Red Mist

17

Jaime Berger’s not with you?” Mandy O’Toole moves to the far end of the table and takes a chair where there are a Vitaminwater and a BlackBerry with earphones.

“I believe she may be coming in later,” I reply.

“Now, that’s somebody with no off switch, and I guess that’s good if you do what she does. You know, everybody’s fair game.” Colin’s pathology technician begins talking about Jaime, as if I asked. “I ran into her in the ladies’ room when she came here a couple weeks ago and I’m washing my hands and she starts in about Barrie Lou Rivers’s adrenaline level. Did I notice anything histologically that might hint at a surge of adrenaline indicating stress and panic, like if she was being abused the night of her execution. And I said histology wouldn’t show something like that, because you can’t see adrenaline microscopically. That would require a special biochemical study.”

“Which was probably ordered, knowing Colin,” I comment.

“That’s him all right. No stone unturned. Blood, vitreous, cerebrospinal fluid, and I think that was the lab result Ms. Berger might have come across. Barrie Lou Rivers did have a moderately elevated level of adrenaline. But people are way too quick to read something into findings like that, don’t you agree?”

“People often are quick to read all sorts of things into findings that don’t necessarily mean what they assume they do,” I reply.

“Well, if someone’s suffering a catastrophic event like a heart attack or they’re choking on food, they certainly might panic and dump a lot of adrenaline antemortem,” she says, her blue stare unwavering. “I mean, if I was choking to death, I’m sure I’d have a lot of adrenaline pumping. Nothing to make a person more panic-stricken than not being able to breathe. Gee, it’s an awful thought.”

“Yes, it is.”

I wonder again what Jaime Berger has been circulating about me. She told Colin I visited Kathleen Lawler at the GPFW yesterday. What else has Jaime been saying? Why is Mandy O’Toole looking so intently at me?

“I used to watch you when you had that show on CNN,” she then says, and I realize the possible explanation for her interest. “I’m sorry you quit, because I thought it was really good. At least you offered some common sense about forensics and not all this screaming and sensationalism like some of the other shows. It must be cool to have your own show. If you ever have another one and need someone to talk about histology …”

“That’s very kind, but what I’m doing these days isn’t necessarily compatible with having a TV show.”

“Well, I’d jump at it if I was asked. But nobody wants to watch tissue processing. I guess the coolest part is removing the specimens from the body, you know what you get to do. Although finding the perfect fixative and knowing which one to use with what is kind of exciting.”

“How long have you worked with Colin?”

“Since 2003. The same year the GBI started becoming paperless. So you’re lucky or not with the Jordan cases, depending on how you look at it. Everything now is electronic, but it wasn’t back then in January 2002. I don’t know about you, but I still like paper. There’s always that one thing someone decided not to scan, except when it’s Colin. He’s crazy obsessive-compulsive. He doesn’t care if it’s a paper napkin that got mixed in with the paperwork, it goes into the file. He’s always saying the devil’s in the details.”

“And he’s right,” I reply.

“I should have been an investigator. I keep asking him to send me to a death-investigation school like the one at the New York City OCME, where you used to be, but it’s all about money. And there’s not any.” She reaches for the BlackBerry and earphones on the table. “I should let you get to work. Let me know if you need anything.”

I remove the top case file from the stack of four on the end of the table closest to the door, and a quick look affirms what I might have hoped for but certainly didn’t expect. Colin has offered me collegial respect and professional courtesy, and quite a lot more than that. By law he’s required to disclose only those records he directly generated, such as the medical examiner’s report of initial investigation, preliminary and final autopsy reports, autopsy photographs, and lab and special studies requests.

He could be stingy with his personal notes and call sheets if he’s of a mind to be, and conveniently overlook almost any documents he chooses, forcing me to ask for them and possibly to butt heads with him. Worse, he could treat me like a member of the public or the media, compelling me to write an official letter of request that will have to be approved and responded to with an invoice for the services and costs involved. Payment would have to be received before the documents can be mailed, and by the time all is said and done, I would be back in Cambridge and it would be the middle of July or later.

