Red Mist

21

In the polished-steel mirror that Kathleen Lawler complained about when I was with her yesterday afternoon, Investigator Sammy Chang’s reflection walks behind me and stops in the doorway of the cell.

“I’ll be right here, giving you some room,” he lets me know.

The toilet and sink are combined into a stainless-steel unit with no movable parts except buttons for flushing and turning tap water on and off. I don’t see or smell anything that might indicate Kathleen Lawler was sick before she died, but I note a very faint electrical odor.

“Do you smell something odd?” I ask Chang.

“I don’t think so.”

“Something electrical but not exactly. An unpleasant peculiar odor.”

“No. I don’t think I smelled anything at all while I was looking around. Wouldn’t be the TV.” He indicates the small television encased in transparent plastic on a shelf.

“I don’t believe that could be it,” I reply, noticing water stains in the steel sink and a vague chalky residue.

I lean closer, and the odor is stronger.

“Acrid, like something shorting out, like a blow-dryer that overheats.” I do my best to describe it. “A battery smell. Sort of.”

“A battery?” He frowns. “No batteries I saw. No blow-dryer.”

He walks over to the sink and bends close. “Well, maybe,” he says. “Yeah, maybe something. I don’t have the best nose.”

“I think it would be a good idea to swab whatever this is in the sink,” I tell him. “Your trace-evidence lab has SEM/EDX? We should take a look at the morphology at high magnification, see if it’s some sort of particulate that was in a solution and figure out what it is. Metals, some other material. If it’s a chemical, a drug, something that won’t be picked up by x-ray spectroscopy? Don’t know what other detectors the GBI’s scanning electron microscope might have, but if possible, I’d ask for EDX, FTIR to get the molecular fingerprint of whatever this is.”

“We’ve been thinking of getting one of those handheld FTIRs, you know, like HazMat uses.”

“A very good idea these days, when you’re faced with the possibility of explosives, weapons of mass destruction, nerve and blistering agents, white powders. It would also be a good idea to charm whoever is in charge of your trace lab and get this analysis done quickly, as in now. They could do it in a matter of hours if they move it to the head of the line. I don’t like the symptoms described.” I talk quietly and choose my words carefully, because I don’t know who’s listening.

But I have no doubt someone is.

“I can be pretty charming.” Chang is small and slender, with short black hair, deadpan, almost monotone, but his dark eyes are friendly.

“Good,” I answer. “A little charm right now would be welcome.”

“You think she might have been sick in here?”

“That’s not what I’m smelling,” I reply. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t queasy, which is what her neighbor Ellenora described. A sour stomach.”

The most obvious consideration on the differential diagnosis is going to be what’s already being suggested by those who aren’t qualified to do so and certainly aren’t objective. Kathleen Lawler was vulnerable to a sudden cardiac death precipitated by physical exertion in conditions that were risky for a woman her age who has never taken good care of herself. She was dressed in a synthetic-blend uniform with long pants and long sleeves, and I estimate it is close to a hundred degrees outside, the humidity at least sixty percent and climbing. Stress makes everything worse, and Kathleen certainly seemed stressed and upset about being moved into segregation, and I won’t be surprised if we discover she had heart disease from a lifetime of unhealthy eating and drug and alcohol abuse.

“What about trash,” I say to Chang. “I noticed white trash bags on some of the doors, but I don’t see one in here. Empty or full.”

“Good question.” He meets my eyes, and we exchange an understanding.

If there was a trash bag or any trash in here earlier, it was gone by the time he arrived.

“Do you mind if I look around?” I ask him. “I won’t touch anything without your permission.”

“Except for anything you want me to collect, I’m done in here. So help yourself.” His gloved hands open the plastic packaging of sterile applicators as he moves past me to the sink.

“I’ll tell you as I get to whatever it is,” I inform him anyway, because legally the scene is his. Only the body and any associated biological or trace evidence are Colin Dengate’s, and I’m nothing more than an invited guest, an outside expert who needs permission. Unless a case is the jurisdiction of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners — in other words, the Department of Defense — I have no statutory authority outside of Massachusetts. I will ask before I do the smallest thing.

