Red Mist

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Well, if someone borrowed Lola’s clothes so this person could commit multiple murders, why wasn’t that person’s DNA recovered from the pants, sweater, the Windbreaker?” This is Marino’s way of confirming that neither Dawn Kincaid’s nor any other individual’s DNA was recovered from Lola’s clothing.

  “Washing with hot soapy water could have eradicated another donor’s DNA if we’re talking sweat and skin cells. Maybe not blood, but it depends on how much, and if it was a small amount, perhaps from being scratched by a child, the blood might have been washed off in the shower,” I contemplate out loud. “Especially in early 2002, when the testing wasn’t nearly as sensitive as it is today. Did anybody look at Lola Daggette’s shoes?”

  “What shoes are you talking about?”

  “She must have had shoes. Were they issued by Liberty House?”

  “I don’t think the wards were issued shoes. Only jeans and denim shirts. But I really don’t know,” Marino answers me, as he continues looking at Mandy O’Toole, who isn’t looking at him. “Nobody’s ever said anything about shoes that I’m aware of.”

  “Someone should have looked for blood on her shoes. I see nothing here to indicate Lola was cleaning a pair of shoes in the shower. Or undergarments, for that matter. If clothing is saturated, the blood soaks through onto panties, undershirts, bras, socks. But she was washing only the pants, sweater, and jacket.”

  “You and shoes,” Marino says.

  “Because they’re really important.”

  Shoes are happy to tell me where a person’s feet were at the time of a terminal event. At a homicide scene. On the brake pedal or accelerator. On a dusty windowsill or balcony before the person jumped or was pushed or fell. On the body of a victim who was stomped and kicked, or in one case I had, in wet cement when a murderer fled the scene through a construction site. Shoes, boots, sandals, all types of footwear have tread patterns and unique flaws that leave their mark, and they deposit evidence and carry it away.

  “Whoever killed the Jordans would have had blood on his or her shoes,” I say. “Even if it was trace amounts, something would have been there.”

  “Like I said, I haven’t heard anything about shoes.”

  “Unless Colin has them in the lab, stored with the other evidence, it’s too late now,” I reply, as I look through photographs included in Lola Daggette’s bid for clemency last fall.

  The first few pages are portraits and candid shots intended to humanize the victims and inflame the governor of Georgia, Zebulon Manfred, who ultimately denied clemency to Lola Daggette. He is quoted in a photocopied newspaper article included in the transcript as stating that efforts to spare her life are based on evidence already heard and rejected by a jury of her peers and the appeals courts. “We can ruminate about this heartless act of human depravity until the cows come home,” he said in a public statement, “and it all comes back to the same horror acted out by Lola Daggette, who was in a mood to massacre an entire family on the early Sunday morning of January sixth, 2002. And she did. With no motive whatsoever except that she felt like it.”

  I can only imagine the governor’s outrage when he looked at a studio portrait of the Jordan family during the last Christmas season of their lives, just weeks before their brutal deaths. Clarence Jordan, with his shy smile and kind gray eyes, was dressed festively in a dark green suit and tartan plaid vest, his wife, Gloria, sitting next to him, a plain-looking young woman with dark brown hair parted down the middle, demure in green velvet and ruffles. Their five-year-old twins are seated on either side of their parents, towheads with rosy cheeks and big blue eyes, Josh dressed exactly like his father, Brenda like her mother. There are more photos, and I flip through them, getting the point all too well as they draw whoever is looking at them deeper into the nightmare that begins on page seventeen of the transcript.

  A child’s bloody bare arm dangles off a blood-soaked bed. The wallpaper is Winnie-the-Pooh and the sheets have a western pattern of lassos, cowboy hats, and cacti, all of it spattered with elongated drops of cast-off blood, and drips and large dark stains, and what appear to me to be wipe marks. Dawn Kincaid enters my mind without my inviting her, and I see her inside that dark bedroom, pausing during her frenzied attack, using the sheets and bedspread to clean off her hands and the weapon. I feel her lust and rage and hear her breathing hard and fast as her heart hammers and she stabs and slashes, and I wonder why she would slaughter two children, two five-year-olds.

