Red Mist (18 page)

“We’ll just leave them to air-dry in the rack,” I decide.

I stuff empty take-out containers into a trash bag.
I cover the
pungent mac-and-cheese and tuck it inside the empty refrigerator, and decide that Marino’s right about truffles.
I’ve never
liked them, either.

“I didn’t know what else to do.”
Jaime’s not talking about cleaning up after dinner or her getaway place down here in the
Low-country.
She’s talking about Lucy.
“How do you love a liability?”

“Who are you talking to?”

“You’re her family.
It’s not the same.
I’m afraid I’m going to have a terrible headache in the morning.
I don’t feel so good.”

“Obviously it’s not the same.
I love her no matter what, even when it’s not convenient or helpful to my politically correct
image.”
I return to the couch, grabbing my shoulder bag, so angry I’m afraid of what I might do next.
“And who the hell isn’t
a liability?”

“It’s like loving an amazing horse that will break your neck someday.”

“And who goaded it?”
I walk back into the kitchen.
“Who spurred it into acting dangerously?”

“You don’t really think I asked her to do something like that?”
She looks at me sleepily.

“Of course not.”
I enter Marino’s number into my phone.
“I’m sure you didn’t ask her to hack into NYPD’s computer any more
than you asked me to come to Savannah.”

M
arino’s van chugs and backfires somewhere from the dark direction of the river many blocks from here, and I emerge from the
deep shadows of a live oak tree, where I’ve been waiting because I couldn’t be with Jaime Berger a moment longer.

“I’m going to have to get off the phone.”
So far I’ve managed to keep the anger out of my tone and not sound judgmental as
I talk with my niece.
“I’ll call you back when I’m in my room in about an hour or so.
I want to make a stop first.”

“I can call the hotel phone, if you don’t want to use your cell,” Lucy says.

“I’m already using it.
I’ve been using it.”
I don’t elaborate on what
I think of Jaime and her self-serving ideas of pay phones and FBI eavesdropping.

“You shouldn’t have any of this on your mind at all,” Lucy says.
“It’s not about you.
It’s not your problem.
And I don’t view
it as my problem anymore.”

“You don’t get over something like this as if it never happened,” I reply, looking in the direction of Marino, of what there
can be no doubt is his van, which isn’t fixed.

On the wooded square across the street, the Owens-Thomas House hulks against the night, pale English stucco with tall white
columns and a serpentine-shaped portico.
The shapes of old trees stir and iron lamps glow, and for an instant I catch something
moving, but as I stare in that direction, I find nothing.
My imagination.
I’m tired and stressed.
I’m unnerved.

“I still worry about who knows or might find out.
You’re right about that,” Lucy says, as I step closer to the street, looking
up and down it and into the square, seeing no one.
“When I first found out about the protective order issued to the CFC, that’s
what I thought it was about.
They were after me for hacking.
I’ve been careful.
They’d probably like nothing better than to
get me into trouble because of old shit with the FBI, with ATF.”

“Nobody’s after you, Lucy.
It’s time you put that out of your mind.”

“It depends on what Jaime’s said to certain people and what she continues saying and how she twists the facts.
What she told
you isn’t what happened, not exactly.
She’s made it a whole lot worse than it was,” she says.
“It’s like she’s obsessed with
turning me into
a bad person so she feels justified in what she did.
So everyone will understand why she ended it.”

“Yes, I’d say it’s exactly like that.”
I watch for the van, which I can hear but not yet see, on Abercorn now and getting
closer as I try to contain my complete disrespect for someone I suspect my niece still loves.

“Which is the real reason why I left New York.
I knew there was talk about the security breach even if I wasn’t outright accused.
No way I could continue doing forensic computer work there.”

“The way she treated you is what hurt you most and why you left New York, left absolutely everything you’d built for yourself,”
I disagree calmly, quietly.
“I don’t believe for a minute you started all over again in Boston because of rumors.”

I look back at Jaime’s building, at her windows lit up.
I can see her silhouette moving past the drawn draperies in what I
assume is the master bedroom.

