Red Mist (44 page)

“A pharmacist at Monck’s Pharmacy.
A small pharmacy owned by Herbert Monck.”
Benton must have searched Roberta Price’s name
as he was listening to me.

“Where Jaime shopped, but Roberta Price’s name isn’t on Jaime’s prescription bottles.
And I wonder why,” I reply.

“Why?
I’m sorry, I’m confused.”
Benton sounds completely distracted.

“Just a hunch that maybe when Jaime went into Monck’s Pharmacy, Roberta Price kept her distance,” I add, and I recall the
man in the lab coat who sold the Advil to me mentioning the name Robbi, someone who must have been inside the store a moment
earlier and then suddenly wasn’t.
“I don’t guess you can tell me what kind of car Roberta Price drives, and if it might be
a black Mercedes wagon,” I say to Benton.

A long pause, and he says, “No car registered to her, at least not by the name Roberta Price.
Could be in some other name.
Did Gloria Jordan get her meds from this same pharmacy?”

“One close to her home.
A Rexall back then that’s been replaced by a CVS.”

“So at some point after the murders, maybe Roberta Price changed jobs, ending up in a smaller pharmacy very close to the GPFW,”
Benton says to me, as he tells someone else he’ll be right there.
“There’s no probable cause to go after a pharmacist just
because she filled prescriptions for Gloria Jordan, for the GPFW—and probably tens of thousands of other people in this area,
Kay.
I’m not saying we won’t look into it, because we will.”

“A pharmacy that must not have a problem aiding in executions at the GPFW, possibly the men’s prison, too.
It’s unusual,”
I point
out.
“Many pharmacists see themselves as drug-therapy managers responsible for promoting a patient’s best interests.
Killing
your patient usually isn’t included.”

“It tells us Roberta Price doesn’t have ethical issues about it or just feels she’s doing her job.”

“Or takes pleasure in it, especially if the anesthesia wears off or something else goes wrong.
They had a case like that here
in Georgia not so long ago.
Took at least twice the usual time to kill the condemned inmate, and he suffered.
I wonder who
prescribed those lethal drugs.”

“We’ll find out,” Benton says, but he’s not going to do it this minute.

“And someone needs to contact the DNA lab Jaime was using,” I tell him, whether he thinks it’s a priority or not, as I walk
in the direction of Colin’s grumbling Land Rover.
“I suspect they’re not going to be up to speed with the new technologies
being used by the military.”

I’m referring to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab, AFDIL, at Dover Air Force Base, where DNA technology has reached
a new level of sophistication and sensitivity because of the challenges posed by our war dead.
What happens when identical
twins end up in theater and one of them is killed or, God forbid, both?
Standard DNA testing can’t tell them apart, and while
it’s true that their fingerprints wouldn’t be the same, there may be nothing left of their fingers to compare.

“IEDs and the devastating injuries, in some cases almost complete annihilation,” I add.
“The challenges of identification
when all that’s left is a mist of contaminated blood on a shred of fabric or
a fragment of burned bone.
I know AFDIL has the technology to analyze epigenetic phenomena, using methylation and histone
acetylation for making DNA comparisons not possible with other types of analyses.”

“Why would we need to do something like that in these cases?”

“Because identical twins may start out in life with identical
DNA, but older twins are going to have significant differences in their gene expression if you have the technology to look
for these differences, and the more time twins spend apart, the greater these differences become.
DNA determines who you are,
and eventually who you are determines your DNA,” I explain, as I open the passenger’s door, hot air blasting out of the blower.

T
he man who answers the door is sweating, the veins standing out like ropes in his big tan biceps, as if he was in the middle
of a workout when we showed up unannounced.

He is visibly displeased to find two strangers on his porch, one of them in range pants and a GBI polo shirt, the other in
a khaki uniform, an old Land Rover parked in the shade of a live oak tree next to trellises of jasmine separating this property
from the one next door.

“I’m sorry to disturb you.”
Colin opens his wallet, displaying his medical examiner’s shield.
“We’d really appreciate a few
minutes of your time.”

“What’s this about?”

“Are you Gabe Mullery?”

“Is something wrong?”

“We’re not here on official business, and nothing’s wrong.
This is a casual visit, and we’ll leave if you ask us to.
But if
you’d give me a minute to explain, we’d be most grateful,” Colin says.
“You’re Gabe Mullery, the owner of the house?”

“That’s me.”
He doesn’t offer to shake our hands.
“It’s my house.
My wife’s all right?
Everything’s okay?”

“As far as I know.
Sorry if we scared you.”

“Nothing scares me.
What do you need?”

Quite handsome, with dark hair, gray eyes, and a powerful jaw, Gabe Mullery is in cutoff sweatpants and a white T-shirt emblazoned
with
U.S.
NAVY NUKE: If you see me running, it’s already too late
.
He blocks the doorway with his muscular body, clearly not the sort to appreciate strangers dropping by without calling first,
no matter the reason.
But we didn’t want to give the man who lives in the former Jordan house the chance to say no.
I need
to see the garden and figure out what Gloria Jordan was doing in it the afternoon of January 5.

