Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  Price nodded. “Let’s hear from Pete Brubaker next. Pete, thanks for agreeing to dust off your file and jump in on this.”

  “Glad to help, if I can,” he said. “This guy’s bad news. Sooner we get him back in prison, the better off the world is.”

  “Pete,” said Price, “do you have an opinion on whether Satterfield himself killed the doctor’s wife and the guard’s family?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “He killed the EMTs because he had to—they were between him and freedom. But he had no particular reason to kill the others himself. More likely, his accomplices did that. Maybe on Satterfield’s orders, maybe on their own initiative, to cover their tracks. A guy like Satterfield gets off on two kinds of murders—sadistic sexual murders, like the prostitutes he murdered years ago—and revenge killings.”

  “Pete, this is Bill Brockton,” I interrupted. “By revenge, you mean like the way he came after me all those years ago? Because he thought I’d ruined his life?”

  “Exactly,” said Brubaker. “The way he came after you then. The way he’s almost certainly coming after you now. You and probably your family, too. The way he sees it, he’s got unfinished business. With all of you.”

  His words hung in the air for what seemed like several minutes, and I was acutely conscious of every pair of eyes in the room focusing intently on my face. But beyond that—after that—I was conscious of very little. I vaguely heard discussion and delegation of security details, round-the-clock surveillance of my home, my office, Jeff’s home, Jeff’s office, the boys’ school. I heard myself, my voice sounding muffled and far away, reciting phone numbers, addresses, and other information in a robotic monotone.

  After the meeting, I sleepwalked out the door of the building, dwarfed once more by the massive concrete columns, feeling quite small, extremely exposed, and—despite the agent assigned to follow and protect me—very, very alone.

  CHAPTER 23

  “HERE,” I SAID, “I’LL SHOW YOU.” AND WITH THAT, I clambered onto the table at the front of the auditorium and knelt on all fours.

  I loved teaching the intro course, giving freshmen and sophomores—plus the occasional branching-out junior and home-stretch senior—their first taste of the incredible feast that anthropology offered: Evolution. Anatomy. Archaeology. Human civilizations, from aboriginal to Zulu.

  I enjoyed doing what Horace said poets should do: instruct and delight. I liked kneeling and crawling, wagging my butt to illustrate how humans—prehistoric prehuman ancestors, actually, millions of years ago—had once been quadrupeds, before eventually standing up for themselves, “or standing up for their dinner,” as I liked to put it, and becoming bipeds. Students would invariably laugh, and in recent years some had taken to snapping photos with their cell phones, posting them on Facebook or Instagram or SnackChat or whatever the latest social-media network was. They laughed and they learned, and I loved it.

  I used to love it, anyhow. But not anymore. On this occasion, as I twitched and shimmied, hamming up the prehistory of hominids, I felt silly and stupid. I resented my students for requiring entertainment, and I resented myself for stooping to it, quite literally. My heart wasn’t in it, and neither were my hips, and the few token laughs I heard from the students sounded forced and embarrassed. After class, I made a beeline for the door and hurried back to the bone lab, instead of hanging around to joke with students, as I usually did.

  The lab’s heavy steel door banged open, hard and loud, when I entered. Miranda—sitting just inside the door, staring at her computer screen—yelped and jumped, sloshing coffee all over the desktop. “Dammit!” she said, scrambling to move papers and books out of harm’s wet way, then grabbing a handful of tissues from a box to begin mopping.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” My apology came out sounding sulky, as if I felt that I was the one who had been victimized by her reaction.

  “Hey, no worries,” she said. “I didn’t really need those ten years you just took off my life.” She narrowed her eyes and examined my face. “Didn’t you just come from teaching intro?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That usually gets you superjazzed. What happened?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing. It just . . . I dunno. I guess I’m just off my game.”

