Red Mist

by Patricia Cornwell

  She worried that breakfast hadn’t agreed with her and she shouldn’t have been walking around in the heat and humidity that was bad enough to kill a horse, as she reportedly put it. At around noon she said she was having chest pains and hoped she wasn’t having a heart attack, and then Kathleen wasn’t talking anymore and inmates in other cells nearby began shouting for help. Kathleen’s cell door was unlocked at approximately twelve-fifteen. She was discovered slumped over on her bed and could not be resuscitated.

  “I agree it’s strange she said what she did to you,” Colin remarks, weaving around traffic as if responding to a scene where it’s not too late to save someone. “But there’s no way an inmate on death row could have gotten to her.”

  He’s referring to Kathleen Lawler’s claim that she was moved to Bravo Pod because of Lola Daggette and that Kathleen was afraid of her.

  “I’m simply repeating what she told me,” I reply. “I didn’t necessarily take her seriously at the time. I didn’t see how it was possible for Lola Daggette to, quote, ‘get’ her, but Kathleen seemed to believe Lola intended to harm her.”

  “Bizarre timing, and I’ve certainly seen my share of it,” Colin says. “Cases where the decedent had some sort of premonition or prediction that didn’t make sense to anybody. Then next thing you know, boop. The person’s dead.”

  Certainly I’ve had family members tell me that their loved one had a dream or a feeling that presaged his or her death. Something told the person not to get on the plane or into the car or not to take a certain exit or go hunting that day or out for a hike or a run. It’s nothing new to hear such stories or even to be told that a victim issued warnings and instructions about an imminent violent end and who would be to blame. But I can’t get Kathleen Lawler’s comments out of my head or push aside my suspicion that I’m not the only one who heard them.

  If our conversation was covertly recorded, then there are others who are privy to Kathleen’s complaints about how outrageous and unfair it was to move her to a cell where danger was directly overhead, as she described it not even twenty-four hours ago.

  “She also commented on the isolation of Bravo Pod and that the guards could do something bad to her and there would be no one to witness it,” I tell Colin. “She worried that by being moved into segregation she’d been made vulnerable. She seemed sincere, not necessarily rational but as if she believed it. In other words, I didn’t get the sense she was saying it for effect.”

  “That’s the problem with inmates, especially those who’ve spent most of their lives locked up. They’re believable. They’re so manipulative it’s not manipulation anymore, at least not to them,” Colin says. “And they’re always saying someone’s going to get them, mistreat them, hurt them, kill them. And of course, they’re not guilty and don’t deserve to be in prison.”

  When we turn off Dean Forest Road, passing the same strip mall where I used a pay phone the day before, I ask about the blood droplets in the photographs I was in the midst of reviewing when Sammy Chang called. Is either Colin or Marino aware there was blood in the Jordans’ sunporch, in their backyard and their garden? Someone was bleeding, and it’s possible this person was leaving the house, perhaps exiting the property through the garden and a stand of trees that led to East Liberty Street. Or perhaps the person was injured in the backyard and dripped blood while returning to the house. Blood that wasn’t cleaned up, I add, which makes me wonder if it was left at the time of the murders.

  “A steady drip,” I explain. “Someone bleeding from an upright position while moving, possibly walking in or out of the house. For example, if someone cut his or her hand and was holding it up. Or a cut to the head or a nosebleed.”

  “It’s curious you’d mention a cut hand,” Colin replies.

  “I don’t think I know about this.” Marino is loud in my ear again.

  “I would imagine the bloodstains I’m talking about were swabbed for DNA,” I add.

  “I don’t know about blood on a porch or in the yard,” Marino says. “I don’t think Jaime’s got those photos.”

  “Off the record?” Colin says, as we retrace my steps from the day before, the GPFW minutes away. “Because you need to get this from the actual DNA reports. But it’s never been believed those bloodstains have anything to do with the murders. You’re doing what I did back then—getting caught up in something that ended up meaning nothing.”

  “The photos were taken when the crime scene was processed,” I assume.

