“No,” I said. “He thinks it’s an outlier—some wack job who’s gotten all spun up by what he hears on talk radio or reads on the Internet. Those groups spew hate and violence, but when push comes to shove, Brubaker says, they’re big on talk, small on action. But there are outliers even the hate-group leaders find scary. He suspects our killer is one of those fringe loonies.”
“Laurie, too. She says what worries SPLC the most these days is the rise of the lone-wolf terrorist. Like Dylann Roof, the Charleston kid who killed all those people in the black church. He got obsessed with neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate groups, including the Council of Conservative Citizens.”
“Who are they?”
“A white-supremacy group that denounces racial mixing and calls blacks a ‘retrograde species.’ After Roof shot all those people, the CCC claimed it was shocked and saddened. Yeah, right.” She practically spat the words. “Hypocritical jerks.” She slapped her palm on the desktop, and the sound made me jump. “So why the hell can’t we find out who our victim was? I’ve spent hours going through these missing-person reports, and he’s just not there.”
I shared her frustration, though not her eyestrain. “Well,” I said finally, “if there’s no missing person who fits the profile, I suppose that means nobody’s reported him missing.”
“But why the hell not?”
I considered this. I’d worked at least a dozen murder cases in which the victims—some of them dead for weeks or months—had never been reported missing. All those victims had been women, though, and most had been prostitutes, long alienated from their families. “You think he could’ve been a male prostitute?” I said. “Remember what Laurie told us about Glenn Miller, the neo-Nazi caught with a black transvestite in the backseat of his car? Maybe our killer picks up the guy, has kinky sex, and then blames the victim for tempting him to go against his beliefs?”
Miranda twitched her mouth to one side, then the other, and then shook her head. “I don’t buy it. For one thing, I’ve never heard of a Muslim male prostitute. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but it seems very much at odds with what I know of Muslim culture.” She shrugged. “Not that I know much about Muslim law. But a young Muslim man who’s carrying prayer beads? I have a hard time picturing him walking the streets and turning tricks.”
The scenario struck me as a bit far-fetched, too. “Okay,” I said, “let’s assume he wasn’t a prostitute. Why else could he go missing without being reported? Runaway?”
“Twenty’s a little old to be a runaway,” she said. “Besides, even if he were an aging runaway, seems like his family would have reported him. Could’ve just been a real loner, though. Or mentally ill. Or . . .”—her eyes darted back and forth as she thought—“maybe he wanted to be under the radar for some other reason.”
“Because he was a terrorist?”
She shot me a sharp glance. “And some Cooke County redneck ferreted out a nefarious plot that Homeland Security and the FBI completely overlooked? Come on, Dr. B, don’t tell me you’ve drunk the every-Muslim-is-a-terrorist Kool-Aid, too? You’re smarter than that. You’re better than that.”
Stung by her rebuke, I didn’t feel smart, and I didn’t feel good. I felt small and ashamed.
CHAPTER 16
I DROVE PAST IT TWICE BEFORE I REALIZED THAT THE low, featureless building was the place I was seeking. The Muslim Community of Knoxville was housed in a drab, one-story structure made of precast concrete, the panels textured with vertical ribs and grooves—a style I’d seen mainly on the exteriors of convenience marts. The windows were protected by steel bars, and surveillance cameras stood watch over the building’s doors and perimeter. The only flourishes that set the place apart from a Circle K or a liquor storage warehouse were a pair of green awnings over the doorways, plus a matching green plywood panel over the front door, featuring a cutout of a pointed dome.