Red Mist (42 page)

“I’m just not aware of any deaths from that, any homicides, as I’ve said,” he adds.
“Not one.”

A folding bike that’s nothing more than a ruse, a prop, an explanation for the helmet that interferes with security cameras,
Lucy is implying.
It would look suspicious to be wearing a bike helmet with safety lights on it if you didn’t have a bike,
and it would look equally odd if you were wearing a lighted hat or headband.
That’s why the woman was walking the bike across
the street when she appeared at Jaime’s building at almost the same moment I did, it occurs to me.
The woman with the baguette
ring and military watch wasn’t riding the bike at all, and probably had a car parked somewhere.

“It’s about dosage,” Briggs continues.
“Almost anything can be a poison if you get too much of it, including water.
You can
be poisoned by your wallpaper if there’s enough copper arsenide in it.
That’s what happened to Clare Boothe Luce, paint chips
falling from her bedroom ceiling when she was the ambassador to Italy.”

“I’m just wondering if there’s been anything new in efforts to weaponize botulinum toxin,” I say to him.
“Any technologies
that a violent sociopathic person might have gotten hold of.
A rogue military person, for example.
Like the Army scientist
who was working on an improved anthrax vaccine and carried out anthrax attacks that left at least five people dead.”

“You always have to pick on the Army,” says Briggs, who couldn’t be more Army.
“Nice of him to do us the courtesy of killing
himself before the FBI could arrest him.”

“Any other scientists who have been banned from labs where such research is going on?”
I ask.
“Especially anyone with military
ties.”

“If it becomes necessary to look for that, we could,” Briggs says.
“In my opinion, it’s necessary.”

“Obviously that’s your opinion, which is why you’re up all night and calling me in Afghanistan.”

“No new technologies that the military might know about?”
I again ask.
“Anything classified, you don’t have to tell me what.
Just that we should be considering such a possibility.”

“No, thank God.
Nothing I’m aware of.
A gram of pure crystalline toxin could kill a million people if it was inhaled, and
to weaponize it, you’d need a way to produce a large aerosol.
Fortunately, there’s still no effective method.”

“What about a small aerosol distributed to a lot of people?”
I ask.
“In other words, an approach that is different, more painstaking.
Or a distribution of small packages of poison that are mass-produced like MREs.”

“I’m curious about why you’re mentioning MREs specifically.”

I tell him about Kathleen Lawler, about the burns on her foot
and the trace evidence in her sink, and that her gastric contents were similar to an MRE menu of chicken and pasta with a
ration of cheese spread.

“How the hell would an inmate get hold of an MRE?”
he asks.
“Exactly,” I reply.
“Almost any food could have been poisoned,
so why an MRE?
Unless someone is experimenting with them to use on a bigger target.”

“That would be pretty damn awful, and it would have to be a systematic approach, a highly organized one.
Someone working in
the factory where rations are being produced and packaged, otherwise you’re talking about a lot of vials of the toxin and
hypodermic needles and hijacked delivery trucks.”

“You wouldn’t need a systematic approach if the point is terror,” I reply.

“Well, I guess that’s true,” he reconsiders.
“Have a hundred or three hundred or a thousand casualties at once in theater
or on military bases or in operational areas, and the impact would be destabilizing.
It would be disastrous to morale, would
empower the enemy and further cripple the U.S.
economy.”

“So not anything we’re doing or working on,” I make sure.
“Not research our government might be involved in to damage morale
and cripple the economy of the enemy.
To terrorize.”

“It’s just not practical,” he replies.
“Russia’s given up trying to weaponize botulinum toxin, as has the U.S., for which
I’m grateful.
A terrible idea, and I hope no one ever cracks the technology, but that’s just me.
A point source aerosol release,
and ten percent of the people downwind of it up to a third of a mile away are going to be incapacitated or dead.
God forbid
it drifts to a school or a shopping
mall.
One thing we need to figure out is why some people are dead while others aren’t or weren’t intentional targets.”

“We don’t think Dawn Kincaid was intentional.”

“But you think her mother was, and also the prosecutor.”

