Red Mist

15

It was still hot when the sun came up, and by eight a.m. I’m sweltering in black field clothes and black ankle-high boots as I sit on a bench in front of the hotel, drinking a venti iced coffee I got at a nearby Starbucks.

The bell in the City Hall tower rings in the first day of July, deep, melodious peals echoing in brassy reverberations as I watch a cabdriver watching me. Rawboned and weathered, with pants hitched up and a beard as scruffy as Spanish moss, he reminds me of characters I’ve seen in Civil War photographs. I imagine he hasn’t migrated far from the birthplace of his ancestors and still shares traits in common with them, like so many people I notice in cities and towns insulated from the outside world.

I’m reminded of what Kathleen Lawler said about genetics. No matter what we strive to become in life, we’re still who and what the forces of biology shape us to be. Hers is a fatalistic explanation, but she’s not completely wrong, and as I recall her comments about predetermination and DNA, I have a feeling she wasn’t referring only to herself. She was also alluding to her daughter. Kathleen was warning me, perhaps attempting to intimidate me, about Dawn Kincaid, with whom she claims to have no contact, yet according to a number of sources, it simply isn’t true. Kathleen knows more than she’s letting on, has secrets she keeps that likely are related to why Tara Grimm moved her into segregation at the same time I was lured down here. I believe Jaime Berger has caused real trouble.

She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with, because she isn’t as rationally motivated or as in touch with herself as she believes. While her selfish reasoning may very well have been precipitated by her clashes with New York police and politicians, most of what drives her is related to my niece, and now none of us have ended up in a good place, certainly not a safe one. Not Benton, not Marino, not Lucy, not me, and least of all Jaime, although she might not see it or believe it if I pointed it out. She’s completely deluded herself, and I’m along for the ride and reminded of what an old Diener used to tell me during my Richmond days:

You have to live where you wake up, even if somebody else dreamed you there.

When I woke up this morning after very little sleep, I realized I can’t afford to waiver in my resolve. Too much is at stake, and I don’t trust Jaime’s analysis of most matters or have faith in her approach, but I will do what I can to help. I’m involved not because I volunteered. I was drafted, practically abducted, and that’s of no consequence anymore. My sense of urgency isn’t about Lola Daggette or Dawn Kincaid and her mother, Kathleen Lawler.

It’s not about nine-year-old murders or the recent ones in Massachusetts, although these cases and those involved in them are critically important, and I will make investigative sense of them as best I can. What overrides all of it is Jaime’s meddling with the people closest to me. I feel she has endangered Lucy, Marino, and Benton. She has threatened our relationships, which have always been intricate and complicated, held in place by fragile threads. The network that we are is sturdy only when each of us is.

These people Jaime trifles with are my family, my only family, really. I don’t count my mother or my sister, I’m sorry to confess. I can’t rely on them, and frankly wouldn’t think of entrusting myself to their care, not even on their better days, the few they have. There was a time when I was happy to widen my inner circle to include Jaime, but what I won’t permit is for her to range about on the perimeter and dislodge the rest of us from our moorings or change who we are to one another. She abandoned Lucy in a way that was cold and unfair, and now Jaime seems determined to redefine Marino’s career, his very identity. In short order, she has managed to inflame his jealousy of Benton again and imply that my husband has betrayed me and is indifferent to my safety and happiness.

Even if there weren’t old murders connected to recent ones that seem to share the common denominator of Savannah, I wouldn’t leave right now. I extended my hotel reservation and booked a room for Lucy, who took off in her helicopter with Benton at dawn. I said I needed their help. I told them I usually don’t ask, but I want them here. Marino’s white cargo van turns into the hotel’s brick driveway, still loud but at least not bucking and shaking, and I get up from the bench. I walk toward the cabdriver with the scruffy beard and smile at him as I drop my Starbucks cup into the trash.

“Good morning,” I greet him, as he continues to stare.

“You mind me asking who you’re with?” He eyes me up and down, leaning against his blue taxicab parked beneath the same palm tree where Marino left his crippled van some seven hours earlier.

“Military medical research.” I give the taxi driver the same meaningless answer I’ve offered other people this morning who wondered aloud why I’m wearing black cargo pants, a long-sleeved black tactical shirt with the CFC shield embroidered in gold on it, and boots.