Built into the wall opposite the toilet are the two gray metal shelves arranged with books and notepads, and an assortment of clear plastic containers that are supposed to prevent the concealment of contraband. I open each and recognize the scents of cocoa butter, Noxzema, balsam shampoo, mint mouthwash, and peppermint toothpaste. In a plastic soap dish is a thick white cake of Ivory soap, in a plastic tube a toothbrush, and in another plastic bottle what looks like hair gel. I note a small plastic comb, a hairbrush without a handle, and large-size foam rollers, perhaps from a time when Kathleen Lawler’s hair was longer.

There are novels, poetry, and inspirational books, and transparent plastic baskets full of mail, notepads, and writing tablets. I see no evidence of a shakedown, nothing to suggest a squad has rifled through Kathleen’s belongings, but I wouldn’t expect obvious signs of disturbance. If her property was gone through before Chang got here, the purpose wasn’t to search for marijuana or a shank or anything else prohibited by the prison. The purpose would have been something else that at the moment I can’t fathom. What might a prison official have been looking for? I don’t know, but there isn’t a legitimate reason for someone to have removed her trash bag before the GBI got here, and my bad feeling is getting worse.

“If it’s all right with you, I’d like to look.” I indicate the contents of the baskets, informing Chang of my every move.

“Sure.” He swabs the steel sink. “Yeah, there’s sort of an odor, you’re right. And whatever it is, it’s gray. A milky gray.” He tucks the applicators into a plastic collection tube and labels the blue screw cap with a Sharpie.

Each notepad is ruled and has a glued top and a cardboard back, probably purchased from the commissary, where spiral notebooks would not be sold because wire could be fashioned into a weapon. The pages contain poetry and prose interspersed with doodles and sketches, but most are filled with journal entries that are dated. It appears Kathleen was a faithful and expansive diarist, and I’m immediately struck by the absence of anything current. As I flip through each notepad, I determine that she was consistent about making detailed daily entries dating from some three years ago, when she was returned to the GPFW for DUI manslaughter. But there is nothing after this past June 3, when she filled the notepad’s last page front and back in her distinctive hand:

June 3 Friday

Rain thrashes a world I’ve lost and last night when the wind hit the steel mesh on my window just right it sounded like a bending saw. Discordant then screaming like steel cables straining. Like some monstrous beast made of metal. Like a warning. I lay here listening to loud metal groans and reverberations and I thought, “Something is coming.”

In the chow hall at supper a couple of hours ago I could feel it. I can’t describe what it was. Not tangible like a stare or a comment, just something I sensed. But definitely I could tell. Something brewing.

All of them eating mystery-meat hash and not looking at me, as if I wasn’t there, like there’s a secret they keep. I didn’t speak to them. I didn’t see them. I know when not to acknowledge anyone, and they know when I know it. Everybody knows everything in here.

I keep thinking it’s about food and attention. People will kill over food, even bad food, and they’ll kill over credit, even undeserved and stupid credit. I published those recipes in Inklingsand didn’t give credit because it sure as hell wasn’t earned or remotely merited, and it wasn’t my choice anyway. I don’t have the final say and I did worry I’d get the blame. A little bit of blame goes a long way in here. I don’t know what else to figure. My magazine just came out and suddenly there’s a shift.

One microwave in the unit shared by sixty of us, and we all do the same damn things in Mama’s Test Kitchen, as the other inmates refer to me and my culinary creativity. Or they used to. Maybe they won’t anymore, even if the treats are my idea. Treats always have been all about me and my inventiveness. Who else would think of it when there’s not a damn thing to work with besides crap and more crap?

Crap we get from the commissary. Crap we get in the chow hall. Beef and cheese sticks, tortillas and butter pats I taught them to turn into potstickers. Pop-Tarts, vanilla-cream cookies and strawberry Kool-Aid to make strawberry cake. Yes, everybody does it when it’s treat time because I was doing it first.

I don’t care who submitted what. The recipes are mine! Who taught who the art of scraping vanilla cream out of cookies and whipping it up with Kool-Aid to make pink icing? Who showed them the art of dissolving Pop-Tarts and crumbled cookies in water (reconstituting and reinventing, as I repeatedly explain) and cooking it in the microwave until the center bounces back at a touch?

