Red Mist

He looks at his watch. He looks behind him as Officer Macon escorts Marino to a men’s room.

  “Has the van gotten here?” I ask.

  “Ready when you are.”

  “What about Colin?”

  “I think he’s depending on you to wind it up. There’s nothing else he wants to do until we get her in.”

  “Fine. I’ll bag her hands, photograph her, if that’s all right.”

  “I’ve got plenty of photos.”

  “I’m sure you do. But as you can tell, I like to overdo things,” I say to him.

  “How about a real camera? And while you’re overdoing things, there’s also a locker box.”

  “A locker box?” I look around the cell to see what he might be talking about.

  “Attached to the foot of the bed.” He points. “Hidden by the covers.”

  “I’d like to take a look.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “I’ll be quick so you can get in and collect a few things that need to go to the labs. I’m sure you’re ready to get out of here.”

  “Not me. I love prisons. Reminds me of my first marriage.”

  I resume examining what is on top of Kathleen’s desk, a thin stack of cheap white paper and plain envelopes, a see-through Bic pen, a book of self-adhesive postage stamps, and a small tablet with the cover flipped back that seems to be an address book. I don’t recognize any names, but I riffle through the pages, looking for Dawn Kincaid and Jack Fielding. I don’t find them. In fact, most of the names have Georgia addresses, and when I come across one for Triple Q Ranch outside of Atlanta, I realize how old the address book is. Triple Q was where Kathleen was a therapist when she got involved with Jack in the mid- to late seventies. More than thirty years old, at least, I think, as I continue turning pages. Whoever she’s been writing recently most likely isn’t in here, I decide. If she had a current address book, it appears to be missing.

  “This should go in, too,” I tell Investigator Chang.

  “Yeah, I noticed it.”

  “Old.”

  “Exactly.” He knows what I’m implying. “Course, she might not have any friends, anyone to write or call anymore.”

  “I was told she liked to write letters.” I open the book of stamps, noting that six out of twenty are missing. “She worked in the library to fund her commissary account. And maybe got a few contributions now and then from family.” I mean from Dawn Kincaid.

  “Not from family in the past five months or after she was moved in here, not in maximum security.”

  “No,” I agree Kathleen wasn’t in a position to fund her account since she was moved to Bravo Pod, and certainly Dawn couldn’t have been doing it from Butler, and before that, from the Cambridge jail. “It might be interesting to see how much money is left in that account and what she might have bought of late,” I suggest.

  “Good idea.”

  There is a pocket dictionary and a thesaurus, and two library books of poetry, Wordsworth and Keats, and next I go to the bed. I crouch at the foot of it, moving the blanket and sheet out of the way, and I’m mindful of Kathleen Lawler’s legs draped over the side. My left shoulder brushes against her hip, and it is warm against me but not warm as in life. Minute by minute, she continues to cool.

  I open the locker box, a single metal drawer filled with a hodgepodge of personal effects. Drawings and poetry, family photographs, including several of an exquisite little blond girl who got more gorgeous as she got older, and then suddenly was a temptress, overly made up, with a voluptuous body and dead eyes. I find the photograph of Jack Fielding that I gave to Kathleen yesterday, included with the others, as if he was her family. There are a few of him when he was young, perhaps ones he mailed to her in the early years, and the photographs are worn and torn at the edges, as if they have been handled frequently.

  I don’t find any other diaries, but there is a booklet of fifteen-cent stamps and also stationery with a festive border of party hats and balloons, which seems a strange choice for an inmate, possibly left over from someone who used it for invitations to a birthday celebration or some other fun event. The stationery isn’t something that would be sold in a prison commissary, and I suppose it’s also possible Kathleen has had it from a time that predates her being locked up for DUI manslaughter. Maybe that’s the explanation for fifteen-cent stamps that feature a white sandy beach with a bright yellow-and-red umbrella beneath a vivid blue sky, a seagull flying overhead.

