Without Mercy (22 page)

His cheeks flushed again. “No, sir, I didn't.”

“Therefore, you also don't know that her father's specialty is the U.S. electric power grid—specifically, ways to make it less vulnerable to blackouts and terrorist attacks. You think that's bad for our country?”

“No, sir, I guess not.”

“I don't have to guess,” I said. “I know it's not bad for our country. It's damned important for our country. But you looked at Mona, saw a head scarf, and decided she was beneath you—just another raghead immigrant, right?”

“Yes, sir, I guess I did. I'm sorry.”

“I'm not the one you need to say that to, am I?”

“No, sir, probably not.”

“
Probably
not?”

He sighed. “I should apologize to her.”

“Well, I'll give you a chance to do so. At the beginning of class next time.”

He looked pained. “In
class
? In
front
of class?”

I nodded. “If you want to stay in the class. And avoid a misconduct hearing and a police report.”

Another sigh. “Yes, sir. Can I go now?”

“No, you can't,” I said. “We're not quite through here. It sounds like maybe you're willing to see Mona a little differently, now that you know she's not just some pushy immigrant?” McNulty's eyes darted back and forth, and I could see him parsing my words, searching for subtext—seeking a snare—so I laid it on the table. “But what if she were? What if she were an Afghan immigrant, or a Syrian refugee? What's wrong with that?”

“Well, maybe nothing, individually. But . . . there's so
many
of them, and a lot of them are terrorists.”

“Really? A lot? How many?”

“I don't know,” he said. “But
any
is too many. Don't you think so? Or do you
want
terrorists coming to America?”

“McNulty, if you condescend to me one more time, you'll be out of here so fast your privileged little head will spin,” I snapped. “Of course I don't want terrorists here. But I also don't want to live in a country that's got a wall around it. I still believe in the Statue of Liberty—‘send me your poor'; ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door'; all that land-of-opportunity stuff. Maybe it's corny, but I still believe it's part of what made this country great.”

I scrutinized the boy's face: pale skin, dark hair. “McNulty. Is that a Native American name?” He blinked, startled. “I'm kidding. Irish, right?” He nodded warily. “You know when your ancestors came to America?”

“Not exactly. A long time ago. Early eighteen hundreds?”

“Ask your parents or grandparents. Chances are, they came in the late 1840s or early 1850s. You know why?”

He shrugged. “Looking for a better life, I suppose.”

I nodded. “Sure, if by ‘a better life' you mean not starving to death. They probably came during the Great Famine. Also called the Irish Potato Famine. A million people in Ireland starved to death between 1845 and 1852. A million more came to the United States. You know what they found when they got here?” He shrugged again; he was a shrugger, McNulty. “Bigotry. Prejudice. Abuse by people who thought that these scrawny, dirty Irish immigrants were second class. ‘Irish need not apply,' a lot of help-wanted ads specified. People said there were too many Irish, that they were dangerous and drunkards, that they were bad for America. Sound familiar?”

“Yes, sir.”

“People said similar things about immigrants from Italy and Poland and Germany and Russia. Thing is, McNulty, we're all immigrants here. Native Americans are the only ones with a legitimate beef against immigrants.” I leaned toward him and squeezed his shoulder in what I hoped he'd take as a gesture of conciliation and encouragement. His deltoid was surprisingly robust. “You must work out a lot. Do you?”

“Four or five times a week.”

“Don't forget to challenge your heart muscle,” I said. “Most important muscle in the body. Takes a much stronger man to be kind than to be a bully and a jerk.” He gave a perfunctory nod, but I could tell he'd had enough moral instruction for one day—maybe enough for a lifetime. “Now get out of here. I've got work to do.”

He stood and headed for the door. “Just so you know,” I called after him, “you're not out of the woods yet.” He stopped in his tracks and turned, looking alarmed. “If Mona
wants to file an assault charge or a conduct complaint, she's within her rights. But I'll encourage her to give you another chance. If you apologize—and I mean a sincere apology, not some half-assed, sullen sham—I hope she'll show you some compassion. Which is more than you showed her.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you.” And with that he was gone.

