Without Mercy (11 page)

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.”

“There you go. You, too, might qualify as a race traitor, Dr. Brockton. Better watch your back.” I sensed that she was joking. Or hoped so, at any rate.

“Takes one to know one,” I countered, and she chuckled.
Whistling past the graveyard
, I thought.
Both of us
. I also thought,
Takes a graveyard whistler to know a graveyard whistler
.

After I finished talking with Laurie, I dialed Sheriff O'Conner. He answered after the first ring. “Sheriff, it's Bill Brockton,” I said. “I've got some interesting news. Two ways of skinning the same cat. First, I reconstructed a femur from our victim, using the pieces I fished out of the scat Waylon brought me.”

“And you were able to put it back together? I'm impressed. I figured he was like Humpty Dumpty and couldn't be fixed.”

“It's not perfect, but it's good enough to shed some light. The femur's shape differs slightly from one race to another. In Native Americans and Asians, the front of the bone tends to be curved. Also in whites, though not as much. But in blacks, it's almost straight. From that Confederate coin, I would've bet that this one would be straight. But I think I just lost that bet.”

“So you're saying our victim wasn't black?”

“I can't be sure—there's plenty of room for individual skeletal variations, and this is just a reconstruction, so I wouldn't
put a huge amount of faith in its accuracy. But there's a second thing. A measurement from another bone—a shinbone—also seems to tip the scales toward white. So just guessing, which is all I can do at this point, I'd guess we're not looking at a white-on-black hate crime.”

O'Conner was silent a long while. Finally I heard him take a deep breath, then blow it out. “Well, looks like we're back to square one,” he said. “I'll tell Morgan and Waylon. And we'll go back to beating the bushes on the white side of the tracks.”

“A whole lot more foliage on that side,” I said. “Up in Cooke County, anyhow.”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Tell me about it, Doc.”

I hung up, more frustrated than I could remember feeling in a long time. It was maddening, not knowing something as simple as the race of our victim—and not being likely to know for nearly eight weeks. In my mind's eye, I saw the bone sample I had sent to the TBI crime lab sitting, overlooked and forgotten and gathering dust, while other samples, and other cases, raced ahead.

Patience, Brockton,
I counseled myself.
Eight weeks isn't that long. It'll go by in the blink of an eye
.

Bullshit
, retorted a far less serene, far more honest version of myself.

“DELIA ANSELMETTI,” ANSWERED A WARM VOICE.

“Good morning,” I said. “It's Dr. Brockton. How's my newest assistant professor?”

“I'm good. Mostly settled in, except for some of the lab equipment, and enjoying my students.”

“I'm glad to hear that. Are you in your dingy old office, or your shiny new lab?”

“I'm in the office. If you shout, I can probably hear you even without the phone.”

That was true; Delia's office was only a half-dozen doors down from my administrative office, where I'd started my day. “I'd hate to shout at you, since I'm asking for a favor. Can I pop in and see you for a minute?”

“Sure. I have to teach a class in ten minutes, but come on down. Even if we don't get to finish, we can at least get started.”

“I'm on my way.” I hung up the phone, made a quick exit from my office, and took a right turn down the corridor.

Sometimes Stadium Hall reminded me of the interior of a
space station, its curving hallway—bent by the arc of Neyland Stadium's grandstands, beneath which a wedge-shaped building had been shoehorned—calling to mind the gigantic space wheels spinning through the fantasies of sci-fi films and early NASA visionaries.

At other times, though, the building's lopsided configuration, with rooms lining only one side of the corridor, called to mind the image of a giant brain that was lacking one of its hemispheres. Since I was walking counterclockwise from my office—from south to north, along the stadium's southeastern rim—it appeared to be the brain's left hemisphere that had been removed, leaving behind only a solid wall of reinforced concrete, whose vast beige expanse was enlivened only by a few outdated bulletin boards and large, fading academic posters, dense with text, graphs, and tables.

On my way to Delia's, I passed three of these posters, which had been presented at academic conferences by job-seeking graduate students in recent years. “Morphological Variations in the Acromium Process” was the first thrilling title. “Weight Gain in Third-Instar Maggots at the Anthropology Research Facility,” offered the second poster.
Or, Eating More and Enjoying It Less,
I mentally subtitled that one. “Synthetic Training Aids for Cadaver Dogs,” read the third one. “What Is the Optimal Ratio of Cadaverine and Putrescine?”
Doggone if I know,
I silently responded.

Just beyond the third poster was Delia's office, the door ajar. I knocked, heard “Come in,” and did as I was told.