  The last time I paid fifteen cents for a stamp was at least twenty years ago, so either she was saving them for a special reason or someone sent them to her, and I recall Kathleen mentioning to me the hardship of affording postage. The book originally contained twenty stamps, and the top pane of ten is missing. I pick up the thin stack of white copying paper from the desk and hold up a sheet of it to the light, finding no indentations that might have been made by writing on a sheet of paper that was on top. I try the party stationery next, holding up a sheet, tilting it in different directions as I make out indentations that are fairly deep and visible: the date, June 27,and the salutation, Dear Daughter.

  “… Yes, because I’d like to ask exactly what she did,” I overhear Colin saying to Tara Grimm beyond the cell’s open door. “You were told she walked around the cage for an hour, for the entire hour. Fine. I appreciate that, but like I said, I need to hear it from the officer who was present. Did she drink water? How much? How often did she rest? Did she complain of light-headedness, muscle weakness, headache, or nausea? Did she voice any complaints at all?”

  “I asked all that and have passed it on to you word for word.” Tara Grimm’s quiet, melodious voice.

  “I’m sorry, but not good enough. I need you to get the officer and bring her here or take us to her. I need to talk to her myself. I’d like to see the exercise cage. It would be good if we could do this now, so we can get the body to my office without further delay….”

  I make out some words but not others indented on the stationery. It won’t be possible to determine exactly what Kathleen wrote in her letter on party paper until it can be examined in better conditions than a mesh-covered window and low-output recessed cell lighting that probably is manipulated by a key switch in the control room, preventing inmates from turning off their lights to ambush a guard coming in. I catch the shadow of what is written in a graceful hand that now is familiar:

  I know … a joke, right? … so I thought I’d share … from PNG … Kind of fits with everything else … trying to bribe me and win me over … How are you feeling …?

  PNG as in persona non grata? A person who isn’t welcome or, in legal terms, someone, usually a foreign diplomat, who is censured by no longer being allowed to enter a certain country. I wonder to whom Kathleen was referring as I hear the papery sound of Marino walking back into the cell, and he sets down a rugged waterproof Pelican case next to the bed.

  “I’m sure there’s a hand lens somewhere,” I say, as he snaps open stiff clasps. “A ten-X with LEDs, if possible. The lighting’s not so great in here.”

  He finds an illuminated magnifier, which I turn on with a switch and begin to slowly move over the tops of Kathleen Lawler’s pale hands. The smooth pinkish palms, her fingers and their pads, the wrinkles of her skin, the minutiae of her prints and faint bluish veins are ten times their normal size in the lighted lens. Her unpainted nails are slightly furrowed and clean, a few whitish fibers under them that could be from her uniform or the bedsheets, and a hint of something orange under the nail of her right thumb.

  “If you could locate the fine forceps and a GSR kit for me. If Colin doesn’t have one, I’m sure Investigator Chang will,” I say to Marino, as I hold up the right hand by the second knuckle of the thumb, the body cooling but still limber, as in life.

  Marino shuffles equipment around inside the case and says, “Got it.”

  Like a surgical assistant, he lays the tweezers in my nitrile-covered palm and then gives me a small metal stub with a circular carbon tape adhesive
disk on top for lifting gunshot residue off the palmar and back surfaces of hands. I instruct him to hold the illuminated lens over the thumbnail as I use the tweezers to coax out the whitish fibers and minute flecks of a crumbled orange pasty substance, capturing them with the sticky stub, which I seal inside a small plastic evidence bag that I label and initial.

  Crouching by the bed, I begin to look at the exposed flesh of the lower legs and the bare feet, holding the magnifier over an area on the top of the left foot where there is a cluster of bright red marks.

  “Maybe she got bit by something,” Marino says.

  “I think she might have dripped something hot on herself,” I reply. “First-degree burns that you might expect if you drip a hot liquid on your foot.”

  “I don’t see how she could heat up anything in here.” He leans close to the body, looking at the area of skin I’m talking about. “Could water from the sink do that?”

  “You can run it and see. But I doubt it.”

  “It’s okay to run it?”

  “I swabbed the sink,” Chang tells him from the open door. “You can run water if you want to see how hot it gets. Maybe she had something in here. Something electrical?” he suggests. “Possible she was electrocuted?”

