Instead of the small cramped space of the elevator bay that one would expect, there was a larger darkened space beyond the doors. I stepped into the space.
Rafferty hit a switch on the wall and the space beyond the elevator doors lit up as garish strobe lights re-enacted the atmosphere of a stripper joint, complete with blaring techno music. This night was only getting stranger.
I looked around noticing something familiar about the setting. Had I been somewhere like this before?
Sal interrupted my thoughts. "Yeah, you've been here before, or there I should say. It was that stripper joint where that under-aged girl got knocked off last year. I believe they called the joint, The Gentlemen's Groan. It appears to be an exact replica too."
I gave him a piercing look and he fumbled adding, "From what I remember, that is of the investigation."
Yeah right, I thought to myself as I turned away to inspect the room. Sal's weaknesses were well known throughout the office.
What could all this mean, I thought to myself? I had a dead Iraqi civilian and a complete model of my very own precinct, complete with a night club lounge.
Yesterday, at 4:30pm, an Iraqi born citizen had stumbled into the office and made a wild report about being held hostage in an abandoned warehouse, in an elaborately set up hoax, as he had put it. It had seemed a little too much to be believed, but a report was filed anyway to be checked into by a patrol cop later.
Earlier tonight, at a little past ten, Ahmed Sazzar was found dead in his hotel suite. He had been cruelly tortured, for what had appeared to be hours, and then his neck had been broken. His murder had prompted us to look into the report filed earlier in the day, and this was where it had led. Instead of providing answers, all it had done was raise more questions.
I had looked into Ahmed's past, but had come up with little to go on. He had emigrated from Iraq a few years back, and he had no ties with any terrorist activity that anyone was aware of, or was telling me anyway. Ahmed didn't strike me as a bomb maker though. By all appearances, he had come to America for the long haul. He had married an American woman last year and had no history of wrong doing or violence. He had been an antiquities dealer in Iraq, and had also dabbled in the archeological field as an ethno linguist.
Upon moving to the United States five years previously, he had dropped the antiquities business in favor of a job at one of the cities' prominent museums, where he had helped manage the Middle Eastern collection. It had been a good job and his finances had all been in order and accounted for, with no debts to speak of. He seemed to be both the model citizen and husband.