Red Mist (3 page)

I envision the blizzard of intense white specks as small as pollen on the MRI scan of the first victim Dawn Kincaid stabbed
with an injection knife.
Bright white particles densely concentrated around a buttonhole wound and blasted deep inside the
organs and soft tissue structures of the chest.
Like a bomb going off internally.
If she’d
finished what she’d started when she came after me with that same weapon, I would have been dead before I hit the ground.

“Not that I understand why you were wearing body armor at your own house.”
The warden probes because she can.

I don’t offer that part of my job with the Department of Defense is medical intelligence, and that General Briggs wanted my
opinion of the latest level of body armor developed for female troops.
I happen to know for a fact that the vest can stop
a steel blade.
Luck, dumb luck, and I remember being shocked by what I saw in the mirror after it was over.
My red-tinted
face.
My red-tinted hair.
For an instant I smell the iron smell and hear the hissing red mist as it landed warmly, wetly,
all over me inside my cold, dark garage.

“I understand the dog was out there in the garage with you when it happened, if what’s been in the news is true.
How is Sock?”
I hear the warden say, as I look down at my hands.
My clean hands with their functional unpolished short squared nails.
I
take a deep breath and concentrate on any odors in the room.
No iron bloody smell, just the hint of Tara Grimm’s perfume.
Estée Lauder.
Youth-Dew.

“He’s doing quite well.”
I focus on her again and wonder if I missed something.
How did we get on the subject of a rescued
greyhound?

“So you still have him?”
She looks steadily at me.

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m glad to hear it.
He’s a very good dog.
But they all are.
Just as sweet as they can be, and I know Kathleen didn’t want
to give him up to just anyone and is hoping she’ll get him back when she’s out.”

“When she’s out?”
I ask.

“Dawn adopted Sock because Kathleen didn’t want anyone else to have him, she loved that dog so much,” Tara says.
“Good to
animals, I’ll give her credit for that, at least, and knowing all this should have alerted you that the two of them have a
connection, an alliance.
Kathleen and Dawn, even though Kathleen will lead you to think otherwise, as you’re about to find
out.
Since I’ve been the warden here, Dawn’s been a fairly frequent visitor, coming to see her mother three or four times
a year, making deposits in her commissary account.
Of course, that’s stopped.
The two wrote to each other, but the police
took those letters, although it doesn’t prevent the two of them from communicating now, one inmate writing another.
You probably
know all that.”

“I’d have no reason to.”

“Kathleen lies about it now that Dawn’s in trouble.
Doesn’t want any guilt by association when it comes to someone who might
be in a position to help her.
You, for example.
Or a prominent lawyer.
Kathleen will say what she thinks is to her advantage.”

“What do you mean ‘when she gets out’?”
I repeat.

“You know, everybody’s wrongly convicted this day and age,” she says.

“I didn’t realize there’s any suggestion Kathleen Lawler might have been.”

“She won’t get Sock back unless he lives to be a very old dog,” Tara Grimm says, as if she’ll make sure of it.
“I’m glad you’re
keeping him.
I’d hate for one of the rescues we train here to be homeless again or end up in the wrong hands.”

“I can assure you Sock won’t ever be homeless or in the wrong
hands.”
I’ve never had a pet so bonded to me, following me everywhere like a needy shadow.

“Most of our greyhounds come from a racetrack in Birmingham, the same one Sock came from,” she says.
“They retire them, and
we take them so they aren’t euthanized.
It’s good for the inmates to be reminded that life is a God-given gift, not a God-given
right.
It can be given or taken away.
When you acquired Sock, you didn’t know he belonged to Dawn Kincaid, I assume.”

“He was inside a back room of an unheated house in Salem in the winter and had no food.”
She can interrogate all she wants.
I’m not going to tell her much.
“I took him home with me until we could figure out what to do with him.”

“And then Dawn showed up to get him,” the warden says.
“She came to your house that same night to get her dog back.”

“It’s interesting if that’s the story you’ve heard,” I reply, and I wonder where she might have gotten an absurd idea like
that.

“Well, your interest in Kathleen is a mystery to me,” she says.
“I wouldn’t think it was the wisest move for someone in your
position.
Now, I said so to Mr.
Brazzo, but of course he wasn’t going to elaborate on your real motive for agreeing to meet
with Kathleen.
Or why you’ve been so kind to her.”

I have no idea what she means.

“Let me be a little more blunt,” the warden says.
“At certain times during the day, inmates with e-mail privileges are allowed
to use the computer lab, and whatever they send to pen pals or receive from them has to go through our prison e-mail system,
which is monitored and has filters.
I know what she’s e-mailed to you over recent months.”

