Without Mercy (21 page)

I THRASHED, AWAKE AND ANXIOUS, FOR MOST OF THE
night—the new normal, apparently—then finally drifted off shortly before dawn. I woke up at eight, weary and bleary and astonishingly late for me, and called the bone lab. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda,” answered my assistant, sounding far chirpier than I felt.

“Good morning,” I said. “Sort of.”

“Dr. B? Did you just wake up? I mean,
you
? Just now?”

“Ten minutes ago,” I said. “I finally fell asleep at six, so I'm running behind on everything today. How would you feel about teaching today's nine o'clock forensic class?”

“Me? Sure. But . . .”

“But what? You can say if you don't want to.”

“No. I mean, no, I don't want to say no. I'd love to teach it. Today is blunt-force trauma, right?”

“Right.”

“But . . . you
love
teaching that class. Are you sure you can bear to let go of the reins for an hour?”

“Are you implying I have control issues?”

“No, I'm not implying it. I'm saying it, straight up. You have a teeny-tiny control issue, roughly the size of Texas, when it comes to teaching class.”

“You just watch me,” I said. “I'll sit in the back of the room and I won't say a word.”

“Wait—I'll be up there teaching, and you'll just be
sitting
there?”

“In the back of the room,” I repeated. “I won't say a word.”

“Right. Sure, boss. And then hell will freeze over. And our elected leaders will all work together for the common good.”

“Not a word, I tell you. Not so much as a syllable.”

BY THE TIME I GOT TO CAMPUS, I HAD RALLIED A BIT,
and I had mixed feelings about enlisting Miranda to teach. Unfortunately, I had painted myself into a corner, with a thick coat of paint in the unmistakable shade of Stubborn Pride. I had left myself no choice but to let her teach.

I suspected she hadn't headed to class yet, so I stopped off at the bone lab to check. At the very least, I could accompany her and offer constructive feedback. Perhaps she'd even offer the reins of class back to me.

The lab's door of the bone lab gave a particularly loud rasp as I pushed it open, setting my teeth thoroughly on edge. “How do you stand that noise?” I asked Miranda, whose desk was only three feet from the source of the sound.

“Hmm? What noise?” She looked up. “Oh, the door? It's like anything annoying—you hear it enough times, you learn to tune it out.” She smiled at me with an arch, enigmatic smile.

Across the room, I saw the familiar blond hair of Joanna Hughes, her bent head and tense shoulders a study in concentration.
“You working on our Middle Eastern guy?” I called. She didn't answer, so I ambled over to take a look. Peering over her shoulder, I was stunned. Three days before, I had handed her a bare skull. Now, a pair of warm brown eyes stared back at me from a remarkably lifelike face. “Joanna, you're amazing,” I said. “How on earth did you finish this so fast?”

“He's not actually finished,” she said. “I haven't done anything with the hair yet, and I'm not sure about the nose. But he's getting close, I think.” She took a deep breath and released it, hunching her shoulders up to her ears, then letting them drop. “You can get a lot done if you don't sleep. This guy got under my skin. Miranda told me how he died—how he was killed—and I couldn't stop thinking about him. So I figured I might as well just go flat out.”

“It's remarkable,” I said, studying the details: the chiseled cheekbones, the prominent eyebrows, the strong, straight nose. “This is so much better than that grainy video footage. Once the TV stations and the newspapers put this out there, somebody's sure to recognize him.”

Miranda sidled up behind me. “Notice anything interesting about Joanna's reconstructions?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, eyeing the half-dozen heads on her table. “I notice they're terrific. What are you noticing?”

“They're all the same color,” Miranda said. “The African American woman, the European man, the Hispanic kid from the Arizona desert, the Middle Eastern guy. All the same shade of gray.” I was on the verge of pointing out that of course they were, because they were all made of clay, but I realized she was making a bigger point. “It's boring, but it's safe,” she went on. “Our guy, 16–17. Maybe killed just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the wrong clothes or the wrong skin.”

“Maybe so.”

“Isn't it a shame,” she said, “that what makes some people different—what makes them less boring—makes other people hate them?”

