Red Mist

32

The sun is high in another washed-out sky, the heat wave tenaciously holding its grip on the Lowcountry, and what Colin Dengate claims simply isn’t true. Not everyone gets used to riding around with no air-conditioning in weather like this, although Benton was thoughtful enough to bring me clothes, summer khakis, so I’m not baking in all black.

It’s July 2, Saturday, almost ten a.m., and Colin’s staff isn’t working except for whoever’s on call, and he had to swap a few favors to set up what I need, he said. Then he had to pick me up at the hotel, because I don’t have a way to get around on my own. Marino is off with a shopping list for medical supplies that I want to have on hand, and he just dropped off Lucy at the local Harley-Davidson dealership. She intends for her transportation to be a motorcycle while she’s here, and I wasn’t going to leave Benton without the rental car, although his plan at the moment is to stay at the hotel. When I left him he was making phone calls, and FBI agents are on their way to Savannah from the Atlanta field office so he can brief them thoroughly as we wait for the news from the CDC to have its impact.

Botulinum toxin serotype A has been confirmed in Kathleen Lawler’s and Jaime Berger’s gastric contents. The toxin has been confirmed in the empty container of seaweed salad and also the leftovers in the refrigerator from the bag of take-out sushi that a serial poisoner delivered to Jaime’s apartment building Thursday night. I haven’t given the latest information to Briggs, who is in transit on a military airlifter out of the Middle East, but I don’t need him to repeat what’s expected of me, which is to do nothing. I don’t want to hear him tell me that again, and I’m grateful I can’t, because I don’t intend to comply, at least not quite.

The investigation is locked down and off-limits in anticipation of what we expect to be a rapid and decisive diverting of jurisdiction to Homeland Security, the FBI, whatever the federal government decides, and I know when I’m supposed to stay out of the way, to use what I call the ten-foot-pole rule. Don’t go anywhere near these poisoning cases, and were Briggs or anyone else to ask me, I would say that technically I’m not. The nine-year-old murders of a Savannah family and the mentally impaired woman who was convicted of them are of no interest to the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the White House, or scarcely anyone else this moment.

Those cases are still closed, and Lola Daggette is still scheduled to die because Jaime never filed the petition to vacate her capital-murder convictions. The new DNA results are languishing in a private lab, awaiting some other criminal defense attorney to step in and finish what Jaime started. Until then, the Jordan murder cases are cold and old and irrelevant, when attention is on a serial poisoner, who might be a terrorist planning mass murder. As I’ve sorted through all that has happened, I continue to ask why. But the whyof a terrorist plan to cause incapacitation and casualties among innocent civilians or military personnel isn’t my question. Unfortunately, there’s a long line of disturbed people in the world who would covet the chance to cause such destruction. What has my attention is something else.

If earlier deaths at the GPFW were vengeful murders that also served as research for a poisoner planning a widespread attack, then how do Kathleen Lawler and Jaime Berger fit with the modus operandi and ultimate goal? Jaime’s reopening the Jordan case shouldn’t matter to a poisoner planning terror, unless Jaime was tampering with something that alarmed this person enough to take the risk of getting Jaime out of the way. By murdering her and Kathleen, and inadvertently poisoning Dawn Kincaid, the killer has only drawn attention to herself when before there was none. A cluster of homicidal poisonings with botulinum toxin that might include tampering with military rations, and the entire U.S. government is going to come down on the killer’s head. Ultimately, she won’t get away with it, and to take that chance after quiet years of painstaking premeditation can’t be attributed to a loss of self-control or an escalated urge to torture and murder. Something unexpected happened.

Pathologists — and certainly this is my natural inclination — focus more on cause than effect. I’m less interested in the gore of blood and tissue spattered everywhere than I am in the angle of an entrance wound that might suggest it wasn’t the victim who pulled the trigger, and I don’t care about the drama of symptoms beyond the suffering they cause. My method is to track down the disease, to reflect away distractions, and to dissect to the bone, if need be, or, in the Jordan case, return to the crime scene as best I can. I intend to look at the photographs and all the evidence as if they’ve never been examined, and I might visit the Jordans’ former home if I determine there’s anything left to see that matters.