I slumped in the chair, suddenly weary—and painfully aware that I wasn't out of the woods yet either.

MIRANDA WAS IN THE BONE LAB, AS I'D THOUGHT
she would be, but—contrary to my prediction—she wasn't absorbed in an e-mail or a Google search or a post for her Facebook page devoted to forensic anthropology. She was staring at half a dozen skulls, arranged in a semicircle on a lab table, their empty eye orbits all staring back at her. Surveying the lot of them, I noticed that she had three males and three females; two Caucasoids, two Negroids, and two Arikara Indians. “What are you looking for,” I asked, “and what do you see?”

“I'm looking for an explanation,” she said. “A reason why people choose to see differences as defects. As deficiencies.”

“You're looking in the wrong place,” I told her. “You won't find your answer in the dead. Only in the living. But you already know that.”

She sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do. It just always surprises and saddens me when I smack up against that kind of thing.”

“I know,” I told her.
Quit stalling, Brockton
, I scolded myself. I drew a slow breath. “You know I admire your idealism. And your sense of justice. And your bravery.” I paused. Here came the hard part. “But Miranda—”

She interrupted me with a sudden, keening cry. “I know, I know,” she said, her shoulders suddenly shaking, her words so choked I could scarcely understand them. “I crossed a line. I did.”

“You did,” I agreed. “Never lay hands on a student in anger. Never, never, never.”

“I know, I
know
,” she wailed. “You've taught me better than that. You've
shown
me better than that. I'm so sorry, Dr. B. So, so sorry.” She wiped a trail of tears and snot off her face with her scarf, then stared at the slimy mess. “Goddammit,” she said, but there was no heat in the curse; just defeat. “Do you need to fire me? Do you want me to quit?” Her eyes, so sorrowful and vulnerable, damn near broke my heart.

“Good grief, come here,” I said. I opened my arms and enfolded her in a hug—not the first one I'd ever given her, I realized, but one of only a few, and the only one that had ever been more than a quick, awkward, surface-level gesture. “When I was a little kid,” I said, “maybe five or six years old, my grandmother came to visit. Nana, we called her. She loved to take us for nature hikes, and one day, on one of these nature hikes, she was teaching me how to make a Robin Hood hat out of a great big leaf. She pulled a leaf off of this bush and made a hat for herself, to show me how, then pointed to a leaf and said, ‘Now you try.' So I grabbed the leaf and pulled and pulled, but it wouldn't let go of the stem. Finally I snapped, ‘How do you get these damn leaves off?!' She was shocked. Hell,
I
was shocked—I didn't even know I knew that word, let alone how to use it—and I knew I was in for it. Sure enough, when we got home, my mother said she'd have to wash out my mouth with soap.”

I felt Miranda move—was it a sob, or a chuckle?—and heard her snuffle, and I went on. “But hours passed, and she
didn't do it. I knew it was still coming, and the suspense was killing me. So finally, just before bedtime, I couldn't stand it any longer. I found the biggest bar of Ivory soap we had, and I crammed it into my mouth and I rubbed it all over my tongue and the roof of my mouth, and I scraped it back and forth across all my teeth. By the time I was done, I'd whittled about half of that bar into my mouth, and I was gagging from the taste.”

“Good story,” Miranda said, disengaging and stepping back so she could look at me. “And there's a point, too, I'm guessing?”

“Two weeks later, one of my older cousins was visiting, and said the f-word. My mother washed out his mouth on the spot, but all she did was rub the soap back and forth across his lips a couple times, like ChapStick. My point is, don't go overboard on the self-punishment. Quitting would be the worst thing you could do. Just . . . go and sin no more.”

Smiling through her tears, Miranda pressed her hands together, as if in prayer, and gave the slightest, sweetest bow of her head. “No more,” she said. “Never, never, never.”

I believed she was telling the truth.

For both our sakes, I hoped she was.

