Without Mercy Read online

  But despite decades of puzzle practice, beginning with my early fieldwork reassembling shattered Arikara Indian skulls, I wondered if I was out of my league this time. It wasn’t just that this was a 3-D puzzle; every skeletal reconstruction required working in 3-D, after all. But thanks to the bear’s mighty, bone-crunching jaws, many of the pieces were badly damaged, which meant that their edges would no longer match up exactly. Last but not least, this puzzle contained many extraneous pieces, from other, smaller bones, adding to the mix and the muddle.

  The phone rang. Miranda rolled her chair backward and snagged the handset without even looking. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda,” she said, then listened a moment. From the phone’s handset, I could hear a female voice, rapid and loud. Miranda listened briefly, wincing slightly at the barrage, holding the phone slightly away from her ear. “Well, this is the Body Farm. It’s actually called the Anthropology Research Facility—” I saw the eye roll, an early warning sign. “Yes, ma’am, I do know that everybody calls it the Body Farm. . . . No, ma’am, we’re not trying to confuse people. People are just so . . . easily confused. What can I do for you, ma’am? Did you have a question?” Not surprisingly, I could hear the edge creeping into Miranda’s voice; in fact, I was surprised that the edge wasn’t already razor sharp. “No, I’m sorry, you can’t come take a tour of the Body Farm. . . . Well, because it’s a research facility, not a tourist attraction.”

  Miranda’s head was shaking slowly, partly in disbelief, but mainly, I suspected, the way a bull’s head shakes just before he charges. “By ‘tourist,’ I don’t mean outsider, I just mean somebody who wants to take a tour. . . . Well, I didn’t mean it to be offensive, ma’am. . . . Well, yes, there is another reason. We wouldn’t want a tourist—or a lifelong Knoxville resident like yourself—to pick up some deadly disease from one of our corpses. . . . Well, for instance, hepatitis. Or Ebola. Or Zika.” Miranda’s voice was no longer edgy; during the litany of life-threatening diseases, her tone had turned chirpy. “They say there’s a new airborne strain of Zika that doesn’t require mosquitoes. All you have to do is breathe anywhere in the vicinity of the infection. There’s even some speculation that it’s transmissible by telephone—can you believe it?” She paused, her eyes taking on a devilish gleam. “I’m sorry we can’t offer you a tour, ma’am, but we do have a volunteer opening right now. We just lost one of our best volunteers. A most sudden and tragic illness. If you’d like to come in for an interview . . .” She pulled the handset away from her ear and looked at it. “Huh,” she said, a slight smile tugging at her mouth. “We must have gotten cut off.”

  “You are so bad,” I scolded. “I can’t believe you scared that poor woman like that. Zika? Ebola? You are going to get us in huge trouble!” But try as I might, I couldn’t keep from grinning. So much for the stern administrator, I thought.

  By the third call, my own patience was wearing thin, and when the fourth call came in, I snapped. “I’ll get it,” I grumbled. Snatching up the receiver, I bellowed, “Yes yes yes?!? What do you want?!?”

  I heard a faint gasp on the other end, followed by a long silence. Finally, a quavery old voice—the woman must have been at least a hundred—warbled, “Oh, dear, I must have dialed the wrong number. I was trying to reach the Anthropology Department. I . . . well, I was hoping to donate my body to science. But I seem to have made a mistake. I’m so sorry to bother you.”

  Stricken, I hastily reviewed my options. I could, of course, confess and grovel and try to mend the fence I’d just mowed down—unburn the bridge I’d just torched—but that seemed like an iffy bet, considering my rudeness. Brockton, you are going to hell, I thought, then I put on my most charming voice. “Don’t you worry, ma’am. I misdial all the time. I bet if you hang up and try again, you’ll get ahold of them, and they’ll be so glad you called.” The woman hung up, and I hung up. “I’ll let you answer if she calls back,” I told Miranda sheepishly. “Do be nice to her.”

