Red Mist

10

She sets two large blue paper bags on the stone peninsula in the kitchen and acts remarkably relaxed and cheerful for a New York prosecutor or even a former one who has set up a clandestine operation in coastal Georgia that requires security cameras and what I suspect is a handgun concealed in the brown cowhide hobo handbag slung over her shoulder.

Her dark hair is smartly styled, a little longer than I remember it, her features sharply defined and very pretty, and she is as lithe as a woman half her age in faded jeans and an untucked white shirt. She wears no jewelry and very little makeup, and while she might fool most people, she can’t fool me. I see the shadow in her eyes. I detect the brittleness in her smile.

“I apologize, Kay,” she says right off as she hangs her unattractive heavy-looking pocketbook on the back of a barstool, and I wonder if it’s Marino’s influence that possibly has her packing a gun.

Or is this a habit she acquired from Lucy, and it occurs to me that if Jaime is carrying a concealed weapon, she’s likely doing so illegally. I don’t know how she could have a license in Georgia, where she may rent an apartment but wouldn’t qualify as a resident. Security cameras and a gun that isn’t legal. Perhaps just the usual precautions, because she knows the same harsh realities I do about what can happen in life. Or it might be that Jaime has gotten fearful and unstable.

“I’d be absolutely livid if someone pulled something like this on me,” she says, “but it’s going to make more sense, if it doesn’t already.”

I think of getting up to hug her, but she’s already involved with opening the take-out bags, which I interpret as her preferring to keep a safe distance from me. So I stay where I am on the couch and try not to feel anything about last Christmas in New York and the many times all of us were together before that or what Lucy would do if she could see where I am. I don’t want to think about how she would react if she could see Jaime looking very pretty but with haunted eyes and a stiff smile, unpacking take-out food in an old loft that’s reminiscent of the one Lucy had in Greenwich Village, a handbag nearby that might have a gun in it.

I’m nagged by a growing distrust that is fast reaching critical mass. Jaime’s the sort of woman who is accustomed to getting what she wants, yet she gave up Lucy without a fight, and now I find out she’s given up her career just as easily. Because it suited her purposes for some reason,it enters my thoughts like a judgment. I have to remind myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except my being here and why and if what I suspect will turn out to be true — that I’m being deceived and used by my niece’s ex-lover.

“I’m sure you remember Il Pasticcio just a few blocks from here?” Jaime takes out foil-lined cardboard containers covered with plastic lids, and plastic quart containers of what might be soup, and the loft fills with aromas of herbs, shallots, and bacon. “Well, now it’s the Broughton and Bull.” She opens a drawer and starts collecting silverware and paper napkins. “They make an amazing pot pie with pearl onions. Braised rabbit. Shrimp bisque with poblano — green tomato oil. Seared scallops with bacon-wrapped jalapeños.” She opens one container after another. “I thought I’d just let you help yourselves. Well, maybe it’s easier if I serve,” she reconsiders, glancing around as if expecting a dining-room table to appear, as if she’s unfamiliar with the rented space she’s in.

“I hope you got me the barbecue shrimp,” Marino says from his chair.

“And fries,” Berger says, as if she and Marino are comfortable companions. “And the mac-and-cheese with truffle oil.”

“I’ll pass.” He makes a face.

“It’s good to try new things.”

“Forget truffles or truffle oil or whatever. I don’t need to try anything that smells like ass.” Marino retrieves a brown expansion file from the stack on the floor by the desk, a file labeled with a sticker that has BLRwritten on it in black Magic Marker.

“Would you like some help?” I ask Jaime, but I don’t get up. I sense she doesn’t want me in her space, or maybe it’s simply that I’m the one feeling distant and untouchable.

“Please stay put. I can open bags and put food on plates. I’m not the cook you are, but I can at least do that.”

“Your sushi’s in the refrigerator,” Marino says.

“My sushi? Okay, why not.” She opens the refrigerator door and retrieves the containers Marino placed inside. “They have my credit card on file because I confess I’m addicted. At least three nights a week. I probably should worry about mercury. You still don’t eat sushi, Kay?”

“I still don’t. No, thank you.”

“I think I’ll serve the bisque in mugs, if nobody minds. How far did you get?” She looks at Marino. “Tell me where you left off.”

“Far enough to know how much trouble it must have been for the two of you to make this evening possible,” I answer for him.

