Red Mist (25 page)

Taking from them what she never had,
it enters my mind.
Robbing
them of their safe home and parents who held them and took care of them and didn’t give them away, and I try not to fill the
scene in my mind with images of her, of the woman who would come after me nine years later.
Blood on the bedroom floor becomes
blood inside my garage, and I feel the warm mist on my face.
I smell its iron smell.
I taste its iron-salty taste, and I will
Dawn Kincaid to leave me.
I force her out of my thoughts and banish her from my psyche as I follow the bloody trail into the
hallway.

Partial footwear prints, drips, smears, and streaks along the fir wood floor.
Small handprints and swipes made by bloody clothing
and bloody hair low on the white plaster wall at the level of the banister, and then a pinpoint constellation, as if the person
was struck, and larger drops in an arterial pattern that spattered and ran down the white wall, a fatal injury that could
not be survived longer than several minutes.
The carotid was severed or partially severed, probably from behind, the killer
in pursuit, and then the arterial spatters are gone, as if evaporated.
More drips and a confusion of patterns on the stairs
leading to a large puddle beginning to coagulate under a small body curled in a fetal position in the entryway, near the front
door.
Tousled blond hair and pink SpongeBob pajamas.

The kitchen has a black-and-white tile floor that looks like a checkerboard with bloody partial footwear prints, and in the
white sink is a residue of blood and two bloody dish towels wadded up.
On the counter is a fine china plate, and on it a half-eaten
sandwich, bloody smudges and smears everywhere, and nearby a block of yellow cheese and a packet of boiled ham that is opened.
A close-up of a knife handle reveals what looks like more smudges of blood, and
I’m aware of Marino getting out of his chair.
I’m aware of a rapid high-pitched pulsing.

White bread, jars of mustard and mayonnaise left out, and two empty bottles of Sam Adams, and next the guest bath, blood drips
and footwear prints all over gray marble.
Formal peach linen hand towels, bloody and bunched up by the sink, a bottle of lavender-scented
hand soap turned on its side, bloody fingerprints visible on it.
A bar of soap sits in a puddle of bloody water in a dish
shaped like a shell, and then the toilet that wasn’t flushed, and I shuffle through documents, looking for reports from the
fingerprints examination.
Lab reports, where are they?
Did Colin include them?

I find them.
Fingerprint analysis reports issued by the GBI.
The bloody prints on the bottle of hand soap and a kitchen knife
were from the same individual but were never identified.
There was no hit in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification
System, but there should have been when Dawn Kincaid’s fingerprints were taken after her arrest nine years later, this past
February.
The unidentified prints from the bottle of hand soap and the knife handle in the Jordan case should still be in
the IAFIS database, so why wasn’t there a hit when Dawn’s prints were entered?
Two different DNA labs have linked her to the
murders, but the prints aren’t hers?

“Something’s not right about all this,” I mutter, as I flip through more pages, looking at more photographs.

A narrow staircase at the back of the house and terra-cotta tile flooring in a glassed-in sunporch, and blood droplets and
a scale for measurement.
A labeled white plastic six-inch ruler was placed next to each dark stain, seven close-up photographs
of droplets spaced out along the brick-colored tile flooring, the drops round with minimally
scalloped edges, each more than a millimeter in diameter.
Low- to medium-velocity impact spatter with an angle of approximately
ninety degrees, each drop surrounded by much tinier ones.
The blood broke apart upon impact because the surface of the floor
is smooth, flat, and hard.

I follow the blood outside into the yard, into a garden planted in the footprint of what appears to be an outbuilding from
an earlier century, crumbled stone walls exposed and incorporated into the landscaping, and a caved-in area of earth filled
in with plantings, what is left of a root cellar, it occurs to me.
Statuary is graying, some of it tinted green with mildew,
an Apollo planter, an angel holding a bouquet, a boy with a lantern, and a girl with a bird.
Dried bloody droplets darkly
speckle blades of grass and the leaves of japonicas, tea olives, and English boxwoods, then more dark droplets, these closer
together and angled on rockery, what might be a rock garden for flowers in the spring.
I’m careful with my conclusions.
I’m
careful not to read too much into what I’m seeing.

