Red Mist

19

Colin Dengate shifts his old Land Rover into fourth gear, and the big engine roars as if it’s ravenous. We speed along a narrow strip of pavement hidden by impenetrable woods, the road bending sharply through shaded pines and straightening out into an open flat terrain of apartment buildings and blazing sun, the Coastal Regional Crime Laboratory as hidden from civilization as the Bat Cave.

Hot wind buffets the olive-green canvas roof, making a loud drumming sound as Colin passes along information that is suspiciously detailed when one considers that Kathleen Lawler was alone the final hours of her life. While other inmates might have heard her, they couldn’t see her when she died inside her cell, most likely from a heart attack, Officer M. P. Macon suggested to Investigator Sammy Chang before Chang could get there. By the time Chang was called, the prison had Kathleen’s death figured out, one of those sad random events probably related to Lowcountry summer weather. Heat stroke. A heart attack. High cholesterol. Kathleen never had taken care of herself worth shit, Chang was told.

According to Officer Macon, Kathleen reported nothing unusual earlier in the day, wasn’t ill or out of sorts when her breakfast tray of powdered eggs, grits, white toast, an orange, and a half pint of milk was passed through the drawer of her cell door at five-forty a.m. In fact, she seemed cheerful and chatty, reported the corrections officer who delivered her meal and later was questioned by Officer Macon.

“He told Sammy that she was asking what it would take to get a Texas omelet with hash browns. She was joking around,” Colin says. “Apparently of late she’d become more obsessed than usual with food, and it’s Sammy’s impression from what’s been said to him that she might have been assuming she wasn’t going to be at the GPFW much longer. Maybe she was fantasizing about her favorite things to eat because she was anticipating having whatever she wanted, and I’ve seen this syndrome before. People block out what they’ve been deprived of until they believe it’s within their reach. Then that’s all they think about. Food. Sex. Alcohol. Drugs.”

“Probably all of the above, in her case,” Marino’s loud voice sounds from the backseat.

“I think Kathleen was under the impression a deal was in the works if she was cooperative,” I say to Colin, as I write a text-message to Benton. “Her sentence was going to be reduced and she was on her way back to the free world.”

I explain to Benton that he and Lucy might not be able to reach us when they land in Savannah, that I’m on my way to a death scene, and I tell him whose. I ask him to let me know as soon as possible if there is anything new with Dawn Kincaid and her alleged asthma attack.

“Has anyone bothered to mention to Jaime Berger that she has shit for clout with prosecutors and judges around here?” Colin looks in the rearview mirror, directing this to Marino.

“I can’t hear too good in this wind tunnel,” he answers loudly.

“Well, I don’t think you want the windows up,” Colin yells.

“Whether Jaime has clout or not around here, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of organized protest, especially these days, because of the Internet,” I remind Colin of the damage Jaime Berger can do. “She’s perfectly capable of mounting a campaign of social and political pressure, similar to what happened in Mississippi recently when civil- and human-rights groups pressured the governor into suspending the sentences of those two sisters who’d gotten life sentences for robbery.”

“Damn ridiculous,” Colin says in disgust. “Who the hell gets life for robbery?”

“I can’t hear a damn thing back here.” Marino is perched on the edge of the bench seat, leaning forward and sweating.

“You need to buckle up,” I say over the hot wind rushing in through open windows, the engine loud and growling, as if the Land Rover wants to claw across a desert or up a rocky slope and is bored and restive with the tameness of a paved highway.

We are making good time, on 204 East now, passing the Savannah Mall, heading toward Forest River and the Little Ogeechee, and marshland and endless miles of scrub trees. The sun is directly overhead, the glare as intense as a flashgun, blindingly bright as it beats down on the square nose of the white Land Rover and the windshields of other traffic.

“My point,” I say to Colin, “is Jaime’s perfectly capable of going to the media and making Georgia look like a stronghold of bigoted barbarians. In fact, she’d enjoy it. And I doubt Tucker Ridley or Governor Manfred wants that.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Colin says. “It’s moot.”

He’s right, it is, at least in Kathleen Lawler’s case. She won’t be getting a suspended sentence or even a reduced one, and she’ll never taste free-world food again.

“At eight this morning she was escorted to a recreation cage for her hour of exercise,” Colin says, and he explains that he was told the one hour allowed for exercise is set early in the morning during the summer.

Supposedly Kathleen walked inside the cage more slowly than usual, resting frequently as she complained about how hot it was. She was tired, and the humidity made it difficult to breathe, and when she was returned to her cell at a few minutes past nine she complained to other inmates that the heat had worn her out and she should have stayed inside. For the next two hours, Kathleen continued to complain on and off that she wasn’t feeling well. She was exhausted. She found it difficult to move, and she was having a hard time catching her breath.