The go-bag I found in my room when I walked in at close to two a.m. had all of the essentials I might need on the road working a case but nothing suited for the civilian world, certainly not one located in the subtropics. I recognize Marino’s handiwork. In fact, I have no doubt he packed the go-bag himself, removing items from my office closet and bathroom and also my locker in the morgue changing room. As I’ve continued reconstructing these past several months and especially the two weeks since he’s been gone I recall being puzzled when certain items seemed to be missing. I thought I had more uniform shirts. I was sure I had more cargo pants. I could have sworn I had two pairs of boots, not just one. The contents of the go-bag suggest that from Marino’s point of view, I’m going to spend my time down here in labs or a medical examiner’s office, or more to the point, with him.

Had Bryce packed for me, and that’s the usual routine when an emergency rushes me out of town or I’m stranded somewhere, he would have included a suit bag with blazers, blouses, and slacks generously padded and wrapped with tissue paper so nothing gets wrinkled. He would have picked out shoes, socks, workout clothes, and toiletries, his choices made with far more thoughtfulness and flair than if I’d packed myself, and most likely he would have stopped by my house. Bryce doesn’t hesitate to help himself to anything he anticipates I might need, including lingerie, which is of no personal interest to him beyond his occasional comments about various labels and fabrics, and which detergents and dryer sheets he prefers. But he would not have sent me off to Georgia in the summer with three sets of cold-weather field clothes, three pairs of men’s white socks, a flak jacket, boots, one deodorant, and an insect repellent.

“I didn’t know if you ate yet,” Marino says, as I open the van’s door, and right away I notice the interior is much cleaner than it was when I was in it last. I smell citrus-scented air freshener and butter and deep-fried steak and eggs. “They got a Bojangles’ a couple miles from here near Hunter Army Airfield, which gave me an excuse to do a test run. The van’s good as new.”

“With the minor exception of air-conditioning.” I buckle up and notice the bulging bag on the floor between our seats as I roll the window down all the way.

“Would need to get a new compressor for that, but the hell with it. I mean, you wouldn’t believe the deal I got on this thing, and you sort of get used to not having air. Like the old days. When I was growing up, a lot of cars didn’t have it.”

“Or shoulder harnesses or air bags or antilock brakes or navigational systems,” I reply.

“I got you a plain egg biscuit, but there’s a few steak, egg, and cheese ones, too, if you’re hungry,” he says. “And there’s water in a cooler.” He pokes a thumb toward the backseat. “No olive oil at Bojangles’, so you just have to make do. I know how you feel about butter.”

“I love butter, which is why I stay away from it.”

“Jesus. I don’t know what the hell it is about craving fat. But I just go with it now. I’m learning not to fight some things. If you don’t fight them, they don’t fight you back.”

“Butter fights me back when I try to button my pants. You must have stayed up all night. When did you find time to get this thing fixed and give it a bath?” I ask.

“Like I said, I found a mechanic, got his home number off the Internet. He met me at his shop at five this morning. We swapped out the alternator, balanced the tires, cleaned out the wheel wells, tightened the plug wires, and I replaced the wiper blades while we were at it, and cleaned it up a little,” he says, as we drive along West Bay, past restaurants and shops of stucco, brick, and granite, the street lined with live oaks, magnolias, and crepe myrtles.

Marino is dressed for the field, but he was sensible in what he selected for himself, the CFC summer uniform of khaki cargo pants and beige polo shirt in a lightweight cotton blend, and he wears tactical nylon mesh and suede trainers instead of boots. A baseball cap protects the top of his bald head and the tip of his sunburned nose, and he has on dark glasses and sunblock that is watery white in the deep creases of his sweaty neck.

“I appreciate your thinking to pack my field clothes,” I say to him. “I’m wondering when you did that?”

“Before I left.”

“That much I deduced on my own.”

“I should have brought you the khakis. You must be hot as hell. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Probably that you would take what you could find when you rummaged, and it’s been a bit too chilly in Massachusetts for warm-weather uniforms, since we’ve had an unusually cold spring. My khakis are in a closet at my house. If you had asked Bryce …”

“Yeah, I know. But I didn’t want him involved. The more involved he gets, the harder it is for him to keep his mouth shut, and he makes such a big thing out of whatever it is. He would have turned packing into a fashion show and sent me down here with a steamer trunk.”