“SOMEONE'S ON LINE ONE FOR YOU,” PEGGY ANNOUNCED
curtly when I picked up the phone. “Says it's important, but he won't give his name.”

I felt a bloom of sweat on my scalp, and my mental alarms went nuts, all of them shrieking at two hundred decibels. “Does it sound like Satterfield?”

“How would I know what he sounds like? I've never talked to him. Never heard him interviewed.”

“Sorry. Stupid question.”

“But just guessing? I'd say he sounds young and scared, not middle-aged and murderous.”

“Okay, I'll take it. And Peggy?”

“Yes?”

“I know I've been acting strange. I'm really sorry. Please try”—I almost said “not to take it personally,” but that seemed like a surefire prelude to an epic case of foot-in-mouth disease—“to bear with me a little longer. Till this Satterfield storm blows over.”

There was a pause. “I've borne with you for nearly twenty-five
years now,” she said. “I'd say that's a pretty good testament to my patience.”

“Touché,” I said, feeling the unaccustomed sensation of a smile twitching at my lips.

I pressed the blinking button for line 1. “Hello, this is Dr. Bill Brockton. How can I help you?”

“Dr. Brockton?” Peggy was right, though if anything, she'd erred on the side of understatement. My caller sounded very young—the age of my grandsons, perhaps—and extremely scared. “The Dr. Brockton who's the head of the Body Farm?”

“That's me,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“My name is Hassim,” he said. “I met you the other day? When you came to the mosque?”

My nervousness vanished, replaced by a sort of electric hum of hope. “Hello, Hassim. Nice to hear from you. I hope I didn't cause any trouble by showing up uninvited.”

“No, sir. I mean, people
are
pretty nervous these days, with all the terrible things being said about Muslims.” His voice—no discernible accent, so perhaps, like Mona, he, too, was the American-born child of immigrant parents—sounded less fearful now; more weary, perhaps, with a hint of bitterness.

“I'm not surprised,” I said. “I'd be nervous, too. Not everyone feels that way. I certainly don't.”

“No, sir, I didn't think you did. I remembered you when you came to the mosque. You talked at our high school last year. The STEM Academy. The new magnet school in the old L&N train depot.”

“Y'all were a good group,” I said, although the truth was, I didn't actually remember them. School groups tend to blur together, at least if you talk to a hundred a year. But I did remember
liking the setting: a magnificent old railway station, converted into a school for science nerds. “What's on your mind, Hassim?”

“I'm not supposed to be calling you. The imam said we should keep the community's business to ourselves. But it doesn't seem right, not to help . . .” He trailed off.

“Not to help identify someone who was killed?” I said it as gently as I could. “So his family won't have to keep wondering what happened to him? Never knowing, always wondering?”

“Yes, sir. I started thinking about
my
parents, and how upset they'd be if
I
disappeared. And what it would be like for them, if they never knew . . . that I . . .”

“Who do you think it might be, Hassim? And how do I find his parents?”

“His name is Shafiq. Shafiq Mustafah. His parents are in Egypt. Cairo, I think. He was here on a student visa, studying at UT. Engineering or computer science—I'm not sure which. But he had a problem with his passport.”

“What kind of problem, Hassim?”

“His parents were dissidents—they were part of the pro-democracy protests a few years ago, in the Arab Spring—and when the military took control, they got arrested, and Shafiq's passport got canceled.”

I thought—or hoped—I was following him. “You're saying his passport got revoked, or canceled, by the Egyptian government? Because his parents were pro-democracy dissidents?”

“Yes, sir. At least, that's what I think happened.”

“But didn't that mean he had to go back to Egypt?”

“That's the thing. He was
supposed
to go, but he didn't
want
to go. His parents were already in prison, and he was afraid he'd be arrested, too. He wanted to apply for political asylum here, but he had a hard time finding anyone to help
him, and he was afraid he was about to be deported. I thought maybe he
had
been deported. And maybe he was. Maybe he's not the one who was killed.”

“But maybe he went into hiding? So he wouldn't be sent back to Egypt?”

