The funeral was on my mind as I drove from Catavina’s secret coop back to the station house. I heard the rolling rumble of thunder, and it surprised me because we don’t get many thunderstorms in the city. I glanced through the windshield up at the sky, but there were no clouds at all in sight. I felt an odd chill, thinking that maybe the thunder had been a humbling sign from God, underscoring my memories of Shaknahyi’s burial. For the first time since his death, I felt a deep emotional loss.
I also began to think that my idea of vengeance would not be adequate. Finding Paul Jawarski and bringing him to justice would neither restore Shaknahyi nor free me from the intrigue in which Jawarski, Reda Abu Adil, Friedlander Bey, and Lieutenant Hajjar were somehow involved. In a sudden realization, I knew that it was time to stop thinking of the puzzle as one large problem with one simple solution. None of the individual players knew the entire story, I was certain of that. I’d have to pursue them separately and assemble what clues I could find, hoping that in the end it would all add up to something indictable. If Shaknahyi’s hunches were wrong and I was heading off on a fool’s errand, I would end up worse than disgraced. I would surely end up dead.
I parked the copcar in the garage and went up to my cubicle on the third floor of the station house. Hajjar rarely left his glass booth, so I didn’t think there’d be much chance that he’d catch me. Catch me! Hell, all I was doing was getting some work done.
It had been a couple of weeks since I’d done any serious work at my data deck. I sat down at my desk and put a new cobalt-alloy cell-memory plate in one of the computer’s adit ports. “Create file,” I said.
“File name,” prompted the data deck’s indifferent voice.
“Phoenix File,” I said. I didn’t have a lot of actual information to enter. First I read in the names from Shaknahyi’s notebook. Then I stared at the monitor screen. Maybe it was time to follow up on Shaknahyi’s research.
All of the satellite decks in the station house were connected to the central police database. The problem was that Lieutenant Hajjar had never entirely trusted me, and so I’d been given only the lowest security clearance. With my password, I could only obtain information that was also available to any civilian who came in the front door of the station house and inquired at the information desk. However, in the months I’d worked at the copshop, I’d casually nosed out all the codes from other paper-pushers with higher ratings. There was a great and active underground involved with circulating classified information among the nonuniformed staff. This was technically highly illegal, of course, but in actual fact it was the only way any of us could get our jobs done. “Search,” I said.
“Enter string to be searched,” muttered the Annam-ese deck in its peculiar American accent.
“Bouhatta.” Ishaq Abdul-Hadi Bouhatta was the first entry in Shaknahyi’s notebook, a murder victim whose killer had not yet been caught.
“Enter password,” said the computer. I had the list of security codes scribbled on a torn sheet of paper that I’d hidden in a tech manual. I’d memorized the top-level password long ago, however. It was a twenty-four-character mix of alphanumerics and Arabic Standard Code for Information Interchange symbols. I had to key those in manually.
“Accepted,” said the data deck. “Searching.” In about thirty seconds, Bouhatta’s complete file appeared on my monitor. I skipped through the personal biography and the details of his death — except to note that he’d been killed at close range by a charge from a static pistol, the same as Blanca. What I wanted to know was where his body had been taken. I found that information in the medical examiner’s report, which formed the last page of the file. There’d been no autopsy; instead, Bouhatta’s corpse had been delivered to Abu Emir Hospital in Al-Islam Square.
“Search again?” asked the deck. “No,” I said. “Import data.” “Database?”
“Abu Emir Hospital,” I said.
The computer thought about that for a moment. “Current security code is sufficient,” it decided. There was a long pause while it accessed the computer records of the hospital.
When I saw the hospital’s main menu on my screen, I ordered a search of Bouhatta’s records. It didn’t take long, and I found what I needed. Just as Shaknahyi’s notes suggested, Bouhatta’s heart and lungs had been removed almost immediately after his death and transplanted into the body of Elwau Chami. I supposed then that Shaknahyi’s other information was correct, concerning the victims of the other unsolved murders.
Now I wanted to take his research one important step further. “Search again?” the hospital’s database inquired. “Yes,” I said.
“Enter string to be searched.” “Chami.” A few seconds later, I saw a list of five names, from Chami, AH Masoud to Chami, Zayd. “Select entry,” said the deck.
“Chami, Elwau.” When the file came up on the screen, I read through it carefully. Chami was a faceless man, not as poor as some, not as rich as others. He was married and had seven children, five sons and two daughters. He lived in a middle-class neighborhood northeast of the Budayeen. The medical records said nothing about any run-ins with the law, of course, but there was one important fact buried in the redundant forms and reports: Elwau Chami operated a small shop in the Budayeen, on Eleventh Street north of the Street. It was a shop I knew well enough. Chami sold cheap Oriental rugs in the front, and he leased the rear of the establishment to an old Pakistani married couple who sold brass ornaments to tourists. The interesting fact was that I knew Friedlander Bey owned the building; Chami probably also worked as gatekeeper for the high-stakes gambling parlor upstairs.
Next I researched Blanca Mataro, the sexchange whose corpse I’d discovered with Jirji Shaknahyi. Her body had been taken to another hospital, and it had provided urgently needed kidneys and liver to a seriously ill young woman she’d never met. This in itself wasn’t unusual; many people signed up to donate organs in case of sudden or accidental death. I just found it rather coincidental that the recipient happened to be the niece of Umar Abdul-Qawy.
I spent an hour and a half tracking down files on all the other names in Shaknahyi’s notebook. Besides Chami, two of the murder victims — Blanca and Andreja Svobik — had ties to Papa. I was able to prove to my satisfaction that of the other four names, two had rather obvious connections to Reda Abu Adil. I was willing to bet a large sum of money that the rest did too, but I didn’t need to pursue the matter any further. None of this was ever going to have to stand up in court. Neither Abu Adil nor Fried-lander Bey would ever be dragged in front of a judge.
So what had I learned, after all? One: There had been at least four unsolved murders in the city in the last several weeks. Two: All four victims had been killed in the same way, with a shot at close range from a static pistol. Three: Healthy organs were taken from all four victims after death, because all four were listed in the city’s charity file of voluntary donors. Four: All four victims and all four recipients had direct ties to either Abu Adil or Papa.
I had proved Shaknahyi’s suspicion beyond the possibility of coincidence, but I knew that Hajjar would still deny that the murders were related. I could point out that the killers had used a static pistol so that none of the internal organs would be damaged, but Hajjar’d shrug that off too. I was pretty damn certain that Hajjar knew about all this already, which was why I’d been put to pasture investigating On Cheung, instead of looking into Shaknahyi’s death. There were a lot of powerful men allied against me. It was a good thing I had God on my side. “Search again?” asked my data deck. I hesitated. I did have one more name to check, but I really didn’t want to know the details. After he’d been shot, Shaknahyi had told me to find out where his parts went. I thought I already knew, although I didn’t have an exact name. I was sure that some of Jirji Shaknahyi still lived on in the body of some low-level employee of Abu Adil or Friedlander Bey, or one of their friends or relatives. I was completely disgusted, so I just said “Quit.” I looked at the monitor’s dark screen and thought about what I needed to do next.