Red Mist

25

Two police cruisers and Sammy Chang’s white SUV are parked in front of the eight-story brick building, but there are no emergency lights or flashers, no sign of tragedy or disaster. I don’t hear sirens nearby or in the distance, just the sound of the cargo van’s big engine and its new windshield wipers thudding. It is stuffy and stifling with the windows up, the blower circulating hot, humid air, the rain so heavy it sounds like a car wash. Thunder rumbles and cracks, the old city shrouded in fog.

Chang and two Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan officers are huddled out of the weather under the overhang at the top of the steps by the same front door that buzzed open for me as a delivery woman on a bicycle appeared seemingly out of nowhere like a phantom last night. Lucy, Benton, Marino, and I emerge from the van into the rain and wind, and I look around again for an ambulance, not seeing or hearing one, and I’m not happy, because I asked. As a precaution I want a rescue squad. To save time if there is time left and anything to save. Rain splashes on the steamy brick walkway, the sound of the downpour loud like clapping hands.

“Police. Anybody home? Police!” an officer announces, as he holds the intercom button. “Yeah, she’s not answering.” He steps back and looks around as rain falls harder. “We need to figure out another way. Every damn day now.” He looks up at the moiling dark sky and billowing curtains of water. “As usual, left my slicker in the car.”

“It won’t last long. Will be over by the time we come back out,” the other officer says.

“Well, I hope we don’t get hail. I’ve already had one car messed up that way. Looked like someone went after it with a high-heel shoe.”

“What’s a New York prosecutor doing down here anyway? She on vacation? A lot of permanent residents in this building, but they leave in the summer, some of them renting their places by the week. She here short-term or what?”

“Did anybody call for an ambulance?” I ask loudly, as wind rocks giant live oak trees and Spanish moss whips like gray swags, like frayed dirty rags. “It would be a good idea to have an ambulance here,” I add, as the two officers and Chang watch the four of us roll up on them with the urgency of the storm that is thundering closer, almost overhead, the hard rain sizzling on the walkway and the street and pouring off the gabled overhang.

“I’m wondering if there’s a leasing office,” one of the officers says. “They’ll have a key.”

“Not one in this building, I don’t think.”

“Most of these older places don’t have one on site,” Chang says. “Or we can try some of the neighbors, maybe …”

Then Marino is pushing past everyone, almost shoving the uniformed officers out of the way, keys in hand.

“Whoa. Easy, partner. Who are you?”

I’m distractedly aware of Chang explaining who we are and why we’re here as Marino unlocks the door, and I’m vaguely mindful of my sopping-wet black field clothes and boots. I comb back my dripping hair with my fingers as I hear FBIand Bostonand chief ME working with Dr. Dengatewhile all of us head to the elevator, Lucy close behind me, her hand pressing against my back, pushing me and hanging on, and I feel what’s in her touch. I feel the desperation in the pressure of her hand flat against my back, a gesture I’ve not felt in a very long time, what she used to do when she was a little girl, when she was being protective or was scared, when she didn’t want to get separated from me in a crowd or for me to leave her.

I’ve told Lucy everything will be okay, because it will be somehow, but I don’t believe it will be okay the way we hope, the way we wish, the way it should be in a perfect world. We don’t know anything, I’ve reminded my niece, even though I have no hope. I just don’t feel it. Jaime isn’t answering her cell phone or apartment phone or e-mails or text messages. We haven’t heard from her since Marino and I left her at around one o’clock this morning, but there could be a logical explanation, I’ve said to Lucy. While we have to take every action possible, that doesn’t mean we are assuming the worst, I’ve reassured her repeatedly.

But I am assuming the worst. What I’m experiencing is painfully familiar, like a sad old friend, a grim companion who has been a depressing leitmotif on my life’s journey, and my response is a feeling I know all too well, a sinking, a solidification, like concrete setting, like something settling heavily into a deep darkness, a bottomless lightless space, out of reach and over. It’s what I sense right before I walk into a place where death quietly and finally waits for me to tend to it as only I can. I don’t know what is going through Lucy’s mind. Not this same feeling or premonition I’m having but something confusing and contradictory and volatile.