I don’t think it was pruning, and I want to know why she returned to her garden very early the next morning, possibly to the
old root cellar, possibly because she was forced back there in the pitch dark about the time she and her family were murdered.
I have an imagined scenario that is based on my interpretation of the evidence, and information Lucy e-mailed to me during
the drive here only strengthens my conclusion that Mrs.
Jordan wasn’t an innocent victim, and that’s putting it kindly.

I suspect that on the night of January 5 she may have spiked her husband’s drink with clonazepam, ensuring he would settle
into a
hard sleep.
At around eleven, she went downstairs and disarmed the alarm, leaving the mansion and her family vulnerable to
a break-in that she couldn’t have anticipated would end the way it did.
What she probably had in mind was wrong, and most
of all it was foolish, not so different from a lot of schemes devised by unhappy people who want out of their marriages and
are seduced into believing they’re entitled to take what they think they deserve.

Mrs.
Jordan probably never meant for her children to be harmed, and certainly not herself, and possibly not even her husband,
whom I suspect she’d come to resent deeply, if not hate.
She may have been determined to get away from him, but probably what
she wanted was a secret source of cash, something of her own, and not necessarily for him to be dead.
A simple plot, a simple
burglary on a January night after a day of intermittent thunderstorms and chilly blustery winds, Lucy let me know the weather
back then.
One doesn’t decide to clean up the garden in such conditions, not that there’s any evidence Mrs.
Jordan actually
pruned so much as a branch stub or a watersprout the afternoon before her death.

What was she doing by the crumbled walls and depressed earth, what looked to me in photographs like the ruins of a root cellar
from an earlier century?
Maybe attempting to outsmart her accomplice or accomplices, and the grim irony is she wouldn’t have
survived even if she’d been honorable.
She didn’t recognize the devil she’d befriended and come to trust, and must have assumed
all would be forgiven if a fortune in gold I suspect she’d promised to share was nowhere to be found because she’d decided
to keep all of it for herself and had hidden it.

“Look, I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to be bothered
about this,” Colin is saying on the hot front porch, with its stately white columns and view of a cemetery that dates from
the American Revolution.
Puffs of hot wind carry the scent of cut grass.

“Not that damn case,” Gabe Mullery says.
“You and reporters, and the worst are the tourists.
People ringing the bell and wanting
a tour.”

“We’re not tourists, and we don’t want that kind of tour.”
Colin introduces me, adding that I’m returning to Boston in the
next day or two and want to take a look at the garden in back.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but what the hell for?”
Mullery says, and past him, through the open doorway, is the fir wood staircase,
and the landing near the foyer where Brenda Jordan’s body was found.

“You have every right to be rude about it,” I reply, “and you’re not obligated to let me look.”

“It’s my wife’s thing, and she completely redid it.
Her office is out there.
So whatever you think you’re going to see probably
doesn’t exist anymore.
I don’t understand the point.”

“If it’s all right, I’d like a quick look anyway,” I reply.
“I’ve been reviewing some information….”

“About that case.”
He exhales loudly in exasperation.
“I knew it was a mistake to get this place, and now with her execution
coming up of all times on fucking Halloween.
Like we can be in town for that.
Close up the fucking place and call in the National
Guard, would if I could, and wait it out in Hawaii, you got that straight.
All right.”

He steps aside to let us in.

“Ridiculous having this conversation at all,” he continues irritably, “but not outside in this heat for all the world to see.
Buying this damn place.
Jesus Christ.
I shouldn’t have listened to my wife.
I told
her we’d be on the tour route and it wasn’t a good idea, but she’s the one here most of the time.
I travel pretty much constantly.
She should live where she wants, it’s only fair.
You know, I’m sorry people died in here, but dead is dead, and what I hate
is people violating our privacy.”

“I can understand that,” Colin says.

We walk into the grand foyer of a house that looks so familiar it’s as if I’ve been in it before, and I imagine Gloria Jordan
on the stairs, barefoot and in her blue floral-printed flannel gown, padding toward the kitchen, where she waited for company
and a conspiracy to unfold.
Or perhaps she was in some other area of the house when the door’s glass shattered and a hand
reached in to unlock the dead-bolt with the key that shouldn’t have been there.
I don’t know where she was when her husband
was murdered but not in bed.
That’s not where she was when she was stabbed twenty-seven times and her throat was slashed,
overkill, what I associate with lust and rage.
Most likely that attack took place in the area of the foyer where she stepped
barefoot in her own blood and in the blood of her slain daughter.

