Red Mist

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I didn’t mean literally. I’m just asking what you think would have done the job. Something you can’t smell or taste, and you put it in her sushi. Besides the bacteria that causes botulism. What else, for example?” He returns his BlackBerry to his pocket and pulls on fresh gloves, tucking his used ones in an evidence bag and sealing it so they can be disposed of safely.

  “Hard to know where to begin, and these days it’s also hard to know what might be out there,” I say to him. “Really scary chemical and biological agents made in labs and weaponized by our own military.”

  28

  We step back inside the bedroom, where Colin is pacing as he talks on his cell phone, giving instructions to the removal service. He has covered Jaime’s body with a disposable sheet, an act of kindness and gesture of respect that wasn’t necessary, and I’m struck by the irony. He has shown Jaime far more consideration than she ever showed him.

  “You’re going to want to double-bag her at least,” he is saying over the phone, as he paces past the windows, the drapes still drawn. It is hard to know what time of day it is, and I realize it’s raining just as hard. I can hear rain drumming on the roof and spattering the glass. “That’s right, just use the same precautions as if it’s infectious and we don’t know that it isn’t, and we always treat every body as infectious, anyway, right?”

  “Fentanyl and the so-called date rape drug Rohypnol, nerve agents such as tabun and sarin, oksilidin, anthrax,” I go down the list with Chang. “But some of these are very fast-acting. If someone put Rohypnol or fentanyl in her food, for example, she wouldn’t have made it through dinner. I think the priority is to screen for clostridium botulinum.”

  “Botulism. Wow, that’s scary. Why are you thinking of that as opposed to something else?” He places his bagged contaminated gloves on the foot of the bed.

  “The symptoms as they’ve been described.”

  “It’s just strange to think of poisoning someone with a bacteria.”

  “Not the bacteria but the toxin produced by the bacteria,” I explain. “That would be the way to do it, and it’s what the military has in mind. You don’t weaponize the bacteria. You weaponize the toxin, which is odorless, tasteless, as best anybody knows, relatively easy to get hold of, and therefore difficult to trace.” I add to his suspicions about me. “We don’t have time for a mouse assay. Not a nice thing to do to a mouse, by the way. Injecting it with serum and waiting days to see if it dies.”

  Colin covers the phone with his hand and says to me, “What about botulism?”

  I tell him we should screen for it.

  “You got a place in mind?”

  I tell him I have an idea about it.

  He nods and gets back to the removal service. “Exactly. The regular way with a removal cot, bags that don’t leak. I know all of them do, let’s be honest, but double or triple up and autoclave or incinerate them after the fact, along with soiled protective clothing, gloves, whatever’s contaminated. The same drill if you were worried about hepatitis, HIV, meningitis, septicemia. For God’s sake, don’t reuse the bags, is what I’m getting at, and wash everything down, disinfect really good. Bleach … Yes. I would.”

  “Your idea?” Chang asks me.

  “An aggressive one. A blitz attack,” I reply. “Screen for anything that is a reasonable possibility, and botulinum should be first on the list, all serotypes. And do it as quickly as possible. I mean immediately. Two people have died in twenty-four hours, and a third is on life support. We don’t have the luxury of waiting days for an old-fashioned assay when there are newer and faster methods. Monoclonal antibodies or using electrochemiluminescence, ECL, which I know is being done at USAMRIID, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. I’m happy to contact them and see if I can help facilitate testing if needed. But I think it would be more practical and expeditious to deal with the CDC. That’s my vote. A lot less red tape, and I’m sure they would have an analyzer that can test for biological agents such as botulinum neurotoxins, staphylococcal enterotoxin, ricin, anthrax.”

  “USAMRIID?” Colin says, as he gets off the phone. “Why are we thinking about the military, and what the hell is this about clostridium botulinum, and did I just hear anthrax?”

  “I’m simply suggesting possibilities based on not just this situation but others,” I reply. “Three cases, and the reporting of the symptoms is similar if not the same.”

