Free Kingdom of Strangers by Zoë Ferraris Page B

looking for better work somewhere else or trying to escape an abusive situation. It was a common enough occurrence, and short of finding a dead body, the police had no way to prove foul play. They had no luck at all tracking down Cortez’s headhunter, Sonny Esposa. He had disappeared long ago.
    Ibrahim went through the motions of it all—the interviews, the car rides, the edgy conversations with his men—in a half state of panic. He saw Sabria in every living room, consular office, and police meeting room. He conjured up clear mental pictures of Cortez walking down the street, perhaps running a quick errand for her employer—
Would you mind picking up some bread from the baker’s, some milk from the corner store?
—and then Sabria slid into the frame, cloaked and veiled, and it was Sabria stepping into the wrong taxi, being held at gunpoint and frozen with terror. It was Sabria being driven to the edge of the desert, being immobilized by chloroform, then beaten and shot in the head and dismembered.
    He had no idea how the killer caught his victims, and he was still a little fuzzy on the horrors perpetrated on the women, but in Ibrahim’s mind, it was as clear as reality. Chloroform. Hard plastic restraints. A semiautomatic with a silencer. A small sword for cutting off the hands. He knew it was wrong to build mental pictures laced with assumptions and personal terrors, so he let the images play out like silent movies and reminded himself that it was too implausible that Sabria, a woman with a natural distrust of men, would be taken by anyone, even at gunpoint. Equally implausible that the killer noticed Ibrahim so quickly after they discoveredthe bodies—and that the killer then found out about his mistress. It was the ego’s darkest delight to assume it was the center of the universe.
    Chamelle Plaza was a women’s-only shopping mall made up of the kind of designer boutiques and spas that made Katya feel like a poor Indonesian street sweeper collecting empty bottles at the edges of a royal palace. Fifteen minutes shy of the day’s last prayer time, the place was bustling with Sri Lankan housemaids looking after whole flocks of children while mothers flitted between day spas and manicure salons, hurrying to finish their business before the call to prayer closed all the shops. The air was cool and clean, and Katya stood in the central courtyard waiting for the sheen of sweat to dry from her face and for her cloak to stop sticking to her clothes.
    Her first thought was that if Ibrahim’s girlfriend worked here, the chances were good that she had run away with a wealthy businessman or maybe even a prince. Not that she would have met him at the mall; simply that she would have been the type to trade in an old purse for a more flashy one when the time was right. Walking past the overpriced shops staffed with snooty-looking women in Armani did nothing to interfere with the stereotype.
    Before leaving the lab, she had run a search on the missing woman. It was probably redundant—Ibrahim would have checked already—but she wanted to be thorough. She discovered that Miss Sabria Gampon’s visa was indeed expired. She hadn’t been deported, at least not officially; sometimes it took a few weeks for the paperwork to catch up. She also discovered that Sabria used to work in Undercover herself.
    Katya found the boutique: La Mode Internationale. It was tucked between a jewelry store and a bustling café. She pushed through the glass door and crossed an enormous white marblefloor with a self-important stride that she hoped matched the haute elegance all around her. Little nooks on the wall were lit with red lights, and each held a handbag that looked more like a child carrier with hardware than a purse. A woman approached and greeted her with a plastered-on smile and a perkiness that Katya would have been happy to see at the bank but that felt oppressive here.
    “Good evening,” the woman said. She was a middle-aged Filipina