  “By Investigator Long, and are part of the case file but weren’t submitted as evidence during the trial,” Colin says. “They were determined to be unrelated. I don’t know if you saw the photos of Gloria Jordan.”

  “Not yet.”

  “When you do, you’ll note she has a cut on her left thumb, between the first and second knuckle. A fresh cut but more like a defensive injury, which baffled me at first because there weren’t any other defense injuries. She was stabbed in the neck, chest, and back twenty-seven times, and her throat was cut. She was killed in bed, and there’s no indication she struggled or even knew what was happening. As it turns out, the DNA of the blood drips on the porch was Gloria Jordan’s. When I found that out, it occurred to me that she might have cut her thumb earlier and it had nothing to do with her murder. This sort of thing happens more often than not these days. Old blood, sweat, saliva that has nothing to do with the crime you’re investigating. On clothing, inside vehicles, in a bathroom, on the stairs, on the driveway, on a computer keyboard.”

  “Was her cut thumb bloody when you examined the body?” Marino asks, as we drive past the salvage yard with its mangled heaps of wrecked cars and trucks.

  “Jesus. There was blood everywhere,” Colin answered. “Her hands were like this.” He takes his hands off the wheel and tucks them under his neck. “Maybe a reflex to move them to her throat after it was cut or to tuck up in a fetal position as she died. Or they might have been positioned like that by the killer, who I believe spent some time staging the bodies, making a mockery of them. Point is, her hands were covered with blood.”

  “Anything in the bathroom to make you think she might have cut herself earlier?” Marino asks.

  “No. But one of their neighbors said in a statement that Mrs. Jordan was out in the garden the afternoon before the murders, presumably doing winter pruning,” Colin continues, as I envision the dormant garden behind the Jordans’ house, the branch stubs, water sprouts, and sucker growth I noted in photographs I just saw.

  Gloria Jordan wasn’t much of a gardener, or she hadn’t gotten very far with her pruning when she cut her thumb and had to stop.

  “The guy next door who had a poodle?” Marino asks. “Lenny Casper, the neighbor who called the police the morning of the murders after noticing the busted glass in the kitchen door?”

  “Yes, I believe that’s the name. As I recall, he could see the Jordans’ backyard from several of his windows, and he noticed Mrs. Jordan working in her garden earlier that day, during the afternoon. The theory that makes the most sense is she cut herself while pruning. The blood drips were left by her when she came back in from the garden after she cut her thumb. My guess is she was holding her hand up and it dripped in the pattern you observed in the scene photographs. She walked back into the house and dripped blood on the floor of the sunporch, and a few drops were found in the hallway in the area of the guest bath.”

  “That’s possible,” I suppose dubiously.

  “It was a vital wound,” he adds. “You’ll see that in photos and the histology. She had a blood pressure, she had tissue response, when it was inflicted.”

  “Maybe so,” I reply, but I have my doubts. “Why no Band-Aid? No dressing of any kind?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was a little odd. But people do odd things. In fact, they do them more often than not.”

  “Maybe she wanted the air to get at it,” Marino shouts. “Some people do that.”

  “She was married to a doctor, who likely
knew that infection is the most common complication of an open wound,” I reply. “In fact, if she’d not had a tetanus shot in recent memory and cut herself on a garden tool, that should have been in the equation, too.”

  “There’s just no other logical explanation for the blood on the sunporch and in the garden,” Colin says. “It’s definitely hers. So obviously something happened that caused her to bleed, and it’s not related to her being stabbed to death, most likely in her sleep. She and her husband both had anxiolytics, sedatives, on board. Clonazepam. In other words, Klonopin, which is used to relieve anxiety or panic or as a muscle relaxant. Some people use it as a sleep aid,” he explains, for Marino’s benefit. “The hope is the Jordans never knew what hit them.”

  “Was it your theory at the time that her husband was killed first?” I ask.

  “It’s not possible to know the order they were killed, but logic would suggest the killer would get him first, then her, then the children.”

  “Her husband’s stabbed to death right next to her and it didn’t wake her up? Must have been a lot of clonazepam,” I comment.