  “Right now a lot of things are possible,” I reply.

  “A blow-dryer, a curling iron, if someone brought one in for her to use,” Change suggests. “Would be against regulations, that’s for sure. But it could account for the electrical smell.”

  “Where would she have plugged anything in?” I ask, seeing no electrical outlets, only an enclosed wall mount where the TV is connected.

  “Something battery-operated could have exploded.” Marino turns water on in the sink. “If enough heat builds up with anything that’s got a battery, it can explode. But if that happened, she’d have more than just those little spots on her foot. And you’re sure they aren’t insect bites?” He holds his hand under running water, waiting to see how hot it will get. “Because that might make more sense, since she was outside and then started feeling bad. I’ve had that happen. A damn yellow jacket gets into my shoe or sock and keeps stinging until it dies. Once I was going about sixty on my Harley and rode through an entire swarm of honeybees. Getting stung inside your helmet isn’t a lot of fun.”

  “Some edema, some minor swelling. These look like burns, very recent ones, confined to the outer layer of skin, first-degree or possibly superficial second-degree. It would have been painful,” I describe.

  “No way that did it.” Marino turns off the water. “Not hot at all. No better than lukewarm.”

  “Maybe you could ask if she might have burned her foot somehow.”

  He steps past Chang, disappearing outside the cell. “The Doc wants to know if she might have burned herself,” I hear him say.

  “If who did?” Colin’s voice.

  “If Kathleen Lawler did. Like if someone maybe gave her a cup of really hot coffee or tea and she dripped it on her foot.”

  “Why?” Colin asks.

  “Impossible,” Tara Grimm says. “Inmates in segregation have no access to microwave ovens. There are no microwave ovens in Bravo Pod, except in the kitchen, and she certainly had no access to the kitchen. It’s impossible she could have gotten hold of something hot enough for her to get burned.”

  “Why are you asking?” Colin appears in the doorway, no longer in white Tyvek, and he’s sweating and doesn’t look happy.

  “She has burns on her left foot,” I reply. “Looks like something splashed or dripped on her.”

  “We’ll take a closer look when we get her to the office.” He walks out of sight again.

  “Did she have her shoes and socks on when she was found?” I ask whoever is listening.

  Tara Grimm appears in the doorway of the cell.

  “Of course not,” she says to me. “We wouldn’t have removed her shoes and socks. She must have taken them off when she came in from exercise. We didn’t do anything to her.”

  “Seems like putting on a sock, a shoe, over burns wouldn’t have felt very good,” I observe. “Was she limping during her hour of exercise? Did she mention any discomfort?”

  “She complained about the heat and that she was tired.”

  “I’m wondering if she burned herself after she was returned to her cell. Did she take a shower when she came in from the exercise area?”

  “I’ll say it again. No, it’s not possible,” Tara says flatly, slowly, and with undisguised hostility. “There was nothing to burn herself with.”

  “Any chance she might have had something electrical in her cell at some point this morning?”

  “Absolutely not. There are no accessible outlets in any of the cells in Bravo Pod. She couldn’t have burned herself. You can ask fifty times, and I’ll keep saying the same thing.”

  “Well, it appears she did burn herself. Her left foot,” I reply.

  “I don’t know anything about burns. And she couldn’t have. You must be mistaken.” Tara stares hard at me. “There’s nothing here she could have burned herself with,” she repeats. “She probably has mosquito bites. Or stings.”

  “They’re not bites or stings.”

  I palpate Kathleen’s head. My purple-gloved fingers feel along the contours of her skull and down her neck, checking what I always check, using my sense of touch to discover the most subtle injury, such as a fracture or a spongy, boggy area that might indicate hemorrhage to soft tissue hidden by her hair. She is warm, and her head moves as I move my hands, her lips slightly parted as if she’s asleep and might open her eyes wide at any moment and have something to say. I feel no injuries, nothing abnormal, and I tell Marino to give me the camera and a transparent six-inch scale.

