Red Mist

by Patricia Cornwell

  Symptoms, it occurs to me, that were eerily similar to what Jaime described when we were talking about Barrie Lou Rivers and what may be in store for Lola Daggette if she is executed on Halloween. Cruel and unusual, an awful way to die, and, according to Jaime, deliberately cruel. I thought she was trumping up a dramatic story to make her case, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe there is more truth to what she was alleging than she knew. Not scared to death but scared of it.

  “Your mind is awake, but you can’t talk. You can’t move or make the slightest gesture, and your eyes are shut. You look unconscious. But the muscles of your diaphragm are paralyzed, and you’re aware as you suffer the pain and panic of suffocation. You feel yourself die, and your system is in overdrive. Pain and panic. Not just about death but about sadistic punishment,” I describe what Jaime was saying about death by lethal injection and what happens if the anesthesia wears off.

  I think about how a killer might expose someone to a poison that stops breathing and renders the person unable to talk or call for help. Especially if the intended victim is incarcerated.

  “Why would anyone send an inmate twentysomething-year-old postage stamps?” I get out of my chair.

  “Why not sell them?” I ask. “Wouldn’t they be worth something to a collector? Or maybe that’s where they came from. Maybe they were recently purchased from a collector, a stamp company. No lint, dust, dirt, nothing stuck on the back, not wrinkled or grungy like they might be if they’d been in a drawer for decades. And allegedly sent by me in a counterfeit CFC envelope that included a forged letter on my counterfeit letterhead? Possibly, maybe? She seemed to think I’d been generous with her when I hadn’t been. A big envelope allegedly from me, and extra postage. Something else in it. Maybe stamps.” Lucy finally gives me her eyes, and I can see what’s in them. A deeper green, and they are immeasurably sad and glinting with anger.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to her, because of how dreadful it is to imagine Jaime’s death the way I just described it.

  “What kind of stamps?” she asks. “Tell me exactly what they looked like.”

  I tell her what I found in Kathleen Lawler’s prison cell, tucked inside a locker at the base of her steel bed, a single pane of ten fifteen-cent postage stamps issued in an earlier era when glue on the back of them, and on labels and envelope flaps, had to be licked or moistened with a sponge. I describe the letter to Kathleen that I didn’t write and the strange party stationery that she couldn’t have gotten from the commissary. Someone sent her stamps and stationery, and it very well may have been me or, more precisely, someone impersonating me.

  Then the stamp is on the computer screen. A wide white beach with sprigs of grass, and an umbrella with red and yellow panels is propped against a dune beneath a seagull flying through the cloudless sky over bright blue water.

  31

  It is midnight, and we are picking at a dinner that Benton has managed to overcook and wilt, but no one is particular at the moment or preoccupied with food, at least not in a good way. Right now I can easily imagine not wanting to eat ever again, as everything I look at turns into a potential source of disease and death.

  Bolognese sauce, lettuce, salad dressing, even the wine, and I’m reminded that a peaceful, healthy coexistence on this planet is shockingly fragile. It takes so little to cause disaster. Shifting tectonic plates in the earth that create a tsunami, clashing temperatures and humidity unleashing hurricanes and tornadoes, and worst of all is what humans can do.

  Colin Dengate e-mailed me about an hour ago with information he probably shouldn’t be releasing to me, but that’s who he is, a redneck, as he describes himself. Armed and dangerous, he likes to say, roaring around in that ancient Land Rover of his in the blistering heat and afraid of nothing, including bureaucrats, or bureausaurs, as he calls people who let policies, politics, and phobias get in the way of doing what is right. He’s not going to shut me out of any investigation, certainly not when efforts to frame me are blatant enough to bury any reasonable doubt that I’m the one running around poisoning people.

  Colin let me know that Jaime died in good health, just as Kathleen Lawler did. There was nothing on gross examination to show what caused Jaime’s death, but her gastric contents were undigested, including pinkish, reddish, and white tablets or pills that he and I suspect are ranitidine, Sudafed, and Benadryl. He explained that Sammy Chang passed along lab results that probably don’t mean anything unless it’s possible Kathleen died of heavy metal poisoning, and Colin certainly doesn’t think so, and he’s right, she didn’t. Specifically, he wanted to know if trace elements of magnesium, iron, and sodium might hold any special meaning for me.

