Deviations Page 8

  The chief’s brow furrowed as he looked at the photo. I’d used a pink highlighter to trace the contusions. He looked up. “What’s 1488?”

  Ryan looked down and read off a piece of paper. “The symbol 1488, sometimes written 14 slash 88, refers to one of two different fourteen-word slogans. One of them is, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.” The other is, “Because the beauty of the White Aryan women must not perish from the earth.”

  The chief’s expression was grim. “And what’s the 88?”

  “It’s an eighty-eight word passage from Mein Kampf, volume 1, chapter 8.”

  “Just give me the main point.”

  “The main point,” Ryan said, “is that everything we do is to be judged according to whether it advances the existence and reproduction of our race.”

  The chief rubbed his chin. “Shit.” He looked at me.

  “I gotta agree.”

  “I’m going to make some calls. You two might want to start learning about the patriot movement.”

  * * * *

  “Know what I was thinking?” I said, tapping my fingers on my desk. “Remember on the Arlen Hagerty case, we talked to my friend Carol Freeman at the university?”

  “Yeah, I remember, she filled us in on Dolores Weston’s relationship with Henley Pharmaceuticals.” Ryan was already on the university Web site. He wrote her number on a slip of paper and handed it to me across our desks.

  I punched in the number. “Hello, Carol? Karen Seagate.” We did ten seconds of how-ya-doing’s. “You know much about neo-Nazis? You know, the patriot movement?” I hit Speaker.

  “A little bit. Why, what’s it to you? You got a case?”

  “No,” I said, smiling, “I’m thinking of getting a master’s degree.”

  She laughed. “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “I’m going back to school. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.”

  “All right,” she said, sighing. “I’ll figure it out on my own. No, I’m not the one to talk to. But there’s this squirrely guy in History, Willson Fredericks, you should be talking to. He’s been here a hundred years, written a bunch of books on all the Nazis—and I think he’s got a recent one just on the patriots.”

  “Squirrely as in he won’t be straight with me?”

  “No, not that. He’ll tell you the truth. Just personally squirrely. But he knows what he’s talking about.”

  “Great. Thanks a lot, Carol—”

  “And what case did you say you were working on?”

  “Talk to you later, Carol.”

  Ryan was already on the professor’s site. “This guy Willson Fredericks is kind of a big deal on militias and the patriot movement. Three books on the movement: 1991, 1999, and 2010. A whole lot of articles—the Holocaust, history of fascism, the militias, domestic terrorism, the new patriot movement—everything we’re talking about. He’s got speeches at conferences, served on the boards of history organizations.” He looked up from his screen. “He’s our guy.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do some research, then tomorrow we have us a chat with the professor.”

  Chapter 7

  At the end of the shift, Ryan headed home. I decided to stay at my desk. Too many ways to get in trouble at my house. There was an AA meeting close to headquarters at eight o’clock. I decided to buy a sandwich from the machine, then kill some time till the meeting.

  I learned real fast that the patriots are all over the Internet, and they love making videos. Thousands of homemade videos of morons shooting their semi-automatics and grinning at the camera. Skinheads shouting about how the tree of liberty will be watered with the blood of patriots as they fight to defend your rights. Lots of black screens with white letters spelling out how the president and his jackbooted thugs are THIS VERY MINUTE planning the next terrorist attack. Many different recordings of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. That’s definitely their favorite tune. Second place goes to a soundtrack of boots marching, which works well with photos and videos of Nazi storm troopers.

  One thing these patriots need to work on is what they really think about the Holocaust. There are dozens of videos with guys ranting about how the Holocaust never happened, mostly because the so-called gas chambers didn’t have the right kind of piping or the whole thing was just bad hygiene, which is how Anne Frank died—it was typhus and probably her own fault but certainly not the fault of the German troops who were doing the best they could with all those people in such tight quarters. And anyway there’s no evidence that there were concentration camps in the first place.

  But then there are hundreds of videos showing the warehouses bursting with the eyeglasses and the teeth with gold fillings, and the piles of bones stacked to the ceiling, and the living skeletons in the striped concentration-camp uniforms, their eyes bugging out of their sunken faces, looking blankly through the barbed wire. And the long trenches overflowing with thousands of naked corpses, their arms and legs all snapped and sticking this way and that, dead from the gas because it was cheaper than bullets. All of this showing, of course, what the president and the rest of the New World Order are planning to do to the true patriots.

  Yes, these guys definitely need to sit down at a swastika-shaped table and figure out what the hell they think. The Holocaust: Happened? Didn’t happen? Will definitely happen soon? Good thing? Not such a good thing?

  I was starting to sink deeper and deeper, starting to think maybe a small drink or four would smooth out some of the jagged black edges, when I stumbled on the best video. It was a photo montage of the president wearing a full Nazi field uniform, with brown shirt, jodhpurs, and high, shiny black leather boots. He was carrying a riding crop. These photos weren’t like those cheesy posters that numbskulls carry at street protests, where someone used a Sharpie to draw a Hitler moustache. No, these were professional-quality Photoshopped images, which was appropriate because the guy wanted the world to know that the president isn’t just like a Nazi, he actually is a Nazi, and these photos of him prove it. Personally, he convinced me. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense: after a long day of taking our guns away, riding roughshod over our God-given freedoms, and trampling our Constitutional rights, the president pours himself a drink, gets funky, and slips into a Nazi uniform, complete with a swastika armband. I mean, wouldn’t you?

