Red Mist (31 page)

“But all indications are that the oxygen was cut off from her brain for too long,” Benton says, as I hear Jaime’s speech before
I left her around one a.m., talking thickly and slurring her words.
“By the time they got to her in her cell, she’d stopped
breathing, and while they’ve kept her alive, she’s gone.”

I remember the take-out bag I carried into the apartment and where it came from, handed to me by a stranger, and I accepted
it without thinking.

I start to say, “I thought she was fine.
Just an asthma attack—”

“Limited information at the time, and this is being kept
extremely hushed,” Benton interrupts.
“The initial thought was an asthma attack, but very quickly her symptoms became severe,
and attending staff at Butler tried a single dose of epinephrine, assuming anaphylaxis, but there was no improvement.
She
couldn’t talk or breathe.
There’s a concern she was poisoned somehow.”

I envision the woman wearing the lighted helmet leaning her bicycle against the lamppost.

“No one can begin to imagine how she could have gotten hold of anything poisonous at Butler,” Benton is saying from the other
side of the room.

A delivery woman handing me the bag of sushi, and I vaguely recall something felt wrong but I ignored the feeling because
so much felt wrong yesterday.
Everything that happened from the time Benton drove me to the airport in Boston yesterday, the
entire day felt wrong, and then the rest of it plays out in my memory.
Jaime walking into her apartment after Marino and I
had been talking for the better part of an hour.
She didn’t seem aware she had ordered sushi, and I didn’t question it.

I put down the scalpel.
“Has anybody talked to Jaime today?
Because I haven’t, and she’s not called here.”

Nobody answers.

“She was supposed to stop by the lab today.
I left her a message, and she’s not called back.”
I pull off my hair cover and
the disposable gown.
“What about Marino?
Does anybody know if he’s talked to her?
He was going to call her.”

“He tried while he was driving us here and didn’t get an answer,” Lucy says, and the look on her face indicates she realizes
why I’m asking.

I throw my soiled clothing into the trash and peel off my gloves.
“Call nine-one-one, and maybe you can get hold of Sammy
Chang, and he can meet us,” I tell Colin.
“Make sure they send an ambulance.”
I give him the address.

T
wo police cruisers and Sammy Chang’s white SUV are parked in front of the eight-story brick building, but there are no emergency
lights or flashers, no sign of tragedy or disaster.
I don’t hear sirens nearby or in the distance, just the sound of the cargo
van’s big engine and its new windshield wipers thudding.
It is stuffy and stifling with the windows up, the blower circulating
hot, humid air, the rain so heavy it sounds like a car wash.
Thunder rumbles and cracks, the old city shrouded in fog.

Chang and two Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan officers are huddled out of the weather under the overhang at the top of the steps
by the same front door that buzzed open for me as a delivery woman on a bicycle appeared seemingly out of nowhere like a phantom
last
night.
Lucy, Benton, Marino, and I emerge from the van into the rain and wind, and I look around again for an ambulance, not
seeing or hearing one, and I’m not happy, because I asked.
As a precaution I want a rescue squad.
To save time if there is
time left and anything to save.
Rain splashes on the steamy brick walkway, the sound of the downpour loud like clapping hands.

“Police.
Anybody home?
Police!”
an officer announces, as he holds the intercom button.
“Yeah, she’s not answering.”
He steps
back and looks around as rain falls harder.
“We need to figure out another way.
Every damn day now.”
He looks up at the moiling
dark sky and billowing curtains of water.
“As usual, left my slicker in the car.”

“It won’t last long.
Will be over by the time we come back out,” the other officer says.

“Well, I hope we don’t get hail.
I’ve already had one car messed up that way.
Looked like someone went after it with a high-heel
shoe.”

“What’s a New York prosecutor doing down here anyway?
She on vacation?
A lot of permanent residents in this building, but
they leave in the summer, some of them renting their places by the week.
She here short-term or what?”

“Did anybody call for an ambulance?”
I ask loudly, as wind rocks giant live oak trees and Spanish moss whips like gray swags,
like frayed dirty rags.
“It would be a good idea to have an ambulance here,” I add, as the two officers and Chang watch the
four of us roll up on them with the urgency of the storm that is thundering closer, almost overhead, the hard rain sizzling
on the walkway and the street and pouring off the gabled overhang.

