensed something wrong as soon as he pulled up to the security gate at Marian’s hillside community and saw the guard shack empty. He waited in his car, engine idling as he looked around. He hadn’t called Marian before driving over, certain that Redbeard already had her phone bugged. No reason to let him think that Marian was more than a colleague of Sarah’s, a good Muslim intellectual she shared only tea with. A follow-up call from Rakkim would tell Redbeard that she merited closer scrutiny. Better to show up unannounced. Marian had told him he could come by anytime.

He wasn’t sure how China and the Three Gorges Dam figured into Sarah’s research, but Sarah had been looking for something in Warriq’s journals. Besides, he wanted to talk more with Marian, she might have remembered something. Something that Sarah said. Something she didn’t say. First contact was always awkward. Trust took time. Distrust was immediate. For an instant at the War Museum this morning he had actually considered telling Redbeard about the journals. The impulse had passed. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, watched another car drive into the resident’s lane and flash an entry code. The gate flew up, then back down as the car zipped past.

Rakkim backed up and parked in the visitors’ lot, then slipped into the guard shack and buzzed Marian’s house. No answer. Marian and her staff might have gone into the city, or shopping, or left for afternoon prayers at the mosque, but he took off toward her house, walking at first, then faster, until he was running flat out up the steep, winding streets.

He was out of breath when he got to Marian’s front door, chest aching. He rang the bell, then beat on the door before anyone inside would have had a chance to answer it. The door was locked. A good lock too, and he didn’t have any tools. He trotted around to the back, peeked through the windows but couldn’t see inside. The back door was ajar, an invitation. The knife was in his hand.

He slowly opened the door, moved inside on the balls of his feet, taking a few steps, listening, then taking a few steps more. A fly hovered around his ear. He swatted it away, but it returned, a sluggish, fat green fly humming an ugly tune as Rakkim silently worked his way across the kitchen. No sound other than the ticking of the antique grandfather clock in the foyer. And the buzzing of the flies.

Rakkim put the knife away. Even before he caught the smell, he knew that whoever had been here had left hours ago. He took a deep breath, walked out of the hallway and into the living room. A few moments later he was back in the kitchen, hands on his knees and grateful that he hadn’t had breakfast. He had seen men blown apart by land mines and bullets, guts and glory flung to the winds, some dying with a surprised how-the-fuck-did-that-happen expression, some dying quietly, dead before they were even aware of it. He had seen all that and more, but one glance into the living room and he could barely contain his anger and revulsion. The other dead had been outside of him somehow, killed in action, part of some greater process that anesthetized guilt and left Rakkim a bystander, albeit not an innocent one. This was different. The living room was an atrocity exhibition arranged for his private benefit. He washed his face in the kitchen sink, but the cold water did nothing to numb his rage. Then he walked back into the living room. He didn’t bother holding his breath. It wasn’t the smell that tore at him.

The flies stirred at his entrance, rising up in a buzzing, dark cloud, then settled back down on the heads of the bodyguard and his wife. Terry and his wife sat beside each other on the purple, floral-print sofa as though sitting for a formal wedding portrait. Terry cradled his wife’s severed head in his lap. She did the same for his head. Their hair was matted with blood, their eyes staring straight ahead. Blackened blood crusted their gray clothes like a rusty carapace. Flies moved across the soaked sofa, the carpet shimmering with their metallic green brightness. Green, the color of Islam, green the color of the Prophet’s banner, green the color of the robe of Ali, the fourth caliph. Rakkim remembered his lessons well. The flies squirmed, green the color of obscenity.

Rakkim moved closer, wanting to see, needing to see, not to turn away. This tableau was a challenge someone had laid down, a moral and visual dislocation. Closer now. Marian’s bodyguard was a seasoned warrior, but someone had killed him easily, killed him and his wife while they sat there waiting to die, then left them with their heads exchanged as a greeting specifically meant for Rakkim. On the wall behind them, scrawled in blood, was written, R U Having Fun Yet? The same slogan Mardi had in neon on the wall of the Blue Moon. In spite of his efforts to hide his tracks, Rakkim must have led the killer here…and the killer had left a calling card that could not be ignored.