“Then you’re also aware I never answered.”

“I’m aware of all inmate communications to and from the outside world, whether it’s e-mail or letters written on stationery
and sent by post.”
She pauses, as if what she just said is supposed to mean something to me.
“I have an idea what you’re after
and why you’re being friendly and accessible with Kathleen.
You want information.
What should concern you is who’s really
behind Kathleen’s invitation.
And what that person might want.
I’m sure Mr.
Brazzo told you the troubles she’s had.”

“I’d rather hear your account of them.”

“Child molesters have never been particularly popular in prisons,” she says slowly, thoughtfully, in her blunted drawl.
“Kathleen
served her sentence for that long before I came here, and after she got out the first time, she got into one bad mess after
another.
She’s served six different sentences since her first incarceration, all of them right here at the GPFW, because she
never seems to drift any farther away than Atlanta when she gets out.
Drug crimes, until this most recent conviction for killing
a teenage boy who had the misfortune of riding a motor scooter through an intersection at the moment Kathleen ran a stop sign.
It’s a twenty-year sentence, and she’s required to serve eighty-five percent of it before she’s eligible for parole.
Unless
there’s intervention, she’s likely to spend the rest of her natural life here.”

“And who might intervene?”

“Are you personally acquainted with Curtis Roberts?
The Atlanta lawyer who called your lawyer to invite you here?”

“No.”

“I don’t think the other inmates knew about Kathleen’s early conviction
of child molesting until your cases up there in Massachusetts started hitting the news,” she says.

I don’t recall there being anything about Kathleen Lawler on the news, and the explanation I was given about why she’d been
transferred to Bravo Pod was that she’d angered other inmates.

“Some of them decided they were going to teach her a lesson for what she did to your murdered colleague when he was a boy,”
Tara adds.

I’m quite certain Kathleen Lawler’s illicit relationship with Jack Fielding has not been in the news.
I would know.
Leonard
Brazzo didn’t mention this, either.
I don’t think it’s true.

“That, added to the boy on the scooter she ran over while she was driving under the influence.
There are a lot of mothers
in here, Dr.
Scarpetta.
Grandmothers, too.
Even a few great-grandmothers.
Most of these inmates have children.
They don’t
tolerate anyone who harms a child,” she goes on in a slow, quiet voice that is as hard as metal.
“I got wind of a plot, and
for Kathleen’s own protection I transferred her to Bravo Pod, where she’ll remain until I feel it’s safe to move her.”

“I’m curious about what’s been in the news, exactly.”
I try to draw out details of what I suspect is a complete fabrication.
“I don’t think I’ve heard this same news.
I don’t recall hearing Kathleen’s name mentioned in connection with the Massachusetts
cases.”

“Apparently one of the inmates, or maybe it was one of the guards, someone here caught something on TV about Kathleen’s past,”
Tara says evasively.
“About her being a sex offender, and it spread like wildfire.
It’s not a popular thing to be at the
GPFW.
Harming a child isn’t forgiven.”

“And you saw whatever this was on the news as well?”

“I didn’t.”
She watches me as if trying to figure out something.
“I’m just wondering if there’s another reason,” I add.

“You think there might be.”
It’s not a question the way she says it.

“I was contacted about this visit two weeks ago, or,
more accurately, Leonard Brazzo was,” I remind her.
“Which was around the time Kathleen was moved to protective custody and
lost e-mail access.
What this suggests to me is the rumor started spreading like wildfire about the same time I was asked
to meet with her.
Would that be correct?”

She holds my gaze, her face inscrutable.

“I’m just wondering if there really was anything in the news.”
I go ahead and say it.

T
he slayings began in northeastern Massachusetts about eight months ago, the first victim a star college football player whose
mutilated nude body was found floating in Boston Harbor near the Coast Guard Station.

Three months later a young boy was killed
in his own backyard in Salem, assumed to be the victim of a black-magic ritual that involved hammering nails into his head.
Next an MIT graduate student was stabbed to death with an injection knife in a Cambridge park, and finally Jack Fielding was
shot with his own gun.
We were supposed to believe that Jack killed the others and himself, when in fact his own biological
daughter is to blame, and perhaps she would have gotten away with it had she not failed in her attempt on me.

“There’s been a lot about Dawn Kincaid in the media,” I continue making my point to Tara Grimm.
“But I haven’t heard anything
about Kathleen or her past.
For that matter, what happened to Jack as a boy hasn’t been in the news.
Not that I’m aware of.”

