Without Mercy Read online

  I nodded. “Last question,” I said. “Is it as hard to get out of here as it is to get in?”

  She smiled. “Depends on how you mean that. Like I said, I’ve been here a whole lot of years.”

  THREE HOURS AFTER WE’D ARRIVED AND CLEARED the security checkpoint, Miranda and I turned in our visitor badges, reclaimed our driver’s licenses, and stepped out into the Montgomery afternoon sun. My head still spun from our whirlwind climb up the family tree of hatemongers and violence.

  I still didn’t know who our victim was or why he’d been killed. I also didn’t have any more clarity about who the killer was. But I had a far greater understanding of the vast, entwined network of racist hate groups that might have spawned or inspired that killer. If the first step toward knowledge is indeed to recognize your own ignorance—a maxim my fellow professors and I often quoted to our students—then Miranda and I had certainly taken that step, and more, in Montgomery, I reflected as I glanced up at the SPLC headquarters once more.

  “Dr. B? Before we hit the road,” Miranda said, “could we look around a little? There’s so much history here, and I’d love to take in some of it.” I opened my mouth to protest, but she cut me off. “Please? Just the highest of the high spots?” With a shrug, I caved. “Thanks,” she beamed. “Here, let’s walk around the corner for a second.”

  On the same block as the SPLC, downhill from the law center and literally in its shadow, stood a modest brick church: Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had served as a young pastor. Miranda led me up the stairs and into the simple sanctuary, its pale plaster walls and dark wooden pews splashed with yellow, red, and green from the stained-glass windows. “Look at that,” she whispered. “That’s the pulpit where he preached for four years. And downstairs, in the church basement? That’s where the Montgomery bus boycott was organized, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white man and move to the ‘colored’ section at the back of the bus.”

  Knowing how the bus boycott had spelled the end of segregation—and knowing how King’s life and death had galvanized so much of the civil rights movement—I couldn’t help but feel awed by the significance of the site. I was struck, too, by the contrast between King’s message of nonviolence and the bloodlust of the Christian Identity movement.

  “Thank you,” said Miranda. “There are three more things I’d like to see, if that’s okay? We can drive to all of them in, like, five minutes.”

  “You’re the boss,” I said.

  We walked back up the hill to my truck, clambered in, and left the SPLC behind. A few blocks from the church, Miranda pointed to a small white house with a full-width front porch. “That’s the parsonage where King and his family lived,” she said. “It was bombed early in the bus boycott. He thought he should give up, but his wife—and a prayer—convinced him not to.”

  A few blocks from the Kings’ modest home, we passed the “first White House of the Confederacy,” a grand mansion that served as the home of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Lost Cause. And two blocks from that was the Alabama state capitol, which briefly served as the Confederacy’s capitol . . . and which, a century later, served as the destination for the thousands of people who marched from Selma to Montgomery to demand equal voting rights for blacks and whites.

  A half mile downhill from the capitol—where the train station and the riverboat landing stood side by side—we parked briefly and got out to read a historical marker describing Montgomery’s thriving slave trade in the decades before the war. Hundreds of slaves had arrived in Montgomery every day, by boat and train, for sale in the city’s four slave markets. A strong field hand could fetch $1,500 at auction, I read; a skilled artisan, $3,000. By the start of the Civil War, Montgomery had a larger slave population than Natchez or New Orleans, and the state as a whole contained almost half a million slaves. Many of them, in shackles and chains, had passed through the very place where Miranda and I now stood.

  “Incredible,” said Miranda, reading the marker. “Montgomery is so small, but it played a huge role in the history of slavery, racism, and civil rights.” She looked away from the marker, surveying the train station and the landing, where an old-fashioned riverboat—white with a big red paddle wheel at the stern—bobbed gently in its moorings, as if it had somehow churned a century and a half down the river of time to get here. Miranda raised her hands to her face, and when she pulled them away, I saw moisture gleaming on her fingertips. “So,” she said quietly. “That crack I made the other day? Comparing myself to a slave? I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I’m ashamed to’ve made light of slavery.”

