Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  I knew, having discussed the matter with them, that I could rely on Richard and Dr. Grimes to ask most of the questions at Miranda’s dissertation defense. Still, I felt a responsibility to read it, even if I couldn’t fully understand it. And so, with a sense of heavy foreboding—or was it rapid-onset sleepiness?—I opened the cover and began to read.

  Sometime later, I felt my eyelids open, as heavily as if they had weights attached to them. Glancing down, I saw that I had made it only to page six before nodding off. Blinking and shaking off the grogginess, I realized that what had awakened me was not my subconscious sense of professorial duty, but a steady tap-tap-tapping at my door. “Come in,” I called, hastily straightening up from the slumped posture in which I’d been dozing.

  The door opened slowly, tentatively, and a head peered around the edge. “Dr. Brockton? Are you in there?”

  “Come in, Delia,” I said. “I didn’t hear you knocking at first. I was . . . immersed in Miranda Lovelady’s dissertation. Using elliptical Fourier analysis to compare frontal-sinus shapes. Fascinating work. Another great tool for identification.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for that,” she said. “Fourier analysis is way above my pay grade.”

  “Oh, it’s like anything else,” I told her. “Just dive in, and pretty soon you’ll get the hang of it.” I laid the dissertation aside before she could ask any more questions. “What brings you down here to my inner sanctum? Something important, or Peggy wouldn’t have steered you here. She knows I only hide out here when I need to hunker down and think hard. You’re not having trouble with that finger bone I gave you, I hope?”

  “No, not at all. I just came to give you the results from the DNA analysis.”

  “You got the results already? Wow, that’s fast! I don’t expect to hear back from the TBI crime lab for another seven and a half weeks.”

  She gave a slight smile. “Well, I don’t get nearly as many samples as the TBI does. And I have a bit more incentive to fasttrack things for you, since I’m hoping to get tenure someday.”

  I grinned. “Delia, if I could give you tenure right now, I would. Five years from now, if I’m still around, remind me that I owe you for this.”

  “Deal.”

  “So what can you tell me about case number 16–17, my poor bear-bait John Doe? Was ForDisc right? Is he Caucasoid, or white, or European, or whatever is today’s word for folks who look like me?”

  “Like you? Not exactly,” she said. She handed me a printout. “According to the AIMs—the ancestry information markers—his DNA comes almost entirely from the Middle East.”

  “The Middle East—my God, of course!” I smacked my forehead in chagrin. “Why didn’t I think of that? That explains a lot. His facial features and skin tone would be different, but his bones would look virtually the same as a white European or an American guy’s.”

  Delia gave a slight smile. “Brothers under the skin,” she observed.

  “Indeed.” Now that I had this piece of the puzzle, other pieces were suddenly coming together, too. Springing up from my chair—was it possible I’d been dozing mere moments before?—I hurried to the table beneath my window and plucked a small wooden object from the tray. Placing it in my upturned palm, I showed it to Delia. “Several of these were found in bear scat near the death scene. I thought they were just buttons, but they’re not. They must be prayer beads.” My mind was racing. “If that’s true, then I bet this was a hate crime, the victim killed because he was Muslim, not because he was black.” Another realization, this one horrifying, came to me. “Christ,” I said, “this explains the raw bacon, too.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Raw bacon,” I repeated. “I told you the victim was kept alive for a while, right?” Delia nodded. “So there were all these empty tin cans. Beanee Weenees, Vienna sausages, deviled ham, stuff like that. The weird thing, though, was that there with all that precooked food was an empty bacon wrapper. Raw bacon. ‘Why would they feed him raw bacon,’ I kept wondering. I finally decided they smeared him with raw bacon to attract the bear. But that wasn’t the only reason.”

  I could see Delia processing this, and when she grimaced, I knew she’d figured it out. “It’s pork,” she said.

