Finding Nouf (3 page)

"I think it's her." He coughed as the smell rose up and engulfed him. Poor girl. Her face was half charred from the sun, and the other half was a ghastly gray. She must have been lying on her side for days; the burns were extreme. The gray side, however, was spattered with mud. "Thank you," he said, stepping back.

Miss Hijazi inspected Nouf's head. Nayir noticed something sticky in her hair just above the left ear. He turned to Maamoon and asked, "Is that blood?"

Maamoon simply shrugged while Miss Hijazi continued inspecting the wound. "Yes," she answered finally. "There's bruising. It looks like someone hit her pretty hard. And there's something else..." With tweezers, she plucked a tiny sliver from the wound and held it up. "Looks like a wood chip."

Nayir felt a strange agitation. He kept his eyes on the examiner. "Was that wound the cause of death?"

"No," Maamoon said. "She drowned."

A silence ensued, but Maamoon, his eyes flashing with professional delight, pointed to an x-ray on the wall that showed Nouf's chest. Nayir studied the x-ray, not sure what to make of it. "She drowned?"

"That's what I said. A classic case. Foam in the mouth. Her lungs and stomach were filled with water."

The simplicity of "drowning" cracked open a complexity of prospects. At least, when a woman drowns in the largest sand desert in the world, there ought to be an equally remarkable explanation. "If she drowned," Nayir said, "then how do you explain the wound on her head?"

The examiner bristled. "She must have bumped it."

"While she was drowning?"

"Yes,
while she was drowning.
"

During this exchange Miss Hijazi continued to probe Nouf's scalp. Nayir noticed that her hands were unsteady. He dared a look at her eyes and saw a frown. "If this wound is from the drowning," she said finally, "then there must be other wounds like it on her body."

Nayir marveled at her audacity and wondered how the examiner could put up with it. He glanced at her nametag again, noticing this time that she was a lab technician, not a medical examiner. What exactly was the difference?

"It rained a week ago, did it not?" Maamoon asked.

"Almost two weeks ago," Nayir answered. "The day she disappeared there was rain. How long has she been dead?"

"It's difficult to say."

Nayir could feel the woman's gaze on his face, but he kept his attention on Maamoon. "Is it possible to say whether the bump on her head occurred when she was still alive?"

"Yes," the woman said.

Nayir waited for an elaboration, but she didn't provide one. A silence ensued, and Miss Hijazi gently moved the sheet from Nouf's arms. When she turned her attention to a series of bruises on Nouf's wrists and hands, Nayir allowed himself to watch. She swabbed one of the lesions. "Looks like sand," she said. "There's something beneath her fingernails too. These look like defensive wounds."

"No, no, no," Maamoon clucked, pushing her aside and pointing to one of Nouf's wrists. "Those marks are from a camel's reins. Don't you see the pattern?"

Nayir studied the wounds more closely. They weren't uniform, and Nouf had scratches on her fingertips as well. "They look like defensive wounds to me."

Maamoon grew stern. "I said they're from leather straps."

Miss Hijazi placed a swab in a glass tube and set it gently on the counter. Turning back to the body, she paused for a moment and then gingerly lifted the edge of the gray sheet that covered Nouf's legs. She held it in the air and studied the body for a long time. Nayir watched her eyes move over it, as carefully and sensitively as her hands, and it surprised him to see that she was touched by this death. There was a sadness in her eyes that spoke of personal loss, and he wondered if she had known the family and if she was the one who had informed them.

Finally she laid down the sheet. When she spoke, her voice was questioning, reluctant, a sharp contrast to her words. "I see no evidence that she touched a camel. No hairs on the body, no abrasions on her thighs." Maamoon tried to interrupt her, but she continued. "I don't have much experience estimating time of death, but I'd guess she's been dead at least a week."

"Of course!" Maamoon snapped. "Considering how often it rains in the desert, I'd say she died when it rained. Here's what happened. The wadis filled up, she was crossing the desert through one of those wadis, and
shack!
it started to rain. She tried to swim, but a flash flood carried her away. She banged her head; she hurt her wrists.
Yanni,
she drowned."

Nayir studied the examiner. "But she had a camel."

"So what?" he cried. "Camels can't swim!"

