Red Mist (33 page)

Savannah’s homicide unit, but not to Officer J.
T.
Harley, who is nice enough but naïve and much too invested in playing detective.
Chang will make sure that Marino and I are questioned by the appropriate party, depending on who takes jurisdiction, and likely
it will be a joint investigation.
The GBI and the local police will work this together, and the FBI will be next.
If Jaime’s
death is connected to what’s happened in Massachusetts—specifically, the alleged
poisoning of Dawn Kincaid—then the cases have crossed state lines and the FBI will become involved in what’s going on in Savannah
and possibly take charge just as it has up north.

I nudge aside the drawn drapery, looking down at the street in front, where Chang is getting his crime scene equipment out
of his SUV.
Rain pelts the building’s roof as if small pebbles are hitting it, and lightning shimmers over the low skyline
of homes and historic buildings and trees.
Thunder sounds like a distant kettledrum or the artillery fire of a faraway war,
cracking and splitting the air, and I know what I would do if Cambridge weren’t a thousand miles from here.

I would direct that the truck, our mobile containment autopsy facility, be driven to Savannah right now.
But the distance
makes such a plan impractical if not impossible, because Colin Dengate isn’t going to wait two days to do the autopsy, and
he shouldn’t.
We don’t want to wait.
We mustn’t wait.
We need serum.
We need tissue specimens.
We need gastric contents.
Of
course, there is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, in nearby Atlanta, but Colin probably won’t wait
for their truck, either, and we’ve been exposed and are okay.
A number of people have been exposed and seem to be fine.
I
was inside Katheleen Lawler’s prison cell.
I touched her and breathed the air and smelled what was in her sink, and I’ve been
exposed to her blood and gastric contents, to her inside and out.
I don’t feel sick.
Marino, Colin, and Chang don’t, either.
There are no warning signs at all that we might be at risk.

Whatever killed Kathleen or Jaime or poisoned Dawn Kincaid, assuming it is all the same toxin, works relatively swiftly.
It
shuts down digestion and interferes with breathing.
Something that
paralyzes, I consider.
In food or drink.
And I remember the way Jaime looked before I left her around one o’clock this morning.
Her eyelids were heavy.
She was slurring her words and having difficulty speaking.
Her pupils were dilated.
I assumed she
was intoxicated and drowsy, but the antacid on the kitchen counter suggests her stomach was bothering her, and that’s the
same complaint Kathleen had, if the woman in the cell across from her was telling the truth.

“You know they work all our crime scenes now since they’ve been getting training at that forensic academy in Knoxville where
the Body Farm is …” Officer Harley says.

He is talking and I’m barely listening as I continue to look out at the stormy late afternoon, at trees thrashing in the wind,
at headlights shining down Abercorn Street.
Then the Land Rover comes into view.

“Every GBI investigator’s been trained there, every single one, meaning we got the best-trained crime scene people probably
in the entire United States,” Officer Harley boasts, as if he has no feelings about the body on the bed, as if there is nothing
extraordinarily monstrous about what has occurred.

Officer T.
J.
Harley didn’t know Jaime Berger.
He has no idea who she is or who any of us are or what we are to one another,
and I feel something change in me as Colin parks and extinguishes the headlights.
I feel a flat calm, a detachment, the way
I get when something is too much and yet I must function and in fact function at the highest level.
I know what I’m in for,
only a fool wouldn’t know that, and I slide my hands into the pockets of my cargo pants as I envision Jaime’s silhouette passing
behind the drawn drapes in this room late last night.

Marino and I were sitting in his van on the street below, and her shadow moved back and forth as if she were restlessly pacing.
Then she got undressed.
The clothes she was wearing when we were with her are on a chair by the dresser as if she dropped
or tossed them, the way one does when drunk, upset, in a hurry, not feeling well.
She put on the maroon robe she eventually
would die in and was looking down at us from a window in the living room as we drove off, and I didn’t know.
I had no clue
what had been done and the role I likely played in it.

I
turn away from the window, and Jaime Berger’s stiff unnatural position remains the same, draped over the side of the bed
like a Dalí painting.

Her biological existence has ended, and flesh and blood have begun breaking down like a set being struck after a drama has
been played out and is over.
She is gone.
Nothing can undo it.
Now the rest of it must be dealt with, and that is what I know
how to manage, and I’m strongly motivated to help.
But there are serious complications.

“I’m not going to touch anything or do anything else unless appropriately instructed,” I tell Officer Harley.
“Dr.
Dengate
just pulled up, but I need you to stay right where you are.
Or if I walk into any other area of the apartment, you need to
be with me,” I remind him
again.
“I must be accompanied by you or Investigator Chang, and I need one of you able to swear to that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”
He stares at me as if he’s not quite sure what I might do that requires watching or swearing to.