  I nodded. “It’s pork. If you’re a bad guy, and you’ve decided to torture and kill a young Muslim, you want to humiliate him as much as you can, right? So after you strip him of his clothes and his future and every other scrap of autonomy and dignity he’s got, how else can you degrade him?”

  “You cover him with something his faith says is unclean and sinful,” she said.

  “You do,” I agreed. “So he knows death’s coming—I’m sure the killer has told him he’s in bear country—and he knows he’s dying an unclean death.”

  “Wow,” Delia said grimly. “Are all your killers this evil?”

  “Not all,” I said. Satterfield, the sadistic serial killer, popped into my mind, uninvited and unwelcome. “Some are much worse.”

  MIRANDA SIGHED AND PUSHED BACK FROM THE COMPUTER screen, squinting and rubbing her eyes. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why can’t we find him?” She stopped rubbing her eyes and shook her head in exasperation. “It all fits. A young Muslim man is abducted, then chained to a tree by some white-supremacist sociopath. He’s subjected to humiliation and abuse, then finally murdered in a god-awful way. I called Laurie Wood, at SPLC, by the way. I was wondering if she saw any inconsistency between the Confederate coin and the Muslim victim. I mean, first we think it’s a white-on-black hate crime, then suddenly we decide it’s white on Muslim—are they interchangeable? She said absolutely—a lot of the same people and groups who hate on blacks are now ramping up against Muslims. HGH.”

  “Huh?”

  “HGH. Texting shorthand. Stands for ‘haters gonna hate.’ Laurie says it’s almost certainly a hate crime.”

  “So does Pete Brubaker,” I said. “I was on the phone with him just before I came down here.”

  She looked up at me. “He’s the retired FBI profiler?”

  “Right.”

  “Does he think it’s somebody connected with one of the known hate groups?”

  “No,” I said. “He thinks it’s an outlier—some wack job who’s gotten all spun up by what he hears on talk radio or reads on the Internet. Those groups spew hate and violence, but when push comes to shove, Brubaker says, they’re big on talk, small on action. But there are outliers even the hate-group leaders find scary. He suspects our killer is one of those fringe loonies.”

  “Laurie, too. She says what worries SPLC the most these days is the rise of the lone-wolf terrorist. Like Dylann Roof, the Charleston kid who killed all those people in the black church. He got obsessed with neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate groups, including the Council of Conservative Citizens.”

  “Who are they?”

  “A white-supremacy group that denounces racial mixing and calls blacks a ‘retrograde species.’ After Roof shot all those people, the CCC claimed it was shocked and saddened. Yeah, right.” She practically spat the words. “Hypocritical jerks.” She slapped her palm on the desktop, and the sound made me jump. “So why the hell can’t we find out who our victim was? I’ve spent hours going through these missing-person reports, and he’s just not there.”

  I shared her frustration, though not her eyestrain. “Well,” I said finally, “if there’s no missing person who fits the profile, I suppose that means nobody’s reported him missing.”

  “But why the hell not?”

  I considered this. I’d worked at least a dozen murder cases in which the victims—some of them dead for weeks or months—had never been reported missing. All those victims had been women, though, and most had been prostitutes, long alienated from their families. “You think he could’ve been a male prostitute?” I said. “Remember what Laurie told us about Glenn Miller, the neo-Nazi caught with a black transvestite in the backseat of his car? Maybe our killer picks up the guy, has kinky sex, and then blames the vic
tim for tempting him to go against his beliefs?”

  Miranda twitched her mouth to one side, then the other, and then shook her head. “I don’t buy it. For one thing, I’ve never heard of a Muslim male prostitute. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but it seems very much at odds with what I know of Muslim culture.” She shrugged. “Not that I know much about Muslim law. But a young Muslim man who’s carrying prayer beads? I have a hard time picturing him walking the streets and turning tricks.”

  The scenario struck me as a bit far-fetched, too. “Okay,” I said, “let’s assume he wasn’t a prostitute. Why else could he go missing without being reported? Runaway?”

