Without Mercy (14 page)

I DROVE PAST IT TWICE BEFORE I REALIZED THAT THE
low, featureless building was the place I was seeking. The Muslim Community of Knoxville was housed in a drab, one-story structure made of precast concrete, the panels textured with vertical ribs and grooves—a style I'd seen mainly on the exteriors of convenience marts. The windows were protected by steel bars, and surveillance cameras stood watch over the building's doors and perimeter. The only flourishes that set the place apart from a Circle K or a liquor storage warehouse were a pair of green awnings over the doorways, plus a matching green plywood panel over the front door, featuring a cutout of a pointed dome.

Looking closer as I turned up Thirteenth Street, I noticed a small sign near the entrance identifying the building as Annoor Mosque. A sign at the entrance to the parking lot made it clear that the mosque was private property, under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
Not exactly a welcome mat
, I thought,
but not surprising
. U.S. incidents of anti-Muslim vandalism, harassment, and violence—already higher since
9/11—had tripled in 2016, I had read, egged on by the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Donald Trump and other presidential hopefuls. College students in Tucson had flung trash onto a mosque from the balconies of their luxury apartment tower. Yahoos in Georgia held a march in Atlanta at which they brandished loaded rifles and burned copies of the Quran, causing me to wonder how they'd feel if a band of armed Muslims gathered to burn copies of the Bible.

As I stepped onto the property and approached the entrance, I wondered if my progress was being tracked on a series of video monitors. The mosque had better security than the Body Farm, I realized, but that probably made sense: Although it was possible for an intruder to steal members of my flock, it wasn't possible to wound or kill them. A scrap of dialogue from
The Revenant
popped into my head, and in one of my bizarre flights of fancy, I imagined one of my corpses repeating the line to some malevolent midnight intruder:
I ain't afraid to die anymore. I done it already
.

The mosque's door, a windowless steel slab, was locked. I rapped on it, gently at first, then, when there was no answer, hard enough to sting my knuckles.
Behold, I stand at the door and knock
, I thought, with a mixture of hope and irony. Finally, my knuckles aching, I noticed the doorbell, and pressed the button. I looked up then, directly into the lens of the surveillance camera, and gave an awkward wave, plus what I meant as a friendly, trustworthy smile. My greeting must have passed muster, for a moment later, the doorknob turned and the door opened.

I stepped into the entry hall and was met by two young men. The one who had opened the door was brown skinned—Indian, perhaps—and the other was pale. Both were shoeless, and both were guarded looking. Following their footwear example,
and prompted by the tall racks of cubbyholes on either side of the foyer, I removed my rubber-soled Merrell Mocs to indicate respect, then began talking, looking from one dubious face to the other. “Hello,” I began. “My name is Dr. Bill Brockton. I'm the head of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee.” Something flickered in the face of one of the young men—the slight, brown-skinned one—so I focused more of my spiel on him, hoping he might be more receptive, although for all I knew, what I'd seen was a flicker of resentment. “I'm working on a forensic case—a murder, unfortunately—involving what we think was a young Muslim man. The victim was about twenty, and he was killed by someone who might have been a white supremacist.”

The two young men—both of them around the same age as my victim, as best I could tell—looked at each other in apparent alarm, though I couldn't tell if their alarm was focused on the crime or on me, the bearer of evil tidings. “We think the victim was killed several months ago,” I went on, “sometime during the summer. Trouble is, we're not having any luck identifying him. We've checked missing-person reports from all over the country”—I kept saying “we” rather than “I,” in hopes of making it clear that I wasn't a solitary lunatic—“but we can't find a single report of a young Muslim man who's gone missing.”

The pale one—a large young man, easily six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than I—said, “Excuse me. Let me make a call.” He pulled out a phone, stepped away from me, and spoke softly for several minutes. Finally he returned and handed me the phone. “It's our imam,” he said. “He's the one you need to speak with.”

I took the phone from him to speak to the mosque's leader. During the brief pause after I told him my name and title, he
said, in a formal, careful voice, “I am familiar with who you are.” His voice surprised me. He didn't sound Middle Eastern; he sounded southern, and black. After my initial surprise, though, I felt stupid: Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were far from the only African Americans to convert to Islam; for all I knew, there might be millions of other black Muslims in the United States.

