Red Mist (45 page)

There will be no execution.
I will make sure of it.

“Damn shame it didn’t go down as planned, that the judge delayed it.
We want it over with so it will settle to the bottom,
out of sight, and be forgotten.
Hopefully someday people will stop asking for the nickel tour.”

I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure Lola Daggette never sees the death chamber, and maybe the day will come when she’ll
have nothing to fear.
Not Tara Grimm, not corrections officers at the GPFW, not
Payback,
as in paying the ultimate price, and maybe that ultimate price is one with the first name of Roberta.
Anything can be a poison
if you have too much of it, even water, General Briggs said, and who would know more about medications and microbes and their
fatal possibilities than a pharmacist, an evil alchemist who turns a drug meant to heal into a potion of suffering and death.

“Tell me what you want to look at,” Gabe Mullery says to me.
“I don’t know if I can help you or not.
Another owner lived here
before we bought the place, and I really don’t know the details of what it was like when those people were killed.”

The kitchen is unrecognizable, completely renovated, with new cabinets and modern stainless-steel appliances and a black granite
tile floor.
The door leading outside is solid with no panes of glass, just as Jaime said, and I wonder how she knew, but I
have a guess.
She wouldn’t have hesitated to walk here and insert herself, possibly feigning she was a tourist wandering around,
or she might have boldly said who she was and why she was interested.
I notice the laptop
computer on an area of the counter where there is no place to sit and work.
There is a wireless keypad on top of a table and
contacts in every window I see, an upgraded security system that might include cameras.

“Well, you’re smart to have a good security system,” I remark to Gabe Mullery.
“Considering the curiosity people have about
this place.”

“Yeah, it’s called a Browning nine-mil.
That’s my security system.”
He grins.
“My wife’s into all the gadgets, glass breaks,
motion sensors, video cameras, the nerdy one.
Always worrying people will think we got drugs in here.”

“Two urban myths,” Colin says.
“Doctors keep drugs in the house and make a lot of money.”

“Well, I am gone all the time, and she does sell drugs for a living.”
He opens the kitchen door.
“Another urban myth that
pharmacists keep a stash at home,” he says, as we go down stone steps to a hyphen of flagstones and grass, and I hear music
on the sunporch, which is set up as a gym and probably where Gabe Mullery was when we showed up.
Before that, he probably
was cutting the grass.

I recognize the red terra-cotta tile floor behind glass where there’s a bench and racks of free weights, and leaning against
the back of the house are two bicycles with small wheels and hinged aluminum frames, one red, with the seat and handlebar
raised high, the other one silver and for someone shorter.
Next to them are a lawnmower, a rake, and bags of clippings.

“I guess the best thing is to let you wander around,” Mullery says, and I can tell by his demeanor he’s not the least bit
wary of us and has no idea that maybe he should be.
“Gardening’s not my thing.
This is Robbi’s domain,” he says, as if he’s not particularly interested in it, and nothing that once was there is left.

The tea olives and original shrubbery, the statuary, the rockery, the crumbling walls, have been replaced by a limestone terrace
built directly over what I suspect was once a root cellar, and behind the terrace is a small outbuilding painted pale yellow
with a shingled mansard roof and a vent rising from it that looks industrial, and under the eaves are bullet cameras.
So far
I’ve counted three, and tucked behind boxwoods are an HVAC and a small backup generator, and storm shutters cover the windows
as if Gabe Mullery’s wife is expecting a hurricane and a power outage and is worried about trespassing and spying.
The building
is blocked on three sides by privacy screens, white-painted lattices climbing with crimson glory vine and firethorn.

“What sort of work does Robbi do in her office back here?”
I ask her husband what would be a normal question under normal
circumstances.

“Getting her Ph.D.
in pharmaceutical chemistry.
Online studies, writing her dissertation.”
He would never volunteer any of
this if he weren’t an innocent, a big, strong warrior who doesn’t know he lives with the enemy.

