Red Mist (40 page)

“I won’t forgive her.”

“It’s easier to be angry than sad,” I say.

“I won’t forgive or forget.
She set me up, and she lied.
She set you up, and she lied.
She began lying so much there was no
reference point of truth left, and so she believed her bullshit.”

Lucy moves the cursor to
play
and clicks the mouse pad, and the digital recording begins.
Bricks and steps and iron railings in shades of gray, and the
sound of cars driving along the street in front of Jaime’s building, their headlights flashing past.
Lucy opens another window
and clicks on another file as a figure appears in the distance on the dark street, someone slender and on foot, the same young
woman, I assume, but there is no bicycle, and she isn’t dressed the way she was last night.
She begins to cross the street,
and then the shocking hot spot of white glare as if she is an alien or a deity.
She walks up to the entrance of the building,
comfortable and at ease, her head flaring like a nimbus.

“That’s not the way she was dressed,” I tell Lucy.

“Stalking,” she says.
“Dry runs.
So far I’ve found five of them for the last two weeks.”

“Last night she had on a light-colored shirt.
So what I just saw on the recording was from when …?”
I start to ask, but I’m
stopped by the sound of Jaime Berger’s voice.

“… I realize that once again I’m breaking the no-contact rule that I myself made.”
The familiar voice drifts out of a speaker,
and Lucy clicks on the volume and turns it up as the figure in the video recording disappears down the dark street in front
of Jaime’s building.
“I guess you know by now Kay is here and will be helping with a case of mine.
We just had dinner, and
I’m afraid she got perturbed with me.
Always the lioness when it comes to you, and that didn’t help.
Jesus God, it never helped.
An unfortunate triangulation is
putting it kindly.
Somehow I always felt she was in the room no matter what room.
Lights out, hello, Auntie Kay, are you there?
Oh, well.
We’ve been through all this ad nauseam …”

“Stop,” I tell Lucy, and she pauses both files.
“Did she call you on your new number?
When did she do that?”
But I have a
feeling I know.

Jaime’s voice is halting, and she is slurring her words.
She sounds very much like she did last night when I left her, but
slightly more impaired and nastier.
I look at the BlackBerry plugged into the charger on the desk.

“Your old phone,” I say to Lucy.
“You didn’t change your number, you simply got a new one when you switched to an iPhone.”

“She didn’t have my new number.
I never gave it to her, and she never asked,” Lucy says.
“I don’t use it anymore.”
She indicates
the BlackBerry.

“You kept it because she’s continued to call it.”

“That’s not really the only reason.
But she’s called it.
Not often.
Mostly late at night when she’s had too much to drink.
I save all of the messages, download them into audio files.”

“And you listen to them on your computer.”

“I can listen to them anywhere.
That’s not the point.
The point is to save them, to make sure they’re never lost.
They’re
all pretty much the same.
Like this one.
She doesn’t ask me anything.
Doesn’t say she wants me to call her back.
She just
talks for a couple of minutes and abruptly ends it without saying good-bye.
Sort of the way she ended it with us.
Pronouncements
and her talking at me and not listening, and then disconnecting.”

“You save them because you miss her.
Because you still love her.”

“I’ve saved them to remind myself why I shouldn’t miss her.
Or love her.”
Lucy’s voice quavers, and I hear her grief and frustration
and rage.
“What I’m trying to tell you is she didn’t sound sick or in physical distress.”
She clears her throat.
“She just
sounds like she was drinking, and that was a half hour after you were gone.
So she probably didn’t sound even as bad as that
when you were still with her.”

“She didn’t mention she felt bad or strange.
She didn’t mention anything.”

Lucy shakes her head.
“I can play all of it if you want, but she doesn’t say anything like that.”

I imagine Jaime in her maroon bathrobe, walking from room to room in her apartment, sipping expensive Scotch and looking out
the window at Marino’s van driving off.
I don’t know the precise time we left, but it was no more than thirty minutes later
that she called Lucy’s old phone number and left the message.
Clearly, her symptoms didn’t become severe until later, and
I envision the nightstand with its spilled drink and empty base unit, the phone under the bed, and also what I saw in the
master bath, medications and toiletries scattered everywhere.
I suspect Jaime might have drifted off to sleep and possibly
around two or three a.m.
woke up short of breath and barely able to swallow or speak.
It was probably at his point she frantically
searched for something to take that might relieve her terrifying symptoms.

