Red Mist

TWO DAYS LATER

The bell in City Hall’s gold-domed tower rings in slow, heavy clangs on a hazy Independence Day that won’t include fireworks for some of us. It’s Monday, and while the plan was to get out early for the long flight home, it’s already noon.

By the time we land at Hanscom Air Force Base west of Boston it will be eight or nine p.m., our delay not due to the weather but to the winds of Marino’s moods, which are gusting in fits and starts and constantly changing direction. He insisted on returning his cargo van to Charleston, where he wants us to land en route, in case he decides to return home with us, because he’s not sure, he said. He might stay down here in the Lowcountry and do some fishing or thinking, and he might look for a preowned johnboat or decide to take a sabbatical, as he put it. He might end up back in Massachusetts, it was hard to say, and as he deliberated over what he should do with himself he discovered other ways to stall.

He needed more coffee. He might make one last run for steak-and-egg biscuits he can’t get up north. He should go to the gym. He should return the rented motorcycle to the dealership so Lucy doesn’t have to do it. She’s been through enough with all the police and FBI interviews, all the red tape, as he put it, that goes with a shooting, and it’s a bad feeling to kill someone and realize the person wasn’t reaching for a weapon but a wallet or driver’s license or an inhaler. Even when the dirtbag deserved it, you’d rather it didn’t go down like that, because someone’s always going to question your judgment, he went on and on, and that’s what stresses you out more than having the person dead, if you’re honest about it. He didn’t want Lucy on a motorcycle right now, and began worrying about her flying because of what he imagines is her state of mind.

Lucy is fine. It’s Marino who’s not. He ran errand after errand, and when at last he was ready to set out for the two-hour drive to Charleston, he decided he wanted all the provisions I’d bought, which can’t fit in the helicopter anyway, he pointed out. Not that I’d planned on hauling extra pots and pans and canned foods and a butane two-burner stovetop all the way back to New England, but he insisted he have them. He hasn’t had a chance to set up his new place in Charleston, he explained, as he piled everything he could find into boxes he got from a liquor store, including open bags of chips and trail mix and used containers and bottles of cleansers and hand-washing detergent, even a travel hair dryer he doesn’t need for his bald head and a travel iron and ironing board he’ll never use on his synthetic blends.

He grabbed spices, and several almost-empty jars of olives, pickles, relishes, and fruit preserves, and a banana, condiments and crackers, paper napkins, plastic silverware and plates, foil wrap, a stack of folded shopping bags. Then he went from room to room and gathered up the hotel toiletries as if he’s turned into a hoarder.

“Like those pickers or whatever they’re called on TV,” I decide. “Digging through other people’s cast-offs and junk and never throwing anything out. This is a new compulsion.”

“Fear,” Benton says, a computer notebook in his lap, his phone on the table next to his chair. “Afraid he might get rid of something or lose sight of it and then he needs it.”

“Well, I’m texting him again. No excuses, he’s coming home with us. I don’t want him down here by himself when he’s not thinking clearly and in the throes of some new compulsion. We’re landing in Charleston, no matter what he says, and if need be, I’ll go to his condo and haul him out of there.”

“Not many compulsions left for him to choose from,” Benton says, as he skims through electronic files. “No booze, no cigarettes. He doesn’t want to get fat, so he’s not going to turn to food, and he starts hoarding. Sex is a better compulsion. Relatively inexpensive and requires no storage space.” He opens another e-mail that I can tell from where I sit is from the FBI, possibly an agent named Phil whom Benton was on the phone with a short while ago.

It has been a busy morning inside the living room of our hotel suite, our camp with its dramatic view of the river and the port. Since the sun came up, Benton and I have been preparing to return north while processing information that continues to be gathered at what seems the speed of light. I’m not accustomed to an investigation being worked like a war, with multiple attacks on multiple fronts made by different branches of the military and law enforcement, all of it executed with a force and pace that is dazzling. But most cases I work aren’t a threat to national security and of interest to the president, and labs and investigative teams have pulled full pitch, as Lucy put it.

So far information has been well contained and kept out of the news as the FBI and Homeland Security continue their relentless quest to make sure that nothing Roberta Price was tampering with might have found its way into a military base exchange, on a destroyer or airlifter loaded with troops, in a submarine armed with nuclear missiles, in the hands of soldiers in combat or anywhere. DNA and fingerprint analyses and comparisons have been confirmed, and it is a fact that Roberta Price and Dawn Kincaid are different sides of the same evil, identical twins, or clones, as some investigators have been referring to siblings who grew up without each other and then reunited to form a catalyst that created hideous technologies and caused untold numbers of deaths.