She worried that breakfast hadn’t agreed with her and she shouldn’t have been walking around in the heat and humidity that was bad enough to kill a horse, as she reportedly put it. At around noon she said she was having chest pains and hoped she wasn’t having a heart attack, and then Kathleen wasn’t talking anymore and inmates in other cells nearby began shouting for help. Kathleen’s cell door was unlocked at approximately twelve-fifteen. She was discovered slumped over on her bed and could not be resuscitated.

“I agree it’s strange she said what she did to you,” Colin remarks, weaving around traffic as if responding to a scene where it’s not too late to save someone. “But there’s no way an inmate on death row could have gotten to her.”

He’s referring to Kathleen Lawler’s claim that she was moved to Bravo Pod because of Lola Daggette and that Kathleen was afraid of her.

“I’m simply repeating what she told me,” I reply. “I didn’t necessarily take her seriously at the time. I didn’t see how it was possible for Lola Daggette to, quote, ‘get’ her, but Kathleen seemed to believe Lola intended to harm her.”

“Bizarre timing, and I’ve certainly seen my share of it,” Colin says. “Cases where the decedent had some sort of premonition or prediction that didn’t make sense to anybody. Then next thing you know, boop. The person’s dead.”

Certainly I’ve had family members tell me that their loved one had a dream or a feeling that presaged his or her death. Something told the person not to get on the plane or into the car or not to take a certain exit or go hunting that day or out for a hike or a run. It’s nothing new to hear such stories or even to be told that a victim issued warnings and instructions about an imminent violent end and who would be to blame. But I can’t get Kathleen Lawler’s comments out of my head or push aside my suspicion that I’m not the only one who heard them.

If our conversation was covertly recorded, then there are others who are privy to Kathleen’s complaints about how outrageous and unfair it was to move her to a cell where danger was directly overhead, as she described it not even twenty-four hours ago.

“She also commented on the isolation of Bravo Pod and that the guards could do something bad to her and there would be no one to witness it,” I tell Colin. “She worried that by being moved into segregation she’d been made vulnerable. She seemed sincere, not necessarily rational but as if she believed it. In other words, I didn’t get the sense she was saying it for effect.”

“That’s the problem with inmates, especially those who’ve spent most of their lives locked up. They’re believable. They’re so manipulative it’s not manipulation anymore, at least not to them,” Colin says. “And they’re always saying someone’s going to get them, mistreat them, hurt them, kill them. And of course, they’re not guilty and don’t deserve to be in prison.”

When we turn off Dean Forest Road, passing the same strip mall where I used a pay phone the day before, I ask about the blood droplets in the photographs I was in the midst of reviewing when Sammy Chang called. Is either Colin or Marino aware there was blood in the Jordans’ sunporch, in their backyard and their garden? Someone was bleeding, and it’s possible this person was leaving the house, perhaps exiting the property through the garden and a stand of trees that led to East Liberty Street. Or perhaps the person was injured in the backyard and dripped blood while returning to the house. Blood that wasn’t cleaned up, I add, which makes me wonder if it was left at the time of the murders.

“A steady drip,” I explain. “Someone bleeding from an upright position while moving, possibly walking in or out of the house. For example, if someone cut his or her hand and was holding it up. Or a cut to the head or a nosebleed.”

“It’s curious you’d mention a cut hand,” Colin replies.

“I don’t think I know about this.” Marino is loud in my ear again.

“I would imagine the bloodstains I’m talking about were swabbed for DNA,” I add.

“I don’t know about blood on a porch or in the yard,” Marino says. “I don’t think Jaime’s got those photos.”

“Off the record?” Colin says, as we retrace my steps from the day before, the GPFW minutes away. “Because you need to get this from the actual DNA reports. But it’s never been believed those bloodstains have anything to do with the murders. You’re doing what I did back then — getting caught up in something that ended up meaning nothing.”

“The photos were taken when the crime scene was processed,” I assume.

“By Investigator Long, and are part of the case file but weren’t submitted as evidence during the trial,” Colin says. “They were determined to be unrelated. I don’t know if you saw the photos of Gloria Jordan.”

“Not yet.”

“When you do, you’ll note she has a cut on her left thumb, between the first and second knuckle. A fresh cut but more like a defensive injury, which baffled me at first because there weren’t any other defense injuries. She was stabbed in the neck, chest, and back twenty-seven times, and her throat was cut. She was killed in bed, and there’s no indication she struggled or even knew what was happening. As it turns out, the DNA of the blood drips on the porch was Gloria Jordan’s. When I found that out, it occurred to me that she might have cut her thumb earlier and it had nothing to do with her murder. This sort of thing happens more often than not these days. Old blood, sweat, saliva that has nothing to do with the crime you’re investigating. On clothing, inside vehicles, in a bathroom, on the stairs, on the driveway, on a computer keyboard.”