Symptoms, it occurs to me, that were eerily similar to what Jaime described when we were talking about Barrie Lou Rivers and
what may be in store for Lola Daggette if she is executed on Halloween.
Cruel and unusual, an awful way to die, and, according
to Jaime, deliberately cruel.
I thought she was trumping up a dramatic story
to make her case, but maybe she wasn’t.
Maybe there is more truth to what she was alleging than she knew.
Not scared to death
but scared of it.

“Your mind is awake, but you can’t talk.
You can’t move or make the slightest gesture, and your eyes are shut.
You look unconscious.
But the muscles of your diaphragm are paralyzed, and you’re aware as you suffer the pain and panic of suffocation.
You feel
yourself die, and your system is in overdrive.
Pain and panic.
Not just about death but about sadistic punishment,” I describe
what Jaime was saying about death by lethal injection and what happens if the anesthesia wears off.

I think about how a killer might expose someone to a poison that stops breathing and renders the person unable to talk or
call for help.
Especially if the intended victim is incarcerated.

“Why would anyone send an inmate twentysomething-year-old postage stamps?”
I get out of my chair.

“Why not sell them?”
I ask.
“Wouldn’t they be worth something to a collector?
Or maybe that’s where they came from.
Maybe
they were recently purchased from a collector, a stamp company.
No lint, dust, dirt, nothing stuck on the back, not wrinkled
or grungy like they might be if they’d been in a drawer for decades.
And allegedly sent by me in a counterfeit CFC envelope
that included a forged letter on my counterfeit letterhead?
Possibly, maybe?
She seemed to think I’d been generous with her
when I hadn’t been.
A big envelope allegedly from me, and extra postage.
Something else in it.
Maybe stamps.”
Lucy finally
gives me her eyes, and I can see what’s in them.
A deeper green, and they are immeasurably sad and glinting with anger.

“I’m sorry,” I say to her, because of how dreadful it is to imagine Jaime’s death the way I just described it.

“What kind of stamps?”
she asks.
“Tell me exactly what they looked like.”

I tell her what I found in Kathleen Lawler’s prison cell, tucked inside a locker at the base of her steel bed, a single pane
of ten fifteen-cent postage stamps issued in an earlier era when glue on the back of them, and on labels and envelope flaps, had
to be licked or moistened with a sponge.
I describe the letter to Kathleen that I didn’t write and the strange party stationery
that she couldn’t have gotten from the commissary.
Someone sent her stamps and stationery, and it very well may have been
me or, more precisely, someone impersonating me.

Then the stamp is on the computer screen.
A wide white beach with sprigs of grass, and an umbrella with red and yellow panels
is propped against a dune beneath a seagull flying through the cloudless sky over bright blue water.

I
t is midnight, and we are picking at a dinner that Benton has managed to overcook and wilt, but no one is particular at the
moment or preoccupied with food, at least not in a good way.
Right now I can easily imagine not wanting to eat ever again,
as everything I look at turns into a potential source of disease and death.

Bolognese sauce, lettuce, salad dressing, even the wine, and I’m reminded that a peaceful, healthy coexistence on this planet
is shockingly fragile.
It takes so little to cause disaster.
Shifting tectonic plates in the earth that create a tsunami,
clashing temperatures and humidity unleashing hurricanes and tornadoes, and worst of all is what humans can do.

Colin Dengate e-mailed me about an hour ago with information
he probably shouldn’t be releasing to me, but that’s who he is, a redneck, as he describes himself.
Armed and dangerous, he
likes to say, roaring around in that ancient Land Rover of his in the blistering heat and afraid of nothing, including bureaucrats,
or bureausaurs, as he calls people who let policies, politics, and phobias get in the way of doing what is right.
He’s not
going to shut me out of any investigation, certainly not when efforts to frame me are blatant enough to bury any reasonable
doubt that I’m the one running around poisoning people.

Colin let me know that Jaime died in good health, just as Kathleen Lawler did.
There was nothing on gross examination to show
what caused Jaime’s death, but her gastric contents were undigested, including pinkish, reddish, and white tablets or pills
that he and I suspect are ranitidine, Sudafed, and Benadryl.
He explained that Sammy Chang passed along lab results that probably
don’t mean anything unless it’s possible Kathleen died of heavy metal poisoning, and Colin certainly doesn’t think so, and
he’s right, she didn’t.
Specifically, he wanted to know if trace elements of magnesium, iron, and sodium might hold any special
meaning for me.

“I understand that.”
Benton paces back and forth past windows overlooking the Savannah River, lights scattered along the opposite
shore, where shipyard cranes are etched faintly against the distant dark sky.
“But what you need to understand is the following.
They could be deadly poisonous,” he is saying to Special Agent Douglas Burke from the FBI’s Boston field office.