  I Googled “Montana patriots” and found the Montana Patriot Front, which has its own channel, with 137 videos. There was a video shot from inside what they called the “church” at Lake Hollow, really a log cabin, crammed with a few dozen folding chairs and a plywood altar. The only thing churchy about the place was a plastic Jesus on the cross, maybe a foot tall, hanging on the front wall, looking about as spiritual as it must have looked on the shelf at Wal-Mart. Painted on the front of the wooden podium on the altar was a swastika with lightning-bolt arms on it. The swastika was twice the size of Jesus—just to make sure everyone knew what was what.

  A guy walks up to the podium. He’s wearing camo pants, a brown t-shirt, and a military fatigue jacket. Short, paunchy, with dark, thin hair combed neat, parted down the middle, he’s fussy and deliberate as he arranges his note cards. He looks up, adjusting the microphone. “My name is Thomas McClaren. I’m from Spokane, Washington.” His expression darkens. “And I’m here to talk with you about a subject that is of crucial importance to all of us at this gathering. All of the white people of these great United States. I want to explain to you this afternoon the scientific basis of our cause. Why the white people of the United States bear an awesome responsibility to cast down the black people … may I call them niggers?”

  Whoa. You kiss your wife with that mouth, motherfucker? I looked at the corner of the YouTube screen. This guy was going to spew for 14:32. It was a real long quarter hour, but I learned a lot.

  Such as that only white people can be Christians. This seemed to be the most important point because the shithead said it many times. American white people are the best
kind of Christians, but not all American white people are Christians. Jewish American white people are (of course) not Christians and are therefore evil. Jewish people are intelligent, but not in a good way. They are wily. Which is why they grow up to be wily Jew politicians. Although many Jewish people look white, they really aren’t. It’s not about whether they have white skin. It’s much more complicated than that. And because Jewish people probably aren’t officially white, they cannot be the chosen people. Who are the real chosen people, the asshole asked? I got this one right: real white American Christians.

  By contrast, black people are always drunk. (When I was a kid, I was taught it was Irish people, but there must be some new science.) Black people are officially people, but God made them stupid so they’d be happy tending the herds. They’re not smart enough to do agriculture. That’s due to the drunkenness: they can’t plant the seeds in a straight line. Because there aren’t that many animals for black people to herd today, they spend most of their time watching Oprah, collecting welfare, and having many, many black bastard babies.

  Muslim people are all A-rabs, regardless of where they live. They want to kill the chosen people (the true American white Christians, not the Jews) because they hate us although they like the things we have and want to have them, too. Mexicans are definitely not white. More than one Mexican is a horde of Mexicans. Horde must mean liquid in Spanish because Mexican hordes either stream across the border or flood the border. Many Mexicans spend all their time in the parking lot at Home Depot; others take the jobs that rightly should go to real Americans; and all Mexicans (like all black people) collect welfare and have many, many (Mexican) bastard babies.

  I also learned that, despite all the uproar about using the N-word, the following words are still okay to use in a log-cabin church with a swastika over the door: nigger, darkie, kike, Jew bastard, spic, and wetback. These words are not offensive, although they do cause different reactions in people.

  Some people laugh when they hear them. The laughter means that the person hearing the word is better than the person being described by the word. The laughter happens because the truth—that some people, such as drunken black people, would rather watch Oprah than work for a living—is spoken so rarely that it catches the listener by surprise. It is the laughter of people who realize that, while it might be politically incorrect to call a nigger a nigger, it is, unfortunately, true. Black people are niggers.

  Other people shake their heads in sadness when they hear these words. They’re a notch more evolved than those who simply laugh. They understand that niggers, kikes, wetbacks, and A-rabs represent the most serious threat facing true white Christian Americans. This threat makes them sad.

  Still other people nod their heads in determination. They are the most evolved because they understand that some people have already put down the pen and picked up the sword of righteous anger to smite those who wish to destroy us, and that the day is drawing nigh for each and every one of us to strike back in our crusade to rid the world of Satan’s children so that God’s dominion on Earth can be realized.

  When I saw these people on the video, I couldn’t predict which ones were going to laugh, which were going to be sad, and which were going to be determined. They were all white people dressed alike, and they all looked glad they’d driven out into the woods for the weekend speeches, workshops, target practice, and explosives workshops. When I looked at other videos from the end of the rally, the people all looked ready to drive back home because they had to go to work on Monday, pay the mortgage, coach their kid’s T-ball, and generally get on with things. I couldn’t tell whether anyone in the audience had already picked up the sword of righteous anger and done some smiting.

  Oh, I learned one more thing: that I still do love Jack Daniel’s.