“Was her cut thumb bloody when you examined the body?” Marino asks, as we drive past the salvage yard with its mangled heaps of wrecked cars and trucks.

“Jesus. There was blood everywhere,” Colin answered. “Her hands were like this.” He takes his hands off the wheel and tucks them under his neck. “Maybe a reflex to move them to her throat after it was cut or to tuck up in a fetal position as she died. Or they might have been positioned like that by the killer, who I believe spent some time staging the bodies, making a mockery of them. Point is, her hands were covered with blood.”

“Anything in the bathroom to make you think she might have cut herself earlier?” Marino asks.

“No. But one of their neighbors said in a statement that Mrs. Jordan was out in the garden the afternoon before the murders, presumably doing winter pruning,” Colin continues, as I envision the dormant garden behind the Jordans’ house, the branch stubs, water sprouts, and sucker growth I noted in photographs I just saw.

Gloria Jordan wasn’t much of a gardener, or she hadn’t gotten very far with her pruning when she cut her thumb and had to stop.

“The guy next door who had a poodle?” Marino asks. “Lenny Casper, the neighbor who called the police the morning of the murders after noticing the busted glass in the kitchen door?”

“Yes, I believe that’s the name. As I recall, he could see the Jordans’ backyard from several of his windows, and he noticed Mrs. Jordan working in her garden earlier that day, during the afternoon. The theory that makes the most sense is she cut herself while pruning. The blood drips were left by her when she came back in from the garden after she cut her thumb. My guess is she was holding her hand up and it dripped in the pattern you observed in the scene photographs. She walked back into the house and dripped blood on the floor of the sunporch, and a few drops were found in the hallway in the area of the guest bath.”

“That’s possible,” I suppose dubiously.

“It was a vital wound,” he adds. “You’ll see that in photos and the histology. She had a blood pressure, she had tissue response, when it was inflicted.”

“Maybe so,” I reply, but I have my doubts. “Why no Band-Aid? No dressing of any kind?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was a little odd. But people do odd things. In fact, they do them more often than not.”

“Maybe she wanted the air to get at it,” Marino shouts. “Some people do that.”

“She was married to a doctor, who likely knew that infection is the most common complication of an open wound,” I reply. “In fact, if she’d not had a tetanus shot in recent memory and cut herself on a garden tool, that should have been in the equation, too.”

“There’s just no other logical explanation for the blood on the sunporch and in the garden,” Colin says. “It’s definitely hers. So obviously something happened that caused her to bleed, and it’s not related to her being stabbed to death, most likely in her sleep. She and her husband both had anxiolytics, sedatives, on board. Clonazepam. In other words, Klonopin, which is used to relieve anxiety or panic or as a muscle relaxant. Some people use it as a sleep aid,” he explains, for Marino’s benefit. “The hope is the Jordans never knew what hit them.”

“Was it your theory at the time that her husband was killed first?” I ask.

“It’s not possible to know the order they were killed, but logic would suggest the killer would get him first, then her, then the children.”

“Her husband’s stabbed to death right next to her and it didn’t wake her up? Must have been a lot of clonazepam,” I comment.

“I’m guessing it happened incredibly fast. A blitz attack,” he says.

“What about her shoes? If she was bleeding while walking back inside the house earlier in the day, it’s likely she dripped blood on whatever shoes she was wearing in the garden. Anybody think to check for bloody shoes?”

“I think you got a shoe fetish,” Marino says, to the back of my head.

“Since she had only a nightgown on and was barefoot when she was murdered,” Colin replies, “shoes weren’t something anybody was interested in.”

“And at some point earlier she left blood on the sunporch floor and in the hallway?” I ask, as we pass the greenhouse with its diapered shrubs and potted trees in front. “It was there for the rest of the day and night, and no one cleaned it up?”

“They probably didn’t use the sunporch much in the winter, and the tile was dark red. The flooring in the hallway was dark hardwood. She might not have noticed or probably just forgot,” he says. “I do know for a fact the DNA is hers. It was her blood,” he emphasizes. “I think you’ll agree she wasn’t dripping blood downstairs and outside in the early-morning hours when the murders took place. There is every reason to believe she never got out of bed.”

“I agree it doesn’t seem possible she was bleeding on the sunporch and in her backyard, and then climbed back in bed to be stabbed multiple times while an intruder was inside her house murdering her entire family,” I reply, as I’m reminded of the obvious pitfalls of ending an investigation before it’s begun because everyone involved believes the killer has been caught.

When Lola Daggette was discovered washing bloody clothing in her shower at the halfway house, assumptions were easy, and what difference did it make if they were wrong? Blood on the sunporch floor or a cut on Gloria Jordan’s thumb or the burglar alarm not being set or unidentified fingerprints didn’t matter anymore. Lola’s far-fetched lies and fantastic alibis, and the case was over, the killer tried and convicted and on death row. There are no more questions when people already have the answers.