“Come on over,” she said. “It’ll be good to see you.”
THE CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION WAS housed in an aging building on Melrose Avenue, just in back of Hodges Library. The building’s old bones were attractive enough; it was a typical academic building from the 1940s or 1950s, a four-story brick edifice whose doors and windows were trimmed in stone. But any scrap of elegance or dignity it had once possessed was shredded by the air-conditioning units jutting from windows on every floor. The air conditioners gave the building a sort of third world look, which was sad yet somehow appropriate, I supposed. The sign at the entrance read INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION in large letters, and, in smaller letters below, INTERNATIONAL STUDENT AND SCHOLAR SERVICES. Beside the latter label, someone had spray-painted the letters “ISIS.”
Debbie Dwyer’s office was on the second floor; her window—one of the few that was unobstructed by an air conditioner—looked out on a courtyard where maple trees blazed red and orange. When I knocked and entered, she stood and walked around the desk to hug me. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“You have,” I said. “You look a lot more . . . important now.” She was wearing a power suit—fitted gray skirt and gray jacket, softened by a white silk blouse—but something else was different, too, although I couldn’t quite tell what it was.
“It’s the hair,” she said. “The impression of power is inversely proportional to the length.” I looked at her hair, not quite shoulder length, puzzled by the comment. “For years I wore it long,” she explained, and I nodded, remembering. “Got compliments galore. But respect and responsibility? Not so much.” She said it with a smile, but it was clear that she wasn’t entirely joking, and I felt bad about the workplace complexities she’d had to confront and overcome. She pointed to a pair of armchairs in a corner of the office. “Please, have a seat,” she said, taking one of the chairs for herself. “I am sorry about the rules,” she said. “They’re really quite specific.”
Before I even had a chance to answer, there was a knock on her door. “Excuse me, Debbie,” said an attractive young woman. Her hair was long and lovely: compliment-worthy, I thought ironically. “We’ve got a . . . situation. Could I borrow you for a few minutes?”
Debbie gave me an apologetic glance. “I’m so sorry. Can you wait right here? This shouldn’t take long. I’ll be back in five minutes.” She gave me an odd look as she said it—a look that felt rather like a nudge in the ribs—and then she was gone, the door clicking shut behind her, before I had a chance to say or ask anything that might clarify whether I should wait or simply give up and go.
I glanced around the office, and then I laughed, suddenly and softly. “You rascal,” I murmured. At my elbow was a small round table between the two armchairs, and on the table were two things: a lamp, and a manila file folder labeled MUSTAFAH, SHAFIQ.
I checked my watch. Five minutes, I told myself. Better move fast, Brockton. First I pressed the button in the door handle to lock the door—I didn’t want anyone walking in and seeing me breaking a federal law—then I laid the folder on Debbie’s desk and flipped it open. The first thing I saw, on the folder’s inside cover, was a young man’s face staring at me, wide-eyed, from a copied photograph. It was a passport photo—small and washed out and bad, embodying the special, egregious badness of every passport ever taken—and I nearly shouted with astonishment. Staring at me, from the bad photocopied photo, was a familiar face. The face Joanna Hughes had just re-created on the skull of my Cooke County victim, 16–17. But something wasn’t right. This was a kid—way younger than twenty.
The entire passport had been photocopied, I realized as I continued staring. I checked the passport’s date of issue and understood why the face staring back at me looked too young: the passport had been issued three years before, in 2013. Then I saw the birth date—July 1995—and a wave of sorrow washed over me. Shafiq Mustafah had turned twenty-one all alone and stark naked, chained to a tree like an abused dog, as death lumbered toward him from the dark woods of Cooke County and the dark heart of a hate-filled man.