I can tell from what I’m overhearing that Douglas Burke, a member of the task force that has been working the Mensa Murders,
is resistant to answering Benton’s questions beyond confirming the
statement that Massachusetts General Hospital has released to the media.
Dawn Kincaid has botulism.
She remains on life support,
and her brain is no longer viable.
Benton has asked point-blank if fifteen-cent postage stamps featuring a beach umbrella
might have turned up inside her cell at Butler.

“She got hold of the toxin somehow,” he pushes.
“Poisoned, in other words, unless she got it from Butler’s food, which I seriously
doubt.
Anybody else at Butler with botulism?
… Exactly.
The glue on the stamps could be the source of the exposure.”

“That was pretty good, but no offense to Benton, he should stay out of the kitchen.”
Marino pushes away his bowl of unfinished
Bolognese sauce without pasta, which turned out gummy.
“The Botox Diet.
All you got to do is think about botulism.
That will
make you lose weight.
Doris used to do her own canning,” he adds, talking about his ex-wife.
“Creeps me out to think about
it now.
You can get it from honey, you know.”

“Mostly that’s a risk for infants,” I reply distractedly, as I listen to Benton’s conversation.
“They don’t have the robust
immune systems adults do.
I think you’re fine to eat honey.”

“Nope.
I stay away from sugar, fake sugar, and I sure as hell don’t want honey or home canning or maybe salad bars, either.”

“You can get the stuff for like twenty bucks a vial from China.”
Lucy has her MacBook on the dining-room table, typing with
one hand as she eats a piece of bread with the other.
“Fake name, fake e-mail account, and you don’t have to be a doctor or
work in a lab.
Order what you want from the privacy of your own home.
I could do it as I sit here.
I’m surprised something
like this hasn’t happened before now.”

“Thank God it hasn’t.”
I begin to clear the dishes while I continue to debate whether I should call General Briggs.

“The most potent poison on the planet, and it shouldn’t be this easy to get,” Lucy says.

“It didn’t used to be,” I reply.
“But botulinum toxin type A has become ubiquitous since its introduction into the treatment
of numerous medical conditions.
Not just cosmetic procedures but migraine headaches, facial tics and other types of spasms,
hypersalivation—drooling, in other words—crossed eyes, involuntary muscle contractions, sweaty palms.”

“How much of it would you have to use, saying you could order vials of it off the Internet?”
Glass clanks as Marino drops
empty bottles in the recycle bag inside the kitchenette, where he’s followed me.

“It comes in a crystalline form, a white powder, vacuum-dried Clostridium botulinum type A, that you reconstitute.”
I turn
on the water in the sink and wait for it to get hot.

“Then you just inject it in a package of food, for example,” Marino says.
“Or a take-out container.”

“Very simple.
Frighteningly so.”

“So if you got hold of enough of it, you could wipe out thousands of people.”
Marino finds a dish towel and begins to dry
as I wash.

“If you tampered with some product, like a prepackaged food or beverages that aren’t heated sufficiently to destroy the toxin,
yes,” I reply, and that is what scares me.

“Well, I think you should call Briggs.”
He takes a plate from me.

“I know you do,” I reply.
“But it’s not that simple.”

“Sure it is.
You just friggin’ call him and give him a heads-up.”

“It sets things in motion before we have lab results.”
I hand him a wineglass to dry.

“Dawn Kincaid’s got botulism.
That’s one lab result.”
He opens cabinets and starts putting away dishes.
“You ask me, that’s
the only confirmation you need when you think of everything else we’re finding out and start putting the pieces together.
Like the shit in Kathleen Lawler’s sink that fits with the burns on her foot.”

“It might fit with that.
I’m speculating.”

“The person you should be speculating with is him.”

He means General Briggs, the chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, my commander and an old friend from my earliest
days when I began my career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Marino wants me to tell Briggs that Kathleen Lawler’s gastric
contents appear to be undigested chicken and pasta and cheese that possibly were poisoned with botulinum toxin, and that scanning
electron microscopy and energy-dispersive x-ray analysis of the odd-smelling residue recovered from her sink revealed magnesium,
iron, and sodium.
The answer to Colin Dengate’s question about whether the finding of these elements in the chalky residue
means something to me is yes.
Unfortunately, it does.

