Red Mist

24

On a countertop are boxes of different-size gloves, and I get two pairs for each of us, and Colin unzips the body pouch. Plastic rustles as he opens it all the way. I help him slide Kathleen Lawler onto the steel table, and he walks to bins mounted on a wall and begins to collect blank forms, securing them to a metal clipboard as I remove the rubber bands around her wrists and ankle. I remove the brown paper bags I placed over her hands and left foot earlier, and fold them and package them for the trace evidence lab, then I tear off a large sheet of white butcher paper from a dispenser on a counter and cover the autopsy table beside the one we’re using.

Her body is considerably cooler but still limber and easy to manipulate as we begin to undress it, and we place each article of clothing on the paper-covered table next to us. The button-up white uniform shirt with inmate stamped on the back in large dark blue letters. The white trousers with a button fly and the blue initials GPFW down the sides of the legs. A bra. A pair of panties. I find a hand lens on a cart and turn on a surgical lamp, and under magnification I discover a faint area of orange smearing, as if Kathleen might have wiped her hand on her right pant leg. I retrieve a camera from a shelf and place a scale next to the stain, centering it under the light.

“I don’t know where you get food testing done around here,” I say to Colin. “This looks like cheese, but we should find out. I’m not going to swab it, will let trace take care of it. She had something orange under her right thumbnail, too. Might be the same thing, something she touched or ate not long before she died.”

“GBI uses a private lab in Atlanta that analyzes food, cosmetics, consumer products, you name it,” he says. “I wonder if inmates can buy these cheese sticks or cheese spread in the commissary.”

“Definitely the yellowy-orange color of cheddar or a cheddar spread. I didn’t see any cheese or cheese sticks in her cell, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have something like that earlier. Of course, we’d know more if her trash hadn’t disappeared. What about petechial hemorrhages of the eyes, the face, in the Plames case?” I return to the subject of Shania Plames’s death as I return to the table bearing Kathleen Lawler’s body.

“Nothing. But you don’t always have that, either, in suicidal hangings with full vascular compression.”

“Based on the rig you’ve described, the way her uniform trousers were tied around her neck and legs, I’m not sure I would expect the full vascular compression associated with full — not partial— suspension or with complete ligature strangulation.”

“It was unusual,” he agrees solemnly.

“Possibly staged?”

“Never entered my mind at the time.”

“Why would it? I doubt it would have entered mine.”

“I’m not going to say it couldn’t have been staged,” he continues. “But I would have expected evidence of a struggle, of some means of incapacitating her. Not so much as a bruise.”

“I’m just wondering if it’s possible she was already dead when she was tied up and placed in the position she was found.”

“Right about now I’m wondering a lot of things,” he says grimly. I measure a tattoo on the lower-right abdomen, a Tinker Bell— like fairy that is six and a half inches from wing to wing. Based on the way the image is stretched, I estimate that Kathleen got the tattoo when she was thinner.

“And if she already was dead when she was positioned on her bed,” I add, as I continue to think about Shania Plames, “the question is, dead from what?”

“Dead from what and with no indication of foul play or anything out of the ordinary.” Colin pushes up the mask loose around his neck, covering his nose and mouth. “Something that doesn’t show up on autopsy or on a tox screen.”

“There are countless poisons that don’t show up on a standard drug screen,” I contemplate, as we hold the body on its side, checking the back. “Something fairly fast-acting, causing symptoms that remain largely unreported because either witnesses aren’t reliable or the victim is isolated and out of sight or all of the above.” I measure another tattoo, this one a unicorn. “And most important, something not survivable. The person doesn’t live to tell. There are no failed attempts that anybody ever reports.”

“None that we know of, at any rate,” he says. “But we wouldn’t know. If someone gets extremely ill in prison and survives, we’re not going to find that out. We don’t get near-deaths reported to us.”

He presses his fingers against an arm, a lower leg, and makes a note of moderate blanching. He opens the eyelids and with a plastic ruler measures the pupils.