  “I’m guessing it happened incredibly fast. A blitz attack,” he says.

  “What about her shoes? If she was bleeding while walking back inside the house earlier in the day, it’s likely she dripped blood on whatever shoes she was wearing in the garden. Anybody think to check for bloody shoes?”

  “I think you got a shoe fetish,” Marino says, to the back of my head.

  “Since she had only a nightgown on and was barefoot when she was murdered,” Colin replies, “shoes weren’t something anybody was interested in.”

  “And at some point earlier she left blood on the sunporch floor and in the hallway?” I ask, as we pass the greenhouse with its diapered shrubs and potted trees in front. “It was there for the rest of the day and night, and no one cleaned it up?”

  “They probably didn’t use the sunporch much in the winter, and the tile was dark red. The flooring in the hallway was dark hardwood. She might not have noticed or probably just forgot,” he says. “I do know for a fact the DNA is hers. It was her blood,” he emphasizes. “I think you’ll agree she wasn’t dripping blood downstairs and outside in the early-morning hours when the murders took place. There is every reason to believe she never got out of bed.”

  “I agree it doesn’t seem possible she was bleeding on the sunporch and in her backyard, and then climbed back in bed to be stabbed multiple times while an intruder was inside her house murdering her entire family,” I reply, as I’m reminded of the obvious pitfalls of ending an investigation before it’s begun because everyone involved believes the killer has been caught.

  When Lola Daggette was discovered washing bloody clothing in her shower at the halfway house, assumptions were easy, and what difference did it make if they were wrong? Blood on the sunporch floor or a cut on Gloria Jordan’s thumb or the burglar alarm not being set or unidentified fingerprints didn’t matter anymore. Lola’s far-fetched lies and fantastic alibis, and the case was over, the killer tried and convicted and on death row. There are no more questions when people already have the answers.

  20

  We gather crime scene cases and personal-protection equipment from the back of the Land Rover and follow the concrete walkway through blooming shrubs and flower beds, their colorful blossoms washed out by the glare. Inside the checkpoint of the white-columned brick building, Officer Macon and the warden are waiting for us.

  “An unhappy time, I’m afraid,” Tara Grimm greets us, and today her demeanor matches her name.

  She is unsmiling, her dark eyes unfriendly when they fix on me, her mouth firmly set. In frumpy contrast to her elegant black dress from the day before, she wears a pastel blue skirt suit, a loud flower-printed blouse with a looping bow tie, and toeless flats.

  “I guess you’re with Dr. Dengate,” she says to me, and I sense disappointment. I detect hostility. “I thought you’d gone back to Boston.”

  She assumed I was far north of here or at least on my way, and I can see in her eyes and the expression on her face that her mind is making rapid recalculations, as if my presence somehow changes what might happen next.

  “This is my chief of investigative operations,” I introduce her to Marino.

  “And you happened to be in Savannah for what reason?” She doesn’t even try to be gracious.

  “Fishing.”

  “Fishing for what?” she asks.

  “Mostly I get croakers,” Marino says.

  If she gets his unseemly pun, she doesn’t let on. “Well, we’re very grateful for your time and attention,” she says to Colin, as Officer Macon and two other uniformed guards inspect our crime scene cases and equipment.

  When they turn their attention to the personal-protective clothing, Colin orders them to halt.

  “Now, you can’t be touching that,” he says. “Unless you want your DNA on everything, and I’m guessing you don’t, since we don’t know for a fact what killed this lady.”

  “Just let them on through.” The warden’s lilting voice has the iron ring of a military commander. “You come with me,” she orders Officer Macon, “and we’ll escort them over to Bravo Pod.”

  “Sammy Chang with the GBI should be there,” Colin says.

  “Yes, I believe that’s his name, the agent with the GBI who’s been going through the cell. Now, how do you want to do this?” she addresses Colin in a different voice altogether, as if I’m not here, as if our mission is a casual one.

  “Do what, exactly?” The first steel door slides open and slams shut behind us with a jarring clang. Then the next door opens and shuts. Officer Macon is ten feet ahead of us, communicating over his radio with central control.