She looped a scarf around her neck—the morning felt more like midwinter than late fall—and said, “I need to head to class.”

“I'll go with you,” I said. Miranda shot me a suspicious glance. “Hey, I'm only helping carry the skulls. I won't meddle in class. Promise.”

MIRANDA CLICKED TO THE NEXT SLIDE, A CLOSE-UP
of a bashed-in skull, shown from behind. Thirty student faces leaned forward, captivated by the image from a forensic case we had worked a year before. “So from
this
blow,” she said, using a laser pointer to highlight the crater at the back of the skull, “the fracture patterns radiate outward about the same distance in all directions.” She traced several of the lines, each of them a foot long on the three-foot image of the skull. “Compare that to the other blow.” She clicked to the next slide, showing the skull's shattered temporal bone. “Notice
this
fracture,” she said, highlighting a crack that zigzagged from the temple toward the back of the head. “See how it starts out nice and strong, like the others? It's cracking, cracking, cracking, but then—
bam
—it stops all of a sudden, at this point where it intersects the one from the back of the head.”

Looking out at the students—junior and senior undergraduates taking Introduction to Forensic Anthropology—she posed a question. “What does that tell you about the order in which the blows to the head were delivered? And therefore,
what inferences can you draw about the defendant's statement to the police?”

The class was silent, possibly because they hadn't read the background materials on the case. Finally, a young woman in the front row—Mona, noteworthy for her quiet intelligence, flowing tunics, and ever-present hijab covering her hair—raised her hand. “He's lying,” she said. “It wasn't self-defense.”

I smiled, then—unable to stay in my seat any longer—I stood and took the reins of the class back from Miranda, along with the laser pointer. “Explain,” I prompted Mona.

“The defendant said he hit the victim in the side of the head first, to avoid being stabbed, then hit him again as he fell. But the blow to the temple was the second blow, not the first one.”

“Go on,” I encouraged. Beside me, I heard Miranda sigh, just loudly enough to be sure I heard it, as she stepped aside. “How can you tell?”

“The way the cracks propagated.”

I knew what “propagated” meant, but I suspected some of her classmates didn't. “Mona, pretend you're on the witness stand, in court,” I told her. “Dr. Mona Faruz, forensic anthropologist for the prosecution. Explain your terminology and your reasoning.”

“Sorry,” she said, her olive skin flushing slightly. “Fractures in brittle materials propagate—they grow and spread—in a consistent way, whether the material is a ceramic cup or a steel pipeline or a human skull.” Mona was an engineering major, so I suspected she knew more than anyone else in the room about fracture mechanics. “When an impact is severe enough to cause cracking, the crack, or cracks, will spread from the point of impact until their energy is dissipated, or weakened.”

I didn't want her to get so detailed that she'd lose people. Using the laser pointer that I'd taken from Miranda, I traced the shortest crack. “Are you saying that something dissipated the energy of this crack? What was it? Why didn't this crack propagate any farther?”

“Cracks don't jump cracks,” she said, holding up both hands to form a big T, as if calling for a time-out. “The crack from the blow to the temporal bone stopped when it intersected this crack, which was already there—from the
first
blow, which the defendant delivered to the back of the head.” She held up an index finger to underscore a point she was about to make. “A blow he
couldn't
have delivered if he was face-to-face with the victim, as he claimed.”

I nodded. “Class,” I told the group, “you're the jury. Based on the testimony you've just heard, how many think this was murder, rather than self-defense?” All but two hands went up. “Good job, Dr. Faruz.” I checked my watch; as I suspected, we were at the end of our class period. “Okay, that's all for today. Next time, we'll talk about gunshots. Be sure to look at the cases ahead of time. I'm giving extra points for class participation next time.”

The students stood and started filing out, and I began boxing up the skulls we'd brought to class. As I closed the lid to one of the boxes, I glanced up and noticed a boy in the third row nudge his neighbor. Then, to my astonishment, he stuck his foot into the aisle just as Mona was passing him. She tripped and fell, her books and papers and purse and laptop flying, and the two boys snickered. “Oops,” said the boy who'd tripped her. He muttered something else; I couldn't catch all of it, but I was sure I heard the word “rag.”