  “You’ve been off your game for the past week,” she said. “Ever since He Who Must Not Be Named escaped from Azkaban.” Under almost any other circumstances, I would have laughed at her cleverness—equating a real-life scumbag, Satterfield, to the fictional evil wizard in the Harry Potter books. But with Satterfield on the loose, and possibly coming after me—or, worse, coming after my family—her attempt at humor hit me wrong.

  “Glad you find this amusing,” I said.

  “Hey, I just . . .” She trailed off, probably afraid of antagonizing me further. “Sorry.”

  I saw the hurt in her eyes, and I knew my rebuke had stung her. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Me too.” I held up a hand—a farewell, or a truce—and retreated to my private sanctuary. To brood.

  I MUST HAVE BROODED FOR HOURS, FOR WHEN MY intercom beeped, I came out of my funk enough to notice that the steel girders outside my windows were beginning to sink into shadow. I picked up the phone reluctantly, expecting Peggy. “Yes?”

  For a moment I heard only ragged breathing at the other end of the line, then a hoarse whisper. “Can you come here? To the bone lab. Please.”

  It was not Peggy, and something was very wrong. “Miranda? Miranda, what’s wrong?” I bolted upright in my chair, then scrambled to my feet. Now I heard weeping—deep, racking sobs. “Miranda, are you hurt?” But the line had gone dead.

  I considered calling the campus police—was it possible that Satterfield was here? had found his way to the bone lab, and to Miranda?—but I dared not waste the time it would take to call and explain my fears to them. Instead, I ran, hurtling myself down the stairs and out the door that exited beside the north end zone, sprinting along the one-lane service road that threaded the girders supporting the stadium. Students stared as I passed, and I heard one or two call my name, but I waved them off and kept running.

  When I came to a stop outside the bone lab, I paused to look through the window, wondering if I’d see Miranda with a gun to her head or a knife to her neck. Instead, I saw her sitting at her desk, her hands to her mouth, staring at her computer screen. I burst into the door, and the expression on her face when she looked at me was one of heartbreak and horror. “Miranda, what’s wrong?” I repeated. “What’s got you so upset?”

  Instead of answering, she just shook her head, unable to speak, and pointed at the computer. The screen was a pale gray, as if all the color had been bled from it, and it took me a moment to realize what I was seeing. The instant I did, I felt a shock wave of horror ripple through my whole body. The monitor was showing a video, grainy and low in contrast, but the place was clearly recognizable: a patch of woods, shown from a high camera that was looking down—looking down from the trunk, I knew, of a large tulip poplar on a Cooke County mountainside.

  At first there was no movement on the screen, but there was sound—a low whimper of fear, the voice ragged with terror. Moments later a pale figure—a thin, naked young man—came into the frame, lurching and staggering and clinking the chain, casting desperate glances over his shoulder. I strained to see his features but the video’s quality was too poor. A few steps behind the boy lumbered a large black bear, grunting and snuffling and rumbling in a low growl.

  The angle changed—to a different camera, apparently—and the chase scene continued, the boy’s movements becoming jerkier, the chain’s clanking more frantic. Suddenly he stumbled and fell, and the bear was upon him. The boy began screaming, in terror and agony, and the bear roared and snarled. The sound grew louder and more unbearable. Miranda covered her ears and hid her face in her elbow, and I could hear her own cries of distress mingling with the boy’s screams and the bear’s savagery. I didn’t know how to mute the speakers, so I reached o
ut and jerked the wires from them, then wrapped my arms around Miranda’s shoulders. She turned and buried her face against my chest, shaking with sobs that quieted and then grew silent, but continued for what seemed minutes. Finally she pulled away and drew a deep, deep breath, then let it out in a shuddering sigh.

  A roll of paper towels—the thick, heavy blue kind, almost like flannel, sold in Home Depots and AutoZones for use in workshops—sat on a nearby table. I tore off two and handed them to Miranda. She wiped her eyes and face with one, then blew her nose long and loudly into it. Wadding it up and dropping it into the waste can beneath the desk, she repeated the maneuver with the second one. When I offered her the roll for more, she shook her head and took two more deep breaths.