“Maybe, I don't know. I just don't know.” He sounded miserable.

“Hassim, this is very helpful,” I said. “I appreciate it, and I won't tell anyone you called.”

“Thank you. I . . . I hope it's not him. But if it is, I appreciate what you're doing.”

After I hung up, I thought—fretted—about what to do if case number 16–17 turned out to be UT student Shafiq Mustafah. How would I even go about contacting his parents, somewhere in an Egyptian prison? How would they be able to bear it, these parents who had entrusted their son to America—the nation that held itself up as the world's shining beacon of democratic enlightenment and decency—when they learned that his fate had turned out to be far worse than theirs?

Most of the time I loved my job, but as I contemplated the conversations that might lie ahead, I hated this piece of it.
Can't be helped
, I thought.
Won't be easy, but has to be done
.

Opening my desk drawer, I took out the UT Directory and flipped to the listing for the Center for International Education, the office that dealt with foreign students and the mountains of paperwork they brought and generated during their studies here. My eye was caught by a familiar name: Deborah Dwyer, the center's assistant director, had been Kathleen's secretary many years before. Kathleen had always praised the young woman's abilities, predicting that she would go on to bigger and better things than secretarial work. It pleased me to see that Kathleen had been right.

I dialed Debbie's extension, and she answered on the second ring. “International Education, Deborah Dwyer.”

“Hello, Deborah Dwyer. It's Bill Brockton, in Anthropology. How in the world are you?”

“I'm doing well, Dr. Brockton. How are you? It's good to hear your voice.”

“I'm hanging in,” I said, then—to my own surprise—added, “I still miss her, Debbie. After all these years, I do.”

There was a pause, and when she spoke again, her voice sounded thick. “I know. So do I. She was such a fine woman. Very special.”

“She was. Thank you. She always spoke so highly of you. I know she'd be proud of how you're doing.” I cleared my throat. “But listen, I didn't call to make you and me cry. I called to ask a favor.”

“Sure. What can I do for you?”

“I'm wondering what sort of information you have on a student from Egypt—a young man named Shafiq Mustafah.”

She didn't answer right away, so I went on, “He's studying engineering or computer science or some other STEM field. Or was, I think. Maybe not now.”

“Is this the name of someone who's taking a class from you?” Her voice had gone guarded.
A bad sign
, I thought.

“No, it's not.”

“Do you have a records release? Signed by the student?”

“No, why—do I need one?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“But he's a student at a public university. I'm a faculty member. Why can't I see the file of any student I need to?”

“Same reason students can't see
your
file. It's personal information, subject to strict privacy protections. Takes a court order, a request from the Department of Homeland Security.
Unless you can get a release from—what did you say his name is?”

“Shafiq. I
can't
get a release from Shafiq, Debbie, because Shafiq is
dead
.” I heard a soft gasp, but I barged ahead. “That's what I'm afraid of, anyhow. I've got the skeletal remains of a twenty-year-old Middle Eastern male here, and I'm trying to identify him, but I'm having a hell of a time. I've just learned that Shafiq Mustafah went missing about six months ago. At this moment, he's my only lead. But so far all I have is a name.”

“God in heaven,” she said, then I heard her draw a deep breath. “Dr. Brockton, I don't think we should be talking about this on the phone. Can you come see me?”

“If you can't give me any information, I don't see any point,” I said. It came out sounding more sulky than I intended. Or maybe it came out exactly as sulky as I intended.

“The privacy protections are very clear,” she said. “All the same, I wish you'd come see me. Please?”

“Well, since you put it that way. When should I come?”

“Are you free now?”

“Well . . .” I checked my calendar. “I've got a meeting with the provost in an hour, but if you think we can be done in time for me to make that?”

“Come on over,” she said. “It'll be good to see you.”

