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“Let me see,” I said, rotating the bone to study the back side. Just below the ragged edge of what had once been the proximal end—the “knee” end—was a small hole angling down into the bone: an opening through which a small artery had once carried nutrients to the bone’s interior. “Yes, it does. I’m looking right at it.”
“Excellent. You got a caliper handy?”
“Sure. Somewhere. Hang on.” I opened my desk drawer and rummaged around until I found one.
The other end of the line was silent for a moment. “Okay, I’ve got ForDisc booted up,” Richard said.
“I didn’t hear any computer keys clattering.”
“It opens with a mouse click,” he reminded me. “We made it easy to use.”
“Right. Good work.”
I heard what might have been a slightly exasperated sigh from Richard. “Measure the transverse diameter of the shaft,” he said. “Right at the nutrient foramen.”
“Measuring,” I said. “Okay, it measures a little less than an inch. What does that tell you?”
“It tells me you need to switch to the metric system, Bill. What’s the diameter in millimeters?”
“Ah.” I squinted at the gauge. “Twenty-three . . . point . . . one.”
“ForDisc doesn’t take decimals,” he said.
“What? How can it be accurate if it’s not precise?”
This time his sigh sounded more than slightly exasperated. “You’re saying your caliper reading—on a chewed-up bone—is accurate to within a tenth of a millimeter? One two-hundred-fiftieth of an inch? Besides, weren’t you the one who started out by saying it was ‘a little less than an inch’?”
“Okay, okay,” I grumbled. “Call it twenty-three millimeters.”
“And that’s the transverse diameter—side to side, not front to back?”
“Yes, transverse. You asked for transverse, so I gave you transverse. I’d’ve given you front to back if you’d asked for front to back.”
“No need to get snippy,” Richard said. “Just making sure. You know what they say—garbage in, garbage out.”
“Richard, you’re killing me. Come on, what’s it say?”
“Let’s see.” I heard a couple of clicks. “For black males in the forensic data bank, the average transverse tibial diameter, at the nutrient foramen, is twenty-seven millimeters. Average for whites is twenty-five. So statistically, ForDisc says there’s a 70 percent chance your victim is white.”
“Seventy? That’s a pretty high percentage.”
“Doesn’t mean he is white,” Richard hastened to hedge. “That’s an estimate, based on averages. From one bone, which is not exactly a robust data set.”
“I know, I know.”
“But it does gives you some reason to question whether he’s black.”
“It does,” I agreed. “But why in the world would a Confederate hillbilly chain a white boy in the woods to die?”
“Ah, I’m afraid ForDisc can’t help you with that,” he said. “That’s a little beyond the capabilities of the software.”
“Well, see if you can work that feature into the next upgrade,” I suggested, and he chuckled. I thanked him and hung up, surprised to find that I was . . . surprised. Both the reconstructed femur and the tibial measurement suggested, though they certainly didn’t prove, that the victim was white, not black. Individually, each was a fairly subtle, uncertain
indication, but together, they seemed to carry more weight.
But what did it mean? If it wasn’t a racially motivated hate crime, what was it—a simple revenge killing, as Brubaker, the retired FBI profiler, had suggested? I thought about calling him back but decided that without additional information to go on, he wasn’t likely to have additional insights.
On an impulse, I rooted around in my wallet and fished out the card Laurie Wood had handed me in Montgomery, at the end of our meeting at the Southern Poverty Law Center. After we exchanged a few opening pleasantries, I cut to the chase. “This case has more twists than a kudzu vine,” I told her. “Here’s the latest. The victim of our Confederate hate killer—if that’s what he was—was white, not black.”
“Hmm,” she said. “That is a twist, but it could still be a white-supremacist thing.”
“How, exactly?”
“If the victim did something that made the killer consider him a ‘race traitor’—someone who seriously betrayed the white race.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, dating a black woman. Fathering a child by a black woman. Arresting a white man for beating up a black man. Coming to the aid of a black man who’s being harassed or abused by a white man. There was a case in Mississippi in 2014, a nineteen-year-old white girl who was dating a black man. She burned to death—a car fire—and there was much rejoicing on Stormfront, a neo-Nazi website, by people who thought she got what she deserved. ‘Race traitor’ is in the eye of the beholder, and if your killer’s looking hard for somebody to call a race traitor, it won’t be hard to find.” She paused, then added, “You ever had a case where your work ended up helping convict a white man for a black man’s murder?”
“Well, yes—a couple of them, actually.”