Rakkim wasn’t sure how he knew that it had been a lone individual who had done this…perhaps it was the singularity of the aesthetic. The killing had a grotesque artistry; the mocking phrase from the club, the switching of heads, all spoke to a unique point of view. A joker who didn’t want or need assistance.

He waved away the flies, bent down, and looked into the bodyguard’s dead eyes. It had been a long time since Rakkim had prayed, but he said a prayer now. A prayer that Terry forgive him for bringing death to the house, and a prayer that Terry be welcomed into Paradise, that he spend eternity in the company of the faithful. Those who have fear of God will have gardens wherein streams flow and wherein they will live forever with their purified spouses and with the consent of God. Then he closed Terry’s eyes and did the same for his wife. Rakkim didn’t even know her name.

Marian wasn’t in the living room, but Rakkim just had to follow the bloody footprints. It was like the diagrams of dance steps he had seen in old books, fox-trot and waltz and tango and rumba, party dances for good times that weren’t coming back. He followed the footsteps up the stairs, the blackened imprints getting fainter with every step. There were no clouds of flies in this part of the house, no flies at all. He found Marian in the master bedroom, found her submerged in the soaking tub, her hands and feet bound with electrical wire, her black hair drifting like seaweed. She was nude. Of course.

Marian’s chador was thrown into a corner of the bathroom, slashed apart, but there were no wounds on her body. Another indication of the killer’s skill with a blade. Rakkim sat on the edge of the tub, looking down at her. The tub was filled almost to the top, and water had sloshed across the floor from her struggles. Her face was underwater, turned shyly to one side, away from Rakkim. Her breasts and pubic bone broke the surface, an archipelago of sad flesh.

He stared at her profile, saw the bruises on her neck from when she had been clasped and held under, two small bruises on either side of her windpipe…he had a delicate touch, this killer, using just enough force to hold her down, not to strangle her. Marian had not been carved up like Terry and his wife, not posed in some horror show diorama, but her death had been even more cruel. Marian, who had loved only one man in her life, who had allowed only one man to see her nakedness, had been drowned slowly, thrashing and screaming and coughing up water, fully aware that she was to be left exposed for all the world to see. No wonder she had fought so hard, even tied hand and foot.

Rakkim should have told her the truth on the balcony. She had asked him if he believed that there was one love for each of us, one love and one love only, and he had told her he didn’t know. She had known he was lying, but he had stayed with the lie. Maybe the lie wasn’t meant for her, but meant to convince himself. He hadn’t fooled either of them.

He was going to have to contact Colarusso. This area of Seattle was out of the detective’s jurisdiction, but Redbeard could take care of that with a call to the police chief. Redbeard would have plenty of questions, but that was the price of getting him to make the call. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be long before the neighbors started wondering what had happened to the guard at the front gate, or the next security shift came to work, and then the local cops would be brought in to comb the area. Better to send in Colarusso; he would listen to Rakkim and would do what he was asked. A true investigation was out of the question. The forensic techs would tell him the approximate size and weight of the killer based on the bloody footsteps, and there might even be fingerprints and skin samples from under Marian’s fingernails, all sorts of DNA possibilities, but it didn’t matter. The man who had done this was outside the jurisdiction of the police. He was beyond the law. That’s where Rakkim would find him. That’s where Rakkim lived too.

Colarusso would have questions, of course, but he would accept the answers Rakkim gave him. The detective might even be able to help. First though, Rakkim had something more important to do. He walked out of the bathroom and over to the closet. He was going to find Marian a clean chador. He was going to lift her out of the tub, carry her over to her bed, and get her dressed. Then he would pray for her too.