Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  I didn’t want her to get so detailed that she’d lose people. Using the laser pointer that I’d taken from Miranda, I traced the shortest crack. “Are you saying that something dissipated the energy of this crack? What was it? Why didn’t this crack propagate any farther?”

  “Cracks don’t jump cracks,” she said, holding up both hands to form a big T, as if calling for a time-out. “The crack from the blow to the temporal bone stopped when it intersected this crack, which was already there—from the first blow, which the defendant delivered to the back of the head.” She held up an index finger to underscore a point she was about to make. “A blow he couldn’t have delivered if he was face-to-face with the victim, as he claimed.”

  I nodded. “Class,” I told the group, “you’re the jury. Based on the testimony you’ve just heard, how many think this was murder, rather than self-defense?” All but two hands went up. “Good job, Dr. Faruz.” I checked my watch; as I suspected, we were at the end of our class period. “Okay, that’s all for today. Next time, we’ll talk about gunshots. Be sure to look at the cases ahead of time. I’m giving extra points for class participation next time.”

  The students stood and started filing out, and I began boxing up the skulls we’d brought to class. As I closed the lid to one of the boxes, I glanced up and noticed a boy in the third row nudge his neighbor. Then, to my astonishment, he stuck his foot into the aisle just as Mona was passing him. She tripped and fell, her books and papers and purse and laptop flying, and the two boys snickered. “Oops,” said the boy who’d tripped her. He muttered something else; I couldn’t catch all of it, but I was sure I heard the word “rag.”

  Before I could react, Miranda was on them like a shot. Grabbing the culprit by his shirt, she hauled him to his feet, then released him. I started toward them, half expecting her to strike him. Instead, she yanked her scarf from around her neck and wrapped it over the top of her head, like a hijab. “I’m Muslim, too, asshole,” she snarled. “You want to trip me? Go on. I dare you. I fucking dare you.”

  As I started toward them to intervene, I heard a sharp popping sound from the back of the classroom, which made me stop and look up in alarm. Then I heard it again. One of the boys in the class, I saw, was slowly clapping his hands. A dozen other students had stopped on their way out, and now, one by one, they joined the first one in applauding. A girl hurried forward; she helped Mona to her feet and gave her a hug. Another gathered Mona’s scattered possessions. A third girl, who also happened to be wearing a scarf, joined the group, and—slowly and deliberately, her eyes full of challenge—she rewound her scarf to echo Miranda’s gesture of solidarity.

  I admired their kindness, but I thought it best to defuse the situation. Laying a hand on Mona’s shoulder, I said, “Miss Faruz, are you all right?” She nodded, not speaking, tears streaking her face. “Do you have another class now?” She nodded again. “I don’t want to make you late for that. But come see me this afternoon, please. Will you do that?” I gave her shoulder a squeeze, and she managed a faint smile as she nodded a third time, then turned to go.

  I touched Miranda’s arm lightly; even through the sleeve of her sweater, I could feel the knotted muscles. “Miranda, can you carry these skulls back by yourself?”

  She drew a long breath, then let it out slowly, and the tension in her arm eased a bit. “Yes,” she said, her voice almost inaudible.

  “Thank you.” I squared off facing the troublemaker—Kevin McNulty was his name—and his buddy. Pointing to his buddy, I said, “You—out” and gestured with my head toward the doorway. Without a word, he scrambled to his feet and fled, leaving me alone in the room now with my problem student. “What do you have to say for yourself, McNulty?” I saw his jaw set and his eyes flash with defiance. He wasn’t going to make this easy for me. “Start talking, son. And don’t give me any crap about it being an accident. I saw the whole sorry business. Heard it, too. So if you bullshit me, I’ll call the UT Police so fast it’ll make your head spin, and I’ll tell them how I saw you assault a woman in my classroom.”