“I really do apologize,” Jaime again says, but she doesn’t sound sorry.

She sounds very sure of her right to do exactly what she’s done.

“Frankly, it’s my prerogative to make certain you understand what’s happening. I simply had to be extraordinarily careful how I did it.” She glances up at me as she moves about in the kitchen. “I feel it’s my moral responsibility to watch your back. Obviously, I’ll always err on the side of discretion and deemed it unwise to call you, e-mail you, or contact you directly. If asked I can truthfully say I didn’t. You called me. But who will know that fact unless you decide to share it?”

“If I decide to share what? That an inmate slipped me a note and I drove off to find the nearest pay phone as if I’m in summer camp on a scavenger hunt?” I reply.

“I interviewed Kathleen yesterday and was reminded she was looking forward to seeing you today.”

“Was reminded?” I say to her, as I look at Marino. “I’m sure you knew anyway. Curtis Roberts is probably an associate of yours. You know, the lawyer with the Georgia Innocence Project who called Leonard Brazzo.”

“I can truthfully say you contacted me while you were in the area on your own business,” Jaime repeats.

“Business you set up for me so you could get me here,” I reply. “There’s nothing truthful about any of this.”

“Marino didn’t brief you or divulge anything he shouldn’t have,” she continues to make her case. “He didn’t pass along any invitations to you that might be unwise right now under the circumstances. No one passed on anything that might have negative consequences.”

“Someone certainly did. That’s why I’m sitting here,” I answer.

“In a privileged conversation with a witness in a case I’m working, I conveyed that I was hoping you would get in touch with me,” she says, completely justified, at least in her mind.

“I seriously doubt much at the GPFW isn’t monitored or recorded,” I point out.

“I wrote a note on my legal pad asking Kathleen to give you my cell phone number and the instruction to call me on a pay phone,” Jaime says. “She read the note as we sat at the table. Nothing was said out loud. Nothing was observed, and the legal pad left with me. Kathleen’s happy to help me in any way possible.”

“Because she’s convinced she’s going to get a reduced sentence, according to the warden,” I comment.

“It would be a good idea for you to dispose of any notes anyone might have given you.”

“From which I’m to conclude you were told not to talk to me and you’re worried about the security of my communications,” I get to the bottom line. “My office and home phones, my cell phone, my e-mail.”

“Not exactly told not to talk,” Jaime says. “Federal agents always encourage witnesses and other parties of interest not to communicate with the subject of an investigation. But I wasn’t ordered not to talk to you, and as long as they don’t know I did, and I prefer they don’t, there shouldn’t be any repercussions. And I think we’ve succeeded in that and are over that hurdle. Tomorrow’s a different day and a different story, a different mission altogether. If they find out at some point we were together at Colin Dengate’s office, it’s of no consequence. They can’t stop us from working a case together while you happened to be in the area.”

“Working a case,” I repeat.

“Jerk-offs,” Marino says, and he’s come to like the FBI a lot less since he left law enforcement and no longer has the power to arrest anyone. His hostility also has to do with Benton.

“If one can avoid it, it’s always best not to annoy the FBI,” Berger adds, as she gets plates and mugs out of a cabinet. “If I annoy them, it doesn’t help you. And some of this is about Farbman, about the problems he’s caused and is capable of causing.”

Dan Farbman is the deputy commissioner of public information for NYPD, and I’m aware that he and Jaime have crossed swords in the past. When I worked for the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner a few years ago, I didn’t get along with him all that well, either. But I don’t know about anything recent or what Deputy Commissioner Farbman could have to do with any potential problems I might have with the Department of Justice. I say as much to Jaime. I tell her I don’t see what Farbman could possibly have to do with me.

“What’s happened in Massachusetts and Dawn Kincaid’s subsequent arrest and indictments have nothing to do with NYPD or Farbman,” I add, as I watch Marino sliding paperwork out of the file, flipping through it, and finding what looks like some sort of official form, lines of it highlighted in orange.

“Yours is a federal case,” Jaime says to me. “An attack on a medical examiner affiliated with the Department of Defense, and it’s accepted that this attack was directed at a federal official and therefore is federal jurisdiction and will be tried in federal court. Which is a good thing. But it also makes you and your case of interest to the FBI.”

“I’m well aware.”

“The talk is that the commissioner may be the next director of the FBI, meaning Farbman thinks he’ll go with him to be in charge of media relations. Were you aware of that?”

