Red Mist (7 page)

“People like you don’t get where they are by being easy.
They step on people and have to kick them out of the way or belittle
them for the fun of it.”

“That’s one thing I don’t do.
It’s a shame if he indicated otherwise.”

“He always blamed you when things didn’t go well.”

“He often did.”

“What he never did even once was blame me.”

“Do you blame him for what’s happened to you?”
I ask.

“He might have been twelve, but he wasn’t a boy.
He sure as hell wasn’t, take it from me.
He started it.
Following me around.
Trumping up excuses to talk to me, to touch me, telling me how he felt, how smitten he was.
Things happen.”

Yes, things happen,
I think.
Even when they absolutely shouldn’t.
“It just broke his heart when they hauled me off in handcuffs, and then later, when he had to look at me in court, it just
about killed him,” she says, and her hostility toward me has vanished as suddenly as it appeared.
“They separated us, all
right, busted us apart, but not our souls.
We still had our souls.
Jack did admire you.
As tedious as it was hearing about
it, he did have respect for you.
I know he did.
The thing about Jack, though, was he never felt just one thing about anybody.
If he loved you, he hated you.
If he respected you, he
disrespected you.
If he wanted to be with you, he’d run away.
If he found you, he’d lose you.
And now he’s gone.”

She looks down at her hands in her lap, and her shackles scrape and clank against the floor as she moves her feet and begins
to shake.
Her face is red, and she’s about to cry.

“I had to get that out.
I know it wasn’t nice.”
She doesn’t look at me.

“I understand.”

“I hope you won’t cut me off because of it.
I’d like to keep hearing from you.”

“It’s all right to get things out.”

“I didn’t know how I would feel about it after some time has passed, about him being dead,” she says, staring down.
“I almost
can’t comprehend it.
It’s not like he was part of the life I have now, but he was my past.
He’s the reason I’m here.
And now
the reason is gone but I’m not.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“It feels so vacant.
That’s the word that keeps coming into my mind.
Vacant.
Like a big vacant lot windswept and barren.”

“I know it’s painful.”

“If people had just left us alone.”
She lifts her eyes, and they are bloodshot and swimming with tears.
“We didn’t hurt each
other.
If they’d just left us alone, none of this would have happened.
Who were we hurting?
It’s everyone else who was hurtful.”

I say nothing.
There is nothing to say.

“Well, I hope the rest of your time in Savannah is productive.”
It sounds very odd, the way she puts it.

Officer Macon walks past the glass windows on either side of the steel door again, making sure everything is okay, and while
Kathleen doesn’t look at him, I can tell he is on her radar.

“I’m glad you came and we had a chance to talk.
I’m glad your lawyer and all the lawyers opened that door for us, and I appreciate
any pictures or anything else you’re kind enough to give me,” she adds, and it sounds strange, as if she means something other
than what she’s saying, something other than what I know, and she waits for Officer Macon to vanish from our view again.

Reaching inside the collar of her white uniform shirt, she withdraws something from her bra.
She scoots a tightly folded piece
of paper across the table to me.

W
ater drips from live oak trees and palmettos at the edge of the parking lot, and I smell rain and the sweet perfume of flowering
shrubs, their petals littering the earth like bright confetti.
The air is thick and hot, and the sun glowers intermittently
through roiling dark clouds to the west, and I climb back into the cargo van, marveling that nobody stopped me.

As Officer Macon escorted me out of Bravo Pod and along a sidewalk still wet from the storm, he gave no indication that anything
was out of line or even out of the ordinary, but I didn’t believe him.
I couldn’t imagine he or someone, perhaps the warden
herself, wasn’t aware that Kathleen Lawler had slipped me a communication I’m not supposed to have.
Back at the checkpoint,
where my hand
was scanned under a UV light, revealing the password
snow
stamped on my skin, nothing was said beyond Officer Macon’s thanking me for coming, as if my visiting the Georgia Prison
for Women was some sort of favor to the place.
I told him Kathleen was afraid for her safety, and he smiled and said the inmates
love to tell “tall tales,” and that the very reason she’d been moved was to ensure her safety.
I said good-bye and left.

I’m about to conclude that my original suspicion is correct.
My conversation with Kathleen might have been audio-recorded,
but she and I were not captured by a video camera.
Otherwise, when she silently flicked the kite across the table to me, it
would have been observed by corrections officers, at the very least.
Most certainly I would have been marched back to the
warden’s ivy-infested office, where I would have been forced to surrender the folded piece of paper that I’m aware of in my
back pocket as if it is a rock or something hot.
It also occurs to me that Kathleen wouldn’t have sneaked anything to me had
she worried about being caught, and I have the growing suspicion she is part of a manipulation more treacherous than anything
I might have imagined.
Although I’m not ready to decide she just got the best of me, I realize she might have.