More than a few bloodstains are required to establish a pattern, but this isn’t cast-off blood.
It isn’t back or forward spatter.
It wasn’t tracked into the sunporch or out into the yard and garden by bloody footwear.
I don’t believe it dripped from bloody
clothing or from a bloody weapon or that an assailant with scratches from a child’s fingernails bled this much.
The seven
droplets on the terra-cotta tile floor are round and some eighteen inches apart, and one of them is smeared as if it might
have been stepped on.

I envision someone dripping blood as he or she walks through the sunporch, heading for the back door that leads out to the
yard, and into the garden, or maybe the person headed the other way.
Maybe someone bleeding was walking into the house, not out of it, and there is no reference to this important evidence in
anything I’ve seen so far.
Jaime didn’t mention it last night.
Marino hasn’t mentioned it, and suddenly I’m aware of people
talking.
I look up and focus on where I am.
Marino is standing in the open doorway with Mandy O’Toole.
Behind them, Colin
Dengate has a peculiar look on his face as he holds his phone to his ear.

“… Are they hearing you?
Because I don’t want you to keep calling me about it so I have to repeat myself.
Tell them for me
I don’t give a shit what they want to do.
They’re not to touch a damn thing … Well, hello?
Exactly.
You don’t know that one
of them, one of the guards didn’t … We always have to include that into the equation, not to mention they don’t know crap
about how to work a scene,” Colin is saying, and he must be talking to GBI investigator Sammy Chang, whose ringtone is a
Star Trek
Tricorder, the strange electronic pulsing I heard minutes ago.

“Okay, good … Sure, yes.
Within the hour … Yes, she told me that.”
Colin’s eyes fix on me as if I’m the person who might have
told him whatever he refers to.
“I understand.
I’m going to ask her … And no.
For the record, for the third time, the warden’s
not to set foot in there,” he says, as I get out of my chair.

Colin ends the call and says to me, “Kathleen Lawler.
I think you should come.
Since you were there, it might be helpful.”

“Since I was where?”
But I know.

He turns to Mandy O’Toole.
“Get my gear and see if Dr.
Gillan can take care of the motor-vehicle fatality coming in.
Maybe
you can give him a hand.
The victim’s poor mother has been waiting in
the lobby all damn morning, so maybe you can check on her while you’re at it.
I was going to but can’t now.
See if she needs
water, a soda or something.
Damn state trooper told her to come straight here to ID him.
Well, based on what I’ve been told,
he sure as hell isn’t viewable.”

C
olin Dengate shifts his old Land Rover into fourth gear, and the big engine roars as if it’s ravenous.
We speed along a narrow
strip of pavement hidden by impenetrable woods, the road bending sharply through shaded pines and straightening out into an
open flat terrain of apartment buildings and blazing sun, the Coastal Regional Crime Laboratory as hidden from civilization
as the Bat Cave.

Hot wind buffets the olive-green canvas roof, making a loud drumming sound as Colin passes along information that is suspiciously
detailed when one considers that Kathleen Lawler was alone the final hours of her life.
While other inmates might have heard
her, they couldn’t see her when she died inside her cell, most likely from a heart attack, Officer M.
P.
Macon suggested to
Investigator Sammy
Chang before Chang could get there.
By the time Chang was called, the prison had Kathleen’s death figured out, one of those
sad random events probably related to Lowcountry summer weather.
Heat stroke.
A heart attack.
High cholesterol.
Kathleen never
had taken care of herself worth shit, Chang was told.

According to Officer Macon, Kathleen reported nothing unusual earlier in the day, wasn’t ill or out of sorts when her breakfast
tray of powdered eggs, grits, white toast, an orange, and a half pint of milk was passed through the drawer of her cell door
at five-forty a.m.
In fact, she seemed cheerful and chatty, reported the corrections officer who delivered her meal and later
was questioned by Officer Macon.

“He told Sammy that she was asking what it would take to get a Texas omelet with hash browns.
She was joking around,” Colin
says.
“Apparently of late she’d become more obsessed than usual with food, and it’s Sammy’s impression from what’s been said
to him that she might have been assuming she wasn’t going to be at the GPFW much longer.
Maybe she was fantasizing about her
favorite things to eat because she was anticipating having whatever she wanted, and I’ve seen this syndrome before.
People
block out what they’ve been deprived of until they believe it’s within their reach.
Then that’s all they think about.
Food.
Sex.
Alcohol.
Drugs.”

“Probably all of the above, in her case,” Marino’s loud voice sounds from the backseat.