“You packed for me before you left,” I repeat. “And when might that have been, exactly?”

“I pulled a few things together the last time I was in the office. I don’t know, the fourteenth or fifteenth, not that I was positive what would happen when I got down here.”

He turns onto US-17, heading south, the air blowing through our open windows as hot as an oven.

“I think you were absolutely positive what would happen,” I correct him. “Why don’t we just come clean about it?”

I open the glove box for extra napkins and spread them in my lap before retrieving our breakfast from the bag between our seats.

“It would be helpful if you’d admit that when you decided to take a last-minute vacation, you knew you were coming down here to assist Jaime,” I say to him. “You also knew I soon would follow without the benefit of the real reason why and would arrive with little more than the clothes on my back.”

“I’ve tried to make you understand why you couldn’t know in advance.”

“Yes, you’ve tried, and I’m sure you’re convinced of your reasoning even if I’m not. In fact, I shouldn’t call it your reasoning. It’s Jaime’s reasoning.”

“I don’t know why you don’t care if the FBI’s spying on you.”

“I don’t believe it. And if they are, they must be bored. Now, which one of these am I opening for you?” I examine warm biscuits in yellow wrappers slick with butter.

“They’re all the same except yours.”

“Okay, I think I can figure out mine, since it’s half the weight of the others.” I open more napkins and drape them over Marino’s thigh. “I would like a little clarity. And not about the FBI but about you.”

“Don’t get pissed again.”

“I’m asking for clarity, not a disagreement or a fight. Had you already rented your apartment in Charleston before Jaime called the CFC two months ago and you took the train to New York to have a secret meeting with her?”

“I’d been thinking about it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I unwrap a chicken-fried steak, egg, and cheese biscuit, and he takes it in his huge hand and a third of it is gone in one bite, buttery crumbs snowing down on his napkin-covered lap.

“I’d been looking into it,” he says, as he chews. “I’d been checking out rentals in the Charleston area for a while, more of a pipe dream, really, until I talked to Jaime. She told me about her work in the Lola Daggette case and that she could use my help, and I’m thinking this is kind of amazing, sort of like it was meant to be. It’s the same part of the world where I was just looking for something to rent. But it makes sense when you realize that most places with good fishing and motorcycle riding also have the death penalty. Anyway, I decided she was right. It might be smart to become a private contractor.”

“Her suggestion. Of course.”

“Well, she’s smart as hell, and it made sense. You know, I can pick and choose my hours a little better, pick and choose where I want to be, earn a little more money, maybe.” He takes another bite of his biscuit. “I told myself it’s now or never. This is your chance. If you don’t try to make things turn out the way you want right now when it’s under your nose, you probably won’t get asked twice.”

“Did Jaime go into detail about what happened to her in New York? About why she quit?” I ask.

“I guess she told you what Lucy did.”

“I thought you said she hadn’t mentioned Lucy to you.” I open my egg biscuit, and although I usually don’t eat fast food and certainly don’t share Marino’s addiction to all things fried, suddenly I’m starved.

“She didn’t, exactly,” Marino says, and we are on the Veterans Parkway now, making very good time through long stretches of forests, the sky huge and a whitish blue that augurs a scorching day. “All she mentioned was the Real Time Crime Center, that its security was compromised and Jaime basically got blamed. No one officially accused her, but she said comments were being made about how coincidental it was that here she is claiming NYPD is skewing crime stats at the same time their computer system is broke into and it just so happens she’s in a relationship with a well-known computer hack.”

“That’s not the story Lucy tells,” I reply. “She says it wasn’t the Real Time Crime Center. It was one precinct where they allegedly were bumping down felony grand larcenies to misdemeanors and changing burglaries to criminal-mischief complaints.”

“That’s bad enough.”

“I don’t know exactly what she got into or how, but yes, it’s bad enough. And I’m sorry if that’s how Lucy is described, as a well-known computer hack. If that’s what people think of her.”

“Well, shit, Doc, she’s always going to do it,” Marino says. “If she can get into something, she’s going to get into it, and there isn’t much she can’t get into. I know you know that by now, so why pretend it’s ever going to change? Maybe I’d be the same way if I was like her, do what’s needed to get what you want because you can. Legalis just moguls on a black-diamond slope. Something you go over and around, and the more of them and the more difficult they are, the more Lucy likes it.”