Delia Anselmetti had the olive complexion, dark hair, and dark eyes that her Italian name seemed to call for. Even her office seemed Mediterranean: unlike most of the drab, beige walls in Stadium Hall, Delia's were a warm reddish orange, as if by stepping through her doorway, I had suddenly
been transported to a room in Venice or Florence. Delia's education and expertise were exotic, too, at least to me. A molecular anthropologist, she had focused on biochemistry, genetics, microbiology, statistics, and computer modeling—courses that only slightly overlapped my own background and interests in archaeology, anatomy, osteology, skeletal trauma, and forensics. Scarcely older than Miranda, and only just embarking on her career, Delia represented a new generation of anthropologists, a generation I admired for their scientific savvy, even as I struggled to keep up with their conversations and publications.

“Your office looks great,” I said. “I didn't realize the Physical Plant folks offered any colors but hospital beige and UT Orange.”

She flushed slightly. “Actually, I painted it myself—my husband and I—the weekend I moved into the office. Seemed crazy to move everything in, then have to move everything out again so they could paint it later. And duller.”

“I approve,” I said. “You want something done right—or done fast—you sometimes have to do it yourself.” I got straight to the point, not wanting to make her late for class. “Except when you
can't
do it yourself. Which is why I'm hoping you can help me. I'm wondering if you could run a DNA analysis for me.”

She frowned. “I'd be glad to, but the forensic DNA lab isn't finished yet. They're still installing the air-handling equipment. It's almost like we're building a clean room for NASA. The standards for forensic work—”

I held up a hand to interrupt her. “I'm not after something that would be admissible in court,” I explained. “Here's my problem. I've got a murder victim that I can't identify. I can't even tell what race he was.”

If possible, she looked even more uncomfortable. “When you say race, do you mean geographic and genetic ancestry, or cultural identity?”

Oh, crap
, I thought,
here we go again
, remembering Miranda's discomfort with my mention of “race” at the death scene. The three-race model still struck me as simple and useful—useful to me, and useful to law enforcement. In recent years, however, “race” had come to be hotly debated among anthropologists, and in some circles, simply saying the word was like waving a red flag, an invitation to a shouting match or a shaming.

“Let me ask another way,” I said. “I can't identify this young man—I know his sex and his approximate age, but nothing else. I've got no skull; I don't even have an intact femur. When I log onto the Department of Justice website and search the Missing Persons database, DOJ tells me that
thirteen hundred
young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five are missing. Two-thirds of those are described by DOJ as ‘white,' one-sixth are listed as ‘black' or ‘African American,' a few dozen as Asian, another few dozen as Native American, and a couple hundred as ‘other' or ‘unsure.' My initial guess had been that my victim would be categorized as black, because the murder shows some signs of being a hate crime.”

“What makes you think that?”

“We found a Confederate coin at the scene. We suspect it belonged to the killer, so we're thinking—or we
were
thinking, until just now—that he might belong to the Klan or some other white-supremacist hate group. Now, though, I'm not at all sure that the victim is African American. So it would help us a lot—me, the TBI, and the poor little Cooke County Sheriff's Office—if we didn't have to chase down all thirteen
hundred of those missing-person leads.” She nodded slowly. “So could you run a quick DNA test, Delia? Maybe narrow it down to one of those missing-person categories—white, black, Asian, whatever way you can match the genetics with the law enforcement descriptions? Again, it's not for court. Just to help focus the investigation.”

“If that's all you need, I probably can. If the DNA's not too degraded. Can you spare a tooth? That would give me the best shot at an intact, uncontaminated sample.”

I shook my head. “No skull, remember? And no scattered teeth. But I could cut a cross section from a long-bone shaft—a femur, or a humerus. That's next best, right?”

“Actually, no.” She hesitated, as if she felt awkward about correcting me. “If you've got a tarsal or metatarsal or phalange—any little bone from the hands or feet—that's probably a better source.” Seeing my surprise, she shrugged. “I know, I know, the conventional wisdom used to be that heavy cortical bone—the shaft of a femur or humerus—would protect the DNA better than anything except tooth enamel. But turns out it doesn't.” Still dubious, I raised my eyebrows, so she went on. “That's something we learned from the team that identified victims from the World Trade Center after 9/11. They analyzed something like twenty thousand fragments for DNA—many of them not even an inch in size—and the best DNA recovery rate came from finger bones and toe bones.”

“I'll be,” I said. “Live and learn.”

Delia's phone gave a soft chime. “Oh dear,” she said, “I'm late for class.”

“Sorry to keep you,” I said, backing through the doorway. “Blame it on your boss.”

“Aye aye, Captain.” She smiled, which I took as a sign that she wouldn't be too harsh in assigning blame.

“There'll be a finger bone in your mailbox before your class lets out,” I said, as she emerged and closed her door. “Special delivery. And thanks.”

“Happy to help the team.”

I started toward my office, and she headed the opposite direction. “Happy to have you on it,” I called over my shoulder. “Even if you make me feel like a dinosaur.”