Red Mist ks-19

by Patricia Cornwell

  “None that we know of, at any rate,” he says. “But we wouldn’t know. If someone gets extremely ill in prison and survives, we’re not going to find that out. We don’t get near-deaths reported to us.”

  He presses his fingers against an arm, a lower leg, and makes a note of moderate blanching. He opens the eyelids and with a plastic ruler measures the pupils.

  “Dilated equally, six millimeters,” he says. “Theoretically, with opiates you can see constricted pupils postmortem. I never have. Other drugs cause dilation, but dead pupils are dilated anyway.” He makes swift incisions with the scalpel from clavicle to clavicle and down the length of the body. “We’ll PERK her. Work her up for sexual assault. Work her up for every damn thing we can possibly think of.” He begins reflecting back tissue, guiding the scalpel with his right index finger and manipulating with his thumb as he holds forceps in his left hand.

  “Which cabinet?” I ask, and he points a bloody gloved finger.

  I find the Physical Evidence Recovery Kits and examine the body for sexual assault, swabbing every orifice and photographing, labeling each evidence bag.

  “I’m going to swab the inside of her nose and mouth for toxicology while I’m at it,” I let Colin know. “And submit hair.”

  He removes the breastplate of ribs and drops it in a plastic bucket by his feet as the morgue assistant, George, walks in with films. He attaches them to light boxes, and I walk over to have a look.

  “An old fracture of her right tibia. Nothing recent. Typical arthritic changes.” I move from one light box to the next, scanning bright white bones and the shadowy shapes of organs. “She does have a fair amount of food in her stomach. I wouldn’t expect that if she ate at five-forty this morning and died at around noon, or some six hours later. Delayed gastric emptying.” I return to the autopsy table and pick up a scalpel. “Something that’s causing the digestion basically to quit. Barrie Lou Rivers’s last meal was undigested. What about the other two?” I refer to Shania Plames and Rea Abernathy.

  “I vaguely recall. And yes. Undigested food. Certainly in Barrie Lou Rivers’s case, and I figured it was stress,” Colin says. “I’ve seen it before in executions. The inmate eats his last meal and it’s mostly undigested because of anxiety, of panic. Although go figure how any of them eat. If I was about to be executed, I don’t think I would. Just give me a bottle of bourbon and a box of Cuban cigars.”

  I cut a slit in the stomach and empty its contents into a carton. “Well, she certainly didn’t have what we were told was delivered to her cell early this morning.”

  “No eggs and grits?” Colin glances at what I’m looking at as he uses both hands to lift the liver out of the electronic scale’s stainless-steel bowl. He picks up a long-handled, wide-bladed autopsy knife.

  “Two hundred and eighty MLs, with pieces of what looks like chicken, pasta, something orange.”

  “Orange as in the fruit? Supposedly an orange was on the breakfast tray.” He cuts sections of liver as if he’s slicing bread.

  “Not that kind of orange,” I answer. “I’m not seeing evidence of fruit. Orange as in the color orange. Cheeselike, and the same color as the orange material I found under her thumbnail and on her trousers. Where might she have gotten chicken, pasta, and cheese this morning?”

  “Moderate fatty changes in the liver but not bad, considering. But about one out of three livers are normal in alcoholics,” he says, starting on the lungs. “You know what makes you an alcoholic. You drink more than your doctor. So they lied about what she ate this morning. Chicken and pasta? I got no idea.” He grabs a lung out of the scale and wipes his bloody hands on a towel. “If they somehow killed her, wouldn’t you think they’d be smart enough to know she’s going to end up here and we can tell what she ate?” He jots down weights on the clipboard.

  “Not everyone is that astute, especially if she really did eat between five-thirty and six this morning, when breakfast apparently is served in Bravo Pod.” I label a carton for toxicology. “The assumption might have been that her food would be digested by the time she died. Under normal circumstances, it would have been.”

  “She’s got some congestion, mild edema.” He slices sections of a lung. “Engorgement of alveolar capillaries, pink foamy fluid in the alveolar spaces. Typical of acute respiratory failure.”

