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mutilation of tissue and skin—probably from fish, although it was hard to be certain. The lower half of the black cloak she was wearing was tangled around her waist. One of the sleeves was torn. And the scarf that had perhaps been covering her hair was wound around her neck like a garrote. Had she been strangled?
    The coroner, Ibrahim, was staring down at the body with a faraway look in his eyes.
    “Washed up on shore this morning,” he reported. “This beach is busy. Someone would have noticed if she’d washed up last night.” Although the coroner shared the name of Osama’s father, Osama often noted that the two men had little else in common. This Ibrahim, who was soft and dough-faced and missing an ear, had served as one of Osama bin Laden’s mujahideen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s. For that the officers gave him respect, but Ibrahim’s behavior could be abrupt and crass, and sometimes downright menacing. Osama tried not to feel like an upstart. He was only thirty, the department’s youngest detective inspector, as Ibrahim often liked to point out.
    “The water’s pretty warm,” Osama said. “She would probably have died, what—seven days ago?” Ibrahim scowled, prompting Osama to ask: “Do you want to revise that?”
    Ibrahim glared at him. “Not until we cut her open.”
    “Cause of death?” Osama asked.
    The coroner jutted out his chin, an unmistakable sign of annoyance that said
I’ll tell you when I know, now leave me the hell alone
.
    Osama had to admit there were too many options. She might have drowned, or died from loss of blood from the many stab wounds covering her body. Perhaps she had been choked by the fabric around her neck. The burns probably wouldn’t have killed her, but it was possible that the pain from the burns had rendered her unconscious and caused her to drown after someone had thrown her in the ocean.
    “These burns look premortem,” Osama went on.
    “Yes,” Ibrahim said, then added, almost as an afterthought, “I’ve seen worse.”
    Osama was giving up. He knew that anything he asked now would be subject to future revision anyway. Ibrahim was always tense at a crime scene, especially when women were involved.
    “And I’m guessing that her hands were dipped in something,” Osama said. “Kitchen oil, maybe?”
    Ibrahim walked away without an answer.
    Osama turned to Majdi, who was kneeling in the sand a few feet away.
    “What has forensics got for me?” Osama asked.
    Majdi was combing a quadrant of sand with a gloved hand, his glasses sliding down his sweaty nose. He looked up, but like a child who can’t stop playing, he compulsively turned back to the sand and kept combing. “Up the shore, behind you a bit, we’ve got a spot of your usual beach detritus—cigarettes, bottles, pieces of Styrofoam—but not much of it, frankly. And I’m not finding anything here. It looks like nothing else washed up on shore with her.”
    “Are you certain she washed up?”
    “Yeah.” Majdi glanced at the girl’s body and Osama knew what he was thinking:
A sea-bloated corpse isn’t proof enough for you?
“Well, you never know,” Majdi said. “I’ve already been in touch with the coast guard; they’re faxing us the ocean current reports for the past two weeks. We should be able to get an approximate location of where she entered the water, but I can’t make any promises.”
    “Any ID on the body?”
    “No,” Majdi said. “There’s no cell phone, no ID card or anything. You saw the condition of her hands. I hold out a little hope for fingerprints, but just a little.” He gave a dry rasp and shook his head.
    Osama began to feel the dread of having to deal with Missing Persons. The reports were almost all of women—housemaids, mostly—who had left their employers because of bad pay, brutal conditions, sexual or psychological abuse, or in some cases just
because
. Slavery had been outlawed in the kingdom in 1962, but that hadn’t changed the fact that it