  “Twenty’s a little old to be a runaway,” she said. “Besides, even if he were an aging runaway, seems like his family would have reported him. Could’ve just been a real loner, though. Or mentally ill. Or . . .”—her eyes darted back and forth as she thought—“maybe he wanted to be under the radar for some other reason.”

  “Because he was a terrorist?”

  She shot me a sharp glance. “And some Cooke County redneck ferreted out a nefarious plot that Homeland Security and the FBI completely overlooked? Come on, Dr. B, don’t tell me you’ve drunk the every-Muslim-is-a-terrorist Kool-Aid, too? You’re smarter than that. You’re better than that.”

  Stung by her rebuke, I didn’t feel smart, and I didn’t feel good. I felt small and ashamed.

  CHAPTER 16

  I DROVE PAST IT TWICE BEFORE I REALIZED THAT THE low, featureless building was the place I was seeking. The Muslim Community of Knoxville was housed in a drab, one-story structure made of precast concrete, the panels textured with vertical ribs and grooves—a style I’d seen mainly on the exteriors of convenience marts. The windows were protected by steel bars, and surveillance cameras stood watch over the building’s doors and perimeter. The only flourishes that set the place apart from a Circle K or a liquor storage warehouse were a pair of green awnings over the doorways, plus a matching green plywood panel over the front door, featuring a cutout of a pointed dome.

  Looking closer as I turned up Thirteenth Street, I noticed a small sign near the entrance identifying the building as Annoor Mosque. A sign at the entrance to the parking lot made it clear that the mosque was private property, under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Not exactly a welcome mat, I thought, but not surprising. U.S. incidents of anti-Muslim vandalism, harassment, and violence—already higher since 9/11—had tripled in 2016, I had read, egged on by the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Donald Trump and other presidential hopefuls. College students in Tucson had flung trash onto a mosque from the balconies of their luxury apartment tower. Yahoos in Georgia held a march in Atlanta at which they brandished loaded rifles and burned copies of the Quran, causing me to wonder how they’d feel if a band of armed Muslims gathered to burn copies of the Bible.

  As I stepped onto the property and approached the entrance, I wondered if my progress was being tracked on a series of video monitors. The mosque had better security than the Body Farm, I realized, but that probably made sense: Although it was possible for an intruder to steal members of my flock, it wasn’t possible to wound or kill them. A scrap of dialogue from The Revenant popped into my head, and in one of my bizarre flights of fancy, I imagined one of my corpses repeating the line to some malevolent midnight intruder: I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I done it already.

  The mosque’s door, a windowless steel slab, was locked. I rapped on it, gently at first, then, when there was no answer, hard enough to sting my knuckles. Behold, I stand at the door and knock, I thought, with a mixture of hope and irony. Finally, my knuckles aching, I noticed the doorbell, and pressed the button. I looked up then, directly into the lens of the surveillance camera, and gave an awkward wave, plus what I meant as a friendly, trustworthy smile. My greeting must have passed muster, for a moment later, the doorknob turned and the door opened.

  I stepped into the entry hall and was met by two young men. The one who had opened the door was brown skinned—Indian, perhaps—and the other was pale. Both were shoeless, and both were guarded looking. Following their footwear example, and prompted by the tall racks of cubbyholes on either side of the foyer, I removed my rubber-soled Merrell Mocs to indicate respect, then began talking, looking from one dubious face to the other. “Hello,” I began. “My name is Dr. Bill Brockton. I’m the head of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee.” Something flickered in the face of one of the young men—the slight, brown-skinned one—so I focused more of my spiel on him, hoping he might be more receptive, although for all I knew, what I’d seen was a flicker of resentment. “I’m working on a forensic case—a murder, unfortunately—involving what we think was a young Muslim man. The victim was about twenty, and he was killed by someone who might have been a white supremacist.”