“I’m wondering if there’s a leasing office,” one of the officers says.
“They’ll have a key.”

“Not one in this building, I don’t think.”

“Most of these older places don’t have one on site,” Chang says.
“Or we can try some of the neighbors, maybe …”

Then Marino is pushing past everyone, almost shoving the uniformed officers out of the way, keys in hand.

“Whoa.
Easy, partner.
Who are you?”

I’m distractedly aware of Chang explaining who we are and why we’re here as Marino unlocks the door, and I’m vaguely mindful
of my sopping-wet black field clothes and boots.
I comb back my dripping hair with my fingers as I hear
FBI
and
Boston
and
chief ME working with Dr.
Dengate
while all of us head to the elevator, Lucy close behind me, her hand pressing against my back, pushing me and hanging on,
and I feel what’s in her touch.
I feel the desperation in the pressure of her hand flat against my back, a gesture I’ve not
felt in a very long time, what she used to do when she was a little girl, when she was being protective or was scared, when
she didn’t want to get separated from me in a crowd or for me to leave her.

I’ve told Lucy everything will be okay, because it will be somehow, but I don’t believe it will be okay the way we hope, the
way we wish, the way it should be in a perfect world.
We don’t know anything, I’ve reminded my niece, even though I have no
hope.
I just don’t feel it.
Jaime isn’t answering her cell phone or apartment phone or e-mails or text messages.
We haven’t
heard from her since Marino and I left her at around one o’clock this morning, but there could be a logical explanation, I’ve
said to Lucy.
While we have to take every action possible, that doesn’t mean we are assuming the worst, I’ve reassured her
repeatedly.

But I am assuming the worst.
What I’m experiencing is painfully familiar, like a sad old friend, a grim companion who has
been a depressing leitmotif on my life’s journey, and my response is a feeling I know all too well, a sinking, a solidification,
like concrete setting, like something settling heavily into a deep darkness, a bottomless lightless space, out of reach and
over.
It’s what I sense right before I walk into a place where death quietly and finally waits for me to tend to it as only
I can.
I don’t know what is going through Lucy’s mind.
Not this same feeling or premonition I’m having but something confusing
and contradictory and volatile.

During the twenty-minute ride here she was logical and held together, but she is pale as if she is sick, and she looks both
terrified and angry.
I see the shadings and flares of her emotions in her intense green eyes, and I heard her internal chaos
in a comment she made during the drive.
She said that the last time she talked to Jaime was six months ago when Lucy accused
her of getting into something for the wrong reason.
Getting into what?
I asked.
Getting into defending people and saving them by turning their lies into truth if that’s what it takes, because that’s what
she’s doing to herself.
It’s what she’s comfortable with
, Lucy said.
It’s as if Jaime managed to climb up a big mountain of truth only to fall over the other side of it,
Lucy said in the loud, hot van as the rain began, and her voice was double-edged with fear and rage.
I warned her because I could see it so plainly,
she said.
I told her exactly what she was doing, and she did it anyway.

“You go ahead,” Benton is saying to Marino.

She kept pushing it to the next dangerous level,
Lucy said as we drove into the storm, her voice trembling slightly as if she was out of breath.
Why did she have to do this?
Why!

“She been having problems or something?”
one of the cops asks Marino.
“Personal problems, financial trouble, anything like
that?”

“Nope.”

“Bet she just went out somewhere, maybe sightseeing, and didn’t tell anyone.”

“That’s not her,” Lucy says.
“No fucking way.”

“And left her phone or the battery’s dead.
Know how many times that happens around here?”

“She doesn’t fucking sightsee,” Lucy says behind my back.
Marino wipes his wet face on his sleeve, his eyes darting around,
the way he looks when he’s extremely upset beneath his imperviousness, his rudeness.
The elevator doors slide open, and all
of us crowd inside except Benton and Lucy, as the police keep offering possibilities, trying to talk us out of our growing
sense of urgency when they have no reason to talk us out of a damn thing.

“She’s probably fine.
I see it all the time.
Someone visits from out of town, and if you don’t hear from them?
People get
worried.”

