which guy owned the knife and shirt?”
“Prints?”
“None. Then, there’s the line-up. Try to knock that out. I’m worried we’re not gonna get this all put together in time.” She looked over at Jackie. “With a trial date in a month, that means the Omnibus hearing to challenge this stuff will come up in about two weeks. If I’m forced to try it, I don’t want any accusations of malpractice ‘cause we’re not ready.”
“You’ll want to see the crime scene. There’s the investigation of witnesses …”
“I’ve already got BJ working his butt off. I hope to hell he scores. The only problem with him is he’s an adult ADD.”
“Huh?”
“He starts off with great ideas and energy but then loses interest. The trick to working with him is to keep him focused. Like the DNA. I’ve been after him to get the test results.” She opened her Blackberry and tapped into her schedule. “Oh, damn! I forgot the appearance this afternoon with the hockey jock.” She glanced at her watch.
“Tough case?”
“Depends on how you look at it. I’ve got a U of M hockey player who was filmed having sex with a woman in the stairwell of a parking ramp. Indecent exposure is the charge. It’s only a misdemeanor, and I told him to plead. We’ll get it off his record later. Know what he tells me?”
“What?”
“He has a constitutional right to freedom of expression. Can you believe it? I’m gonna have to give him a crash course in constitutional law this afternoon when I kick his expressive butt.”
“How about the autopsy of our victim. Still want to go over it?”
“Yeah,” Zehra said. “You never know when something small will pop up for us.”
Jackie tapped on her laptop. She finished and looked at Zehra. “I’m like, amazed at you-you’re so thorough. I really appreciate the chance to work with you. A lot of the younger women look up to you.”
“Thanks, but I don’t see myself that way.”
“It must be tough being the first Muslim in the office. Me-I’m Christian, Catholic. A result of the French co- opting the Vietnamese aristocracy into converting in order to receive special treatment during the occupation.”
“It’s hard to be a Muslim in America period, although we’re the third largest religion in this country. Particularly after 9/11, you can’t believe the looks I get everywhere I go. Even though I’m female, I still get the looks.” She took a deep breath. “You should try getting on a plane.”
“What?”
“When I’m seated, I don’t dare go to the toilet and never, never go to the one in the front, near the cockpit. Many times, I’ve been afraid some of the passengers would take me down out of their own fear. Of course, I’m so claustrophobic, I have a hard time flying anyway.”
Jackie remained silent for a moment. Then said, “But you’re so pretty, so small. I can’t imagine …”
“Well …” she sighed. Some days the effort was just too much, too discouraging. Before Zehra could wallow much deeper, her cell phone rang. She answered to hear her mother’s voice.
“Zehra, you’ve got to come over for dinner tomorrow night. I’m fixing the lamb dish you like so much.”
“Thanks Mom, but I’m too busy, and you know I’m not eating much meat anymore.”
If she didn’t love her mother so much, these conversations could become a pain in the neck. She nagged Zehra constantly about getting a good job at a big company and marrying. After all, she was thirty-two. Couldn’t she find a nice Muslim man, preferably a doctor or engineer?
Of course Zehra would like to be married some day. Most men she dated were Christians because the Muslim population, besides Somali, was small in Minnesota. Although they shared a religion, that was about it. Even the way Somalis practiced Islam was a product of culture and history-foreign to Zehra’s experience. In the meantime, her mother’s words echoed the loneliness she often felt. Zehra imagined that she lived in a large bell of quiet isolation that seldom rang.
Her mother said, “Well, you could stand to put a little weight on. Now, could you be here at six-thirty? We’ll have a cup of tea before …”
“Ah, Mom. I’m so busy … oh, all right” Zehra hardly waited for the response in order to get her mother off the phone. Zehra feared the true reason for the invitation.
“Okay, dear.” A pause. “Oh, one last thing I forgot. I’ve invited a nice, young friend to come too. I’m sure you’ll like him. Goodbye.”
Snapping the phone off, Zehra shook her head. Probably another loser!
“Something wrong?” Jackie looked at Zehra closely.
“My mother. Still trying to set me up. In her generation, arranged marriages sometimes happened amongst Muslim women. I guess it had some merit to it-my parents were arranged, and they’re still happily married. But, I don’t like the idea at all. I try to be nice to my mother, but I just get mad at myself for not saying, ‘no.’”
A penetrating voice carried into the office from the hallway.
“That’s BJ,” Zehra told Jackie.
The resonant sound of singing was followed by a large black man. He turned sharply into the office and pulled up straight until he finished a phrase. “Jazz,” he told them. “Beautiful, beautiful music. Too bad the kids don’t learn this stuff in school. A lot better than gangsta rap for them.” He nodded to each of them. “These black kids are losing their roots if they don’t understand jazz.”
Zehra looked up at him. He stood over six feet, had a shaved head, a gray goatee, and liquid brown eyes that never stopped moving. When speaking, Zehra noticed he over-enunciated his words, like Denzel Washington. Probably because BJ also had large, beautiful teeth like the actor, which seemed to get in the way when he talked. Sometimes, to kid him, she called him Denzel.
Jackie asked, “Do you play jazz?”
“Got my own group. ‘Gabriel’s Horns,’ we call it. I play the trumpet. We just put out a new CD.”
“BJ, I was just telling Jackie about the FACS training you had.”
“Yeah, cool stuff.”
Jackie offered him her chair. “How’s it work?” she asked.
“Well, it’s a system for breaking down human facial expressions into a series of muscle movements, called action units.”
“You mean like every time I wrinkle my face or smile, you’re checking me out?” Jackie said. “Wicked.”
“Exactly,” BJ said. “We memorize about seventy muscle and head movements, and the combination of those can tell us what a person is really thinking. It’s not perfect, but it helps me when interviewing people to have a sense if they’re lying or not.”
“Is it something new?”
“Researchers developed it in the seventies, and law enforcement is starting to use it. There was a famous case of a woman in South Carolina who went on TV to plead for the return of her kidnapped kids. I saw the video in training. The woman’s cheeks lifted in a smile while the corners of her mouth tried to suppress it. The disconnect between a smile and her pleading led investigators to question her further. Turns out, she killed her two kids and made up the kidnapping.”
“Awesome.”
He took the chair and scowled.
“Don’t tell me, BJ …” Zehra held her breath.
His eyes darted from one to the other. “I warned them sons of bitches,” he said. “This wasn’t gonna work. ‘Oh, no,’ they said. ‘You’re black. They’ll open doors for you.’” BJ waved his hands in the air. “May as well’ve sent Linda, the white chick that works next to me, for all the good black did me.”
“We all warned Mao,” Zehra said. “None of us want this case.”
BJ kept talking, “Besides, I was a cop for twenty years. Some of these cases are just too close to home. This is ugly-a young kid slashed to death. You know I’ll do my job, but how about a nice auto thief instead?”
“BJ,” Zehra said, “Did you interview the main witness, the one from the porch, to see what he says?”
He stopped abruptly and sat still. “Z, we didn’t score.”
“What happened?” The tension tightened the muscles low in her body. In her mind she saw a digital clock clicking over, crossing off the days until she had to start the trial.
