Red Mist

  “Why would you doubt it?” I exclaim, unable to stop myself.

  “Jack never stayed single very long, and not one of his wives or girlfriends would have been very happy to know he was exchanging letters with the woman who molested him when he was a kid.”

  “They e-mailed each other. We know that for a fact.”

  “His wives or girlfriends weren’t going into his e-mail, my guess is,” Marino says. “But letters arriving in the mailbox, letters tucked in drawers or other places, that’s a risk I can’t imagine Jack would take.”

  “Don’t try to make me feel better.”

  “I’m saying I never saw any letters and that he hid any shit about Kathleen Lawler,” Marino says. “All the years I knew him he never mentioned her or what happened to him at that ranch. And I don’t know what all I said back then in the early days. To be honest, some of it probably wasn’t nice. Sometimes I was a jerk in the beginning, when you first took over as chief, and you shouldn’t listen to bullshit from some piece-of-shit convict. Whether what she said is true or not, Kathleen Lawler wanted to hurt you, and she did.”

  I don’t say anything as we stare at each other.

  “I don’t know what’s taking Jaime so long.” He abruptly gets up and looks out the window again. “I don’t know why you’re so pissed at me, unless it’s because you’re really pissed at Jack. Fucking son of a bitch. Well, you should be pissed at him. Goddamn worthless lying piece of shit. After all you did for him. Damn good thing Dawn Kincaid got him first, or maybe I would have.”

  He continues to stare out the window with his back to me, and I sit quietly. The mood has passed like a violent storm that erupted out of nowhere, and I’m struck by what Marino said a moment ago about Jaime Berger. When I finally speak to his big, broad back, I ask if he meant it literally when he said Jaime has disappeared into the private sector.

  “Yeah,” he says, without turning around. “Literally.”

  She isn’t with the Manhattan DA’s office anymore, he tells me. She resigned. She quit. Like a lot of sharpshooting prosecutors, she’s switched to the other side. Almost all of them do it eventually, vacate low-paying thankless jobs in drab government offices turgid with bureaucracy, finally fed up with the never-ending parade of tragedies, parasites, remorseless thugs, and cheaters passing through. Bad people doing bad things to bad people. Despite public perception, victims aren’t always innocent or even sympathetic, and Jaime used to comment that I was lucky my patients couldn’t lie to me. It was a cold day in hell when a witness or a victim told her the truth. I think it’s easier if they’re dead, she said, and she was right on one count at least. It’s much harder to lie when you’re dead.

  But I never thought Jaime would defect to the private sector. I don’t believe her decision was driven by money as I listen to Marino describe her refusal of a retirement party or any sort of send-off, not even a luncheon or a cake or drinks at the local pub after work. She left silently, without fanfare, with virtually no notice, around the same time she called the CFC to ask about Lola Daggette, he says, and I know something has happened. Not just to Jaime but to Marino. I sense that both of their lives have been redirected somehow, and it disappoints me that I didn’t know before this moment. It’s very sad if neither one of them felt they could tell me.

  Maybe I really am impossibly hard on people, and I hear Kathleen Lawler’s cruel comments and see the triumphant expression on her face as she made them, as if she’d been waiting most of her life to make them. I’m raw. I realize just how raw I am, and it’s because I know there’s a grain of truth in what Kathleen said. I’m not easy. It’s a fact I’ve never really had friends. Lucy, Benton, some former staff. And throughout it all, Marino. As bad as it’s ever gotten, he’s still here, and I don’t want that to change.

  “I have a feeling that’s not all Jaime asked when she called the CFC,” I say to him, and there is nothing accusatory in my tone. “I suspect it’s not a coincidence that about the time she called the CFC and you took the train to New York, you also started talking about fishing and boats, about missing the South.”

  “We got along better when I didn’t work for you.” He turns around and wanders back to his chair. “I used to feel better about myself when I was called in as an expert, you know, a homicide detective, a sergeant detective with A Squad instead of working for your office, working for Jaime’s office, now working for your office again. I’m an experienced homicide detective and trained in crime scene and death investigation. Shit, all I’ve done and seen? I don’t want to play out the rest of my days stuck in a little cubicle somewhere, waiting to take orders, waiting for something to happen.”