The Julia Childs of the slammer, that’s who. It was me. NOT YOU! I’ve done it all along because I’ve lived here longer than most of you are goddamn old, and my recipes are so legendary they’ve become like a quote or a cliché or a proverb with an origin long forgotten and therefore up for grabs in your small, ignorant minds. “A good man is hard to find ” wasn’t Flannery O’Connor’s idea, it was the title of a song. And “a house divided against itself cannot stand ” wasn’t Lincoln, it was Jesus. Nobody remembers where anything came from and they help themselves. They steal.

I did what I was told and published the recipes — my recipes — and gave no credit to anyone, including me, that’s the fucking irony. I’m the one cheated. All of you pouting, sulking, eating your slop in cold silence when I’m around as if you’ve been wronged. There’s no room at your table when I get there because the seat is saved.

Don’t think I don’t know the source. Lemmings led into the sea.

Lights out in five. And again the darkness comes.

Mindful of eyes and ears beyond the open door of the cell, I say nothing about what I’ve just read. I do not comment that at least one notepad seems to be missing, possibly a diary, maybe more than one that Kathleen had been keeping since June 3, and, more important, since she was moved to Bravo Pod. I don’t believe she abruptly stopped writing, certainly not after she was transferred into segregation.

During the past two weeks, I would have expected her to have written more, not less, having little to do twenty-three hours a day except to sit inside this tiny cell with no view and its terrible television reception, cut off from other inmates and her job in the library, and no longer having a magazine or e-mail access. What might she have recorded in writings that someone doesn’t want us to read? But I don’t ask, and I don’t mention how struck I am by her metaphor of lemmings led into the sea.

Are lemmings other inmates, and if so, who has led them? I envision Lola Daggette giving Tara Grimm the finger a few minutes ago, and it very well may have been Lola who instigated the kicking of the cell doors. Full of bravado and hostility and with no impulse control and a low IQ, she was someone Kathleen feared. But Lola Daggette isn’t the reason Kathleen is dead on her bed. Lola’s not the reason inmates in the general population of medium security started shunning Kathleen in the chow hall, either. How would inmates in other pods have a clue what Lola Daggette thinks or says, or whether she has a problem with someone? She is as isolated and confined in her upstairs cell as Kathleen was in this one.

I suspect Kathleen was referring to someone else, and I’m reminded of Tara Grimm’s explanation that Kathleen had to be moved into protective custody because word got out that she was a convicted child molester. What word? What got out? Information the warden could blame on others, something that was on TV, caught by another inmate, by someone, she wasn’t sure who, and I didn’t believe her when she offered this explanation in her office yesterday, and I don’t believe her now.

I suspect I know who has been doing the influencing. Provoke inmates into being angered over something as petty as credit in a magazine, and nothing got published in Inklingsthat Tara Grimm didn’t approve. She had the final say about recipes with no names attached, and inmates felt slighted and it’s true that small slights can be huge, and Kathleen got moved. Maybe in her paranoid and agitated state she came up with the reason: Lola Daggette was behind an unprecedented loss of freedom that must have felt like punishment. Or perhaps a suggestion was made to Kathleen. Guards like Officer Macon may have informed her, taunted her, teased her into believing that Lola was making threats, and maybe she was. It doesn’t matter. Lola didn’t kill her.

I don’t let on to Marino that anything is unusual when he rustles past me in white and places a digital thermometer on the foot of the bed to record the ambient temperature. He hands a second thermometer to Colin for the temperature of the body. Despite witness accounts that place the time of death at approximately twelve-fifteen p.m., we will calculate it ourselves based on postmortem changes. People make mistakes. They are shocked and traumatized, and get the details wrong. Some people lie. Maybe everybody at the GPFW does.

I look around some more, entertaining the possibility that a notepad for June will turn up in here somewhere as I scan gray walls taped with the handwritten poems and passages of prose Kathleen mentioned to me in e-mails. The poem titled Fatethat she sent me is directly over the small steel ledge of a desk anchored to the wall. Near a steel stool bolted to the floor is another transparent plastic basket, this one large and stacked with undergarments, a uniform neatly folded, and packs of ramen noodles and two honey buns Kathleen must have gotten from the commissary. She told me she had no money because she no longer had her library job, yet she seems to have made purchases. Maybe they aren’t recent. I’m reminded she’s been in the segregation of Bravo Pod only two weeks. I poke the honey buns with my gloved finger. They don’t feel stale.

