Without Mercy by Jefferson Bass

color.”
    â€œYou’re a couple steps ahead of me there,” I said, wondering how on earth she’d gotten all the way to transgender crime.
    â€œSorry. 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.
    â€œEver heard of Glenn Miller?” she asked.
    â€œI’m guessing you’re not talking about the 1940s big-band leader,” I ventured.
    â€œHardly. 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.”
    â€œSwell guy,” Miranda said dryly. “Thank God he’s a lousy shot.”
    â€œWish 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.”
    â€œWar against whom?” I asked.
    â€œWell, 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.”
    â€œMorris 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.”
    â€œWowzer,” said Miranda. “Playing for keeps.”
    â€œNo 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