Red Mist (29 page)

“… 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.

C
olin 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 avoiding 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.”

“What might Kathleen have meant by ‘sleepy’?”
I inquired, and the officer seemed to be annoyed by that.
“Well, sleepy,” she
repeated, as if she was sorry she said it and wanted to take it back.
There’s a difference between being sleepy and fatigued,
I explained.
Physical activity can make one fatigued, as can illness, I pointed out.
But sleepiness by my definition indicates
feeling drowsy, having difficulty keeping one’s eyes open, and this can occur when someone is sleep-deprived but also when
certain conditions such as low blood sugar are to blame.

Officer Slater’s answer was to cut her eyes at Tara Grimm and say to Colin and me that Kathleen complained she wished she
hadn’t eaten so close to going outside in the heat and humidity.
Eating a big meal might have given her indigestion, and maybe
she was having heartburn, she wasn’t sure, but Kathleen was always complaining about the food at the GPFW, Officer Slater
let us know.

Kathleen “fussed” about the food whether it was delivered to her cell in Bravo Pod or when she was eating in the chow hall.
She talked about food all the time, usually complaining it wasn’t any good or there wasn’t enough, “but it was always something
she was unhappy about,” Officer Slater said, and the inflection of her voice and the shifting of her eyes as she continued
to talk gave me the same feeling I got when I was talking to Kathleen yesterday.
Officer Slater was mindful of the warden
and not the truth.

“What’s Benton doing?”
I ask Lucy.

“Talking to the Boston field office.”

“Do we have an update?”
I want to know about Dawn Kincaid.

“Not that I know of, but he looks intense out there on the ramp,
where no one can hear him as usual.
You want him?”

“I don’t want to hold you up.
We’ll talk when I see you.
I don’t know who might be here.”
What I’m suggesting is she could
run into Jaime Berger, who still hasn’t bothered to return my phone call.

“Maybe it will be her problem,” Lucy says.

“I’d rather it isn’t anybody’s problem.
I’d rather you don’t have an unpleasant encounter.”

“Gotta pay for gas.”

I smell creosote and Dumpsters baking in the sun as Colin and I reach the morgue, a windowless pale yellow cinder-block building
flanked by HVACs and an industrial backup generator on one side and the bay on another.
Beyond the back fence, tall pines
sway in the wind, and in the distance, lightning shimmers in blooming black clouds and I can see veils of rain far off to
the southwest, a bad storm heading this way from Florida.
The huge metal shutter door is rolled up, and we walk through an
empty concrete space to another door that Colin unlocks with a key.

“We probably autopsy on average two per year, and then another five or six that we sign out after a view.”
He picks up where
he left off when Lucy called, explaining the types of cases he typically gets from the GPFW.

“If I were you, I’d review all of them for however many years Tara Grimm has been the warden,” I reply.

“Mostly we’re talking cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease, liver disease, congestive heart failure,” Colin says.
“Georgia’s not exactly known for compassionate release if an
inmate is terminally ill.
That’s all we need.
Convicted felons getting out early because they’re dying of cancer and they
rob a bank or shoot someone.”

“Unless the inmate died in hospice, in other words, a death that was beyond questioning, I’d go back and look,” I suggest.

“I’m thinking.”

“Any case that gave you even the slightest concern.
I’d review it again.”

“No concern at the time, to be perfectly honest, but you’ve got my hindsight kicking in.
Shania Plames,” he then says.
“A
really sad story.
Suffered from postpartum psychiatric problems, depressed and delusional, and ended up killing her children,
all three of them.
Hanged them from a balcony railing.
Her husband owned a tile company in Ludowici, was out of town on a
fishing trip.
Imagine coming home to that?”

He checks the big black log inside the receiving area that has a floor scale, a walk-in refrigerator, and a small office with
in-out boxes.

“Good, she’s here.”
He means Kathleen Lawler is.

“Shania Plames was a sudden death at the GPFW,” I suppose.

“On death row,” he says.
“About four years ago, she asphyxiated
herself after she came in from the exercise cage one morning.
Used a pair of her uniform pants, wrapped one leg around her
neck, the other leg around her ankles, sort of hog-tying herself, and lay on her belly.
The weight of her legs hanging over
the edge of the bed put just enough pressure on her jugular to cut the oxygen off to her brain.”

We follow a white tiled hallway past locker rooms, bathrooms, various storage rooms, and the decomp autopsy room, with its
solitary table and double drawer refrigerator-freezer, and Colin continues to tell me it was an unusually creative way to
kill oneself in an environment that is virtually suicide-proof, and he wasn’t really sure if what Shania Plames had rigged
up with her trousers would work but he wasn’t about to try it.
He gives me every detail he can recall about her and one other
case, Rea Abernathy, who was just last year, found with her head in the toilet bowl, the steel rim of it compressing her neck,
her cause of death positional asphyxia.

“She didn’t have a ligature mark, but one might expect the absence of that when what she’d allegedly used to strangle herself
was a wide, relatively soft fabric,” Colin says, about Shania Plames.
“There were no injuries to the internal structures of
the neck, and that wasn’t unusual, either, in a suicidal hanging by partial suspension or ligature strangulation by positioning.
No injuries or evidence that gave me anything to go on with Rea Abernathy, either.”

As in the Barrie Lou Rivers case, his diagnoses were based mainly on the history, a process of elimination.

“Not at all the way I want to practice forensic medicine,” Colin says darkly, as we enter an anteroom of deep steel sinks,
red biohazard trash cans, hampers, and shelves of disposable protective clothing.
“Frustrating as hell.”

“Why was Rea Abernathy in prison?”
I ask.

“Paid someone to drown her husband in the swimming pool.
Was supposed to look like an accident and it didn’t.
He had a big
contusion on the back of his head, a big intracranial hematoma.
Dead before he hit the water.
Plus, the guy she paid to do
it was someone she was having an affair with.”

“And what about her?
She absolutely didn’t drown in the toilet?”

“Wouldn’t have been possible.
Prison toilets are shallow and elongated, the water below the level of the bowl.
Built to be
suicide-resistant, like everything else inside the cell.
You’d have to get your face way down inside it to drown or suffocate,
and that’s not going to happen unless someone holds you forcibly, and there was no sign of that, no injuries, like I said.
The story was she was sick, was gagging.
Or maybe was trying to throw up.
There was a suggestion she might have had an eating
disorder.
And she passed out or had an arrhythmia.”

“Assuming she was alive when she ended up in that position.”

“I’m not in the business of assuming,” Colin says unhappily.
“But there was nothing else.
Negative tox.
Another diagnosis of exclusion.”

“The symbolism,” I point out.
“Her husband supposedly drowns, and she dies with her head in a toilet and at a glance, at least
to the uninitiated, might appear to have drowned.
Shania Plames hangs her children and then herself.”
I remember what Tara
Grimm said about not forgiving anyone who harms a child or an animal, and that life was a gift that could be given or taken
away.
“Barrie Lou Rivers poisons people with tuna-fish sandwiches, and that’s what she ate for her last meal,” I add.

We pull on splash-proof sleeves and fluid-resistant aprons, then shoe covers, and surgical caps and masks.

“I liked the old days better, when we didn’t have to bother wearing all this shit,” Colin says, and he sounds angry.