Without Mercy (13 page)

IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS, I UNLOCKED THE DOOR
of the bone lab, the steel door grating harshly as it dragged free of the sill. Switching on the lights, I closed my eyes against the glare of the fluorescents, gradually relaxing my squint so that my eyelids glowed red, the spider work of capillaries showing through, until I opened the lids and blinked in the cold brightness.

Venturing deep into the ranks of steel shelves in the lab's inner recesses, where the stadium's grandstands sloped down from overhead, I chose three boxes at random—three from among the thousands—and carried them to an empty table at the front of the room.

The corrugated boxes, measuring three feet long by a foot square, felt as dry and brittle as the bones within them. The labels on the ends of the boxes, listing the site and grave number and date of excavation, had faded and begun to peel during the decades since they had been printed and glued to the cardboard. A thick layer of dust—some of it Tennessee dust, some of it South Dakota dust, perhaps some of it the
dust of Caesar—whirled away when I puffed a breath across the top of the boxes.
Dust in the wind
, I thought.
All we are is dust in the wind
.

Opening the first box—its lid hinged along one side—I peered inside and saw a large, magnificent specimen: a tall, robust male, his bones the rich color of caramel. The skeleton was virtually complete and in remarkable condition; even the long, thinly arching ribs were unbroken. A string had been threaded through the spinal canal of each vertebra and then tied in a loop to keep them together, and for a moment I imagined them as a bizarre necklace, a trophy that a warrior might wear to strike fear into an enemy from another tribe. The bones of the man's leg—the tibia and especially the femur—were long and massive. Aligning the two and holding them alongside my own leg, I saw that the man would have towered over me.

I laid him out in anatomical position on one of the lab's long tables, and he stretched from one end all the way to the other. He was an adult, but a young one, I saw when I looked at his teeth. He had a complete set of molars—first, second, and third—so he must have been at least eighteen. But the surfaces of the molars, especially the third molars, showed little of the rapid, characteristic occlusal wear caused by the Plains Indians' gritty diet of stone-ground corn. Clearly he was in his prime, and an impressive prime it must have been. Hoping to pin down his age more closely, I checked the distal end of a femur, as well as the medial end of a clavicle. Neither end had fully fused to the shaft just yet, so the man was probably not yet twenty-five. His relative youth was also corroborated by the cranial sutures, the joints in the skull. The sutures showed up as dark, sharp lines squiggling between the bones; they were only just beginning to blur and fill and
smooth, as the body began to apply its own bony spackling compound to seal and conceal the joints. By the time he was sixty, those cranial sutures would be entirely obliterated . . . except that this magnificent young man would not, could not, did not make it to sixty. At twenty years of age, his left temporal bone had been shattered by a blunt object—a war club, I suspected—wielded by a Mandan or Pawnee or Sioux warrior who had been stronger, or faster, or stealthier than this remarkable young man.

The second box contained a young woman—a girl, really, no more than fifteen, when she died. She was tall for her age, I realized when I removed the leg bones from the box, perhaps five feet eight inches already, and still growing. I could see this because the epiphyses, the ends and edges of her bones, had not yet fully fused to stop her growth. Her sacrum, the assemblage of the five lowest vertebrae, was already large, suggesting that her pelvic cavity would have had plenty of room to bear strapping babies. But her hips not yet reached their full womanly width. The iliac crest—the outer, curving edge of the hip bones—was not yet fused to the body of the ileum, so the growth plate between the two surfaces was still building. She was still growing . . . except that, because of fever or exposure or some other cause that had left no signs of trauma on her bones, she
wasn't
still growing. And she would never, of course, bear those strapping babies her body had been readying itself to bear. I laid her out in anatomical order, too, alongside the male, struck by the resemblance they bore to medieval European grave markers, the full-length stones bearing effigies of skeletons to remind the living of the inevitability of death.

The smallest, yet somehow the most powerful, was the third, a child. A meager cluster of bones—scarcely more than a
handful—surrounded by crumpled newspaper and foam padding to keep it from rattling around in the vastly overscaled, adult-sized box. The teenaged girl's hipbone had been as big as my hand; this child's—there was no way to tell if it was male or female—was smaller than my ear. But what was most striking about the child—who was a month or so shy of its second birthday, judging by the presence of a full set of baby teeth—was the head: the disproportionately large cranium and eye orbits that make the skulls of babies and children look otherworldly, almost like little aliens. The child's cranial sutures—at this stage rather like jagged sawteeth or the ragged edges of splintered wood—had not yet started to interlock, as they would begin to do by adolescence. As a result, after the soft tissue had decayed, the skull had literally fallen to pieces in the grave: the frontal bone, containing the forehead and the upper halves of the immense, staring eye orbits; the parietal bones, which had formed the left and right sides of the skull; the occipital bone, whose convex outer surface and ridged inner surface reminded me of the weathered shell of a dead tortoise I had found one summer when I was a boy.