“Suze did the tox on Barrie Lou Rivers.” Marino’s big voice precedes him as he enters the conference room and stares at Mandy O’Toole sitting at the far end of the table. “Didn’t know anybody else was in here,” he adds, and I can always tell when he likes what he’s looking at.

She takes off her earphones and says to him, “Hi. I’m Mandy.”

“Yeah? What do you do?”

“Path tech and more.”

“I’m Marino.” He takes a chair next to me. “You can call me Pete. I’m an investigator and more. I guess you’re the watchdog.”

“Don’t mind me. I’m listening to music and catching up on e-mail.” She puts her earphones back on. “You can say anything you want. I’m just the wallpaper.”

“Yeah, I know all about wallpaper,” Marino says. “Can’t tell you how many cases get blown because of wallpaper leaking information.”

I barely listen to them as I take a survey of what Colin Dengate has made available, and I’m appreciative and relieved. I almost want to find him to thank him, and in part it might be a reaction to my being deceived and mishandled by Jaime Berger, and how demeaning and upsetting that feels. Colin easily could have resorted to any number of maneuvers and ploys to make reviewing anything inconvenient if not impossible. But he didn’t.

Regardless of any personal opinion he might have about Lola Daggette’s guilt, he’s not trying to force on others what he perceives as justice. Based on the girth of the files he’s left for me to peruse, he’s doing quite the opposite. He hasn’t vetted much, if anything, including records one might argue he shouldn’t disclose, and that thought leads to others. He wouldn’t be this generous without getting the approval of Chatham County District Attorney Tucker Ridley, and I wouldn’t have expected Ridley to budge an inch beyond his legal obligations as mandated by the state’s open-records act. I could have been offered nothing more than the most basic medical examiner reports when what I’m most interested in is the rest of it.

Police, incident and arrest reports, even criminal or medical histories or witness statements — it could be absolutely anything that might find its way into a decedent’s case record because the detective happened to hand over copies to the medical examiner, and if the ME is like me, every scrap of paper, every electronic file, is preserved. All such documents I assumed would be excluded. When Colin walked me to this conference room, I anticipated finding very little to review and within the hour wandering back down the hall to his office so he could fill in the blanks if he was so inclined.

“Anything that goes on around here, I know about it anyway.” Mandy has taken off her earphones again.

“That right?” Marino blatantly flirts. “What do you know about Barrie Lou Rivers? Any rumors about her floating around? You involved in her case?”

“I did the histology, was in and out of the autopsy room collecting tissue sections while Colin was doing her post.”

“You must have come in after hours,” Marino says, as if he’s investigating Mandy O’Toole for something. “And you weren’t listed as an official witness. Some prison guard named Macon and a couple other people. I don’t remember seeing your name.”

“That’s because I wasn’t an official witness.”

I rearrange my chair to face a view of tall, spindly pines and buzzards floating high above them like black kites, and I decide it could be argued that the Jordan case is no longer active and all direct litigation is final. This might explain why the district attorney made a calculated decision not to impede me in any way. When an investigation is terminated, its documents are subject to disclosure, and as I follow my reasoning a little further, it occurs to me that Tucker Ridley might very well be done with Lola Daggette. Despite Jaime’s retesting of evidence, in Tucker Ridley’s mind and maybe in Colin Dengate’s, the investigation was terminated when Lola Daggette’s appeals were exhausted and the governor refused to commute her sentence to life.

“He always this difficult?” Mandy says, and I realize she’s talking to me about Marino.

“Only if he likes you,” I reply, as I think about public perception.