  I pointed at the screen, although by now the horrific video had ended, and asked, “Where on earth did you get that?”

  “The dark web,” she said hoarsely.

  “The what?”

  “The dark web. It’s like a secret, underground Internet, lurking right alongside things like Wikipedia and Facebook and YouTube and Amazon and eBay and NPR and such. The dark web is invisible and unsearchable, unless you know how to get into it and find what you’re looking for. People use it to do things anonymously: Buy and sell drugs. Trade child pornography. Stream pirated movies. And share poison like this.”

  “But . . . how do you even know about it? How did you find this?”

  She reached for the roll of paper towels and tore off one. First she blew her nose again, then she cleared her throat and spat into it. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m drowning in my own effluvia here.” She tossed this one, too, then took a sip of cold coffee from her Day of the Dead mug. “I called Laurie Wood at SPLC yesterday. We talked some more about the ancestry information Delia gave us, and about the prayer beads.”

  “But how—”

  “Hang on, boss, I’m getting there. So after we talked a while, she transferred me to one of her colleagues. The SPLC’s web guru. A young hipster guy, sounds like, named Sean. Sean’s done some poking around in the dark web, and when I told him we thought there might be video of our victim being killed, he mentioned a site he saw once, a year or two ago, called ‘Watch Niggers Die.’”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Charming, right? The site showed video clips of black people in the act of dying, some of it scenes from movies, some of it real-life footage of accidents or shootings taken by security cameras and police cameras. The only requirement was that the footage show the death of a black person. The more gruesome, the better.” I shook my head, in disbelief and disgust, and she went on. “So I started thinking: If there was a site called ‘Watch Niggers Die’—and according to Sean, it got a huge amount of traffic before it was taken down—maybe there’d be something similar about Muslims and Jews and Middle Eastern immigrants. So I started Google searching—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “I thought you said this stuff on the deadly web—”

  “The dark web,” she corrected.

  “I thought you said the dark web wasn’t searchable.”

  “It’s not. So I started searching on the regular web, looking for hate terms for Muslims. Guess what one of the favorites is?”

  I stared at her, then shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe ‘raghead’?”

  “That’s one, yes,” she said. “So is ‘towelhead.’ Both relatively tame. The favorite, among the hard-core haters, is ‘sand nigger.’ So I did more searching on that, and I started seeing a lot of rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth posts—on Facebook and Twitter and other sites—by a guy calling himself White Knight. Get it?”

  “Like, the white knights of the KKK?”

  She nodded. “That, plus white knight as in ‘savior of the white race.’ All these race-baiting, race-hating posts—some about blacks, some about Jews, but more and more, in the past year, about Muslims.”

  I nodded. “It does seem like we’ve turned some kind of corner since the San Bernardino and Paris shootings.”

  “And since Donald Trump made racism and fascism seem patriotic,” she said, her voice venomous. “Anyhow, finally I found a picture of a bloody body. The post said ‘See sand nigger. See sand nigger die. Die, sand nigger, die. Die, die, die.’ Somebody replied, ‘Would LOVE to see that!’ and so WhiteKnight gave him some clues for how to find it. A sort of lame, half-assed version of code. I managed to break it in a few hours. I had just found . . . this”—she made a face of revulsion as she nodded at the computer—“when I called you. You should watch the whole thing. The whole thing—the whole crime—is on here, edited down to ten minutes. It shows the poor kid being beaten and chained to the tree. It shows the killer—wearing a mask, so we don’t see his face—throwing food at the kid and calling him all sorts of vile things. It shows the poor kid begging for his life when he’s being smeared with the bear bait and the bacon grease.”

  “Miranda, you’re amazing,” I said. I felt sickened by the video, but proud of my assistant. And I felt excited about the breakthrough. “No way the FBI can say this isn’t a hate crime now,” I said. “I can’t wait to see Price’s face when she gets a look at this.” As soon as I said it, I felt bad—turning the torture and death video into a trump card I could play, an I-told-you-so I could rub the FBI agent’s nose in. “I shouldn’t have said that,” I told Miranda. “Not that way. I do think the FBI needs to see it, but first I want to show Jim O’Conner and Waylon.”