Cranking the engine, I remove what Kathleen gave to me as I scan the parking lot, making sure no one is nearby and watching.
I’m aware of the mesh-covered narrow windows in the blue metal-roofed pods, of the columned red-brick administrative building
I just left.
Steam rises from wet pavement and is carried on the heavy, warm air through my open window, and in a far corner
of the crowded lot I notice a black Mercedes wagon reminiscent of a hearse, and a woman sitting inside it with the engine
off, talking on a cell phone.
It’s hot
and muggy to be inside a car with no air-conditioning running, but her windows are cracked.
She doesn’t seem to be paying
any attention to me.
I’m uneasy and unsettled, and by this point I believe I have reason to be.

Ever since Benton dropped me off at Logan early this morning, I’ve had the sensation that I’m being monitored or tampered
with, yet I’m aware of no tangible evidence that might prove it.
But the feeling has gotten stronger because of other odd
things.
This ridiculous van I never reserved, dirty and smelly, its glove box crammed full of Bojangles’ napkins and charter-boat
brochures.
When I tried repeatedly to call Bryce to complain, leaving him the pointed message that I can’t believe a high-end
concierge rental company would have something like this in their fleet, he never called back.
I’ve had no communications from
him all day, as if my chief of staff is avoiding me.
Then there’s strange information I’ve been given.
And now this.

I smooth open a piece of white paper that was folded into a diamond shape no bigger than a throat lozenge.
Written in blue
ball-point ink is a phone number that is vaguely familiar at first, and then I’m jolted by recognition.
“USE PAY PHONE,” the
note says in tiny block printing, and there is nothing else, just that underlined directive and Jaime Berger’s cell phone
number.
The late afternoon is darker, rain starting again, tapping the metal roof of the van, and I turn on the windshield
wipers.
They leave greasy arches as they slowly, loudly sweep across the glass, and I retrieve my shoulder bag from under
the seat.
I watch the black Mercedes wagon drive out of the lot, noticing a Navy Diver bumper sticker on the back as I get
a strange feeling.
Then I realize why.

My bag has been gone through.
Am I sure?
I think so.
Yes, I’m certain, I decide, as I reconstruct what I did when I first
arrived several hours earlier.
I sent Benton a text message and zipped my phone into the rear pocket of my bag, where I always
keep my wallet, my credentials, my keys, and other valuables.
Now my phone is in the side compartment.
How simple and safe
to search the van while I was inside the prison.
Officers had my keys, and I was locked up in Bravo Pod, talking to Kathleen,
but I can’t think of anything important that someone might have found.
My iPhone and iPad are password-protected, so no one
could have gotten into those, and I can’t think of anything else that would matter.
What might someone have been looking for?
Perhaps case files, it occurs to me.
Or, more likely, something that might indicate I came here today for reasons other than
what I told Tara Grimm.
I unlock my phone.

My first impulse is to call my niece, Lucy, and bluntly ask her if she’s been in touch with Jaime Berger.
It’s possible Lucy
has information that might give me a hint about what is going on, about what I’ve just walked into, but I can’t bring myself
to do it.
Lucy hasn’t talked about Jaime since all of us were together last, some six months ago, during the holidays, and
she has yet to admit they’ve broken up, when I know they must have.
My niece wouldn’t have moved from New York to Boston if
there hadn’t been a personal reason.

It wasn’t about money.
Lucy doesn’t need money.
It wasn’t about her wanting to bring her extraordinary computer expertise
to the Cambridge Forensic Center, which just began taking cases last year.
She doesn’t need to work for me or the CFC.
Her
decision to relocate her entire existence most likely was about fearing a loss she believed was inevitable, and she did what
she’s always done so well.
She
aggressively avoided pain and dodged rejection.
She probably ended the relationship before Jaime had the chance, and by the
time Lucy did so, she’d already set up a new life for herself in Boston.
My niece has a habit of telling you she’s leaving
after she’s already gone.

I drive away from the GPFW, going out the same way I came in, past the nursery and the salvage yard, wondering where I’m going
to find a pay phone.
There isn’t one on every corner these days, and I’m not sure I should call Jaime or anyone else.
Benton
worried that I was being set up, and I’m about to conclude he is right.
By whom and for what reason?
Maybe by Dawn Kincaid’s
defense team.
Maybe by something far more sinister.
Dawn Kincaid tried to murder me and failed, so now she wants to finish
the job.
The thought gusts through my mind like an arctic blast, and my head is beginning to pound as if my hangover is back.