“I was in here last night.
Not in this room.
But in this apartment, and it’s likely I’m the last person to see her alive.”

“That’s the thing about this kind of work.”
He leans against the doorframe, his duty belt making scraping sounds against wood.
“You never know who or what you’re going to encounter.
I’ve rolled up on scenes before and it turned out I knew the victim.
Not that long ago, a guy killed on his motorcycle was someone I went to high school with.
That was kind of weird.”

My impulse is to move her body, to cover her, to reposition her so she isn’t bent like a hairpin, her arms and head hanging
over the edge of the bed.
Her face and neck are suffused a deep purplish-red from blood settling due to gravity after her
circulation quit, and her lips are parted, her upper teeth bared, one eye closed, the other open to a slit.
Death has made
a mockery of Jaime Berger’s perfect beauty, contorting and distorting her obscenely and grotesquely, and I don’t want Lucy
to see her, not even a photograph, and I notice the overturned glass again and the empty phone charger.
I get down on the
floor to look and discover the handset several inches under the bed, as if Jaime might have been groping for it and knocked
it off the table.
I don’t pick it up.
I don’t touch anything.

“I was in the living room and kitchen from around nine o’clock last night until close to one a.m.,” I inform Officer Harley.
“I was in the guest bathroom once not long before I left.
I handled a
number of things while I was here.
Paperwork.
Items in the kitchen.
I’ll make sure Investigator Chang is aware.”

“So you came down from Boston to meet up with her.”

“No.
I came to Savannah for another reason.
She asked to see me while I was here.”
I’m not going to explain any more than
that, not to a uniformed officer, a first responder who won’t be investigating this case.
“We have a long, rather complex
history that I’ll be happy to go over in detail with whoever I need to talk to when we get to that point.
In the meantime,
if you’ll just stay nearby so I have a witness to what I do or don’t do in here.”

“Sure.
Or you can wait outside if you’d rather …?”

“I’m already inside this apartment, and I intend to help if I can,” I say firmly.

Under ordinary circumstances I would have left already, but I refuse to consider what some in my profession might deem an
act of self-preservation.
I ignore the part of me that is arguing I should get out of here now.
I shouldn’t compromise myself
further.
No medical examiner would want to be in the position I find myself in, but if I can help determine what happened
to Jaime, I feel morally obliged; in fact, I must.
This isn’t just about her.
I can’t save her.
I am worried about others.

Homicidal poisonings are rare and greatly feared because there isn’t always an intended victim, and even when there is, it
might not be that person who dies.
Barrie Lou Rivers apparently didn’t care who ate her arsenic-laced tuna-fish sandwiches.
Whatever cruel and coldly calculated point she intended to make didn’t necessarily involve a specific individual, and take-out
food from her deli could
have ended up with anyone.
Poison doesn’t leave fingerprints or DNA.
It almost never has a size or shape like a bullet or
a blade, and it rarely leaves a track that can be measured like a wound.
I’ve worked only a handful of homicidal poisonings
in my career, and they were frustrating and terrifying.
Stopping the perpetrator was a race against time.

Chang is back, setting his crime scene case on the bedroom floor.
He gives me gloves as if we are partners, and I pull on
two pairs.
I slip my hands into my pockets as more footsteps sound in the hallway.

“The phone’s under the bed.”
I indicate where, and then Colin walks in, dressed in street clothes, a plaid shirt and light
gray slacks, his dark blue GBI Windbreaker and glasses speckled by rain.

He carries the same hard case he had with him at the prison earlier today, and he sets it on the floor and says to me, “What
we got?”

“No obvious injuries, but I haven’t examined her, and I shouldn’t.
Looks like she might have fumbled for the phone, perhaps
knocking over her glass,” I answer.
“Scotch, I think.
She was drinking Scotch when I left her very early this morning.
The
phone’s under the bed.”

“She pour the Scotch herself?”
Chang bends over and holds up the bedcovers with a gloved hand.

“Yes.
And the wine.”

“Just want to know whose prints or DNA might be on what.”

“You guys don’t need to be in here now,” Colin says to Officer Harley.
“Thanks for your help, but the fewer people in here, the better, okay?
Don’t be eating or drinking anything in here, needless
to say, and be careful what you touch.
We’ve had several victims possibly exposed to something, and we don’t know what it
is.”

Officer Harley says, “So you don’t think it’s drugs?
I didn’t notice pill bottles or anything, but I didn’t open up any cabinets
or drawers.
I haven’t looked around because I’ve been in here with her the whole time.”
He’s letting them know he’s kept an
eye on me.
“I can check out the bathroom, for example.
I could check out the medicine cabinet, if you want.”