“I may have heard rumors.”

“Unless I can block Farbman’s appointment, which I fully intend to do. We don’t need our national crime statistics and terrorist alerts tampered with next. He’s not exactly a fan of mine.”

“He never was.”

“Now it’s worse. I’d say our relationship is in critical condition— only I intend to be the one who survives,” she says. “He won’t forgive me for accusing him of lying about NYPD crime stats, accusing him of data cheating. And as you might recall, you had your run-ins with him, too, for the same reason.” She arranges plates on the stone peninsula.

“I never actually accused him or anyone at NYPD of data cheating.”

“Well, I have, and it’s hard for me to imagine you’re surprised that he’s been doing it.” She finds serving spoons in a drawer.

“He’s always had a habit of presenting statistics and slanting stories in ways that are politically favorable. But I hadn’t heard he’s been accused of data cheating,” I reply.

“You really weren’t aware.”

“I wasn’t,” I repeat, and I get the feeling she’s wondering if Lucy might have said something about this to me. When Jaime apparently confronted Farbman, she and Lucy were still together.

Marino sets paperwork on the coffee table, within my reach, and I pick up the photocopy of a document stamped CONFIDENTIALby the Georgia Prison for Women:

Recommended Procedures for Execution by Lethal Drug Injection

Materials

Sodium Thiopental 5gr/2 % Kit Sterile 50cc Syringe

Pancuronium Bromide Injection (20mg) Simple Intravenous Line

Potassium Chloride Injection, USP (40mEq) Sterile 20cc Syringe

This is followed by directions for the preparation of the drugs included with the “kit,” instructions for mixing the solution and how to attach an intravenous line to an eighteen-gauge needle and a bag of saline to keep the line open. I’m struck by the informal, almost casual, tone of a document that is a step-by-step guide for how to kill someone.

Be sure to expel the air from the line so it will be ready for the injection….

“I did the decent thing and complained directly to the commissioner instead of going to the media,” Jaime continues to describe her conflict with Dan Farbman and NYPD.

Remember to check the prisoner immediately prior to the administration of any drugs to be sure the intracath is patent and there’s no infiltration of the IV solution….

“Unfortunately, the commissioner is pals with the mayor. It got ugly,” Jaime explains. “I got ganged up against.”

“And so the FBI decided to go into my e-mail and tap my phones because of your battle with Farbman? Because you’ve accused him of data cheating? And because some years ago I had a few run-ins with him, too?” I don’t buy it.

Marino sets down another page, and I pick it up next, reading the highlighted paragraph:

Following the injection of the thiopental sodium into the system, it is “washed in” by normal saline. THIS STEP IS EXCEEDINGLY IMPORTANT. If the thiopental sodium remains within the IV and pancuronium bromide is injected, a precipitate will form and possibly clog the line.

“It’s messy when you make enemies.” Jaime doesn’t answer my question as she removes chopsticks from their paper wrapper. “It’s been messy enough in New York for me to leave the DA’s office. My apartment’s on the market. I’m thinking about alternative places to live.”

“You’ve left your life in New York because of an acrimonious situation with Farbman? That’s hard for me to imagine,” I reply, as I look at more documents relating to Georgia’s most infamous poisoner, the Deli Devil.

Between 1989 and 1996, Barrie Lou Rivers poisoned seventeen people, nine of them fatally, with arsenic she got from a pesticide company, all of her victims regular patrons of the deli she managed in an Atlanta skyscraper occupied by multiple companies and firms. Day after day, unsuspecting innocents lined up in the atrium at her deli counter for the tuna-fish special, which was quite the deal: sandwich, chips, a pickle, and a soda for $2.99. When her sadistic crimes were finally discovered, she told police she was tired of people “griping about their food and decided to give them something to gripe about, all right.” She was sick and tired of “shitholes bossing me around like I’m Aunt Jemima.”

“There are other nuances,” Jaime Berger is saying as I read. “Unfortunately, of a personal nature. Some of what I was asked by the FBI agents who showed up at my door was most inappropriate. It was obvious they’d talked to Farbman first, and you can imagine his favorite point was about me. That you and I were almost family.”