During the twenty-minute ride here she was logical and held together, but she is pale as if she is sick, and she looks both terrified and angry. I see the shadings and flares of her emotions in her intense green eyes, and I heard her internal chaos in a comment she made during the drive. She said that the last time she talked to Jaime was six months ago when Lucy accused her of getting into something for the wrong reason. Getting into what?I asked. Getting into defending people and saving them by turning their lies into truth if that’s what it takes, because that’s what she’s doing to herself. It’s what she’s comfortable with, Lucy said. It’s as if Jaime managed to climb up a big mountain of truth only to fall over the other side of it,Lucy said in the loud, hot van as the rain began, and her voice was double-edged with fear and rage. I warned her because I could see it so plainly,she said. I told her exactly what she was doing, and she did it anyway.

“You go ahead,” Benton is saying to Marino.

She kept pushing it to the next dangerous level,Lucy said as we drove into the storm, her voice trembling slightly as if she was out of breath. Why did she have to do this? Why!

“She been having problems or something?” one of the cops asks Marino. “Personal problems, financial trouble, anything like that?”

“Nope.”

“Bet she just went out somewhere, maybe sightseeing, and didn’t tell anyone.”

“That’s not her,” Lucy says. “No fucking way.”

“And left her phone or the battery’s dead. Know how many times that happens around here?”

“She doesn’t fucking sightsee,” Lucy says behind my back. Marino wipes his wet face on his sleeve, his eyes darting around, the way he looks when he’s extremely upset beneath his imperviousness, his rudeness. The elevator doors slide open, and all of us crowd inside except Benton and Lucy, as the police keep offering possibilities, trying to talk us out of our growing sense of urgency when they have no reason to talk us out of a damn thing.

“She’s probably fine. I see it all the time. Someone visits from out of town, and if you don’t hear from them? People get worried.”

They are beat cops, and this is really nothing more than what’s known on the street as a welfare check, maybe a more dramatic one than usual, with a bigger, more official posse showing up, but a welfare check nonetheless. The police do them daily, especially this time of year, when it’s the height of tourist season, vacation time, and the schools are out. Someone calls 911 and insists the police check on the welfare of a friend, a family member who isn’t answering the phone or hasn’t been heard from for a while. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it’s nothing. In the one case when it’s something, it isn’t tragic. Rarely does it turn out that the person is dead.

“I’m going with you,” Lucy says to me.

“I need to go in first.”

“I have to go with you.”

“Not now.”

“I have to,” Lucy insists, and Benton puts his arm around her, pulling her close to him in what’s more than a comforting hug. He’ll make sure she doesn’t bolt for the stairs and try to force her way inside the apartment.

“I’ll call as soon as I’m in,” I promise Lucy in the narrowing space of the closing doors, and they shut completely and she is gone, and the ache inside my chest is indescribably awful.

The elevator of gleaming old wood and polished brass lurches as it lifts, and I explain to the police that no one has heard from Jaime Berger and she didn’t come to Savannah to sightsee. She’s not here on vacation. It may be nothing, and I certainly hope it’s nothing. But it’s out of character for her, and she was expected to show up at some point at Dr. Dengate’s office today, and she hasn’t appeared and hasn’t called. An ambulance should have been requested, and it would be a good idea to call for one now, and all the while I’m saying this I realize it’s repetitive, it’s perseverative, and the officers, both of them young, have their own theory about what is going on.

It’s clear they assume that Marino lives with this out-of-town woman who’s not answering her phone or contacting anyone. Why else would he have keys? Most likely this is a messy domestic situation that nobody wants to talk about. I reiterate that Jaime is a prominent prosecutor from New York, or actually a former one, and we have reasons to be worried about her safety.