  The two young men—both of them around the same age as my victim, as best I could tell—looked at each other in apparent alarm, though I couldn’t tell if their alarm was focused on the crime or on me, the bearer of evil tidings. “We think the victim was killed several months ago,” I went on, “sometime during the summer. Trouble is, we’re not having any luck identifying him. We’ve checked missing-person reports from all over the country”—I kept saying “we” rather than “I,” in hopes of making it clear that I wasn’t a solitary lunatic—“but we can’t find a single report of a young Muslim man who’s gone missing.”

  The pale one—a large young man, easily six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than I—said, “Excuse me. Let me make a call.” He pulled out a phone, stepped away from me, and spoke softly for several minutes. Finally he returned and handed me the phone. “It’s our imam,” he said. “He’s the one you need to speak with.”

  I took the phone from him to speak to the mosque’s leader. During the brief pause after I told him my name and title, he said, in a formal, careful voice, “I am familiar with who you are.” His voice surprised me. He didn’t sound Middle Eastern; he sounded southern, and black. After my initial surprise, though, I felt stupid: Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were far from the only African Americans to convert to Islam; for all I knew, there might be millions of other black Muslims in the United States.

  In any case, taking the imam’s words as a hopeful sign, I repeated what I’d told the young men, adding, “I’m here to ask for help identifying this young man. I’m hoping that you, or someone else at the mosque—or one of your colleagues at another mosque—might know of a young Muslim man who’s missing.”

  He was silent for a moment, then he spoke slowly. “I’ll need to ask around and get back to you. You must understand that an imam doesn’t always know everything about every member of his mosque. I can’t be the imam of just a few people. I have to be the imam of all. And that means keeping a certain distance. So I don’t always know what’s happening in the lives of individual members of the community.”

  “I understand,” I said. “If you would ask around, I’d appreciate it. I’ll leave my card here with these young men, so they can relay my contact information to you.” With that, I thanked him and handed the phone back to the large, pale young man. Then I took two cards out of my wallet and handed one to each. “Whoever sees the imam first, please pass that along. Thank you for letting me in. I’m sorry to bring sad news.”

  Before leaving, I took a closer look at the interior of the mosque. I was seeing only the foyer and its intersection with the main hallway, but, except for the rack for shoes, it could have been one of a hundred small Methodist or Baptist or Presbyterian churches I had seen during my life: Beige cinder-block walls. Acoustic-tile ceilings. Bulletin boards with hand-lettered notices and printed flyers announcing upcoming events. Carpeting that was still plush and bright along the walls, but thin and worn at the center of the halls, thanks to the passage of many years and countless footsteps.

  As the steel door clicked shut behind me, something in the sheen of light on its surface caught my eye, and I noticed that the paint wasn’t unifo
rm. Parts of the door had been recently repainted, I realized, and as I looked closer, I realized that the fresh paint was covering graffiti—harsh, hateful words I could still discern, faintly but unmistakably, despite the efforts to cover them, to cancel them out. Hate always leaves a mark, I thought sadly. Like a break in a bone. It might heal, but you can always see where it happened.

  CHAPTER 17

  I HAD INTENDED TO RETURN TO MY OFFICE AFTER MY visit to the mosque, but instead, I found myself drawn toward I-40. I unclipped my phone and called Miranda. “I’m going back to Cooke County,” I told her. “You wanna go?”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “To help me,” I said. “Why else?”

  “No, I mean why are you going?”

  “I still think we’re missing something,” I said.

  “What could we be missing? We brought back the bones, the chain, even the trash. Waylon brought us the bear poo. We collected everything but the tree. Unless the tree is the missing piece, we got everything there was to get. What is it you’re imagining?”

  I shrugged. “Some missing piece. I don’t know what.”

  “Well, duh,” she said. “Funny thing about missing pieces—they’re almost always . . . missing.”

  “Ha ha, Miss Smarty-Pants. But there’s something else. There has to be.”

  “Why? Because justice always prevails? Because the good guys always win, and the bad guys never get away?”