  “Miranda,” I began, but she waved me off.

  “It’s okay, Dr. B,” she said. “You don’t need to make me feel better. I do have white guilt, and I should have white guilt. My whole life is one big exercise in white privilege.”

  I didn’t know how to argue with her, or whether to argue with her, so I kept quiet. She turned from the river, looking up the gentle slope of downtown Montgomery: the old business district, the white marble capitol, the sleek tower of the SPLC. “Incredible,” she repeated. “Montgomery is like an American Jerusalem.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Sacred to two warring factions. Holy ground to die-hard racists and civil rights crusaders.”

  I didn’t always agree with Miranda’s politics—she tended to be far more liberal on virtually every issue than I was—but I had profound respect for her intelligence, idealism, and compassion. Our work together had exposed her to some of the worst of human nature, yet she still believed in the basic dignity and decency of people, whatever their color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or immigration status. Miranda wasn’t a churchgoer—not even a believing Christian, as far as I knew—but she embodied more of the teachings of Jesus than most Bible-thumpers I’d encountered over the years: people who made a big deal of religious faith yet seemed never to have heard or heeded Christ’s teachings about charity, forgiveness, and kindness toward the poor, the sick, the hungry, the homeless.

  She turned to me. “Hey,” she said, “speaking of people oppressed by the white man, did you ever manage to see The Revenant?”

  I shook my head. “I checked the movie listings, but I didn’t find it. I don’t think it’s playing anymore.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “It has been almost a year since it came out. Oh well—you would’ve hated it. All those Arikara Indians. Not to mention the bear attack. You would’ve been bored out of your skull.”

  “Hmm,” I grunted.

  “Hey, boss?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry I freaked out about Waylon killing the bear. I guess if the bear was charging him, he didn’t really have a choice.”

  “I guess not,” I said. “Not unless he was willing to die so the bear could live. Besides, I think the government has a policy of killing bears that have killed people. They’re afraid the bears’ll get a taste for humans and become habitual offenders. Seems a shame, but I can see their point.”

  She nodded. “Hey, boss?”

  “I’m still right here.”

  “I’m glad we came to Montgomery. But it creeps me out, too. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  She didn’t have to tell me twice. But all the way back to Knoxville, as the sun set and the moon rose and the auto traffic gave way to heavy trucks, it felt as if we hadn’t left Montgomery entirely behind; as if we’d brought some of it with us, in the form of ghostly stowaways, polluting the air with exhalations of secondhand hate.

  I still didn’t know what version of hate had killed our Cooke County victim. But after Laurie’s introductory course—Hate Groups 101—I now agreed with Miranda. This had to be a hate crime. But what kind of hate crime? We needed help finding out.

  CHAPTER 9

  IT WAS WITH DECIDEDLY MIXED FEELINGS THAT I dialed the local FBI field office and asked for Angela Price, and I felt more than a twinge of
regret when my call went through to her, rather than to voice mail. “Special Agent Price,” she said, her tone brisk and businesslike, wasting neither time nor warmth. Then she simply waited, apparently not wanting to waste words, either.

  “Hello. It’s Dr. Bill Brockton, from UT,” I said, awkwardly adding. “Good morning.” I didn’t call her by name, because it felt awkward to say “Special Agent Price.” I knew most of the local FBI agents, and I called the others by their first names, but Price was different. Even though I’d known her for years, and had worked with her on several cases, I didn’t feel entitled—or permitted—to call her Angela.

  “How are you, Dr. Brockton?” Her tone warmed. By a fraction of a degree.

  “I’m good. Keeping busy, which I like, except for the fact that it means people keep killing people.”

  “We do depend on the dark side of human nature for our livelihoods, don’t we? How can I help you, Dr. Brockton?”

  “I’m wondering,” I began, with less confidence than I liked, “what your criteria are for opening a hate-crime investigation?”

