“You got the results already? Wow, that’s fast! I don’t expect to hear back from the TBI crime lab for another seven and a half weeks.”
She gave a slight smile. “Well, I don’t get nearly as many samples as the TBI does. And I have a bit more incentive to fasttrack things for you, since I’m hoping to get tenure someday.”
I grinned. “Delia, if I could give you tenure right now, I would. Five years from now, if I’m still around, remind me that I owe you for this.”
“Deal.”
“So what can you tell me about case number 16–17, my poor bear-bait John Doe? Was ForDisc right? Is he Caucasoid, or white, or European, or whatever is today’s word for folks who look like me?”
“Like you? Not exactly,” she said. She handed me a printout. “According to the AIMs—the ancestry information markers—his DNA comes almost entirely from the Middle East.”
“The Middle East—my God, of course!” I smacked my forehead in chagrin. “Why didn’t I think of that? That explains a lot. His facial features and skin tone would be different, but his bones would look virtually the same as a white European or an American guy’s.”
Delia gave a slight smile. “Brothers under the skin,” she observed.
“Indeed.” Now that I had this piece of the puzzle, other pieces were suddenly coming together, too. Springing up from my chair—was it possible I’d been dozing mere moments before?—I hurried to the table beneath my window and plucked a small wooden object from the tray. Placing it in my upturned palm, I showed it to Delia. “Several of these were found in bear scat near the death scene. I thought they were just buttons, but they’re not. They must be prayer beads.” My mind was racing. “If that’s true, then I bet this was a hate crime, the victim killed because he was Muslim, not because he was black.” Another realization, this one horrifying, came to me. “Christ,” I said, “this explains the raw bacon, too.”
“Excuse me?”
“Raw bacon,” I repeated. “I told you the victim was kept alive for a while, right?” Delia nodded. “So there were all these empty tin cans. Beanee Weenees, Vienna sausages, deviled ham, stuff like that. The weird thing, though, was that there with all that precooked food was an empty bacon wrapper. Raw bacon. ‘Why would they feed him raw bacon,’ I kept wondering. I finally decided they smeared him with raw bacon to attract the bear. But that wasn’t the only reason.”
I could see Delia processing this, and when she grimaced, I knew she’d figured it out. “It’s pork,” she said.
I nodded. “It’s pork. If you’re a bad guy, and you’ve decided to torture and kill a young Muslim, you want to humiliate him as much as you can, right? So after you strip him of his clothes and his future and every other scrap of autonomy and dignity he’s got, how else can you degrade him?”
“You cover him with something his faith says is unclean and sinful,” she said.
“You do,” I agreed. “So he knows death’s coming—I’m sure the killer has told him he’s in bear country—and he knows he’s dying an unclean death.”
“Wow,” Delia said grimly. “Are all your killers this evil?”
“Not all,” I said. Satterfield, the sadistic serial killer, popped into my mind, uninvited and unwelcome. “Some are much worse.”
MIRANDA SIGHED AND PUSHED BACK FROM THE COMPUTER screen, squinting and rubbing her eyes. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why can’t we find him?” She stopped rubbing her eyes and shook her head in exasperation. “It all fits. A young Muslim man is abducted, then chained to a tree by some white-supremacist sociopath. He’s subjected to humiliation and abuse, then finally murdered in a god-awful way. I called Laurie Wood, at SPLC, by the way. I was wondering if she saw any inconsistency between the Confederate coin and the Muslim victim. I mean, first we think it’s a white-on-black hate crime, then suddenly we decide it’s white on Muslim—are they interchangeable? She said absolutely—a lot of the same people and groups who hate on blacks are now ramping up against Muslims. HGH.”
“Huh?”
“HGH. Texting shorthand. Stands for ‘haters gonna hate.’ Laurie says it’s almost certainly a hate crime.”
“So does Pete Brubaker,” I said. “I was on the phone with him just before I came down here.”
She looked up at me. “He’s the retired FBI profiler?”
“Right.”
“Does he think it’s somebody connected with one of the known hate groups?”