Red Mist (2 page)

The GPFW is the model for a number of prisons, I’ve learned from the careful research I’ve done.
It’s regarded as a superior
example of enlightened and humane rehabilitation for female felons, many of them trained while in custody to be plumbers,
electricians, cosmetologists, woodworkers, mechanics, roofers, landscapers, cooks, and caterers.
Inmates maintain the buildings
and grounds.
They prepare the food and work in the library and in the beauty
salon, and assist in the medical clinic and publish their own magazine and are expected to at least pass the GED exam while
they’re behind bars.
Everyone here earns her keep and is offered opportunities, except those housed in maximum security,
known as Bravo Pod, where Kathleen Lawler was reassigned two weeks ago, about the same time her e-mails to me abruptly stopped.

Parking in a visitor’s space, I check my iPhone for messages to make sure there is nothing urgent to attend to, hoping for
something from Benton, and there is.
“Hot as hell where you are, and supposed to storm.
Be careful, and let me know how it
goes.
I love you,” writes my matter-of-fact practical husband, who never fails to give me a weather report or some other useful
update when he’s thinking about me.
I love him, too, and am fine and will call in a few hours, I write him back, as I watch
several men in suits and ties emerge from the administration building, escorted by a corrections officer.
The men look like
lawyers, maybe prison officials, I decide, and I wait until they are driven away in an unmarked car, wondering who they are
and what brings them here.
I tuck my phone into my shoulder bag, hiding it under the seat, taking nothing with me but my driver’s
license, an envelope with nothing written on it, and the van keys.

The summer sun presses against me like a heavy, hot hand, and clouds are building in the southwest, boiling up thickly, the
air fragrant with lavender mist and summersweet as I follow a concrete sidewalk through blooming shrubs and more tidy flower
beds while invisible eyes watch from slitted windows around the prison yard.
Inmates have nothing better to do than stare,
to look out at a world they can no longer be part of as they gather intelligence more shrewdly than the CIA.
I feel a collective
consciousness taking in
my loud white cargo van with its South Carolina plates, and the way I’m dressed, not my usual business suit or investigative
field clothes but a pair of khakis, a blue-and-white striped cotton shirt tucked in, and basket-weave loafers with a matching
belt.
I have on no jewelry except a titanium watch on a black rubber strap and my wedding band.
It wouldn’t be easy to guess
my economic status or who or what I am, except the van doesn’t fit with the image I had in mind for this day.

My intention was to look like a middle-aged casually coiffed blond woman who doesn’t do anything dramatically important or
even interesting in life.
But then that damn van!
A scuffed-up shuttering white monstrosity with windows tinted so dark they
are almost black in back, as if I work for a construction company or make deliveries, or perhaps have come to the GPFW to
transport an inmate alive or dead, it occurs to me, as I sense women watching.
Most of them I will never meet, although I
know the names of a few, those whose infamous cases have been in the news and whose heinous acts have been presented at professional
meetings I attend.
I resist looking around or letting on that I’m aware of anyone watching as I wonder which dark slash of
a window is hers.

How emotional this must be for Kathleen Lawler.
I suspect she has thought of little else of late.
For people like her, I’m
the final connection to those they’ve lost or killed.
I’m the surrogate for their dead.

T
ara Grimm is the warden, and her office at the end of a long blue hallway is furnished and decorated by the inmates she keeps.

The desk, coffee table, and chairs are lacquered honey-colored oak and have a sturdy shape and for me a certain charm because
I almost always would rather see something made by hand, no matter how rustic.
Vines with heart-shaped variegated leaves crowd
planters in windows and trail from them to the tops of homebuilt bookcases, draping over the sides like bunting and tumbling
in tangled masses from hanging baskets.
When I comment on what a green thumb Tara Grimm must have, she informs me in a measured
melodious voice that inmates tend to her indoor plants.
She doesn’t know the name of the creepers, as she calls them, but
they could be philodendron.“Golden pothos.”
I touch a marbled yellow-green leaf.
“More commonly known as devil’s ivy.”

“It won’t stop growing, and I won’t let them cut it back,” she says from the bookcase behind her desk, where she is returning
a volume to a shelf,
The Economics of Recidivism.
“Started out with one little shoot in a glass of water, and I use it as an important life lesson all these women chose to
ignore along the path that landed them in trouble.
Be careful what takes root or one day it will be all there is.”
She shelves
another book,
The Art of Manipulation.
“I don’t know.”
She scans vines festooning the room.
“I suppose it’s getting a bit overwhelmed in here.”

