Red Mist (41 page)

“What good ones?”
Marino frowns.

“She had current stamps, forty-four-cent ones, in her cell, but she didn’t share those.
Just the ones that were, quote, ‘shit’
other
people didn’t want anymore.
Ones she thought were from a PNG.
From me.”

“That’s what stinginess will get you.
She gives away her daughter and twenty-three years later gives her botulism,” Marino
says as Benton empties the serving bowl of pasta into the trash and it lands in a solid mass.

“Sorry about that,” says my husband, who is rather worthless in the kitchen.
“And washing the lettuce in hot water wasn’t
the best idea, either.”

“You’d have to boil lettuce a good ten minutes to destroy botulinum toxin, which is very heat-resistant,” I inform him.

“So you ruined it for nothing,” Marino is happy to let Benton know.
“If Dawn wasn’t an intended victim, that tells us something,”
Benton says.

“The stamps didn’t poison Kathleen.
It doesn’t appear she ever touched the stamps, and that tells us something, too,” Marino
says, as we return to the dining-room table, where Lucy is working on her computer and has committed the only act that she
considers a crime.

Paper.
She doesn’t believe in printouts, but there is too much information to sort through, so much to look at and connect.
Images, security-company billing information and logs, decision trees, datasets, and her searches continue.
Out of consideration
for the rest of us, she is doing her best to make it easy, sending files to the printer in the other room.

“It’s looking like she got killed by what she ate, right?
Maybe chicken and pasta and cheese spread, and not the stamps.”
Marino pulls out a chair and sits.
“That’s really something.
Maybe she’s lucky
she didn’t live to learn that her daughter licked three of those stamps to put on the letter to her lawyer.
How much botulism
could you get on three stamps?”

“About three hundred and fifty grams of botulinum toxin is enough to kill everyone on the planet,” I reply.
“Or about twelve
ounces.”

“No fucking shit.”

“So it wouldn’t take much on the back of stamps to create a potent poison that would have caused a rapid onset of symptoms,”
I add.
“My guess is that within several hours Dawn Kincaid was feeling really bad.
If Kathleen had used the stamps when she
first received them, I wouldn’t have been able to interview her because she would have been dead.”

“Maybe that was the intention,” Benton says.

“I don’t know,” I reply.
“But you have to wonder.”

“But that’s not what killed her, and that’s what’s weird.”
Lucy hands out stacks of whatever she’s printed so far.
“Someone
sends her stamps spiked with botulinum toxin but doesn’t wait for her to use them.
Why?
Seems to me she would have used the
stamps eventually, and when she did, she was going to die.”

“It might suggest that whoever sent them doesn’t work at the prison,” Benton remarks.
“If you didn’t have access to Kathleen
or what was in her cell or witness mail going out, you might assume the stamps were ineffective, not realizing she simply
hadn’t gotten around to using them.
So the person doing the tampering decided to try again.”

“The stamps sure as hell aren’t ineffective,” Marino comments.
“And how would the poisoner know what’s effective?”
Benton
points out.
“Who do you test your poisons on to make sure they work?
Certainly not yourself.”

But you might test your poisons on inmates—a possibility I’ve considered throughout the evening—and that a warden might be
inclined to allow it in certain cases, if she is driven by a need to control and punish, the way Tara Grimm seems to be.
I
remember the hard look in her eyes that wasn’t disguised by her southern charm when I sat in her office yesterday, and her
obvious displeasure with the idea that a wrongfully convicted woman soon to be executed might go free or that a deal was in
the works that could release Kathleen Lawler early.
There could be no doubt that Tara resented Jaime Berger’s meddling in
the lives of inmates and overriding the wishes of their respectable, highly praised warden, the daughter of another prominent
warden, who designed the very facility that she considers rightfully hers.

It no longer seems possible Tara Grimm wasn’t aware of the kite Kathleen slipped to me.
The warden probably knew all about
it and not only didn’t care but considered my meeting with Jaime a gift, the ideal opportunity to have me intercepted by someone
with a take-out bag that I suspect contained a potent dose of botulinum toxin serotype A injected into sushi or seaweed salad.
Tara had known for almost two weeks that it was in the works for me to come to her facility, and somehow the woman with the
take-out bag knew I was headed to Jaime’s apartment, and perhaps, as Lucy has suggested, this person was waiting in the nearby
dark for me, possibly waiting all night and well into the morning, watching the silhouette of her victim walking past windows,
waiting for lights to go off and back on, waiting for death.

People stalked and followed and spied on, and manipulated like puppets, by someone who is cunning and meticulous, a poisoner
who is patient and precise and as cold as dry ice, and I can’t think of a more vulnerable population, a captive one like rats
in a lab, especially if anyone working at the correctional facility is in collusion with whoever might be masterminding such
sinister research.
Figuring out what works and what doesn’t as you design a much bigger attack, biding your time, fine-tuning
for months, for years.

Barrie Lou Rivers died suddenly while she was awaiting her execution.
Rea Abernathy was found dead inside her cell, slumped
over the toilet, and Shania Plames appeared to be a suicidal asphyxiation, supposedly hog-tying herself with her prison uniform
pants.
Then Kathleen Lawler, and Dawn Kincaid, and now Jaime Berger, all of the deaths disturbingly the same.
Nothing is found
on autopsy, the diagnosis one of exclusion.
There was no reason, at least not in the earlier cases, to suspect homicidal poisonings
that would elude routine toxicology screens.

