Red Mist

9

Idon’t offer him anything to drink. I offer him nothing as I open the refrigerator, scanning glass shelves. Wine, seltzer, Diet Coke. Greek yogurt. Wasabi and pickled ginger and low-salt soy sauce.

Opening cabinets, I find little inside them, just the rudimentary dishes and cookware one might expect in a furnished rental. A salt-and-pepper set but no other spices, a fifth of Johnnie Walker Blue. I help myself to a bottle of water in the pantry, where there are more diet drinks, and an assortment of vitamins, analgesics, and digestive aids, and I recognize the desolate patterns of a life that’s stopped. I know what is in the cupboards, pantries, and refrigerators of people who are terrified of loss. Jaime hasn’t gotten over Lucy.

“How the hell does he keep something like this from you?” Marino won’t shut up about Benton. “I wouldn’t have. I don’t give a shit about protocol. If I knew the feds were after you, I’d tell you, give you a friggin’ heads-up, which is exactly what I’m doing while he sits around and is the good Bureau boy, playing by the rules, not doing a damn thing while his own damn agency investigates his wife. Just like he didn’t do a damn thing the night it happened. Sitting in front of the fire having a drink while you wander outside in the damn dark by yourself.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“He knew Dawn Kincaid and maybe others were on the loose, and he lets you go outside alone at night.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“It’s a miracle you aren’t dead. I blame him, damn it. In a blink it could have all been over with because Benton couldn’t bother.”

I walk back to the couch.

“I won’t forgive him.” As if it is for Marino to forgive, and I wonder what Jaime has managed to stir up in him about Benton.

How much has she encouraged the jealousy that is always there, ready to lunge or strike with the slightest provocation.

“He didn’t want you to come down here, but he didn’t volunteer to come with you, now, did he?” Marino says loudly and hotly, and I think about the letters, about how insecure and selfish he can be.

When I was first appointed the chief medical examiner of Virginia and Marino was Richmond’s star detective, he couldn’t have been more unhelpful and unkind. He did what he could to run me off the job until he realized he was better served by having me as an ally and a friend. Maybe that’s what really motivates him, after all. My authority and the way I’ve always taken care of him. Better to have me on his side. Better to have a good job, especially when good jobs are few and far between and he’s not getting any younger. If I fired him, he’d be lucky to get hired as a damn Pinkerton guard, I think furiously, and then instantly I feel beaten up inside and on the verge of tears.

“I wouldn’t have wanted Benton to come to Savannah with me, and he certainly couldn’t have gone into the prison. That wouldn’t have been possible,” I reply, as I drink water from the bottle. “And even if what you’re saying is true and the FBI is investigating me for some ridiculous unfounded reason, Benton wouldn’t know.”

I sit back down on the leather couch.

“They wouldn’t tell him,” I reply logically, repeating myself as I think of Kathleen Lawler’s comments about my reputation and that unlike her, I have one to lose.

I remember being alerted by what seemed an allusion, as if she were warning me and taking pleasure in the thought that some misfortune might be in store for me. I think about the letters, about what she says is in them, and I’m stunned by how hurt I feel. After twenty-something years, it shouldn’t matter, but it does.

“How can he work in criminal intelligence for the friggin’ Bureau of Investigation and not know?” Marino says adamantly, and at times like this I know how much he dislikes Benton.

Marino will never accept that Benton and I are married, that I possibly could be happy, that my seemingly aloof husband has dimension and appeal that Marino will never comprehend.

“Let’s start with how you would know such a thing,” I reply.

“Because the Feds have issued a preservation order to the CFC so nothing is deleted from our server,” he answers. “What that tells me is they’ve been in it for a while. They’re snooping through your e-mails, maybe through other things in there, too.”

“Why don’t I know about a court order issued to my office?” I think of the highly sensitive information on the CFC server, some of it classified as secret or even top secret by the Department of Defense.

“Shit,” Marino says. “How can you be so calm about it? Did you hear what I just told you? The FBI is investigating you. You’re a target.”

“I most certainly would know if I’m a target. I’d be on the verge of indictment for a federal crime, and they’d interview me. They’d put me in front of a grand jury. They would have been in touch with Leonard Brazzo by now. Why has no one told me about a court order?” I repeat.

“Because you’re not supposed to know about it. I’m not supposed to know about it, either.”

