Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  “I sure did, Doc. That’s partly what makes me think it’s part of the crime scene. I’m guessing somebody used to wear that around his neck on a chain.”

  I nodded. “Maybe the victim pulled it off in a struggle.”

  “That’s the way I figure it, too,” he agreed.

  I glanced at Miranda, whose eyes were darting to and fro, a sign that she was thinking hard. Suddenly her gaze snapped back to me. “Jesus,” she said. “It’s a hate crime. Has to be. Some redneck racist chained a black kid out there to die. God, I hate haters!”

  “Hang on,” I said. “We don’t know the victim was black.”

  “But we don’t know that he wasn’t, either,” she pointed out. “And aren’t you always quoting Occam’s razor? ‘The simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost always right’?”

  “I might have said that a time or two,” I conceded.

  “Or two hundred,” she retorted.

  “But we don’t have the facts,” I said. “Not enough. Not yet.”

  Waylon cleared his throat. “How y’all figure on tellin’ was he black or white?”

  “Well, it’s harder without the skull,” I said. “If the distal ends of the femurs weren’t chewed off, we could tell by looking at the angle of Blumensaat’s line.”

  “’Scuse me, Doc. You done lost me there.”

  “Blumensaat’s line,” I repeated. “It’s a seam, basically, in the bottom of the thigh bone. Where the shaft of the bone joins the condyles, the knuckles of the knee.” I touched my outer thigh, just above my knee, and traced a line angling down and backward. “Nobody knows why, but the angle of that seam—named after the doctor who first studied it—is different in blacks and whites. One of my graduate students was the first to notice and measure that difference. If we had an intact femur—or the skull—we’d have a lot more to go on.”

  “Still,” said Miranda, “you’re willing to consider the possibility that it’s a racial hate crime. Right?”

  “At this point,” I said, sighing, “I’m willing to consider any possibility.”

  “Good,” she said as she flashed a smile. Was it just my nervous imagination, or was it another look of triumph?

  Waylon told us good-bye and began maneuvering his bulk toward the doorway, but then he stopped and turned back toward us. “Oh, hell, I ’bout forgot. I found something else you might want.” He reached down and fished around in the thigh pocket of his cargo pants, then hauled out a large, lumpy plastic bag and laid it on my desk.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “That there’s some bear scat,” he said. “While I was up there, I figured I might nose around a bit, see if maybe I could find the young feller’s skull. Didn’t have no luck finding that, but I did find some scat, with a few buttons and some pieces of bone in it.”

  “Great—can’t wait to sink my teeth into that,” I said, and Waylon and Miranda both laughed.

  “Where did you find it?” asked Miranda.

  “Three, four hunnerd yards from the tree where the boy was chained. Mr. Bear had him a den near there. He weren’t none too happy to see me, I can tell you that.”

  “He was there?” Miranda said. “You saw him?”

  “I saw him, all right. Up close and personal. He come at me just like that grizzly in that movie.” Miranda shot me a meaningful, I-told-you-so glance at the reference to the film she’d been nagging me to watch. “I made out a might better than the feller in the movie, though.”

  “How’d you get away?” she asked.

  “Get away?” The big man looked puzzled. “Well, I got away, if you want to call it that, by shootin’ him. He was a big boy. Three hunnerd pounds. Like to’ve not dropped, but he finally did. ’Bout ten foot away from me.”

  “You shot the bear?” Waylon nodded, grinning. “You killed the bear?” Miranda seemed to have trouble taking it in. “But . . . aren’t bears endangered?”

  “They are when they’re chargin’ at me,” said Waylon, “that’s for dang sure.” He chuckled at his joke, and I smiled, but Miranda turned crimson.