In any case, taking the imam's words as a hopeful sign, I repeated what I'd told the young men, adding, “I'm here to ask for help identifying this young man. I'm hoping that you, or someone else at the mosque—or one of your colleagues at another mosque—might know of a young Muslim man who's missing.”

He was silent for a moment, then he spoke slowly. “I'll need to ask around and get back to you. You must understand that an imam doesn't always know everything about every member of his mosque. I can't be the imam of just a few people. I have to be the imam of all. And that means keeping a certain distance. So I don't always know what's happening in the lives of individual members of the community.”

“I understand,” I said. “If you would ask around, I'd appreciate it. I'll leave my card here with these young men, so they can relay my contact information to you.” With that, I thanked him and handed the phone back to the large, pale young man. Then I took two cards out of my wallet and handed one to each. “Whoever sees the imam first, please pass that along. Thank you for letting me in. I'm sorry to bring sad news.”

Before leaving, I took a closer look at the interior of the mosque. I was seeing only the foyer and its intersection with the main hallway, but, except for the rack for shoes, it could have been one of a hundred small Methodist or Baptist
or Presbyterian churches I had seen during my life: Beige cinder-block walls. Acoustic-tile ceilings. Bulletin boards with hand-lettered notices and printed flyers announcing upcoming events. Carpeting that was still plush and bright along the walls, but thin and worn at the center of the halls, thanks to the passage of many years and countless footsteps.

As the steel door clicked shut behind me, something in the sheen of light on its surface caught my eye, and I noticed that the paint wasn't uniform. Parts of the door had been recently repainted, I realized, and as I looked closer, I realized that the fresh paint was covering graffiti—harsh, hateful words I could still discern, faintly but unmistakably, despite the efforts to cover them, to cancel them out.
Hate always leaves a mark
, I thought sadly.
Like a break in a bone. It might heal, but you can always see where it happened
.

I HAD INTENDED TO RETURN TO MY OFFICE AFTER MY
visit to the mosque, but instead, I found myself drawn toward I-40. I unclipped my phone and called Miranda. “I'm going back to Cooke County,” I told her. “You wanna go?”

“Why?” she asked.

“To help me,” I said. “Why else?”

“No, I mean why are
you
going?”

“I still think we're missing something,” I said.

“What could we be missing? We brought back the bones, the chain, even the trash. Waylon brought us the bear poo. We collected everything but the tree. Unless the tree is the missing piece, we got everything there was to get. What is it you're imagining?”

I shrugged. “Some missing piece. I don't know what.”

“Well, duh,” she said. “Funny thing about missing pieces—they're almost always . . .
missing
.”

“Ha ha, Miss Smarty-Pants. But there's something else. There has to be.”

“Why? Because justice always prevails? Because the good guys always win, and the bad guys never get away?”

“No,” I said. “I know it doesn't always work out that way. All I know is, it feels like I've got something stuck in my teeth—stuck in my brain—and it's driving me crazy.”

“And going back to the scene would be . . . mental floss?” I groaned. It was a dreadful pun, and I fervently wished I'd thought of it myself.

“Mental floss,” I agreed. “Unless I go back and take another look, I'm not gonna be able to concentrate on teaching. Or grading. Or, especially, on reading your dissertation.”

“A low blow,” she said. “Look, I just can't go. I've
got
to get ready to defend my dissertation. But good luck chasing that wild goose.”

I NEARLY MISSED THE INTERSTATE EXIT FOR JONESPORT
. I was in the left lane, passing a Walmart truck, when I noticed the exit only a few hundred yards ahead. “Well, crap,” I muttered, flooring the gas pedal. Barely clearing the front bumper of the semi, I whipped across the right lane and rocketed onto the ramp, then hit the brakes to avoid careening through the stop sign just ahead. The Walmart truck roared past, the horn blaring long and loud, the driver justifiably angry. “Sorry,” I said to the truck's rear bumper as it barreled on. “Didn't mean to be a jerk.”

The near miss spiked my adrenaline and also jolted me back to the present—a helpful place to be, given that it would take some concentration to find my way back up to the death scene. I'd considered calling the sheriff's office and asking if either O'Conner or Waylon could go with me, but in the end,
I decided I'd rather be there alone, free to spend as much time as I wanted, unburdened by conversation or by the distraction of feeling watched as I rambled aimlessly, looking for . . . what? I had no idea.

