Red Mist

20

We gather crime scene cases and personal-protection equipment from the back of the Land Rover and follow the concrete walkway through blooming shrubs and flower beds, their colorful blossoms washed out by the glare. Inside the checkpoint of the white-columned brick building, Officer Macon and the warden are waiting for us.

“An unhappy time, I’m afraid,” Tara Grimm greets us, and today her demeanor matches her name.

She is unsmiling, her dark eyes unfriendly when they fix on me, her mouth firmly set. In frumpy contrast to her elegant black dress from the day before, she wears a pastel blue skirt suit, a loud flower-printed blouse with a looping bow tie, and toeless flats.

“I guess you’re with Dr. Dengate,” she says to me, and I sense disappointment. I detect hostility. “I thought you’d gone back to Boston.”

She assumed I was far north of here or at least on my way, and I can see in her eyes and the expression on her face that her mind is making rapid recalculations, as if my presence somehow changes what might happen next.

“This is my chief of investigative operations,” I introduce her to Marino.

“And you happened to be in Savannah for what reason?” She doesn’t even try to be gracious.

“Fishing.”

“Fishing for what?” she asks.

“Mostly I get croakers,” Marino says.

If she gets his unseemly pun, she doesn’t let on. “Well, we’re very grateful for your time and attention,” she says to Colin, as Officer Macon and two other uniformed guards inspect our crime scene cases and equipment.

When they turn their attention to the personal-protective clothing, Colin orders them to halt.

“Now, you can’t be touching that,” he says. “Unless you want your DNA on everything, and I’m guessing you don’t, since we don’t know for a fact what killed this lady.”

“Just let them on through.” The warden’s lilting voice has the iron ring of a military commander. “You come with me,” she orders Officer Macon, “and we’ll escort them over to Bravo Pod.”

“Sammy Chang with the GBI should be there,” Colin says.

“Yes, I believe that’s his name, the agent with the GBI who’s been going through the cell. Now, how do you want to do this?” she addresses Colin in a different voice altogether, as if I’m not here, as if our mission is a casual one.

“Do what, exactly?” The first steel door slides open and slams shut behind us with a jarring clang. Then the next door opens and shuts. Officer Macon is ten feet ahead of us, communicating over his radio with central control.

“We can arrange transport to your facility,” she suggests.

“I think to keep things clean and simple, we’ll take care of that,” Colin answers. “One of our vans is on the way.”

The hallway the warden leads us along creates the illusion of a labyrinth, each corner, locked door, and connecting corridor reflected in the large convex mirrors mounted high on the walls, everything gray concrete and green steel. We emerge back into the sultry afternoon, with its oppressive heat, and women in gray silently drift about the prison yard like shades, moving in groups between buildings, pulling weeds by hand along walkways, congregated beneath a cluster of mimosa trees, three greyhounds squatting or lying in the grass, panting.

Inmates watch our passage with no expression on their faces, and I feel sure the news has reached every pod that Kathleen Lawler is dead. A well-known member of their community who allegedly was forced into protective custody because it was feared one or many of them might hurt her lasted in maximum security barely two weeks.

“They’re not kept out long,” Tara finally speaks to me, as Officer Macon opens the gate leading into Bravo Pod, and I realize she means the dogs. “In this weather, they stay in most of the day except for when they have to potty.”

I imagine what an ordeal it must be in a prison when one of the rescued greyhounds signals it’s time.

“Of course, they’re fairly well acclimated to heat, with their long snouts and lean builds. They have no undercoats, and you can imagine the heat at the racetrack. So they do fine here, but we’re careful,” she continues, as if I might have accused her of animal abuse.

Keys jangle from a long chain attached to Officer Macon’s belt as he unlocks the door to Bravo Pod and we step inside that dreary world of solid gray. I can almost feel a heightened alert as we pass by the second level’s mirrored glass tower, where guards invisibly watch and control the interior doors. Instead of turning left toward the visitation rooms where I was yesterday, we are led to the right, past the stainless-steel kitchen, which is deserted, then the laundry room with its rows of industrial maximum-load machines.

Through another heavy door we enter an open empty area with stools and tables bolted to the concrete floor, and one level up is a catwalk and behind it the maximum-security cells with green metal doors, each with a face peering out of the small pane of glass. Female inmates stare down at us with unwavering intensity, and the kicking begins as if on cue. They pound their feet against their metal doors, and the thudding rings in a shocking din, as if the very gates of hell are slamming.

“Holy shit,” Marino says.

Tara Grimm stands perfectly still, looking up, and her eyes move along the catwalk and fix on a cell directly above the door we just came in. The face looking out is pale and indistinguishable from my vantage point one floor down, but I can make out the long brown hair, the wide stare, the unsmiling mouth, as a hand enters the glass and she gives the warden the finger.