“Yes.”

“And based on what you’re telling me, you think that whoever is responsible really wanted the prosecutor …”

“Jaime Berger and Kathleen Lawler.
Yes, I believe whoever is responsible really wanted them dead.”

“Then they’re not necessarily what you’re considering research, like the deaths of inmates, if what you suspect is true.
A
science project.
I don’t mean to trivialize the death of anyone who might have been killed with botulinum toxin.
A hell of
a way to die, for fuck’s sake.”

“I feel as if something changed,” I reply.
“I feel as if whoever is doing this is meticulous and has a plan, and then something
came up she wasn’t expecting.
Possibly because of Jaime.
Somebody doesn’t like what she was doing.”

“You believe this person is female.”

“A woman delivered the sushi last night.”

“Well, if that’s confirmed.”

“I suspect it’s going to be, and then what?”
I say to him.

“Three cases of homicidal poisoning by botulinum toxin that include a tampered-with MRE?
All hell’s going to break loose,
Kay,” he says.
“And you need to stay out of the way.
A million miles from it.”

T
he sun is high in another washed-out sky, the heat wave tenaciously holding its grip on the Lowcountry, and what Colin Dengate
claims simply isn’t true.
Not everyone gets used to riding around with no air-conditioning in weather like this, although
Benton was thoughtful enough to bring me clothes, summer khakis, so I’m not baking in all black.

It’s July 2, Saturday, almost ten a.m., and Colin’s staff isn’t working except for whoever’s on call, and he had to swap a
few favors to set up what I need, he said.
Then he had to pick me up at the hotel, because I don’t have a way to get around
on my own.
Marino is off with a shopping list for medical supplies that I want to have on hand,
and he just dropped off Lucy at the local Harley-Davidson dealership.
She intends for her transportation to be a motorcycle
while she’s here, and I wasn’t going to leave Benton without the rental car, although his plan at the moment is to stay at
the hotel.
When I left him he was making phone calls, and FBI agents are on their way to Savannah from the Atlanta field office
so he can brief them thoroughly as we wait for the news from the CDC to have its impact.

Botulinum toxin serotype A has been confirmed in Kathleen Lawler’s and Jaime Berger’s gastric contents.
The toxin has been
confirmed in the empty container of seaweed salad and also the leftovers in the refrigerator from the bag of take-out sushi
that a serial poisoner delivered to Jaime’s apartment building Thursday night.
I haven’t given the latest information to Briggs,
who is in transit on a military airlifter out of the Middle East, but I don’t need him to repeat what’s expected of me, which
is to do nothing.
I don’t want to hear him tell me that again, and I’m grateful I can’t, because I don’t intend to comply,
at least not quite.

The investigation is locked down and off-limits in anticipation of what we expect to be a rapid and decisive diverting of
jurisdiction to Homeland Security, the FBI, whatever the federal government decides, and I know when I’m supposed to stay
out of the way, to use what I call the ten-foot-pole rule.
Don’t go anywhere near these poisoning cases, and were Briggs or
anyone else to ask me, I would say that technically I’m not.
The nine-year-old murders of a Savannah family and the mentally
impaired woman who was convicted of them are of no interest to the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the White
House, or scarcely anyone else this moment.

Those cases are still closed, and Lola Daggette is still scheduled
to die because Jaime never filed the petition to vacate her capital-murder convictions.
The new DNA results are languishing
in a private lab, awaiting some other criminal defense attorney to step in and finish what Jaime started.
Until then, the
Jordan murder cases are cold and old and irrelevant, when attention is on a serial poisoner, who might be a terrorist planning
mass murder.
As I’ve sorted through all that has happened, I continue to ask why.
But the
why
of a terrorist plan to cause incapacitation and casualties among innocent civilians or military personnel isn’t my question.
Unfortunately, there’s a long line of disturbed people in the world who would covet the chance to cause such destruction.
What has my attention is something else.