  “I understand that.” Benton paces back and forth past windows overlooking the Savannah River, lights scattered along the opposite shore, where shipyard cranes are etched faintly against the distant dark sky. “But what you need to understand is the following. They could be deadly poisonous,” he is saying to Special Agent Douglas Burke from the FBI’s Boston field office.

  I can tell from what I’m overhearing that Douglas Burke, a member of the task force that has been working the Mensa Murders, is resistant to answering Benton’s questions beyond confirming the statement that Massachusetts General Hospital has released to the media. Dawn Kincaid has botulism. She remains on life support, and her brain is no longer viable. Benton has asked point-blank if fifteen-cent postage stamps featuring a beach umbrella might have turned up inside her cell at Butler.

  “She got hold of the toxin somehow,” he pushes. “Poisoned, in other words, unless she got it from Butler’s food, which I seriously doubt. Anybody else at Butler with botulism? … Exactly. The glue on the stamps could be the source of the exposure.”

  “That was pretty good, but no offense to Benton, he should stay out of the kitchen.” Marino pushes away his bowl of unfinished Bolognese sauce without pasta, which turned out gummy. “The Botox Diet. All you got to do is think about botulism. That will make you lose weight. Doris used to do her own canning,” he adds, talking about his ex-wife. “Creeps me out to think about it now. You can get it from honey, you know.”

  “Mostly that’s a risk for infants,” I reply distractedly, as I listen to Benton’s conversation. “They don’t have the robust immune systems adults do. I think you’re fine to eat honey.”

  “Nope. I stay away from sugar, fake sugar, and I sure as hell don’t want honey or home canning or maybe salad bars, either.”

  “You can get the stuff for like twenty bucks a vial from China.” Lucy has her MacBook on the dining-room table, typing with one hand as she eats a piece of bread with the other. “Fake name, fake e-mail account, and you don’t have to be a doctor or work in a lab. Order what you want from the privacy of your own home. I could do it as I sit here. I’m surprised something like this hasn’t happened before now.”

  “Thank God it hasn’t.” I begin to clear the dishes while I continue to debate whether I should call General Briggs.

  “The most potent poison on the planet, and it shouldn’t be this easy to get,” Lucy says.

  “It didn’t used to be,” I reply. “But botulinum toxin type A has become ubiquitous since its introduction into the treatment of numerous medical conditions. Not just cosmetic procedures but migraine headaches, facial tics and other types of spasms, hypersalivation—drooling, in other words—crossed eyes, involuntary muscle contractions, sweaty palms.”

  “How much of it would you have to use, saying you could order vials of it off the Internet?” Glass clanks as Marino drops empty bottles in the recycle bag inside the kitchenette, where he’s followed me.

  “It comes in a crystalline form, a white powder, vacuum-dried Clostridium botulinum type A, that you reconstitute.” I turn on the water in the sink and wait for it to get hot.

  “Then you just inject it in a package of food, for example,” Marino says. “Or a take-out container.”

  “Very simple. Frighteningly so.”

  “So if you got hold of
enough of it, you could wipe out thousands of people.” Marino finds a dish towel and begins to dry as I wash.

  “If you tampered with some product, like a prepackaged food or beverages that aren’t heated sufficiently to destroy the toxin, yes,” I reply, and that is what scares me.

  “Well, I think you should call Briggs.” He takes a plate from me.

  “I know you do,” I reply. “But it’s not that simple.”

  “Sure it is. You just friggin’ call him and give him a heads-up.”

  “It sets things in motion before we have lab results.” I hand him a wineglass to dry.

  “Dawn Kincaid’s got botulism. That’s one lab result.” He opens cabinets and starts putting away dishes. “You ask me, that’s the only confirmation you need when you think of everything else we’re finding out and start putting the pieces together. Like the shit in Kathleen Lawler’s sink that fits with the burns on her foot.”