  “You’re quitting,” I reply. “That’s what you’re trying to say.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You deserve the life you want. You deserve it more than anyone I know. It disappoints me you would think you couldn’t share what you’ve been feeling. That probably bothers me most.”

  “I don’t want to quit.”

  “Sounds like you already have.”

  “I want to switch to being a private contractor,” he says. “Jaime and me talked about it when I went to New York. You know, she’s struck out on her own and she said I should think about it, that she could use my help on cases, and I know you can use my help. I don’t want to be owned by anyone.”

  “I’ve never looked at it as my owning you.”

  “I’d like a little independence, a little self-respect. I know you can’t relate to that. Why would someone like you ever lack in self-respect?”

  “You’d be surprised,” I reply.

  “I want to have a little place on the water, to ride motorcycles, go fishing, and work for people who respect me,” he says.

  “Jaime’s hired you as a consultant on the Lola Daggette case?”

  “She’s not paying me. I said I can’t do that until I change my status with the CFC, and at some point I was going to talk to you about it,” Marino says, as I hear the metal sound of a key in a lock and the door opens.

  Jaime Berger walks in, and I smell savory meat. I smell french fries and truffles.

  10

  She sets two large blue paper bags on the stone peninsula in the kitchen and acts remarkably relaxed and cheerful for a New York prosecutor or even a former one who has set up a clandestine operation in coastal Georgia that requires security cameras and what I suspect is a handgun concealed in the brown cowhide hobo handbag slung over her shoulder.

  Her dark hair is smartly styled, a little longer than I remember it, her features sharply defined and very pretty, and she is as lithe as a woman half her age in faded jeans and an untucked white shirt. She wears no jewelry and very little makeup, and while she might fool most people, she can’t fool me. I see the shadow in her eyes. I detect the brittleness in her smile.

  “I apologize, Kay,” she says right off as she hangs her unattractive heavy-looking pocketbook on the back of a barstool, and I wonder if it’s Marino’s influence that possibly has her packing a gun.

  Or is this a habit she acquired from Lucy, and it occurs to me that if Jaime is carrying a concealed weapon, she’s likely doing so illegally. I don’t know how she could have a license in Georgia, where she may rent an apartment but wouldn’t qualify as a resident. Security cameras and a gun that isn’t legal. Perhaps just the usual precautions, because she knows the same harsh realities I do about what can happen in life. Or it might be that Jaime has gotten fearful and unstable.

  “I’d be absolutely livid if someone pulled something like this on me,” she says, “but it’s going to make more sense, if it doesn’t already.”

  I think of getting up to hug her, but she’s already involved with opening the take-out bags, which I interpret as her preferring to keep a safe distance from me. So I stay where I am on the couch and try not to feel anything about last Christmas in New York and the many times all of us were together before that or what Lucy would do if she could see where I am. I don’t want to
think about how she would react if she could see Jaime looking very pretty but with haunted eyes and a stiff smile, unpacking take-out food in an old loft that’s reminiscent of the one Lucy had in Greenwich Village, a handbag nearby that might have a gun in it.

  I’m nagged by a growing distrust that is fast reaching critical mass. Jaime’s the sort of woman who is accustomed to getting what she wants, yet she gave up Lucy without a fight, and now I find out she’s given up her career just as easily. Because it suited her purposes for some reason,it enters my thoughts like a judgment. I have to remind myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except my being here and why and if what I suspect will turn out to be true—that I’m being deceived and used by my niece’s ex-lover.