“Honey?
Who’s here?”
A woman’s voice, and she appears around the side of the house, walking calmly but with purpose, not toward
her husband but toward me.

In bone-colored linen slacks and a fuchsia blouse with her hair pulled back, she’s not Dawn Kincaid, but she could be if Dawn
wasn’t brain-dead in Boston and was more filled out, was very fit.
I notice the baguette ring and the big black watch and
most of all, her
face.
I see Jack Fielding in her eyes and nose, and the shape of her mouth.

“Hello?”
the woman says to her husband as she stares at me.
“You didn’t tell me we had company.”

“They’re medical examiners and wanted to look around because of the murders,” says her handsome husband, who’s a busy doctor
in the Naval Reserves and is gone a lot, leaving her alone to do what she wants.
“Why home so early?”

“Some big ole bad-boy cop came in,” she says to him while she looks at me.
“Asking a lot of strange questions.”

“Asking you?”

“Asking about me.
I was in back but could hear the whole thing, and I thought it was annoying.”
She looks at me with Jack
Fielding’s eyes.
“He was buying an Ambu bag and wanted to know if we had a defibrillator, was chatting up a storm with Herb,
then the two of them were outside smoking.
I decided to leave.”

“Herb’s a moron.”

“A lot of loose grass clippings,” she complains to him, but she doesn’t look around.
She looks at me.
“You know how much I
don’t like that.
Please make sure you rake the rest of them up.
I don’t care if they’re good fertilizer.”

“Hadn’t finished.
Wasn’t expecting you home so soon.
I think it’s time to hire a yard man.”

“Why don’t you get us some water and some of those cookies I baked.
And I’ll give our visitors a tour.”

“Colin?
While I look at the garden, what’s left of it, maybe you can give Benton a message for me,” I say to him, but I don’t
take my eyes off her, and I know Colin senses something is wrong.

I give him Benton’s cell phone number.

“Maybe you could let him know he and his colleagues really need to see what Robbi has done to her garden, converting the old
root cellar into a remarkably functional office, unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
Robbi for Roberta, let me guess,” I say to
Colin, as I look at her, and I can hear him on his phone.

“Yes, in the backyard,” Colin says quietly, but he doesn’t recite the address or where we are, and I suspect that Benton might
already be on the way.

“It’s exactly what I’d like to do at home, build an office in back that’s as secure as Fort Knox, an area where maybe gold
once was kept before it was stolen,” I say to Roberta Price’s face.
“With backup power and special ventilation, plenty of
privacy and security cameras I could monitor from my desk.
Or better yet, remotely.
Keeping an eye on who comes and goes.
If you don’t mind my husband and his colleagues dropping by,” I say to Roberta, as the kitchen door shuts, and I wonder if
Colin is armed.

“Price or Mullery?”
I ask her.
“You probably took your husband’s name, Mullery.
Dr.
and Mrs.
Mullery in a lovely historic
house that must hold special memories for you,” I tell her stonily, as I’m vaguely aware of a loud engine in the distance.

She steps closer to me and stops.
I see her anger seething because she’s finished and she knows it, and I again wonder if
Colin is armed and I wonder if she is, and while I’m wondering about all of this I’m worried most about the husband boiling
out of the house with his nine-millimeter.
If Colin points a gun at Roberta or tackles her to the ground, he very well might
end up beaten to death or shot, and I don’t want Colin shooting Gabe Mullery, either.

“When your husband comes out of the house,” I say to her, as Colin moves closer to us, “you need to tell him the police are
coming.
The FBI is on the way even as we speak.
You don’t want him getting hurt, and he’ll get hurt if you do anything rash.
Don’t run.
Don’t do anything, or he’ll get in the middle.
He won’t understand.”

“You won’t win.”
She slips her hand inside her shoulder bag, and her eyes are glassy.
She is breathing hard, as if she is
extremely agitated or about to attack, and the sound of the loud engine is close, a motorcycle, as her husband emerges from
around the side of the house, carrying bottles of water and a plate.