  “And typical in heart failure. Hers is surprisingly good.” I begin cutting sections of her heart on the large cutting board. “Looks a little pale. No scarring. Vasculature widely patent. Valves, chordae tendineae, papillary muscles are without note,” I dictate as I dissect. “Ventricular wall thicknesses, chamber diameters are appropriate. Exiting great vessels widely patent. No lesions in the myocardium.”

  “I sure wouldn’t have guessed that.” Colin wipes his hands again and writes it down. “Nothing to make us think an MI, then. All roads keep leading to toxicology.”

  “Not seeing anything at all to indicate an MI. You can check for histologic evidence, the theory that cardiac myocytes divide after myocardial infarction. But generally if I don’t see anatomic evidence, I’m skeptical. And I’m seeing no evidence. Aorta has minimal atherosclerosis.” I look up as the doors to the autopsy room swing open. “Nothing whatsoever to indicate she died from anything cardiac-related, in my opinion.” I hear familiar voices as George walks back in.

  I recognize Benton’s calm, mellow baritone, and my mood is lifted by the sight of him in creased khaki pants and a green polo shirt, lean and handsome. His silver hair is slicked back, probably from sweating in a van with no air-conditioning, and it doesn’t matter that we are in a stark autopsy room that smells like death or that my white gown and gloves are bloody and Kathleen Lawler is opened up, her sectioned organs in a bucket on the floor beneath the table.

  I’m happy to see Benton, but our being in a morgue in the middle of an autopsy isn’t why I don’t want him close, and then Lucy appears, slender and foreboding in a black flight suit, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders and streaked rose gold in the overhead lights. Both of them stay where they are, on the other side of the room.

  “You need to stay over there,” I tell them anyway, and I sense from Benton’s demeanor that something is wrong. “We don’t know what she’s been exposed to, but a tox death is first on our list. Where’s Marino?”

  “He didn’t want to come in. Probably for the same reason you don’t want us getting close,” Benton says, and something absolutely is wrong.

  I can see it on his face, in the tense way he is standing and the imperviousness of his face. His eyes are locked on mine, and he looks quietly agitated, the way he gets when he is intensely worried.

  “Dawn Kincaid’s in a coma,” he then says.

  An alarm begins to sound at the back of my thoughts.

  “I got the latest update when we landed, and they’re saying that she’s brain-dead but they’re not entirely sure.” He projects his voice so Colin and I can hear him. “You know how that is. They’re never really sure even when they are. Whatever’s the cause, it’s very suspicious,” he adds, and I envision Jaime Berger’s face last night right before I left her apartment.

  She looked sleepy, and her pupils were dilated.

  “But all indications are that the oxygen was cut off from her brain for too long,” Benton says, as I hear Jaime’s speech before I left her around one a.m., talking thickly and slurring her words. “By the time they got to her in her cell, she’d stopped breathing, and while they’ve kept her alive, she’s gone.”

  I remember the take-out bag I carried into the apartment and where it came from, handed to me by a stranger, and I accepted it without thinking.

  I start to say, “I thought she was fine. Just an asthma attack—”

  “Limited information at the time, and this is being kept extremely hushed,” Benton interrupts. “The initial thought was an asthma attack, but very quickly her symptoms became severe, and attending staff at Butler tried a single dose of epinephrine, assuming anaphylaxis, bu
t there was no improvement. She couldn’t talk or breathe. There’s a concern she was poisoned somehow.”

  I envision the woman wearing the lighted helmet leaning her bicycle against the lamppost.

  “No one can begin to imagine how she could have gotten hold of anything poisonous at Butler,” Benton is saying from the other side of the room.

  A delivery woman handing me the bag of sushi, and I vaguely recall something felt wrong but I ignored the feeling because so much felt wrong yesterday. Everything that happened from the time Benton drove me to the airport in Boston yesterday, the entire day felt wrong, and then the rest of it plays out in my memory. Jaime walking into her apartment after Marino and I had been talking for the better part of an hour. She didn’t seem aware she had ordered sushi, and I didn’t question it.

  I put down the scalpel. “Has anybody talked to Jaime today? Because I haven’t, and she’s not called here.”

