At first there was no movement on the screen, but there was sound—a low whimper of fear, the voice ragged with terror. Moments later a pale figure—a thin, naked young man—came into the frame, lurching and staggering and clinking the chain, casting desperate glances over his shoulder. I strained to see his features but the video’s quality was too poor. A few steps behind the boy lumbered a large black bear, grunting and snuffling and rumbling in a low growl.
The angle changed—to a different camera, apparently—and the chase scene continued, the boy’s movements becoming jerkier, the chain’s clanking more frantic. Suddenly he stumbled and fell, and the bear was upon him. The boy began screaming, in terror and agony, and the bear roared and snarled. The sound grew louder and more unbearable. Miranda covered her ears and hid her face in her elbow, and I could hear her own cries of distress mingling with the boy’s screams and the bear’s savagery. I didn’t know how to mute the speakers, so I reached out and jerked the wires from them, then wrapped my arms around Miranda’s shoulders. She turned and buried her face against my chest, shaking with sobs that quieted and then grew silent, but continued for what seemed minutes. Finally she pulled away and drew a deep, deep breath, then let it out in a shuddering sigh.
A roll of paper towels—the thick, heavy blue kind, almost like flannel, sold in Home Depots and AutoZones for use in workshops—sat on a nearby table. I tore off two and handed them to Miranda. She wiped her eyes and face with one, then blew her nose long and loudly into it. Wadding it up and dropping it into the waste can beneath the desk, she repeated the maneuver with the second one. When I offered her the roll for more, she shook her head and took two more deep breaths.
I pointed at the screen, although by now the horrific video had ended, and asked, “Where on earth did you get that?”
“The dark web,” she said hoarsely.
“The what?”
“The dark web. It’s like a secret, underground Internet, lurking right alongside things like Wikipedia and Facebook and YouTube and Amazon and eBay and NPR and such. The dark web is invisible and unsearchable, unless you know how to get into it and find what you’re looking for. People use it to do things anonymously: Buy and sell drugs. Trade child pornography. Stream pirated movies. And share poison like this.”
“But . . . how do you even know about it? How did you find this?”
She reached for the roll of paper towels and tore off one. First she blew her nose again, then she cleared her throat and spat into it. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m drowning in my own effluvia here.” She tossed this one, too, then took a sip of cold coffee from her Day of the Dead mug. “I called Laurie Wood at SPLC yesterday. We talked some more about the ancestry information Delia gave us, and about the prayer beads.”
“But how—”
“Hang on, boss, I’m getting there. So after we talked a while, she transferred me to one of her colleagues. The SPLC’s web guru. A young hipster guy, sounds like, named Sean. Sean’s done some poking around in the dark web, and when I told him we thought there might be video of our victim being killed, he mentioned a site he saw once, a year or two ago, called ‘Watch Niggers Die.’”
“What?”
“Yeah. Charming, right? The site showed video clips of black people in the act of dying, some of it scenes from movies, some of it real-life footage of accidents or shootings taken by security cameras and police cameras. The only requirement was that the footage show the death of a black person. The more gruesome, the better.” I shook my head, in disbelief and disgust, and she went on. “So I started thinking: If there was a site called ‘Watch Niggers Die’—and according to Sean, it got a huge amount of traffic before it was taken down—maybe there’d be something similar about Muslims and Jews and Middle Eastern immigrants. So I started Google searching—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “I thought you said this stuff on the deadly web—”
“The dark web,” she corrected.
“I thought you said the dark web wasn’t searchable.”
“It’s not. So I started searching on the regular web, looking for hate terms for Muslims. Guess what one of the favorites is?”
I stared at her, then shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe ‘raghead’?”
“That’s one, yes,” she said. “So is ‘towelhead.’ Both relatively tame. The favorite, among the hard-core haters, is ‘sand nigger.’ So I did more searching on that, and I started seeing a lot of rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth posts—on Facebook and Twitter and other sites—by a guy calling himself White Knight. Get it?”
“Like, the white knights of the KKK?”
She nodded. “That, plus white knight as in ‘savior of the white race.’ All these race-baiting, race-hating posts—some about blacks, some about Jews, but more and more, in the past year, about Muslims.”