Red Mist (37 page)

“Like a train wreck.
That probably would be a more apt description,” I reply, as he helps us get the carts inside, and I pause
to take my boots off.
“I’ll clean up in a minute, but let me get things set up and dinner started.
I promise I’m safe.
In
non-air-conditioned vehicles all day, rained on, and I look like hell and don’t smell good, but nothing to worry about.”

As if they’ve never been exposed to me after I’ve been at crime scenes or in the morgue.

“Sorry I didn’t have access to a locker room when I left the
apartment.”
I continue to talk and apologize because there’s no sign of Lucy, and that can’t be good.

I’m sure she knows we’re here, but she’s not come out to see us, and I interpret that as a danger sign.

“But it’s almost a certainty it’s something Jaime ate,” I’m explaining.
“I’m very suspicious of botulinum toxin in her food,
possibly in Kathleen Lawler’s food.
MGH should be testing Dawn Kincaid for it, but they’ve likely thought of that, and I’m
sure they have access to fluorescent tests, which are highly sensitive and quick.
You might want to mention it to someone
up there.
One of the agents working her case,” I reiterate to Benton.

“Apparently she hadn’t eaten anything when she started having symptoms,” he says.
“I don’t think it’s believed she was poisoned
with food, but I’ve passed along your suspicions about the possibility of botulism.”

“Maybe something she drank,” I reply.

“Maybe.”

“Possible you can get a detailed inventory of what was in her cell, of what she might have had access to?”

“It’s not likely you’re going to be allowed to have that information,” Benton says.
“I’m probably not going to be allowed
to have it, either, for obvious reasons.
Considering what Dawn Kincaid has accused you of.”

“Your mistake was not hitting her harder with the fucking flashlight,” Marino says.

“Well, I certainly can’t be blamed for what’s happened to her now,” I reply.
“What about the sushi restaurant?
Do we know
anything more about that?”

“Kay, who would be telling me?”
Benton says patiently.

“Yes, everybody’s going to be secretive when all I want to do is stop the person from killing someone else.”

“All of us want the same thing,” he says.
“But your connection to Dawn Kincaid, to Kathleen Lawler and Jaime, creates more
than a minor problem when it comes to sharing information.
You can’t work those cases, Kay.
You just can’t.”

“The fact is I’m not going to transfer a neurotoxin like botulinum from my clothes or boots, of course, but I’m going to get
out of them anyway,” I decide.
“Unfortunately, no rooms come with a washer and dryer, so there was no way around that.
If
you could find the trash bags I just bought,” I say to Benton.
“My shirt and pants are going in one, and I’ll send them out
to be laundered or, better yet, pitch them.
I might just pitch my boots, too.
Maybe everything, I don’t know.
Maybe you could
get me a robe.”

“Believe I’ll go clean up.”
Marino grabs two nonalcoholic beers, doesn’t matter that they aren’t chilled, and walks through
the living room to his connecting door.

I find sanitizing wipes in my shoulder bag and clean my face, my neck, my hands, as I’ve done multiple times this day, and
Benton finds a robe for me and opens a trash bag.
I take off the uniform I’ve lived in since the sun came up, the black cargo
pants and black shirt that Marino packed in a go-bag weeks ago when a plan was being hatched and it wasn’t what he thought.
Jaime tricked all of us.
I don’t know the extent of her deception or her motivation or ultimately what she had in mind.
It
wasn’t right or fair, and much of it was unkind, but she didn’t deserve to die and to die so cruelly.

The kitchenette has cupboards with dishes and silverware, and a
refrigerator and a microwave, and I set up the butane stove and the toaster oven, and we begin to put away food and supplies.
There is no sign of Lucy.
Her room is off the dining area to the right of the living room, and the door is shut.

“What I didn’t get a chance to do was go to a pharmacy.”
I unwrap cookware and pull tags off utensils I bought.
“One with
home healthcare, some things we should have on hand, but nothing was open after six, not the sort of pharmacy I have in mind
that has home medical equipment and supplies.
I’ll give Marino a list, and maybe he can pick up what I need in the morning.”

“Seems to me you’ve got everything covered,” Benton says, with a calmness that makes me only more unnerved, as if it portends
a bad storm.

“An Ambu bag, I should at least have one of those.
So simple, but the difference between life and death.
I used to keep one
in my car.
I don’t know why I don’t do it anymore.
Complacency is a terrible thing.”

“Lucy’s been in her room working on her computers,” Benton says, because I haven’t asked about her directly and he knows why.
“She went out for a run and both of us went to the gym.
I think she’s in the shower, or she was a few minutes ago.”

I wash a new cutting board and two new pots.

“Kay, you’re going to have to handle it better than this,” Benton says, as he places bottles of water in the refrigerator.

“Handle her or handle what’s happened to Jaime?
What is it I’m supposed to handle in this situation where nobody wants me
to handle anything at all?”

“Please don’t get defensive.”
He finds a corkscrew in a drawer.

“I’m not.”
I peel the skin off a sweet onion and rinse green peppers while Benton decides on a bottle of Chianti.
“I’m not
trying to be defensive.
I’m not trying to be anything except responsible, to do what’s right and safe.”
I begin to dice.
“To
do anything I can.
I admit I feel I’ve gotten all of you into this, and I don’t know how one apologizes for such a thing.”