  “You thinking this is a national security issue or terrorism? Because USAMRIID’s not going to help unless it is. Of course, I realize you probably know people.”

  “The accurate answer at the moment is we don’t know what this is,” I reply. “But what’s going through my mind is the other cases you’ve told me about. Barrie Lou Rivers and other inmates who died suddenly and suspiciously at the GPFW. An onset of something and people quit breathing. Nothing is found on autopsy or on a routine drug screen. In those cases, you didn’t have specimens tested for botulinum toxin, I assume.”

  “Wouldn’t have been a reason for that to occur to me or anyone,” Colin replies.

  “I’m just going to say it. Right now I’d be worried about a serial poisoner. Nobody hopes I’m wrong more than I do,” I tell them, and I go into more detail about the delivery person who rode up on a bicycle last night as I was about to enter this building.

  I describe the impression I got that Jaime might not have placed the order for the sushi and that the person who delivered it mentioned the restaurant had Jaime’s credit card on file. She said that Jaime had food delivered regularly.

  “As I look back on it,” I add, “the person offered a lot of information. Too much information. I’m vaguely aware of having an unsettled feeling at the time. Something seemed strange.”

  “Maybe trying to convince you she was a delivery person because maybe she wasn’t,” Colin considers. “Someone who placed an order, picked it up, poisoned whatever it was, and pretended to be a delivery person for the restaurant.”

  “If someone who works at the restaurant is responsible, that won’t be hard to track,” Chang remarks. “That would be really risky. Stupid, in fact.”

  “I’m more worried it wasn’t a restaurant employee,” Colin says. “And that it’s going to be hard as hell to track. If this is someone who’s been doing it for a while, the person is anything but stupid.”

  “Certainly would have to know her patterns.” Chang looks at the sheet-draped body on the bed. “Have to know where she orders food and what she likes and where she lives and all the rest. Has Marino mentioned her having any other associates or friends in the area?”

  I reply that he hasn’t and insist that sushi didn’t appear to be on the menu last night. By all appearances, Jaime had no intention of eating sushi or serving it to us, and in fact would have known that neither Marino nor I eat it. I describe arriving at the apartment and being told that Jaime had walked to a nearby restaurant for take-out, and when she returned it was with more than enough food for the three of us. Even so, when she was presented with the option of having sushi, she joked that she was addicted to it and said she had it sent in at least three times a week, and she ate the take-out delivery and was the only one who did.

  “Kathleen Lawler also ate something that wasn’t on the menu,” I remind them. “Her gastric contents indicate she ate chicken and pasta, and possibly cheese, while the other inmates were served their usual meals of powdered eggs and grits.”

  “She didn’t buy chicken and pasta in the commissary,” Chang says. “And her trash was missing, plus there was something weird in her sink. If it was poison in her sink, though, it wasn’t colorless and odorless.”

  “Unless she was escorted somewhere for a special meal, obviously somebody delivered chicken and pasta, and possibly a cheese spread, to her cell,” I tell them. “You probably noticed Jaime had security cameras installed, out front and outside her apartment door. Question is whether they record, and Marino will know the details. I think he he
lped her with the installation or advised her about it. Or I suppose you might find the digital video recorder somewhere, if there is one.”

  “It’s her cameras? The one out front in particular is hers and not the building’s?” Colin asks.

  “They’re hers.”

  “Perfect,” Chang says. “Do you remember what the person looked like?”

  “It was dark, and it happened fast,” I tell him. “She had lights on her helmet and a bicycle and some type of bag or backpack that the take-out food was in. White female. Fairly young. Black pants, light-colored shirt. She gave me the take-out bag, recited what the order was, and I handed her a ten-dollar tip. Then I went inside and took the elevator up here to Jaime’s apartment.”

  “Anything unusual about the take-out bag?” Colin asks.

  “Just a white bag with the name of the restaurant on it. Stapled shut with the receipt attached, and Marino opened it, placed the sushi in the refrigerator, and Jaime served herself and ate most of it. Various rolls and seaweed salad. There should be one seaweed salad left that I placed inside the refrigerator when I helped her clean up last night, or more exactly, after midnight, around twelve-thirty, quarter of one. We need to get the containers out of the trash, gather up all of the leftovers.”

