“Come on, Denzel,” Zehra urged him. “We’ve got a meeting with Harmon in ten minutes.”
“I’m all over it, Z.”
When they got outside her office, they crumpled under the heat and humidity. An FBI agent assigned to Zehra followed a few steps behind.
“Something wrong with this weather,” BJ said. “Storm must be coming. You can always tell by the smell in the air.”
They crossed the street and rode the elevator in the Government Center up to Harmon’s office. BJ didn’t say a word. Zehra asked him, “What’s wrong? Out late last night?”
He shook his head.
Her thoughts returned to Michael, to the feel of his smooth skin and the smell of his cologne. What was he doing now? She longed to be with him again, because with him her loneliness lifted for a while.
They met Steve Harmon in his office. “Hey, Zehra, sorry to hear about you. How are you holding up?” Harmon said.
Zehra shrugged her shoulders. “Hanging in there.”
“Any last-minute things we should talk about? Judge Goldberg’s anxious to get this baby moving on Monday.”
“There is something. We watched the video yesterday and noticed the gloves the killer wore. Do you know anything about them?”
“Gloves? That’s right, it looked like the killer had something on his hands. ’Course, the quality of the film is so poor, it’s hard to tell for sure.”
“Did the police find them at the crime scene? Are you holding out on us?”
Harmon’s eyes opened wide. “Don’t ever accuse me of anything unethical. You’ve got all the evidence I have.”
“Then where did the gloves go?”
“El-Amin kept them after he slashed the kid?”
“But the killer dropped the mask at the crime scene, so why not the gloves, too?”
“Don’t know. And, frankly, I’m not too concerned about that. I want a conviction.”
Zehra said, “You’ve got to admit, this is the weirdest murder case ever—the type of mask worn, gloves, glasses. It’s more than a disguise.” She waited for a response. When Harmon didn’t say anything, Zehra asked, “Can we see the evidence in the property room?”
“I’ve already called ahead for you. Sergeant Miller’s waiting for you.”
In a few minutes, Zehra, BJ, and the agent had crossed under the street in the tunnel past the cafeteria and come up in the massive City Hall, where the Minneapolis Police Department had its headquarters. In the basement of City Hall, they stopped at a worn wooden door with a frosted glass window in the top half. Large letters stenciled on the window said “Property Room.”
As they entered, Sgt. Miller came from behind a secured door and shook hands. He smiled broadly when he recognized BJ. “Hey, dude. Still on the wrong side, huh?”
“Pays better,” BJ lied. “Everything’s cool. By the way, nice threads.” The sergeant wore an old uniform with frayed blue shirt cuffs.
Miller led them back into a large room. Rows of metal shelves towered around them as they worked their way deeper into the room. Each shelf held dozens of banker’s boxes, numbered and marked with the name of the case they came from. They were filled with exhibits for hundreds of cases. Other than the scraping of their shoes over the old concrete floor, silence hung in the room like old dust.
After three turns, Miller stopped and reached for the appropriate box. “Here it is,” he grunted. Although a younger man, he looked like he’d been in the basement, alone with the boxes, a long time. His skin looked as dry as the paper boxes, and his left eye had a tendency to twitch at odd times.
He carried the box to a small metal table at the end of the row. Since forensics had already analyzed the evidence, it could be touched with bare hands. Most of the items in the box had been taken from El-Amin’s apartment or found at the crime scene. Zehra watched as shirts, shoes, pants, a pair of glasses that resembled the ones in the video, and a curved knife were laid on the table.
The knife was unusual. From a long handle, the blade curved slightly, resembling a scimitar. Zehra held it in her hands. A shiver ran through her when she thought of what had been done with this weapon. Who had held it? As she turned it back and forth, the lights from the ceiling glistened off the shiny blade. An idea flashed across her mind. There was something she tried to remember about the knife. After a few moments she gave up, hoping her thought would come back later.
Outside, the sun, although steamy hot, felt good in comparison to the chill in the basement. “How about some coffee?” Zehra suggested. Her neck and shoulders still ached from the bomb blast.