“When did you see her last?” one of the officers asks Marino. “Last night.”

“And nothing was out of the ordinary?”

“Nope.”

“Everybody getting along?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t have words?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe a little disagreement?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe a little fight?”

“Don’t even start that shit with me.”

“There are some unusual circumstances,” Chang tells the officers, as the elevator bumps to a stop, and there is only so much Chang or any of us is going to explain.

We’re not going to mention Kathleen Lawler or suggest that she may have been poisoned. I have no intention of volunteering information about Lola Daggette or the Mensa Murders, and I’m not going to share that Dawn Kincaid, who was locked up in a state hospital for the criminally insane, is brain-dead and perhaps was poisoned. I’m not going to comment right now that a woman on a bicycle showed up last night with sushi Jaime probably didn’t order. I don’t want to talk or explain or speculate or imagine. I’m frantic, and at the same time already know what awaits us, or fear I do, and we are out of the elevator, rushing down the hallway, to the end of it, where Marino unlocks the heavy oak door.

“Jaime?” his big voice booms as we enter the apartment, and I notice instantly that her burglar alarm isn’t set. “Fuck!” Marino glances at the keypad by the door, noticing the same ominous detail, his tanned face flushed and slick with sweat, his CFC khakis a grayish tan from the rain. “She always sets it. Even when she’s here. Hello! Jaime, you home? Shit.”

The kitchen looks exactly as it did when I left last night, except for a bottle of antacid on the counter that I know wasn’t there when I washed dishes and put food away, and her big brown handbag isn’t on the back of the chair where I saw her hang it by its shoulder strap when she came in with the take-out food from the Broughton and Bull. Her bag is on the leather couch in the sitting area, its contents scattered over the coffee table, but we don’t stop to see what might be missing or what she might have been digging for. Chang and I follow Marino’s long stride down the hardwood hallway that leads to the master area in back.

Through the open doorway I see a sleigh bed and rumpled green and brown covers, and Jaime in a maroon bathrobe that is untied and disarrayed. She is facedown, with her hips twisted to one side, her arms and head hanging off the bed, her position inconsistent with someone who died in her sleep and similar to Kathleen Lawler’s, as if their last moment was a struggle, an agonizing one. The bedside lamps are on, and the drapes are drawn.

“Shit,” Marino says. “Jesus,” he mutters, as I go to her and detect the odor of burnt fruit and peat. What smells like Scotch is spilled on the bedside table, and there is an overturned tumbler, and near it the empty base unit for a cordless phone.

I touch the side of her neck to check for a pulse. But she is cold, and rigor is well advanced, and I look up at Chang, then at one of the uniformed officers stepping inside the room.

“I’ll be right back,” Chang says to me. “Need to get some things out of the car,” he adds, as he leaves.

The officer stares at the body draped over the right side of the bed. He moves closer as he slips his portable radio off his belt.

“You need to keep back and don’t touch anything,” Marino snaps at him, his eyes blazing.

“Hey, take it easy.”

“You don’t know shit,” Marino erupts. “There’s no fucking reason for you to be in here. You don’t know shit, so get the hell out.”

“Sir, you need to calm down.”

“Sir? What? I’m a fucking knight? Don’t call me sir.”

“Take it easy,” I say to Marino. “Please.”

“Goddamn. I can’t believe this. Jesus Christ. What the hell happened?”

“The more we can limit exposure, the better,” I say to the officer. “We really don’t know what we’re dealing with here,” I add, and he backs up several steps, staying by the doorway as Marino stares at the body and then looks away, his face deep red.

“You mean it could be something we could get, like something contagious?” the officer asks.

“I don’t know, but it’s best you don’t get close or touch anything.” I scan every visible part of her, seeing nothing that tells me anything, and the absence of anything tells me something. “Lucy and Benton shouldn’t come in here,” I tell Marino. “Lucy doesn’t need to be exposed to this. She doesn’t need to see this.”

“Jesus. Shit!”