Before I could react, Miranda was on them like a shot. Grabbing the culprit by his shirt, she hauled him to his feet,
then released him. I started toward them, half expecting her to strike him. Instead, she yanked her scarf from around her neck and wrapped it over the top of her head, like a hijab. “I'm Muslim, too, asshole,” she snarled. “You want to trip me? Go on. I dare you. I fucking dare you.”

As I started toward them to intervene, I heard a sharp popping sound from the back of the classroom, which made me stop and look up in alarm. Then I heard it again. One of the boys in the class, I saw, was slowly clapping his hands. A dozen other students had stopped on their way out, and now, one by one, they joined the first one in applauding. A girl hurried forward; she helped Mona to her feet and gave her a hug. Another gathered Mona's scattered possessions. A third girl, who also happened to be wearing a scarf, joined the group, and—slowly and deliberately, her eyes full of challenge—she rewound her scarf to echo Miranda's gesture of solidarity.

I admired their kindness, but I thought it best to defuse the situation. Laying a hand on Mona's shoulder, I said, “Miss Faruz, are you all right?” She nodded, not speaking, tears streaking her face. “Do you have another class now?” She nodded again. “I don't want to make you late for that. But come see me this afternoon, please. Will you do that?” I gave her shoulder a squeeze, and she managed a faint smile as she nodded a third time, then turned to go.

I touched Miranda's arm lightly; even through the sleeve of her sweater, I could feel the knotted muscles. “Miranda, can you carry these skulls back by yourself?”

She drew a long breath, then let it out slowly, and the tension in her arm eased a bit. “Yes,” she said, her voice almost inaudible.

“Thank you.” I squared off facing the troublemaker—Kevin McNulty was his name—and his buddy. Pointing to his
buddy, I said, “You—
out
” and gestured with my head toward the doorway. Without a word, he scrambled to his feet and fled, leaving me alone in the room now with my problem student. “What do you have to say for yourself, McNulty?” I saw his jaw set and his eyes flash with defiance. He wasn't going to make this easy for me. “Start talking, son. And don't give me any crap about it being an accident. I saw the whole sorry business. Heard it, too. So if you bullshit me, I'll call the UT Police so fast it'll make your head spin, and I'll tell them how I saw you assault a woman in my classroom.”

The boy blanched. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead, and his hands began to tremble, but he remained silent. “You're running out of time, boy,” I said. He still didn't speak, so I took my cell phone from my belt, scrolled through my contacts until I found “UT Police,” and hit “call.” I angled the phone slightly, so he could hear that the call was genuine. “UT Police,” came a woman's voice through the speaker. “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton, in Anthropology,” I said, looking into McNulty's eyes. “Can you send an officer to the auditorium in McClung Hall, please?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Is this an emergency?”

McNulty finally broke. “Wait,” he said. “Please. I'm sorry. Really. Please don't.”

My eyes still locked on his, I told the dispatcher, “Officer, hang on. I think we've got this resolved.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I can have somebody there in two minutes.”

“Thank you, but I think we're okay here.”

“All right, Dr. Brockton. You take care, and call back if you need us.”

“I will,” I told her. “I appreciate it.” I hung up, reholstered my phone, and motioned to a chair. McNulty sat, and I did
too, leaving a seat between us as a buffer. “Now you tell me, what on earth made you think that was an acceptable way to treat another student? Was it because she's a girl who's smart? Do you treat all intelligent women that way?” He shrugged and shook his head. “That's not good enough. I need you to explain. What were you thinking about her that gave you permission to demean her like that?”

He heaved a heavy sigh. “I guess . . . I guess I just snapped. I see all these Muslim immigrants everywhere, and it . . . it feels like they're taking over our country. I think they're bad for our country . . .” He trailed off and shrugged again.

“These Muslim immigrants? Like Mona?” He nodded tentatively. “Mona was born and raised here in Knoxville,” I told him. “She's every bit as American as you are. Her father's a professor here. Did you know that?” He shook his head. “He's one of the best electrical engineers in the world. So you didn't know that, either, did you?”