Red Mist (9 page)

I study myself in the mirror over the bathroom sink and decide I look wilted by heat and rain, by hours spent in a prison
and driving a malfunctioning van with no air-conditioning, and this isn’t the way I want Jaime to see me.
I can’t completely
define the way she makes me feel, but I recognize ambivalence and self-consciousness, a certain discomfort that has never
gone away in all the years I’ve known her.
It’s irrational, but I can’t seem to help it.
To watch Lucy so openly adore her
was indescribable.

I remember the first time they met more than a decade ago, how
animated Lucy was, how riveted she was to Jaime’s every word and gesture.
Lucy couldn’t take her eyes off her, and when it
finally became what it was meant to become many years later, I was amazed and pleased.
I was startled and unnerved.
Most of
all, I didn’t trust it.
Lucy was going to get hurt, I thought all along.
She was going to get as badly hurt as she’s ever
been in her life, I feared.
No woman she’s ever been with can compare to Jaime, who is close to my age and undeniably powerful
and compelling.
She’s rich.
She’s brilliant.
She’s beautiful.

I scrutinize my short blond hair and muss it with a dab of gel, staring at the face staring back at me.
The overhead light
is unkind, creating shadows that accentuate my strong features, deepening the fine lines at the corners of my eyes and the
shallow folds from my nose to my mouth.
I look shopworn.
I look older.
Jaime’s going to sum me up in a glance by saying that
what I’ve been going through has taken its toll.
Almost being murdered has left its mark.
Stress is toxic.
It kills cells.
It causes your hair to fall out.
Extreme stress interferes with sleep and you never look rested.
I don’t look awful, really.
It’s the lighting in here, and I think of Kathleen Lawler’s complaints about bad lighting and bad mirrors as I uncomfortably
recall recent comments Benton has made.

I’m starting to look more like my mother, he mentioned the other day when he came up behind me and put his arms around me
as I was getting dressed.
He said it was the style of my hair, maybe because it’s a little shorter, and he meant it as a compliment,
but I didn’t take it as one.
I don’t want to look like my mother, because I don’t want to be anything like my mother, not
anything like my only sibling, Dorothy, either, both of them still in Miami and
always complaining about one thing or another.
The heat, the neighbors, the neighbors’ dogs, the feral cats, politics, crime,
the economy, and, of course, me.
I’m a bad daughter, a bad sister, and a bad aunt to Lucy.
I never come to visit and rarely
call.
I’ve forgotten my Italian heritage, my mother said to me recently, as if growing up in an Italian neighborhood in Miami
somehow makes me a native of the Old Country.

Outside the hotel, the sun has dipped behind stone and brick buildings along Bay Street, and the air is still hot but not
nearly as humid.
A bell in City Hall tolls, its rich metallic peal sounding the half hour as I follow steep granite steps
down to River Street, walking behind and below the hotel.
Through lighted arched windows on the lower level I see a ballroom
being set up for some event, and then the river is before me.
It has turned a deep indigo blue in the waning light of the
approaching night, and the sky is clearing, the moon huge and egg-shaped as it rises, and streets and sidewalks are thick
with tourists arriving for sunset cruises and the restaurants and shops.
Old men sell stiff yellow flowers woven of sweetgrass,
the air fragrant with the vanilla scent of the long, thin leaves, and I hear the distant sentimental notes of a Native American
flute.

I’m vividly aware of everything I pass.
I notice every person, but I don’t look directly at anyone.
Who else knows I’m here?
Who else cares, and why?
I walk with purpose I don’t really feel, wishing I could duck inside one of the fine restaurants and forget about Jaime Berger
and what she might want from me.
I wish I could forget Kathleen Lawler and her hideous biological daughter and the horror
of what happened to Jack Fielding, which was worse than death.
He degenerated into something unrecognizable in those six months
I was at
Dover Air Force Base getting board-certified in radiologic pathology so we could begin doing CT scans or virtual autopsies
at my new headquarters in Cambridge.
I’d given Jack the opportunity of a lifetime, trusting him to run the place while I was
gone, and he did.
Right into the ground.

It might have been the drugs he was on, his daughter turning him into a crazed beast, and some of what he did may have been
for money.
What I won’t say to anyone is that Jack is better off dead and I’m grateful I won’t have to confront him and finally
banish him for good.
I can’t imagine what he was thinking unless he just didn’t care, but he spared both of us the vilest
and most brutal showdown, and that’s exactly what it would have been.
A face-off that was a lifetime in coming, and one he
would lose decisively.
He had to have known that when I got home I would discover every bad thing he was doing, every loathsome
violation, that I would uncover every immoral and selfish act.
Jack Fielding knew he was done.
He knew I would not have forgiven
him.
I would not have taken him back or protected him this time.
When Dawn Kincaid killed him, he was already dead.

And in an odd way, realizing all this has given me an unexpected satisfaction and a little more self-respect.
I have changed,
and it’s for the better.
You really can’t love unconditionally.
People can burn and beat love out of you.
They really can
kill it, and it’s not your fault you don’t feel it anymore, and how liberating it is to finally realize that.
Love isn’t for
better or for worse, through thick or thin.
It damn well shouldn’t be.
Were Jack still alive, I would not love him.
When I
examined his dead body in the cellar of his Salem house, I did not feel love for him.
He was stiff and cold beneath my hands,
unyielding and stubborn, holding on to his dirty secrets in death the same way he did in life, and a part of me was glad he
was gone.
I was relieved.
I was grateful.
Thank you for the freedom, Jack.
Thank you for being gone forever so I don’t feel obliged to waste any more of my life on
you.