  “First off,” she said dryly, “there has to be a crime.” Duh, I thought, parroting Miranda’s standard response to patently obvious statements. “Second, there needs to be reason to believe that hate or bias—against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity—was a motivation for the crime, in whole or in part.”

  “How much reason?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said, ‘There needs to be reason to believe’ that hate was a motive. I’d just like to get a clearer picture of what you mean by that.”

  There was a pause. “Well,” she said slowly, “for example, if you were found bludgeoned to death in your office at the university, I wouldn’t be inclined to think that racial, sexual, or religious bias was the motive. Unless there’s a kinky side of you that seriously rubbed somebody the wrong way.” I felt myself taken aback. Was this Price’s odd way of having a bit of fun with me, or was there a passive-aggressive edge to her choice of example? “But if you were an African American pastor instead of a white professor, and your house was bombed, and a big cross was burned in your front yard, I’d say there was ample reason to believe we were looking at a hate crime.”

  “I’d say so,” I agreed.

  “Although we might find out that the real motive was something else entirely.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, suppose the pastor were having an extramarital affair with one of his parishioners, and the woman’s husband found out he’d been cuckolded by the pastor. The husband might murder the pastor—a classic revenge killing—but make it look like a hate crime, to deflect suspicion. We’d start out investigating that murder as a hate crime, but pretty soon, I hope, we’d discover the real reason for the crime. Does that make it clearer?”

  “It does,” I said slowly.

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I’m not unconvinced. I’m just thinking about evidence that’s not as obvious as a burning cross.”

  “Dr. Brockton, are we talking hypotheticals here, or is there something specific on your mind? Because the Bureau doesn’t generally deal in hypotheticals.”

  Here we go, I thought. Price was forcing me to lay my cards on the table, and I knew my hand was weak. “There’s a case—actual, not hypothetical—that I’m working on. A young man was chained to a tree in the woods. He was kept alive, possibly for weeks, and then finally killed by a bear. He’d been smeared with bear bait and raw bacon, so I’m thinking the killer wanted him to suffer a while first, then be attacked by the bear. By the time he was found, he was just bones. And not that many of ’em.”

  “This was up in Cooke County?”

  I was surprised, because I’d seen no news coverage of the murder. “You already know the case?”

  “No,” she said. “I already know Cooke County. Where else would you find a crime like that?”

  “Ah.”

  “So what else can you tell me about the victim? He was young and male. Black, or white?”

  She was already drilling into the nerve. “To be honest, we don’t know yet. Without a skull or intact long bones, it’s hard to make a determination.”

  A pause. “So what makes you think you’re looking at a hate crime?”

  “For one thing, the staging, if I’m using that term right. The victim was made powerless. Naked and chained. Fed like a dog. Smeared with bear bait and bacon grease. Seems like the killer wanted to humiliate him as much as possible. Make him less than human.”

  “But that doesn’t prove bias or hate,” she said. “Just cruelty.”

  “There is one piece of evidence,” I began. “A coin found at the scene. A collector’s item. A commemorative coin from 1925.”

  “Commemorative of what?”

  “Of the huge Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia. Giant carvings of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis—the heroes of the Lost Cause.”

  “I know who they were,” she said. “And you take an old coin as evidence of a hate crime? You can’t even tell me the victim’s race, but—let me guess—you have a hunch that the victim was a black man, and that this is a weird twist on a lynching?”

  “Maybe,” I said, flinching at the withering sarcasm I could hear in her voice. “This Confederate coin looks like it was worn as a pendant. Which could indicate that Confederate ideology—specifically, racism—was important to the killer.” I paused, but she left me hanging, so I added, “It’s the only thing we’ve got that might indicate motive.”

  There was a long silence. “Dr. Brockton, if that’s the only thing you’ve got, you don’t have much. If the sheriff’s office or the TBI wants to put in a formal request for the Bureau’s assistance, we’ll certainly consider it. But from what you’ve told me, this just sounds like something out of Deliverance. A backwoods case of southern gothic depravity.”