“I think Kathleen was under the impression a deal was in the works if she was cooperative,” I say to Colin, as I write a text-message
to Benton.
“Her sentence was going to be reduced and she was on her way back to the free world.”

I explain to Benton that he and Lucy might not be able to reach
us when they land in Savannah, that I’m on my way to a death scene, and I tell him whose.
I ask him to let me know as soon
as possible if there is anything new with Dawn Kincaid and her alleged asthma attack.

“Has anyone bothered to mention to Jaime Berger that she has shit for clout with prosecutors and judges around here?”
Colin
looks in the rearview mirror, directing this to Marino.

“I can’t hear too good in this wind tunnel,” he answers loudly.

“Well, I don’t think you want the windows up,” Colin yells.

“Whether Jaime has clout or not around here, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of organized protest, especially these days,
because of the Internet,” I remind Colin of the damage Jaime Berger can do.
“She’s perfectly capable of mounting a campaign
of social and political pressure, similar to what happened in Mississippi recently when civil- and human-rights groups pressured
the governor into suspending the sentences of those two sisters who’d gotten life sentences for robbery.”

“Damn ridiculous,” Colin says in disgust.
“Who the hell gets life for robbery?”

“I can’t hear a damn thing back here.”
Marino is perched on the edge of the bench seat, leaning forward and sweating.

“You need to buckle up,” I say over the hot wind rushing in through open windows, the engine loud and growling, as if the
Land Rover wants to claw across a desert or up a rocky slope and is bored and restive with the tameness of a paved highway.

We are making good time, on 204 East now, passing the Savannah Mall, heading toward Forest River and the Little Ogeechee,
and marshland and endless miles of scrub trees.
The sun is directly overhead,
the glare as intense as a flashgun, blindingly bright as it beats down on the square nose of the white Land Rover and the
windshields of other traffic.

“My point,” I say to Colin, “is Jaime’s perfectly capable of going to the media and making Georgia look like a stronghold
of bigoted barbarians.
In fact, she’d enjoy it.
And I doubt Tucker Ridley or Governor Manfred wants that.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Colin says.
“It’s moot.”

He’s right, it is, at least in Kathleen Lawler’s case.
She won’t be getting a suspended sentence or even a reduced one, and
she’ll never taste free-world food again.

“At eight this morning she was escorted to a recreation cage for her hour of exercise,” Colin says, and he explains that he
was told the one hour allowed for exercise is set early in the morning during the summer.

Supposedly Kathleen walked inside the cage more slowly than usual, resting frequently as she complained about how hot it was.
She was tired, and the humidity made it difficult to breathe, and when she was returned to her cell at a few minutes past
nine she complained to other inmates that the heat had worn her out and she should have stayed inside.
For the next two hours,
Kathleen continued to complain on and off that she wasn’t feeling well.
She was exhausted.
She found it difficult to move,
and she was having a hard time catching her breath.

She worried that breakfast hadn’t agreed with her and she shouldn’t have been walking around in the heat and humidity that
was bad enough to kill a horse, as she reportedly put it.
At around noon she said she was having chest pains and hoped she
wasn’t
having a heart attack, and then Kathleen wasn’t talking anymore and inmates in other cells nearby began shouting for help.
Kathleen’s cell door was unlocked at approximately twelve-fifteen.
She was discovered slumped over on her bed and could not
be resuscitated.

“I agree it’s strange she said what she did to you,” Colin remarks, weaving around traffic as if responding to a scene where
it’s not too late to save someone.
“But there’s no way an inmate on death row could have gotten to her.”

He’s referring to Kathleen Lawler’s claim that she was moved to Bravo Pod because of Lola Daggette and that Kathleen was afraid
of her.

“I’m simply repeating what she told me,” I reply.
“I didn’t necessarily take her seriously at the time.
I didn’t see how it
was possible for Lola Daggette to, quote, ‘get’ her, but Kathleen seemed to believe Lola intended to harm her.”

“Bizarre timing, and I’ve certainly seen my share of it,” Colin says.
“Cases where the decedent had some sort of premonition
or prediction that didn’t make sense to anybody.
Then next thing you know, boop.
The person’s dead.”

Certainly I’ve had family members tell me that their loved one had a dream or a feeling that presaged his or her death.
Something
told the person not to get on the plane or into the car or not to take a certain exit or go hunting that day or out for a
hike or a run.
It’s nothing new to hear such stories or even to be told that a victim issued warnings and instructions about
an imminent violent end and who would be to blame.
But I can’t get Kathleen Lawler’s comments out of my head or push aside
my suspicion that I’m not the only one who heard them.