They are beat cops, and this is really nothing more than what’s known on the street as a welfare check, maybe a more dramatic
one than usual, with a bigger, more official posse showing up, but a welfare check nonetheless.
The police do them daily,
especially this time of year, when it’s the height of tourist season, vacation time, and the schools are out.
Someone calls
911 and insists the police check on the welfare of a friend, a family member who isn’t answering the phone or hasn’t been
heard from for a while.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it’s nothing.
In the one case when it’s something, it isn’t
tragic.
Rarely does it turn out that the person is dead.

“I’m going with you,” Lucy says to me.

“I need to go in first.”

“I have to go with you.”

“Not now.”

“I have to,” Lucy insists, and Benton puts his arm around her, pulling her close to him in what’s more than a comforting hug.
He’ll make sure she doesn’t bolt for the stairs and try to force her way inside the apartment.

“I’ll call as soon as I’m in,” I promise Lucy in the narrowing space of the closing doors, and they shut completely and she
is gone, and the ache inside my chest is indescribably awful.

The elevator of gleaming old wood and polished brass lurches as it lifts, and I explain to the police that no one has heard
from Jaime Berger and she didn’t come to Savannah to sightsee.
She’s not here on vacation.
It may be nothing, and I certainly
hope it’s nothing.
But it’s out of character for her, and she was expected to show up at some point at Dr.
Dengate’s office
today, and she hasn’t appeared and hasn’t called.
An ambulance should have been requested, and it would be a good idea to
call for one now, and all the while I’m saying this I realize it’s repetitive, it’s perseverative, and the officers, both
of them young, have their own theory about what is going on.

It’s clear they assume that Marino lives with this out-of-town woman who’s not answering her phone or contacting anyone.
Why
else would he have keys?
Most likely this is a messy domestic situation that nobody wants to talk about.
I reiterate that
Jaime is a prominent prosecutor from New York, or actually a former one, and we have reasons to be worried about her safety.

“When did you see her last?”
one of the officers asks Marino.
“Last night.”

“And nothing was out of the ordinary?”

“Nope.”

“Everybody getting along?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t have words?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe a little disagreement?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe a little fight?”

“Don’t even start that shit with me.”

“There are some unusual circumstances,” Chang tells the officers, as the elevator bumps to a stop, and there is only so much
Chang or any of us is going to explain.

We’re not going to mention Kathleen Lawler or suggest that she may have been poisoned.
I have no intention of volunteering
information about Lola Daggette or the Mensa Murders, and I’m not going to share that Dawn Kincaid, who was locked up in a
state hospital for the criminally insane, is brain-dead and perhaps was poisoned.
I’m not going to comment right now that
a woman on a bicycle showed up last night with sushi Jaime probably didn’t order.
I don’t want to talk or explain or speculate
or imagine.
I’m frantic, and at the same time already know what awaits us, or fear I do, and we are out of the elevator, rushing
down the hallway, to the end of it, where Marino unlocks the heavy oak door.

“Jaime?”
his big voice booms as we enter the apartment, and I notice instantly that her burglar alarm isn’t set.
“Fuck!”
Marino
glances at the keypad by the door, noticing the same ominous detail, his tanned face flushed and slick with sweat, his CFC
khakis a
grayish tan from the rain.
“She always sets it.
Even when she’s here.
Hello!
Jaime, you home?
Shit.”

The kitchen looks exactly as it did when I left last night, except for a bottle of antacid on the counter that I know wasn’t
there when I washed dishes and put food away, and her big brown handbag isn’t on the back of the chair where I saw her hang
it by its shoulder strap when she came in with the take-out food from the Broughton and Bull.
Her bag is on the leather couch
in the sitting area, its contents scattered over the coffee table, but we don’t stop to see what might be missing or what
she might have been digging for.
Chang and I follow Marino’s long stride down the hardwood hallway that leads to the master
area in back.

Through the open doorway I see a sleigh bed and rumpled green and brown covers, and Jaime in a maroon bathrobe that is untied
and disarrayed.
She is facedown, with her hips twisted to one side, her arms and head hanging off the bed, her position inconsistent
with someone who died in her sleep and similar to Kathleen Lawler’s, as if their last moment was a struggle, an agonizing
one.
The bedside lamps are on, and the drapes are drawn.