  “Those quarterly staff trainings you like to grumble about,” Miranda said. “Wasn’t the last one on ‘Leadership by Example’?”

  “I’ll take the Fifth on that,” I said. “And I’ll take this little project of mine down to my office. My hideaway office. Clearly I’ll never get a femur put back together if I stay here.”

  “Clearly we’ll never get another body donation if you keep scaring off the donors,” she cracked. “But don’t you want to work on that over at the processing facility instead?”

  “Why would I want to go clear across the river?”

  “Well, last time I checked, that’s where the exhaust hoods are. You’re hoping to glue pieces together, right?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So the fumes are nasty. Not just stinky-nasty. Toxic-nasty.”

  I waved a hand dismissively. “You kids today. You’re so . . .”

  “Intelligent?” she supplied. “Maybe that’s because we haven’t spent years softening our brains with solvent fumes.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll open a window. Besides, I’ve got you on speed dial. If I start to pass out, I’ll call you.”

  “You do that,” she said sweetly. “I’ll come running. The last thing you’ll hear, as you start climbing those stairs to the bright white light, will be the sound of my voice, saying, ‘I tried to tell you, but would you listen?’”

  She was kidding. Surely she was kidding.

  ONE HUNDRED AND TEN YARDS AWAY FROM THE BONE lab—right beside Neyland’s north end zone—was my sanctuary: the private, off-the-beaten-track office to which I retreated whenever I needed to hole up, bear down, or zone out. It wasn’t exactly a secret hideout—my colleagues and graduate students knew where it was—but it was distant and inconvenient enough from the department’s main crossroads to allow me to concentrate with minimal interruptions. My not-so-secret hideout.

  I had brought with me two metal trays from the bone lab, along with the two gnawed femurs from the Cooke County victim, plus a bag filled with the bone shards I’d recovered from the bear scat Waylon had brought me. Setting the trays on my desk, I switched on my desk lamp, a gooseneck lamp featuring a large magnifying glass encircled by a doughnut-shaped fluorescent bulb. The lens magnified objects by a factor of three; if I didn’t need the magnification, I could angle the light from one side, but if I wanted to see fine details—and fat fingers, kielbasa-sized beneath the lens—I could swing the lamp directly into my line of vision and peer through the glass.

  I kept a small bottle of adhesive in the office, in a nozzle-tipped plastic bottle I’d gotten from a pastry chef. The chef had used it to create delicate designs with icing—swirls and inscriptions on birthday cakes and wedding cakes—but I had repurposed it to apply precise lines of a high-tech bone glue. Called Paraloid B-72, the glue was made by dissolving pellets of clear acrylic in acetone. Besides being clear, strong, and fast-setting, Paraloid had the advantage of being easy to unglue: all it took to break the bond was a quick brushing with acetone, and the hard plastic would soften and let go, as easily as clear nail polish dissolved with polish remover—the chemical country cousins, I supposed, of my scientific-sounding adhesive.

  I had already simmered the fragments overnight to clean and deodorize them. Now, as a first step toward simplifying the two-part, 3-D puzzle of the femurs, I began by removing fragments that were clearly not femoral in origin. The easiest to exclude were the tips of fingers and toes: tiny bones that were entirely or largely intact, and therefore easily recognizable. Luckily, of the double handful of bones and fragments I’d sifted from the scat, almost half fit into this category. Once I had set those aside, my job was 50 percent simpler.

  Except, of course, that it wasn’t: The remaining material fragments were ten times harder to identify. It had taken only a matter of minutes to eliminate the finger and toe bones—about the same amount of time it took the bear to eliminate them, I realized—but it took the rest of the morning to sort the splintered fragments into yes, no, and maybe pi
les. The yes fragments tended to include the broad, convex surfaces of the condyles, the knee’s knobby “knuckles.” The no bits tended to include enough dense surface material, or cortical bone, to allow me to tell that they came from smaller bones, such as ribs or arms. The maybes—the pain-in-the-ass maybes—consisted largely of chunks of spongy bone—cancellous bone—from the interior of bone shafts and vertebrae. Randomly shaped, with a texture and a heft similar to volcanic pumice, these pieces struck me as capable of coming from virtually anywhere in the skeleton.

