“And that’s the transverse diameter—side to side, not front to back?”
“Yes, transverse. You asked for transverse, so I gave you transverse. I’d’ve given you front to back if you’d asked for front to back.”
“No need to get snippy,” Richard said. “Just making sure. You know what they say—garbage in, garbage out.”
“Richard, you’re killing me. Come on, what’s it say?”
“Let’s see.” I heard a couple of clicks. “For black males in the forensic data bank, the average transverse tibial diameter, at the nutrient foramen, is twenty-seven millimeters. Average for whites is twenty-five. So statistically, ForDisc says there’s a 70 percent chance your victim is white.”
“Seventy? That’s a pretty high percentage.”
“Doesn’t mean he is white,” Richard hastened to hedge. “That’s an estimate, based on averages. From one bone, which is not exactly a robust data set.”
“I know, I know.”
“But it does gives you some reason to question whether he’s black.”
“It does,” I agreed. “But why in the world would a Confederate hillbilly chain a white boy in the woods to die?”
“Ah, I’m afraid ForDisc can’t help you with that,” he said. “That’s a little beyond the capabilities of the software.”
“Well, see if you can work that feature into the next upgrade,” I suggested, and he chuckled. I thanked him and hung up, surprised to find that I was . . . surprised. Both the reconstructed femur and the tibial measurement suggested, though they certainly didn’t prove, that the victim was white, not black. Individually, each was a fairly subtle, uncertain indication, but together, they seemed to carry more weight.
But what did it mean? If it wasn’t a racially motivated hate crime, what was it—a simple revenge killing, as Brubaker, the retired FBI profiler, had suggested? I thought about calling him back but decided that without additional information to go on, he wasn’t likely to have additional insights.
On an impulse, I rooted around in my wallet and fished out the card Laurie Wood had handed me in Montgomery, at the end of our meeting at the Southern Poverty Law Center. After we exchanged a few opening pleasantries, I cut to the chase. “This case has more twists than a kudzu vine,” I told her. “Here’s the latest. The victim of our Confederate hate killer—if that’s what he was—was white, not black.”
“Hmm,” she said. “That is a twist, but it could still be a white-supremacist thing.”
“How, exactly?”
“If the victim did something that made the killer consider him a ‘race traitor’—someone who seriously betrayed the white race.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, dating a black woman. Fathering a child by a black woman. Arresting a white man for beating up a black man. Coming to the aid of a black man who’s being harassed or abused by a white man. There was a case in Mississippi in 2014, a nineteen-year-old white girl who was dating a black man. She burned to death—a car fire—and there was much rejoicing on Stormfront, a neo-Nazi website, by people who thought she got what she deserved. ‘Race traitor’ is in the eye of the beholder, and if your killer’s looking hard for somebody to call a race traitor, it won’t be hard to find.” She paused, then added, “You ever had a case where your work ended up helping convict a white man for a black man’s murder?”
“Well, yes—a couple of them, actually.”
“There you go. You, too, might qualify as a race traitor, Dr. Brockton. Better watch your back.” I sensed that she was joking. Or hoped so, at any rate.
“Takes one to know one,” I countered, and she chuckled. Whistling past the graveyard, I thought. Both of us. I also thought, Takes a graveyard whistler to know a graveyard whistler.
After I finished talking with Laurie, I dialed Sheriff O’Conner. He answered after the first ring. “Sheriff, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said. “I’ve got some interesting news. Two ways of skinning the same cat. First, I reconstructed a femur from our victim, using the pieces I fished out of the scat Waylon brought me.”
“And you were able to put it back together? I’m impressed. I figured he was like Humpty Dumpty and couldn’t be fixed.”
“It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to shed some light. The femur’s shape differs slightly from one race to another. In Native Americans and Asians, the front of the bone tends to be curved. Also in whites, though not as much. But in blacks, it’s almost straight. From that Confederate coin, I would’ve bet that this one would be straight. But I think I just lost that bet.”