“The same records you were looking at yesterday,” Colin is saying, as we walk along the deserted corridor, mobiles of bats and bones slowly twirling from the ceiling inside his empty lab building. “The knife recovered from the kitchen. Clothes, some other items that I collected at the scene and sent in with the bodies then. All of it submitted as evidence at trial, unless the prosecutor considered it irrelevant. My path tech Mandy will be in the room with you. Nice of her to come in, since we can’t afford overtime. Anyway, same drill as before. And I’ll be in my office, because I know damn well you’d rather take a look and not listen to opinions, meaning mine. You get to interpret the evidence the same way I did, and I won’t be breathing down your neck.”

Mandy O’Toole, in scrubs and examination gloves, is arranging a pair of children’s pajamas on white butcher paper that covers the conference room table, the case records I started looking at yesterday out of the way, stacked on a chair.

“It’s the kids’ stuff that’s really, really hard for me,” she says, and I recognize most of what I’m seeing from photographs I began to review yesterday.

Neatly spread out on the white paper are two sets of children’s pajamas, one SpongeBob, the other a football design with helmets of the Georgia Bulldogs. A pair of men’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt must have been what Clarence Jordan was sleeping in when he was stabbed to death in bed, and a blue floral and lace nightgown obviously was his wife’s. All of the garments are stained dark brown with old blood, and riddled with small slits and punctures from at least one sharp instrument, and there are multiple small holes where fabric was removed for DNA analysis.

I pull gloves out of a box on the table and put them on, then pick up evidence labeled and marked by the court: a knife, and I leave it inside its bag, examining it through the plastic. The blade is approximately six inches in length, the wooden handle smudged with old blood. White, filmy partial fingerprints and an intact one are permanently fixed in superglue on the nonporous smooth surfaces of the steel and lacquered wood, and while the knife may have been used by the killer to make a sandwich in the kitchen, I don’t believe it killed anyone.

The kitchen knife is a clip point, or “granny,” used for such tasks as removing the eyes from potatoes or peeling vegetables and fruits, and as suggested by the name, the blade has been clipped off from the middle of the spine all the way to the point, leaving a dull edge for resting your thumb. Any knife with a false curved edge will be less effective in piercing, and therefore not a good choice in stabbings. Furthermore, the blade at its widest point is almost two inches, which is inconsistent with what I saw on body diagrams in the autopsy reports. I walk to the other end of the table and look through the thick files on the chair, sifting through documents until I find what I remember looking at yesterday morning, a description of the wounds.

The cause of death in all four cases is multiple sharp force injuries, and I’m particularly interested in the stab wounds to the chest and neck, because areas of the body that offer a thickness of tissue and hollow spaces can be a good indication of the length of the blade. On Clarence Jordan’s right lateral chest, the wound measures one inch long and extends to a depth of three inches, penetrating the pericardial sac and the heart. On his right lateral neck, the wound track travels front to back and downward, and to a depth of three inches, severing his carotid artery.

Other measurements of the other victims’ wounds suggest the blade was at most three inches in length and an inch wide, with some sort of guard at the top of the handle that left four parallel but irregular abraded contusions spaced one-eighth of an inch apart. Such a pattern injury couldn’t have been inflicted by the granny knife or any kitchen knife I can think of, and it was Colin’s conclusion at the time that the weapon was unknown and inconsistent with anything recovered from the scene. It would seem that the killer carried in what must have been an unusual cutting instrument, and afterward left with it.

Clarence Jordan has no incised wounds or defensive injuries of the arms or hands, arguing against him struggling or even being awake when he was attacked. Toxicology findings of a blood alcohol concentration of.04 and what would be considered a therapeutic level of clonazepam paint a picture of him having a drink or two and taking a modest dose, perhaps a milligram of the benzodiazepine, to calm anxieties or to help him sleep. That thought leads me around to the other side of the table, where a plastic evidence bag that isn’t marked for court contains half a dozen prescription bottles, only one of them with Clarence Jordan’s name on it, the beta blocker propranolol. Other bottles belonged to his wife, including antibiotics, an antidepressant, and clonazepam, and while it isn’t uncommon for someone to take another person’s medication, it surprises me that Clarence Jordan would.

