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“But how—”
“Hang on, boss, I’m getting there. So after we talked a while, she transferred me to one of her colleagues. The SPLC’s web guru. A young hipster guy, sounds like, named Sean. Sean’s done some poking around in the dark web, and when I told him we thought there might be video of our victim being killed, he mentioned a site he saw once, a year or two ago, called ‘Watch Niggers Die.’”
“What?”
“Yeah. Charming, right? The site showed video clips of black people in the act of dying, some of it scenes from movies, some of it real-life footage of accidents or shootings taken by security cameras and police cameras. The only requirement was that the footage show the death of a black person. The more gruesome, the better.” I shook my head, in disbelief and disgust, and she went on. “So I started thinking: If there was a site called ‘Watch Niggers Die’—and according to Sean, it got a huge amount of traffic before it was taken down—maybe there’d be something similar about Muslims and Jews and Middle Eastern immigrants. So I started Google searching—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “I thought you said this stuff on the deadly web—”
“The dark web,” she corrected.
“I thought you said the dark web wasn’t searchable.”
“It’s not. So I started searching on the regular web, looking for hate terms for Muslims. Guess what one of the favorites is?”
I stared at her, then shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe ‘raghead’?”
“That’s one, yes,” she said. “So is ‘towelhead.’ Both relatively tame. The favorite, among the hard-core haters, is ‘sand nigger.’ So I did more searching on that, and I started seeing a lot of rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth posts—on Facebook and Twitter and other sites—by a guy calling himself White Knight. Get it?”
“Like, the white knights of the KKK?”
She nodded. “That, plus white knight as in ‘savior of the white race.’ All these race-baiting, race-hating posts—some about blacks, some about Jews, but more and more, in the past year, about Muslims.”
I nodded. “It does seem like we’ve turned some kind of corner since the San Bernardino and Paris shootings.”
“And since Donald Trump made racism and fascism seem patriotic,” she said, her voice venomous. “Anyhow, finally I found a picture of a bloody body. The post said ‘See sand nigger. See sand nigger die. Die, sand nigger, die. Die, die, die.’ Somebody replied, ‘Would LOVE to see that!’ and so WhiteKnight gave him some clues for how to find it. A sort of lame, half-assed version of code. I managed to break it in a few hours. I had just found . . . this”—she made a face of revulsion as she nodded at the computer—“when I called you. You should watch the whole thing. The whole thing—the whole crime—is on here, edited down to ten minutes. It shows the poor kid being beaten and chained to the tree. It shows the killer—wearing a mask, so we don’t see his face—throwing food at the kid and calling him all sorts of vile things. It shows the poor kid begging for his life when he’s being smeared with the bear bait and the bacon grease.”
“Miranda, you’re amazing,” I said. I felt sickened by the video, but proud of my assistant. And I felt excited about the breakthrough. “No way the FBI can say this isn’t a hate crime now,” I said. “I can’t wait to see Price’s face when she gets a look at this.” As soon as I said it, I felt bad—turning the torture and death video into a trump card I could play, an I-told-you-so I could rub the FBI agent’s nose in. “I shouldn’t have said that,” I told Miranda. “Not that way. I do think the FBI needs to see it, but first I want to show Jim O’Conner and Waylon.”
She nodded. “That seems right. It is their case, after all. If the feds come storming in, they’ll shove the locals aside and end up getting all the credit.”
“You’re the one who should get all the credit,” I said.
Miranda blushed. Her glowing look was only slightly undercut by the small, sparkling droplet dangling, earringlike, from the tip of her nose.
O’CONNER AND WAYLON DIDN’T SPEAK DURING THE video, but occasionally I heard what seemed to be sounds of dismay from the sheriff—sighs and clucks and tsks—accompanied by low, menacing growls from Waylon. When the bear made its entrance, Waylon’s growls blended with those of the animal, creating a bizarre, stereophonic duet that, because of its oddness, made it easier for me to endure the gruesome footage the second time around. Miranda, I was relieved to notice, had an easier time of it as well, emitting no sobs or wails, and requiring only one tissue at the end.
“The FBI might—might—be able to track down who shot and uploaded this,” I said, “but it’s a long shot.”
“Very long,” Miranda agreed. “The guy who posted about it, ‘WhiteKnight,’ would be easy to find, but he’s probably not the one who shot this. Just the one who blabbed about it.”
“The trouble with this dark web stuff is that it’s anonymous and untraceable,” I added, “because it’s all locked up behind something called door software.”
O’Conner looked puzzled. “Door software?”
“Tor software,” Miranda corrected, smiling slightly at my garbled explanation. “T-O-R. The letters stand for ‘the onion router.’ It’s an encryption program—like a computerized combination lock, created by thousands of different computers, and each computer has only one digit of the combination.”
“Oh, right,” said O’Conner. “Waylon was telling me about this not long ago.” I was surprised and mortified to be the least informed of the group. “The FBI found a way around the encryption—they busted a bunch of child pornographers by exploiting some sort of weakness—but then the Tor programmers fixed that, so now it’s virtually impossible.”
I shook my head. “I don’t get it. Why would anybody want to shield child pornographers and drug merchants and other scum of the earth?”
“Hey, Tor’s not all bad,” Miranda said. “It was created and funded by the U.S. military—the navy and DARPA, I think—so classified intel could be sent online. It’s not just used by kiddie-porn perverts; it’s also used by whistleblowers and investigative journalists and groups like Human Rights Watch to protect their sources. That’s the thing about free speech and privacy and
other constitutional rights: we’re all for them when people like us want them, but not when folks we despise want them.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Please tell me you’re not about to launch into your ACLU pitch now.”
“No, I am not,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “I’m saving that for the drive back to Knoxville.”
“Goody,” I said, then turned to O’Conner. “What do you say, Jim? Shall we take this to the FBI and push for a hate-crime investigation? They can’t say no this time—not if they see this video. Maybe they could crack the encryption and track down the person who made it.”
It was Waylon, not O’Conner, who responded, and his words floored me. “Hell, ain’t no need to go to the FBI for that. I can tell you who done it right now.”
CHAPTER 24
WAYLON’S WORDS—“I CAN TELL YOU THAT RIGHT now”—created an electric silence in the sheriff’s office. Miranda, the sheriff, and I all stared at the deputy.
Finally O’Conner spoke. “Well, go ahead, Waylon. We’re all ears. What do you know, and how do you know it?”
“I reco’nize the feller’s voice,” said the big man. “That, and the way he walks—kindly bowlegged and loose-jointed, but springy, too. Name’s Jimmy Ray Shiflett. Grew up here. Always had him a big chip on his shoulder.”
“That goes for all the Shifletts,” said O’Conner. “Seems to be in the DNA.”
Waylon nodded. “Jimmy Ray lit out when he was big enough—sixteen, maybe eighteen. Spent some time in the army, then come back a few years ago with an even bigger piece of timber on his shoulder.”
