Without Mercy by Jefferson Bass Page A

thousand pounds of ammunition.”
    Miranda gave a low whistle of amazement. “Holy hand grenades, Batman.”
    â€œOh, right,” said Laurie. “I forgot—a bunch of grenades, too.” She drew a deep breath and then blew it out, as if to clear something foul from her lungs or her soul. “I had a point in bringing all this up. What were we talking about before I went off on this Glenn Miller detour?”
    It took me a moment to recall. “Oh, motivation for our murder case. Race? Religion? Sexual orientation?”
    â€œRight, right. So Miller’s an interesting case. He spews all this white-supremacy venom—calls black people ‘bubble-lipped, blue-gummed niggers’ and suchlike—but back in the eighties, around the time he sent out his Declaration of War on blacks and homosexuals, we hear tell Miller was picked up by the cops in Raleigh, North Carolina. Rumor is, Miller was in the backseat of his car with a prostitute—a black man in women’s clothing.”
    â€œHoly hypocrisy,” said Miranda.
    Laurie laughed. “You think? Miller claimed he lured the prostitute into the car for a beating, but that didn’t appear to be what was happening on the upholstery.”
    â€œSo,” I mused, “he wanted a taste of forbidden fruit?”
    â€œ Über forbidden,” said Miranda. “Like, forbidden to the second or third power—not just an African American, but a male African American. In drag. That’s some world-class sinning, by his standards.” Her brow furrowed slightly. “So all this vitriol is just overcompensation for his own dark, forbidden desires?”
    Laurie shrugged. “We’ll never know. Hell, maybe Miller himself doesn’t even know. Guys like him don’t strike me as particularly self-aware, you know?”
    Miranda made a face. “So Miller’s on death row for shooting Christians he mistook for Jews. Any of his fine, upstanding friends look capable of this?”
    Laurie frowned. “Our Intelligence Project tracks a lot of extremists. Many of them have called, at one time or another, for the slaughter of blacks and Jews. But my guess is, it’s probably not a leader—not somebody with a high profile—who did this. More likely, somebody inspired by that kind of incendiary talk. Maybe somebody who wants to impress the leadership. Somebody who wants to prove himself, get intothe club, score points by committing a killing. There’s multiple groups and ideologies that could fit with your case. But a lot of the groups have links to, or spun off from, one particularly influential hate group.”
    She fiddled with the computer again, and the projector displayed a picture of a bespectacled white man in his fifties or sixties, photographed midsentence, his mouth slightly open, his index finger pointing to emphasize whatever he was saying. Despite what appeared to be an angry expression on his face, the man looked slightly nerdy, even to me—a grocery-store manager or McDonald’s supervisor—but behind him was a large Nazi flag. “This cheery fellow, James Wickstrom, is a leader of what’s called the Christian Identity movement,” Laurie said. “Christian Identity, or Identity, hard-liners despise blacks and other people of color. They consider them subhuman, and call ’em ‘mud people.’ But they hate Jews even worse.”
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    She rolled her eyes. “You want psychology, or theology? The Identity crazies believe the Jews were created when Eve had sex with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Wickstrom—”
    â€œExcuse me,” Miranda interrupted, “but I misheard something there. The Jews were created when Eve what ?”
    â€œHad sex with the serpent. In the Garden of Eden. Cain—the ‘first Jew,’ according to these folks—wasn’t the son of Adam and Eve, according to Identity