I scan the chain-of-custody form that accompanied the execution drugs scheduled for Barrie Lou Rivers, DOC #121195. The prescription was filled at three-twenty p.m. on the first day of March 2009. Kathleen Lawler told me that Barrie Lou Rivers choked on a tuna-fish sandwich in her cell. If that’s true, she must have choked to death at some point after three-twenty p.m. on the day of her execution. The prescription for what was to be her lethal cocktail was filled but never administered, because she died before prison officials could strap her to the gurney. It occurs to me that her last meal may have been the same thing she served to her victims.

“You’ve been back and forth to the GPFW, interviewing Lola Daggette, whose appeals have run out,” I say to Jaime. “I assume she’s talking to you about something important or you wouldn’t have transplanted yourself to Savannah. Your problems in New York aren’t why you’re here, I don’t imagine.”

“She’s not been helpful,” Jaime says. “You’d think she would be, but she’s not as afraid of the needle as she is of Payback.The person she claims killed the Jordan family.”

“Has she said she knows who Paybackis?” I inquire.

“ Paybackis the devil,” Jaime says. “Some evil ghost that planted bloody clothes in Lola’s room.”

“Her execution is set for this fall, and she’s still saying such things?”

“October thirty-first. Halloween,” Jaime says. “I suspect the judge who delayed her execution and then reset it is letting everyone know what he really thinks of Lola Daggette, wants to make sure she’s given a trick, not a treat, four months from now. Emotions still run high about that case. A lot of people are eager for her to get what they perceive she deserves. They want her to die as painfully as possible. You know, wait just a little too long after administering the sodium pentothal. Forget to expel air from the line. Hope it gets clogged.”

Marino places a stack of color printouts on the table, autopsy photographs, and I pick them up.

“Sodium thiopental is fast-acting and can wear off just as quickly, as I’m sure you know,” Jaime continues. “If you screw up the timing when injecting the remaining drugs, and what we’re really talking about is the intramuscular blocking agent pancuronium bromide? If you wait too long? The sodium thiopental, the anesthesia, begins to wear off. A blocked line and prison officials have to put in a new one, and the efficacy of the sodium thiopental has dissipated by the time all that’s been done.

“You may look asleep, but your brain has come to,” she says. “You can’t open your eyes, talk, or make a sound as you lie on the gurney with restraints holding you down, but you’re conscious and aware that you can’t breathe. The long-acting pancuronium bromide has paralyzed the muscles in your chest, and you asphyxiate. No one watching has any idea that you’re anything but peacefully asleep as your face turns blue and you suffocate. One minute, two minutes, three minutes, maybe longer, as you die a silent, agonizing death.”

The autopsy of Barrie Lou Rivers was performed by Colin Dengate, and I have a good idea how he might feel about someone who poisoned innocent victims by lacing their deli sandwiches with arsenic.

“Except the warden knows.” Jaime retrieves a bottle of wine and a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and shuts the door with her hip. “The executioner knows. The anonymous doctor in his hood and goggles knows and can damn well see your panic as he monitors your racing heart before you finally flatline. But then, some of these very people presiding over judicial homicides, the death squad, want the condemned to suffer. Their secret mission is to cause as much pain and to terrorize as much as possible without lawyers, judges, the public knowing. This sort of thing has been going on for centuries. The executioner’s ax blade is dull or off the mark and requires a few extra blows. The hanging doesn’t go well because the noose slips and the person strangles slowly, twisting at the end of a rope in front of a jeering crowd.”

As I listen to what sounds like one of Jaime Berger’s classic opening arguments in court, I know that most people who count in this part of the world, including certain judges and politicians and most of all Colin Dengate, would be unmoved by her. I have a pretty good idea how Colin feels not only about what happened to the Jordan family but about what should happen to Lola Daggette. Yes, emotions run high, especially those of my feisty Irish colleague who heads the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Coastal Regional Crime Lab in Savannah. Jaime Berger coming down to the Lowcountry wouldn’t impress him and might just feel like an invasion. I suspect he’s not inclined to give her the time of day.

“As you’re well aware, Kay, I don’t believe that a form of euthanizing begun in Nazi Germany to eliminate undesirables is one we should emulate in the United States. And it shouldn’t be legal,” she says, as she arranges sushi and seaweed salad on a plate. “Doctors are prohibited from playing any role in executions, including pronouncing death, and the lethal-injection drugs are increasingly difficult to obtain. There’s a shortage because of the stigma for U.S. manufacturers to make them, and some states have been forced to import the drugs, making the source and quality of them questionable. The drugs shouldn’t be legally available to prison officials, and none of this stops anything. Doctors participate and pharmacists fill the prescriptions and prisons get their drugs. Regardless of one’s beliefs or moral convictions, Lola didn’t kill the Jordans. She didn’t kill Clarence, Gloria, Josh, and Brenda. In fact, she never met them. She was never inside their house.”