You should get as far from here as possible.
It’s too late to fly out of the Savannah–Hilton Head Airport, but I could drive to Atlanta, where I’m sure I can get a flight
to Boston tonight.
In this damn cargo van?
I envison myself broken down on the roadside near a swamp in the middle of nowhere
and decide my wisest course is to stay in Savannah as planned.
Don’t do anything rash.
Be deliberate and logical,
I tell myself, as I drive in the rain, the van chugging and misfiring, slowing down and speeding up on its own while its
worn-out wiper blades smear the glass with loud rubbery swipes.
My head is aching like a bad tooth, and I’m out of Advil,
having taken the last of it earlier today when I was traveling.

I roar past a truck dealership and an auto body shop, and every place I pass feels isolated and impenetrable and ominous,
as if the world is in a lockdown.
I’ve not noticed another car in miles and
have the same eerie feeling I get right before something bad happens.
A stillness, a shifting of reality, a sense of foreboding
that always precedes a tragic announcement, a brutal case coming in, a horror of a scene in the room just ahead.
My thoughts
find their way back to Lola Daggette.

I don’t remember much about the murders of the Savannah doctor and his family, only that they were savage and that there are
still lingering questions to this day about whether there was one perpetrator or two, or if whoever is to blame had some connection
to the victims.
I remember I was staying in a hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut, when I first heard about the family murdered
“in their sleep,” as it was described all over the news.
January 6, 2002.
It was a time when I was between just about everything
one could be between.
Careers, relationships, residences, and the world prior to 9/11 and the one we’ve been left with since.
It was a terrible phase, really, about as destabilized and depressing as any I can recall, and I was watching the evening
news and eating dinner in my room when I heard about slayings in Savannah believed to have been committed by a teenage girl.
I remember her young face repeatedly shown on the TV screen, and the victims’ Federal-style brick mansion, its portico festooned
with yellow crime scene tape.

Lola Daggette.

I remember she was smiling into television cameras at her arraignment and waving at people in the courtroom as if she didn’t
have a clue about the trouble she was in, and I was struck by the silver braces on her teeth and the teenage blemishes on
her plump cheeks.
She seemed like a harmless kid dazed by the attention and drama but enjoying it, and I was reminded that
people rarely look
like what they do.
No matter how often I’m confronted by examples of that fact, I’m still surprised and chilled by how easy
it is to make judgments based on appearances.
Most of the time we’re wrong.

I slow down and chug off the road into the parking lot of the first open businesses I’ve seen around here, a True Value hardware,
a pharmacy, and a guns-and-ammo store where there are several pickup trucks and SUVs, and a pay phone next to an ATM.
Of course,
there would be a pay phone and an ATM at a business where the sign in front is a body diagram inside a red circle with a slash
across, and the logo:
Don’t be a victim.
Buy a gun.
Through plate glass I see a wall of rifles and shotguns, and a showcase where several men are congregated, and to the left
of the front door, a black pay phone is cradled inside a stainless-steel box attached to the wall.

Reaching for my briefcase, I get out my iPad as rain falls steadily, drumming the metal roof, and I flip off the monotonous
wiper blades and headlights but leave the windows cracked and the engine running.
Clicking on the browser, I log on to the
Internet and search Lola Daggette’s name and read a story published in
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
last November:

SAVANNAH KILLER LOSES FINAL APPEAL

A woman convicted and sentenced to death almost nine years ago for the grisly slayings of a Savannah doctor, his wife, and
their two young children was denied an emergency stay today by the Georgia Supreme Court, clearing the way for the execution.

Lola Daggette was convicted of breaking into Dr.
Clarence Jordan’s three-story mansion in Savannah’s historic district during
the early-morning hours of January 6, 2002.
According to the prosecutor and police, she attacked the thirty-five-year-old
physician and his thirty-year-old wife, Gloria, in bed, stabbing and slashing them repeatedly with a knife before proceeding
down the hallway to their twin son and daughter’s room.
It is believed that five-year-old Brenda was awakened by her brother’s
screams and tried to escape by running down the stairs.
Her pajama-clad body was found near the front door.
Like her parents
and her brother, Josh, she had been stabbed and cut so savagely, she was almost decapitated.

Several hours after the homicides were committed, eighteen-year-old Lola Daggette returned to a nonsecure halfway house, where she was enrolled in a residential program for
substance abuse.
A staff member discovered Daggette in the bathroom, rinsing bloody clothing.
DNA later connected her to the
murders.

With the high court’s action today, all of Daggette’s state and federal appeals and habeas corpus issues have been exhausted,
and her execution by lethal injection at the Georgia Prison for Women is expected to take place in the spring.