“The fear of it,” I say. “That’s what has Marino running in circles and out of town. He sees death every day, but when it’s cases you work, you are deluded into feeling you can control it or that if you understand it well enough, it won’t happen to you.”

“Smoking that cigarette at Monck’s Pharmacy got too close for comfort,” Benton says, as his cell phone rings.

“After what he saw in the root cellar? I guess so,” I agree. “He certainly knows what could have happened.”

“I can give you a suggested approach,” Benton says to whoever’s just called. “Based on the fact that this is someone who feels completely justified. She’s done the world a favor by getting rid of bad people.”

I recognize he’s talking about Tara Grimm, who’s been arrested but not yet charged with any crime. The FBI is making deals, willing to negotiate with her in exchange for information about others at the GPFW, such as Officer Macon, who might have assisted her in meting out the punishment she decided certain inmates deserved, and doing so hand in glove with a diabolically clever poisoner who needed to practice.

“You have to appeal to her truth,” Benton says over the phone. “And her truth is she did nothing wrong. Giving Barrie Lou Rivers a last smoke with a cigarette that had a filter impregnated with … Yes, I would say it that directly, but couching it in your understanding of why she wouldn’t think it was wrong…. Yes, a good way to put it. About to be executed, was going to die anyway, a merciful ending compared to what she did to all those people she chronically poisoned with arsenic. Well, right. It wasn’t merciful, smoking something with botulinum toxin, a horrible way to die, but leave out that part.”

Benton finishes his coffee, listening, staring out at the river, and says, “Stick with what she wants to believe about herself. Right, you hate bad people, too, and can understand the temptation to take justice into your own hands…. That’s the theory. Maybe Tara Grimm, whom you should refer to as Warden Grimm, to acknowledge her power … It’s always about power, you got it. Maybe she will offer it up, that it was a cigarette or the last meal, whatever, but all she did was ensure that Barrie Lou Rivers and the others got what they deserved, had done unto them what they’d done to their victims, an eye for an eye with a little something extra. A twist of the knife for good measure.”

“I don’t know what’s going to give him insight about it,” I say when Benton gets off the phone, because as bad as Marino feels about what happened to Jaime, it’s his nature for him to feel worse about what might have happened to him.

“He’s not exactly strong in the insight department,” Benton replies. “He took a stupid chance. It’s like drinking and getting into a car and then driving on a highway that’s had a lot of accidents. I hope Phil does what I said,” he then says, and Phil is one of many agents I’ve met these past two days. “Someone like that and you have to appeal to their belief in what they’ve done. Feed right into their narcissism. They were doing the world a favor.”

“Yes, people who believe that. Hitler, for example.”

“Except Tara Grimm wasn’t obvious,” Benton says. “Came across as the great humanitarian who ran such an exemplary prison she was held up as a model. Job offers, officials showing up for tours.”

“Yes, I saw all the awards on her walls.”

“The day you were there,” he adds, “a group from a men’s prison in California had gotten the royal tour and were thinking of hiring her as their first female warden.”

“Would be an irony if she ended up in Bravo Pod. Maybe in Lola Daggette’s former cell,” I reply.

“I’ll pass it along,” Benton says drily. “That and Lucy’s suggestion about Gabe Mullery being the next of kin who decides to pull Dawn Kincaid’s plug.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I answer, although Gabe Mullery won’t be the one deciding to disconnect Dawn Kincaid’s life support.

Apparently he’d never heard of her beyond a vague recollection of the name or a similar one that was in the news, relating to murders in Massachusetts. He knew his wife, Roberta Price, had been raised by a family in Atlanta that they sometimes saw on the holidays, but he knew nothing about a sister.

“My guess is she’ll be transferred to a different facility,” I suppose. “A ward of the state, kept alive on a ventilator until the day comes she’s clinically dead.”

“More consideration than any of the victims got,” Benton says. “That’s usually the case. I just feel bad I didn’t listen to Marino when he pointed out the elevated adrenaline and CO levels, and that smoking has been banned from prisons, so why might Barrie Lou Rivers have had that, and I didn’t pay attention because I wasn’t interested at the time. I was focused on something else. Maybe if I tell him that, he won’t be so hard on himself for not paying attention when he stopped by Monck’s Pharmacy and bummed a cigarette.”

“Maybe you won’t be so hard on me for the same reason.” Benton looks up and meets my eyes, because we’ve had a few cross words about it. “You told me something important, and I had my mind on something else. Understandably.”

“I can make us another coffee,” I decide.

“May as well. It’s not putting a dent. I’m sorry I wasn’t nice.”

“So you’ve said.” I get up from my chair as a container ship glides by our windows, stacked high and pushed by tugs. “You don’t have to be nice when it’s work. Just take me seriously. That’s all I ask.”