She and Denzel, with the agent following, sat in a Caribou coffee shop on the second floor skyway that connected the office buildings downtown. With the brutal winters and steamy summers, the skyways bustled with life as the entire city flooded into them. They reminded Zehra of an ant farm—a toy for kids. The ants scurried through the passageways on their way to work or food. People moved through the glass tubes the same way.
BJ licked the foam from his upper lip. His eyes flicked up to Zehra, and he cleared his throat. “Uh, Z, I got something to say to you.”
She could tell he was serious. She set down her cup. “What is it?”
“It’s none of my business, of course, but like my momma said, ‘If you got something to say, say it.’”
Zehra waited.
“It’s about your friend, Michael.”
She sucked in her breath. “Denzel, we got a lot to do in the next few days. Can it wait?”
“I’ll say it quick.” He looked at the settling foam in his cup. “He’s lying to you.”
She jerked back. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what it’s about, but you know with my FACS training, at least I can tell when somebody is probably lying.”
Zehra wrestled with her emotions. Sure, she didn’t know Michael well, but so what? That was the whole purpose of dating. “Maybe, because he’s foreign, his ways of talking and expressing himself are different.”
“Doesn’t make any difference. The signals are universal.” He reached out to her. “I know how you feel about him, but I have to warn you.” His hand covered hers.
“Okay, but I can’t think about it right now.” Zehra waved her hand in between them. “Too much—” She looked at Denzel’s eyes and found them wet and shiny. “I’ll be careful. And thanks for always thinking about me.”
He shrugged and stood. “Got a few things to run down.”
Zehra nodded as he left. She tried to think straight. With the trial and the bombing, her world was a mess. It was impossible to sort through her emotions right now. Maybe in her thrill of meeting such an attractive man, she had missed things she normally would spot. At times, Michael had been patronizing to BJ. Was BJ reacting to that without recognizing it himself?
She had agreed to meet Michael for dinner later. Zehra looked forward to it—both for pleasure and for a chance to view him more critically.
An hour later, her phone rang. It was Denzel.
“Zehra, girl. I’m picking you up in three minutes.” He sounded out of breath.
“What?”
“Don’t have time to explain. Meet me in the front.”
In twenty minutes, they squealed into a three-story parking ramp on the West Bank, near the hospital where the imam had worked in the supply room. Denzel told her, “The coppers found the imam’s body. I still got friends there, so they tipped me.” They bounded out of his car and ran to a circle of squad cars, the medical examiner’s van, yellow tape, and one reporter.
As BJ and Zehra closed in on the activity, a cop in uniform came outside the tape to meet them. “BJ,” he said. “Gotta stay back.”
“Thanks for the tip. What’s shakin’?”
“A citizen saw the car parked here for a while and thought there was an unusually large pool of oil underneath it. When he got closer, he saw it was blood. Looks like the killer backed the car over the pool after killing the victim. To hide it. Tire tracks in the blood
.”
“Where’s the imam?”
“Trunk. It’s his car. ME thinks he’s been here a couple days.”
“Suspects?”
The cop shrugged.
“Lemme take a look.”
The cop looked back and forth, sighed and said, “Just a minute. I’ll get my ass whooped.”
BJ and Zehra moved toward the car. As they got closer, Zehra saw the trunk standing open and a lumpy form stuffed inside. A pallid white hand with dirty fingernails hung over the edge. She started to shake.
BJ stopped and put his arm around her. “You okay, Z?”
Taking a deep breath, she nodded yes.
They approached from the side of the car. A tech bent over the body. She worked on something and then stood up. When she moved to the side, BJ squirmed to the end of the trunk. Zehra moved beside him and forced herself to look.
Just a glance was enough. She felt sick, and her knees began to buckle. She gagged on the fear rising within her body.
The imam’s head flopped back at an unusual angle. His neck had been sliced open from ear to ear, penetrating deeply into his throat. It was an identical wound to the one that had killed the young Somali boy, Ahmed, the victim in her case.