“We can’t always stop outside influences,” Tara says cryptically.
“Family members are in and out.
Lawyers are.
Sometimes powerful
people with motives that aren’t always obvious, and they get something started, place someone in harm’s way, and next thing
that person loses what few privileges she had or loses a lot more than that.
I can’t tell you how many times these liberal
crusader types decide to set things right and all they do is cause a lot of harm and put a lot of people at risk, and maybe
you should ask yourself what business it is of someone from New York City to come down here and meddle in things.”

I get up from a prison-built chair that is as hard and rigid as the warden who ordered it made, and through open blinds I
see women in gray prison uniforms working in flower beds and trimming grass borders along sidewalks and fences and walking
greyhounds.
The sky has gotten volatile and is the color of lead, and I ask the warden who from New York City?
Who is she
talking about?

“Jaime Berger.
I believe the two of you are friends.”
She steps out from behind her desk.

It’s a name I haven’t heard in months, and the reminder is painful and awkward.

“She’s got an investigation going on, and I don’t know the ins and outs of it, and shouldn’t,” she says, about the well-known
head of the Sex Crimes Unit for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
“She has big plans and is insistent that nothing
is leaked to the media or
to anyone.
So I didn’t feel comfortable mentioning anything about it to your lawyer.
But it did occur to me you might have
found out anyway that Jaime Berger has an interest in the GPFW.”

“I know nothing about an investigation and have no idea.”
I’m careful not to let what I’m feeling register on my face.

“You seem to be telling me the truth,” she says, with a glimmer of defiance and resentment in her eyes.
“It seems what I’ve
just said is new information to you, and that’s a good thing.
I don’t appreciate people telling me one reason for something
when they really have another.
I wouldn’t want to think your coming here to visit Kathleen Lawler is a ruse to cover up your
involvement with another individual I’m responsible for at the GPFW.
That you’re really here to help Jaime Berger’s cause.”

“I’m not part of whatever she’s doing.”

“You might be and not know it.”

“I can’t imagine how my coming to visit Kathleen Lawler would have anything to do with something Jaime is involved in.”

“I’m sure you’re aware that Lola Daggette is one of ours,” Tara says, and it’s a strange way to phrase it, as if the GPFW’s
most notorious inmate is an acquisition like a rescued race dog or a rodeo rider or a special plant cultivated in the nursery
down the road.

“Dr.
Clarence Jordan and his family, January sixth, 2002, here in Savannah,” she continues.
“A home invasion in the middle
of the night, only robbery wasn’t the motive.
Apparently killing for the sake of killing was.
Hacked and stabbed them to death
while they were in bed, except for the little girl, one of the twins.
She was chased down the stairs and got as far as the
front door.”

I remember hearing Savannah medical examiner Dr.
Colin Dengate
present the case at the National Association of Medical Examiners’s annual meeting in Los Angeles some years ago.
There was
a lot of speculation about what really happened inside the victims’ mansion and how access was gained, and I seem to recall
the killer made a sandwich, drank beer, and used a bathroom and didn’t flush the toilet.
It was my impression at the time
that the crime scene raised more questions than it answered and the evidence seemed to argue with itself.

“Lola Daggette was caught washing her bloody clothing and then made up one lie after another about it,” Tara says.
“A drug
addict who had problems with anger and a long history of abuse and run-ins with the law.”

“I believe there’s a theory that more than one person could have been involved,” I reply.

“The theory around here is justice was served, and this fall Lola should get to explain herself to God.”

“DNA, or maybe it was fingerprints, was never identified,” I begin to remember the details.
“Opening up the possibility of
more than one assailant.”

“That was her defense, the only remotely plausible story her lawyers could come up with that might explain how the victims’
blood could be all over her clothes if she wasn’t involved.
So they manufactured an imaginary accomplice to give Lola someone
to blame.”
Tara Grimm walks me out into the hall.
“I wouldn’t like to think of Lola being free in society, and it’s a possibility
she could have that opportunity even though her appeals are used up.
Apparently new forensic tests of the original evidence
were ordered, something about the DNA.”

“If that’s true, then law enforcement, the courts, must have a substantive reason.”
I look down the hallway to the checkpoint,
where guards are talking to each other.
“I can’t imagine the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the police, the prosecution,
or the court would allow evidence to be retested unless there were legitimate grounds for it.”

“I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that her conviction could be overturned.
Could be others getting out early
on good behavior, for that matter.
Could be one big jailbreak here at the GPFW.”
The warden’s eyes are hard, the glint in
them now undisguised anger.

“Jaime Berger’s not in the business of getting people out of prison,” I reply.

“That seems to be the business she’s in now.
She’s not paying social calls on Bravo Pod.”

“This was how long ago, exactly?
When she was here?”

“I understand she has a place in Savannah, a getaway.
It’s just something I’ve heard.”
She dismisses the information as gossip,
while I’m certain it’s more than that.