He was a physician with easy access to samples, to any medication he wanted, and it is illegal to share prescription drugs. That doesn’t mean he didn’t get into his wife’s clonazepam the night of January 5 when he returned home from his volunteer work at an area men’s emergency shelter around dinnertime. It also doesn’t preclude the possibility that he didn’t take the sedative willingly. It would be easy to crush pills to mix in someone’s drink, and I continue to think about the security system event logs I reviewed.

According to the actual data from the alarm company’s internal archives, the Jordans armed and disarmed the alarm repeatedly through November of 2001, but something changed in December, when it appears the false alarms, allegedly caused by the Jordan children, began to be a problem. The last month the Jordans were alive, there were five faults that set off the alarm, all involving the same zone, the kitchen door. The police did not respond, and the alarms were cleared because the subscriber, when called by the service, said the alarms were false. The arming of the security system became increasingly erratic through the holidays, based on my review of the logs, but it continued to be set most nights, which is why I find the data for Saturday, January 5, rather odd. The alarm wasn’t set at all that day until almost eight o’clock at night. Then it was disarmed at not quite eleven and never reset, and this seems to be contrary to what has been supposed by journalists and the police over the years.

In fact, it would appear that Dr. Jordan returned home from his volunteer work and set the alarm, then three hours later someone disarmed it, and that detail in addition to his having a sedative on board not prescribed to him disturbs me. I spread out scene photographs of the bloody massacre in the Jordans’ master bedroom, looking at images of the couple’s bodies in the bed, the covers pulled up to their necks, and that bothers me, too. People aren’t manikins when they’re being murdered, and bedcovers aren’t neatly arranged over their dead bodies unless the killer or someone does so for psychological reasons, to restore order or cover up what they’ve done. Colin has commented that the bodies may have been displayed to mock the victims, and I sort through more photos that were taken after he removed the top covers so he could examine Dr. and Mrs. Jordan’s bodies in situ.

He is on his back, his head on a pillow, staring straight up with an open mouth, his arms straight down by his sides, his genitals protruding through the slit in his boxer shorts, and I doubt this was his position at death. Someone rearranged him, and the more I see, the more I understand the hatred that the police, the prosecutor, and others must feel toward Lola Daggette as they imagined her inside this room, enjoying herself after she’s slaughtered everyone, demonstrating blatant degradation and contempt.

The T-shirt and the waistband of Dr. Jordan’s white boxer shorts are completely saturated with blood that has soaked the sheet under him, spreading in a stain that extends to the edge of the mattress and under the body of his wife, the entire fitted sheet bloody. He was stabbed a total of nine times in his chest and neck, and there is no indication he struggled or attempted to ward off the vicious attacks of a knife with an unusual guard that left parallel contusions on his skin. His wife is on her right side, her hands tucked under her chin, facing away from her husband, toward the window that overlooks the street in front and the old cemetery on the other side of it, and I certainly don’t believe she was in this position when she died. Her body was rearranged, staged to look almost pious, as if she is praying, yet her gown is hiked up to her waist and her breasts are exposed.

I pick up her flannel gown, long-sleeved, with buttons up to the neck and a lacy collar that seems to fit with the demure serious-looking woman in the Christmas portrait taken not even a month before she was to be photographed again, this time vulgarly positioned on her blood-soaked bed. Flakes of old dark blood drift to the white paper covering the table as I look at every perforation and cut left by a blade that stabbed her a total of twenty-seven times, her face, her head, her chest, her back, her neck, her throat slashed for good measure. The gown is stained front and back, so saturated with blood that only areas of the sleeves and the bottom of the hem indicate the flannel is a pattern of floral blue.

I’m aware of Mandy O’Toole sitting in a chair she’s moved near a window to stay out of my way. She’s watching me intently, curiously, as I arrange the gown on top of the paper, putting it back the way I found it, dried blood making some areas of the fabric as stiff as petticoat netting. Mandy doesn’t say a word or interfere, and I don’t offer my thoughts, which are getting darker and uglier by the minute. I check Gloria Jordan’s case file again. I study body diagrams and review laboratory reports of blood samples taken from her gown, confirming the presence of her DNA, as one would expect, but also her husband’s and their five-year-old daughter’s. Why Brenda’s blood?

