Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  I felt sure that the skull had come from a twenty-something male whose skeleton appeared European, both to me and to ForDisc; a male whose DNA looked Middle Eastern, to Delia’s sequencing machines; and whose death, to any decent human being, had been horrific. “This was in Shiflett’s house? A trophy?”

  “Kinda looks that way.”

  The white-supremacist symbol on the forehead seemed not merely offensive but deeply ironic, for without the flesh, this skull—from a brown-skinned Middle Easterner—was indistinguishable from the skulls of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans that the Nazis and the neo-Nazis considered the “master race.” It had the same narrow nasal opening; the same sharp nasal sill beneath that opening; the same geometry in the cheekbones and eye orbits. Brothers under the skin, Delia had said when I’d given her the DNA sample a few days before. Trouble was, so many people had trouble seeing beneath the skin—beneath the surface differences—to the shared humanity at the core.

  Steve nodded grimly. “That’s not all. There’s more in the bottom of the box.”

  I set the skull down gently on the bubble wrap I had already removed from the box, then peered inside again, but I saw only more bubble wrap. I took that out and saw that what I had taken for the box’s bottom was actually a second box tucked inside, square but shallow. I slid my fingers down two sides of this box and lifted it out, then set it on the desk and removed a close-fitting lid. Inside, resting on a bed of odd, squiggly packing material, was a small leather-bound volume. Its dark green cover was embossed with ornate geometric designs in gold and red; the title was also stamped in gold—an exotic, swirling script I guessed to be Arabic.

  The book’s cover had been mutilated—the entire book had been mutilated, in fact—by what appeared to be a large-caliber gunshot. The entry wound, as I would have termed it if it were in a corpse, was a neat half-inch hole in the center of the cover. The exit, out the back, was ragged and twice that size. Bizarrely, the “wound” appeared to be bloody, and I stared in puzzlement, riffling through the volume, whose pages were all stained around the edges of the hole. I turned to Steve. “What on earth?”

  “I suspect it’s related to those,” he said, pointing at the packing material in the shallow box. “The book and the skull were both settin’ on those.”

  “But what are they?” He didn’t answer, so I leaned down to examine the material. I had assumed they were made of cardboard, but looking closer, I saw they were furry, with longer tufts of hair at their ends. I reached in and plucked one from the box, holding it up to the light, my face a foot away. One end bore a tapered, inch-long tuft of hair; the other end was blunt—was cut—and bloody. “My God,” I said. “These are pig tails?”

  “Looks like it to me,” he said, “but I’ll ask the lab to confirm it.”

  I nodded in the direction of the other items. “So I’m guessing that’s pig blood on the skull and on the Quran?”

  “Could be,” he said, “but it might be Shiflett’s—he might have wanted to mark his territory, like a dog pissing on a tree. The lab can test it with HemaTrace, tell us if it’s human or animal. Do you want to keep the skull?”

  “I’d like to, yes. I want to get a facial reconstruction done. Put the likeness out there, see if anybody recognizes it. But I can scrape off some of the blood, so you can take that to the lab, too.”

  He nodded, and I rummaged around in my desk drawer for a scalpel. I cleaned the blade with an antibacterial wet wipe—another staple the Anthropology Department purchased in bulk and consumed at a rapid rate—and began scraping flakes of dried blood from the forehead onto a clean sheet of paper. After I’d scraped off a tiny heap of flakes—if the material were salt, I’d call the quantity a pinch—Steve said, “That’s probably good.” He folded the paper, marked it as evidence, and sealed it in the envelope I offered him.

  “What else did y’all find?” I asked. “Hard evidence tying Shiflett to the kid chained to the tree?”

  “Looks like it, though we need the computer forensics people’s help.”

  “With what?”

  “His computer’s hard drive was erased.”

  “Crap,” I said. “Although frankly, I’m kinda surprised this guy had a computer.”

  “Why, Doc? He did communications work in the military. And you know from the snuff film that he was savvy with video editing and social media.”