If Jaime came here to the GPFW to interview someone on death row, she didn’t do so without going through exactly what I am
right now.
She sat down with Tara Grimm first.
Social calls,
as in more than one.
A getaway from what, and for what purpose?
It seems completely out of character for the New York prosecutor
I used to know.

“She’s been coming here, and now you’re here,” the warden says.
“I have a suspicion you’re someone who doesn’t believe in
coincidences.
I’ll let the officers know it’s all right to take that photograph in and leave it with Kathleen.”

She steps back inside her office, and I follow the long blue hallway, returning to the checkpoint, where a corrections officer
in a gray uniform and baseball cap asks me to empty my pockets.
I’m told to place everything in a plastic basket, and I hand
over my driver’s license and the van keys and explain the photograph has been approved by the warden, and the officer says
he’s aware and I can carry it in with me.
I’m scanned, patted down, and given a clip-on red badge that says I’m official visitor
number seventy-one.
My right hand is stamped with a secret code word that will show up only under ultraviolet light when I’m
leaving the facility later today.

“You might get in this place, but if your hand isn’t stamped, you’re never getting out,” the officer says, and I can’t tell
if he’s being friendly or funny or something else.

His name is M.
P.
Macon, according to his nameplate, and he calls on his radio for Central Control to open the gate.
A loud
electronic buzz, and a heavy green metal door slides open and clacks shut behind us.
Then a second one opens, and visitation
rules posted in red warn that I’m entering a zero-tolerance workplace for inmate-employee relationships.
The tile floor has
just been waxed and is tacky beneath my loafers as I follow Officer Macon along a gray corridor where every door is metal
and locked and every corner and intersection are hung with convex security mirrors.

My escort is powerfully built and has a vigilant air that borders on combat wariness, his brown eyes constantly scanning as
we reach another door that is remotely opened.
We emerge into the yard in the heat, and low, ragged clouds stream overhead
as if fleeing some encroaching danger.
Lightning shimmers in the distance, thunder
cracks, and the first drops of rain are the size of quarters on the concrete walkway they smack.
I smell ozone and freshly
cut grass, and the rain soaks through the thin cotton of my shirt as we walk fast.

“I was thinking this would hold off for a while.”
Officer Macon looks up at a dark churning sky that any second is going to
split open directly over us.
“This time of year, it’s every day.
Starts out sunny with a blue sky, just pretty as can be.
Then we get us a bad storm, usually by four or five in the afternoon.
Clears the air, though.
This evening it will be cooled
off nice.
At least for this time of year in these parts.
You don’t want to be here in July and August.”

“I used to live in Charleston.”

“Well, then you know.
If I could take summers off, I’d head up to where you just came from.
Probably a good twenty degrees
cooler in Boston,” he adds, and I don’t like it that he knows where I started out this morning.

Not exactly a difficult deduction to make, I remind myself.
Anyone who checks would find out I work in Cambridge, and the
nearest airport is Logan in Boston.
He unlocks an outer gate and leads me along a walkway with high fencing and rolls of razor
wire on either side.
Bravo Pod looks no different from the other units, but when the outer door clicks open and we step inside,
I feel a collective misery and oppressiveness that seems to seep from gray cinder block and polished gray concrete and heavy
green steel.
The control room on the second level is behind one-way mirrored glass directly across from the entrance, and
there is a laundry room, an ice machine, a kitchen, and a grievance box.

I wonder if it’s true, that this is where Jaime Berger came when
she was here.
I wonder what she talked about with Lola Daggette and if it is connected to Kathleen Lawler’s being moved into
protective custody and how any of it might relate to me.
For Jaime to come here and deliberately place someone in harm’s way
doesn’t sound like her, either.
It’s inconceivable to me that she could have been the source of a rumor about Kathleen Lawler’s
past that engendered hostility among the other inmates.
Jaime is smart, shrewd, and exceedingly cautious.
If anything, she
is careful to a fault.
Or she used to be.
I haven’t seen her in six months.
I haven’t a clue what is going on in her life.
My niece, Lucy, never mentions her or what happened, and I don’t ask.

Officer Macon unlocks a small room that has large plate-glass windows flanking the steel door.
Inside are a white Formica
table and two blue plastic chairs.

“If you just wait here, I’ll bring in Miss Lawler,” he says.
“I may as well warn you, she’s a talker.”

“I’m a pretty good listener.”

“The inmates sure do love attention.”

“Does she have visitors often?”

“She’d like that, all right.
An audience around the clock.
Almost all of them would.”
He doesn’t answer my question.

“Matter where I sit?”

“No, ma’am,” he says.