“Dilated equally, six millimeters,” he says. “Theoretically, with opiates you can see constricted pupils postmortem. I never have. Other drugs cause dilation, but dead pupils are dilated anyway.” He makes swift incisions with the scalpel from clavicle to clavicle and down the length of the body. “We’ll PERK her. Work her up for sexual assault. Work her up for every damn thing we can possibly think of.” He begins reflecting back tissue, guiding the scalpel with his right index finger and manipulating with his thumb as he holds forceps in his left hand.

“Which cabinet?” I ask, and he points a bloody gloved finger.

I find the Physical Evidence Recovery Kits and examine the body for sexual assault, swabbing every orifice and photographing, labeling each evidence bag.

“I’m going to swab the inside of her nose and mouth for toxicology while I’m at it,” I let Colin know. “And submit hair.”

He removes the breastplate of ribs and drops it in a plastic bucket by his feet as the morgue assistant, George, walks in with films. He attaches them to light boxes, and I walk over to have a look.

“An old fracture of her right tibia. Nothing recent. Typical arthritic changes.” I move from one light box to the next, scanning bright white bones and the shadowy shapes of organs. “She does have a fair amount of food in her stomach. I wouldn’t expect that if she ate at five-forty this morning and died at around noon, or some six hours later. Delayed gastric emptying.” I return to the autopsy table and pick up a scalpel. “Something that’s causing the digestion basically to quit. Barrie Lou Rivers’s last meal was undigested. What about the other two?” I refer to Shania Plames and Rea Abernathy.

“I vaguely recall. And yes. Undigested food. Certainly in Barrie Lou Rivers’s case, and I figured it was stress,” Colin says. “I’ve seen it before in executions. The inmate eats his last meal and it’s mostly undigested because of anxiety, of panic. Although go figure how any of them eat. If I was about to be executed, I don’t think I would. Just give me a bottle of bourbon and a box of Cuban cigars.”

I cut a slit in the stomach and empty its contents into a carton. “Well, she certainly didn’t have what we were told was delivered to her cell early this morning.”

“No eggs and grits?” Colin glances at what I’m looking at as he uses both hands to lift the liver out of the electronic scale’s stainless-steel bowl. He picks up a long-handled, wide-bladed autopsy knife.

“Two hundred and eighty MLs, with pieces of what looks like chicken, pasta, something orange.”

“Orange as in the fruit? Supposedly an orange was on the breakfast tray.” He cuts sections of liver as if he’s slicing bread.

“Not that kind of orange,” I answer. “I’m not seeing evidence of fruit. Orange as in the color orange. Cheeselike, and the same color as the orange material I found under her thumbnail and on her trousers. Where might she have gotten chicken, pasta, and cheese this morning?”

“Moderate fatty changes in the liver but not bad, considering. But about one out of three livers are normal in alcoholics,” he says, starting on the lungs. “You know what makes you an alcoholic. You drink more than your doctor. So they lied about what she ate this morning. Chicken and pasta? I got no idea.” He grabs a lung out of the scale and wipes his bloody hands on a towel. “If they somehow killed her, wouldn’t you think they’d be smart enough to know she’s going to end up here and we can tell what she ate?” He jots down weights on the clipboard.

“Not everyone is that astute, especially if she really did eat between five-thirty and six this morning, when breakfast apparently is served in Bravo Pod.” I label a carton for toxicology. “The assumption might have been that her food would be digested by the time she died. Under normal circumstances, it would have been.”

“She’s got some congestion, mild edema.” He slices sections of a lung. “Engorgement of alveolar capillaries, pink foamy fluid in the alveolar spaces. Typical of acute respiratory failure.”

“And typical in heart failure. Hers is surprisingly good.” I begin cutting sections of her heart on the large cutting board. “Looks a little pale. No scarring. Vasculature widely patent. Valves, chordae tendineae, papillary muscles are without note,” I dictate as I dissect. “Ventricular wall thicknesses, chamber diameters are appropriate. Exiting great vessels widely patent. No lesions in the myocardium.”

“I sure wouldn’t have guessed that.” Colin wipes his hands again and writes it down. “Nothing to make us think an MI, then. All roads keep leading to toxicology.”