I look out my open window at tawny marshes and snaking estuaries and creeks, the hot air blowing in the rotten-egg smell of pluff mud.

“Not that Lucy really gives a shit what anybody thinks of her.” Paper crinkles as he wads up his biscuit wrapper.

“I’m sure she’d like you to believe she doesn’t give a shit. She cares about a lot of things more than you might think she does. Including Jaime.” I take a bite of my biscuit. “I know I’m going to regret it, but this is pretty good.”

“I’d better have another one in case we don’t get lunch.”

“You look like you’ve lost weight, and I don’t know how.”

“I only eat when my body’s hungry instead of when I am,” he says. “It took me half my life to figure it out. It’s like I wait until I’m hungry at a cellular level, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t have a clue.” I hand him another biscuit.

“It really works. No shit. The goal is not to think. When you need food, your cells will let you know, and then you take care of it. I don’t think about meals anymore.” He talks with his mouth full. “I don’t plan on having this or that or not having this or that or feel I have to eat at a certain time of day. I let my cells tell me and go with it. I’ve lost fifteen pounds in five weeks, and I’m toying with the idea of writing a book about it. Don’t Think You’re Fat, Just Eat.A play on words. I’m not really telling people not to think they’re fat. I’m telling them not to think about it at all. I believe people would go for it. I probably could dictate it and get someone to type it up.”

“I’m worried you’re smoking again.”

“I don’t know why the hell you keep saying that.”

“Someone’s been smoking in your van.”

“I think it smells pretty good in here.”

“It didn’t smell pretty good yesterday.”

“A couple fishing buddies of mine. Something about driving with the windows wide open when it’s hot as hell. People feel like lighting up.”

“Maybe you could be a bit more evasive,” I reply.

“What’s all this shit about cigarettes? Like suddenly you’re the smoking police.”

“You remember what Rose went through.” I remind him of my secretary Rose’s miserable death from lung cancer.

“Rose didn’t smoke, not even once her whole life. She didn’t have any bad habits and still got cancer, and maybe that’s why. I’ve decided if you try too hard, everything gets worse, so what’s the point in depriving yourself so you can die prematurely in good health? I wish she was still around. It’s not the same. Damn, I hate missing people. I still walk in your office and think she’s going to be there with that old IBM typewriter and an attitude. Some people should never be gone, and those that should hang around forever.”

“You recently were diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma and had several lesions removed. The last thing you need is to start smoking again.”

“Smoking doesn’t cause skin cancer,” he says.

“It triples your chances.”

“Okay. So now and then I bum a cigarette when someone else is lighting up. It’s no big deal.”

“ Don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. Just bum them.Maybe that’s another book you can write. People probably would buy that, too.”

“The shit Lucy worries about will never be proved.” He goes back to that because he doesn’t want to be lectured. “Nobody’s been accused or is going to be. Jaime’s gone for good from the DA’s office, and that’s what people like Farbman wanted, plain and simple. He must feel like he won the lottery.”

“Jaime certainly doesn’t feel that way, despite her protests to the contrary.”

“She seems pretty happy with what she’s doing now.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“She just doesn’t like how it happened, because she was forced. How would you feel if someone ran you off from your career after all you did to get there?”

“I’d like to believe I wouldn’t entice someone I supposedly love to do something destructive because I wanted out of the relationship,” I answer.

“Yeah, but breaking up with Lucy doesn’t have anything to do with Jaime getting run out of the DA’s office.”

“It has everything to do with it. Jaime uncreated herself,” I reply. “She didn’t like what she saw, and she smashed it, destroyed it, so she could start all over. But that doesn’t work. It never does. You can’t rebuild yourself on the foundation of a lie. You helped her with the security and camera system. Is she carrying a gun now, too?”

“I’ve given her a couple of shooting lessons at an indoor range here.”

“Whose idea?”

“Hers.”

“Most New Yorkers don’t carry guns. It’s not part of their culture. It’s not a natural default. Why does she suddenly think she needs a gun?”