  “Including the bag and the receipt,” Chang says. “I definitely want those going to the labs for fingerprints, DNA.”

  “I’m estimating she’s been dead at least twelve hours.” Colin finishes packing up his crime scene case. “So early morning. How early, I can’t be precise. Between four and five is a safe estimate. I’m not seeing anything that tells the story of what happened to her except the obvious, and if the other two are poisonings as well?” He means Kathleen Lawler and Dawn Kincaid. “Then how is that possible? How do you do that to inmates who are incarcerated a thousand miles apart and then to this person?” He means to Jaime. “The good news, if there’s any good news to be found in all this, is the path for the drug or toxin, the route of administration, likely is something that was ingested and not intradermal or inhaled. So hopefully the rest of us are okay.”

  “Nice to know,” Chang says. “Since we’ve been poking around in one victim’s prison cell and now are about to dig in another victim’s trash.”

  I return to the living room, and the clutter on the coffee table is similar to what was in the bathroom, items scattered, as if Jaime upended her pocketbook and dumped everything out. A bottle of an over-the-counter pain reliever. Lipsticks. A compact. A brush. A small bottle of perfume. Breath mints. Facial tissues. Several blister packs that are empty, ranitidine and Sudafed. Chang looks inside a crocodile wallet and finds credit cards and cash. He reports there’s no obvious sign of anything stolen, and I let him know he might want to check for a concealed weapon. The handgun he pulls out of a side compartment of the big brown leather bag is a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38, and he points it up toward the ceiling and pushes in the ejector rod, unloading six rounds into the palm of his hand.

  “Speer Plus P Gold Dots,” he says. “She didn’t mess around. Only I don’t think what got her was anything she could shoot.”

  “I’d like to get started with the trash.” I walk into the kitchen. “What I can do is place each take-out container in a plastic garbage bag. I noticed a box of them last night when I was helping clean up. The heavier-duty the better. Thirty-gallon garbage bags should work just fine temporarily.”

  I go into the cabinet under the sink and begin to shake open black trash bags, deciding to package each take-out container from the sushi restaurant separately. While I deal with the kitchen garbage can, Chang goes into the refrigerator and looks at what’s inside without touching anything.

  “I’m assuming you’ve got some waterproof tape with you,” I say to him, as the rancid stench of rotting seafood wafts up from the metal can.

  “Damn, that stinks,” he complains.

  “She didn’t take out the trash last night, and I didn’t volunteer to do it for her, and now I’m glad. Thank God for that. We need to make everything as watertight as possible,” I explain. “What we don’t want is anything leaking, especially if you plan to transport evidence in your car.”

  “Maybe there’s a better way.” He returns to his scene case and places rolls of evidence tape on the counter. He puts on a face mask and hands me one. “Maybe we should get HazMat in here.”

  “If that was necessary, I wouldn’t still be around to help you.”

  I cover the counter with plastic bags and don’t bother with the face mask. My nose is my friend, even if I don’t like what I’m smelling.

  “I touched all of this when I was helping clean up and didn’t have the benefit of wearing gloves or knowing there was any reason for concern,” I continue. “I’m sure Colin has contacts at the CDC, and if not, I do. I suggest making a call and letting them decide exactly how they want to handle transport, for example, which will be subject to regulatory control, since what we’re talking about is the potential of pathogens or toxins present in body fluids and tissues collected at autopsy, and in foods and food containers, et cetera. But the first step for us is to package all this as rigorously as possible, triple-bag it, document everything. I don’t know if you or Colin have biohazard labels or infectious-substance labels or any other type of leakproof packaging. And we need to get all of this back to the lab and immediately refrigerate it.”

  “We usually don’t deal with stuff like this, I’m happy to report. I don’t have any special biohazard boxes or containers.”