“Lola,” Tara says, holding Lola Daggette’s stare as the terrible racket continues to pound and bang. “The ever gentle, harmless, and innocent Lola,” she says, with an edge. “So now you’ve met. The wrongfully convicted Lola, who some think belongs back in society.”

We move on, passing a door with covered glass, then a cart of library books parked near an unfinished puzzle of Las Vegas, pieces sorted in small piles on a metal tabletop. Officer Macon unlocks another door with his jingling keys, and the instant we’re through it, the kicking stops, returning an absolute silence. Ahead are six doors on each side, sequestered from the rest of the pod, some with empty white plastic trash bags hanging from shiny steel locks, and the faces in the windows range from young to old, and the tense energy in them reminds me of an animal about to lunge, about to bound away like something wild that is terrified. They want out. They want to know what happened. I feel fear and anger. I can almost smell it.

Officer Macon leads us to a cell at the far end, the only one with an empty window and the door ajar, and Marino begins to hand out the protective clothing as we set crime scene cases and camera equipment on the floor. Inside Kathleen Lawler’s cell — a space smaller than a horse stall — GBI crime scene investigator Sammy Chang is perusing a notepad he’s apparently removed from books and other notepads arranged on two gray-painted metal shelves. His gloved fingers flip pages and he’s covered from head to toe in white Tyvek, what Marino calls overkill clothes,having come from an era when the most investigators bothered with was surgical gloves and a swipe of Vicks up their nose.

Chang’s dark eyes wander from Marino to me, and he looks at Colin as he says, “Got pictures of pretty much everything in here. Not sure what more we can realistically do because of access.”

What he implies is the guards and other prison personnel have access to Kathleen’s cell, and countless other inmates have been detained in it over time as well. Dusting for prints and other routine forensic procedures typically done in a suspicious-death case probably aren’t going to be helpful because the scene is contaminated. Deaths in custody are similar to domestic homicides, both complicated by prints and DNA meaning very little if the killer had regular access to the home or location where the death occurred.

Chang is careful what he communicates. He doesn’t want to suggest openly that if someone who works at the prison is responsible for Kathleen Lawler’s death, we’re probably not going to figure that out by processing her cell the way we would a typical crime scene. He’s not going to say in front of Officer Macon and Tara Grimm that his main purpose since he got here has been to secure Kathleen’s cell and make certain nobody — including the two of them — tampers with potential evidence. Of course, by the time he arrived, it really would have been too late to protect the integrity of anything. We don’t know for a fact how long Kathleen was dead in her cell before the GBI and Colin’s office were notified.

“Haven’t touched the body,” Chang tells Colin. “She was like this when I got here at thirteen hundred hours. According to the information I have, she’d been dead about an hour when I got here. But the times I’ve been given for events are a little murky.”

Kathleen Lawler is on top of the rumpled gray blanket and dingy sheet of a narrow steel bed attached to the wall like a shelf beneath a slit of a window covered with metal mesh. Half on her back and half on her side, her eyes are barely open, her mouth agape, and her legs are draped over the edge of the thin mattress. The pants of her white uniform are shoved up above her knees, and her white shirt is bunched up around her breasts, perhaps disarrayed by resuscitative efforts that failed. Or she might have been thrashing about before she died, rearranging her position in a frantic attempt to get comfortable, to relieve whatever symptoms she was suffering from.

“Was CPR attempted?” I ask Tara Grimm.

“Of course, every effort was made. But she was already gone. Whatever happened, it was very fast.”

As Marino, Colin, and I put on white coveralls, I notice an inmate staring through the glass window of the cell across from Kathleen’s. She has a matronly face, a sunken mouth, and a helmet of tightly curled gray hair, and as I look at her she looks back at me and begins to talk in a muffled loud voice through her locked steel door.

“Fast? The hell it was fast!” she starts in. “I was hollering for thirty damn minutes before anyone showed up! Thirty damn minutes!She’s over there strangling, I mean, I could hear it, and I’m hollering and nobody comes. She’s gasping, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I’m going blind, somebody help me, please!’ Thirty damn minutes!Then she got quiet. She’s not answering me anymore, and I start hollering at the top of my lungs for somebody to come….”

In three swift steps Tara Grimm is before the inmate’s door, rapping the glass with her knuckles. “Quiet down, Ellenora.” The way the warden says it makes me think that Ellenora is volunteering this information for the first time. Tara Grimm seems genuinely taken aback and angry. “Let these people do what they need to do, and we’ll let you out and you can tell them exactly what you observed,” she says to the inmate.

“Thirty minutes at least! Why did it take so long? I guess if a body knows they’re dying in here, that’s just too damn bad. If it’s a fire or a flood or I’m choking on a chicken bone, too damn bad,” Ellenora says to me.

“You need to quiet down, Ellenora. We’ll get to you soon enough, and you can tell them what you observed.”

“Tell them what I observed? I didn’t observe a thing. I couldn’t see her. I already told you and all of them I didn’t see nothing.”

