Red Mist

6

Water drips from live oak trees and palmettos at the edge of the parking lot, and I smell rain and the sweet perfume of flowering shrubs, their petals littering the earth like bright confetti. The air is thick and hot, and the sun glowers intermittently through roiling dark clouds to the west, and I climb back into the cargo van, marveling that nobody stopped me.

As Officer Macon escorted me out of Bravo Pod and along a sidewalk still wet from the storm, he gave no indication that anything was out of line or even out of the ordinary, but I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t imagine he or someone, perhaps the warden herself, wasn’t aware that Kathleen Lawler had slipped me a communication I’m not supposed to have. Back at the checkpoint, where my hand was scanned under a UV light, revealing the password snowstamped on my skin, nothing was said beyond Officer Macon’s thanking me for coming, as if my visiting the Georgia Prison for Women was some sort of favor to the place. I told him Kathleen was afraid for her safety, and he smiled and said the inmates love to tell “tall tales,” and that the very reason she’d been moved was to ensure her safety. I said good-bye and left.

I’m about to conclude that my original suspicion is correct. My conversation with Kathleen might have been audio-recorded, but she and I were not captured by a video camera. Otherwise, when she silently flicked the kite across the table to me, it would have been observed by corrections officers, at the very least. Most certainly I would have been marched back to the warden’s ivy-infested office, where I would have been forced to surrender the folded piece of paper that I’m aware of in my back pocket as if it is a rock or something hot. It also occurs to me that Kathleen wouldn’t have sneaked anything to me had she worried about being caught, and I have the growing suspicion she is part of a manipulation more treacherous than anything I might have imagined. Although I’m not ready to decide she just got the best of me, I realize she might have.

Cranking the engine, I remove what Kathleen gave to me as I scan the parking lot, making sure no one is nearby and watching. I’m aware of the mesh-covered narrow windows in the blue metal-roofed pods, of the columned red-brick administrative building I just left. Steam rises from wet pavement and is carried on the heavy, warm air through my open window, and in a far corner of the crowded lot I notice a black Mercedes wagon reminiscent of a hearse, and a woman sitting inside it with the engine off, talking on a cell phone. It’s hot and muggy to be inside a car with no air-conditioning running, but her windows are cracked. She doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to me. I’m uneasy and unsettled, and by this point I believe I have reason to be.

Ever since Benton dropped me off at Logan early this morning, I’ve had the sensation that I’m being monitored or tampered with, yet I’m aware of no tangible evidence that might prove it. But the feeling has gotten stronger because of other odd things. This ridiculous van I never reserved, dirty and smelly, its glove box crammed full of Bojangles’ napkins and charter-boat brochures. When I tried repeatedly to call Bryce to complain, leaving him the pointed message that I can’t believe a high-end concierge rental company would have something like this in their fleet, he never called back. I’ve had no communications from him all day, as if my chief of staff is avoiding me. Then there’s strange information I’ve been given. And now this.

I smooth open a piece of white paper that was folded into a diamond shape no bigger than a throat lozenge. Written in blue ball-point ink is a phone number that is vaguely familiar at first, and then I’m jolted by recognition. “USE PAY PHONE,” the note says in tiny block printing, and there is nothing else, just that underlined directive and Jaime Berger’s cell phone number. The late afternoon is darker, rain starting again, tapping the metal roof of the van, and I turn on the windshield wipers. They leave greasy arches as they slowly, loudly sweep across the glass, and I retrieve my shoulder bag from under the seat. I watch the black Mercedes wagon drive out of the lot, noticing a Navy Diver bumper sticker on the back as I get a strange feeling. Then I realize why.

My bag has been gone through. Am I sure? I think so. Yes, I’m certain, I decide, as I reconstruct what I did when I first arrived several hours earlier. I sent Benton a text message and zipped my phone into the rear pocket of my bag, where I always keep my wallet, my credentials, my keys, and other valuables. Now my phone is in the side compartment. How simple and safe to search the van while I was inside the prison. Officers had my keys, and I was locked up in Bravo Pod, talking to Kathleen, but I can’t think of anything important that someone might have found. My iPhone and iPad are password-protected, so no one could have gotten into those, and I can’t think of anything else that would matter. What might someone have been looking for? Perhaps case files, it occurs to me. Or, more likely, something that might indicate I came here today for reasons other than what I told Tara Grimm. I unlock my phone.