  Twins, a boy and a girl who looked almost exactly alike at that young age, pretty blue-eyed blonds. Had she met them before? Had she watched them in the past, perhaps while gathering intelligence about their house and the family’s habits? How did she know about Josh and Brenda and whose room they were in, or did she? What is the psychology of her going after them in what I interpret as an enraged attack? Who was she really killing when she went after them while they were asleep in their own beds?

  It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t needed or expeditious or motivated by a certain goal, such as stealing. Maybe the parents, but not young children who couldn’t defend themselves and possibly couldn’t identify anyone. There could have been no sensible reason, only a highly personalized driving force, and I feel Dawn Kincaid’s hatefulness, her victims’ blood the language of a fury that she reveled in. I believe she didn’t go after them randomly or impulsively any more than her coming after me was a whim. It was thought out. She intended to leave the entire Jordan family dead. Including the children. Why?

  Taking from them what she never had,it enters my mind. Robbing them of their safe home and parents who held them and took care of them and didn’t give them away, and I try not to fill the scene in my mind with images of her, of the woman who would come after me nine years later. Blood on the bedroom floor becomes blood inside my garage, and I feel the warm mist on my face. I smell its iron smell. I taste its iron-salty taste, and I will Dawn Kincaid to leave me. I force her out of my thoughts and banish her from my psyche as I follow the bloody trail into the hallway.

  Partial footwear prints, drips, smears, and streaks along the fir wood floor. Small handprints and swipes made by bloody clothing and bloody hair low on the white plaster wall at the level of the banister, and then a pinpoint constellation, as if the person was struck, and larger drops in an arterial pattern that spattered and ran down the white wall, a fatal injury that could not be survived longer than several minutes. The carotid was severed or partially severed, probably from behind, the killer in pursuit, and then the arterial spatters are gone, as if evaporated. More drips and a confusion of patterns on the stairs leading to a large puddle beginning to coagulate under a small body curled in a fetal position in the entryway, near the front door. Tousled blond hair and pink SpongeBob pajamas.

  The kitchen has a black-and-white tile floor that looks like a checkerboard with bloody partial footwear prints, and in the white sink is a residue of blood and two bloody dish towels wadded up. On the counter is a fine china plate, and on it a half-eaten sandwich, bloody smudges and smears everywhere, and nearby a block of yellow cheese and a packet of boiled ham that is opened. A close-up of a knife handle reveals what looks like more smudges of blood, and I’m aware of Marino getting out of his chair. I’m aware of a rapid high-pitched pulsing.

  White bread, jars of mustard and mayonnaise left out, and two empty bottles of Sam Adams, and next the guest bath, blood drips and footwear prints all over gray marble. Formal peach linen hand towels, bloody and bunched up by the sink, a bottle of lavender-scented hand soap turned on its side, bloody fingerprints visible on it. A bar of soap sits in a puddle of bloody water in a dish shaped like a shell, and then the toilet that wasn’t flushed, and I shuffle through documents, looking for reports from the fingerprints examination. Lab reports, where are they? Did Colin include them?

  I find them. Fingerprint analysis reports issued by the GBI. The bloody prints on the bottle of hand soap and a kitchen knife were from the same individual but were never identified. The
re was no hit in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, but there should have been when Dawn Kincaid’s fingerprints were taken after her arrest nine years later, this past February. The unidentified prints from the bottle of hand soap and the knife handle in the Jordan case should still be in the IAFIS database, so why wasn’t there a hit when Dawn’s prints were entered? Two different DNA labs have linked her to the murders, but the prints aren’t hers?

  “Something’s not right about all this,” I mutter, as I flip through more pages, looking at more photographs.

  A narrow staircase at the back of the house and terra-cotta tile flooring in a glassed-in sunporch, and blood droplets and a scale for measurement. A labeled white plastic six-inch ruler was placed next to each dark stain, seven close-up photographs of droplets spaced out along the brick-colored tile flooring, the drops round with minimally scalloped edges, each more than a millimeter in diameter. Low- to medium-velocity impact spatter with an angle of approximately ninety degrees, each drop surrounded by much tinier ones. The blood broke apart upon impact because the surface of the floor is smooth, flat, and hard.