  “Good point,” I conceded. “But what can the computer forensics people find, if the hard drive’s been wiped clean?”

  “Erased,” he said, “but probably not wiped. Most people think that deleting files is enough to cover their tracks, but it’s actually not.”

  “How’s that?”

  He shrugged, as if to say that he didn’t fully understand it himself. “The way it was explained to me, deleting a file doesn’t actually delete the file. It makes that file’s space on the drive available, but the data doesn’t really get removed. It just gets overwritten, a little at a time, as new data gets added. So a lot of the old data is still there, especially if there hasn’t been a lot of new data. Sort of like deciding to paint your house a new color, but only painting for a few minutes every couple days. Gonna take a long time before that old paint’s out of sight.”

  “Steve, you missed your calling,” I said. “You should’ve been a computer scientist. Who dabbles in home improvements.”

  He laughed. “Point is, our computer nerds can probably recover a lot of the data.”

  “Well, I hope you’re right.”

  He grinned and held up an index finger. “But wait, there’s more. Much more. We found six video surveillance cameras, powered by a twelve-volt car battery. A video hard drive. DVDs with raw footage of the victim chained to the tree.”

  I felt my excitement rising. “That’s great!” I winced at the way I’d said it, and he gave a shrug: absolution. He understood.

  “Also a big assortment of hate literature. White supremacy publications. Neo-Nazi stuff. A bunch of antigovernment stuff, including The Turner Diaries, Tim McVeigh’s inspiration for Oklahoma City. Militia handbooks. DIY manuals on bomb making and sabotage.”

  I was afraid to ask my next question, but I was even more afraid not to ask it. “Steve, did you find anything that ties Jimmy Ray Shiflett to Nick Satterfield?”

  His brow furrowed. “Satterfield? The escaped killer?” I nodded. “No, nothing. Whatever makes you ask that?”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Just jumpy, I guess. Hearing things go bump in the night.”

  MOST TABLES IN THE BONE LAB WERE LITTERED WITH bare bones. Joanna Hughes’s table was occupied by human heads—some male, some female; some Anglo, some Latino; some smiling, some sad.

  Despite the diversity, all the heads were the uniform gray of potter’s clay. Joanna was a facial reconstruction artist—the first and, as far as I knew, the only student at UT to major in forensic art. She had devised the major herself, combining classes in sculpture, drawing, anatomy, and osteology: a combination that gave her detailed knowledge of how bones, muscles, and tendons meshed to create the complex structures of the human face. Reconstructing a face wasn’t simply a matter of slathering clay onto a skull and mashing it around to create lips and noses and cheeks. No, reconstructing a face was a remarkably intricate process, requiring every muscle of the face to be created and applied, layered and interwoven, just as they had been in life, before the final covering of clay “skin,” whose thickness had to match precise scientific measurements of tissue depth at numerous landmarks on the face and head.

  In my younger days I had tried my hand at clay facial reconstructions. The results were appalling: my reconstructed John Does tended to look like Neanderthals—and misshapen, stupid Neanderthals, at that. Perhaps, in hindsight, it was my failed attempts at facial reconstruction that had taught me to stick with things I could do well. And certainly my own failed attempts had made it easy for me to appreciate the remarkable blend of art and science manifested in every one of Joanna’s reconstructions. No
w, I was counting on that blend to show us what the killer’s grainy video had not: the face, in detail, of our Cooke County murder victim.

  When I walked into the bone lab with the skull Steve Morgan had brought me, I arrived just in time to see Joanna grab the nose of an African American woman and twist it completely off the face. “Ouch,” I said. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t like it,” she said. “It didn’t look right.” She frowned. “Noses are hard. There’s no foundation of bone to guide you. Nothing but a hole—the nasal opening.” She made a self-contradicting face. “Well, actually, there is a formula for estimating breadth and projection. But it still leaves a lot of margin—a lot of requirement—for artistic interpretation. So you just have to guess, from how massive or delicate the rest of the face is, what sort of nose that particular face is asking for. And this face”—she nodded at the one she had partially defaced—“wasn’t asking for the nose I gave her.” She pushed back from the wooden table and eyed the box under my arm. “So that’s him? The guy chained to the tree?” I nodded and handed her the box. She opened it and carefully removed the skull, studying it closely as she talked to me. “You said he’s in his twenties?”