  Nobody answers.

  “She was supposed to stop by the lab today. I left her a message, and she’s not called back.” I pull off my hair cover and the disposable gown. “What about Marino? Does anybody know if he’s talked to her? He was going to call her.”

  “He tried while he was driving us here and didn’t get an answer,” Lucy says, and the look on her face indicates she realizes why I’m asking.

  I throw my soiled clothing into the trash and peel off my gloves. “Call nine-one-one, and maybe you can get hold of Sammy Chang, and he can meet us,” I tell Colin. “Make sure they send an ambulance.” I give him the address.

  25

  Two police cruisers and Sammy Chang’s white SUV are parked in front of the eight-story brick building, but there are no emergency lights or flashers, no sign of tragedy or disaster. I don’t hear sirens nearby or in the distance, just the sound of the cargo van’s big engine and its new windshield wipers thudding. It is stuffy and stifling with the windows up, the blower circulating hot, humid air, the rain so heavy it sounds like a car wash. Thunder rumbles and cracks, the old city shrouded in fog.

  Chang and two Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan officers are huddled out of the weather under the overhang at the top of the steps by the same front door that buzzed open for me as a delivery woman on a bicycle appeared seemingly out of nowhere like a phantom last night. Lucy, Benton, Marino, and I emerge from the van into the rain and wind, and I look around again for an ambulance, not seeing or hearing one, and I’m not happy, because I asked. As a precaution I want a rescue squad. To save time if there is time left and anything to save. Rain splashes on the steamy brick walkway, the sound of the downpour loud like clapping hands.

  “Police. Anybody home? Police!” an officer announces, as he holds the intercom button. “Yeah, she’s not answering.” He steps back and looks around as rain falls harder. “We need to figure out another way. Every damn day now.” He looks up at the moiling dark sky and billowing curtains of water. “As usual, left my slicker in the car.”

  “It won’t last long. Will be over by the time we come back out,” the other officer says.

  “Well, I hope we don’t get hail. I’ve already had one car messed up that way. Looked like someone went after it with a high-heel shoe.”

  “What’s a New York prosecutor doing down here anyway? She on vacation? A lot of permanent residents in this building, but they leave in the summer, some of them renting their places by the week. She here short-term or what?”

  “Did anybody call for an ambulance?” I ask loudly, as wind rocks giant live oak trees and Spanish moss whips like gray swags, like frayed dirty rags. “It would be a good idea to have an ambulance here,” I add, as the two officers and Chang watch the four of us roll up on them with the urgency of the storm that is thundering closer, almost overhead, the hard rain sizzling on the walkway and the street and pouring off the gabled overhang.

  “I’m wondering if there’s a leasing office,” one of the officers says. “They’ll have a key.”

  “Not one in this building, I don’t think.”

  “Most of these older places don’t have one on site,” Chang says. “Or we can try some of the neighbors, maybe …”

  Then Marino is pushing past everyone, almost shoving the uniformed officers out of the way, keys in hand.

  “Whoa. Easy, partner. Who are you?”

  I’m distractedly aware of Chang explaining who we are and why we’re here as Marino unlocks the door, and I’m vaguely mindful of my sopping-wet black field clothes and boots. I comb back my dripping hair with my fingers as I hear FBIand Bostonand chief ME working with Dr. Dengatewhile all of us head to the elevator, Lucy close behind me, her hand pressing against my back, pushing me and hanging on, and I feel what’s in her touch. I feel the desperation in the pressure of her hand flat against my back, a gesture I’ve not felt in a very long time, what she used to do when she was a little girl, when she was being protective or was scared, when she didn’t want to get separated from me in a crowd or for me to leave her.

  I’ve told Lucy everything will be okay, because it will be somehow, but I don’t believe it will be okay the way we hope, the way we wish, the way it should be in a perfect world. We don’t know anything, I’ve reminded my niece, even though I have no hope. I just don’t feel it. Jaime isn’t answering her cell phone or apartment phone or e-mails or text messages. We haven’t heard from her since Marino and I left her at around one o’clock this morning, but there could be a logical explanation, I’ve said to Lucy. While we have to take every action possible, that doesn’t mean we are assuming the worst, I’ve reassured her repeatedly.