“Take your hand out of your bag.
Slowly,” I tell her, as the engine roars close and suddenly stops.
“Don’t do anything that
makes us do something.”

“Looks like we got more company.”
Her husband strides across a yard strewn with fresh grass cuttings, and he drops the bottles
and the plate as Roberta Price withdraws her hand from her purse and she’s holding a canister that is boot-shaped and white,
and a gunshot explodes near the house.

She takes one step and drops to the ground, blood streaming out of her head, an asthma inhaler nearby on the grass, and Lucy
is running across the yard, a pistol gripped in both hands as she shouts at Gabe Mullery not to move.

“Sit down nice and slow.”
Lucy keeps the pistol aimed at him as he stands in his backyard, shocked.

“I’ve got to help her,” he cries out.
“For God’s sake, let me help her!”

“Sit down!”
Lucy yells, as I hear car doors shut.
“Keep your hands where I can see them!”

T
he bell in City Hall’s gold-domed tower rings in slow, heavy clangs on a hazy Independence Day that won’t include fireworks
for some of us.
It’s Monday, and while the plan was to get out early for the long flight home, it’s already noon.

By the time we land at Hanscom Air Force Base west of Boston it will be eight or nine p.m., our delay not due to the weather
but to the winds of Marino’s moods, which are gusting in fits and starts and constantly changing direction.
He insisted on
returning his cargo van to Charleston, where he wants us to land en route, in case he decides to return home with us, because
he’s not sure, he said.
He might stay down here in the Lowcountry and do some fishing or thinking, and he might look for a
preowned johnboat or decide to
take a sabbatical, as he put it.
He might end up back in Massachusetts, it was hard to say, and as he deliberated over what
he should do with himself he discovered other ways to stall.

He needed more coffee.
He might make one last run for steak-and-egg biscuits he can’t get up north.
He should go to the gym.
He should return the rented motorcycle to the dealership so Lucy doesn’t have to do it.
She’s been through enough with all
the police and FBI interviews, all the red tape, as he put it, that goes with a shooting, and it’s a bad feeling to kill someone
and realize the person wasn’t reaching for a weapon but a wallet or driver’s license or an inhaler.
Even when the dirtbag
deserved it, you’d rather it didn’t go down like that, because someone’s always going to question your judgment, he went on
and on, and that’s what stresses you out more than having the person dead, if you’re honest about it.
He didn’t want Lucy
on a motorcycle right now, and began worrying about her flying because of what he imagines is her state of mind.

Lucy is fine.
It’s Marino who’s not.
He ran errand after errand, and when at last he was ready to set out for the two-hour
drive to Charleston, he decided he wanted all the provisions I’d bought, which can’t fit in the helicopter anyway, he pointed
out.
Not that I’d planned on hauling extra pots and pans and canned foods and a butane two-burner stovetop all the way back
to New England, but he insisted he have them.
He hasn’t had a chance to set up his new place in Charleston, he explained,
as he piled everything he could find into boxes he got from a liquor store, including open bags of chips and trail mix and
used containers and bottles of cleansers and hand-washing detergent, even a travel hair dryer he doesn’t need for
his bald head and a travel iron and ironing board he’ll never use on his synthetic blends.

He grabbed spices, and several almost-empty jars of olives, pickles, relishes, and fruit preserves, and a banana, condiments
and crackers, paper napkins, plastic silverware and plates, foil wrap, a stack of folded shopping bags.
Then he went from
room to room and gathered up the hotel toiletries as if he’s turned into a hoarder.

“Like those pickers or whatever they’re called on TV,” I decide.
“Digging through other people’s cast-offs and junk and never
throwing anything out.
This is a new compulsion.”

“Fear,” Benton says, a computer notebook in his lap, his phone on the table next to his chair.
“Afraid he might get rid of
something or lose sight of it and then he needs it.”

“Well, I’m texting him again.
No excuses, he’s coming home with us.
I don’t want him down here by himself when he’s not thinking
clearly and in the throes of some new compulsion.
We’re landing in Charleston, no matter what he says, and if need be, I’ll
go to his condo and haul him out of there.”