  “I’m sure you remember Il Pasticcio just a few blocks from here?” Jaime takes out foil-lined cardboard containers covered with plastic lids, and plastic quart containers of what might be soup, and the loft fills with aromas of herbs, shallots, and bacon. “Well, now it’s the Broughton and Bull.” She opens a drawer and starts collecting silverware and paper napkins. “They make an amazing pot pie with pearl onions. Braised rabbit. Shrimp bisque with poblano–green tomato oil. Seared scallops with bacon-wrapped jalapeños.” She opens one container after another. “I thought I’d just let you help yourselves. Well, maybe it’s easier if I serve,” she reconsiders, glancing around as if expecting a dining-room table to appear, as if she’s unfamiliar with the rented space she’s in.

  “I hope you got me the barbecue shrimp,” Marino says from his chair.

  “And fries,” Berger says, as if she and Marino are comfortable companions. “And the mac-and-cheese with truffle oil.”

  “I’ll pass.” He makes a face.

  “It’s good to try new things.”

  “Forget truffles or truffle oil or whatever. I don’t need to try anything that smells like ass.” Marino retrieves a brown expansion file from the stack on the floor by the desk, a file labeled with a sticker that has BLRwritten on it in black Magic Marker.

  “Would you like some help?” I ask Jaime, but I don’t get up. I sense she doesn’t want me in her space, or maybe it’s simply that I’m the one feeling distant and untouchable.

  “Please stay put. I can open bags and put food on plates. I’m not the cook you are, but I can at least do that.”

  “Your sushi’s in the refrigerator,” Marino says.

  “My sushi? Okay, why not.” She opens the refrigerator door and retrieves the containers Marino placed inside. “They have my credit card on file because I confess I’m addicted. At least three nights a week. I probably should worry about mercury. You still don’t eat sushi, Kay?”

  “I still don’t. No, thank you.”

  “I think I’ll serve the bisque in mugs, if nobody minds. How far did you get?” She looks at Marino. “Tell me where you left off.”

  “Far enough to know how much trouble it must have been for the two of you to make this evening possible,” I answer for him.

  “I really do apologize,” Jaime again says, but she doesn’t sound sorry.

  She sounds very sure of her right to do exactly what she’s done.

  “Frankly, it’s my prerogative to make certain you understand what’s happening. I simply had to be extraordinarily careful how I did it.” She glances up at me as she moves about in the kitchen. “I feel it’s my moral responsibility to watch your back. Obviously, I’ll always err on the side of discretion and deemed it unwise to call you, e-mail you, or contact you directly. If asked I can truthfully say I didn’t. You called me. But who will know that fact unless you decide to share it?”

  “If I decide to share what? That an inmate slipped me a note and I drove off to find the nearest pay phone as if I’m in summer camp on a scavenger hunt?” I reply.

  “I interviewed Kathleen yesterday and was reminded she was looking forward to seeing you today.”

  “Was reminded?” I say to her, as I look at Marino. “I’m sure you knew anyway. Curtis Roberts is probably an associate of yours. You know, the lawyer with the Georgia Innocence Project who called Leonard Brazzo.”

  “I can truthfully say you contacted me while you were in the area on your own business,” Jaime repeats.

  “Business you set up for me so you could get me here,” I reply. “There’s nothing truthful about any of this.”

  “Marino didn’t brief you or divulge anything he shouldn’t have,” she continues to make her case. “He didn’t pass along any invitations to you that might be unwise right now under the circumstances. No one passed on anything that might have negative consequences.”

  “Someone certainly did. That’s why I’m sitting here,” I answer.

  “In a privileged conversation with a witness in a case I’m working, I conveyed that I was hoping you would get in touch with me,” she says, completely justified, at least in her mind.

  “I seriously doubt much at the GPFW isn’t monitored or recorded,” I point out.

  “I wrote a note on my legal pad asking Kathleen to give you my cell phone number and the instruction to call me on a pay phone,” Jaime says. “She read the note as we sat at the table. Nothing was said out loud. Nothing was observed, and the legal pad left with me. Kathleen’s happy to help me in any way possible.”

  “Because she’s convinced she’s going to get a reduced sentence, according to the warden,” I comment.

  “It would be a good idea for you to dispose of any notes anyone might have given you.”

  “From which I’m to conclude you were told not to talk to me and you’re worried about the security of my communications,” I get to the bottom line. “My office and home phones, my cell phone, my e-mail.”