“I always take you seriously. I was just taking other things more seriously at the time.”

“Jaime, and then he bums a cigarette that could have killed him, and yes, he’s traumatized,” I say, because I don’t want to discuss Benton’s apologies anymore, and the kitchenette suddenly seems starkly bare and lonely, as if we’re already gone from here. “And he’s going to have to figure it out or he’ll do something else that’s not very smart, like drinking again or quitting work completely and spending the rest of his days fishing with that charter boat captain friend of his.”

I place a hotel coffee pod in the hotel brewer, because Marino appropriated the Keurig I bought.

“Smoking outside the drugstore where a poisoner works,” I go on. “Not that anyone was certain of that yet, but he was asking questions about her. He was thinking about it.”

“What did you tell him? Don’t eat or drink anything unless we’re damn sure about it,” Benton says, as I carry in his coffee.

“Like the Tylenol scare. When you realize what’s possible, it makes you not want to trust anything anymore. Either that or you go into denial. After what we’ve seen, denial’s probably my choice.” I return to the kitchenette as my thoughts return to the former root cellar behind the lovely old house where Roberta Price helped murder an entire family when she was only twenty-three. “Or I’ll never eat or drink anything again or buy anything off the shelf,” I add.

I don’t know if she ever used the weapon that was found, a stainless-steel folding knife with a three-inch blade and a winged eagle knuckle guard that is consistent with the wound measurement and strange linear contusions in the Jordan slayings. But I imagine stabbing people to death was her twin sister Dawn’s specialty, while Roberta preferred to murder hands-off from a distance. I suspect the knife was kept as a souvenir or an icon all these years, preserved in a rosewood box belowground in an elaborately constructed space with temperature and humidity control and special ventilation.

Inside the converted root cellar, accessible by a door in the office floor hidden by a rug, was a stunning inventory of generic cigarettes and meals ready to eat, and auto-injectors and other products Roberta Price chose to tamper with as she placed regular orders to several companies in China that sell botulinun toxin serotype A with few if any questions asked. HazMat teams found, among other awful things, old envelopes and postage stamps with glued backs that require moistening, not just ones with party themes and beach umbrellas but a variety of stationery and outdated stamps she ordered over the Internet.

Most of these items were destined for inmates, I’ve decided, stamps and stationery, no matter what type, coveted by people locked up and desperate to communicate with the outside. We probably will never know how many people she killed, choosing a means of agonizing death that mimicked the severe asthma attacks suffered not only by her but also by the twin sister she didn’t know, both starting life on April 19, 1979, only a few miles from the GPFW at Savannah Community Hospital. Separated in infancy, neither knew the other existed until soon after 9/11, when Dawn set out to learn the identity of her biological parents, which led to the discovery that she had an identical twin.

In December 2001, they met for the first time in Savannah, both of them cursed with what Benton terms severe personality disorders. Sociopathic, sadistic, violent, and incredibly bright, the two of them had made eerily similar choices in life. Dawn Kincaid talked to an Air Force recruiter about enlisting after college, interested in cyber-security or medical engineering, and thousands of miles east a twin sister was investigating scientific training programs in the Navy.

Separately and independently on opposite coasts, Roberta and Dawn were rejected because of their asthma, and they enrolled in graduate programs. Dawn studied materials science at Berkeley, while Roberta attended the College of Pharmacy in Athens, Georgia, and in 2001 she began working at the Rexall drugstore near the Jordans’ house. On weekends and holidays she dispensed methadone at Liberty Halfway House, where she would have encountered Lola Daggette, a recovering heroin addict.

Recent statements Lola has made to investigators are consistent with what she said to Jaime. Lola had no personal knowledge of what happened on the early morning of January 6, a Sunday, when Roberta was scheduled to dispense methadone from the medical clinic, which happened to be on the same floor as Lola’s room, and none of the residents’ rooms had locks.

A drug addict with significant intellectual limitations and problems with anger management was an easy target for framing, and although it isn’t possible to reconstruct exactly what happened, it is theorized that Roberta entered Lola’s room at some point and took a pair of corduroys, a turtleneck sweater, and a Windbreaker from her closet, which she or Dawn wore during the commission of the murders. Afterward, Roberta entered Lola’s room while she was sleeping, left the bloody clothing on the bathroom floor, and by eight a.m. was dispensing methadone in the medical clinic.

“Death is an intensely personal and lonely enterprise, and no one is really prepared for it, no matter what we convince ourselves of otherwise,” I’m saying to Benton, as I sit back down with my coffee. “Easier for Marino to focus on everything he thinks is wrong with Lucy right now. Or to be obsessed with making sure his cupboards are overflowing.”