  “We’ll do the best we can. Like this.” From the refrigerator, I retrieve the container of seaweed salad leftover from last night and make sure it’s sealed tightly shut. “It goes in one bag, which I’ll wrap around and tape into a tight little package, then that goes into a second bag, and I’ll do exactly the same thing, and finally a third bag, again the same thing,” I describe. “Probably would pass the four-foot-drop test, but I believe we won’t press our luck. I can take care of this or you can help or you can stand here and watch. Or, if you prefer, Colin can do it.”

  “Who’s volunteering me for what?” Colin says, as he walks down the hallway.

  “You got any ideas about how to get this stuff to the labs?” Chang asks him. “She says it should be refrigerated.”

  “And what you’re saying is you don’t want potentially poisonous garbage inside your candy-ass air-conditioned SUV.”

  “I prefer not.”

  “I’ll throw it in the back of mine,” Colin says. “Open air and I just hose her off, decon her good, and Lord knows I’ve done it before. Just can’t use bleach on my fine upholstery.”

  Chang carries his scene case to the desk near the stacks of expansion files with their different-colored gussets, and he begins to process the two laptops. He swabs keyboards and mouse pads, making sure he won’t wish he had done so long after the fact if there is reason to believe someone might have tried to get into Jaime’s computers.

  “I’m going to take these in,” he says, “but I want to look first. Whatever isn’t password-protected.” He moves a gloved finger on the mouse pad. “Bingo,” he says. “If your delivery lady is real, we’re about to meet her. This baby’s got a DVR card. Looks like it goes with that camera out front and the one outside the apartment door.”

  I shake open more black plastic trash bags, and Colin and I individually package the containers that I placed in the trash early this morning.

  “And it’s got audio,” Chang lets us know. “A pretty fancy camera she’s got outside, we’ll start with that and see who shows up. Long-range, pans and tilts three hundred and sixty degrees. And thermal infrared, so it works in complete dark, fog, smoke, haze. What time did you say you got here last night?”

  “Around nine.” I dig chopsticks out of the trash.

  “We probably should package her whisky glass,” Colin decides. “And swab the bedside table, like you said. Let’s make sure we don’t forget.”

  “The Scotch is in there�
��—I indicate which cabinet—“but I doubt that’s it, because the bottle was unopened when she first got into it. And here’s the wine bottle.” I lift it out of the garbage and set it on top of a plastic bag, and the memory of drinking pinot noir and talking on the couch tightens my stomach. It almost takes my breath away.

  “Nothing like day-old seafood,” Colin makes a face.

  “Shrimp bisque. Scallops.”

  “Rather smell a floater. Lord, that’s bad.” He bags an empty container.

  “Well, this is really strange,” Chang says from the desk where he’s seated. “What the hell happened to her head? Now, this I’ve never seen before. Well, shit. That really sucks.”

  We take off our soiled gloves and walk over to see what he’s complaining about.

  “Let me back up to when she’s first picked up by the camera.” Chang’s finger moves on the mouse pad.

  The images are high-resolution and remarkably clear in shades of white and gray. The entrance of the brick building, the iron railing of the front step, the walkway and the trees. The sound of a car going by and a flash of headlights, then she’s there, a distant figure on the street. Chang pauses the recording.

  “Okay. She’s off to the left, right out here in front.” He indicates the street below us in front of the building. “You can barely make her out with the bicycle.” He points at the upper-left area of the computer screen.

  “There you are, pressing the intercom button, and here she comes in the distance. But she’s not on the bike. She’s walking it across the street,” Colin observes. “That’s a little unusual.”

  “And no safety lights on,” I comment, as I look at what’s on the screen. “As if she doesn’t want anyone to see her.”

  “I’m going to guess that’s the point,” Colin agrees.

  “It gets better.” Chang touches the mouse pad, and the recording resumes. “Or worse, actually.”

  The figure moves again in the distance on the dark street, and I can see the vague shape of her, but I can’t make out her face. A shadow in shades of gray moving the shape of a bicycle closer, and I catch a movement of her right hand lifting up and suddenly a hot spot. A shocking white glare. What looks like a ball of white fire has obliterated her head.