My first impulse is to call my niece, Lucy, and bluntly ask her if she’s been in touch with Jaime Berger. It’s possible Lucy has information that might give me a hint about what is going on, about what I’ve just walked into, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Lucy hasn’t talked about Jaime since all of us were together last, some six months ago, during the holidays, and she has yet to admit they’ve broken up, when I know they must have. My niece wouldn’t have moved from New York to Boston if there hadn’t been a personal reason.

It wasn’t about money. Lucy doesn’t need money. It wasn’t about her wanting to bring her extraordinary computer expertise to the Cambridge Forensic Center, which just began taking cases last year. She doesn’t need to work for me or the CFC. Her decision to relocate her entire existence most likely was about fearing a loss she believed was inevitable, and she did what she’s always done so well. She aggressively avoided pain and dodged rejection. She probably ended the relationship before Jaime had the chance, and by the time Lucy did so, she’d already set up a new life for herself in Boston. My niece has a habit of telling you she’s leaving after she’s already gone.

I drive away from the GPFW, going out the same way I came in, past the nursery and the salvage yard, wondering where I’m going to find a pay phone. There isn’t one on every corner these days, and I’m not sure I should call Jaime or anyone else. Benton worried that I was being set up, and I’m about to conclude he is right. By whom and for what reason? Maybe by Dawn Kincaid’s defense team. Maybe by something far more sinister. Dawn Kincaid tried to murder me and failed, so now she wants to finish the job. The thought gusts through my mind like an arctic blast, and my head is beginning to pound as if my hangover is back.

You should get as far from here as possible.It’s too late to fly out of the Savannah — Hilton Head Airport, but I could drive to Atlanta, where I’m sure I can get a flight to Boston tonight. In this damn cargo van? I envison myself broken down on the roadside near a swamp in the middle of nowhere and decide my wisest course is to stay in Savannah as planned. Don’t do anything rash. Be deliberate and logical,I tell myself, as I drive in the rain, the van chugging and misfiring, slowing down and speeding up on its own while its worn-out wiper blades smear the glass with loud rubbery swipes. My head is aching like a bad tooth, and I’m out of Advil, having taken the last of it earlier today when I was traveling.

I roar past a truck dealership and an auto body shop, and every place I pass feels isolated and impenetrable and ominous, as if the world is in a lockdown. I’ve not noticed another car in miles and have the same eerie feeling I get right before something bad happens. A stillness, a shifting of reality, a sense of foreboding that always precedes a tragic announcement, a brutal case coming in, a horror of a scene in the room just ahead. My thoughts find their way back to Lola Daggette.

I don’t remember much about the murders of the Savannah doctor and his family, only that they were savage and that there are still lingering questions to this day about whether there was one perpetrator or two, or if whoever is to blame had some connection to the victims. I remember I was staying in a hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut, when I first heard about the family murdered “in their sleep,” as it was described all over the news. January 6, 2002. It was a time when I was between just about everything one could be between. Careers, relationships, residences, and the world prior to 9/11 and the one we’ve been left with since. It was a terrible phase, really, about as destabilized and depressing as any I can recall, and I was watching the evening news and eating dinner in my room when I heard about slayings in Savannah believed to have been committed by a teenage girl. I remember her young face repeatedly shown on the TV screen, and the victims’ Federal-style brick mansion, its portico festooned with yellow crime scene tape.

Lola Daggette.

I remember she was smiling into television cameras at her arraignment and waving at people in the courtroom as if she didn’t have a clue about the trouble she was in, and I was struck by the silver braces on her teeth and the teenage blemishes on her plump cheeks. She seemed like a harmless kid dazed by the attention and drama but enjoying it, and I was reminded that people rarely look like what they do. No matter how often I’m confronted by examples of that fact, I’m still surprised and chilled by how easy it is to make judgments based on appearances. Most of the time we’re wrong.