  “Early twenties, at most. Could be as young as nineteen. But definitely not, say, twenty-seven.”

  “Wow, the bone structure is classic Caucasoid. But you said he’s Middle Eastern?”

  “According to the DNA.”

  “Crap,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The nose. Narrow? Wide? Straight? Hooked? Middle Eastern noses are all over the map.”

  “So to speak,” I said.

  She laughed. “So to speak.”

  “You’ll do fine,” I assured her, as she set the skull on a cushion to one side of her table. “Just give him whatever nose the rest of his face wants to have.” The last thing I saw, before I turned to go, was a scowling Joanna taking an X-acto knife to the face of the dead African American woman and, in the place where a nose had been only a few moments before, carving a two-inch question mark.

  She’ll do fine, I assured myself. Really.

  CHAPTER 28

  I THRASHED, AWAKE AND ANXIOUS, FOR MOST OF THE night—the new normal, apparently—then finally drifted off shortly before dawn. I woke up at eight, weary and bleary and astonishingly late for me, and called the bone lab. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda,” answered my assistant, sounding far chirpier than I felt.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Sort of.”

  “Dr. B? Did you just wake up? I mean, you? Just now?”

  “Ten minutes ago,” I said. “I finally fell asleep at six, so I’m running behind on everything today. How would you feel about teaching today’s nine o’clock forensic class?”

  “Me? Sure. But . . .”

  “But what? You can say if you don’t want to.”

  “No. I mean, no, I don’t want to say no. I’d love to teach it. Today is blunt-force trauma, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But . . . you love teaching that class. Are you sure you can bear to let go of the reins for an hour?”

  “Are you implying I have control issues?”

  “No, I’m not implying it. I’m saying it, straight up. You have a teeny-tiny control issue, roughly the size of Texas, when it comes to teaching class.”

  “You just watch me,” I said. “I’ll sit in the back of the room and I won’t say a word.”

  “Wait—I’ll be up there teaching, and you’ll just be sitting there?”

  “In the back of the room,” I repeated. “I won’t say a word.”

  “Right. Sure, boss. And then hell will freeze over. And our elected leaders will all work together for the common good.”

  “Not a word, I tell you. Not so much as a syllable.”

  BY THE TIME I GOT TO CAMPUS, I HAD RALLIED A BIT, and I had mixed feelings about enlisting Miranda to teach. Unfortunately, I had painted myself into a corner, with a thick coat of paint in the unmistakable shade of Stubborn Pride. I had left myself no choice but to let her teach.

  I suspected she hadn’t headed to class yet, so I stopped off at the bone lab to check. At the very least, I could accompany her and offer constructive feedback. Perhaps she’d even offer the reins of class back to me.

  The lab’s door of the bone lab gave a particularly loud rasp as I pushed it open, setting my teeth thoroughly on edge. “How do you stand that noise?” I asked Miranda, whose desk was only three feet from the source of the sound.

  “Hmm? What noise?” She looked up. “Oh, the door? It’s like anything annoying—you hear it enough times, you learn to tune it out.” She smiled at me with an arch, enigmatic smile.

  Across the room, I saw the familiar blond hair of Joanna Hughes, her bent head and tense shoulders a study in concentration. “You working on our Middle Eastern guy?” I called. She didn’t answer, so I ambled over to take a look. Peering over her shoulder, I was stunned. Three days before, I had handed her a bare skull. Now, a pair of warm brown eyes stared back at me from a remarkably lifelike face. “Joanna, you’re amazing,” I said. “How on earth did you finish this so fast?”