If earlier deaths at the GPFW were vengeful murders that also served as research for a poisoner planning a widespread attack,
then how do Kathleen Lawler and Jaime Berger fit with the modus operandi and ultimate goal?
Jaime’s reopening the Jordan case
shouldn’t matter to a poisoner planning terror, unless Jaime was tampering with something that alarmed this person enough
to take the risk of getting Jaime out of the way.
By murdering her and Kathleen, and inadvertently poisoning Dawn Kincaid,
the killer has only drawn attention to herself when before there was none.
A cluster of homicidal poisonings with botulinum
toxin that might include tampering with military rations, and the entire U.S.
government is going to come down on the killer’s
head.
Ultimately, she won’t get away with it, and to take that chance after quiet years of painstaking premeditation can’t
be attributed to a loss of self-control or an escalated urge to torture and murder.
Something unexpected happened.

Pathologists—and certainly this is my natural inclination—focus
more on cause than effect.
I’m less interested in the gore of blood and tissue spattered everywhere than I am in the angle
of an entrance wound that might suggest it wasn’t the victim who pulled the trigger, and I don’t care about the drama of symptoms
beyond the suffering they cause.
My method is to track down the disease, to reflect away distractions, and to dissect to the
bone, if need be, or, in the Jordan case, return to the crime scene as best I can.
I intend to look at the photographs and
all the evidence as if they’ve never been examined, and I might visit the Jordans’ former home if I determine there’s anything
left to see that matters.

“The same records you were looking at yesterday,” Colin is saying, as we walk along the deserted corridor, mobiles of bats
and bones slowly twirling from the ceiling inside his empty lab building.
“The knife recovered from the kitchen.
Clothes,
some other items that I collected at the scene and sent in with the bodies then.
All of it submitted as evidence at trial,
unless the prosecutor considered it irrelevant.
My path tech Mandy will be in the room with you.
Nice of her to come in, since
we can’t afford overtime.
Anyway, same drill as before.
And I’ll be in my office, because I know damn well you’d rather take
a look and not listen to opinions, meaning mine.
You get to interpret the evidence the same way I did, and I won’t be breathing
down your neck.”

Mandy O’Toole, in scrubs and examination gloves, is arranging a pair of children’s pajamas on white butcher paper that covers
the conference room table, the case records I started looking at yesterday out of the way, stacked on a chair.

“It’s the kids’ stuff that’s really, really hard for me,” she says, and
I recognize most of what I’m seeing from photographs I began to review yesterday.

Neatly spread out on the white paper are two sets of children’s pajamas, one SpongeBob, the other a football design with helmets
of the Georgia Bulldogs.
A pair of men’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt must have been what Clarence Jordan was sleeping in when
he was stabbed to death in bed, and a blue floral and lace nightgown obviously was his wife’s.
All of the garments are stained
dark brown with old blood, and riddled with small slits and punctures from at least one sharp instrument, and there are multiple
small holes where fabric was removed for DNA analysis.

I pull gloves out of a box on the table and put them on, then pick up evidence labeled and marked by the court: a knife, and
I leave it inside its bag, examining it through the plastic.
The blade is approximately six inches in length, the wooden handle
smudged with old blood.
White, filmy partial fingerprints and an intact one are permanently fixed in superglue on the nonporous
smooth surfaces of the steel and lacquered wood, and while the knife may have been used by the killer to make a sandwich in
the kitchen, I don’t believe it killed anyone.

The kitchen knife is a clip point, or “granny,” used for such tasks as removing the eyes from potatoes or peeling vegetables
and fruits, and as suggested by the name, the blade has been clipped off from the middle of the spine all the way to the point,
leaving a dull edge for resting your thumb.
Any knife with a false curved edge will be less effective in piercing, and therefore
not a good choice in stabbings.
Furthermore, the blade at its widest point is almost two inches,
which is inconsistent with what I saw on body diagrams in the autopsy reports.
I walk to the other end of the table and look
through the thick files on the chair, sifting through documents until I find what I remember looking at yesterday morning,
a description of the wounds.