“Maybe from being down here, where she doesn’t exactly belong, and let’s face it, anything related to Dawn Kincaid is scary. I think what she’s doing now has spooked her, and she got used to guns from Lucy, who’s always armed. She probably takes her Glock into the friggin’ shower. Maybe Jaime got used to guns because of living with them.”

“Just like she got used to having an LLC called Anna Copper that started out as a somewhat spiteful joke because Lucy was hurt? Yes, Groucho Marx, who was heavily invested in Anaconda Copper, a mining company that tanked during the Great Depression and is blamed for polluting the environment. You don’t see what’s going on here, do you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I do.”

“You invest in something that seems hugely valuable but is toxic, and you lose everything. It almost does you in.”

“You ever listen to those old radio programs of his? You Bet Your Life.You know, what color is the White House or who’s buried in Grant’s tomb, that sort of thing. He was pretty funny. You shouldn’t worry about Jaime’s shit.”

“I should worry about her shit, and so should you. It’s one thing to offer objective assistance in a case, and it’s another to be drawn into an agenda, especially a vindictive one, a highly personal one, a dysfunctional one. Jaime has all the incentive imaginable to make some big point, to re-create herself with a vengeance. There are other factors as well. I think you know what I’m referring to.”

Marino makes loud crumpling noises as he digs into the Bojangles’ bag, pulling out more napkins, as we cross a bridge that spans the Little Ogeechee River.

“I just hope you’re careful,” I continue, lecturing him again. “I’m not going to interfere if you choose to consult with other people, if you change your professional status with the CFC, but you need to be very cautious when it comes to Jaime. Do you understand why it might be difficult for you to be completely clearheaded about her?”

He wipes his mouth and fingers as we pass over Forest River now, where shrimp boats are moored and seagulls are congregated on a long wooden pier.

“It’s dangerous when people are propelled by powerful motivations they aren’t aware of. That’s all I need to say.” I don’t expect him to understand or to be persuaded.

Jaime feeds his ego in a way I don’t, because I refuse to manipulate him. I don’t charm and flatter him into doing what I want. I’m blunt and honest, and for the most part it annoys him.

“Listen,” he says. “I’m not stupid. I know she’s got other things going on and Lucy complicated everything. She’s so damn wide open, and I remember her coming into the DA’s office, acting like what was going on between them not only wasn’t a secret, it was something to brag about.”

Just ahead is the Savannah Mall, where I ate a seafood lunch with Colin Dengate last time I was here, and I try to remember when that was. Maybe three years ago, when I was still in Charleston and he was battling a spate of hate crimes in coastal Georgia.

“It shouldn’t have needed to be a secret,” I reply. “In fact, it should have been something to brag about if two people love each other.”

“Well, let’s be honest,” Marino says. “Not everybody feels the way you do. The two of them getting together isn’t the typical fairy-tale couple. It’s not like they’re Prince William and Kate. It’s not like everybody celebrated Jaime and Lucy. Just my opinion, but I think Jaime wanted out of it because it was causing her big problems. All that shit on the Internet, like suddenly she’d been voted off some reality show. Dyke DA, Lesbo Law. It was ugly, and she bailed, and now she’s sorry, even if she won’t admit it.”

“I’m interested in why you think she’s sorry.”

We’re on a narrow two-lane road called Middle Ground Drive, winding through a state-owned tract of land thick with underbrush and pines, not a sign of human habitation. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation keeps the location for their medical examiner’s office and forensic labs as isolated as possible for a reason.

“Shit. You think she’s happy with the life she’s picked?” Marino says. “I’m talking personally.”

“I’d rather hear what you think.”

“After they broke up, Jaime started dating men, including that guy from NBC, Baker Thomas.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“I still got friends at NYPD. When I went to see Jaime a couple of months back, I hooked up with a few of them and heard stuff. Point is, you think she could be more obvious? Going out with a TV correspondent who’s considered one of New York’s most eligible bachelors. Even though I got my theory about him. It’s not an accident he’s never been married. Lucy used to see him in the Village in the kind of bars Bryce would like.”

The Coastal Regional Crime Laboratory is tucked in trees and surrounded by a high privacy fence topped by anti-climb spikes. A metal gate bars the entrance, and to the left of it is a camera mounted on top of an intercom.

“What time is Jaime supposed to meet us?” I ask.