  She nodded. “That seems right. It is their case, after all. If the feds come storming in, they’ll shove the locals aside and end up getting all the credit.”

  “You’re the one who should get all the credit,” I said.

  Miranda blushed. Her glowing look was only slightly undercut by the small, sparkling droplet dangling, earringlike, from the tip of her nose.

  O’CONNER AND WAYLON DIDN’T SPEAK DURING THE video, but occasionally I heard what seemed to be sounds of dismay from the sheriff—sighs and clucks and tsks—accompanied by low, menacing growls from Waylon. When the bear made its entrance, Waylon’s growls blended with those of the animal, creating a bizarre, stereophonic duet that, because of its oddness, made it easier for me to endure the gruesome footage the second time around. Miranda, I was relieved to notice, had an easier time of it as well, emitting no sobs or wails, and requiring only one tissue at the end.

  “The FBI might—might—be able to track down who shot and uploaded this,” I said, “but it’s a long shot.”

  “Very long,” Miranda agreed. “The guy who posted about it, ‘WhiteKnight,’ would be easy to find, but he’s probably not the one who shot this. Just the one who blabbed about it.”

  “The trouble with this dark web stuff is that it’s anonymous and untraceable,” I added, “because it’s all locked up behind something called door software.”

  O’Conner looked puzzled. “Door software?”

  “Tor software,” Miranda corrected, smiling slightly at my garbled explanation. “T-O-R. The letters stand for ‘the onion router.’ It’s an encryption program—like a computerized combination lock, created by thousands of different computers, and each computer has only one digit of the combination.”

  “Oh, right,” said O’Conner. “Waylon was telling me about this not long ago.” I was surprised and mortified to be the least informed of the group. “The FBI found a way around the encryption—they busted a bunch of child pornographers by exploiting some sort of weakness—but then the Tor programmers fixed that, so now it’s virtually impossible.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it. Why would anybody want to shield child pornographers and drug merchants and other scum of the earth?”

  “Hey, Tor’s not all bad,” Miranda said. “It was created and funded by the U.S. military—the navy and DARPA, I think—so classified intel could be sent online. It’s not just used by kiddie-porn perverts; it’s also used by whistleblowers and investigative journalists and groups like Human Rights Watch to protect their sources. That’s the thing about free speech and privacy and
other constitutional rights: we’re all for them when people like us want them, but not when folks we despise want them.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Please tell me you’re not about to launch into your ACLU pitch now.”

  “No, I am not,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “I’m saving that for the drive back to Knoxville.”

  “Goody,” I said, then turned to O’Conner. “What do you say, Jim? Shall we take this to the FBI and push for a hate-crime investigation? They can’t say no this time—not if they see this video. Maybe they could crack the encryption and track down the person who made it.”

  It was Waylon, not O’Conner, who responded, and his words floored me. “Hell, ain’t no need to go to the FBI for that. I can tell you who done it right now.”

  CHAPTER 24

  WAYLON’S WORDS—“I CAN TELL YOU THAT RIGHT now”—created an electric silence in the sheriff’s office. Miranda, the sheriff, and I all stared at the deputy.

  Finally O’Conner spoke. “Well, go ahead, Waylon. We’re all ears. What do you know, and how do you know it?”

  “I reco’nize the feller’s voice,” said the big man. “That, and the way he walks—kindly bowlegged and loose-jointed, but springy, too. Name’s Jimmy Ray Shiflett. Grew up here. Always had him a big chip on his shoulder.”

  “That goes for all the Shifletts,” said O’Conner. “Seems to be in the DNA.”

  Waylon nodded. “Jimmy Ray lit out when he was big enough—sixteen, maybe eighteen. Spent some time in the army, then come back a few years ago with an even bigger piece of timber on his shoulder.”