“I just wish you’d told me.
I don’t know why you didn’t,” I add.

“I thought you wouldn’t want me at the CFC.
You wouldn’t
want me as your IT person or want me around.”

“That I would banish you the way she did?”
I say before I can stop myself.
“Jaime asked you to commit a violation when she
knew how vulnerable you were to her….
Well, I don’t mean to sound like this.”

Lucy doesn’t say anything, and I watch Jaime Berger’s silhouette moving back and forth past the lighted window.
It occurs
to me she might have a security camera monitor in her bedroom and she’s checking it.
She might be watching me, or maybe she’s
distressed
because I spoke my mind and walked out as if I might never come back.
I think of the old saying that people don’t change.
But Jaime has.
She’s reverted back to an earlier vintage of herself that’s gone bad like wine not properly stored.
Living
a lie again, but now she’s impossible to take.
I find her completely unpalatable.

“Anyway, I know about it now,” I tell Lucy.
“And it doesn’t change anything with me.”

“But it’s important you believe it’s not the way she’s described.”

“I don’t care.”
Right now, I really don’t.

“All I did was verify a few numbers by looking at electronic records of the original complaints and the way they were coded,
but I shouldn’t have.”

No, she shouldn’t have, but what Jaime did was worse.
It was calculating and cold.
It couldn’t have been more unkind.
She
abused the power she had over Lucy and betrayed her, and as I get off the phone I wonder who Jaime will manipulate and manage
to compromise next.
Lucy and Marino, and I suppose I should include myself on the list.
I’m in Savannah, immersed in a case
I knew virtually nothing about until a few hours ago, and I look up at her apartment again.
I watch her silhouette move past
the lighted window in back.
She seems to be pacing.

It is almost one a.m., and the van gleams ghostly white in uneven lamplight, loudly heading in my direction like some demon-possessed
machine out of a horror film, slowing down and speeding up, lurching and shuttering.
Obviously Marino didn’t find a mechanic
after he left Jaime’s apartment several hours ago, and by now I’m convinced he deliberately left me alone with her for a reason
that has nothing to do with anything I might want or need.
Brakes screech
when he slows to a stop in front of the apartment building, and the passenger door squeaks as I open it, the interior light
out because Marino always disables it in any vehicle he’s in so he’s not an easy target or
a fish in a barrel,
as he describes it.
I notice bags on the backseat.

“Do a little shopping?”
I ask, and I hear the tenseness in my tone.
“I picked up some water and other stuff so we’d have it
in our rooms.
What happened?”

“Nothing I feel good about.
Why did you leave me alone with her?
Was that your instruction?”

“I thought I said I’d call you when I got here,” he reminds me.
“How long you been standing outside?”

I fasten my shoulder harness, and the door squeaks again as I pull it shut.
“I needed to get some air.
This thing sounds terrible.
In the agonal stages of a drawn-out tortured death.
Good Lord.”

“I thought I told you it’s not a good thing to be wandering around by yourself.
Especially this time of night.”

“As you can see, I didn’t wander far.”

“She wanted time alone with you.
I thought you’d want it, too.”

“Please don’t think for me,” I reply.
“I’d like to take a
detour, take a look at the Jordan house, if this thing can make it without breaking down completely.
I don’t believe wet spark
plugs are the problem.”

“Pretty sure it’s the alternator,” he says.
“Maybe loose plug wires, too.
The distributor cap might be dirty.
I found a mechanic
who’s going to help me out.”

I stare up at Jaime’s apartment, and she has returned to her living room, where the shades are up.
I can see her clearly as
she stands
before a window watching us drive off, and she has changed into something maroon, possibly a bathrobe.

“It’s kind of creepy, isn’t it?”
Marino says, as we head south, the dark shapes of trees and shrubs moving in the hot wind.
“I asked Jaime if she picked her apartment because it’s close to where it happened.
She says she didn’t, but it’s like two
minutes from here.”

“She’s obsessed.
The case of a lifetime,” I comment.
“Only I’m not really sure what case she’s working.
The one in Savannah
or her own.”