“She thought it would be good to give you a chance to look through the cases first.”

“You’ve talked to her today?”

“Not yet. But that’s the plan.”

“I see. I go through them first, and she doesn’t need to show up until it suits her, if she bothers at all.”

“Depends on what you find. I’m supposed to call her. Damn, this place has almost as much security as we do.”

“Hate crimes,” I comment. “Years and years of them, going back to when the lab was first built. Colin’s been quite vocal about it. One case in particular that was all over the news when we had the office in Charleston. You might remember it.”

Marino slows down and eases the van up to the intercom. “Lanier County, Georgia. African American named Roger Mosbly, a retired schoolteacher engaged to a white woman,” I continue. “He was driving home late at night, and as he pulled into his driveway, two white men stepped out in front of his car.”

Marino reaches his arm out the window. He presses the intercom button, and it buzzes loudly.

“They beat him to death with bottles and a baseball bat, and there was pressure behind the scenes for Colin to help the defense make their case that it was a fair fight,” I say. “Road rage. Mosbly started it, even though the defendants had no injuries and he had an abundance of abrasions and bruises to show they tried to drag him out of his car while he still had his seat belt on.”

“White supremacist Nazi asswipes,” Marino says.

“Threats were made because Colin told the truth, and shortly before the trial, the lab’s front windows were shot out one night. After that, the fence went up.”

“Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would want someone executed for a crime they didn’t commit.” Marino presses the intercom button again.

“If he were that kind of person, his place wouldn’t need all this security.” I don’t add that Jaime Berger has misjudged Colin Dengate, that she has misrepresented him. I don’t remind Marino yet again that this lawyer he thinks it would be wonderful to work with has self-serving agendas and really isn’t honest or kind.

A woman’s voice sounds through the speaker: “May I help you?”

“Dr. Scarpetta and Investigator Marino here to see Dr. Dengate,” he announces, as I check my iPhone for messages.

Benton and Lucy just landed in Millville, New Jersey, for fuel, Lucy wrote eleven minutes ago. They’re making terrible time, with strong winds gusting out of the southwest, right on their nose, and there’s a message from Benton that is disturbing:

D.K. no longer at Butler. Will let you know more when I do. Advise caution.

A loud humming as the metal gate slowly slides open on a track across asphalt, and I see the stucco-and-brick lab building, one story but sprawling. Parked in the front lot are white SUVs with the GBI gold-and-blue crest on their doors, and the white Land Rover with an Army-green canvas roof that Colin Dengate has driven for as long as I’ve known him.

“You going to tell Dr. Dengate about the new DNA results?” Marino asks, and I’m thinking about what Benton just wrote. That’s all I can think about.

Flags hang limply from poles, not a breath of air stirring, and the walkway is lined with red-flowering bottlebrush shrubs that hummingbirds love, sprinklers watering them, nozzles spraying at the edge of the grass. We park in a visitor’s space in front of ground-level reflective windows that are bullet- and shatter-resistant and designed to withstand the force of a terrorist blast, and the only thing on my mind is that Dawn Kincaid has escaped from Butler State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

If it’s true, someone else will die. Maybe more than one person. I’m sure of it. She is shockingly clever. She is sadistic, and has managed to get what she wants all of her blighted predatory life, and no one has stopped her. No one ever has, including me. I slowed her down, but I certainly didn’t stop her, and the only reason I’m still here is luck. A mist from the sprinklers touches my face, and I remember the mist of her blood. I remember the taste of salt and iron inside my mouth, on my teeth, on my tongue. A bloody fog on my face, in my eyes, in my hair. Tara Grimm suggested that Kathleen Lawler might be getting out of prison early. It enters my mind that Dawn Kincaid is planning to come down here.

“Hey? You look like you seen a ghost.”

I realize Marino is talking to me.

“I’m sorry,” I reply, as I slide open the van’s back door.

“You going to tell him about the DNA?” he asks again.

“No, absolutely not. It’s not for me to tell. I’d rather review the cases as if I know nothing. I intend to keep an open mind.” I retrieve dripping bottles of water from the cooler. “I don’t know when you put ice in this thing,” I add. “But if you want to brew tea, we probably could.”

“At least it’s wet.” He takes a bottle from me.