“Like I said, I don’t know what it is,” Colin answers.
“Could be drugs.
Could be something else.
Could be a damn ice bullet.”

“There’s not …?”

“We really don’t know what we’re checking for.”
Colin scans the room.
“And the fewer people, the better.”

“There’s really no such thing as an ice bullet….”

“Not in this heat,” Colin says.

“We can handle it from here,” Chang tells the officer, “but it would be really good if one or both of you stay outside, keep
the perimeter secure.
We don’t want anyone walking in.
Hard to know who else might have keys, for example.”

“When Marino and I had dinner with her last night, there was a sushi delivery,” I begin to tell Colin and Chang, as I stay
near the window, out of the way of photographs, out of the way of Colin opening his sturdy plastic scene case as he prepares
to examine the body in situ.
“It would be a very good idea to check with Savannah Sushi Fusion.
If you’re uncomfortable with
my being here …?”
I will leave if that’s what they want, regardless of my preference.
“The reason is pretty glaring.
I was
with Kathleen Lawler late yesterday
afternoon, and this morning she’s dead.
I was with Jaime last night, until about one a.m., and now she’s dead.”

“Well, unless you’re going to confess to something,” Colin says, as he pulls on gloves, “it’s not crossing my mind you’re
the reason people are dead, and I’m just happy as hell that you’re okay.
And that Sammy, Marino, and I are.
Normally I’d suggest
since you know her and were with her last night, it’s not a good idea for you to be present.
But you’re here.
You might have
helpful observations.
It’s up to you if you’d be more comfortable leaving.”

“My biggest concern is another victim,” I reply.
“Especially if we’re dealing with poisonings, and I think you know that’s
what I’m worried about.”

“You and me both.”

“You might be the only one who can say if anything looks out of place,” Chang says to me.
“So it would be helpful if you look
around with me.”
His camera flashes and the shutter clicks as he photographs the handset under the bed.

The help he wants from me is something else entirely, and I know what he’s doing.
I recognize his approach and that it is
the correct one.
Sammy Chang has earned my respect as the day has worn on, and I don’t underestimate him or what he is considering,
and I don’t blame him.
In fact, I expect it.
He’s a shrewd investigator, bright and observant and highly trained, and his
job is to be objective and relentless, and no matter what he’s come to think of me, he would be foolish not to get every scrap
of information he possibly can.
He would be negligent if he didn’t observe me carefully, and he has no choice but to eye me
with suspicion even if there is no hint of it in his professional interactions with me.

“So far I’m not noticing any indication that someone other than Jaime has been in here since Marino and I were with her,”
I start with that.

“Anything going on between the two of them?”
Chang asks.
“Beyond work?
Not that I know of, and it would be hard for me to
imagine.
He took two weeks off from the CFC to come down here and help her with the Jordan case.
As I understand it, he’s
been working with her in this apartment.”

“What about at an earlier time?
They ever have more than a professional relationship?”

“I can’t imagine it,” I repeat, as Colin sets a digital thermometer on the bedside table.

He manipulates the body’s stiff right arm until he can bend it and tucks a second thermometer into the armpit.

“Why would it be hard for you to imagine it?”
Chang asks, and the questioning has begun.

I could put a stop to it.
I could say I’m not going to have this conversation without my lawyer, Leonard Brazzo, present.
But I won’t.

“There’s never been any indication that Jaime and Marino have ever had anything but a professional relationship,” I tell Chang.
“And I certainly can’t imagine him having any motivation whatsoever to harm her.”

“Yes, but you know him.
It’s hard to be objective when we know people.
It would be hard for you to think anything bad about
him.”
Chang is on my side.
The game of good cop/bad cop, as old as time.

“If there were a reason to think something bad about him, I would be honest about it,” I answer.

“But you don’t know what went on between the two of them in private.”
He is looking at the handset he collected from under
the bed, holding it in two gloved fingertips, touching as little of its surfaces as possible.
“This probably isn’t going to
be a waste of time,” he considers.
“Since she’s probably the only one who touched it.
But to be on the safe side, maybe I
should take it in.
Do you agree?
What would you do?”
He looks at me.

“If it were me, I’d want it checked for prints and DNA.
I’d retain additional swabs for chemical analysis if that becomes
a question.”

“Someone might have poisoned her telephone?”
he says, with a straight face.

“You asked what I would do.
An exposure to chemical and biological poisons can be transdermal, through the mucous membrane,
through the skin.
Although I doubt that’s what we’re dealing with or I would expect there to be more victims.
Including us.”

“No chance you used the phone back here at any point.”
His gloved finger presses the menu button.

“I wasn’t in this area of the apartment at any point last night.”

“A nine-one-seven number at one-thirty-two this morning.”
Chang checks the last number Jaime dialed on the handset.