At the bottom of the plastic basket are copies of Inklings,several dozen of them, including the one for June that Kathleen referred to in the journal entry I just read. On the magazine’s front cover are artistic renderings of the contributors, Andy Warhol — like portraits of each woman who is famous for a month because something she wrote will be read by inmates at the GPFW and whoever else has access to the magazine. On the back cover are credits for the staff: the art director, the design team, and of course the editor, Kathleen Lawler, with special thanks to Warden Tara Grimm for her support of the arts, “for her humanity and enlightenment.”

“She’s still quite warm.” Colin is squatting next to the steel bed and holding up the thermometer. “Ninety-four-point-six.”

“It’s seventy-three in here,” Marino says, as his thick gloved fingers hold up the thermometer that was on the foot of the bed. He looks at his watch. “At two-nineteen.”

“Allegedly dead two hours and she’s cooled around four degrees,” I observe. “A little rapid but within normal limits.” That’s the best I can say.

“Well, she’s clothed and it’s relatively warm in here,” Colin agrees. “All we’re going to get is a ballpark.”

He’s implying that if Kathleen has been dead thirty minutes longer or even an hour longer than we’ve been led to believe by those giving us information, we aren’t going to know by postmortem indicators such as her temperature or rigor mortis.

“Rigor’s barely starting in her fingers.” Colin manipulates the fingers of Kathleen’s left hand. “Livor’s not apparent yet.”

“I wonder if she could have gotten overheated outside in the cage,” Marino says, looking around at the writings taped to the walls, taking in every inch of the cell. “Maybe she got heat exhaustion. That can happen, right? You come back inside, but you’ve already got a problem.”

“If she’d died of hyperthermia,” Colin says, as he stands up, “her core temperature would be higher than this. It would be higher than normal even after several hours, and her rigor likely would have sped up and be disproportional to her livor. Also, her symptoms as described by the inmate in the cell across from this one are inconsistent with a prolonged exposure to excessive heat. Cardiac arrest? Now, that’s quite possible. And that certainly can happen following strenuous activities on a hot day.”

“All she did was walk in the cage. And she rested every lap or two,” Marino repeats what’s been said.

“The definition of strenuous is different for different people,” Colin replies. “Someone who is sedentary inside a cell most of the time? She goes outdoors and it’s very hot and humid, and she loses too much fluid. Blood volume decreases, and that causes stress to the heart.”

“She was drinking water while she was outside,” Marino says.

“But was she drinking enough water? Was she drinking enough water inside her cell? I doubt it. On an average day the average person loses about ten cups of water. On an extremely hot, humid day, you can lose three gallons or more if you sweat enough,” Colin says.

He walks out of the cell, and I ask Chang if he has any objections to my continuing to examine what’s on the shelves and on the desk, and he indicates he doesn’t. I retrieve a transparent plastic basket of mail as I’m again reminded of the letters Jack Fielding supposedly wrote, describing how difficult I am, how awful I am to work for. I look for any letters from him or from Dawn Kincaid and don’t find them. I find nothing from anyone that might be important, except for a letter that appears to be from me. I stare in disbelief at the return address, at the CFC logo printed on a ten-by-thirteen-inch white envelope that Bryce orders in quantities of five thousand for the CFC:

Kay Scarpetta, MD, JD

COL USAF

Chief Medical Examiner and Director

Cambridge Forensic Center

The self-sealing flap has been slit open, probably by prison personnel who scan all incoming mail, and inside is a folded sheet with my office letterhead. The note is typed and supposedly signed by me in black ink:

June 26

Dear Kathleen,

I very much appreciate your e-mails to me about Jack and can only imagine your pain and it’s impact during what must be an oppressive confinement since you’ve been moved into protective custody. I look forward to chatting with you on June 30 and sharing confidences about the very special man we had in common. He certainly was a powerful influence on both of our lives, and it is important to me that you believe I wanted only the best for him and would never have intentionally hurt him.

I look forward to meeting you finally after all these years and to our continued communications. As always, let me know if there is anything you need.

Regards,

Kay