It is almost two o’clock in the morning, and I don’t remember the last time I called General John Briggs at this hour.
Whenever
I’ve been as inconvenient as I’m about to be, I’ve had an ironclad reason.
I’ve had proof.
Lucy adds to my pile of printouts,
and I take them with me.
I go back to the bedroom and close the door as I imagine Briggs snapping up his cell phone wherever
he’s sleeping or working.
It could be the Air Force base in Dover, Delaware, the headquarters of the AFME and its port mortuary
where our military casualties are flown in and given dignified transfers and sophisticated forensic examinations, including
three-dimensional CT and explosive-ordnance scans.
He could be in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Africa, maybe not
the MIR space station, but we speculate about it, not really joking, because AFMEs could end up any place where deaths are
the jurisdiction of the federal government.
What Briggs doesn’t need is one more thing to worry him needlessly.
He doesn’t
need me and my intuition.

“John Briggs,” his deep voice answers in my wireless earpiece.
“It’s Kay,” and I tell him why I’m calling.

“Based on what?”
he says what I knew he would.

“Do you want the short answer or a more involved one?”
I prop pillows behind me on the bed and continue scanning the information
Lucy has been printing out.

“I’m about to get on a plane in Kabul, but I have a few minutes.
Then you’re not going to get me for about twenty-five hours.
Short answers are my favorite, but go ahead.”

I give him the case histories, starting with suspicious deaths at the GPFW that Colin has told me about, and from there I
move on to what has happened in the past twenty-four hours.
I point out the obvious concern that the one confirmed poisoning
by botulinum toxin serotype A, Dawn Kincaid, suggests an enhanced delivery system, something we’ve not seen before.

“While it’s theoretically possible that death or severe illness due to botulinun toxin can occur in as few as two to six hours,”
I explain, “usually it’s more like twelve or twenty-four.
It can take longer than a week.”

“Because the cases we’re accustomed to seeing are foodborne,” Briggs says, as I go through the printouts Lucy generated, studying
an enhanced surveillance image of the woman who delivered the take-out bag of sushi last night.

A sadist, a poisoner, I believe.

“We don’t see cases of exposure to the pure toxin,” Briggs says.
“I can’t think of a single one.”

The woman’s head and neck are completely whited out, but Lucy has produced sharply defined and enlarged images of the rest
of her, including the silvery bicycle she walked across the street and leaned against the lamppost.
She is in dark pants,
running shoes and socks, no belt, and a light-colored short-sleeved blouse tucked in.
The only flesh exposed is her forearms
and her hands, and a close-up of her left ring finger shows a baguette-cut square band that might be white gold or yellow
or platinum, I can’t tell.
All of the images are infrared and in shades of white and gray.

“Food contaminated by the Clostridium botulinum spores that produce the toxin,” Briggs is saying, “and it’s got to work its
way through the digestive tract, usually becoming absorbed in the small intestine before it gets into the bloodstream and
begins attacking neuromuscular proteins, basically attacking the brain and preventing the release of neurotransmitters.”

The woman in the surveillance footage also has on a watch: what Lucy shows through other image files is a dark-faced Marathon
wristwatch with a high-impact fibershell and waterproof and dustproof case, made by contract with the U.S.
and Canadian governments
for issuance to military personnel.

“What if a pure, extremely potent toxin was exposed to mucous membrane?”
I propose, as I continue to worry that the killer
has some sort of military connection.

Someone with access to military personnel, perhaps her real target.

“Think about people who apply drugs to the mouth, vagina, rectum,” I add.
“Cocaine, for example.
We know what happens.
Imagine
a poison like botulinum toxin.”

“A really big problem,” Briggs says.
“No cases I’ve ever heard of, no precedents, nothing to compare it to, in other words.
But could only be bad.”

“The pure toxin in the mucous membrane of the mouth.”

“Much faster absorption, as opposed to ingestion of the actual microbe,
the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and its spores, what is actually in contaminated food,” Briggs contemplates.
“The bacteria
have to grow and produce the toxin, all of this taking hours, possibly days, before paralysis starts in the face and spreads
down.”

“Nothing worked its way through the digestive tract, John.
It would seem these people had an exposure that actually induced
gastroparesis,” I reply, and I can see what Lucy wants me to realize about the bicycle.

It appears lightweight, with very small wheels, and she has included an article she pulled off the Internet.
A folding bike.
Someone possibly with a military connection and a folding bike.

“Could also be induced by severe stress,” Briggs says.
“Fight-or-flight syndrome, and your digestion quits.
But that would
be true only if the onset of symptoms was rapid.
Again, no cases to compare it to.
A direct hit to the bloodstream, and everything
vital starts shutting down, my guess.
Eyes, mouth, digestion, lungs.”

A seven-speed bike with an aluminum frame that has quick-release hinges, the entire bike folding into a 12x25x29-inch package,
and in a series of zoomed-in and enhanced photographs from the security camera, Lucy shows the woman taking off a backpack,
opening it, and pulling out the take-out bag from Savannah Sushi Fusion.
The next page is an ad from a sports and outdoors
online site where one can order what appears to be the same type of backpack for $29.99.
Not an insulated bag for delivering
food but a folding bike backpack for carrying or transporting the bike when one isn’t riding it.

“But the truth is, we don’t know what extremely potent doses of botulinum toxin manufactured in a lab might do,” Briggs continues,
as I listen intently and go through paperwork on the bed, my thoughts moving rapidly in multiple directions that somehow point
at the same thing.

But who or what and why?