Patrese almost laughed. It was a question he’d asked himself, and others, more than once, and no one – not teachers, not priests, probably not even the Pope himself – had been able to answer it properly.
‘Not to mention the impeccable behavior of priests up and down the country where young children are involved,’ Mustafa continued.
‘A few bad apples. Sinners, as we all are. Everyone in your culture’s perfect?’
‘I look around here, and I see people brought up to believe in the Christian faith. But I also know that, round here, all too often BC means before crack, and AD means after death. That’s not good enough. And it’s not good enough just to pray and hope everything will turn out all right. We have to go out and do the work.
‘And that work starts here. Islam prohibits drugs and alcohol. You stay off those, you can be a productive member of society. You turn to them, and you’re just waiting to die. And if the only way out of that is through Islam, then so be it. Because Islam places paramount importance on the education of our children. To be a teacher is a special calling. When I’ve finished my studies, I’m hoping to teach at the school we’re raising funds to build here; preschool to fifth grade.’
‘Somewhere to train the next generation of bombers?’
‘Not at all. A school where everybody has a strange name, so nobody feels alone. Muslim kids feel like outsiders in public schools. No matter how good those schools are, they can’t teach Islamic beliefs and morals. So we will. Kids hate being different; so we’ll make them not different. And you know why?’
‘I’ve no doubt you’re going to tell me.’
‘Because we have to do it ourselves now. Since 9/11, we haven’t been able to receive money from other Muslim countries, even from registered Islamic charities.’
‘That’s damn right. There’s a war on.’
Mustafa didn’t take the bait. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.
‘We relied on that money a lot; perhaps too much. That was one of the reasons why, before 9/11, we – the immigrant Muslims – didn’t really have that much to do with the black Muslims.
‘Then suddenly we couldn’t move for surveillance, police raids, airport searches, special registration, and so on. All the time, we had to prove our loyalty to the flag. Still do, every day. I look black anyway, but African-American Muslims sympathize. They know what it’s like; not from being Muslim, but from being black.’
He looked at Beradino first, then Patrese; two white men who he felt would never understand, not fully.
‘We’re all niggers now, basically.’
Thursday, October 21st. 10:26 a.m.
You’ve seen homicide division rooms umpteen times on the silver screen, and it’s one of the few aspects of police work that TV gets right. There really are desks piled high with report forms and coffee cups, and the detectives sitting at those desks really do crick the phones into their necks while pecking two-fingered at their keyboards.
Amidst the barely controlled hubbub of a major homicide investigation, Patrese read the poster above Beradino’s head for the umpteenth time that day.
The Fifth Commandment, Book of Exodus, 20, of THE HOLY BIBLE.
Then: THE OATH OF PRACTICAL HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION.
Beradino, who’d written the poster and had it typeset himself, had clearly never met a capital letter he didn’t like.
Homicide investigation is a profound duty, and constitutes a heavy responsibility. Just as there is no crime worse than taking someone else’s life, so there is no task more important than bringing to justice the people who crossed that line. As such, let no person deter you from the truth and your own personal commitment to see that justice is done. Not only for the deceased, but for the surviving family as well.
And remember – ‘you’re working for God.’
No, Patrese thought angrily; he was working for the city of Pittsburgh. There were times when Beradino’s incessant God-squadding really got on his nerves, and this was one of them – not least because he was pissed anyway.
Every cop knows that the first forty-eight hours after a murder are critical. If they haven’t got a good lead in that time, the chances of solving the crime are halved as evidence disappears, suspects flee, and stories change.
More than forty-eight hours after Michael Redwine had been torched, Patrese and Beradino had nothing.
Sure, they had an autopsy report, but that just confirmed Beradino’s findings – that Redwine, alive when the fire started, had died from smoke inhalation.
And sure, Mustafa Bayoumi’s alibi was provided by his mother, and her alone. But it was hard to see what they could do other than take it at face value. Yes, Sameera could have been lying – she’d said she’d do anything for him, after all – but to test that, they’d have to give her the full nine yards, on a hunch that was flimsy at best.
It didn’t take much imagination to see how carpeting a recent widow that way would look.
Because Patrese and Beradino had to accept Mustafa’s alibi, they had no probable cause to go search the house in Oakland for anything that might connect him to the fire. Even if they did get a warrant, and even if he had been involved, he was clearly a smart kid. He’d have ditched any clothing and other items that might have linked him to the blaze long before now.
That was how they consoled themselves, at any rate; because nothing and no one else in Redwine’s life seemed to point to any other suspects.
Every resident of The Pennsylvanian had been interviewed, as had all doormen, cleaners and maintenance workers; anyone with access to the building, in other words. No one had seen anything.
‘Either they’re on the level, or someone should win a damn Oscar,’ Patrese said.
It still didn’t answer what had started as the $64,000 question and was surely now into six figures – how had the killer got into The Pennsylvanian?
They retraced Redwine’s movements on the last day of his life. He’d been at Mercy in the morning, given a speech at a conference downtown after lunch, and been due to go to the opera – La Bohème – that evening. Nothing untoward.
They’d taken twelve officers from the regular police department and used them to turn Redwine’s life upside down. No friend, acquaintance or incident was deemed too insignificant or commonplace; everyone was followed up, checked out.
TIE, Beradino told the uniforms, TIE – trace, interview, eliminate as a suspect.
They found zilch. Redwine had been a regular attendee at church, done his part at charity fundraisers, and enjoyed hiking and fishing in his spare time. No embittered ex-girlfriends, no secret gay lovers, no outstanding sexual harassment cases. Even the professional jealousies were no more than the usual found among surgeons, which was to say at once endemic and excruciatingly professional.
All in all, no reason for anybody to have killed Redwine, let alone by such a horrific method as burning alive.
The fire had destroyed any physical evidence worth the name, so Patrese and Beradino could find no joy there either. Instant forensic breakthroughs were strictly the preserve of TV shows titled with snappy acronyms. Pittsburgh PD didn’t even have its own DNA lab. It had to use the FBI’s, which had