  “Dammit, Waylon,” she said, her voice sounding thick and constricted. I reached out and touched her arm, hoping to calm her, but she batted my hand away. “Shit.” Head down, she stormed out of my office, leaving in her wake a baffled deputy, an embarrassed boss, and a lumpy bag of bear excrement.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE BUILDING LOOMED ABOVE US LIKE SOME SORT OF postmodern fortress: six stories of stainless steel, glass, stone, and reinforced concrete, rearing skyward from a sloping masonry base that appeared designed to deflect cannonballs or repel armored tanks. “Remind me,” I said to Miranda, “why we’re here?”

  “Gladly.” Indeed, she did look glad, not so much about the reminding as about the being here in southern Alabama. “Our Cooke County murder is a hate crime. Nobody knows more about hate crimes than the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

  “It might be a hate crime,” I corrected. “But even if it is, why’d we have to drive all the way to Montgomery?”

  “Duh. Because this is where the SPLC is.” She indicated the building with a hand flourish worthy of Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune.

  “You couldn’t just set up a conference call with these folks? We couldn’t just swap e-mails with them?”

  She shook her head. “Not as good,” she said. “Besides, you know you love a road trip. And . . . you’ve got no life, and it’s fall break, so we’re not missing anything on campus. Furthermore, there’s nothing else we can do on the case until we get more leads from the sheriff’s office or the TBI.” She repeated the hand flourish. “Or the SPLC.”

  I drew a deep breath, with which I intended to deliver a devastating response, but then I realized that she was right. On all counts. “You might have a point or two,” I conceded. “But what good does it do us to be in Montgomery if we can’t get into the building? Where’s the damn door?” We’d seen what appeared to be a sally port in the basement—a heavy, slanting steel door set deeply into the massive masonry base—but it had offered nothing that bore any resemblance to a pedestrian entrance, let alone a doorbell or welcome mat.

  “Beats me.” She shrugged. “Maybe they beam us up, Star Trek style.”

  As we stood, staring ineptly at the building, an armed guard—a heavyset man with thin gray hair and red cheeks—appeared, seemingly from nowhere. Perhaps the SPLC did possess the secret of transporter-beam technology. “Can I help you?” From his tone, I suspected that what he really meant was, Don’t y’all have someplace else you need to be?

  “We have a meeting here,” I told him. “With Laurie Wood, of the Intelligence Project. But we’re not quite sure how to get inside.” I smiled, hoping to soften him up. “If finding the door is an intelligence test, I reckon we’ve flunked.”

  The guard’s face softened; maybe he even smiled a bit. “Right this way,” he said, leading us up a narrow shelf of a walkway that angled up the building’s antitank base. He swiped a key card across a magnetic reader, and a pair of glass doors, thick as bank teller’s glass, whisked open. We stepped into a small, sparely furnished lobby, where another guard, a young African American woman, sat sentinel behind a counter, one end flanked by a metal detector. The older guard whisked out through the glass doors, having handed us off. “We’re here to see Laurie Wood,” I told our new guard. “She’s expecting us.”

  It almost seemed as if, rather than being expected, we were suspected: We went through an exhaustive screening process, including a TSA-worthy metal detector, which seemed particularly dubious about me. “Third time’s the charm,” I muttered after I finally passed metal-detector muster.

  Miranda, profiting by my example, had divested herself of her keys, two bracelets, and a wide leather belt, which sported a solid oval buckle. The buckle was made of antique silver, ornately carved and set with a cameo at the center: an elegant carving of a Victorian woman. Looking closer, I was startled to see that the “woman” in the cameo was actually a skele
ton; beneath an elaborate coiffure of swirling, piled-up hair was a profile of a woman’s skull and cervical spine, as well as the first three ribs. I made a mental note to ask later about the unusual fashion accessory.

  Miranda made it through the metal detector on her first try, and Laurie was finally called to fetch us. As Miranda threaded her belt back on, I couldn’t help noticing the contrast between her outfit and mine: Miranda was wearing jeans and a sweater, while I was in a coat and tie—fancier clothes than I normally wore on campus, but this wasn’t campus. This was a nationally renowned legal organization, and in my experience, there was no such thing as being overdressed for a law office.