Which was completely untrue. Gorillas were the only animals incapable of swimming. Camels, despite infrequent contact with water, happened to excel at the sport. Nayir had seen it himself at the Dromedary Rehabilitation Center in Dubai, where the therapists encouraged their patients into pools to heal broken bones and soothe arthritic joints. Once in the water, the camels frolicked like children and even grew angry when the sessions ended.
Why,
they seemed to ask,
did Allah craft our bodies to live out of water?

"Camels swim," he said. "And the camel would have saved her life." Nayir fumbled in his pocket for another miswak and stuffed it into his mouth, grateful for the spicy taste, which took away some of the odor of death. He chewed for a while and circled the table. Nouf's right hand stuck out from under the sheet. The wrist was splattered with brownish mud. It seemed to have been baked into her skin by the heat. "What is this?" he asked.

"It looks like mud," Miss Hijazi said. She scraped samples of the skin into a jar.

Maamoon snatched the jar. "She
drowned,
my friends. Mr. Sharqi, are you convinced that it's her?"

Nayir stopped chewing. "Yes, it's her. But that's strange about the camel."

Maamoon shrugged. "Maybe they got separated, say, before she entered the wadi?"

"No one loses a camel in the desert. That's suicide."

"I did not suggest suicide!" the old man yelped.

"Neither did I," Nayir said.

The examiner narrowed his eyes. "Don't even say it. It's ridiculous! You think she was murdered?" Nayir raised his eyebrows.

"How? I mean ...
how?
" Maamoon choked on his spit and coughed. "Someone would have to wait for the particular condition of this woman being in a wadi, alone, in the middle of the desert, without any camel, and it would have to rain and there would also have to be a flash flood at the very same time. And then this killer, who is by Allah a very patient man, would have to find a way to drown her in the flood without actually drowning himself. Who would do that? Why not just stab her and be done with it?"

No one replied. Nayir stole a glance at Miss Hijazi's eyes and
found them inscrutable. The examiner was right—murder by drowning seemed far-fetched. Had Nouf found a water source and died in her desperation to take a drink? Perhaps she'd entered a flooded wadi. The rain had been strong, and he remembered being grateful for it, thinking it might just give her a chance to survive.

"Is there anything else?" the old man snapped, glaring at Nayir.

"I just wondered if everything else was okay," he said. "With the body, I mean ... was she
okay?
"

Maamoon grimaced. Nayir realized that the examiner felt deeply pressured by his question. It gave him an odd feeling of power, even if it was only the result of the authority conferred upon him by the family.

"I know what you're asking," the examiner said, "and we haven't gotten that far. Although she is not actually a medical examiner, Miss Hijazi"—he said the name pejoratively—"is here to do an ultrasound." Abruptly he whipped back the sheet to reveal Nouf's whole body. Nayir blanched and lowered his eyes, but it didn't prevent him from catching sight of everything—the hips, the legs, the pubis. Searching desperately for somewhere to rest his gaze, he caught sight of a tube of jelly, a syringe, and a metal instrument that looked dangerously like a phallus.

"Thank you," he said abruptly. "I think I'll wait outside." As he turned to the door, he stopped. The room was spinning. He sucked in a chestful of air and bent over, hands gripping his knees, forehead pounding. His heart felt like a stone in a can. He imagined that single chasm between the girl's legs, but that moment bled strangely into the next, in which he found himself lying on the floor, head thumping.

"Mr. Sharqi!" Maamoon was kneeling beside him, holding a bottle of camphor to his nose. "Mr. Sharqi, Allah protect you, you're an honest man."

"Water," Nayir croaked.

"I'll get you some!" Shaking his head, Maamoon stood up and left the room.

Nayir struggled to his feet, pausing as he stood to make sure he wouldn't faint again.

Miss Hijazi seemed upset. "I'm sorry, Mr. Sharqi."

He was too embarrassed to reply, but at least she had the decency to go about her business. She took a fingerprint kit from the cabinet, and pulling a chair up to the table, she sat down and began taking Nouf's prints.

A long silence went by and he looked down at Nouf, or what used to be Nouf. The body was now safely beneath the sheet, but he still felt nauseous and had to look away.

"Why do you need to do an ultrasound?" he asked, keeping his eyes away from Miss Hijazi's face.

"Maybe you'd better sit down," she suggested.

