City of Veils by Zoë Ferraris

unspoken, but what Katya already knew, was that the other two investigators—she couldn’t remember their names—had reputations as bullies who arrested anyone who was associated with the crime, even the victim’s families and friends, whether there was evidence for it or not. She always felt sorry for the innocent family members who spent time in jail while grieving the loss of a loved one, even if, more often than not, it was one of those family members who had committed the crime. Osama was the only one who seemed to respect his witnesses and suspects. At least he didn’t arrest them half as often as the other cops, and when he did, he made sure they were well taken care of.
    “I’ll get to work,” Katya said, taking the bag and leaving.
    K atya opened the cabinet that held the files for the department’s most recent cases. Zainab hadn’t bothered to alphabetize them yet. Kneeling on the floor, Katya read each of the names. She hadn’t seen any of the bodies, but the clarity that lingers from speculative horror had rendered the details of each case vivid in her mind.
Roderigo, Thelma.
A skin sample. Shattered iris. Foreign blood beneath her nails.
Alvarez, Najwa.
A dismembered thumb. Fingerprints on a cell phone. A
man’s
cell phone. And more sexually transmitted diseases than any person she’d ever seen. Of the twenty-two cases lined up in the drawer already this summer, nineteen were women. Twelve had been housemaids. It didn’t matter how they died, they were represented here out of all proportion to their population in the real world.
    Eve could easily have been a Saudi housewife, so why did she appear so clearly in Katya’s mind as a servant?
    Katya didn’t believe in intuition. She believed what her father said: that the senses absorbed hundreds of thousands of bits of information, very few of which ever made it to the conscious mind. And when the unconscious mind did the thinking for you, things could sometimes go awry.
    She went back to the table where Eve’s cloak was laid out. Katya had already determined that there was a rip in the pelvic area closely matching the bruising pattern on Eve’s hip. It looked as if the cloak had been caught on something. Perhaps the killer had dragged the body.
    This time, Katya looked at the label.
India Fabric.
No designer. Something you’d buy for twenty-five riyals at the clothing souq. The lower hem was pale and torn in places, perhaps the natural consequence of an ill-fitting cloak. The fabric was worn around the cuffed wrists, which had no snaps or buttons and looked a little shrunken from washing. The wear was undoubtedly from Eve pushing her hands through the cuffs every time she left the house. The wrists were so worn compared to the moderate wear and tear on the elbows and collar (which did have snaps) that she might have put the cloak on every day. For what—six months? Why not once a week for six years? No, Katya thought, in six years, the cloak would have faded much more than it had. She had owned plenty of cheap cloaks in her time, and her experience was telling her that this cloak had been worn frequently for under a year. Any longer than that and the color would be faded, the seams coming apart.
    Who wears a cloak every day? Rich women went out whenever they liked, but their worn cloaks were quickly replaced by new ones. A working woman went out, someone like Katya, but not someone with a professional job where a cloak like this would be an embarrassment. A factory worker? A grocery store employee, someone hidden in the back room, stocking the shelves only when the store was closed? A single mother with no family might have to go out every day to walk her children to school or do the shopping. For that matter, a married woman would go out, if her husband was too busy to take her. But an abused housemaid? She would probably not be allowed to leave the house. She would be isolated, locked in her room at night, or even during the day when she