  I follow the blood outside into the yard, into a garden planted in the footprint of what appears to be an outbuilding from an earlier century, crumbled stone walls exposed and incorporated into the landscaping, and a caved-in area of earth filled in with plantings, what is left of a root cellar, it occurs to me. Statuary is graying, some of it tinted green with mildew, an Apollo planter, an angel holding a bouquet, a boy with a lantern, and a girl with a bird. Dried bloody droplets darkly speckle blades of grass and the leaves of japonicas, tea olives, and English boxwoods, then more dark droplets, these closer together and angled on rockery, what might be a rock garden for flowers in the spring. I’m careful with my conclusions. I’m careful not to read too much into what I’m seeing.

  More than a few bloodstains are required to establish a pattern, but this isn’t cast-off blood. It isn’t back or forward spatter. It wasn’t tracked into the sunporch or out into the yard and garden by bloody footwear. I don’t believe it dripped from bloody clothing or from a bloody weapon or that an assailant with scratches from a child’s fingernails bled this much. The seven droplets on the terra-cotta tile floor are round and some eighteen inches apart, and one of them is smeared as if it might have been stepped on.

  I envision someone dripping blood as he or she walks through the sunporch, heading for the back door that leads out to the yard, and into the garden, or maybe the person headed the other way. Maybe someone bleeding was walking into the house, not out of it, and there is no reference to this important evidence in anything I’ve seen so far. Jaime didn’t mention it last night. Marino hasn’t mentioned it, and suddenly I’m aware of people talking. I look up and focus on where I am. Marino is standing in the open doorway with Mandy O’Toole. Behind them, Colin Dengate has a peculiar look on his face as he holds his phone to his ear.

  “… Are they hearing you? Because I don’t want you to keep calling me about it so I have to repeat myself. Tell them for me I don’t give a shit what they want to do. They’re not to touch a damn thing … Well, hello? Exactly. You don’t know that one of them, one of the guards didn’t … We always have to include that into the equation, not to mention they don’t know crap about how to work a scene,” Colin is saying, and he must be talking to GBI investigator Sammy Chang, whose ringtone is a Star TrekTricorder, the strange electronic pulsing I heard minutes ago.

  “Okay, good … Sure, yes. Within the hour … Yes, she told me that.” Colin’s eyes fix on me as if I’m the person who might have told him whatever he refers to. “I understand. I’m going to ask her … And no. For the record, for the third time, the warden’s not to set foot in there,” he says, as I get out of my chair.

  Colin ends the call and says to me, “Kathleen Lawler. I think you should come. Since you were there, it might be helpful.”

  “Since I was where?” But I know.

  He turns to Mandy O’Toole. “Get my gear and see if Dr. Gillan can take care of the motor-vehicle fatality coming in. Maybe you can give him a hand. The victim’s poor mother has been waiting in the lobby all damn morning, so maybe you can check on her while you’re at it. I was going to but can’t now. See if she needs water, a soda or something. Damn state trooper told her to come straight here to ID him. Well, based on what I’ve been told, he sure as hell isn’t viewable.”

  19

  Colin Dengate shifts his old Land Rover into fourth gear, and the big engine roars as if it’s ravenous. We speed along a narrow strip of pavement hidden by impenetrable woods, the road bending sharply through shaded pines and straightening out into an open flat terrain of apartment buildings and blazing sun, the Coastal Regional Crime Laboratory as hidden from civilization as the Bat Cave.

  Hot wind buffets the olive-green canvas roof, making a loud drumming sound as Colin passes along information that is suspiciously detailed when one considers that Kathleen Lawler was alone the final hours of her life. While other inmates might have heard her, they couldn’t see her when she died inside her cell, most likely from a heart attack, Officer M. P. Macon suggested to Investigator Sammy Chang before Chang could get there. By the time Chang was called, the prison had Kathleen’s death figured out, one of those sad random events probably related to Lowcountry summer weather. Heat stroke. A heart attack. High cholesterol. Kathleen never had taken care of herself worth shit, Chang was told.