“Is Lucy aware of this?”

“She’s the IT person, so she’s the one who got the notice. It’s up to her to make sure no electronic communications are deleted.”

Obviously Lucy told Marino. But she didn’t tell me.

“We don’t delete anything anyway, and a preservation order doesn’t mean anything’s been looked at.” Scare tactics, I think. Marino’s not a lawyer, and Jaime has goaded him into overdrive for some reason that serves her purposes.

“You act like it’s nothing.” His face is incredulous.

“In the first place, my case is being tried in federal court,” I reply. “Of course the Feds, the FBI, might be interested in any electronic records, especially Jack’s records, since we know he got in deep with a number of illegal activities and dangerous people while I was at Dover, not the least of which was his involvement with his daughter, Dawn Kincaid. The FBI already has been looking at his communications, at anything they can find, and they haven’t finished yet. So I would expect a preservation order. But it’s not needed, and what might I delete anyway? An itinerary for a trip to Georgia? I’m surprised Lucy has managed to keep this to herself.”

“All of us could be charged with obstruction of justice,” he says.

“And I’m sure Jaime’s put that worry in your head, too. Has she also talked with Lucy about it?”

“She doesn’t talk to Lucy or even about her.” He confirms my belief that Jaime and Lucy aren’t in touch. “I told Lucy and Bryce they’d be the ones who sent you to jail if they didn’t watch themselves and started telling you things you’re not supposed to know.”

“I appreciate your encouraging them to keep me out of jail.”

“It’s not funny.”

“It certainly isn’t. I don’t like the implication that if I were given information, I’d do something illegal in response, such as deleting records. I’m always under scrutiny, Marino. Every damn day of my life. What has Jaime said to you that’s gotten you so agitated and paranoid?”

“They’re interrogating people about you. Back in April, two FBI agents came to her apartment.”

I feel betrayed, not by the FBI or Benton or even Jaime but by Marino. The letters. I never knew he used to deride me, belittle me to the man I mentored, to my protégé, Jack. I was just getting started, and Marino was poisoning my staff behind my back.

“They wanted to question her about your character because she knows you personally and has a history with you, going back to our Richmond days,” Marino is saying, but what I’m hearing is what Kathleen Lawler said about the letters. “They wanted to corner her before she disappeared into the private sector,” he adds. “And maybe there was a grudge, too. Politics. Her problems with NYPD …”

“Yes, my character.” It boils out of me before I can stop it. “Because I’m such an awful person to work for. So difficult. Someone who can relate to people only if they’re dead.”

“What …?”

“Maybe I’m about to get indicted for being difficult. An awful human being who makes people miserable and ruins them. Maybe I should go to jail for that.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” He stares at me. “What are you talking about?”

“The letters Jack used to write to Kathleen Lawler,” I reply. “I guess no one’s wanted to show them to me. Because of what you and Jack said about me back in our Richmond days. Comments he made and ones you made that he repeated in letters he wrote to Kathleen.”

“I don’t know anything about any letters.” Marino is sitting forward in his chair, a blank expression on his face. “No way there were any letters in his house that were to or from Kathleen Lawler. I got no idea what she might have from him, assuming it’s true he wrote to her. But I doubt it.”

“Why would you doubt it?” I exclaim, unable to stop myself.

“Jack never stayed single very long, and not one of his wives or girlfriends would have been very happy to know he was exchanging letters with the woman who molested him when he was a kid.”

“They e-mailed each other. We know that for a fact.”

“His wives or girlfriends weren’t going into his e-mail, my guess is,” Marino says. “But letters arriving in the mailbox, letters tucked in drawers or other places, that’s a risk I can’t imagine Jack would take.”

“Don’t try to make me feel better.”

“I’m saying I never saw any letters and that he hid any shit about Kathleen Lawler,” Marino says. “All the years I knew him he never mentioned her or what happened to him at that ranch. And I don’t know what all I said back then in the early days. To be honest, some of it probably wasn’t nice. Sometimes I was a jerk in the beginning, when you first took over as chief, and you shouldn’t listen to bullshit from some piece-of-shit convict. Whether what she said is true or not, Kathleen Lawler wanted to hurt you, and she did.”

I don’t say anything as we stare at each other.