I slow down and chug off the road into the parking lot of the first open businesses I’ve seen around here, a True Value hardware, a pharmacy, and a guns-and-ammo store where there are several pickup trucks and SUVs, and a pay phone next to an ATM. Of course, there would be a pay phone and an ATM at a business where the sign in front is a body diagram inside a red circle with a slash across, and the logo: Don’t be a victim. Buy a gun.Through plate glass I see a wall of rifles and shotguns, and a showcase where several men are congregated, and to the left of the front door, a black pay phone is cradled inside a stainless-steel box attached to the wall.

Reaching for my briefcase, I get out my iPad as rain falls steadily, drumming the metal roof, and I flip off the monotonous wiper blades and headlights but leave the windows cracked and the engine running. Clicking on the browser, I log on to the Internet and search Lola Daggette’s name and read a story published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionlast November: SAVANNAH KILLER LOSES FINAL APPEAL

A woman convicted and sentenced to death almost nine years ago for the grisly slayings of a Savannah doctor, his wife, and their two young children was denied an emergency stay today by the Georgia Supreme Court, clearing the way for the execution.

Lola Daggette was convicted of breaking into Dr. Clarence Jordan’s three-story mansion in Savannah’s historic district during the early-morning hours of January 6, 2002. According to the prosecutor and police, she attacked the thirty-five-year-old physician and his thirty-year-old wife, Gloria, in bed, stabbing and slashing them repeatedly with a knife before proceeding down the hallway to their twin son and daughter’s room. It is believed that five-year-old Brenda was awakened by her brother’s screams and tried to escape by running down the stairs. Her pajama-clad body was found near the front door. Like her parents and her brother, Josh, she had been stabbed and cut so savagely, she was almost decapitated.

Several hours after the homicides were committed, eighteen-year-old Lola Daggette returned to a nonsecure halfway house, where she was enrolled in a residential program for substance abuse. A staff member discovered Daggette in the bathroom, rinsing bloody clothing. DNA later connected her to the murders.

With the high court’s action today, all of Daggette’s state and federal appeals and habeas corpus issues have been exhausted, and her execution by lethal injection at the Georgia Prison for Women is expected to take place in the spring.

In other articles I skim, her defense counsel claimed she had an accomplice and it was this person who actually committed the homicides. Lola Daggette never entered the Jordan mansion but was to wait outside while her accomplice committed a burglary, her lawyers said. The sole basis for the defense was the alleged existence of an accomplice who has never been physically described or identified, someone who borrowed a set of Lola’s clothing and afterward instructed her to dispose of it or clean it, possibly with the intention of setting her up to be charged with the crimes. Lola never took the stand, and I can see why a jury would have convened less than three hours before finding her guilty.

She was set to die this past April but was granted a stay after a botched execution resulted in a second dose of deadly chemicals and it took twice the usual time for the condemned to die. As a result, a federal judge blocked the executions of Lola Daggette and five male inmates at Coastal State Prison, asserting that he needed an opportunity to decide whether Georgia’s lethal injection procedures place the condemned at risk of a prolonged and painful death, thus constituting punishment that was cruel and unusual. Georgia executions are supposed to resume this October, with Lola Daggette’s believed to be scheduled first.

I sit in the van in the rain, baffled. If Lola Daggette didn’t commit the murders but knows who did, why would she protect the real killer all these years? Months away from her execution and she’s still not talking? Or maybe she is. Jaime Berger has been in Savannah. She’s interviewed Lola Daggette. Possibly she’s interviewed Kathleen Lawler, with whom she may have made promises of an early release, but how is any of this the jurisdiction of a Manhattan assistant DA, unless the Jordan homicides and possibly Dawn Kincaid somehow connect to a sex crime in New York City?

More to the point, if Jaime has any interest in Kathleen and her diabolical daughter, Dawn, why wouldn’t Jaime have contacted me? Apparently she just did, I’m reminded, as I look at the tiny piece of creased paper on the seat next to me, and I then think of the violent events of this past February, when I was almost killed. There was no break in Jaime’s silence. She didn’t call. She didn’t send an e-mail. She didn’t check on me. While we were never close friends, her seeming indifference was painful and surprising.

Returning the iPad to my briefcase, I retrieve my Visa card from my wallet and climb out of the van, the rain falling in big, cool drops on my bare head. I pick up the receiver of the pay phone and enter zero and the number Kathleen Lawler wrote on the kite. I swipe my credit card, and the call goes through. Jaime Berger answers on the second ring.