  But when our SPLC host showed up, I suddenly felt overdressed and nerdy. Laurie Wood looked as if she might have just come from an art show, or a pottery studio. A fortysomething brunette, shorter than either Miranda or me, she wore jeans and a sweater—had the two of them conferred and coordinated their wardrobes?—and a large, chunky necklace of silver medallions connected by a leather cord. Her shoulder-length brown hair swayed with her relaxed, rolling gait, and her eyes had a look that struck me as curious, good-humored, and ironic. There seemed to be some sadness in it, too. My immediate impression was of a woman who’d seen a lot of life, and who’d learned not to take herself too seriously. “Hi, I’m Laurie,” she said, offering us a warm smile, a frank gaze, and a solid, welcoming handshake.

  She badged us through another security door and onto an elevator, which took us up several floors. We emerged into a large, open area, completely without walls. Everyone worked in cubicles with shoulder-high dividers, and above them, I could see across the entire floor and out two walls of thick glass that overlooked downtown Montgomery. The state’s domed capitol was visible out the east wall; taller, newer buildings—banks and office buildings—toward the north, and, in the distance, an old railroad station perched on the bank of the Alabama River.

  “Quite a view you’ve got here,” I said admiringly. “But I’m surprised at all the glass up here. Down below, it looks designed to repel a siege.”

  Laurie smiled. “We’ve got good reason to be formidable at street level. We got firebombed back in 1983 by some of our friends in the KKK.”

  “Is that when y’all were suing the Klan?” asked Miranda.

  Laurie nodded. “We’d won a lawsuit against a Texas Klan group a couple years before that,” she said. “We’d also gotten death sentences for eleven black inmates overturned. So the Klan was pretty unhappy with us. The fire burned down our building and destroyed a lot of records. We still get targeted with death threats and bomb plots pretty regularly.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear this. I had friends, including more than a few law enforcement friends, who viewed the SPLC as a bunch of liberal, left-wing troublemakers, but on the six-hour drive from Knoxville, Miranda had made a convincing case for the group’s importance in tracking violent extremists.

  Laurie led us around a corner to the south side of the building—the side with solid walls—and ushered us into a conference room, outfitted with a large, oval table. She gestured at the high-backed leather chairs. “Please.”

  Laurie sat at the head of the table; Miranda sat on her right, and I sat across from Miranda, on Laurie’s left. I’d brought a large manila envelope with me, and I laid it on the table in front of her. She looked at the envelope, then raised an eyebrow at me, clearly interested in whatever was in the envelope. “Miranda told me you’re working on a murder case that looks like a hate crime.”

  I waggled my hand in a maybe, maybe-not gesture. “I’m not saying it isn’t, but there’s not enough evidence yet to say that it is. That’s why we’re here—to see if it fits the pattern.”

  She looked again at the envelope. “And you’ve got material on the case in there?”

  I nodded. “Death-scene photos, mostly,” I said. “I should warn you, the pictures aren’t gory, but they’re disturbing.”

  If possible, she looked even more interested than before. “Dr. Brockton, I was a crime reporter before I took this job. I saw gory and disturbing things when I was a journalist, and I’ve seen plenty more in this job. After twenty years of tracking violent hate groups, I don’t shock easy.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Sounds like you’d have made a good forensic anthropologist, too.” I slid the envelope toward her. “Go for it, then. I won’t say anything more until you’ve had a look and told us what you think.”

  She grinned and opened the clasp, then extricated the stack of photos and began leafing through eagerly, her eyes scanning rapidly, then freezing as she squinted and stared, with laserlike intensity, at some detail or other. Occasionally she uttered a soft “hmm” to herself.

  I had included a dozen or so of the best death-scene photos, as well as shots I’d taken in the lab showing the bacon wrapper and the bear-bait stick. When she’d reviewed the entire stack from top to bottom, she reversed direction and looked at the images again, working her way back to the top. “Fascinating,” she said finally, still staring at the topmost image, a wide shot showing the tree, the groove etched in its bark, the chain stretching away, and the padlocked neck loop with the postcranial bones to one side. “You want to know what I think?”