“I don’t know what’s taking Jaime so long.” He abruptly gets up and looks out the window again. “I don’t know why you’re so pissed at me, unless it’s because you’re really pissed at Jack. Fucking son of a bitch. Well, you should be pissed at him. Goddamn worthless lying piece of shit. After all you did for him. Damn good thing Dawn Kincaid got him first, or maybe I would have.”

He continues to stare out the window with his back to me, and I sit quietly. The mood has passed like a violent storm that erupted out of nowhere, and I’m struck by what Marino said a moment ago about Jaime Berger. When I finally speak to his big, broad back, I ask if he meant it literally when he said Jaime has disappeared into the private sector.

“Yeah,” he says, without turning around. “Literally.”

She isn’t with the Manhattan DA’s office anymore, he tells me. She resigned. She quit. Like a lot of sharpshooting prosecutors, she’s switched to the other side. Almost all of them do it eventually, vacate low-paying thankless jobs in drab government offices turgid with bureaucracy, finally fed up with the never-ending parade of tragedies, parasites, remorseless thugs, and cheaters passing through. Bad people doing bad things to bad people. Despite public perception, victims aren’t always innocent or even sympathetic, and Jaime used to comment that I was lucky my patients couldn’t lie to me. It was a cold day in hell when a witness or a victim told her the truth. I think it’s easier if they’re dead, she said, and she was right on one count at least. It’s much harder to lie when you’re dead.

But I never thought Jaime would defect to the private sector. I don’t believe her decision was driven by money as I listen to Marino describe her refusal of a retirement party or any sort of send-off, not even a luncheon or a cake or drinks at the local pub after work. She left silently, without fanfare, with virtually no notice, around the same time she called the CFC to ask about Lola Daggette, he says, and I know something has happened. Not just to Jaime but to Marino. I sense that both of their lives have been redirected somehow, and it disappoints me that I didn’t know before this moment. It’s very sad if neither one of them felt they could tell me.

Maybe I really am impossibly hard on people, and I hear Kathleen Lawler’s cruel comments and see the triumphant expression on her face as she made them, as if she’d been waiting most of her life to make them. I’m raw. I realize just how raw I am, and it’s because I know there’s a grain of truth in what Kathleen said. I’m not easy. It’s a fact I’ve never really had friends. Lucy, Benton, some former staff. And throughout it all, Marino. As bad as it’s ever gotten, he’s still here, and I don’t want that to change.

“I have a feeling that’s not all Jaime asked when she called the CFC,” I say to him, and there is nothing accusatory in my tone. “I suspect it’s not a coincidence that about the time she called the CFC and you took the train to New York, you also started talking about fishing and boats, about missing the South.”

“We got along better when I didn’t work for you.” He turns around and wanders back to his chair. “I used to feel better about myself when I was called in as an expert, you know, a homicide detective, a sergeant detective with A Squad instead of working for your office, working for Jaime’s office, now working for your office again. I’m an experienced homicide detective and trained in crime scene and death investigation. Shit, all I’ve done and seen? I don’t want to play out the rest of my days stuck in a little cubicle somewhere, waiting to take orders, waiting for something to happen.”

“You’re quitting,” I reply. “That’s what you’re trying to say.”

“Not exactly.”

“You deserve the life you want. You deserve it more than anyone I know. It disappoints me you would think you couldn’t share what you’ve been feeling. That probably bothers me most.”

“I don’t want to quit.”

“Sounds like you already have.”

“I want to switch to being a private contractor,” he says. “Jaime and me talked about it when I went to New York. You know, she’s struck out on her own and she said I should think about it, that she could use my help on cases, and I know you can use my help. I don’t want to be owned by anyone.”

“I’ve never looked at it as my owning you.”

“I’d like a little independence, a little self-respect. I know you can’t relate to that. Why would someone like you ever lack in self-respect?”

“You’d be surprised,” I reply.

“I want to have a little place on the water, to ride motorcycles, go fishing, and work for people who respect me,” he says.

“Jaime’s hired you as a consultant on the Lola Daggette case?”

“She’s not paying me. I said I can’t do that until I change my status with the CFC, and at some point I was going to talk to you about it,” Marino says, as I hear the metal sound of a key in a lock and the door opens.

Jaime Berger walks in, and I smell savory meat. I smell french fries and truffles.