“Can you go out there and make sure she doesn’t try to come in? Make sure the apartment door is shut and locked.”

“Jesus. What the hell could have happened?” His voice shakes, and his eyes are bright and bloodshot.

“Please make sure the door is locked,” I instruct Marino. “Make sure your partner stays out there so no one comes in who’s not supposed to come in,” I say to the officer, who has short red hair and deep blue eyes. “We can’t do anything else, and we shouldn’t touch anything. We have a suspicious death, and we need to treat this as a crime scene. I’m worried about poisoning, and we need to stop right now before anything is disturbed. I’d prefer you’re not in here, because we don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I repeat. “But I need you to stay right there. I need you to stay with me,” I say to the officer, as Marino walks out, his footsteps loud on hardwood.

“What makes you think it’s a crime scene?” The officer with red hair is looking around, but he doesn’t move away from the doorway. He has no interest in getting near the body after what I just said. He has no interest in being inside this room. “Except for her purse out there. But if she let someone in who ended up robbing her, it must have been someone she knew, or how could he get in the door downstairs?”

“We don’t know that anyone was in here.”

“So something could be poisonous inside this apartment.”

“Yes.”

“Or maybe an overdose and she was digging in her purse for pills.” The officer doesn’t budge from his position in the doorway. “Maybe I should check her bathroom.” He looks at a door that is ajar to the left of the bed, but he doesn’t move an inch.

“It’s best you don’t, and I need you to stay with me.” I enter Benton’s number on my phone.

“I was on a scene last year. Woman OD’d on oxys, and it looked a lot like this. Nothing really out of place except for where she was digging around for drugs in drawers, in her purse. She was dead on the bed, kind of on top of the covers, sort of lying across the bed instead of in it. A real pretty girl trying to be a dancer who got hooked on oxys.”

I press callas I stare at the master bath, but I don’t go near it. Light seeps through the partially open doorway. The bedside lamps are on, and the light is on inside the bathroom. Jaime never went to bed last night, or if she did, she got up again at some point.

“They said accident, but my personal opinion was suicide. Boyfriend had just broke up with her, you know. She had a lot of problems,” the officer is saying, and he may as well be talking to himself.

“Lucy can’t come in here,” I tell Benton the instant he answers, and he knows what that means and is silent. “I don’t know what to suggest,” I add, because I don’t know what he should say to Lucy right now.

She’s going to know the truth if she doesn’t already. There is one question with only two possible answers. Jaime is dead inside this apartment or she’s not, and Lucy already knows. Right this very minute it’s occurring to her as Benton listens to what I’m telling him on the phone, as I describe what I’m seeing, and he’s not doing anything to dispel what Lucy fears. A look, a smile, a gesture, or a word that would make it all go away, but he gives her nothing, and I imagine him staring straight ahead as he listens to me. Lucy realizes the worst, and I have no idea what to do about it, but I can’t go out and deal with her at the moment. I have to deal with what’s happened in here. I have to deal with Jaime. I have to deal with what might happen next.

I look at her body on the bed, her open robe tangled around her hips. She is nude underneath it, and I can’t stand the idea of the redheaded officer in the doorway, of anybody else seeing her this way. But I can’t touch her. I can’t touch anything, and I stand near a window. I don’t wander around or get any closer.

“Please stay with Lucy, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” I’m saying to Benton over the phone. “If you can find a way to get her to the hotel, and I’ll meet you there, that might be the best plan. It’s not good for her to hang around, and you really can’t do anything.” I don’t care that he’s FBI. I don’t care what he is or what powers he has. “Not here, not right now. Please just take care of her.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”

“Okay.”

I tell him that the room arrangements need to be changed. I want a suite with a kitchenette, if possible. I want rooms that can be connected, because I have a strong feeling about what will happen. I’m quite sure I know what we’re going to need to do, and most of all, we need to be together.

“I’ll handle it,” Benton promises.