  * * * *

  “Professor Willson Fredericks. Very prolific scholar.” Ryan had hung up his sport jacket and was walking over to his desk. He looked like he had slept eight luxurious, dream-free hours, eaten a balanced, nutritious breakfast, hugged and kissed his baby and his wife, put his ear to his wife’s big belly to hear the next baby gurgling, and driven in to headquarters, tapping his fingers to an oldies station while thinking about how we were going to get whoever killed Dolores Weston.

  Pretty much the same for me. After watching some Montana Patriot Front videos, I had blacked out, coming to around eleven, which gave me time to stagger into the final AA meeting of the day and get my damn card signed. Running on four hours’ sleep, I stumbled into work this morning a couple minutes early, just before Ryan. “And what did you learn?” I said.

  “Well,” Ryan said, “Fredericks is super smart, works real hard. Writes a couple of articles a year, half on a World War II era subject, the other half on the patriot movement today.”

  “And he write anything that’s gonna help us with Dolores Weston?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s pretty tight with the local group, the Montana Patriot Front.”

  “Yeah, I discovered them last night.”

  “I read three of his articles that said he was at Lake Hollow a number of times, doing interviews and conducting ‘ethnographic research.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It’s what sociologists and anthropologists do. They put themselves in an environment and study the culture. You know, who talks to who, how things get done, the basic values and belief systems, that kind of thing.”

  “You mean, he hangs out with them? Do they know he’s doing this?”

  “I assume so. His articles are all over the Internet, under his own name. His photograph is all over the university’s Web site. If he were sneaking into the compound without their permission—which I don’t think would be easy to do—and they caught him, they’d treat him like he’s some kind of mole or something. And they don’t like that.”

  “Okay, but why would they invite him into the compound to expose them?” I said.

  “It isn’t like he’s uncovering all kinds of dirt about them that we don’t know. He isn’t talking about how they’re stealing money, or anything like that. He’s writing academic articles.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, one of the articles, he’s comparing the Montana Patriot Front to a couple of other groups, in terms of how they define themselves in their charter documents. You know, the mixture of old-school Nazi philosophy and anti-immigrant thinking. It’s like he’s studying this tribe in Borneo, comparing it to other tribes.”

  “And they’re okay with him writing about them like they’re a tribe in Borneo?”

  “Only thing that makes sense is they think they’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. He can come and listen and write his articles that nobody in Lake Hollow is going to read, but what’s the downside? If he talks about their philosophy, they’re so egotistical they think that helps them get the word out. Plus, it helps them feel like they’re pulling their weight in the broader patriot movement. The Montana group is smaller than a lot of the others, so the articles make them feel like they’re important.”

  I wasn’t sure I was buying Ryan’s theory. Hard to imagine these guys thinking they look like anything other than morons who’ve been dropped on their heads couple too many times, but I guess the definition of being crazy is that you’re absolutely certain you sound perfectly reasonable—and that everyone else is crazy. “Anything else you get off those articles?”

  “One other thing. Over and over, Fredericks cites some guy named Benjamin Connors as a source. So I looked him up. Everybody else he cites—even the crackpots who say the Holocaust never happened—they’ve got titles and affiliations. They work for bogus think tanks or they’re professors, but they’ve got names and jobs, and they write things and attend conferences. This guy Benjamin Connors—I can’t find any evidence that there really is someone named Benjamin Connors. And when Willson Fredericks cites him in his articles, he never cites anything Connors has written. He just lists it as ‘personal communication.�
�”

  “I spent some time on YouTube last night—watching the Montana Patriot Front channel.”

  “You see Fredericks on one of the videos?”

  “No, didn’t see him there, but there was this video of a speech in their log cabin they call a church. It was pretty scary. There’s some twisted dudes out there.”

  “See anything you want to follow up on?”

  “I don’t know. The guy was saying how the time for talk has passed, how they need to take action. Said that some patriots have already carried out missions, picked up the sword, that kind of shit, and how we’re all gonna have to do that. Lots of nigger-this and nigger-that. Kikes, towleheads, wetbacks. But everything is groups, no individuals.”

  “No clear threats against anyone in particular?”

  “I didn’t see anything like that.”

  “So how do you want to go at Fredericks?” Ryan said as we headed out to the parking lot.

  “We’re just stupid cops coming to talk to the smart professor. If we get anything off him, we tell Murtaugh. Otherwise, we wait for the chief to tell us how he wants us to proceed. Sound good to you?

  “Absolutely. Let’s talk to the smart professor.”

  Chapter 8

  “Thanks very much for taking to time to speak with us,” I said. “You mind if Detective Miner grabs a chair from out in the hall?”

  “Not at all,” Professor Willson Fredericks said. He remained standing, so I did, too. The office was insultingly small. I’m thinking eight by thirteen, but the eight was closer to six because the cinder block walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which crawled over the top of his battered gray steel desk like a speed bump. One wall was all window, looking out over the quad on campus. It must have been the break between classes because dozens of students were crisscrossing the quad, every one of them carrying a backpack. The girls could’ve been me twenty years ago, except I couldn’t afford Starbucks, I didn’t have a cell phone, and I kept my boobs inside my shirt. The sun was on High, and even though it was only fifty-five degrees, the girls were trying to get into it. Even from this guy’s second-floor office, I could see that this was the first day of Nipple Fest.