I notice from Colin’s measurements and descriptions that the wound to Gloria’s neck begins behind her left ear and travels down in one clean incision, under the chin, below the right earlobe, consistent with her having her throat cut from behind. If she didn’t see it coming and her carotid was severed, that would explain the lack of defensive injuries Colin mentioned, but it raises more questions than it answers. Next I notice another photograph of her on the bed, a close-up taken from the foot of it. Blood spatters are on the tops of her feet, and the soles of them are bloody, which doesn’t seem possible if she was lying down when she was cut and stabbed. But it’s hard to say. There was so much blood everywhere, and I try to imagine an assailant cutting Mrs. Jordan’s throat from behind if she was lying down, sound asleep, drugged out on clonazepam.

I follow blood that is streaked, smeared, pooled, stepped in, and splashed on the stairs, and then the arterial pattern that may have been from the slashing of the knife, perhaps to the neck, perhaps Gloria Jordan’s neck, the spatter arching in rhythm to the beating of a heart that was about to quit. But whose heart, and which direction was the person heading, up or down, in or out? Crime scene investigators, even good ones like Sammy Chang, can’t swab every blood drop or streak or mop up every pool and puddle at a scene, and the labs couldn’t possibly analyze all of it.

Down the stairs to the landing at the bottom, and I pause in the area near the entryway and front door where Brenda collapsed as I try to come up with an explanation for why her blood would have been transferred to the nightgown of her mother, who supposedly died in bed. I look for any evidence that efforts were made to clean up blood in the foyer, on the stairs, in the hallway, or anywhere in the house, but I see nothing that hints of it, and there is nothing to suggest it in any of the reports I’ve seen. I continue going back to the area of the entryway, to Brenda’s body, a sight that must have horrified police when they arrived at the house after the next-door neighbor discovered the broken glass in the kitchen door and called 911.

No normal person likes to look at dead children, and it’s a temptation not to look closely enough. The flooring in the area of the entryway is a chaotic pattern of drips and spatters cast off by a weapon, and smears and puddles, and bloody prints left by footwear and also marks that appear to have been made by bare feet. Toe prints and a heel that are too large for a child’s, and I pick up the SpongeBob pajamas again. They have footies. The marks left by bare feet could not have been left by Brenda when she was fleeing downstairs toward the front of the house and the door, and I find myself back to the same conundrum, the cut, which is significant, on her mother’s left hand.

Colin speculates Mrs. Jordan sliced open her thumb while pruning in her garden, and I follow the thread of this theory through photographs, returning to the sunporch and the garden in back. I revisit the round drops of dried blood, approximately eighteen inches apart on terra-cotta tile and flagstone and foliage, Mrs. Jordan’s blood, believed to be unrelated to the case and excluded from evidence at the trial. If what Colin suggests is correct, and I don’t think it is, she must have injured herself almost immediately after she began pruning. But there’s no tool anywhere in any of the pictures I review, not a cut branch or side shoot or sucker in sight, the garden bleak and in need of a winter cleanup it never got.

When Marino questioned Lenny Casper, the former next-door neighbor who happened to notice Mrs. Jordan in her garden the Saturday afternoon of January 5, Casper made no mention of her appearing to have hurt herself. Maybe he didn’t notice, but most people taking their dog out or looking through a window might be aware of someone hurrying back into the house, dripping blood. A casual observation by a neighbor and drops of Gloria Jordan’s blood that didn’t make sense in the context of such gory homicides led to the conclusion that she cut her thumb earlier in the day. She returned to the house, forgot to clean up the sunporch and the hallway near the guest bath, and didn’t bandage her injury or let her physician husband tend to it when he arrived home from the men’s shelter. I just don’t believe it.

According to her toxicology report, when Mrs. Jordan died she had alcohol and clonazepam on board, higher blood levels than her husband’s, and she was taking the antidepressant sertaline. After the murders, these prescription drugs were collected from the master bathroom, from what appears to be her side of the sink, and I look at them again in their evidence bag, noticing a detail that eluded me earlier.

“You want to help me with something?” I ask Mandy, who is observing everything I do with her cobalt blue stare.

“You bet.” She’s already out of her chair.

“The Barrie Lou Rivers case file? I believe it’s electronic, not printed, because her death occurred after the office became paperless.”

“Want me to print it?” she asks.

“Not necessary. But I’m interested in a document, if you can find it in her file.”

“Can you wait one minute so I can get my laptop?”

“I’ll stand in the hallway.” I step outside the conference room.