A folded piece of paper was tucked into one end of the box. I took it out, unfolded it, and read the inventory of grave goods buried with the baby:

This burial was associated with many artifacts:

bison robe

shell pendant

glass marbles

small glass bottle

brass baby spoon

blue glass pendant

clay buffalo effigy

In addition, there were many types of glass beads with this burial, including the following types and numbers: 11,067 blue glass seed beads, about 300 of which were still attached to a bison robe; 70 white glass seed beads; 9 ellipsoidal, red, transparent beads; 16 ellipsoidal, white, wire-wound beads; 10 ellipsoidal, milky white, wire-wound beads; 1 ellipsoidal green faceted transparent bead; 2 tubular blue beads; 3 compound tubular red on white beads; 22 spherical peacock blue beads; 19 yellow-and-blue spherical transparent beads; 17 spherical blue beads with white and yellow spots; 5 spherical clear beads; 3 amber-colored spherical transparent beads; and 3 spherical green beads
.

Marveling at the treasure trove of grave goods—the list took me back to the day we had unearthed the baby, and the crew and I had talked about how precious the child must have been in life, and how deeply grieved in death—I began laying out the bones, tucking them between those of the young man and the girl. Just as I finished, the bone lab's door opened.

“Good Lord,” said Peggy. “What are you doing, and why are you doing it so early in the morning? It's not even seven yet.”

“I woke up early,” I said.

“You
always
wake up early,” she said, with the same half-exasperated tone in which Miranda had said the very same words to me a few days before.

“I dreamed about Arikara Indians last night, so I came in to spend some time with them.” I turned and looked at her. “What about you? What are
you
doing here at this hour?”

“I wasn't sleeping either,” she said, and I thought I saw her cheeks flush slightly. “I saw the lights on and thought Miranda forgot to turn them off last night.” She stepped through the doorway, came into the lab, and walked over to the table where I stood. Looking down at the three Arikara skeletons, she caught her breath. “They're beautiful,” she said softly. “Were they a family?”

“What? No. At least, I don't think so.”

“They look like one,” she said. “Or like they could have been one, if they'd had the chance. They make me think of all those Renaissance paintings of the Holy Family, except that they're Native American.” She laughed softly. “And skeletons. But still . . .”

She laid a hand on my arm for just an instant, then turned and walked out, leaving me to ponder the dead Indians, the Holy Family, and the mysterious ways of women.

I FELT STUPID. MIRANDA WAS MY STUDENT; I WASN'T
just her boss, I was her doctoral adviser and dissertation-committee chairman, so I occupied a far loftier rung of the academic and intellectual ladder. In theory, that is.

But reading her dissertation—or, rather, attempting to read it—made me feel like an impostor and ignoramus. Hell, even the title intimidated me: “An Empirical Examination of Frontal Sinus Outline Variability Using Elliptic Fourier Analysis.” The good news was, I was on solid ground for the first nine words. The frontal sinus—the airspace in the bones of the forehead, just above the brow ridges—was familiar territory. Roughly fan shaped with scalloped edges, the frontal sinus sometimes reminded me of the lobes of a chanterelle mushroom. Forensically, the frontal sinus was a useful tool for confirming a dead person's identity, provided that an antemortem x-ray of the person's skull, showing the frontal sinus, could be found for comparison to the postmortem x-ray. Like fingerprints, teeth, DNA profiles, and snowflakes, frontal sinuses were unique: no two alike. So when
it came to frontal sinus outline variability, and its forensic value, I was on board.

But then, after breezing through the first nine words, I slammed into those final three: “Elliptic Fourier Analysis.” I knew, from looking him up, that Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in the 1700s. I also knew that he had found ways to use mathematical formulas to define shapes, outlines, and patterns. The main thing I knew, though, was that it took someone far more mathematically gifted than I was just to follow his thinking, let alone to harness it, to use it—as Miranda had done—to map the intricate, intracranial coastline of the frontal sinus. I didn't know what the hell regular old Fourier analysis was, let alone
elliptical
Fourier analysis.

Mercifully, Miranda's dissertation committee included members who were quite comfortable with its terminology and methodology. My colleague Richard, the developer of ForDisc, didn't bat an eye at the mention of Fourier analysis; it was quite possible that ForDisc relied on the magic of Fourier analysis—straight or elliptical or even zigzag, for all I knew—to evaluate unknown skeletons and issue its predictions about stature and race. And Dr. Gerald Grimes, who headed the Radiology Department at UT Medical Center, had seen thousands of frontal sinus x-rays in his long career, so if anybody qualified as an expert on the shape of the frontal sinus, surely he did.

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 victim 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.