I wander for a while to clear him out of my head, to steel myself, to wipe my eyes and hope they aren’t red.
Turning on Houston
Street away from the river as the City Hall bell rings nine times, I move deeper into the historic district, taking a right
on East Broughton and stopping on Abercorn in front of the Owens-Thomas House, a two-century-old mansion of limestone and
Ionic columns that is a museum now.
Around it are other gracious antebellum buildings and homes, and I’m reminded of the three-story
old brick house I saw on the news nine years ago.
I wonder where the Jordans lived and if it might be near here, and did the
killer or killers target the family in advance, or were they random victims of opportunity?
Most people in this area have
burglar alarms, and it nags at me that the Jordans’ must not have been armed, not that everybody bothers, even wealthy people,
who should know better.

But if you were planning on breaking into an expensive house during early-morning hours when the family was asleep, wouldn’t
your first assumption be that there was an alarm and it was set?
I noticed in articles I scanned while parked at the gun store
that Clarence Jordan was out the Saturday afternoon of January 5, volunteering at a local men’s emergency shelter, and returned
home around seven-thirty that evening.
No mention was made of the alarm and why he didn’t bother to set it when he came in
for the night, but it doesn’t appear he did.
The system couldn’t have been armed when
the break-in occurred at some point after midnight the following morning.

The killer—supposedly Lola Daggette—smashed the glass out of the first-story kitchen door, reached inside, flipped open the
lock, and walked in.
Assuming the alarm system didn’t have glass-break or motion sensors, it would have had contacts, and
even if the perpetrator knew the code, the instant the door was opened, the chime would have sounded, beeping or chirping
until the system was disabled.
It’s hard to imagine four people would sleep through that.
Maybe Jaime has the answer.
Maybe
Lola Daggette has told her what really happened and I’m about to find out why I’m here and what I have to do with it.

I stand on the sidewalk in darkness that is uneven in the glow of tall iron lamps, and I try my lawyer, Leonard Brazzo.
He
is fond of steak houses, and when he answers his cell phone he tells me he’s at the Palm and it’s mobbed.

“Let me step outside,” his voice sounds in my wireless earpiece.
“Okay, better,” he adds, and I hear cars honking.
“How did
it go?
How was she?”
He means Kathleen Lawler.

“She mentioned something about letters Jack wrote to her,” I reply.
“I don’t recall any letters being found, and I didn’t
see such a thing when I was looking through his personal effects at his house in Salem.
But it’s possible no one mentioned
letters to me,” I say, as I stare at Jaime Berger’s white-brick building across the street, eight stories, with large sashed
windows.

He resented the fucking hell out of you.

“Got no idea,” Leonard replies.
“But why would Jack have letters he wrote to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Unless she returned them to him at some point?
Sorry about the wind.
Hope you can hear.”

“I’m just telling you what she said.”

“The FBI,” he says.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if they got a court order to search her cell or wherever she might have personal
belongings stored, looking for letters or any other type of communication to or from or about Jack Fielding or Dawn Kincaid.”

“And we wouldn’t necessarily know about that,” I reply.

“No.
The police, DOJ, wouldn’t be obliged to share any letters with us.
Saying they exist.”

Of course they wouldn’t be obliged to share.
I’m not the one on trial for murder or attempted murder, and that’s the aggravating
irony.
During the discovery phase, Dawn Kincaid and her legal team have a right to all evidence the prosecution has obtained,
including any mocking letters Jack might have written to Kathleen Lawler about me.
But I wouldn’t be told about them or learn
of their content until they’re produced in court and used against me.
Victims have no rights while they’re being victimized
and few rights during the slow, tedious grind of the criminal justice process.
The injuries don’t heal but continue to be
inflicted, by lawyers, by the media, by jurors, by witnesses who testify that someone like me had it coming or caused it.

He used to say you have no idea how hard you are on people … a bitch who needed to be fucked …

“Are you worried about what the letters might say?”
Leonard is asking me.

“They don’t appear to paint me favorably, if what I’ve been told is true.
That will be helpful to her.”

It will be helpful to Dawn Kincaid, I’m indicating without saying her name out loud, as I stand on a sidewalk in the dark,
people and cars going by, headlights hurting my eyes.
The more I’m disparaged, the less credible I become and the less sympathy
jurors will have for me.

“Let’s deal with any letters if they present themselves.”
Leonard says not to get worked up about something that hasn’t happened.

“I also was curious if Jaime Berger might have been in touch with you,” I get to that point.

“The prosecutor?”

“The very same.”

“No, she hasn’t been in touch.
Why would she?”

“Curtis Roberts”—the lawyer Tara Grimm mentioned to me— “what can you tell me about him?”

“He’s a volunteer lawyer with the Georgia Innocence Project, works with a firm in Atlanta.”

“So he’s representing Kathleen Lawler pro bono.”

“Apparently.”

“Why would the Innocence Project be interested in her?
Is there a legitimate question about her conviction for DUI manslaughter?”
I ask.

“I just know he called on her behalf.”

I decide to ask nothing further as I think about Kathleen Lawler’s note and her instructions for me to find a pay phone.
Why?
If that was Jaime’s direction, then it suggests she might be concerned about
my talking on my cell phone.
I tell Leonard Brazzo I’ll go into more detail later and to enjoy his dinner.
I end the call
and cross the street to face whatever I’m about to face.
I wonder which windows are Jaime’s and if she is watching for me
and what it must be like to stare out at a world that no longer includes Lucy.
I wouldn’t want to miss my niece.
I wouldn’t
want the misery of knowing her and then not having her anymore.