“All of us together,” I say it again. “It’s not negotiable. Maybe you can get a rental car or a Bureau car. We need a car. We can’t just ride around in Marino’s van. I don’t know how long we’re going to be here.”

“I’m not sure about him.” Benton is quiet and gives nothing away in his tone.

Without saying it, he is communicating that if Jaime has been murdered, Marino could have a problem with the police. They might consider him a suspect. He has keys to her building and her apartment. He probably knows her alarm code. He was closely associated with her, and the police already have asked if the two of them might have been arguing or fighting last night. In other words, the assumption is they were lovers.

“I’m not sure exactly what’s happened, obviously,” I say to Benton. “I know what I suspect, and I suspect it strongly, and will deal with it accordingly as best I can. As much as can be allowed.”

I’m implying that I believe Jaime was murdered.

“But I’m not sure about him or either of us.” I’m saying I’ve got a similar complication.

Marino won’t be the only suspect. I carried in the take-out sushi last night. I might have delivered death to Jaime in a white paper bag.

“I’m here,” I add. “I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

“Okay” is all Benton says, because Lucy is with him and he can’t say much.

I end the call, alone in the bedroom with Jaime’s dead body and a Savannah-Chatham officer whose nameplate reads T. J. Harley.He has remained in the doorway, looking at the body, looking around, having no informed idea what he needs to be looking for or if he should stay with me as I’ve requested or join his partner or call for a supervisor or a detective from the homicide unit. I can see myriad thoughts in his eyes.

“What’s making you think it’s suspicious besides her purse having been gone through?” he asks.

“We don’t know that someone else did that,” I reply. “She might have gone through it herself.”

“For what besides pills?”

“We don’t know that she’s an overdose.”

“She make it a habit to carry a lot of cash in her wallet?”

“I have no idea what’s in her wallet or how much cash she carries routinely,” I reply.

“If she does, that could be a motive.”

“We don’t know that anything’s been stolen.”

“Possible she was strangled or smothered?”

“No ligature mark or petechial hemorrhages,” I answer. “Nothing to make me think that from what I’m seeing. But she needs to be carefully examined. She needs an autopsy. Right this moment, we don’t know why she’s dead.”

“What do you know about her relationship with her friend?” He means Marino.

“He used to work for her when he was with NYPD and has been helping her very recently as a consultant. Understandably, he’s upset.”

“NYPD?”

“Investigations. He was assigned to the sex crimes unit, to her.”

“So maybe something was going on with them,” he decides. “Maybe our first priority should be to find out if she placed an order for sushi last night,” I reply. “Instead of assuming the obvious. That maybe it’s someone close to her who maybe had something going on and maybe did something terrible.”

“It usually is, though.”

“Usually? I’d say often but not always or usually.”

“Really, though.” He’s sure of himself. “You look in the backyard first.”

“You look where the evidence takes you,” I reply.

“You’re joking about sushi, right?”

“No.”

“Oh, I thought you were implying raw fish did it. Me? I won’t touch the stuff. Especially now. Oil spills, radioactive water. I may quit eating fish. Even cooked.”

“There will be take-out containers, a bag, a receipt in the trash. Leftovers in the refrigerator,” I inform him. “Please make sure that neither you nor your partner touches anything. I advise you to stay out of the kitchen and let Investigator Chang handle it or Dr. Dengate. Or whoever they direct.”

“Yeah, Sammy’s the investigator, not me, and no way I’m messing with his scene. Not that I couldn’t. I might put in for it one of these days because I think I’m a good fit. You know, attention to detail, that’s the most important part, and I’m anal about detail. I’ve worked with him before, the OD I was just telling you about.” Officer Harley gets on his radio and transmits, “Could be an exposure. Don’t touch anything in the kitchen or trash or anywhere.”

“A what?” his partner’s voice replies inside the bedroom.

“Just don’t touch anything. Nothing at all.”

“Ten-four.”