  “It might fit with that. I’m speculating.”

  “The person you should be speculating with is him.”

  He means General Briggs, the chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, my commander and an old friend from my earliest days when I began my career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Marino wants me to tell Briggs that Kathleen Lawler’s gastric contents appear to be undigested chicken and pasta and cheese that possibly were poisoned with botulinum toxin, and that scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive x-ray analysis of the odd-smelling residue recovered from her sink revealed magnesium, iron, and sodium. The answer to Colin Dengate’s question about whether the finding of these elements in the chalky residue means something to me is yes. Unfortunately, it does.

  When water is added to food-grade iron, magnesium, and sodium or salt, the result is an exothermic reaction that rapidly produces heat. Temperatures can reach up to one hundred degrees centigrade, and it is this technology that is the basis for the flameless ration heaters used to cook or warm up food eaten by soldiers in the field. MREs, meals ready to eat, offer dozens of different menus, including chicken with pasta, and many of the tough tan plastic bags they’re packaged in offer additional rations, such as cheese spread. Each of these self-contained meals includes a water-activated flameless ration heater packaged in a sturdy polybag, an ingenious device that requires a soldier in the field to do nothing more than cut off the top, add water, and then place the bag under the MRE, propping both against “a rock or something,” according to the operating instructions.

  I realize it’s possible there might be other explanations for why swabs of the residue in Kathleen’s sink show trace elements of iron, magnesium, and sodium, but it is the combination of evidence that offers a possible nightmarish answer that can’t easily be explained away. The unpleasant odor that reminded me of a shorted-out blow-dryer or overheated insulation strikes me as consistent with a chemical reaction producing heat, and Kathleen had burns on her left foot that prison officials claimed she could not have sustained while incarcerated in Bravo Pod. I believe she accidentally dripped a hot liquid on her bare skin, and it may very well have been the boiling water from a flameless ration heater.

  The first-degree burns were recent, and I can’t dismiss from my thoughts her obsession with food and certain comments she made to me, and I wonder if a missing diary or more than one might have contained what Kathleen was doing and thinking and possibly eating since she’d been moved to Bravo Pod. Tara Grimm was taking care of her, was good to her, and Kathleen was more than happy to be a test kitchen.She had sweet buns and packages of noodles in her cell and knew how to turn Pop-Tarts into strawberry cake, fancying herself the Julia Child of the slammer. Maybe Tara Grimm was seeing to it that Kathleen got an occasional treat in exchange for cooperation or other favors, and early this morning the treat was a ready-to-eat feast that had been injected with poison.

  “Plus, there’s the shit about the camera,” Marino continues to lecture me about what I should do. “Defeating infrared with infrared, a strip of tiny IR LEDs on her bike helmet, assuming Lucy’s right about that. Whatever this person did, the camera got defeated with something, and that’s a fact, completely whiting out her head the instant she got close enough for her face to be recognizable on the camera, and Lucy says the recording can’t be fixed or restored. Like the damn Chinese blinding our spy satellites with lasers. You should call him.”

  “It will be sounding an alarm that could end up in the Oval Office,” I say what I’ve said before. “General Briggs will have to pass the information up the chain, straight to the Pentagon, the White House, if there’s even the slightest possibility that the bigger target is our troops—that what we’re dealing with is the preliminary if not plenary stages of a terrorist plot,” I’m explaining, as Benton appears.

  “She isn’t going to say it outright.” He tells me about his conversation with Special Agent Douglas Burke, who is a woman. “But reading between the lines, the answer is yes. Fifteen-cent stamps matching the description we have were found in Dawn Kincaid’s cell. A pane of ten with three removed that are on a letter she didn’t get around to mailing. A letter to one of her lawyers.”

  “The question is, where might she have gotten the stamps?” I ask.

  “Dawn received mail yesterday afternoon from Kathleen Lawler,” Benton says. “Douglas wouldn’t confirm that the stamps were included, but the fact that she is letting me know about the letter suggests it.”