The warden is somewhere in her forties, I deduce, tall and svelte and strangely out of place in her scoop-neck black dress
that flows mid-calf with a gold coin lariat wrapped around her neck, as if she paid special attention to her appearance this
day, perhaps because of the men just leaving, visitors, possibly important ones.
Dark-eyed, with high cheekbones and long
black hair swept up and back, Tara Grimm doesn’t look like what she does, and I wonder if the absurdity occurs to her or others.
In Buddhism, Tara is the mother of liberation, which one might argue this Tara certainly is not.
Although her world is grim.

She smoothes her skirt as she sits down behind her desk and I take a straight-backed chair across from her.
“Mainly I needed
to go over anything you might intend to show Kathleen,” she informs me of the reason I was directed to her office.
“I’m sure
you know the routine.”

“It’s not routine for me to visit people in prison,” I reply.
“Unless
it’s in the infirmary or worse.”
What I mean is if an inmate needs a forensic physical examination or is dead.

“If you’ve brought reports or other documents, anything to go over with her, I need to approve them first,” she lets me know,
and I tell her again that I’ve come as a friend, which is legally correct but not literally true.

I am no friend to Kathleen Lawler and will be deliberate and cautious as I extract information, encouraging her to tell me
what I want to know without letting on I care.
Did she have contact with Jack Fielding over the years, and what happened during
episodes of freedom when she was on the outside?
An ongoing sexual affair between a female offender and her younger male victim
certainly has occurred in other cases I’ve researched, and Kathleen was in and out of prison the entire time I knew Jack.
If there were continued romantic interludes with this woman who molested him as a boy, I wonder if the timing of them might
be related to those periods when he went haywire and vanished, prompting me to find him and eventually hire him back.

I want to know when he first discovered that Dawn Kincaid was his daughter and why he recently connected with her in Massachusetts,
allowing her to live in his house in Salem, and for how long, and was this related to his walking out on his wife and family?
Did Jack know he was being altered by dangerous drugs, or was that part of Dawn’s sabotage, and was he aware his behavior
was increasingly erratic, and whose idea was it for him to engage in illegal activities at the Cambridge Forensic Center,
the CFC, while I was out of town?

I can’t predict what Kathleen might know or say, but I will handle
the conversation the way I’ve planned and rehearsed with my lawyer, Leonard Brazzo, and give her nothing in return.
She can’t
be required to testify against her own daughter and wouldn’t be credible in court, but I won’t reveal a single fact that could
find its way back to Dawn Kincaid and be used to help her defense.

“Well, I didn’t suppose you’d bring anything relating to those cases,” Tara Grimm says, and I sense she is disappointed.
“I
confess to having a lot of questions about what went on up there in Massachusetts.
I admit I’m curious.”

Most people are.
The Mensa Murders, as the press has dubbed homicides and other vicious acts involving people with genius
or near-genius IQs, are about as grotesque as anything one might ever conjure up.
After more than twenty years of working
violent deaths, I still haven’t seen it all.

“I won’t be discussing any investigative details with her,” I tell the warden.

“I’m sure Kathleen will be asking you, since it is her daughter we’re talking about, after all.
Dawn Kincaid supposedly killed
those people and then tried to murder you, too?”
Her eyes are steady on mine.

“I won’t be discussing any details with Kathleen about those cases or any cases.”
I give the warden nothing.
“That’s not why
I’m here,” I reiterate firmly.
“But I did bring a photograph I’d like her to have.”

“If you’ll let me see it.”
She reaches out a fine-boned hand with perfectly manicured nails painted deep rose as if she just
had them done, and she wears many rings and a gold metal watch with a crystal bezel.

I give her the plain white envelope I’d tucked into my back pocket,
and she slides out a photograph of Jack Fielding washing his prized ’67 cherry-red Mustang, shirtless and in running shorts,
grinning and glorious, when he was captured on camera some five years ago, between marriages and deteriorations.
Although
I didn’t do his autopsy, I’ve dissected his existence these five months since his murder, in part trying to figure out what
I could have done to prevent it.
I don’t believe I could have.
I was never able to stop any self-destruction of his, and as
I look at the photograph from where I sit, anger and guilt spark, and then I feel sad.

“Well, I guess that’s fine,” the warden says.
“He was easy on the eyes, I’ll give him that.
One of these obsessive bodybuilders,
good Lord.
How many hours in a day would it take?”

I look around at framed certificates and commendations on her walls because I don’t want to look at her looking at that photograph,
uncertain why it’s bothering me so much.
Maybe it’s harder to see Jack through a stranger’s eyes.
Warden of the Year.
Outstanding Merit.
Distinguished Service Award.
Meritorious Service Award, Continuing Excellence.
Supervisor
of the Month.
Some of them she’s won more than once, and she has a bachelor’s degree cum laude from Spalding University in Kentucky, but
she doesn’t sound like a native, more like Louisiana, and I ask her where she’s from.