  The boy blanched. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead, and his hands began to tremble, but he remained silent. “You’re running out of time, boy,” I said. He still didn’t speak, so I took my cell phone from my belt, scrolled through my contacts until I found “UT Police,” and hit “call.” I angled the phone slightly, so he could hear that the call was genuine. “UT Police,” came a woman’s voice through the speaker. “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton, in Anthropology,” I said, looking into McNulty’s eyes. “Can you send an officer to the auditorium in McClung Hall, please?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “Is this an emergency?”

  McNulty finally broke. “Wait,” he said. “Please. I’m sorry. Really. Please don’t.”

  My eyes still locked on his, I told the dispatcher, “Officer, hang on. I think we’ve got this resolved.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I can have somebody there in two minutes.”

  “Thank you, but I think we’re okay here.”

  “All right, Dr. Brockton. You take care, and call back if you need us.”

  “I will,” I told her. “I appreciate it.” I hung up, reholstered my phone, and motioned to a chair. McNulty sat, and I did too, leaving a seat between us as a buffer. “Now you tell me, what on earth made you think that was an acceptable way to treat another student? Was it because she’s a girl who’s smart? Do you treat all intelligent women that way?” He shrugged and shook his head. “That’s not good enough. I need you to explain. What were you thinking about her that gave you permission to demean her like that?”

  He heaved a heavy sigh. “I guess . . . I guess I just snapped. I see all these Muslim immigrants everywhere, and it . . . it feels like they’re taking over our country. I think they’re bad for our country . . .” He trailed off and shrugged again.

  “These Muslim immigrants? Like Mona?” He nodded tentatively. “Mona was born and raised here in Knoxville,” I told him. “She’s every bit as American as you are. Her father’s a professor here. Did you know that?” He shook his head. “He’s one of the best electrical engineers in the world. So you didn’t know that, either, did you?”

  His cheeks flushed again. “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “Therefore, you also don’t know that her father’s specialty is the U.S. electric power grid—specifically, ways to make it less vulnerable to blackouts and terrorist attacks. You think that’s bad for our country?”

  “No, sir, I guess not.”

  “I don’t have to guess,” I said. “I know it’s not bad for our country. It’s damned important for our country. But you looked at Mona, saw a head scarf, and decided she was beneath you—just another raghead immigrant, right?”

  “Yes, sir, I guess I did. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not the one you need to say that to, am I?”

  “No, sir, probably not.”

  “Probably not?”

  He sighed. “I should apologize to her.”

  “Well, I’ll give you a chance to do so. At the beginning of class next time.”

  He looked pained. “In class? In front of class?”

  I nodded. “If you want to stay in the class. And avoid a misconduct hearing and a police report.”

  Another sigh. “Yes, sir. Can I go now?”

  “No, you can’t,” I said. “We’re not quite through here. It sounds like maybe you’re willing to see Mona a little differently, now that you know she’s not just some pushy immigrant?” McNulty’s eyes darted back and forth, and I could see him parsing my words, searching for subtext—seeking a snare—so I laid it on the table. “But what if she were? What if she were an Afghan immigrant, or a Syrian refugee? What’s wrong with that?”

  “Well, maybe nothing, individually. But . . . there’s so many of them, and a lot of them are terrorists.”

  “Really? A lot? How many?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But any is too many. Don’t you think so?
Or do you want terrorists coming to America?”

  “McNulty, if you condescend to me one more time, you’ll be out of here so fast your privileged little head will spin,” I snapped. “Of course I don’t want terrorists here. But I also don’t want to live in a country that’s got a wall around it. I still believe in the Statue of Liberty—‘send me your poor’; ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door’; all that land-of-opportunity stuff. Maybe it’s corny, but I still believe it’s part of what made this country great.”

  I scrutinized the boy’s face: pale skin, dark hair. “McNulty. Is that a Native American name?” He blinked, startled. “I’m kidding. Irish, right?” He nodded warily. “You know when your ancestors came to America?”

  “Not exactly. A long time ago. Early eighteen hundreds?”

  “Ask your parents or grandparents. Chances are, they came in the late 1840s or early 1850s. You know why?”

  He shrugged. “Looking for a better life, I suppose.”

