Red Mist (26 page)

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.

W
e 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-security 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.

Chang’s dark eyes wander from Marino to me, and he looks at Colin as he says, “Got pictures of pretty much everything in here.
Not sure what more we can realistically do because of access.”

What he implies is the guards and other prison personnel have access to Kathleen’s cell, and countless other inmates have
been detained in it over time as well.
Dusting for prints and other routine forensic procedures typically done in a suspicious-death
case probably aren’t going to be helpful because the scene is contaminated.
Deaths in custody are similar to domestic homicides,
both complicated by prints and DNA meaning very little if the killer had regular access to the home or location where the
death occurred.

Chang is careful what he communicates.
He doesn’t want to suggest openly that if someone who works at the prison is responsible
for Kathleen Lawler’s death, we’re probably not going to figure that out by processing her cell the way we would a typical
crime scene.
He’s not going to say in front of Officer Macon and Tara Grimm that his main purpose since he got here has been
to secure Kathleen’s cell and make certain nobody—including the two of them—tampers with potential evidence.
Of course, by
the time he arrived, it really would have been too late to protect the integrity of anything.
We don’t know for a fact how
long Kathleen was dead in her cell before the GBI and Colin’s office were notified.

“Haven’t touched the body,” Chang tells Colin.
“She was like this when I got here at thirteen hundred hours.
According to
the information I have, she’d been dead about an hour when I got here.
But the times I’ve been given for events are a little
murky.”

Kathleen Lawler is on top of the rumpled gray blanket and dingy sheet of a narrow steel bed attached to the wall like a shelf
beneath a slit of a window covered with metal mesh.
Half on her back and half on her side, her eyes are barely open, her mouth
agape, and her legs are draped over the edge of the thin mattress.
The pants of her white uniform are shoved up above her
knees, and her white shirt is bunched up around her breasts, perhaps disarrayed by resuscitative efforts that failed.
Or she
might have been thrashing about before she died, rearranging her position in a frantic attempt to get comfortable, to relieve
whatever symptoms she was suffering from.

“Was CPR attempted?”
I ask Tara Grimm.

“Of course, every effort was made.
But she was already gone.
Whatever happened, it was very fast.”

As Marino, Colin, and I put on white coveralls, I notice an inmate staring through the glass window of the cell across from
Kathleen’s.
She has a matronly face, a sunken mouth, and a helmet of tightly curled gray hair, and as I look at her she looks
back at me and begins to talk in a muffled loud voice through her locked steel door.

“Fast?
The hell it was fast!”
she starts in.
“I was hollering for thirty damn minutes before anyone showed up!
Thirty damn minutes!
She’s over there strangling, I mean, I could hear it, and I’m hollering and nobody comes.
She’s gasping, ‘I can’t breathe,
I can’t breathe, I’m going blind, somebody help me, please!’
Thirty damn minutes!
Then she got quiet.
She’s not answering me anymore, and I start hollering at the top of my lungs for somebody to come….”

In three swift steps Tara Grimm is before the inmate’s door, rapping the glass with her knuckles.
“Quiet down, Ellenora.”
The way the warden says it makes me think that Ellenora is volunteering this
information for the first time.
Tara Grimm seems genuinely taken aback and angry.
“Let these people do what they need to do,
and we’ll let you out and you can tell them exactly what you observed,” she says to the inmate.

“Thirty minutes at least!
Why did it take so long?
I guess if a body knows they’re dying in here, that’s just too damn bad.
If it’s a fire or a flood or I’m choking on a chicken bone, too damn bad,” Ellenora says to me.

“You need to quiet down, Ellenora.
We’ll get to you soon enough, and you can tell them what you observed.”

“Tell them what I observed?
I didn’t observe a thing.
I couldn’t see her.
I already told you and all of them I didn’t see
nothing.”

“That’s right,” Tara Grimm says coolly, condescendingly.
“Your original statement was you didn’t observe anything.
Are you
changing your mind?”

“Because I couldn’t!
I couldn’t observe nothing!
It’s not like she was standing up and looking out the window.
I couldn’t
see her, and that made it awful, just hearing her pleading and suffering and groaning.
Making these bloodcurdling sounds like
an animal suffering.
A body could die in here, and who’s going to come!
It’s not like we got a panic button we can push!
They
let her die in her cell,” she says to me.
“They let her just die in there!”
Her wide eyes stare at me.