“Mississippi, originally,” she says.
“My father was the superintendent of the state penitentiary there, and I spent my early
years on twenty thousand acres of delta land as flat as a pancake, with soybeans and cotton that the inmates farmed.
Then
he got hired by Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, more farmland far away from civilization, and I lived right there
on the grounds, which might seem strange.
But I didn’t mind living in the lap of my father’s work.
Amazing what you get used to as if it’s normal.
It was his recommendation that the GPFW be built out here in the middle of
scrubland and swamps, and that the women take care of it and cost the taxpayers as little as possible.
I guess you could
say that prisons are in my blood.”

“Your father worked here at some point?”

“No, he never did.”
She smiles ironically.
“I can’t imagine my father overseeing two thousand women.
He would have been a
bit bored with that, although some of them are a whole lot worse than the men.
He was sort of like Arnold Palmer giving advice
about golf-course design, no one better, depending on your vision, and he was progressive.
A number of correctional institutions
called upon him for advice.
Angola, for example, has a rodeo stadium, a newspaper, and a radio station.
Some of the inmates
are celebrated rodeo riders and experts in leather, metal, and woodworking design that they’re allowed to sell for their own
profit.”
She doesn’t say all this as if she necessarily thinks it’s a good thing.
“My worry about these cases you have up
north is did they get everyone involved?”

“One would hope.”

“At least we know for sure Dawn Kincaid is locked up, and I hope she stays locked up.
Killing innocent people for no good
reason,” the warden says.
“I hear she’s got mental problems because of stress.
Imagine that.
What about the stress she’s caused?”

Some months ago, Dawn Kincaid was transferred to Butler State Hospital, where doctors will determine whether she is competent
to stand trial.
Ploys.
Malingering.
Let the games begin.
Or as my chief investigator, Pete Marino, puts it, she got caught
and caught a case of the crazies.

“Hard to imagine she was all on her own when she was coming up with ways to sabotage and destroy innocent lives, but the worst
is that poor little boy.”
Tara is talking about what is none of her business, and I have no choice but to let her.
“Killing
a helpless child who was playing in his backyard while his parents were right there inside the house?
There’s no forgiveness
for harming a child or an animal,” she says, as if harming an adult might be acceptable.

“I was wondering if it would be all right for Kathleen to keep the photograph.”
I don’t verify or refute her information.
“I thought she might like to have it.”

“I suppose I can’t see any harm in it.”
But she doesn’t seem sure, and when she reaches across her desk to hand the photograph
back to me, I catch what is in her eyes.

She’s thinking,
Why would you give her a picture of him?
Indirectly, Kathleen Lawler is the reason Jack Fielding is dead.
No, not indirectly,
I think, as anger simmers.
She had sex with an underage boy, and the child they produced grew up to be Dawn Kincaid, his
killer.
That’s about as direct as anything needs to get.

“I don’t know what Kathleen has seen that’s recent,” I offer as an explanation, returning the photograph to its envelope.
“It’s an image I choose to remember him by, the way he was in better times.”

I can’t imagine Kathleen looking at this photograph and not opening up to me.
We’ll see who manipulates whom.

“I don’t know how much you were told about why I moved her into protective custody,” Tara says.

“I simply know that she has been.”
My answer is intentionally vague.

“Mr.
Brazzo didn’t explain?”
She seems dubious as she folds her hands on top of her tidy square oak desk.

Leonard Brazzo is a criminal trial lawyer, and the reason I need one is that when Dawn Kincaid’s attempt on my life goes to
trial, I don’t intend to entrust my welfare to some overworked or green assistant U.S.
attorney.
I have no doubt the team
of lawyers who have taken her on pro bono will make my being attacked inside my own garage somehow excusable.
They’ll claim
it was my fault she ambushed me from behind in the pitch dark.
I’m alive because I was bizarrely lucky, and as I sit inside
Tara Grimm’s ivy-infested office, it bothers me more than I care to admit that I’m really not responsible for saving myself.

“As I understand it, she’s been moved into protective custody for her own safety,” I reply, as I envision the level-four-A
camouflage vest with its inserted Kevlar-ceramic plates.
I remember the body armor’s tough nylon texture, the new smell of
it, and its weight as I draped it over my shoulder inside my dark, frigid garage that night after retrieving it from the backseat
of the SUV.

“Seems like my moving her to Bravo Pod might have made you hesitant about what you might be walking into down here in Savannah,”
Tara comments.
“Seems like you might not be inclined to seek out anything
unsafe
after what you’ve been through.”