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“I sure did, Doc. That’s partly what makes me think it’s part of the crime scene. I’m guessing somebody used to wear that around his neck on a chain.”
I nodded. “Maybe the victim pulled it off in a struggle.”
“That’s the way I figure it, too,” he agreed.
I glanced at Miranda, whose eyes were darting to and fro, a sign that she was thinking hard. Suddenly her gaze snapped back to me. “Jesus,” she said. “It’s a hate crime. Has to be. Some redneck racist chained a black kid out there to die. God, I hate haters!”
“Hang on,” I said. “We don’t know the victim was black.”
“But we don’t know that he wasn’t, either,” she pointed out. “And aren’t you always quoting Occam’s razor? ‘The simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost always right’?”
“I might have said that a time or two,” I conceded.
“Or two hundred,” she retorted.
“But we don’t have the facts,” I said. “Not enough. Not yet.”
Waylon cleared his throat. “How y’all figure on tellin’ was he black or white?”
“Well, it’s harder without the skull,” I said. “If the distal ends of the femurs weren’t chewed off, we could tell by looking at the angle of Blumensaat’s line.”
“’Scuse me, Doc. You done lost me there.”
“Blumensaat’s line,” I repeated. “It’s a seam, basically, in the bottom of the thigh bone. Where the shaft of the bone joins the condyles, the knuckles of the knee.” I touched my outer thigh, just above my knee, and traced a line angling down and backward. “Nobody knows why, but the angle of that seam—named after the doctor who first studied it—is different in blacks and whites. One of my graduate students was the first to notice and measure that difference. If we had an intact femur—or the skull—we’d have a lot more to go on.”
“Still,” said Miranda, “you’re willing to consider the possibility that it’s a racial hate crime. Right?”
“At this point,” I said, sighing, “I’m willing to consider any possibility.”
“Good,” she said as she flashed a smile. Was it just my nervous imagination, or was it another look of triumph?
Waylon told us good-bye and began maneuvering his bulk toward the doorway, but then he stopped and turned back toward us. “Oh, hell, I ’bout forgot. I found something else you might want.” He reached down and fished around in the thigh pocket of his cargo pants, then hauled out a large, lumpy plastic bag and laid it on my desk.
“What is it?” I asked.
“That there’s some bear scat,” he said. “While I was up there, I figured I might nose around a bit, see if maybe I could find the young feller’s skull. Didn’t have no luck finding that, but I did find some scat, with a few buttons and some pieces of bone in it.”
“Great—can’t wait to sink my teeth into that,” I said, and Waylon and Miranda both laughed.
“Where did you find it?” asked Miranda.
“Three, four hunnerd yards from the tree where the boy was chained. Mr. Bear had him a den near there. He weren’t none too happy to see me, I can tell you that.”
“He was there?” Miranda said. “You saw him?”
“I saw him, all right. Up close and personal. He come at me just like that grizzly in that movie.” Miranda shot me a meaningful, I-told-you-so glance at the reference to the film she’d been nagging me to watch. “I made out a might better than the feller in the movie, though.”
“How’d you get away?” she asked.
“Get away?” The big man looked puzzled. “Well, I got away, if you want to call it that, by shootin’ him. He was a big boy. Three hunnerd pounds. Like to’ve not dropped, but he finally did. ’Bout ten foot away from me.”
“You shot the bear?” Waylon nodded, grinning. “You killed the bear?” Miranda seemed to have trouble taking it in. “But . . . aren’t bears endangered?”
“They are when they’re chargin’ at me,” said Waylon, “that’s for dang sure.” He chuckled at his joke, and I smiled, but Miranda turned crimson.
“Dammit, Waylon,” she said, her voice sounding thick and constricted. I reached out and touched her arm, hoping to calm her, but she batted my hand away. “Shit.” Head down, she stormed out of my office, leaving in her wake a baffled deputy, an embarrassed boss, and a lumpy bag of bear excrement.
CHAPTER 8
THE BUILDING LOOMED ABOVE US LIKE SOME SORT OF postmodern fortress: six stories of stainless steel, glass, stone, and reinforced concrete, rearing skyward from a sloping masonry base that appeared designed to deflect cannonballs or repel armored tanks. “Remind me,” I said to Miranda, “why we’re here?”
“Gladly.” Indeed, she did look glad, not so much about the reminding as about the being here in southern Alabama. “Our Cooke County murder is a hate crime. Nobody knows more about hate crimes than the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
“It might be a hate crime,” I corrected. “But even if it is, why’d we have to drive all the way to Montgomery?”
“Duh. Because this is where the SPLC is.” She indicated the building with a hand flourish worthy of Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune.
“You couldn’t just set up a conference call with these folks? We couldn’t just swap e-mails with them?”
She shook her head. “Not as good,” she said. “Besides, you know you love a road trip. And . . . you’ve got no life, and it’s fall break, so we’re not missing anything on campus. Furthermore, there’s nothing else we can do on the case until we get more leads from the sheriff’s office or the TBI.” She repeated the hand flourish. “Or the SPLC.”
I drew a deep breath, with which I intended to deliver a devastating response, but then I realized that she was right. On all counts. “You might have a point or two,” I conceded. “But what good does it do us to be in Montgomery if we can’t get into the building? Where’s the damn door?” We’d seen what appeared to be a sally port in the basement—a heavy, slanting steel door set deeply into the massive masonry base—but it had offered nothing that bore any resemblance to a pedestrian entrance, let alone a doorbell or welcome mat.
“Beats me.” She shrugged. “Maybe they beam us up, Star Trek style.”
As we stood, staring ineptly at the building, an armed guard—a heavyset man with thin gray hair and red cheeks—appeared, seemingly from nowhere. Perhaps the SPLC did possess the secret of transporter-beam technology. “Can I help you?” From his tone, I suspected that what he really meant was, Don’t y’all have someplace else you need to be?
“We have a meeting here,” I told him. “With Laurie Wood, of the Intelligence Project. But we’re not quite sure how to get inside.” I smiled, hoping to soften him up. “If finding the door is an intelligence test, I reckon we’ve flunked.”
The guard’s face softened; maybe he even smiled a bit. “Right this way,” he said, leading us up a narrow shelf of a walkway that angled up the building’s antitank base. He swiped a key card across a magnetic reader, and a pair of glass doors, thick as bank teller’s glass, whisked open. We stepped into a small, sparely furnished lobby, where another guard, a young African American woman, sat sentinel behind a counter, one end flanked by a metal detector. The older guard whisked out through the glass doors, having handed us off. “We’re here to see Laurie Wood,” I told our new guard. “She’s expecting us.”
It almost seemed as if, rather than being expected, we were suspected: We went through an exhaustive screening process, including a TSA-worthy metal detector, which seemed particularly dubious about me. “Third time’s the charm,” I muttered after I finally passed metal-detector muster.
Miranda, profiting by my example, had divested herself of her keys, two bracelets, and a wide leather belt, which sported a solid oval buckle. The buckle was made of antique silver, ornately carved and set with a cameo at the center: an elegant carving of a Victorian woman. Looking closer, I was startled to see that the “woman” in the cameo was actually a skele
ton; beneath an elaborate coiffure of swirling, piled-up hair was a profile of a woman’s skull and cervical spine, as well as the first three ribs. I made a mental note to ask later about the unusual fashion accessory.