When water is added to food-grade iron, magnesium, and sodium or salt, the result is an exothermic reaction that rapidly produces
heat.
Temperatures can reach up to one hundred degrees centigrade, and it is this technology that is the basis for the flameless
ration heaters used to cook or warm up food eaten by soldiers in the field.
MREs, meals ready to eat, offer dozens of different
menus, including chicken with pasta, and many of the tough tan plastic bags
they’re packaged in offer additional rations, such as cheese spread.
Each of these self-contained meals includes a water-activated
flameless ration heater packaged in a sturdy polybag, an ingenious device that requires a soldier in the field to do nothing
more than cut off the top, add water, and then place the bag under the MRE, propping both against “a rock or something,” according
to the operating instructions.

I realize it’s possible there might be other explanations for why swabs of the residue in Kathleen’s sink show trace elements
of iron, magnesium, and sodium, but it is the combination of evidence that offers a possible nightmarish answer that can’t
easily be explained away.
The unpleasant odor that reminded me of a shorted-out blow-dryer or overheated insulation strikes
me as consistent with a chemical reaction producing heat, and Kathleen had burns on her left foot that prison officials claimed
she could not have sustained while incarcerated in Bravo Pod.
I believe she accidentally dripped a hot liquid on her bare
skin, and it may very well have been the boiling water from a flameless ration heater.

The first-degree burns were recent, and I can’t dismiss from my thoughts her obsession with food and certain comments she
made to me, and I wonder if a missing diary or more than one might have contained what Kathleen was doing and thinking and
possibly eating since she’d been moved to Bravo Pod.
Tara Grimm was taking care of her, was good to her, and Kathleen was
more than happy to be a
test kitchen.
She had sweet buns and packages of noodles in her cell and knew how to turn Pop-Tarts into strawberry cake, fancying herself
the
Julia Child of the slammer
.
Maybe Tara Grimm was seeing to it that Kathleen got an occasional treat in exchange for
cooperation or other favors, and early this morning the treat was a ready-to-eat feast that had been injected with poison.

“Plus, there’s the shit about the camera,” Marino continues to lecture me about what I should do.
“Defeating infrared with
infrared, a strip of tiny IR LEDs on her bike helmet, assuming Lucy’s right about that.
Whatever this person did, the camera
got defeated with something, and that’s a fact, completely whiting out her head the instant she got close enough for her face
to be recognizable on the camera, and Lucy says the recording can’t be fixed or restored.
Like the damn Chinese blinding our
spy satellites with lasers.
You should call him.”

“It will be sounding an alarm that could end up in the Oval Office,” I say what I’ve said before.
“General Briggs will have
to pass the information up the chain, straight to the Pentagon, the White House, if there’s even the slightest possibility
that the bigger target is our troops—that what we’re dealing with is the preliminary if not plenary stages of a terrorist
plot,” I’m explaining, as Benton appears.

“She isn’t going to say it outright.”
He tells me about his conversation with Special Agent Douglas Burke, who is a woman.
“But reading between the lines, the answer is yes.
Fifteen-cent stamps matching the description we have were found in Dawn
Kincaid’s cell.
A pane of ten with three removed that are on a letter she didn’t get around to mailing.
A letter to one of
her lawyers.”

“The question is, where might she have gotten the stamps?”
I ask.

“Dawn received mail yesterday afternoon from Kathleen Lawler,”
Benton says.
“Douglas wouldn’t confirm that the stamps were included, but the fact that she is letting me know about the letter
suggests it.”

“Written on party stationery?”
I ask.

“She didn’t say.”

“Mentioning something about a PNG and a bribe?
In other words, derisive comments, probably about me?”

“Douglas didn’t go into that level of detail.”

“Fragments of indented writing I could make out while in Kathleen’s cell.
What struck me as sarcastic, and understandably
so, if she were under the impression that I sent her the stamps and stationery, what would appear to be cheap leftovers, something
I didn’t want,” I say, as I recall Kathleen’s snide comment about people sending inmates their detritus, things leftover and
expired that they no longer want.
“That I might try to butter her up or bribe her with such a stingy gift,” I continue.
“Only
it wasn’t from me.
The forged letter likely accompanying these items was mailed in Savannah on June twenty-sixth, meaning
there was ample time for Kathleen to mail a pane of these same stamps to Dawn.”

“It seems she did, but Douglas wouldn’t go into detail, and she didn’t refer to you,” Benton replies.
“Although I certainly
was clear about obvious forged documents and a campaign on the part of an individual or individuals to set you up and that
none of it is plausible.”

“An accident,” I decide.
“Her incarcerated mother sends her incarcerated daughter stamps so they can be prison pen pals, having
no idea the glue on the back has been tampered with.
But Kathleen was too selfish to send the good ones.”