“You probably can tell I’m not from here,” Mullery is saying, and at first I thought he might be English, but his accent sounds
more Australian.
“Sydney, London, then to North Carolina to specialize in hyperbaric medicine at Duke.
I ended up here in
Savannah long after the murders, so stories about this place didn’t mean much to me or I sure as hell never would have gone
to see it when it went on the market a few years ago.
We looked, and it was love at first sight for Robbi.”

Not the marriage made in heaven it was painted to be,
Lucy e-mailed me, and attached information from records she searched that paint
a portrait of a miserable woman with a self-destructive past who married Clarence Jordan in 1997 and immediately had twins,
a boy and a girl named Josh and Brenda.
A Cinderella story, it must have seemed to those around her when at the age of twenty
she was hired by Dr.
Jordan’s practice as a receptionist, and apparently this is how they met.
Maybe he thought he could save
her, and for a while she must have stabilized, her earlier years ones of chaos and trouble, pursued by collection agencies
as she cashed bad checks and got drunk in public, moving from one low-rent apartment to the next every six or twelve months.

“Kings Bay?”
Colin assumes Gabe Mullery is affiliated with the Atlantic Fleet’s home port for Trident II submarines armed
with nuclear weapons, less than a hundred miles from here.

“A diving medical officer in the reserves,” he says.
“But my day job is here at Regional Hospital.
Emergency medicine.”

Another doctor in the house, I think, and I hope he’s happier than Clarence Jordan must have been, trying to control his wife
and do so discreetly, possibly relying on his publicized friendship with the chairman of the news service that owned a number
of newspapers and television and radio stations back then, someone Dr.
Jordan served with on committees and charitable foundations
and who had the ability to manipulate what might end up in the press.

The media didn’t report a word about Mrs.
Jordan’s recurrence of bad behavior, the series of sad and humiliating events beginning
in January of 2001 when she was arrested for shoplifting after hiding an expensive dress under her clothes and neglecting
to remove the security tag.
A cry for attention, for help, but possibly more
treacherous than that, it went through my mind, as I was going through Lucy’s e-mail.

Mrs.
Jordan was striking out in a way that might actually punish a husband who neglected her and had rigid expectations about
his wife’s role and behavior, and she retaliated by targeting his pride, his image, his impossibly high standards.
Not even
two months after her shoplifting incident at Oglethorpe Mall, she ran her car into a tree and was charged with DUI, and four
months after that in July, she called the police, intoxicated and belligerent, claiming the house had been burglarized.
Detectives
responded, and in her statement she claimed the housekeeper had stolen gold coins worth at least two hundred thousand dollars
that were kept hidden under insulation in the attic.
The housekeeper was never charged, the accusation dismissed after Dr.
Jordan informed police he’d recently relocated the gold, an investment he’d had for years.
It was safely inside the house,
and nothing was missing.

But what became of the gold between July and January 6?
Dr.
Jordan could have sold it, I suppose, although the price was at
an all-time low throughout 2001, averaging less than three hundred dollars an ounce, Lucy pointed out, and it seems odd to
think he wouldn’t have waited for the value to go up, especially if he’d had the gold for a while.
There’s no evidence he
needed money.
His 2001 tax return showed earnings and dividends on investments totaling more than a million dollars.
Whatever
became of the gold, it seems a fact it was gone after the murders.
There’s no reference to stolen property, and investigative
reports indicate that jewelry and the family silver didn’t appear to have been touched.

Certainly Gloria Jordan didn’t end up with a small fortune in gold, since it likely was she who relocated it the last time,
likely the afternoon before her murder, and although I don’t think anyone will ever know exactly what happened, I do have
a theory based on the facts as I now know them.
I think she staged a burglary to explain the disappearance of what she herself
intended to steal, and then decided she wouldn’t have to share the loot with a coconspirator, or more than one, if she pretended
she couldn’t find it.
Her husband must have hidden the gold yet again, and she was dreadfully sorry but it wasn’t her fault.

I can only imagine what she might have said when her accomplice, or most likely two of them, showed up, but I believe Mrs.
Jordan was up against a force of evil far more brilliant and cruel than she could conjure up in her worst dreams.
I suspect
that on the early Sunday morning of January 6, she was forced to reveal the gold’s hiding place and perhaps while she was
in the garden near the old root cellar she received her first cut.
Possibly as a warning.
Or maybe the beginning of the attack,
and she fled back into the house, where she was killed, her body carried upstairs to be lewdly displayed in bed next to her
slain husband.

“So we’re looking around and it’s a great place, and I’m impressed, I admit,” Gabe Mullery is saying to us.
“And an amazingly
good price, and then the Realtor went into detail about what had happened here in 2002, and no wonder it was a deal.
I wasn’t
thrilled about the association or the karma or whatever you might want to call it, but I’m not a superstitious person.
I don’t
believe in ghosts.
What I have come to believe in is tourists, in idiots that have the sense and
manners of pigeons, and I don’t want a carnival atmosphere now that her execution’s back on.”