“That’s right,” Tara Grimm says coolly, condescendingly. “Your original statement was you didn’t observe anything. Are you changing your mind?”

“Because I couldn’t! I couldn’t observe nothing! It’s not like she was standing up and looking out the window. I couldn’t see her, and that made it awful, just hearing her pleading and suffering and groaning. Making these bloodcurdling sounds like an animal suffering. A body could die in here, and who’s going to come! It’s not like we got a panic button we can push! They let her die in her cell,” she says to me. “They let her just die in there!” Her wide eyes stare at me.

“We’ll have to move you to a secure unit if you don’t stop,” Tara warns her, and I can tell she doesn’t know quite what to do.

She wasn’t expecting this display, and it occurs to me that the inmate named Ellenora is cagey like a lot of inmates. She behaved herself when she was questioned by prison officials the first time, because she wanted a chance to do exactly what she’s doing now, to make a scene when we arrived. Had she erupted earlier, I suspect she would already have been moved to a secure unit, no doubt a euphemism for solitary confinement or a cell where psychiatric patients are restrained.

Colin’s booties make a sliding sound as he walks into Kathleen Lawler’s cell, and Marino opens crime scene cases on the polished concrete floor. He checks out the cameras as I lean against the wall, steadying myself to work shoe covers over my big black boots with their big tread. As I pull on examination gloves, I feel the inmate’s stare. I feel what’s in it, the high voltage of fear, of near hysteria, and Tara Grimm knocks on the window again as if to shut her up in advance. Ellenora’s frightened face in the tiny pane of glass flinches as the warden’s knuckles suddenly are there, rapping.

“What makes you think she couldn’t breathe?” Tara Grimm asks loudly, for our benefit.

“I’m sure she couldn’t, because she said so,” Ellenora replies from behind her barrier. “And she was aching and feeling puny. So tired she could hardly move, and she was gasping. She hollered, ‘I can’t breathe. I don’t know what’s happening to me.’ ”

“Usually when someone can’t breathe they can’t talk. I’m wondering if you misunderstood. If you can’t breathe, you can’t holler, especially through steel doors. You have to have a lungful of air to holler,” Tara says to her so I will hear it.

“She said she couldn’t talk! She was having trouble talking! Like her throat was swolled up!” Ellenora exclaims.

“Well, now, if you tell someone you can’t talk, that’s a contradiction, isn’t it?”

“It’s what she said! I swear to God Almighty!”

“Saying I can’t talk would be like running for help because I can’t stand up.”

“I swear to God Almighty and Jesus Christ it’s what she said!”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Tara Grimm tells her ward on the other side of the thick steel door. “And you need to calm down, Ellenora, and lower your voice. When I ask you questions, you need to answer what I ask and not yell and make a fuss.”

“What I’m saying is the truth, and I can’t help if it’s upsetting!” Ellenora gets more excited. “She was begging for help! It was the most awful thing I ever did hear! ‘I can’t see. I can’t talk. I’m dying! Oh, fuck, oh, God! I can’t stand this!’ ”

“That’s enough, Ellenora.”

“What she said exactly. Gasping and begging, ‘Please help me!’It was terror, pure terror, her begging, ‘Oh, fuck, I don’t know what’s happening! Oh, please, someone help me!’ ”

Tara knocks the glass again. “Enough of that language, Ellenora.”

“It’s what she said, not me. It’s not me saying it. She said, ‘Fucking help me, please! I must’ve got hold of something!’ ”

“I’m wondering if she might have had allergies, food allergies, insects,” the warden says to me. “Possibly to wasps, bees, allergies she never told anyone about. Might she have gotten stung by something when she was outside exercising? It’s just a thought. There’s certainly a lot of yellow jackets when it’s hot and muggy like this and everything’s in bloom.”

“Anaphylactic reactions to insect stings or after an exposure to shellfish, peanuts, whatever the person is allergic to, usually are very swift,” I reply. “It doesn’t sound as if this death was swift. It took longer than minutes.”

“She was feeling bad for at least an hour and a half!” Ellenora yells. “Why did they take so damn long?”

“Did you hear her get sick?” I look at Ellenora through the thick pane of glass. “Did it sound like she might have vomited or had diarrhea?”

“I don’t know if she got sick or not, but she said she had a sour stomach. I didn’t hear her get sick. I didn’t hear her toilet flush or nothing. She was yelling about being poisoned!”

“So now she’s been poisoned,” Tara says, cutting her eyes at me as if to remind me to consider the source.

Ellenora’s face is agitated, her eyes wild. “She said, ‘I’ve been poisoned! Lola did it! Lola did it! It’s that shit I ate!’ ”

“That’s quite enough. Now, stop it,” Tara says, as I walk inside Kathleen Lawler’s cell. “You watch that mouth of yours,” I hear Tara say behind my back. “We have people here.”