The cause of death in all four cases is multiple sharp force injuries, and I’m particularly interested in the stab wounds
to the chest and neck, because areas of the body that offer a thickness of tissue and hollow spaces can be a good indication
of the length of the blade.
On Clarence Jordan’s right lateral chest, the wound measures one inch long and extends to a depth
of three inches, penetrating the pericardial sac and the heart.
On his right lateral neck, the wound track travels front to
back and downward, and to a depth of three inches, severing his carotid artery.

Other measurements of the other victims’ wounds suggest the blade was at most three inches in length and an inch wide, with
some sort of guard at the top of the handle that left four parallel but irregular abraded contusions spaced one-eighth of
an inch apart.
Such a pattern injury couldn’t have been inflicted by the granny knife or any kitchen knife I can think of,
and it was Colin’s conclusion at the time that the weapon was unknown and inconsistent with anything recovered from the scene.
It would seem that the killer carried in what must have been an unusual cutting instrument, and afterward left with it.

Clarence Jordan has no incised wounds or defensive injuries of the arms or hands, arguing against him struggling or even being
awake when he was attacked.
Toxicology findings of a blood alcohol concentration of .04 and what would be considered a therapeutic
level of clonazepam paint a picture of him having a drink or two and taking a modest dose, perhaps a milligram of the benzodiazepine,
to calm anxieties or to help him sleep.
That thought leads me around to the other side of the table, where a plastic evidence
bag that isn’t marked for court contains half a dozen prescription bottles, only one of them with Clarence Jordan’s name on
it, the beta blocker propranolol.
Other bottles belonged to his wife, including antibiotics, an antidepressant, and clonazepam,
and while it isn’t uncommon for someone to take another person’s medication, it surprises me that Clarence Jordan would.

He was a physician with easy access to samples, to any medication he wanted, and it is illegal to share prescription drugs.
That doesn’t mean he didn’t get into his wife’s clonazepam the night of January 5 when he returned home from his volunteer
work at an area men’s emergency shelter around dinnertime.
It also doesn’t preclude the possibility that he didn’t take the
sedative willingly.
It would be easy to crush pills to mix in someone’s drink, and I continue to think about the security
system event logs I reviewed.

According to the actual data from the alarm company’s internal archives, the Jordans armed and disarmed the alarm repeatedly
through November of 2001, but something changed in December, when it appears the false alarms, allegedly caused by the Jordan
children, began to be a problem.
The last month the Jordans were alive, there were five faults that set off the alarm, all
involving the same zone, the kitchen door.
The police did not respond, and the alarms were cleared because the subscriber,
when called by the service, said the alarms were false.
The arming of the security system became increasingly erratic through
the holidays, based on my review of the
logs, but it continued to be set most nights, which is why I find the data for Saturday, January 5, rather odd.
The alarm
wasn’t set at all that day until almost eight o’clock at night.
Then it was disarmed at not quite eleven and never reset,
and this seems to be contrary to what has been supposed by journalists and the police over the years.

In fact, it would appear that Dr.
Jordan returned home from his volunteer work and set the alarm, then three hours later someone
disarmed it, and that detail in addition to his having a sedative on board not prescribed to him disturbs me.
I spread out
scene photographs of the bloody massacre in the Jordans’ master bedroom, looking at images of the couple’s bodies in the bed,
the covers pulled up to their necks, and that bothers me, too.
People aren’t manikins when they’re being murdered, and bedcovers
aren’t neatly arranged over their dead bodies unless the killer or someone does so for psychological reasons, to restore order
or cover up what they’ve done.
Colin has commented that the bodies may have been displayed to mock the victims, and I sort
through more photos that were taken after he removed the top covers so he could examine Dr.
and Mrs.
Jordan’s bodies in situ.

He is on his back, his head on a pillow, staring straight up with an open mouth, his arms straight down by his sides, his
genitals protruding through the slit in his boxer shorts, and I doubt this was his position at death.
Someone rearranged him,
and the more I see, the more I understand the hatred that the police, the prosecutor, and others must feel toward Lola Daggette
as they imagined her inside this room, enjoying herself after she’s slaughtered everyone, demonstrating blatant degradation
and contempt.