Patricia Cornwell - Red Mist

I slow down and chug off the road into the parking lot of the first open businesses I’ve seen around here, a True Value hardware, a pharmacy, and a guns-and-ammo store where there are several pickup trucks and SUVs, and a pay phone next to an ATM. Of course, there would be a pay phone and an ATM at a business where the sign in front is a body diagram inside a red circle with a slash across, and the logo: Don’t be a victim. Buy a gun. Through plate glass I see a wall of rifles and shotguns, and a showcase where several men are congregated, and to the left of the front door, a black pay phone is cradled inside a stainless-steel box attached to the wall.

Reaching for my briefcase, I get out my iPad as rain falls steadily, drumming the metal roof, and I flip off the monotonous wiper blades and headlights but leave the windows cracked and the engine running. Clicking on the browser, I log on to the Internet and search Lola Daggette’s name and read a story published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last November: SAVANNAH KILLER LOSES FINAL APPEAL

A woman convicted and sentenced to death almost nine years ago for the grisly slayings of a Savannah doctor, his wife, and their two young children was denied an emergency stay today by the Georgia Supreme Court, clearing the way for the execution.

Lola Daggette was convicted of breaking into Dr. Clarence Jordan’s three-story mansion in Savannah’s historic district during the early-morning hours of January 6, 2002. According to the prosecutor and police, she attacked the thirty-five-year-old physician and his thirty-year-old wife, Gloria, in bed, stabbing and slashing them repeatedly with a knife before proceeding down the hallway to their twin son and daughter’s room. It is believed that five-year-old Brenda was awakened by her brother’s screams and tried to escape by running down the stairs. Her pajama-clad body was found near the front door. Like her parents and her brother, Josh, she had been stabbed and cut so savagely, she was almost decapitated.

Several hours after the homicides were committed, eighteen-year-old Lola Daggette returned to a nonsecure halfway house, where she was enrolled in a residential program for substance abuse. A staff member discovered Daggette in the bathroom, rinsing bloody clothing. DNA later connected her to the murders.

With the high court’s action today, all of Daggette’s state and federal appeals and habeas corpus issues have been exhausted, and her execution by lethal injection at the Georgia Prison for Women is expected to take place in the spring.

In other articles I skim, her defense counsel claimed she had an accomplice and it was this person who actually committed the homicides. Lola Daggette never entered the Jordan mansion but was to wait outside while her accomplice committed a burglary, her lawyers said. The sole basis for the defense was the alleged existence of an accomplice who has never been physically described or identified, someone who borrowed a set of Lola’s clothing and afterward instructed her to dispose of it or clean it, possibly with the intention of setting her up to be charged with the crimes. Lola never took the stand, and I can see why a jury would have convened less than three hours before finding her guilty.

She was set to die this past April but was granted a stay after a botched execution resulted in a second dose of deadly chemicals and it took twice the usual time for the condemned to die. As a result, a federal judge blocked the executions of Lola Daggette and five male inmates at Coastal State Prison, asserting that he needed an opportunity to decide whether Georgia’s lethal injection procedures place the condemned at risk of a prolonged and painful death, thus constituting punishment that was cruel and unusual. Georgia executions are supposed to resume this October, with Lola Daggette’s believed to be scheduled first.

I sit in the van in the rain, baffled. If Lola Daggette didn’t commit the murders but knows who did, why would she protect the real killer all these years? Months away from her execution and she’s still not talking? Or maybe she is. Jaime Berger has been in Savannah. She’s interviewed Lola Daggette. Possibly she’s interviewed Kathleen Lawler, with whom she may have made promises of an early release, but how is any of this the jurisdiction of a Manhattan assistant DA, unless the Jordan homicides and possibly Dawn Kincaid somehow connect to a sex crime in New York City?

More to the point, if Jaime has any interest in Kathleen and her diabolical daughter, Dawn, why wouldn’t Jaime have contacted me? Apparently she just did, I’m reminded, as I look at the tiny piece of creased paper on the seat next to me, and I then think of the violent events of this past February, when I was almost killed. There was no break in Jaime’s silence. She didn’t call. She didn’t send an e-mail. She didn’t check on me. While we were never close friends, her seeming indifference was painful and surprising.

Returning the iPad to my briefcase, I retrieve my Visa card from my wallet and climb out of the van, the rain falling in big, cool drops on my bare head. I pick up the receiver of the pay phone and enter zero and the number Kathleen Lawler wrote on the kite. I swipe my credit card, and the call goes through. Jaime Berger answers on the second ring.

It’s Kay Scarpetta—” I start to say, and she cuts me off in her crisp, strong voice.

“You’re still staying the night, I hope.”

“Excuse me?” She must think I’m someone else. “Jaime? It’s Kay—”

“Your hotel is within walking distance of me.” Jaime Berger sounds as if she’s in a hurry, not rude but impersonal and brusque and not about to let me get in a word. “Check in first, and we’ll have a bite to eat.”

It’s obvious she doesn’t want to talk, that maybe she’s not alone. This is absurd. You don’t agree to meet someone when you don’t know what it’s about, I tell myself.

“Where?” I ask.

Jaime gives me an address that is several blocks off Savannah’s riverfront. “I’ll look forward to it,” she adds. “See you shortly.”

I call Lucy next as a man in cutoff jeans and a baseball cap climbs out of a dusty gold Suburban. He doesn’t give me a glance as he walks in my direction and slides a wallet out of his back pocket.

“I need to ask you something,” I say immediately when my niece answers, and it’s an effort not to sound frustrated. “You know it’s never my intention to pry or interfere with your personal life.”

“That’s not a question,” Lucy says.

“I hesitated to call you about this, but now I really must. It doesn’t seem to be a secret that I’m down here. Do you understand what I’m getting at?” I turn my back to the man in the baseball cap as he gets cash out of the ATM next to me.

“Maybe you could be a little less mysterious. It sounds like you’re inside a metal drum.”

“I’m using a pay phone outside a gun store. And it’s raining.”

“What the hell are you doing at a gun store? What’s wrong?”

“Jaime,” I then say. “Nothing’s wrong. That I know of.”

After a long pause, my niece asks, “What’s happened?”

I can tell by her hesitation and the tone of her voice that she isn’t going to have information for me. She doesn’t know that Jaime is in Savannah. Lucy isn’t the reason Jaime somehow knows I’m here and why and where I’m staying.

“I’m just making sure you didn’t perhaps mention to her that I was coming down to Savannah,” I reply.

“Why would I do that? What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure what’s going on. In fact, a more accurate answer is I don’t know. But you haven’t talked to her recently.”