THE CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION WAS
housed in an aging building on Melrose Avenue, just in back of Hodges Library. The building's old bones were attractive enough; it was a typical academic building from the 1940s or 1950s, a four-story brick edifice whose doors and windows were trimmed in stone. But any scrap of elegance or dignity
it had once possessed was shredded by the air-conditioning units jutting from windows on every floor. The air conditioners gave the building a sort of third world look, which was sad yet somehow appropriate, I supposed. The sign at the entrance read
INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION
in large letters, and, in smaller letters below,
INTERNATIONAL STUDENT AND SCHOLAR SERVICES
. Beside the latter label, someone had spray-painted the letters “ISIS.”

Debbie Dwyer's office was on the second floor; her window—one of the few that was unobstructed by an air conditioner—looked out on a courtyard where maple trees blazed red and orange. When I knocked and entered, she stood and walked around the desk to hug me. “You're a sight for sore eyes,” she said. “You haven't changed a bit.”

“You have,” I said. “You look a lot more . . .
important
now.” She was wearing a power suit—fitted gray skirt and gray jacket, softened by a white silk blouse—but something else was different, too, although I couldn't quite tell what it was.

“It's the hair,” she said. “The impression of power is inversely proportional to the length.” I looked at her hair, not quite shoulder length, puzzled by the comment. “For years I wore it long,” she explained, and I nodded, remembering. “Got compliments galore. But respect and responsibility? Not so much.” She said it with a smile, but it was clear that she wasn't entirely joking, and I felt bad about the workplace complexities she'd had to confront and overcome. She pointed to a pair of armchairs in a corner of the office. “Please, have a seat,” she said, taking one of the chairs for herself. “I am sorry about the rules,” she said. “They're really quite specific.”

Before I even had a chance to answer, there was a knock on her door. “Excuse me, Debbie,” said an attractive young woman. Her hair was long and lovely:
compliment-worthy
, I
thought ironically. “We've got a . . . situation. Could I borrow you for a few minutes?”

Debbie gave me an apologetic glance. “I'm so sorry. Can you wait right here? This shouldn't take long. I'll be back in
five minutes
.” She gave me an odd look as she said it—a look that felt rather like a nudge in the ribs—and then she was gone, the door clicking shut behind her, before I had a chance to say or ask anything that might clarify whether I should wait or simply give up and go.

I glanced around the office, and then I laughed, suddenly and softly. “You
rascal
,” I murmured. At my elbow was a small round table between the two armchairs, and on the table were two things: a lamp, and a manila file folder labeled
MUSTAFAH
,
SHAFIQ
.

I checked my watch.
Five minutes
, I told myself.
Better move fast, Brockton
. First I pressed the button in the door handle to lock the door—I didn't want anyone walking in and seeing me breaking a federal law—then I laid the folder on Debbie's desk and flipped it open. The first thing I saw, on the folder's inside cover, was a young man's face staring at me, wide-eyed, from a copied photograph. It was a passport photo—small and washed out and bad, embodying the special, egregious badness of every passport ever taken—and I nearly shouted with astonishment. Staring at me, from the bad photocopied photo, was a familiar face. The face Joanna Hughes had just re-created on the skull of my Cooke County victim, 16–17. But something wasn't right. This was a kid—way younger than twenty.

The entire passport had been photocopied, I realized as I continued staring. I checked the passport's date of issue and understood why the face staring back at me looked too young: the passport had been issued three years before, in 2013.
Then I saw the birth date—July 1995—and a wave of sorrow washed over me. Shafiq Mustafah had turned twenty-one all alone and stark naked, chained to a tree like an abused dog, as death lumbered toward him from the dark woods of Cooke County and the dark heart of a hate-filled man.

The file was a half inch thick, and I wasn't sure how best to mine it for other useful information. For an insane moment I considered simply taking it, but taking it, I realized, could put Debbie in a very bad spot. If the file were requested while I had it, she would be held responsible for its loss. Even if the disappearance went undetected by anyone else, there would be the awkward matter of how to return it. Last but not least, if I borrowed the file, Debbie would no longer have plausible deniability, whereas if I simply scanned it here and kept my mouth shut, she could honestly say she didn't know that I had seen it.