  I nodded. “Sure, if by ‘a better life’ you mean not starving to death. They probably came during the Great Famine. Also called the Irish Potato Famine. A million people in Ireland starved to death between 1845 and 1852. A million more came to the United States. You know what they found when they got here?” He shrugged again; he was a shrugger, McNulty. “Bigotry. Prejudice. Abuse by people who thought that these scrawny, dirty Irish immigrants were second class. ‘Irish need not apply,’ a lot of help-wanted ads specified. People said there were too many Irish, that they were dangerous and drunkards, that they were bad for America. Sound familiar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “People said similar things about immigrants from Italy and Poland and Germany and Russia. Thing is, McNulty, we’re all immigrants here. Native Americans are the only ones with a legitimate beef against immigrants.” I leaned toward him and squeezed his shoulder in what I hoped he’d take as a gesture of conciliation and encouragement. His deltoid was surprisingly robust. “You must work out a lot. Do you?”

  “Four or five times a week.”

  “Don’t forget to challenge your heart muscle,” I said. “Most important muscle in the body. Takes a much stronger man to be kind than to be a bully and a jerk.” He gave a perfunctory nod, but I could tell he’d had enough moral instruction for one day—maybe enough for a lifetime. “Now get out of here. I’ve got work to do.”

  He stood and headed for the door. “Just so you know,” I called after him, “you’re not out of the woods yet.” He stopped in his tracks and turned, looking alarmed. “If Mona wants to file an assault charge or a conduct complaint, she’s within her rights. But I’ll encourage her to give you another chance. If you apologize—and I mean a sincere apology, not some half-assed, sullen sham—I hope she’ll show you some compassion. Which is more than you showed her.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you.” And with that he was gone.

  I slumped in the chair, suddenly weary—and painfully aware that I wasn’t out of the woods yet either.

  MIRANDA WAS IN THE BONE LAB, AS I’D THOUGHT she would be, but—contrary to my prediction—she wasn’t absorbed in an e-mail or a Google search or a post for her Facebook page devoted to forensic anthropology. She was staring at half a dozen skulls, arranged in a semicircle on a lab table, their empty eye orbits all staring back at her. Surveying the lot of them, I noticed that she had three males and three females; two Caucasoids, two Negroids, and two Arikara Indians. “What are you looking for,” I asked, “and what do you see?”

  “I’m looking for an explanation,” she said. “A reason why people choose to see differences as defects. As deficiencies.”

  “You’re looking in the wrong place,” I told her. “You won’t find your answer in the dead. Only in the living. But you already know that.”

  She sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do. It just always surprises and saddens me when I smack up against that kind of thing.”

  “I know,” I told her. Quit stalling, Brockton, I scolded myself. I drew a slow breath. “You know I admire your idealism. And your sense of justice. And your bravery.” I paused. Here came the hard part. “But Miranda—”

  She interrupted me with a sudden, keening cry. “I know, I know,” she said, her shoulders suddenly shaking, her words so choked I could scarcely understand them. “I crossed a line. I did.”

  “You did,” I agreed. “Never lay hands on a student in anger. Never, never, never.”

  “I know, I know,” she wailed. “You’ve taught me better than that. You’ve shown me better than that. I’m so sorry, Dr. B. So, so sorry.” She wiped a trail of tears and snot off her face with her scarf, then stared at the slimy mess. “Goddammit,” she said, but there was no heat in the curse; just defeat. “Do you need to fire me? Do you want me to quit?” Her eyes, so sorrowful and vulnerable, damn near broke my heart.

  “Good grief, come here,” I said. I opened my arms and enfolded her in a hug—not the first one I’d ever given her, I realized, but one of only a few, and the only one that had ever been more than a quick, awkward, surface-level gesture. “When I was a little kid,” I said, “maybe five or six years old, my grandmother came to visit. Nana, we called her. She loved to take us for nature hikes, and one day, on one of these nature hikes, she was teaching me how to make a Robin Hood hat out of a great big leaf. She pulled a leaf off of this bush and made a hat for herself, to show me how, then pointed to a leaf and said, ‘Now you try.’ So I grabbed the leaf and pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go of the stem. Finally I snapped, ‘How do you get these damn leaves off?!’ She was shocked. Hell, I was shocked—I didn’t even know I knew that word, let alone how to use it—and I knew I was in for it. Sure enough, when we got home, my mother said she’d have to wash out my mouth with soap.”