  According to Officer Macon, Kathleen reported nothing unusual earlier in the day, wasn’t ill or out of sorts when her breakfast tray of powdered eggs, grits, white toast, an orange, and a half pint of milk was passed through the drawer of her cell door at five-forty a.m. In fact, she seemed cheerful and chatty, reported the corrections officer who delivered her meal and later was questioned by Officer Macon.

  “He told Sammy that she was asking what it would take to get a Texas omelet with hash browns. She was joking around,” Colin says. “Apparently of late she’d become more obsessed than usual with food, and it’s Sammy’s impression from what’s been said to him that she might have been assuming she wasn’t going to be at the GPFW much longer. Maybe she was fantasizing about her favorite things to eat because she was anticipating having whatever she wanted, and I’ve seen this syndrome before. People block out what they’ve been deprived of until they believe it’s within their reach. Then that’s all they think about. Food. Sex. Alcohol. Drugs.”

  “Probably all of the above, in her case,” Marino’s loud voice sounds from the backseat.

  “I think Kathleen was under the impression a deal was in the works if she was cooperative,” I say to Colin, as I write a text-message to Benton. “Her sentence was going to be reduced and she was on her way back to the free world.”

  I explain to Benton that he and Lucy might not be able to reach us when they land in Savannah, that I’m on my way to a death scene, and I tell him whose. I ask him to let me know as soon as possible if there is anything new with Dawn Kincaid and her alleged asthma attack.

  “Has anyone bothered to mention to Jaime Berger that she has shit for clout with prosecutors and judges around here?” Colin looks in the rearview mirror, directing this to Marino.

  “I can’t hear too good in this wind tunnel,” he answers loudly.

  “Well, I don’t think you want the windows up,” Colin yells.

  “Whether Jaime has clout or not around here, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of organized protest, especially these days, because of the Internet,” I remind Colin of the damage Jaime Berger can do. “She’s perfectly capable of mounting a campaign of social and political pressure, similar to what happened in Mississippi recently when civil- and human-rights groups pressured the governor into suspending the sentences of those two sisters who’d gotten life sentences for robbery.”

  “Damn ridiculous,” Colin says in disgust. “Who the hell gets life for robbery?”

  “I can’t hear a damn thing back here.” Marino is perched o
n the edge of the bench seat, leaning forward and sweating.

  “You need to buckle up,” I say over the hot wind rushing in through open windows, the engine loud and growling, as if the Land Rover wants to claw across a desert or up a rocky slope and is bored and restive with the tameness of a paved highway.

  We are making good time, on 204 East now, passing the Savannah Mall, heading toward Forest River and the Little Ogeechee, and marshland and endless miles of scrub trees. The sun is directly overhead, the glare as intense as a flashgun, blindingly bright as it beats down on the square nose of the white Land Rover and the windshields of other traffic.

  “My point,” I say to Colin, “is Jaime’s perfectly capable of going to the media and making Georgia look like a stronghold of bigoted barbarians. In fact, she’d enjoy it. And I doubt Tucker Ridley or Governor Manfred wants that.”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” Colin says. “It’s moot.”

  He’s right, it is, at least in Kathleen Lawler’s case. She won’t be getting a suspended sentence or even a reduced one, and she’ll never taste free-world food again.

  “At eight this morning she was escorted to a recreation cage for her hour of exercise,” Colin says, and he explains that he was told the one hour allowed for exercise is set early in the morning during the summer.

  Supposedly Kathleen walked inside the cage more slowly than usual, resting frequently as she complained about how hot it was. She was tired, and the humidity made it difficult to breathe, and when she was returned to her cell at a few minutes past nine she complained to other inmates that the heat had worn her out and she should have stayed inside. For the next two hours, Kathleen continued to complain on and off that she wasn’t feeling well. She was exhausted. She found it difficult to move, and she was having a hard time catching her breath.