For the sake of it alone, the district attorney isn’t going to get in the way of someone of my rank and reputation, so he’s opened up the country store and invited me to help myself. Why? Because it doesn’t matter anymore. As far as Tucker Ridley is concerned, Lola Daggette has an appointment with death on Halloween. He has no reason to believe she won’t show up. Or maybe the opposite is true, I consider.

Maybe the new DNA results have been leaked and it doesn’t matter what I look at because Lola’s sentence will be vacated soon, and maybe my other fear is legitimate, too. Dawn Kincaid knows she’s about to face new murder charges in Georgia, where, unlike Massachusetts, she could get the death penalty. So she’s orchestrating something, possibly an escape from a Boston hospital that can’t possibly offer the level of security a forensic facility like Butler has.

“I’m just trying to figure out who was around when her body came in,” Marino continues to badger Mandy O’Toole. “Because the case bugs me. You ask me, there’s something not right about it. It’s a little unusual for a histologist to be working at nine o’clock at night, and that’s bugging me, too.”

“The night Barrie Lou Rivers died, I was working late in my lab, on deadline for a journal article about types of fixatives,” she says.

“I thought that’s what old people use to keep their dentures glued in.”

“The advantages of glutaraldehyde for electron microscopy, and the problems of mercurials.”

“I don’t like mercurial people, either. They’re a pain in the ass.”

“Disposing of the tissue is problematic, since mercury is a heavy metal.” She’s toying with him, too. “You know, maybe better to use Bouin’s solution if what you’re after is nuclear detail. Course, when I work with Bouin’s I end up with yellow fingers for a while if I forget and touch something without gloves.”

“Bet that’s hard to explain on a date.”

“When Colin got the call from the prison I was still here, right down the hall,” she gets back to that, “and I told him I’d hang out and get his table set up, help in any way needed. But I wasn’t a witness.”

“What about rumors,” Marino again says. “What was the word about what happened to her?”

“Originally it was thought that Barrie Lou Rivers choked on her last meal. But no evidence of that. No rumors I’ve heard in recent memory. Nobody was talking about the case anymore until Jaime Berger started looking into it. I would offer water, coffee, but I can’t leave the room. You want something, just tell me and I’ll make a call.” She directs this at me. “If you want something,” she says, smiling at Marino as she puts her headphones back on, “get it yourself.”

“Suze mentioned one thing kind of interesting about Barrie Lou Rivers’s CO level,” Marino tells me, as his attention continues drifting back to Mandy. “It was like eight percent. She says normal’s maybe six at most.”

“I don’t know if it’s interesting or not,” I reply, as I go through the transcript of a clemency hearing for Lola Daggette in which Colin Dengate testified, and also GBI investigator Billy Long. “I’ll have to look at her case. Not an unusual level for a smoker.”

“You can’t smoke in prisons anymore. None I know of. Not for years.”

“Yes, and drugs, alcohol, cash, cell phones, and weapons aren’t allowed in prisons, either,” I reply, as I review the factual history of what happened in the early-morning hours of January 6, 2002. “Guards could have given her a cigarette. Rules get broken depending on who has power.”

“But smoking could explain her CO, and if so, why would someone give her a cigarette?”

“We certainly can’t know if anybody did. But it’s true that carbon monoxide and nicotine from cigarettes put a strain on the heart, which is further exasperated by the narrowing of the arteries from heart disease, which is why I keep reminding you not to smoke.” I slide pages in Marino’s direction as I finish with them. “Her heart’s already working hard if she’s stressed, and then an exposure to smoke and her heart works even harder.”

“So maybe that’s why she had the heart attack,” he persists.

“It could have been a contributing factor, assuming someone gave her a cigarette or cigarettes while she was awaiting execution,” I comment, as I read about Liberty Halfway House, a nonsecure, not-for-profit treatment program for girls located on East Liberty Street, just blocks from Colonial Park Cemetery, very close to the Jordan house, maybe a fifteen-minute walk from it, I estimate.