  I took a break to wolf down a boring turkey sandwich I’d brought from home, washing it down with a Diet Coke from the apartment-sized fridge that Peggy restocked once a week. Then, after a pit stop and a few stretches to work the kinks out of my back and shoulders, I hunkered down and began piecing fragments together, rotating bits this way and that, seeking surfaces that would mate, and then applying a thin coating of Paraloid and holding the pieces together until the acetone evaporated and the glue set.

  Luckily, a few of the pieces were fairly large, as big as the end of my thumb, and I felt a surge of optimism when I managed to cobble together most of a medial condyle and affix it to the right femur. But that was the easy part, and from there, the going got tougher and more tedious, the pieces smaller, the joints more jagged, the seams sloppier. The ragged appearance of the bone made me think of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, crudely assembled from ill-fitting parts. Reinforcing that impression was the orthopedic repair work: the compression plate—a long metal bracket—fastened to the side of the shaft by nine stainless-steel screws.

  My head was pounding, possibly from neck tension and eyestrain, but also perhaps from acetone fumes. Somewhere in the back of my muddled brain, I heard an imagined Miranda saying, I told you to work under an exhaust hood. But would you listen? Oh, no.

  I looked up, closing my eyes to rest them briefly, but even then, I couldn’t escape my project: the bright light and jagged shapes left a vivid afterimage, like an x-ray or photo negative, of magnified fingers and bone fragments pulsing on my retinas. When I opened my eyes, I was surprised to see my own reflection in the grimy glass of my office window, my face looking haggard. Outside, night had fallen, transforming the window into a mirror. I had spent the past eight hours—no, nine—piecing together the femur puzzle. A line from a children’s book popped into my head, from Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which I’d read and watched dozens of times, first with my son, Jeff, and, years later, with Jeff’s sons, Tyler and Walker: “He puzzled and puzzled, ’till his puzzler was sore.”

  I wasn’t done yet. Still, gradually, imperfectly, the bone knitted back together, almost as if it were healing from yet another comminuted fracture—the sort that might result from falling two stories and hitting the sidewalk in a kneeling position. If I swung the magnifier to the side, held the bone at arm’s length, and squinted slightly, it wasn’t so bad. I’d seen far worse repair jobs done by the body’s own healing processes. In fact, I realized, if this bone were inside a living leg, instead of lying on a metal tray, it would remodel and smooth out quite nicely over the course of a year or two.

  Building on my initial success, I had focused entirely on the right femur, and now, although a few gaps remained in the surface of the condyles, the overall shape of the bone was restored—certainly enough for my purposes. Gently, in case the glue wasn’t fully cured, I laid the femur on the desktop, positioning it so that the anterior surface of the bone—the front of the thigh—faced the ceiling and the pair of condyles was solidly planted on the desk. Then I studied the bone, scrutinized the bone, stared at it; finally I slid my hand beneath its shaft.

  “I’ll be damned,” I murmured.

  I called Richard, our resident expert—hell, the world’s resident expert—on ForDisc. “So,” I said, “I need a second opinion, and I’m wondering if there’s any way ForDisc can give it to me. Seems a long shot, but I’m desperately trying to determine if my Cooke County John Doe is black or white.” I described my painstaking reconstruction of the femur, and what I inferred from it.

  “I wouldn’t put much faith in a reconstruction,” he said. “Let’s see if ForDisc can help out. Have you got a tibia?”

  “Only one,” I said glumly. “And only part of it. I’m telling you, that was one hungry bear.”

  “Which part do you have?”

  I picked up the ravaged tibia and surveyed it. “I’ve got ten or twelve inches of the shaft. He chewed off both ends.”

  “We might be in luck,” Richard said. “Does your piece of shaft include the nutrient foramen?”

  “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.”