“I’ll be right in. I need to make a phone call.” I step into the hot shade of a tree and call Benton, hoping he and Lucy haven’t taken off yet.

“I’m glad you’re still there,” I say with feeling when he answers. “Sorry about the wind. I’m sorry I asked you to come to Savannah and it’s proving to be such an ordeal.”

“The wind is the least of my worries. It’s just slow. You all right?”

“Not dressed for this weather.”

“Getting a shot of coffee while Lucy pays for fuel. Christ, it’s hot as hell in New Jersey, too.”

“What’s happened?”

“I don’t have anything official and probably shouldn’t get you worried when it might not be a problem. But I know what she’s like and capable of, and so do you. She managed to convince guards and other personnel at Butler that she needed to go to the hospital, to the ER.”

“For what?”

“She has asthma.”

“If she didn’t before, I’m sure she does now,” I say, with a flare of anger.

“Jack had it, and in all fairness, asthma can be inherited.”

“Malingering and more manipulations.” I don’t feel like being fair.

“She was transported by ambulance around seven this morning. A contact of mine at Butler who’s not involved in her case and has no direct information heard about it and left me a message about half an hour ago. I’m really glad you’re a thousand miles away, but be careful. This makes me nervous. I don’t trust it.”

“Understandable, considering who we’re talking about.” Sweat is running down my chest and my back, the air stagnant and thick like steam. “She’s still in custody, right?”

“I assume so, but I don’t have details.”

“You assume it?”

“Kay, all I know is they’ve transported her to MGH, and this happened very recently. It’s not like we can go barging in questioning her when she’s in the middle of an alleged medical problem. She has her rights.”

“Of course she does. More than the rest of us.”

“Knowing her capabilities and skill at manipulating, of course I’m concerned this is a ploy, a scheme,” Benton says.

“They can’t possibly have a clue what they’ve got on their hands.” I mean that Massachusetts General Hospital can’t.

“If nothing else, this may be another ruse on the part of her lawyers to garner sympathy or imply she’s being mistreated or to add to this bullshit about the damage you’ve caused to her mental health, her physical health. Asthma’s made worse by stress.”

“The damage I’ve caused?” I think about what Jaime said last night.

“The obvious case she’s making.”

“I didn’t know you thought she had a case.”

“I’m saying she’s making one. I didn’t say she has one or that I think she does. You sound really upset.”

“If you knew she was trumping up a case against me,” I reply, “it would have been helpful if you’d told me.”

I feel shaky inside as I remember Marino’s accusation that my own husband knows I’m under investigation. How could he live in the same house with me and know such a thing, and why did he let me walk out alone that night, as if Benton doesn’t care. As if I mean nothing to him. As if he doesn’t love me. Marino and his jealousy,I remind myself.

“We’ll talk more about this when I get there,” Benton says. “But if you didn’t know her defense is going to blame everything on you, then you’re the only person who didn’t know. Lucy’s walking out to the helicopter, so I need to go. I’ll call when we land next.”

He tells me he loves me, and I get off the phone. Heat is a shimmering wall rising from blacktop as sprinklers spray, water sweeping in waves and splashing on foliage. I walk to the entrance of the lab building, then into a lobby of comfortable blue cloth chairs and couches, and an area rug with a Persian Serapi design in beige and rose, and potted palms, and prints of aspen trees and gardens arranged on off-white walls. An elderly woman sits alone in a corner, staring blankly out a window, in this tasteful place where no one wants to be, and I try Jaime Berger.

The hell with pay phones and pretending we haven’t talked. I don’t give a damn who’s listening, and I don’t believe her anyway. Her cell phone rings and goes to voicemail.

“Jaime, it’s Kay,” I leave a message. “There’s been a development up north that I can’t help but suspect you know about.” I hear the accusation in my tone, as if whatever has happened somehow is her fault, and maybe it is.

Dawn Kincaid is up to something because she knows about the DNA, I’m sure she does, and Jaime is being naïve or is into denial to think otherwise. A number of people who can cause trouble might know, for that matter. I don’t believe it’s the secret Jaime assumes it is. She has started something terribly dangerous.

“Call me when you get this,” I tell her in a tone that conveys I mean it. “If I don’t answer, try Colin’s office and ask someone to find me.”