At approximately six-forty-five the morning of January 6, a Liberty Halfway House volunteer on the healthcare staff had begun making rounds of the residential facility to collect urine specimens for a random drug screening. When she arrived at Lola Daggette’s room and knocked on the door, there was no answer. The volunteer entered and heard the sound of running water. The bathroom door was shut, and after knocking and calling out Lola’s name and getting no response, the volunteer became concerned and walked in.

She discovered Lola naked on the floor of the shower stall with hot water running. The volunteer testified that Lola was frightened and excited and was using shampoo to wash items of clothing that appeared to be very bloody. The volunteer asked Lola if she had hurt herself, and she said no and demanded to be left alone. She claimed she was doing laundry because she didn’t have access to a washing machine and to “just leave the fucking cup by the sink and I’ll pee in it in a minute.”

At this point, according to the transcript, the volunteer turned off the hot water and ordered Lola to step out of the shower. On the tile floor were “a pair of tan corduroy pants, women’s size four, a blue turtleneck sweater, women’s size four, and a dark red Atlanta Braves Windbreaker, size medium, all of them extremely bloody, and the water on the shower floor was pinkish-red from all the blood,” the volunteer testified, and when she asked Lola whose clothing it was, she replied that it was what she’d had on when she was “checked in” five weeks earlier and was issued uniforms. “They were what I was wearing on the street, and since then they’ve been in my closet,” Lola explained to the volunteer.

Questioned about how blood could have gotten on the clothing, at first Lola said she didn’t know. Then she offered, “It’s that time of the month” and claimed she’d had an accident in her sleep, the volunteer testified. “I got the distinct impression she was making things up as I was standing there, but Lola was known for that at the LHH. She was always talking big and saying whatever would impress someone or keep her out of trouble. She’ll say and do pretty much anything for attention and to protect herself or get a favor and never seems to realize how it’s perceived or any possible consequences.

“Unfortunately, she’s like the boy who cried wolf around here, and it couldn’t have been more obvious the blood could not have come from her having her period,” the volunteer said under oath in the hearing. “It wouldn’t make sense for menstrual blood to be on the thighs, knees, and cuffs of a pair of pants and on the front and sleeves of a sweater and a jacket. Quite a lot of it hadn’t washed off yet, because there was so much of it, and my first thought was wherever it came from, the person must have hemorrhaged, assuming it was human blood, of course.

“I also don’t know why Lola would sleep in street clothes, which the wards aren’t supposed to wear while they are in residence.” The volunteer continued a testimony that was damning. “They wear them when they get here and when they’re released. The rest of the time they wear uniforms, and it didn’t make sense why Lola would have been wearing the clothing in bed. Nothing she said made sense to me, and when I told her that, she kept changing her story.

“She said she’d found the bloody clothes in a plastic bag in her bathroom. I asked to see the plastic bag, and she changed her story again and said there was no bag. She said she’d gotten up to use the bathroom and the clothes were on the floor, in there, in the bathroom, just inside, to the left of the door. I asked if the blood was wet or dry, and she said it was sticky in spots and other stains were dry. She claimed she didn’t know how the bloody clothes got there but was scared and tried to wash them because she didn’t want to be blamed for something.”

The volunteer reminded Lola that what she was suggesting would mean someone had gone into her closet and removed the clothing, gotten it bloody somehow, then reentered her room while she was asleep and left the clothing in the bathroom. Who would do such a thing, and why didn’t Lola wake up? The person who did it “is quiet like a haint and is the devil,” Lola reportedly said to the volunteer. “It’s payback for something I done before I got stuck in here, maybe someone I used to get drugs from, I don’t know,” she said, and she got angry and began to yell.

“You can’t tell no one! You can just fucking throw them out but can’t tell no one! I don’t want to go to jail! I swear I didn’t do nothing, I swear to God I didn’t!” the volunteer testified Lola said, and the more I read, the more I understand why no one at the time considered any suspect other than Lola Daggette.