The road up the mountain was now carpeted with leaves, mostly the bright yellow of tulip poplars. The sound of the tires was muted by the foliage, the normal crunch of gravel replaced by a rushing, swishing sound, almost like wind through treetops: almost as if the leaves contained the sound of the wind within themselves.

At the fork in the road, I bore right, then stopped at the locked gate that blocked the road to the tumbledown ruins of Wasp. Here the fresh leaf fall was so heavy that leaves swirled around my boots as I shuffled through them. When I reached the tree to which the victim had been chained, I stopped and ran my fingers through the groove in the bark, horrified all over again by the young man's cruel captivity, his ceaseless circling, and his eventual violent death.

I was probably on a fool's errand, I realized: anything we hadn't seen and collected the day we worked the scene with O'Conner and Waylon would be completely hidden now. If I'd been thinking more clearly, I'd have brought a leaf blower, and as I pictured myself wielding it, I couldn't help but smile at the absurdity of the image: an egghead professor blowing leaves in a half-million acres of forest. “For my encore, folks,” I announced to the watching trees, “I'll collect every grain of sand off Miami Beach.”

As if in response to my words, the wind kicked up, dislodging still more leaves from the other trees in the area. “Thank you,” I said as leaves floated down. “Thank you
so much. Very
helpful!”

Almost as if in response, the breeze eddied and swirled,
creating small cyclones of golden leaves around the base of the dead tulip poplar. I looked down, delighted, as the leaves spun upward from my feet.

And that's when I saw it—a brief flash of light, coming from a crevice in the tree's craggy roots. One brief glint of something small and shiny. Metallic and foreign. Anomalous and therefore interesting. I tried reaching in with my index finger and thumb to extricate the object, but the gap in the roots was too narrow to accommodate both my fingers. Forceps: forceps would fit, but I had driven my own truck to the mountains this time, not the Anthropology Department's truck, with its cargo bed full of tools and implements. Scanning the ground nearby, I found a promising-looking twig, about the diameter of a pencil.
Man the Toolmaker
, I thought. Angling the twig downward between the roots, I worked one end beneath the small, silvery object and gave the twig a small, deft flick. Trouble was, the flick was neither as small nor as deft as I'd intended. The silvery object catapulted upward, tumbling end over glinting end, and then disappeared beneath the layer of leaves, as if burrowing for safety.

“Crap,” I muttered. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.” I studied the spot where I thought it had gone under, doing my best to pinpoint the location before I moved. Then, still eyeing the spot, I crawled to it on all fours and stuck the twig into the ground as a reference point: a central point from which to begin searching, spiraling my way outward inch by inch, leaf by leaf. Amazing, I soon realized, how very many leaves there are on the floor of a national forest in late October. Equally amazing was how difficult it was to find a small metallic object nestled within those leaves.

Half an hour later—a mountainous pile of leaves later—I glimpsed it again, this time dropping from a handful of leaves
I was sifting, as if it were making another bid for freedom. “Ha!
Gotcha
,” I exclaimed, laying aside the leaves and bending down to examine my prize.

It was a cylindrical fitting of some sort, roughly the diameter of the end of my pinkie finger and less than half an inch long. The widest part was a sort of collar at one end, with flat facets on its rim that appeared designed to be gripped, by a small wrench or pliers. The collar was attached to the body of the cylinder in a way that allowed it to rotate, to spin freely without coming off. The collar's inner surface was threaded, to allow the fitting—a female coupling—to be screwed onto a male coupling. I stared at it, recognizing yet not quite recognizing the shape. It was a familiar object, a doodad I'd seen many times, but something was missing, some crucial piece of context I needed to identify it.

As I turned it over and over in my palm, gradually I ceased to look at the object and began instead to feel it, and I realized that I knew it not just by sight but by touch: My fingertips recognized the object. It was something I'd not only seen but had used; had connected and disconnected many times, twisting the collar to loosen or tighten the coupling, to connect or disconnect a video cable. The cable was the missing piece of context—the cable that must have connected to the back of a television set or a modem or a DVD player. “Or a video camera,” I murmured, feeling a rising sense of horror as the implications sank in.
It's all on video
, I thought.
Somewhere out there—somewhere near here—some sick bastard has the whole thing on video
.

I hoped that we could find it.

And I prayed that we couldn't.