Patricia Cornwell - Red Mist

I follow the blood outside into the yard, into a garden planted in the footprint of what appears to be an outbuilding from an earlier century, crumbled stone walls exposed and incorporated into the landscaping, and a caved-in area of earth filled in with plantings, what is left of a root cellar, it occurs to me. Statuary is graying, some of it tinted green with mildew, an Apollo planter, an angel holding a bouquet, a boy with a lantern, and a girl with a bird. Dried bloody droplets darkly speckle blades of grass and the leaves of japonicas, tea olives, and English boxwoods, then more dark droplets, these closer together and angled on rockery, what might be a rock garden for flowers in the spring. I’m careful with my conclusions. I’m careful not to read too much into what I’m seeing.

More than a few bloodstains are required to establish a pattern, but this isn’t cast-off blood. It isn’t back or forward spatter. It wasn’t tracked into the sunporch or out into the yard and garden by bloody footwear. I don’t believe it dripped from bloody clothing or from a bloody weapon or that an assailant with scratches from a child’s fingernails bled this much. The seven droplets on the terra-cotta tile floor are round and some eighteen inches apart, and one of them is smeared as if it might have been stepped on.

I envision someone dripping blood as he or she walks through the sunporch, heading for the back door that leads out to the yard, and into the garden, or maybe the person headed the other way. Maybe someone bleeding was walking into the house, not out of it, and there is no reference to this important evidence in anything I’ve seen so far. Jaime didn’t mention it last night. Marino hasn’t mentioned it, and suddenly I’m aware of people talking. I look up and focus on where I am. Marino is standing in the open doorway with Mandy O’Toole. Behind them, Colin Dengate has a peculiar look on his face as he holds his phone to his ear.

“… Are they hearing you? Because I don’t want you to keep calling me about it so I have to repeat myself. Tell them for me I don’t give a shit what they want to do. They’re not to touch a damn thing … Well, hello? Exactly. You don’t know that one of them, one of the guards didn’t … We always have to include that into the equation, not to mention they don’t know crap about how to work a scene,” Colin is saying, and he must be talking to GBI investigator Sammy Chang, whose ringtone is a Star Trek Tricorder, the strange electronic pulsing I heard minutes ago.

“Okay, good … Sure, yes. Within the hour … Yes, she told me that.” Colin’s eyes fix on me as if I’m the person who might have told him whatever he refers to. “I understand. I’m going to ask her … And no. For the record, for the third time, the warden’s not to set foot in there,” he says, as I get out of my chair.

Colin ends the call and says to me, “Kathleen Lawler. I think you should come. Since you were there, it might be helpful.”

“Since I was where?” But I know.

He turns to Mandy O’Toole. “Get my gear and see if Dr. Gillan can take care of the motor-vehicle fatality coming in. Maybe you can give him a hand. The victim’s poor mother has been waiting in the lobby all damn morning, so maybe you can check on her while you’re at it. I was going to but can’t now. See if she needs water, a soda or something. Damn state trooper told her to come straight here to ID him. Well, based on what I’ve been told, he sure as hell isn’t viewable.”

Colin Dengate shifts his old Land Rover into fourth gear, and the big engine roars as if it’s ravenous. We speed along a narrow strip of pavement hidden by impenetrable woods, the road bending sharply through shaded pines and straightening out into an open flat terrain of apartment buildings and blazing sun, the Coastal Regional Crime Laboratory as hidden from civilization as the Bat Cave.

Hot wind buffets the olive-green canvas roof, making a loud drumming sound as Colin passes along information that is suspiciously detailed when one considers that Kathleen Lawler was alone the final hours of her life. While other inmates might have heard her, they couldn’t see her when she died inside her cell, most likely from a heart attack, Officer M. P. Macon suggested to Investigator Sammy Chang before Chang could get there. By the time Chang was called, the prison had Kathleen’s death figured out, one of those sad random events probably related to Lowcountry summer weather. Heat stroke. A heart attack. High cholesterol. Kathleen never had taken care of herself worth shit, Chang was told.

According to Officer Macon, Kathleen reported nothing unusual earlier in the day, wasn’t ill or out of sorts when her breakfast tray of powdered eggs, grits, white toast, an orange, and a half pint of milk was passed through the drawer of her cell door at five-forty a.m. In fact, she seemed cheerful and chatty, reported the corrections officer who delivered her meal and later was questioned by Officer Macon.

“He told Sammy that she was asking what it would take to get a Texas omelet with hash browns. She was joking around,” Colin says. “Apparently of late she’d become more obsessed than usual with food, and it’s Sammy’s impression from what’s been said to him that she might have been assuming she wasn’t going to be at the GPFW much longer. Maybe she was fantasizing about her favorite things to eat because she was anticipating having whatever she wanted, and I’ve seen this syndrome before. People block out what they’ve been deprived of until they believe it’s within their reach. Then that’s all they think about. Food. Sex. Alcohol. Drugs.”

“Probably all of the above, in her case,” Marino’s loud voice sounds from the backseat.

“I think Kathleen was under the impression a deal was in the works if she was cooperative,” I say to Colin, as I write a text-message to Benton. “Her sentence was going to be reduced and she was on her way back to the free world.”

I explain to Benton that he and Lucy might not be able to reach us when they land in Savannah, that I’m on my way to a death scene, and I tell him whose. I ask him to let me know as soon as possible if there is anything new with Dawn Kincaid and her alleged asthma attack.

“Has anyone bothered to mention to Jaime Berger that she has shit for clout with prosecutors and judges around here?” Colin looks in the rearview mirror, directing this to Marino.

“I can’t hear too good in this wind tunnel,” he answers loudly.

“Well, I don’t think you want the windows up,” Colin yells.

“Whether Jaime has clout or not around here, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of organized protest, especially these days, because of the Internet,” I remind Colin of the damage Jaime Berger can do. “She’s perfectly capable of mounting a campaign of social and political pressure, similar to what happened in Mississippi recently when civil- and human-rights groups pressured the governor into suspending the sentences of those two sisters who’d gotten life sentences for robbery.”

“Damn ridiculous,” Colin says in disgust. “Who the hell gets life for robbery?”

“I can’t hear a damn thing back here.” Marino is perched on the edge of the bench seat, leaning forward and sweating.

“You need to buckle up,” I say over the hot wind rushing in through open windows, the engine loud and growling, as if the Land Rover wants to claw across a desert or up a rocky slope and is bored and restive with the tameness of a paved highway.

We are making good time, on 204 East now, passing the Savannah Mall, heading toward Forest River and the Little Ogeechee, and marshland and endless miles of scrub trees. The sun is directly overhead, the glare as intense as a flashgun, blindingly bright as it beats down on the square nose of the white Land Rover and the windshields of other traffic.