If possible, she looked even more interested than before. “Dr. Brockton, I was a crime reporter before I took this job. I saw gory and disturbing things when I was a journalist, and I’ve seen plenty more in this job. After twenty years of tracking violent hate groups, I don’t shock easy.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Sounds like you’d have made a good forensic anthropologist, too.” I slid the envelope toward her. “Go for it, then. I won’t say anything more until you’ve had a look and told us what you think.”
She grinned and opened the clasp, then extricated the stack of photos and began leafing through eagerly, her eyes scanning rapidly, then freezing as she squinted and stared, with laserlike intensity, at some detail or other. Occasionally she uttered a soft “hmm” to herself.
I had included a dozen or so of the best death-scene photos, as well as shots I’d taken in the lab showing the bacon wrapper and the bear-bait stick. When she’d reviewed the entire stack from top to bottom, she reversed direction and looked at the images again, working her way back to the top. “Fascinating,” she said finally, still staring at the topmost image, a wide shot showing the tree, the groove etched in its bark, the chain stretching away, and the padlocked neck loop with the postcranial bones to one side. “You want to know what I think?”
“Please.”
“I think whoever did this is one sick puppy.”
She glanced at me, then at Miranda, then back to me. I nodded. “I’d say that’s pretty accurate. But I hope you can tell us a bit more than that.”
“I don’t see any clothing,” she said. “Was there any?”
“None,” said Miranda. “As far as we can tell, he was naked.”
“You say ‘he.’ So the victim was male?”
“Yes,” Miranda and I said in unison.
“Somewhere around twenty years old,” I added.
“Black? White? Other?”
“Not sure,” I said.
“Black,” Miranda said.
Laurie’s gaze swiveled from Miranda’s face to mine, then back to Miranda’s. “Okay, this is getting more interesting all the time,” Laurie said. “Dr. Brockton, you first. What makes you say ‘not sure’?”
I pointed at the top photo. “As you can see, the skeletal remains are far from complete. Without a skull, especially, it’s hard to determine the race of the victim. Which also makes it harder to determine the nature—the motivation—of the crime. Was it a hate crime, or just a revenge killing. If it was a hate crime, what sort of hate crime? Racist? Homophobic? Vegan extremism?”
She smiled at the vegan joke, and I gathered that like Miranda and me—and most police officers I knew—she’d found gallows humor to be an essential defense against the darkness in which she was immersed day in and day out. “Miranda? What’s your take?”
Miranda drew in a breath, then began. “We have a piece of evidence from the death scene that—to me, anyhow—seems to strongly indicate a racial motivation.” She reached down and pulled something from the back pocket of her jeans, then laid it in front of Laurie. It was a photo of the Stone Mountain half-dollar Waylon had found with his metal detector.
“Now that’s interesting.” Laurie’s eyes gleamed, and a smile—a grim one, it seemed to me—tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Very interesting.” I could practically see the gears in her mind beginning to mesh and turn. “So. For the meantime, at least, I’m inclined to vote with Miranda. This coin’s ninety years old. It’s a collector’s item, not a random bit of pocket change.” She took another, closer look, squinting at the coin’s edge. “Is that a bit of solder there on the rim?” Miranda nodded. “So this was worn as a medallion. Maybe almost like a crucifix?” I glanced at Miranda, and her face looked aglow with triumph.
Laurie shifted her gaze to me. “Tell me if I’m reading these photographs right, Dr. Brockton. It looks to me like the victim was chained to a tree and kept alive for quite a while.” I nodded. “The bacon wrapper and the bacon-scented bear bait—do those mean what I think they mean? Was he eventually killed by a bear?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
“Murder by bear. That’s a new one, at least for me.” Her mental gears turned for a few more seconds before she went on. “Several top-of-the-head thoughts. The Confederate coin does suggest a white-on-black hate crime. It’s simple, and it fits. Ever hear of Occam’s razor?”
Miranda gave a quiet snort of laughter. “Hear of it? He quotes it every hour on the hour. ‘The simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost always right.’ I’ll be surprised if it’s not carved on his tombstone someday.”
I felt myself blushing slightly. “It’s a useful principle to teach students. And homicide detectives.”
“I agree,” Laurie said. “But a killer who fetishizes the Confederacy might just as readily murder a Jew or a Muslim or even a white person. Or a homosexual or transgender person of any color.”