“I said it looks great, considering how long it’s been out there. Didn’t you say the town shut down in the 1930s, when the government bought up all the land?”
“Yes’m, I did say that—’cause it’s true—but I don’t b’lieve this has been a-layin’ out there all this time. Not on account of what it is. Take a closer look.”
Miranda plucked the coin from my palm and held it up, angling it to catch the light. “Memorial to the Courage of the Soldier of the South,” she read. She looked at Waylon. “Huh?” She flipped it over to look at the front. “And who are these guys on horseback?”
“Them’s Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” he said. “The most famous generals of the Army of the Confederacy. You see that inscription right there above the year, 1925?”
She squinted. “Stone Mountain. What’s that about?”
“This here’s a special coin that was sold to raise money for that big monument carved in the side of Stone Mountain. Right outside Atlanta.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “I’ve actually seen it from an airplane. Huge. It’s like the Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy, right?”
“Yes’m. I reckon so.”
“But I thought there were three guys carved in that mountainside?”
“That’s right.” He nodded approvingly. “Somebody kicked up a fuss, so Jeff Davis, the president of the Confederacy, ended up getting hisself a piece of the rock, too.”
My mind was still processing Waylon’s suggestion—his guess that the coin wasn’t a relic from the heyday of Wasp, the mountain hamlet that had been abandoned in the 1930s. If the coin was a collector’s item, it seemed unlikely that it had belonged to the victim, since he’d been chained to the tree naked—stripped of even his clothes, much less something of value. Could it have belonged to the killer? I took it back from Miranda and studied it closely. It was in near-mint condition, that was true, so clearly it couldn’t have been weathering for the past eighty years. As I shifted my grip to the coin’s rim, I felt an odd sharpness, like a splinter or sliver, projecting beyond the regular ridges. Looking closer, I saw what appeared to be a bit of silver solder there, with a sharp line suggesting that a piece of it had broken off. “Hmm,” I said. “Waylon, did you notice this piece of solder?”
“I sure did, Doc. That’s partly what makes me think it’s part of the crime scene. I’m guessing somebody used to wear that around his neck on a chain.”
I nodded. “Maybe the victim pulled it off in a struggle.”
“That’s the way I figure it, too,” he agreed.
I glanced at Miranda, whose eyes were darting to and fro, a sign that she was thinking hard. Suddenly her gaze snapped back to me. “Jesus,” she said. “It’s a hate crime. Has to be. Some redneck racist chained a black kid out there to die. God, I hate haters!”
“Hang on,” I said. “We don’t know the victim was black.”
“But we don’t know that he wasn’t, either,” she pointed out. “And aren’t you always quoting Occam’s razor? ‘The simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost always right’?”
“I might have said that a time or two,” I conceded.
“Or two hundred,” she retorted.
“But we don’t have the facts,” I said. “Not enough. Not yet.”
Waylon cleared his throat. “How y’all figure on tellin’ was he black or white?”
“Well, it’s harder without the skull,” I said. “If the distal ends of the femurs weren’t chewed off, we could tell by looking at the angle of Blumensaat’s line.”
“’Scuse me, Doc. You done lost me there.”
“Blumensaat’s line,” I repeated. “It’s a seam, basically, in the bottom of the thigh bone. Where the shaft of the bone joins the condyles, the knuckles of the knee.” I touched my outer thigh, just above my knee, and traced a line angling down and backward. “Nobody knows why, but the angle of that seam—named after the doctor who first studied it—is different in blacks and whites. One of my graduate students was the first to notice and measure that difference. If we had an intact femur—or the skull—we’d have a lot more to go on.”
“Still,” said Miranda, “you’re willing to consider the possibility that it’s a racial hate crime. Right?”
“At this point,” I said, sighing, “I’m willing to consider any possibility.”
“Good,” she said as she flashed a smile. Was it just my nervous imagination, or was it another look of triumph?
Waylon told us good-bye and began maneuvering his bulk toward the doorway, but then he stopped and turned back toward us. “Oh, hell, I ’bout forgot. I found something else you might want.” He reached down and fished around in the thigh pocket of his cargo pants, then hauled out a large, lumpy plastic bag and laid it on my desk.
“What is it?” I asked.