  “Please.”

  “I think whoever did this is one sick puppy.”

  She glanced at me, then at Miranda, then back to me. I nodded. “I’d say that’s pretty accurate. But I hope you can tell us a bit more than that.”

  “I don’t see any clothing,” she said. “Was there any?”

  “None,” said Miranda. “As far as we can tell, he was naked.”

  “You say ‘he.’ So the victim was male?”

  “Yes,” Miranda and I said in unison.

  “Somewhere around twenty years old,” I added.

  “Black? White? Other?”

  “Not sure,” I said.

  “Black,” Miranda said.

  Laurie’s gaze swiveled from Miranda’s face to mine, then back to Miranda’s. “Okay, this is getting more interesting all the time,” Laurie said. “Dr. Brockton, you first. What makes you say ‘not sure’?”

  I pointed at the top photo. “As you can see, the skeletal remains are far from complete. Without a skull, especially, it’s hard to determine the race of the victim. Which also makes it harder to determine the nature—the motivation—of the crime. Was it a hate crime, or just a revenge killing. If it was a hate crime, what sort of hate crime? Racist? Homophobic? Vegan extremism?”

  She smiled at the vegan joke, and I gathered that like Miranda and me—and most police officers I knew—she’d found gallows humor to be an essential defense against the darkness in which she was immersed day in and day out. “Miranda? What’s your take?”

  Miranda drew in a breath, then began. “We have a piece of evidence from the death scene that—to me, anyhow—seems to strongly indicate a racial motivation.” She reached down and pulled something from the back pocket of her jeans, then laid it in front of Laurie. It was a photo of the Stone Mountain half-dollar Waylon had found with his metal detector.

  “Now that’s interesting.” Laurie’s eyes gleamed, and a smile—a grim one, it seemed to me—tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Very interesting.” I could practically see the gears in her mind beginning to mesh and turn. “So. For the meantime, at least, I’m inclined to vote with Miranda. This coin’s ninety years old. It’s a collector’s item, not a random bit of pocket change.” She took another, closer look, squinting at the coin’s edge. “Is that a bit of solder there on the rim?” Miranda nodded. “So this was worn as a medallion. Maybe almost like a crucifix?” I glanced at Miranda, and her face looked aglow with triumph.

  Laurie shifted her gaze to me. “Tell me if I’m reading these photographs right, Dr. Brockton. It looks to me like the victim was chained to a tree and kept alive for quite a while.” I nodded. “The bacon wrapper and the bacon-scented bear bait—do those mean what I think they mean? Was he eventually killed by a bear
?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “Murder by bear. That’s a new one, at least for me.” Her mental gears turned for a few more seconds before she went on. “Several top-of-the-head thoughts. The Confederate coin does suggest a white-on-black hate crime. It’s simple, and it fits. Ever hear of Occam’s razor?”

  Miranda gave a quiet snort of laughter. “Hear of it? He quotes it every hour on the hour. ‘The simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost always right.’ I’ll be surprised if it’s not carved on his tombstone someday.”

  I felt myself blushing slightly. “It’s a useful principle to teach students. And homicide detectives.”

  “I agree,” Laurie said. “But a killer who fetishizes the Confederacy might just as readily murder a Jew or a Muslim or even a white person. Or a homosexual or transgender person of any color.”

  “You’re a couple steps ahead of me there,” I said, wondering how on earth she’d gotten all the way to transgender crime.

  “Sorry. Let me back up and tell you where I’m coming from there.” There was a laptop computer in front of her, connected to a projector at the center of the table. She flipped open the laptop and clicked around for a while, then leaned forward and switched on the projector. An image appeared on a projection screen that hung on the wall at the far end of the table. It was a photo of a graying, bearded man in a wheelchair; he wore a dark suit and tie and an electric-blue shirt, and his right arm was raised in a Nazi salute.