“You didn’t get us into anything.”

“You’re here, aren’t you?
Latchkey in a hotel room in Savannah, Georgia, with someone who finds it necessary to throw her
clothes away.
A thousand miles from home and afraid to drink the water.”

Benton opens the wine, and we seem headed for a repeat of our last night together in Cambridge before I came to Savannah against
his wishes.
In the kitchen, cooking and cutting vegetables, and boiling water, and drinking wine and having heated discussions
and forgetting to eat.

“I haven’t talked to Lucy all day because of where I’ve been and what I was doing,” I then say, and he silently watches me,
waiting for what I’m really feeling to come out.
“And I thought it best to talk to her in person,” I say next.
“Not over the
phone while I’m riding around in Marino’s loud van.”

Benton hands me a glass of wine, and I’m not in a mood to sip.
I’m in a mood to drink, to throw back the entire glass.
One
swallow and I feel the effect instantly.

“I don’t know how to handle her.”
I’m suddenly tearful and so tired I can barely stand.
“I don’t know what she must think
of me, Benton.
How much does she know about what’s happened?
Has she been told that Jaime was slurring her words and her eyelids
were
drooping when I was with her last night and I left her anyway?
That I was furious and disgusted with her and just walked out?”

I begin pouring bottled water into a pot, and Benton stops me.
He takes the bottle from me.
He sets it down and carries the
pot to the sink.

“Enough,” he says.
“I seriously doubt the tap water has been poisoned, and if it has, then nothing we might do is going to
save us or anyone anyway, okay?”
He fills the pot and sets it on the stovetop and turns on the burner.
“Do you understand
your vigilance and that, while much of it is appropriate, some of it isn’t?
Do you have any insight into what’s going on with
you right now?
Because I think it’s pretty obvious.”

“I could have done better.
I could have done more.”

“Your default is to feel that way about everything, and you know why.
I don’t want to get into the past, your childhood and
what certain events did to you.
It would sound simplistic right now, and I know you get tired of hearing me say it.”

I sprinkle salt into the water on the stovetop and open cans of crushed plum tomatoes.

“You took care of a parent who was dying and couldn’t save him after years of trying, and that was most of your childhood,”
Benton says what he has said before.
“Kids take things to heart in a way adults don’t.
They get imprinted.
When something
bad happens and you didn’t stop it, you blame yourself.”

I stir fresh basil and oregano into the sauce, and my hands aren’t steady.
Grief moves through me in waves, and most of all
I’m disappointed in myself because I absolutely could have done better.
Despite what Benton is saying, I was negligent.
The hell with my childhood.
I can’t blame my negligence on that.
There’s no
excuse.

“I should have called Lucy,” I say to Benton.
“There’s no good reason for my not doing it except avoidance.
I avoided it.
I’ve avoided it since I saw both of you last at the apartment building.”

“It’s understandable.”

“That doesn’t make it right.
I’ll go in and deal with her unless she won’t talk to me.
I wouldn’t blame her.”

“And she doesn’t blame you,” he says.
“She’s not happy with me, but she doesn’t blame you.
I’ve had a few talks with her,
and now it’s your turn.”

“I blame myself.”

“You’re going to have to stop.”

“I was incensed last night, Benton.
I stormed out.”

“You’ve really got to stop this, Kay.”

“I almost hated her for what she did to Lucy.”

“You’d be more justified in hating Jaime for what she did to you,” he says.
“It’s bad enough what she did to Lucy, but you
don’t know the rest of it.”

“The rest of it is what we found in her apartment today.
She’s dead.”

“The rest of it begins in Chinatown.
Not two months
ago, as Jaime’s led you to believe, as she led Marino to believe when he took the train to see her in New York.
It began in
March.
In other words, it began not long after Dawn Kincaid tried to kill you.”

“Chinatown?”
I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“She manipulated to get you down here to Savannah, to get your help, and she manipulated the FBI, and she sure as hell manipulated
Marino,” Benton says.
“Forlini’s.
I know you remember that place, since you’ve been there with Jaime on a number of occasions.”

A popular watering hole for lawyers, judges, NYPD cops, and the FBI, Forlini’s is an Italian restaurant that names its booths
after police and fire commissioners, the very sort of political officials that Jaime claimed ran her off the job.

“Obviously I don’t know all the details she might have told you last night,” Benton continues, “but what you relayed to me
later over the phone was enough for me to ask some questions, to look into a few things, not the least of which was the names
of the two agents who supposedly came to her apartment and interrogated her about you.
Both of them are from the New York
field office, and neither of them ever went to her apartment.
She talked to them at Forlini’s one night in early March and
chummed the water, as Jaime certainly knew how to do.”

“Chummed the water with information about me?
Is that what this is leading to?”
I decide on a pasta.
“So she could put me
in a weakened position and show me how much I needed her help?”

“I think you’re getting the picture.”
Benton’s face is hard, but he’s also sad.
I see his disappointment in the slant of his
shoulders and the shadows of his face.
He liked Jaime very much, in the old days he did, and I know what he would think of
her now, alive or dead.

“That’s a pretty despicable thing to do,” I reply.
“Gossip to the FBI that maybe there’s some basis for Dawn Kincaid’s defense.
That I’m unstable and potentially violent or was motivated by jealousy.
God only knows what she said.
Why would she do that?
How could she do that?”