  “Written on party stationery?” I ask.

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Mentioning something about a PNG and a bribe? In other words, derisive comments, probably about me?”

  “Douglas didn’t go into that level of detail.”

  “Fragments of indented writing I could make out while in Kathleen’s cell. What struck me as sarcastic, and understandably so, if she were under the impression that I sent her the stamps and stationery, what would appear to be cheap leftovers, something I didn’t want,” I say, as I recall Kathleen’s snide comment about people sending inmates their detritus, things leftover and expired that they no longer want. “That I might try to butter her up or bribe her with such a stingy gift,” I continue. “Only it wasn’t from me. The forged letter likely accompanying these items was mailed in Savannah on June twenty-sixth, meaning there was ample time for Kathleen to mail a pane of these same stamps to Dawn.”

  “It seems she did, but Douglas wouldn’t go into detail, and she didn’t refer to you,” Benton replies. “Although I certainly was clear about obvious forged documents and a campaign on the part of an individual or individuals to set you up and that none of it is plausible.”

  “An accident,” I decide. “Her incarcerated mother sends her incarcerated daughter stamps so they can be prison pen pals, having no idea the glue on the back has been tampered with. But Kathleen was too selfish to send the good ones.”

  “What good ones?” Marino frowns.

  “She had current stamps, forty-four-cent ones, in her cell, but she didn’t share those. Just the ones that were, quote, ‘shit’ other people didn’t want anymore. Ones she thought were from a PNG. From me.”

  “That’s what stinginess will get you. She gives away her daughter and twenty-three years later gives her botulism,” Marino says as Benton empties the serving bowl of pasta into the trash and it lands in a solid mass.

  “Sorry about that,” says my husband, who is rather worthless in the kitchen. “And washing the lettuce in hot water wasn’t the best idea, either.”

  “You’d have to boil lettuce a good ten minutes to destroy botulinum toxin, which is very heat-resistant,” I inform him.

  “So you ruined it for nothing,” Marino is happy to let Benton know. “If Dawn wasn’t an intended victim, that tells us something,” Benton says.

  “The stamps didn’t poison Kathleen. It doesn’t appear she ever touched the stamps, and that tells us something, too,” Marino says, as we return to the dining-room table, where Lucy is working on her computer and has committed the only ac
t that she considers a crime.

  Paper. She doesn’t believe in printouts, but there is too much information to sort through, so much to look at and connect. Images, security-company billing information and logs, decision trees, datasets, and her searches continue. Out of consideration for the rest of us, she is doing her best to make it easy, sending files to the printer in the other room.

  “It’s looking like she got killed by what she ate, right? Maybe chicken and pasta and cheese spread, and not the stamps.” Marino pulls out a chair and sits. “That’s really something. Maybe she’s lucky she didn’t live to learn that her daughter licked three of those stamps to put on the letter to her lawyer. How much botulism could you get on three stamps?”

  “About three hundred and fifty grams of botulinum toxin is enough to kill everyone on the planet,” I reply. “Or about twelve ounces.”

  “No fucking shit.”

  “So it wouldn’t take much on the back of stamps to create a potent poison that would have caused a rapid onset of symptoms,” I add. “My guess is that within several hours Dawn Kincaid was feeling really bad. If Kathleen had used the stamps when she first received them, I wouldn’t have been able to interview her because she would have been dead.”

  “Maybe that was the intention,” Benton says.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “But you have to wonder.”

  “But that’s not what killed her, and that’s what’s weird.” Lucy hands out stacks of whatever she’s printed so far. “Someone sends her stamps spiked with botulinum toxin but doesn’t wait for her to use them. Why? Seems to me she would have used the stamps eventually, and when she did, she was going to die.”

  “It might suggest that whoever sent them doesn’t work at the prison,” Benton remarks. “If you didn’t have access to Kathleen or what was in her cell or witness mail going out, you might assume the stamps were ineffective, not realizing she simply hadn’t gotten around to using them. So the person doing the tampering decided to try again.”