We roar past grand old houses with windows and gardens lit up, their façades a variety of textures and designs.
Italianate,
colonial, Federal, and stucco, brick, wood, and ballast stone.
Then the right side of the street opens up into what looks
like a small park surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and as we get closer I can make out gravestones and crypts and white
crisscrossing paths dimly illuminated by incandescent lamps.
On the cemetery’s southern edge is East Perry Lane, where there
are large old homes on spacious lots thick with trees, and I recognize the Federal-style mansion from photographs I found
earlier today when I read stories online about Lola Daggette while I was parked in front of the gun store.

The hot night air carries the sweet perfume of oleander as I survey three stories of Savannah gray brick with double-hung
windows symmetrically placed and a grand central portico flanked by soaring white columns.
The roof is red tile, with three
imposing chimneys, and off to one side is an attached stone carport with archways that used to be open and now are glassed
in.
We park directly in front of a property I can’t imagine owning, I don’t care how handsome it is.
I wouldn’t live in any
place where people were murdered.

“I don’t want to sit here long, because the neighbors have a hair trigger about suspicious strangers and suspicious cars,
as you might expect,” Marino says.
“But if you look to the right, almost at the back of the house, just behind the carport
is the kitchen door where the killer broke in.
Well, you can’t see it from here, but that’s where it is.
And that big villa
to the right belonged to the neighbor who went out with his dog the morning of January sixth and noticed the glass busted
out of the Jordans’ kitchen door and a lot of lights on for so early in the morning.
Based on what I’ve been able to reconstruct,
the neighbor, a guy named Lenny Casper, woke up around four a.m., when his poodle started yapping.
Casper says the dog was
upset and wouldn’t settle down, so he figured it needed to go out.”

“Have you talked to this neighbor yourself?”

“On the phone.
He also was interviewed by the media at the time, and what he says now is pretty much the same thing he said
back then.”
Marino looks past me, out my open window, at the Italianate house he’s talking about.
“Around four-thirty his
poodle was doing his business right there where those palm trees and bushes are.”

He points at the up-lit landscaping of palms and oleander, and trellises of yellow jasmine that separate the two properties.

“And he happened to notice the broken glass in the Jordans’ kitchen door,” Marino says.
“He told me the kitchen lights and
a lot of lights in upstairs rooms were on, and his first concern was someone had tried to break in and maybe that’s what woke
up his dog.
So he went back inside his house and called the Jordans, who didn’t answer the phone.
Next he called the police,
and they rolled up around five, found the kitchen door unlocked, the alarm off, and the little girl’s body at the bottom of
the stairs, near the entryway.”

I take in the former Jordan property, at what I estimate is an acre of wooded yard illuminated by post-mounted lanterns that
cast large, thick shadows.
The driveway is granite gravel edged in brick, and slate stepping-stones lead from it past the
carport to a kitchen door that I couldn’t possibly see without getting out of the van and trespassing.

“He moved to Memphis not long after the murders,” Marino then says.
“Neighbors on both sides moved, and based on what I hear,
what happened really hurt real estate values.
Fact is, hardly anybody within blocks on either side who was living here at
the time still lives here now.
From what I understand, the Jordan house is one of the most popular stops on ghost tours, especially
since it happens to be right across the street from Savannah’s most famous cemetery, where a lot of the tours begin and end,
at Abercorn and Oglethorpe, at the entrance we just went past a minute ago.”

Marino reaches in back, and paper rattles as he pulls out two bottles of water.

“Here.”
He hands me one.
“I feel like all I’ve done all day is sweat.
You know, foot tours,” he resumes talking about Savannah’s
haunted attractions and the crowds they draw.
“Some of them candlelit at night, and you can imagine how old it would get if
you live here, either in this house or nearby, and all these tourists are gawking while some guide goes on and on about the
family murdered here.
Hate to think what it’s like now, with it all over the news that Lola Daggette’s execution has been
reset.
Everybody around here has the Jordan murders on their minds again.”