“He’s in the bargaining stage.”

“I guess so. If he stocks his kitchen, has plenty of food and accoutrements, he’s not going to die,” I reply. “If I do A and B, then C won’t happen. He had skin cancer, and suddenly he decides to become a private contractor and basically quit his job with me. Maybe that was bargaining, too. If he makes a big life change, it means he still has a future.”

“I think Jaime was the bigger factor.” Benton checks e-mails as he talks. “Not his skin cancer. She always had a way of making Marino see the pie in the sky. The best thing hasn’t happened to him yet. Something magical is yet to come. Being with her validated his self-deluded belief that he doesn’t need you, Kay. That he’s not spent half his life following you from pillar to post.”

“That’s a shame if I don’t make him see pie in the sky,” I muse, as the doorbell rings. “It’s worse if he feels he’s wasted half his life because of me.”

“I didn’t say he’s wasted it. I know I haven’t wasted anything.” Benton kisses me.

We kiss again and hold each other, then go to the door. Colin is there with a baggage cart that we don’t need, because Lucy’s already taken our luggage to load on the helicopter.

“I don’t know about this,” Colin says, as he pushes the empty cart toward the elevator. “I’ve gotten mighty used to having you around.”

“Hopefully next time we’ll bring something better to town,” I reply.

“You northerners never do. Turn our church bells into cannonballs, burn up our farms, blow up our trains. We’re taking a slight detour, going to SCH instead of the airport. Realize it’s not much closer, but Lucy doesn’t want to deal with the tower and all the people running around in pickle suits, which I imagine she doesn’t mean literally.”

“Military,” Benton says.

“Okay, flight suits, green ones, I guess. I wondered what she meant when she was talking a mile a minute about it, and I was imagining people dressed like pickles,” Colin continues, and I’m not sure if he’s being funny. “Anyway, I guess things are pretty buttoned down, there and at Hunter. Apparently they’re doing ramp checks, and she’s already been ramp-checked once and wants out of there but has instructed me to let her know when we’re close. She doesn’t want to wait at the hospital and have to move if a medflight comes in. Which isn’t likely at SCH, but better safe than sorry.”

We board the elevator, and our glass car begins to glide down, passing below balconies draped with vines, and I envision women inmates working in the prison yard and walking the greyhounds, all of them ghosts of their former selves, abusers and the abused, and then warehoused in a place engaged in a secret enterprise of death. I imagine Kathleen Lawler and Jack Fielding first laying eyes on each other at that ranch for troubled youths, a connection that set in motion a series of events that has changed and lost lives forever, including their own.

“You get tickets for the Bruins or, better yet, the Red Sox, and I just might visit sometime,” Colin says.

“Well, if you ever think of leaving the GBI.” We pass through the lobby, on our way to heavy heat and a hot, windy ride.

“I wasn’t hinting about a job,” he says, as we climb into the Land Rover.

“You always have an invitation at the CFC,” I reply. “We’ve got good barbershop quartets up there, and this thing certainly has heat,” I add, as he turns on the blower. “It probably would do just fine in snowdrifts, blizzards, ice storms.”

I get Marino on the phone, and I can tell from the noise that he’s still in his van, riding toward Charleston or maybe away from it, I have no idea what he’s up to.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“About thirty minutes south,” he says, and he sounds subdued, maybe sad.

“We should land in Charleston by two, and I need you to be there,” I reply.

“I don’t know….”

“Well, I do, Marino. We’ll have a late dinner, celebrate the Fourth up north with something good to eat and get the dogs back from the nanny, all of us together,” I tell him, as the old hospital comes into view.

Founded not long after the Civil War, Savannah Community Hospital, where Kathleen Lawler delivered twins thirty-three years ago, is red brick with white trim and provides full-service but not acute care. It’s not often helicopters land here anymore, Colin says. The helipad is a small grassy area with a rather ragged orange wind sock in back, surrounded by trees that thrash and churn as the black 407 thunders in and sets down lightly on the heels of its skids.

We shout good-bye to Colin over the thudding of the blades, and I climb into the left-front seat and Benton gets in the back, and we buckle up and put on headsets.

“Pretty tight spot in here,” I say to Lucy, dressed in black, scanning her instruments, doing what she likes best, defying gravity and clearing obstacles.

“Old place like this, and they never bother trimming the trees back,” I hear her voice in my headset as I feel us get light, then lift, and the hospital is under our feet.

Colin gets smaller on the ground, waving, as we ascend vertically, straight up, high over trees. We level off and nose around toward the buildings and rooftops of the old city, and beyond is the river, and we follow it to the sea, heading northeast to Charleston and then home.