  I felt Miranda move—was it a sob, or a chuckle?—and heard her snuffle, and I went on. “But hours passed, and she didn’t do it. I knew it was still coming, and the suspense was killing me. So finally, just before bedtime, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I found the biggest bar of Ivory soap we had, and I crammed it into my mouth and I rubbed it all over my tongue and the roof of my mouth, and I scraped it back and forth across all my teeth. By the time I was done, I’d whittled about half of that bar into my mouth, and I was gagging from the taste.”

  “Good story,” Miranda said, disengaging and stepping back so she could look at me. “And there’s a point, too, I’m guessing?”

  “Two weeks later, one of my older cousins was visiting, and said the f-word. My mother washed out his mouth on the spot, but all she did was rub the soap back and forth across his lips a couple times, like ChapStick. My point is, don’t go overboard on the self-punishment. Quitting would be the worst thing you could do. Just . . . go and sin no more.”

  Smiling through her tears, Miranda pressed her hands together, as if in prayer, and gave the slightest, sweetest bow of her head. “No more,” she said. “Never, never, never.”

  I believed she was telling the truth.

  For both our sakes, I hoped she was.

  CHAPTER 29

  “SOMEONE’S ON LINE ONE FOR YOU,” PEGGY ANNOUNCED curtly when I picked up the phone. “Says it’s important, but he won’t give his name.”

  I felt a bloom of sweat on my scalp, and my mental alarms went nuts, all of them shrieking at two hundred decibels. “Does it sound like Satterfield?”

  “How would I know what he sounds like? I’ve never talked to him. Never heard him interviewed.”

  “Sorry. Stupid question.”

  “But just guessing? I’d say he sounds young and scared, not middle-aged and murderous.”

  “Okay, I’ll take it. And Peggy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I know I’ve been acting strange. I’m really sorry. Please try”—I almost said “not to take it personally,” but that seemed like a surefire prelude to an epic case of foot-in-mouth disease—“to bear with me a little longer. Till this Satterfield storm blows over.”

  There was
a pause. “I’ve borne with you for nearly twenty-five years now,” she said. “I’d say that’s a pretty good testament to my patience.”

  “Touché,” I said, feeling the unaccustomed sensation of a smile twitching at my lips.

  I pressed the blinking button for line 1. “Hello, this is Dr. Bill Brockton. How can I help you?”

  “Dr. Brockton?” Peggy was right, though if anything, she’d erred on the side of understatement. My caller sounded very young—the age of my grandsons, perhaps—and extremely scared. “The Dr. Brockton who’s the head of the Body Farm?”

  “That’s me,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Hassim,” he said. “I met you the other day? When you came to the mosque?”

  My nervousness vanished, replaced by a sort of electric hum of hope. “Hello, Hassim. Nice to hear from you. I hope I didn’t cause any trouble by showing up uninvited.”

  “No, sir. I mean, people are pretty nervous these days, with all the terrible things being said about Muslims.” His voice—no discernible accent, so perhaps, like Mona, he, too, was the American-born child of immigrant parents—sounded less fearful now; more weary, perhaps, with a hint of bitterness.

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “I’d be nervous, too. Not everyone feels that way. I certainly don’t.”

  “No, sir, I didn’t think you did. I remembered you when you came to the mosque. You talked at our high school last year. The STEM Academy. The new magnet school in the old L&N train depot.”

  “Y’all were a good group,” I said, although the truth was, I didn’t actually remember them. School groups tend to blur together, at least if you talk to a hundred a year. But I did remember liking the setting: a magnificent old railway station, converted into a school for science nerds. “What’s on your mind, Hassim?”

  “I’m not supposed to be calling you. The imam said we should keep the community’s business to ourselves. But it doesn’t seem right, not to help . . .” He trailed off.