“Not many compulsions left for him to choose from,” Benton says, as he skims through electronic files.
“No booze, no cigarettes.
He doesn’t want to get fat, so he’s not going to turn to food, and he starts hoarding.
Sex is a better compulsion.
Relatively
inexpensive and requires no storage space.”
He opens another e-mail that I can tell from where I sit is from the FBI, possibly
an agent named Phil whom Benton was on the phone with a short while ago.

It has been a busy morning inside the living room of our hotel suite, our camp with its dramatic view of the river and the
port.
Since the sun came up, Benton and I have been preparing to return north while processing information that continues to be
gathered at what seems the speed of light.
I’m not accustomed to an investigation being worked like a war, with multiple attacks
on multiple fronts made by different branches of the military and law enforcement, all of it executed with a force and pace
that is dazzling.
But most cases I work aren’t a threat to national security and of interest to the president, and labs and
investigative teams have pulled full pitch, as Lucy put it.

So far information has been well contained and kept out of the news as the FBI and Homeland Security continue their relentless
quest to make sure that nothing Roberta Price was tampering with might have found its way into a military base exchange, on
a destroyer or airlifter loaded with troops, in a submarine armed with nuclear missiles, in the hands of soldiers in combat
or anywhere.
DNA and fingerprint analyses and comparisons have been confirmed, and it is a fact that Roberta Price and Dawn
Kincaid are different sides of the same evil, identical twins, or clones, as some investigators have been referring to siblings
who grew up without each other and then reunited to form a catalyst that created hideous technologies and caused untold numbers
of deaths.

“The fear of it,” I say.
“That’s what has Marino running in circles and out of town.
He sees death every day, but when it’s
cases you work, you are deluded into feeling you can control it or that if you understand it well enough, it won’t happen
to you.”

“Smoking that cigarette at Monck’s Pharmacy got too close for comfort,” Benton says, as his cell phone rings.

“After what he saw in the root cellar?
I guess so,” I agree.
“He certainly knows what could have happened.”

“I can give you a suggested approach,” Benton says to whoever’s just called.
“Based on the fact that this is someone who feels
completely justified.
She’s done the world a favor by getting rid of bad people.”

I recognize he’s talking about Tara Grimm, who’s been arrested but not yet charged with any crime.
The FBI is making deals,
willing to negotiate with her in exchange for information about others at the GPFW, such as Officer Macon, who might have
assisted her in meting out the punishment she decided certain inmates deserved, and doing so hand in glove with a diabolically
clever poisoner who needed to practice.

“You have to appeal to her truth,” Benton says over the phone.
“And her truth is she did nothing wrong.
Giving Barrie Lou
Rivers a last smoke with a cigarette that had a filter impregnated with … Yes, I would say it that directly, but couching
it in your understanding of why she wouldn’t think it was wrong….
Yes, a good way to put it.
About to be executed, was going
to die anyway, a merciful ending compared to what she did to all those people she chronically poisoned with arsenic.
Well,
right.
It wasn’t merciful, smoking something with botulinum toxin, a horrible way to die, but leave out that part.”

Benton finishes his coffee, listening, staring out at the river, and says, “Stick with what she wants to believe about herself.
Right, you hate bad people, too, and can understand the temptation to take justice into your own hands….
That’s the theory.
Maybe Tara
Grimm, whom you should refer to as Warden Grimm, to acknowledge her power … It’s always about power, you got it.
Maybe she
will offer it up, that it was a cigarette or the last meal, whatever, but all she did was ensure that Barrie Lou Rivers and
the others got what they deserved, had done unto them what they’d done to their victims, an eye for an eye with a little something
extra.
A twist of the knife for good measure.”

“I don’t know what’s going to give him insight about it,” I say when Benton gets off the phone, because as bad as Marino feels
about what happened to Jaime, it’s his nature for him to feel worse about what might have happened to him.