  “We can arrange transport to your facility,” she suggests.

  “I think to keep things clean and simple, we’ll take care of that,” Colin answers. “One of our vans is on the way.”

  The hallway the warden leads us along creates the illusion of a labyrinth, each corner, locked door, and connecting corridor reflected in the large convex mirrors mounted high on the walls, everything gray concrete and green steel. We emerge back into the sultry afternoon, with its oppressive heat, and women in gray silently drift about the prison yard like shades, moving in groups between buildings, pulling weeds by hand along walkways, congregated beneath a cluster of mimosa trees, three greyhounds squatting or lying in the grass, panting.

  Inmates watch our passage with no expression on their faces, and I feel sure the news has reached every pod that Kathleen Lawler is dead. A well-known member of their community who allegedly was forced into protective custody because it was feared one or many of them might hurt her lasted in maximum security barely two weeks.

  “They’re not kept out long,” Tara finally speaks to me, as Officer Macon opens the gate leading into Bravo Pod, and I realize she means the dogs. “In this weather, they stay in most of the day except for when they have to potty.”

  I imagine what an ordeal it must be in a prison when one of the rescued greyhounds signals it’s time.

  “Of course, they’re fairly well acclimated to heat, with their long snouts and lean builds. They have no undercoats, and you can imagine the heat at the racetrack. So they do fine here, but we’re careful,” she continues, as if I might have accused her of animal abuse.

  Keys jangle from a long chain attached to Officer Macon’s belt as he unlocks the door to Bravo Pod and we step inside that dreary world of solid gray. I can almost feel a heightened alert as we pass by the second level’s mirrored glass tower, where guards invisibly watch and control the interior doors. Instead of turning left toward the visitation rooms where I was yesterday, we are led to the right, past the stainless-steel kitchen, which is deserted, then the laundry room with its rows of industrial maximum-load machines.

  Through another heavy door we enter an open empty area with stools and tables bolted to the concrete floor, and one level up is a catwalk and behind it the maximum-s
ecurity cells with green metal doors, each with a face peering out of the small pane of glass. Female inmates stare down at us with unwavering intensity, and the kicking begins as if on cue. They pound their feet against their metal doors, and the thudding rings in a shocking din, as if the very gates of hell are slamming.

  “Holy shit,” Marino says.

  Tara Grimm stands perfectly still, looking up, and her eyes move along the catwalk and fix on a cell directly above the door we just came in. The face looking out is pale and indistinguishable from my vantage point one floor down, but I can make out the long brown hair, the wide stare, the unsmiling mouth, as a hand enters the glass and she gives the warden the finger.

  “Lola,” Tara says, holding Lola Daggette’s stare as the terrible racket continues to pound and bang. “The ever gentle, harmless, and innocent Lola,” she says, with an edge. “So now you’ve met. The wrongfully convicted Lola, who some think belongs back in society.”

  We move on, passing a door with covered glass, then a cart of library books parked near an unfinished puzzle of Las Vegas, pieces sorted in small piles on a metal tabletop. Officer Macon unlocks another door with his jingling keys, and the instant we’re through it, the kicking stops, returning an absolute silence. Ahead are six doors on each side, sequestered from the rest of the pod, some with empty white plastic trash bags hanging from shiny steel locks, and the faces in the windows range from young to old, and the tense energy in them reminds me of an animal about to lunge, about to bound away like something wild that is terrified. They want out. They want to know what happened. I feel fear and anger. I can almost smell it.

  Officer Macon leads us to a cell at the far end, the only one with an empty window and the door ajar, and Marino begins to hand out the protective clothing as we set crime scene cases and camera equipment on the floor. Inside Kathleen Lawler’s cell—a space smaller than a horse stall—GBI crime scene investigator Sammy Chang is perusing a notepad he’s apparently removed from books and other notepads arranged on two gray-painted metal shelves. His gloved fingers flip pages and he’s covered from head to toe in white Tyvek, what Marino calls overkill clothes,having come from an era when the most investigators bothered with was surgical gloves and a swipe of Vicks up their nose.