I glance up at Marino as I study copies of photographs. Last I knew, he was in favor of capital punishment. An eye for an eye. A taste of their own medicine.

“I think Lola Daggette was a screwed-up person, a drug addict with a temper, but she didn’t kill anyone or help do it,” he says to me. “It’s more likely she was set up by the person she calls Payback.She probably thought it was friggin’ fun.”

“Who thought it was fun?”

“The one who really did it. She got her hands on some kid who’s in a halfway house and basically retarded.” Marino looks at Jaime. “IQ’s what? Seventy? I think that’s legally retarded,” he adds.

“She?”I ask.

“Lola’s innocent of the crimes she was tried for and convicted of,” Jaime says. “I’m not as clear as I need to be about what happened the early morning of January sixth, 2002, but I do have new evidence to prove it wasn’t Lola who was inside the Jordans’ house. What I can’t know is what went on from a forensic standpoint, because I’m not that kind of expert. The injuries, for example. All inflicted by the same weapon, and if so, what was this weapon? What do the bloodstain patterns really mean? How long had the Jordans been dead when the next-door neighbor went out with his dog and happened to notice the glass was broken in the back door and then no one answered the bell or the phone?”

“Colin is that kind of expert,” I remark.

“I have a very nice Oregon pinot,” Jaime says. “If that’s all right with you.”

She pulls the cork out of the bottle of wine as I study photographs of Barrie Lou Rivers on the stainless-steel autopsy table, her shoulders propped up by a polypropylene block, her head hanging back, her long gray hair stringy and bloody. The skin of her chest has been reflected up to above the larynx and the vocal cords, and there is nothing lodged in her airway. Close-ups of the small triangular vocal cord opening show it is unobstructed and clear.

Whether it’s an object as small as a peanut or a grape or a large bolus of meat, nothing can get below the level of the vocal cords when someone is choking, and Colin was appropriately careful to make sure he checked for aspirated food before he did anything else. He also deemed the case important enough to stay late or return to his lab after hours and perform the postmortem examination immediately. The time and date of the autopsy are listed on the protocol as nine-seventeen p.m., March 1.

I go through more photographs, looking for anything that might verify what Kathleen Lawler told me about Barrie Lou Rivers’s death in custody. I ask Marino for rescue-squad run sheets or statements made by the guards on duty, for the autopsy report, and he shuffles through the file and hands over whatever there is. I get confirmation that Barrie Lou Rivers likely ate a tuna-fish sandwich on rye bread with pickles not long before she died. Her gastric contents are consistent with this: two hundred milliliters of undigested food, what appear to be fishlike particles, pickles, bread, and caraway seeds .

But there’s nothing to support Kathleen’s claims that Barrie Lou Rivers choked to death. Apparently nobody attempted a Heimlich maneuver, so it doesn’t seem possible that a bolus of sandwich or anything she might have been choking on was ejected, thus explaining why it wasn’t found during the autopsy. There’s no official document that mentions food aspiration or choking, but I know Colin looked for it. I can tell he did by the autopsy photographs.

Then I read a call sheet that includes handwritten notes he made at eight-oh-seven p.m. The suggestion that choking was the cause of death was made by Tara Grimm. “Barrie Lou seemed to be having a hard time breathing,” the warden apparently said to Colin over the phone while the body was in transit, en route to the morgue. She didn’t witness this herself, she said, but it was reported to her that Barrie Lou “was struggling for breath and seemed distressed.” The guards thought it was anxiety, Tara Grimm told Colin. “It wasn’t too long before she was to be taken into the death chamber and prepped, and Barrie Lou was prone to emotional fits and anxiety. Now I’m wondering if she might have choked on her last meal.”

Colin wrote these remarks on the call sheet, and he dutifully checked for food aspiration when he made his first incision on Barrie Lou Rivers’s body less than an hour after he was on the phone with the warden, who did not attend the autopsy. Official witnesses listed on the protocol as having been present include a morgue assistant, a death investigator, and a representative from the GPFW, Officer M. P. Macon. The same prison guard who was my escort earlier today.