  I take photographs of the body, focusing on the hand where I removed the orange substance and white fibers from underneath the nails. I photograph the burns on the bare left foot and slip brown bags over it and each hand, securing them at the ankle and wrists with rubber bands to ensure nothing is added or lost during transport to the morgue. Tara Grimm watches everything I do, no longer subtle about it. She stands in the doorway with her hands on her hips, and I take more photographs. I take more than I need. I take my time as I get angrier.

  23

  Colin opens a back door of the Coastal Regional Crime Laboratory, and we step out into the heat and glare as thunder rumbles and a volatile sea of dark clouds rolls closer. It is a few minutes after four p.m., the wind gusting out of the southwest at about thirty knots, blowing Lucy’s helicopter back into last week, she tells me over the phone.

  “We had to land in Lumberton to refuel yet a third time after waiting out rain showers and bad viz in Rocky Mount,” she says. “Endless boredom over pine trees and hog farms. Smoke everywhere from controlled burning. I think next time Benton might take the bus.”

  “Marino left for the airport a few minutes ago, and it looks like a big storm is getting close,” I tell my niece, as I accompany Colin across a wide expanse of asphalt tarmac used for staff parking and deliveries, the air so thick with humidity I can almost see it.

  “We’ll be fine,” Lucy says. “VFR all the way, and should be there in maybe an hour, an hour-fifteen, unless I end up vectoring around Gamecock Charlie and following the coast down from Myrtle Beach. The scenic route but slower.”

  Gamecock Charlie is a Military Operations Area airspace used for training and maneuvers that are neither publicized nor safe for nonparticipating or civilian aircraft that happen to be nearby. If an MOA is active, or “hot,” it’s wise to stay away.

  “You know what I always say. Never be in a hurry to have a problem,” I tell her.

  “Well, I think it’s hot, based on what I’ve been picking up on Milcom,” Lucy goes on, referring to military communications or UHF monitoring. “I don’t really want to get into the middle of intercepts, low-altitude tactics, aerobatics, whatever.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t.”

  “Not to mention avoidi
ng drones, some aircraft buzzing around that’s remotely controlled by a computer in California. You ever notice how many military bases and restricted areas there are around here? That and deer stands. I don’t guess you know what happened yet.” She means what happened to Kathleen Lawler. “You don’t sound very happy.”

  “We’re getting ready to find out, hopefully.”

  “Usually you’re more than hopeful.”

  “This isn’t usual. We were given a hard time at the prison, and I don’t sound happy because I’m not.” I envision Tara Grimm’s face as she planted herself in the doorway of the cell, glaring at me, and then what happened after that with the guard who supervised Kathleen Lawler’s hour of exercise.

  According to Officer Slater, a big woman with a defiant air and resentful eyes, nothing out of the ordinary occurred this morning between eight and nine o’clock, when Kathleen was escorted out to walk “just like she’s been doing” since she was transferred to Bravo Pod, she told us, after we were escorted to the exercise cage right before we left. I asked if there was any indication Kathleen might have felt unwell or uncomfortable.

  Was she, for example, complaining of being tired or dizzy or having difficulty breathing? Any chance she might have been stung by an insect? Was she limping? Did she seem to be in pain? Did she mention anything at all about the way she felt this morning, and Officer Slater reported that Kathleen griped about the heat, repeating much of the same information we’ve been told multiple times now.

  Kathleen would walk around the cage and periodically lean against the chain-link fencing, Officer Slater said. Kathleen did stoop down to retie one of her sneakers several times, we were told, and it could be that one of her feet was bothering her, but she didn’t mention anything about burning herself. It wouldn’t have been possible for her to burn herself in Bravo Pod, Officer Slater stated with unnecessary defensiveness, parroting what Tara Grimm had told us.

  “So I don’t know why you’d get a notion like that,” Officer Slater said to me as she looked at the warden. Inmates don’t have use of microwaves in Bravo Pod, and the water from the taps isn’t hot enough to cause a burn. Now and then, Kathleen asked for a drink while inside the cage and said her throat was a little scratchy, maybe from pollen or dust or she was “trying to catch something like the flu, and she might of mentioned she was feeling sleepy.”