If our conversation was covertly recorded, then there are others who are privy to Kathleen’s complaints about how outrageous
and unfair it was to move her to a cell where danger was directly overhead, as she described it not even twenty-four hours
ago.

“She also commented on the isolation of Bravo Pod and that the guards could do something bad to her and there would be no
one to witness it,” I tell Colin.
“She worried that by being moved into segregation she’d been made vulnerable.
She seemed
sincere, not necessarily rational but as if she believed it.
In other words, I didn’t get the sense she was saying it for
effect.”

“That’s the problem with inmates, especially those who’ve spent most of their lives locked up.
They’re believable.
They’re
so manipulative it’s not manipulation anymore, at least not to them,” Colin says.
“And they’re always saying someone’s going
to get them, mistreat them, hurt them, kill them.
And of course, they’re not guilty and don’t deserve to be in prison.”

When we turn off Dean Forest Road, passing the same strip mall where I used a pay phone the day before, I ask about the blood
droplets in the photographs I was in the midst of reviewing when Sammy Chang called.
Is either Colin or Marino aware there
was blood in the Jordans’ sunporch, in their backyard and their garden?
Someone was bleeding, and it’s possible this person
was leaving the house, perhaps exiting the property through the garden and a stand of trees that led to East Liberty Street.
Or perhaps the person was injured in the backyard and dripped blood while returning to the house.
Blood that wasn’t cleaned
up, I add, which makes me wonder if it was left at the time of the murders.

“A steady drip,” I explain.
“Someone bleeding from an upright position while moving, possibly walking in or out of the house.
For example, if someone cut his or her hand and was holding it up.
Or a cut to the head or a nosebleed.”

“It’s curious you’d mention a cut hand,” Colin replies.

“I don’t think I know about this.”
Marino is loud in my ear again.

“I would imagine the bloodstains I’m talking about were
swabbed for DNA,” I add.

“I don’t know about blood on a porch or in the yard,” Marino says.
“I don’t think Jaime’s got those photos.”

“Off the record?”
Colin says, as we retrace my steps from the day before, the GPFW minutes away.
“Because you need to get
this from the actual DNA reports.
But it’s never been believed those bloodstains have anything to do with the murders.
You’re
doing what I did back then—getting caught up in something that ended up meaning nothing.”

“The photos were taken when the crime scene was processed,” I assume.

“By Investigator Long, and are part of the case file but weren’t submitted as evidence during the trial,” Colin says.
“They
were determined to be unrelated.
I don’t know if you saw the photos of Gloria Jordan.”

“Not yet.”

“When you do, you’ll note she has a cut on her left thumb, between the first and second knuckle.
A fresh cut but more like
a defensive injury, which baffled me at first because there weren’t any other defense injuries.
She was stabbed in the neck,
chest, and back
twenty-seven times, and her throat was cut.
She was killed in bed, and there’s no indication she struggled or even knew what
was happening.
As it turns out, the DNA of the blood drips on the porch was Gloria Jordan’s.
When I found that out, it occurred
to me that she might have cut her thumb earlier and it had nothing to do with her murder.
This sort of thing happens more
often than not these days.
Old blood, sweat, saliva that has nothing to do with the crime you’re investigating.
On clothing,
inside vehicles, in a bathroom, on the stairs, on the driveway, on a computer keyboard.”

“Was her cut thumb bloody when you examined the body?”
Marino asks, as we drive past the salvage yard with its mangled heaps of wrecked cars and trucks.

“Jesus.
There was blood everywhere,” Colin answered.
“Her hands were like this.”
He takes his hands off the wheel and tucks
them under his neck.
“Maybe a reflex to move them to her throat after it was cut or to tuck up in a fetal position as she
died.
Or they might have been positioned like that by the killer, who I believe spent some time staging the bodies, making
a mockery of them.
Point is, her hands were covered with blood.”

“Anything in the bathroom to make you think she might have cut herself earlier?”
Marino asks.

“No.
But one of their neighbors said in a statement that Mrs.
Jordan was out in the garden the afternoon before the murders,
presumably doing winter pruning,” Colin continues, as I envision the dormant garden behind the Jordans’ house, the branch
stubs, water sprouts, and sucker growth I noted in photographs I just saw.