“Not seeing anything at all to indicate an MI. You can check for histologic evidence, the theory that cardiac myocytes divide after myocardial infarction. But generally if I don’t see anatomic evidence, I’m skeptical. And I’m seeing no evidence. Aorta has minimal atherosclerosis.” I look up as the doors to the autopsy room swing open. “Nothing whatsoever to indicate she died from anything cardiac-related, in my opinion.” I hear familiar voices as George walks back in.

I recognize Benton’s calm, mellow baritone, and my mood is lifted by the sight of him in creased khaki pants and a green polo shirt, lean and handsome. His silver hair is slicked back, probably from sweating in a van with no air-conditioning, and it doesn’t matter that we are in a stark autopsy room that smells like death or that my white gown and gloves are bloody and Kathleen Lawler is opened up, her sectioned organs in a bucket on the floor beneath the table.

I’m happy to see Benton, but our being in a morgue in the middle of an autopsy isn’t why I don’t want him close, and then Lucy appears, slender and foreboding in a black flight suit, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders and streaked rose gold in the overhead lights. Both of them stay where they are, on the other side of the room.

“You need to stay over there,” I tell them anyway, and I sense from Benton’s demeanor that something is wrong. “We don’t know what she’s been exposed to, but a tox death is first on our list. Where’s Marino?”

“He didn’t want to come in. Probably for the same reason you don’t want us getting close,” Benton says, and something absolutely is wrong.

I can see it on his face, in the tense way he is standing and the imperviousness of his face. His eyes are locked on mine, and he looks quietly agitated, the way he gets when he is intensely worried.

“Dawn Kincaid’s in a coma,” he then says.

An alarm begins to sound at the back of my thoughts.

“I got the latest update when we landed, and they’re saying that she’s brain-dead but they’re not entirely sure.” He projects his voice so Colin and I can hear him. “You know how that is. They’re never really sure even when they are. Whatever’s the cause, it’s very suspicious,” he adds, and I envision Jaime Berger’s face last night right before I left her apartment.

She looked sleepy, and her pupils were dilated.

“But all indications are that the oxygen was cut off from her brain for too long,” Benton says, as I hear Jaime’s speech before I left her around one a.m., talking thickly and slurring her words. “By the time they got to her in her cell, she’d stopped breathing, and while they’ve kept her alive, she’s gone.”

I remember the take-out bag I carried into the apartment and where it came from, handed to me by a stranger, and I accepted it without thinking.

I start to say, “I thought she was fine. Just an asthma attack—”

“Limited information at the time, and this is being kept extremely hushed,” Benton interrupts. “The initial thought was an asthma attack, but very quickly her symptoms became severe, and attending staff at Butler tried a single dose of epinephrine, assuming anaphylaxis, but there was no improvement. She couldn’t talk or breathe. There’s a concern she was poisoned somehow.”

I envision the woman wearing the lighted helmet leaning her bicycle against the lamppost.

“No one can begin to imagine how she could have gotten hold of anything poisonous at Butler,” Benton is saying from the other side of the room.

A delivery woman handing me the bag of sushi, and I vaguely recall something felt wrong but I ignored the feeling because so much felt wrong yesterday. Everything that happened from the time Benton drove me to the airport in Boston yesterday, the entire day felt wrong, and then the rest of it plays out in my memory. Jaime walking into her apartment after Marino and I had been talking for the better part of an hour. She didn’t seem aware she had ordered sushi, and I didn’t question it.

I put down the scalpel. “Has anybody talked to Jaime today? Because I haven’t, and she’s not called here.”

Nobody answers.

“She was supposed to stop by the lab today. I left her a message, and she’s not called back.” I pull off my hair cover and the disposable gown. “What about Marino? Does anybody know if he’s talked to her? He was going to call her.”

“He tried while he was driving us here and didn’t get an answer,” Lucy says, and the look on her face indicates she realizes why I’m asking.

I throw my soiled clothing into the trash and peel off my gloves. “Call nine-one-one, and maybe you can get hold of Sammy Chang, and he can meet us,” I tell Colin. “Make sure they send an ambulance.” I give him the address.