  “Not exactly told not to talk,” Jaime says. “Federal agents always encourage witnesses and other parties of interest not to communicate with the subject of an investigation. But I wasn’t ordered not to talk to you, and as long as they don’t know I did, and I prefer they don’t, there shouldn’t be any repercussions. And I think we’ve succeeded in that and are over that hurdle. Tomorrow’s a different day and a different story, a different mission altogether. If they find out at some point we were together at Colin Dengate’s office, it’s of no consequence. They can’t stop us from working a case together while you happened to be in the area.”

  “Working a case,” I repeat.

  “Jerk-offs,” Marino says, and he’s come to like the FBI a lot less since he left law enforcement and no longer has the power to arrest anyone. His hostility also has to do with Benton.

  “If one can avoid it, it’s always best not to annoy the FBI,” Berger adds, as she gets plates and mugs out of a cabinet. “If I annoy them, it doesn’t help you. And some of this is about Farbman, about the problems he’s caused and is capable of causing.”

  Dan Farbman is the deputy commissioner of public information for NYPD, and I’m aware that he and Jaime have crossed swords in the past. When I worked for the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner a few years ago, I didn’t get along with him all that well, either. But I don’t know about anything recent or what Deputy Commissioner Farbman could have to do with any potential problems I might have with the Department of Justice. I say as much to Jaime. I tell her I don’t see what Farbman could possibly have to do with me.

  “What’s happened in Massachusetts and Dawn Kincaid’s subsequent arrest and indictments have nothing to do with NYPD or Farbman,” I add, as I watch Marino sliding paperwork out of the file, flipping through it, and finding what looks like some sort of official form, lines of it highlighted in orange.

  “Yours is a federal case,” Jaime says to me. “An attack on a medical examiner affiliated with the Department of Defense, and it’s accepted that this attack was directed at a federal official and therefore is federal jurisdiction and will be tried in federal court. Which is a good thing. But it also makes you and your case of interest to the FBI.”

  “I’m well aware.”

  “The talk is that the c
ommissioner may be the next director of the FBI, meaning Farbman thinks he’ll go with him to be in charge of media relations. Were you aware of that?”

  “I may have heard rumors.”

  “Unless I can block Farbman’s appointment, which I fully intend to do. We don’t need our national crime statistics and terrorist alerts tampered with next. He’s not exactly a fan of mine.”

  “He never was.”

  “Now it’s worse. I’d say our relationship is in critical condition— only I intend to be the one who survives,” she says. “He won’t forgive me for accusing him of lying about NYPD crime stats, accusing him of data cheating. And as you might recall, you had your run-ins with him, too, for the same reason.” She arranges plates on the stone peninsula.

  “I never actually accused him or anyone at NYPD of data cheating.”

  “Well, I have, and it’s hard for me to imagine you’re surprised that he’s been doing it.” She finds serving spoons in a drawer.

  “He’s always had a habit of presenting statistics and slanting stories in ways that are politically favorable. But I hadn’t heard he’s been accused of data cheating,” I reply.

  “You really weren’t aware.”

  “I wasn’t,” I repeat, and I get the feeling she’s wondering if Lucy might have said something about this to me. When Jaime apparently confronted Farbman, she and Lucy were still together.

  Marino sets paperwork on the coffee table, within my reach, and I pick up the photocopy of a document stamped CONFIDENTIALby the Georgia Prison for Women:

  Recommended Procedures for Execution by Lethal Drug Injection

  Materials

  Sodium Thiopental 5gr/2% Kit Sterile 50cc Syringe

  Pancuronium Bromide Injection (20mg) Simple Intravenous Line

  Potassium Chloride Injection, USP (40mEq) Sterile 20cc Syringe

  This is followed by directions for the preparation of the drugs included with the “kit,” instructions for mixing the solution and how to attach an intravenous line to an eighteen-gauge needle and a bag of saline to keep the line open. I’m struck by the informal, almost casual, tone of a document that is a step-by-step guide for how to kill someone.