  “He’s not actually finished,” she said. “I haven’t done anything with the hair yet, and I’m not sure about the nose. But he’s getting close, I think.” She took a deep breath and released it, hunching her shoulders up to her ears, then letting them drop. “You can get a lot done if you don’t sleep. This guy got under my skin. Miranda told me how he died—how he was killed—and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. So I figured I might as well just go flat out.”

  “It’s remarkable,” I said, studying the details: the chiseled cheekbones, the prominent eyebrows, the strong, straight nose. “This is so much better than that grainy video footage. Once the TV stations and the newspapers put this out there, somebody’s sure to recognize him.”

  Miranda sidled up behind me. “Notice anything interesting about Joanna’s reconstructions?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, eyeing the half-dozen heads on her table. “I notice they’re terrific. What are you noticing?”

  “They’re all the same color,” Miranda said. “The African American woman, the European man, the Hispanic kid from the Arizona desert, the Middle Eastern guy. All the same shade of gray.” I was on the verge of pointing out that of course they were, because they were all made of clay, but I realized she was making a bigger point. “It’s boring, but it’s safe,” she went on. “Our guy, 16–17. Maybe killed just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the wrong clothes or the wrong skin.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Isn’t it a shame,” she said, “that what makes some people different—what makes them less boring—makes other people hate them?”

  She looped a scarf around her neck—the morning felt more like midwinter than late fall—and said, “I need to head to class.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said. Miranda shot me a suspicious glance. “Hey, I’m only helping carry the skulls. I won’t meddle in class. Promise.”

  MIRANDA CLICKED TO THE NEXT SLIDE, A CLOSE-UP of a bashed-in skull, shown from behind. Thirty student faces leaned forward, captivated by the image from a forensic case we had worked a year before. “So from this blow,” she said, using a laser pointer to highlight the crater at the back of the skull, “the fracture patterns radiate outward about the same distance in all directions.” She traced several of the lines, each of them a foot long on the three-foot image of the skull. “Compare that to the other blow.” She clicked to the next slide, showing the skull’s shattered temporal bone. “Notice this fracture,” she said, highlighting a crack that zigzagged from the temple toward the back of the head. “See how it starts out nice and strong, like the others? It’s cracking, cracking, cracking, but then—bam—it stops all of a sudden, at this point where it intersects the one from the back of the head.”

  Looking out at the students—junior and senior undergraduates taking Introduction to Forensic A
nthropology—she posed a question. “What does that tell you about the order in which the blows to the head were delivered? And therefore, what inferences can you draw about the defendant’s statement to the police?”

  The class was silent, possibly because they hadn’t read the background materials on the case. Finally, a young woman in the front row—Mona, noteworthy for her quiet intelligence, flowing tunics, and ever-present hijab covering her hair—raised her hand. “He’s lying,” she said. “It wasn’t self-defense.”

  I smiled, then—unable to stay in my seat any longer—I stood and took the reins of the class back from Miranda, along with the laser pointer. “Explain,” I prompted Mona.

  “The defendant said he hit the victim in the side of the head first, to avoid being stabbed, then hit him again as he fell. But the blow to the temple was the second blow, not the first one.”

  “Go on,” I encouraged. Beside me, I heard Miranda sigh, just loudly enough to be sure I heard it, as she stepped aside. “How can you tell?”

  “The way the cracks propagated.”

  I knew what “propagated” meant, but I suspected some of her classmates didn’t. “Mona, pretend you’re on the witness stand, in court,” I told her. “Dr. Mona Faruz, forensic anthropologist for the prosecution. Explain your terminology and your reasoning.”

  “Sorry,” she said, her olive skin flushing slightly. “Fractures in brittle materials propagate—they grow and spread—in a consistent way, whether the material is a ceramic cup or a steel pipeline or a human skull.” Mona was an engineering major, so I suspected she knew more than anyone else in the room about fracture mechanics. “When an impact is severe enough to cause cracking, the crack, or cracks, will spread from the point of impact until their energy is dissipated, or weakened.”