I decide not to say anything else about sushi or my suspicions. I’m not going to describe my time with Jaime last night. I’ll save it for Chang, for Colin, for whomever. I know Marino and I will have to give statements independently, possibly to a detective from

Savannah’s homicide unit, but not to Officer J. T. Harley, who is nice enough but naïve and much too invested in playing detective. Chang will make sure that Marino and I are questioned by the appropriate party, depending on who takes jurisdiction, and likely it will be a joint investigation. The GBI and the local police will work this together, and the FBI will be next. If Jaime’s death is connected to what’s happened in Massachusetts — specifically, the alleged poisoning of Dawn Kincaid — then the cases have crossed state lines and the FBI will become involved in what’s going on in Savannah and possibly take charge just as it has up north.

I nudge aside the drawn drapery, looking down at the street in front, where Chang is getting his crime scene equipment out of his SUV. Rain pelts the building’s roof as if small pebbles are hitting it, and lightning shimmers over the low skyline of homes and historic buildings and trees. Thunder sounds like a distant kettledrum or the artillery fire of a faraway war, cracking and splitting the air, and I know what I would do if Cambridge weren’t a thousand miles from here.

I would direct that the truck, our mobile containment autopsy facility, be driven to Savannah right now. But the distance makes such a plan impractical if not impossible, because Colin Dengate isn’t going to wait two days to do the autopsy, and he shouldn’t. We don’t want to wait. We mustn’t wait. We need serum. We need tissue specimens. We need gastric contents. Of course, there is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, in nearby Atlanta, but Colin probably won’t wait for their truck, either, and we’ve been exposed and are okay. A number of people have been exposed and seem to be fine. I was inside Katheleen Lawler’s prison cell. I touched her and breathed the air and smelled what was in her sink, and I’ve been exposed to her blood and gastric contents, to her inside and out. I don’t feel sick. Marino, Colin, and Chang don’t, either. There are no warning signs at all that we might be at risk.

Whatever killed Kathleen or Jaime or poisoned Dawn Kincaid, assuming it is all the same toxin, works relatively swiftly. It shuts down digestion and interferes with breathing. Something that paralyzes, I consider. In food or drink. And I remember the way Jaime looked before I left her around one o’clock this morning. Her eyelids were heavy. She was slurring her words and having difficulty speaking. Her pupils were dilated. I assumed she was intoxicated and drowsy, but the antacid on the kitchen counter suggests her stomach was bothering her, and that’s the same complaint Kathleen had, if the woman in the cell across from her was telling the truth.

“You know they work all our crime scenes now since they’ve been getting training at that forensic academy in Knoxville where the Body Farm is …” Officer Harley says.

He is talking and I’m barely listening as I continue to look out at the stormy late afternoon, at trees thrashing in the wind, at headlights shining down Abercorn Street. Then the Land Rover comes into view.

“Every GBI investigator’s been trained there, every single one, meaning we got the best-trained crime scene people probably in the entire United States,” Officer Harley boasts, as if he has no feelings about the body on the bed, as if there is nothing extraordinarily monstrous about what has occurred.

Officer T. J. Harley didn’t know Jaime Berger. He has no idea who she is or who any of us are or what we are to one another, and I feel something change in me as Colin parks and extinguishes the headlights. I feel a flat calm, a detachment, the way I get when something is too much and yet I must function and in fact function at the highest level. I know what I’m in for, only a fool wouldn’t know that, and I slide my hands into the pockets of my cargo pants as I envision Jaime’s silhouette passing behind the drawn drapes in this room late last night.

Marino and I were sitting in his van on the street below, and her shadow moved back and forth as if she were restlessly pacing. Then she got undressed. The clothes she was wearing when we were with her are on a chair by the dresser as if she dropped or tossed them, the way one does when drunk, upset, in a hurry, not feeling well. She put on the maroon robe she eventually would die in and was looking down at us from a window in the living room as we drove off, and I didn’t know. I had no clue what had been done and the role I likely played in it.