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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.”