  But I am assuming the worst. What I’m experiencing is painfully familiar, like a sad old friend, a grim companion who has been a depressing leitmotif on my life’s journey, and my response is a feeling I know all too well, a sinking, a solidification, like concrete setting, like something settling heavily into a deep darkness, a bottomless lightless space, out of reach and over. It’s what I sense right before I walk into a place where death quietly and finally waits for me to tend to it as only I can. I don’t know what is going through Lucy’s mind. Not this same feeling or premonition I’m having but something confusing and contradictory and volatile.

  During the twenty-minute ride here she was logical and held together, but she is pale as if she is sick, and she looks both terrified and angry. I see the shadings and flares of her emotions in her intense green eyes, and I heard her internal chaos in a comment she made during the drive. She said that the last time she talked to Jaime was six months ago when Lucy accused her of getting into something for the wrong reason. Getting into what?I asked. Getting into defending people and saving them by turning their lies into truth if that’s what it takes, because that’s what she’s doing to herself. It’s what she’s comfortable with, Lucy said. It’s as if Jaime managed to climb up a big mountain of truth only to fall over the other side of it,Lucy said in the loud, hot van as the rain began, and her voice was double-edged with fear and rage. I warned her because I could see it so plainly,she said. I told her exactly what she was doing, and she did it anyway.

  “You go ahead,” Benton is saying to Marino.

  She kept pushing it to the next dangerous level,Lucy said as we drove into the storm, her voice trembling slightly as if she was out of breath. Why did she have to do this? Why!

  “She been having problems or something?” one of the cops asks Marino. “Personal problems, financial trouble, anything like that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Bet she just went out somewhere, maybe sightseeing, and didn’t tell anyone.”

  “That’s not her,” Lucy says. “No fucking way.”

  “And left her phone or the battery’s dead. Know how many times that happens around here?”

  “She doesn’t fucking sightsee,” Lucy says behind my back. Marino wipes his wet face on his sleeve, his eyes darting around, the way he looks when he’s extremely upset beneath his imperviousness, his rudeness. The elevator doors slide open, and all of us crowd inside
except Benton and Lucy, as the police keep offering possibilities, trying to talk us out of our growing sense of urgency when they have no reason to talk us out of a damn thing.

  “She’s probably fine. I see it all the time. Someone visits from out of town, and if you don’t hear from them? People get worried.”

  They are beat cops, and this is really nothing more than what’s known on the street as a welfare check, maybe a more dramatic one than usual, with a bigger, more official posse showing up, but a welfare check nonetheless. The police do them daily, especially this time of year, when it’s the height of tourist season, vacation time, and the schools are out. Someone calls 911 and insists the police check on the welfare of a friend, a family member who isn’t answering the phone or hasn’t been heard from for a while. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it’s nothing. In the one case when it’s something, it isn’t tragic. Rarely does it turn out that the person is dead.

  “I’m going with you,” Lucy says to me.

  “I need to go in first.”

  “I have to go with you.”

  “Not now.”

  “I have to,” Lucy insists, and Benton puts his arm around her, pulling her close to him in what’s more than a comforting hug. He’ll make sure she doesn’t bolt for the stairs and try to force her way inside the apartment.

  “I’ll call as soon as I’m in,” I promise Lucy in the narrowing space of the closing doors, and they shut completely and she is gone, and the ache inside my chest is indescribably awful.

  The elevator of gleaming old wood and polished brass lurches as it lifts, and I explain to the police that no one has heard from Jaime Berger and she didn’t come to Savannah to sightsee. She’s not here on vacation. It may be nothing, and I certainly hope it’s nothing. But it’s out of character for her, and she was expected to show up at some point at Dr. Dengate’s office today, and she hasn’t appeared and hasn’t called. An ambulance should have been requested, and it would be a good idea to call for one now, and all the while I’m saying this I realize it’s repetitive, it’s perseverative, and the officers, both of them young, have their own theory about what is going on.