“You’re a couple steps ahead of me there,” I said, wondering how on earth she’d gotten all the way to transgender crime.
“Sorry. Let me back up and tell you where I’m coming from there.” There was a laptop computer in front of her, connected to a projector at the center of the table. She flipped open the laptop and clicked around for a while, then leaned forward and switched on the projector. An image appeared on a projection screen that hung on the wall at the far end of the table. It was a photo of a graying, bearded man in a wheelchair; he wore a dark suit and tie and an electric-blue shirt, and his right arm was raised in a Nazi salute.
“Ever heard of Glenn Miller?” she asked.
“I’m guessing you’re not talking about the 1940s big-band leader,” I ventured.
“Hardly. Frazier Glenn Miller is a modern neo-Nazi. In 2014, he murdered three people outside a Jewish center in Kansas. He thought he was killing Jews, but ironically, all three victims were Christians. Two Methodists and a Catholic. Wrong place, wrong time. He shot at three other people, too, but he missed. He kept shouting, ‘Heil Hitler’ while he was shooting. He’s on death row now.”
“Swell guy,” Miranda said dryly. “Thank God he’s a lousy shot.”
“Wish he’d been lousier. That wasn’t his first run-in with the law,” Laurie went on. She clicked a key on the laptop, and the image changed to a young, vigorous version of Miller, in what I guessed to be his thirties. In this photo, he wore what appeared to be a military uniform: green camo fatigues, a dark green beret adorned with a cross, and a patch on his left shoulder that I recognized as the Confederate flag. “Miller was a Green Beret who did two tours of duty in Vietnam. Shortly after Vietnam, he turned radical racist. He founded a KKK chapter in North Carolina in 1980, the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which morphed into the White Patriot Party. He formed a paramilitary group—he looks like a guerrilla leader, don’t you think?—and mailed out five thousand copies of what he called his Declaration of War.”
“War against whom?” I asked.
“Well, let’s just see,” she said, and clicked another key. Lines of typewritten words filled the screen, enlarged so that the words were six inches high. “I declare war against Niggers, Jews, Queers, assorted Mongrels, White Race traitors, and despicable informants,” one sentence read. The red dot of a laser pointer squiggled across the phrase “White Race traitors.” Laurie explained that the phrase could mean anyone who didn’t share Miller’s white-supremacist views. “One of the white race traitors he mentioned by name was Morris Dees.”
“Morris Dees?” said Miranda. “Your organization’s president?”
Laurie nodded. “Morris was on a hit list of liberals and civil rights leaders targeted for assassination. Miller assigned points to each target. Politicians and judges were worth fifty points apiece. ‘Prominent Jews’ were worth twenty-five points. Blacks were worth one point.”
Appalling though the scheme was, I had to admit I found it intriguing. “And how much was your boss worth?”
She smiled slightly. “Morris was the jackpot. Killing Morris was worth 888 points to Glenn Miller.”
“Wowzer,” said Miranda. “Playing for keeps.”
“No kidding,” said Laurie. “His Declaration of War went on to say, ‘Let the blood of our enemies flood the streets, rivers, and fields of the nation, in Holy vengeance and justice.’ Ten days after he mailed out his manifesto, he was arrested for violating parole. The U.S. marshals who caught him found a cache of dynamite, C-4 plastic explosive, twenty pipe bombs, sawed-off shotguns, pistols, machine guns, and a thousand pounds of ammunition.”
Miranda gave a low whistle of amazement. “Holy hand grenades, Batman.”
“Oh, right,” said Laurie. “I forgot—a bunch of grenades, too.” She drew a deep breath and then blew it out, as if to clear something foul from her lungs or her soul. “I had a point in bringing all this up. What were we talking about before I went off on this Glenn Miller detour?”
It took me a moment to recall. “Oh, motivation for our murder case. Race? Religion? Sexual orientation?”
“Right, right. So Miller’s an interesting case. He spews all this white-supremacy venom—calls black people ‘bubble-lipped, blue-gummed niggers’ and suchlike—but back in the eighties, around the time he sent out his Declaration of War on blacks and homosexuals, we hear tell Miller was picked up by the cops in Raleigh, North Carolina. Rumor is, Miller was in the backseat of his car with a prostitute—a black man in women’s clothing.”
“Holy hypocrisy,” said Miranda.
Laurie laughed. “You think? Miller claimed he lured the prostitute into the car for a beating, but that didn’t appear to be what was happening on the upholstery.”