“He’s not exactly strong in the insight department,” Benton replies.
“He took a stupid chance.
It’s like drinking and getting
into a car and then driving on a highway that’s had a lot of accidents.
I hope Phil does what I said,” he then says, and Phil
is one of many agents I’ve met these past two days.
“Someone like that and you have to appeal to their belief in what they’ve
done.
Feed right into their narcissism.
They were doing the world a favor.”

“Yes, people who believe that.
Hitler, for example.”

“Except Tara Grimm wasn’t obvious,” Benton says.
“Came across as the great humanitarian who ran such an exemplary prison she
was held up as a model.
Job offers, officials showing up for tours.”

“Yes, I saw all the awards on her walls.”

“The day you were there,” he adds, “a group from a men’s prison in California had gotten the royal tour and were thinking
of hiring her as their first female warden.”

“Would be an irony if she ended up in Bravo Pod.
Maybe in Lola Daggette’s former cell,” I reply.

“I’ll pass it along,” Benton says drily.
“That and Lucy’s suggestion about Gabe Mullery being the next of kin who decides
to pull Dawn Kincaid’s plug.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I answer, although Gabe Mullery won’t be the one deciding to disconnect Dawn Kincaid’s
life support.

Apparently he’d never heard of her beyond a vague recollection of the name or a similar one that was in the news, relating
to murders in Massachusetts.
He knew his wife, Roberta Price, had been raised by a family in Atlanta that they sometimes saw
on the holidays, but he knew nothing about a sister.

“My guess is she’ll be transferred to a different facility,” I suppose.
“A ward of the state, kept alive on a ventilator until
the day comes she’s clinically dead.”

“More consideration than any of the victims got,” Benton says.
“That’s usually the case.
I just feel bad I didn’t listen to
Marino when he pointed out the elevated adrenaline and CO levels, and that smoking has been banned from prisons, so why might
Barrie Lou Rivers have had that, and I didn’t pay attention because I wasn’t interested at the time.
I was focused on something
else.
Maybe if I tell him that, he won’t be so hard on himself for not paying attention when he stopped by Monck’s Pharmacy
and bummed a cigarette.”

“Maybe you won’t be so hard on me for the same reason.”
Benton looks up and meets my eyes, because we’ve had a few cross words
about it.
“You told me something important, and I had my mind on something else.
Understandably.”

“I can make us another coffee,” I decide.

“May as well.
It’s not putting a dent.
I’m sorry I wasn’t nice.”

“So you’ve said.”
I get up from my chair as a container ship glides by our windows, stacked high and pushed by tugs.
“You
don’t have to be nice when it’s work.
Just take me seriously.
That’s all I ask.”

“I always take you seriously.
I was just taking other things more seriously at the time.”

“Jaime, and then he bums a cigarette that could have killed him, and yes, he’s traumatized,” I say, because I don’t want to
discuss Benton’s apologies anymore, and the kitchenette suddenly seems starkly bare and lonely, as if we’re already gone from
here.
“And he’s going to have to figure it out or he’ll do something else that’s not very smart, like drinking again or quitting
work completely and spending the rest of his days fishing with that charter boat captain friend of his.”

I place a hotel coffee pod in the hotel brewer, because Marino appropriated the Keurig I bought.

“Smoking outside the drugstore where a poisoner works,” I go on.
“Not that anyone was certain of that yet, but he was asking
questions about her.
He was thinking about it.”

“What did you tell him?
Don’t eat or drink anything unless we’re damn sure about it,” Benton says, as I carry in his coffee.

“Like the Tylenol scare.
When you realize what’s possible, it makes you not want to trust anything anymore.
Either that or
you go into denial.
After what we’ve seen, denial’s probably my choice.”
I return to the kitchenette as my thoughts return
to the former root cellar behind the lovely old house where Roberta Price helped murder an entire family when she was only
twenty-three.
“Or I’ll never eat or drink anything again or buy anything off the shelf,” I add.