  I mumbled a perfunctory thank-you and got off the line, stinging from Price’s implicit—no, her explicit—rebuke. I still believed the Confederate coin to be significant, but Price was correct: Until we could pin down the victim’s race, we couldn’t make the case for a racially motivated hate crime. I had let myself be carried away by Miranda’s certainty—Miranda’s lefty-liberal hunch—and also, perhaps, by my hope that I’d be able to persuade her not to take a job at the FBI. And my lapse in judgment had circled back to bite me.

  It added insult to injury that the fresh bite marks in my backside had been inflicted by the wickedly sharp teeth of Special Agent Angela Price. It pained me particularly that the Price was Right.

  I felt on safer ground and friendlier territory with my next call. As a TBI consultant, I’d always enjoyed good working relationships with TBI field agents and supervisors, and as Steve Morgan’s former teacher, I believed I had far more goodwill capital banked with Steve than I did with Price. He had certainly been friendly and helpful when I’d seen him at the death scene two days before, and I felt sure he was as eager to solve this case as I was. “Steve,” I said heartily when he answered, “it’s Bill Brockton.”

  “Morning, Dr. B,” he said. I took the informality as a further good omen. “What’s up? You calling to say you’ve I.D.’d the victim and collared the bad guy?”

  “I wish,” I said. “Actually, I’m calling to see if you’ve heard anything back from your DNA folks yet. Specifically, about the victim’s race?”

  “No, sir,” he said, and the formality made me cringe. Not a good omen, I thought. Then: Is this how Miranda will talk to me, once she’s gone? “We don’t have anything quite yet. I know the lab got the evidence—I delivered it myself—but that was just the other day. Friday. And today’s just Monday. They don’t work on weekends, so basically this is the first workday they’ve even had the evidence.”

  “How soon you reckon they’ll get to the DNA, Steve?” I tried to sound optimistic and encouraging, not impatient and demanding. Apparently I fai
led, because I heard Steve sigh.

  “Thing is, Doc, they’re pretty backed up in the DNA lab right now.”

  “How backed up?”

  “About two months backed up, to be honest.”

  “Two months? You’re saying they might not get around to this for two months?”

  “That’s pretty standard,” he admitted. “Eight-week backlog is what I was told on Friday.”

  “Christ, Steve, that’s terrible. Can you ask them to fasttrack this one? I can’t just spin my wheels on this for eight weeks.”

  “It’s frustrating, I know. My wheels are spinning, too. But so are everybody else’s. The DNA lab gets a hundred cases a month, and they process a hundred a month. So they’re staying even, but just barely. They’re treading water as fast as they can. But right now, there’s nearly two hundred samples in line ahead of ours. Most of ’em murders and rapes.” He hesitated, but then delivered the kicker. “Can we really say that we oughta be able to cut line, jump ahead of everybody else? I know you’re in a hurry, Doc. I am, too. But so are all those homicide detectives and rape victims.”

  “Crap, Steve,” I said. “Of course I’m not saying my case is more important than some rape victim’s. I know the wheels of justice are turning. I just hate it that they turn so slow.”

  “You and me both, Doc. You and me both.”

  CHAPTER 10

  IN EXPLAINING MY FASCINATION WITH FORENSIC cases, and especially my ability to stomach gruesome details such as dismemberment, I often told students and police this: “I don’t see a murder as a death; I see it as a puzzle. If I have the skills to solve that puzzle and bring someone to justice, I’ve done a good job.”

  But this time, my puzzle analogy was no longer just an analogy; this time, it had become completely literal. Arrayed on a table in the bone lab in front of Miranda and me were dozens of bone shards, their edges jagged and splintered, along with the shafts of the Cooke County victim’s badly chewed femurs. The daunting challenge—the herculean task—was to reassemble at least one of the femurs; the payoff, if I succeeded, was the answer to a crucial question in the case: Was the victim black, and killed in a racially motivated hate crime, as the Confederate coin might suggest?