He was too startled by her forwardness to reply.

"You're here to pick up the body," she said, "so pick up the body and forget about the rest. The case is closed—they've decided it was an accidental death. As Maamoon said, I am not really an examiner. The real examiner is on maternity leave. I'm here only because they couldn't find a replacement and they need a woman to supervise the job. But because this is an important case, they brought Maamoon in from Riyadh, and he decided the death was caused by drowning. So drowning it is. No need to ask questions. It's done."

The sarcasm in her voice surprised him. "You think it is a cover-up?" he asked. She shrugged.

If it was true, then the family would have to be behind it. They were the only people powerful enough. He could think of a few reasons the Shrawis would want to hide the truth, but the biggest reason of all was right in front of him.

He hesitated before asking. "She wasn't a virgin?"

Miss Hijazi finished the fingerprints and packed up the kit. She stood and returned the kit to the wall. Nayir waited, hoping she would give him something, but when she turned back in his direction, he quickly looked away. He wished he could persuade her to trust him, but she was right not to. He was a stranger, and a man. Grudgingly, he acknowledged the decency of her silence, rebellious though it seemed.

He looked at his watch. It was three-fifteen. Nouf had to be in the ground by sunset. He had less than an hour to get the body to the Shrawi estate; the family would need another hour to prepare it for burial.

Maamoon came bustling in with a glass of water. It tasted like
soap, but Nayir didn't complain. The old man clapped him on the back and gave a sympathetic frown. "It's not that bad when they're alive, you know—don't let it spoil you."

The best of women,
the Prophet said,
is the one who is pleasing to look at, who carries out your instructions when you ask her.
The phrase ran through his mind as he pulled his Jeep from the cargo bay at the back of the building and took a left into traffic. Although the Prophet was right, it seemed there was also a way of being righteous without being obedient. Miss Hijazi's silence at the end of the visit weighed on him.

He thought back on her earlier behavior, which he still considered brazen, although he wondered if that too was conducted in the spirit of protecting Nouf. Miss Hijazi had argued with Maamoon about how Nouf had died, about her camel, about the cause of the wound on her head. Nayir couldn't be sure whether her boldness was in Nouf's best interests or whether it was carried out because of professional egotism or because that's simply the sort of person she was. His instincts told him that the former was the case, and that she was guarding secrets for Nouf's sake.

Anyway, she was right about one thing. Defensive wounds, head trauma, drowning, no camel—it sounded strange. The camel part was especially troubling, because if he knew anything, he knew that no one lost a camel in the desert.

D
RIVING SOUTH
along the beachfront road, Nayir watched the city's skyscrapers and jumbled urban scabbing give way to a lazy desert sprawl. To the left, tiny cottages dotted fields that lay barren in the afternoon sun, and to the right, the sea fluttered like a blue satin scarf. Keeping his eyes on the landscape, he was hoping to forget that Nouf's body was in the back. But he couldn't ignore it. He drove slowly, took turns carefully, and obeyed every traffic light despite an absence of traffic, for though it might not be possible to upset the dead, it would certainly be horrible to upset the living by injuring or mauling a beloved daughter's corpse.

He left the freeway and turned onto an access road that followed the shoreline south. Here a magnificent mosque stood alone by the beach, its dome pure white, its minaret slim. The road turned into a private drive marked by a wooden no trespassing sign, and he drove until he reached the tower gates, two white concrete sentinels with an iron fence between them. An ancient, broken video camera hung askew from one of the gates.

Nayir took a few deep breaths and tried to focus. A two-kilometer bridge stretched out before him. It was narrow—barely wide enough for a pickup truck—and from the shoreline it appeared to be made of rubber. Maybe it was only the heat, but the macadam rippled like a roller coaster. The chainlink railing gave him no comfort—in some places it had been ripped apart, exactly as if a car had blown through it. This was the only motor access to the estate. Over the years he'd crossed this bridge a hundred times, but it still made him uneasy.

He drove forward slowly, eyes fixed on the road, taking one breath after another until he picked up a rhythm. He tried to suppress his usual image—blowing a tire, crashing through the fence, dropping into the murky sea—and soon the Shrawis' island grew larger. Glancing up, he could see the soft contours of the whitewashed palace set among the jagged rocks.