Red Mist ks-19

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Haven’t touched the body,” Chang tells Colin. “She was like this when I got here at thirteen hundred hours. According to the information I have, she’d been dead about an hour when I got here. But the times I’ve been given for events are a little murky.”

  Kathleen Lawler is on top of the rumpled gray blanket and dingy sheet of a narrow steel bed attached to the wall like a shelf beneath a slit of a window covered with metal mesh. Half on her back and half on her side, her eyes are barely open, her mouth agape, and her legs are draped over the edge of the thin mattress. The pants of her white uniform are shoved up above her knees, and her white shirt is bunched up around her breasts, perhaps disarrayed by resuscitative efforts that failed. Or she might have been thrashing about before she died, rearranging her position in a frantic attempt to get comfortable, to relieve whatever symptoms she was suffering from.

  “Was CPR attempted?” I ask Tara Grimm.

  “Of course, every effort was made. But she was already gone. Whatever happened, it was very fast.”

  As Marino, Colin, and I put on white coveralls, I notice an inmate staring through the glass window of the cell across from Kathleen’s. She has a matronly face, a sunken mouth, and a helmet of tightly curled gray hair, and as I look at her she looks back at me and begins to talk in a muffled loud voice through her locked steel door.

  “Fast? The hell it was fast!” she starts in. “I was hollering for thirty damn minutes before anyone showed up! Thirty damn minutes!She’s over there strangling, I mean, I could hear it, and I’m hollering and nobody comes. She’s gasping, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I’m going blind, somebody help me, please!’ Thirty damn minutes!Then she got quiet. She’s not answering me anymore, and I start hollering at the top of my lungs for somebody to come….”

  In three swift steps Tara Grimm is before the inmate’s door, rapping the glass with her knuckles. “Quiet down, Ellenora.” The way the warden says it makes me think that Ellenora is volunteering this information for the first time. Tara Grimm seems genuinely taken aback and angry. “Let these people do what they need to do, and we’ll let you out and you can tell them exactly what you observed,” she says to the inmate.

  “Thirty minutes at least! Why did it take so long? I guess if a body knows they’re dying in here, that’s just too damn bad. If it’s a fire or a flood or I’m choking on a chicken bone, too damn bad,” Ellenora says to me.

  “You need to quiet down, Ellenora. We’ll get to you soon enough, and you can tell them what you observed.”

  “Tell them what I observed? I didn’t observe a thing. I couldn’t see her. I already told you and all of them I didn’t see nothing.”

  “That’s right,” Tara Grimm says coolly, condescendingly. “Your original statement was you didn’t observe anything. Are you changing your mind?”

  “Because I couldn’t! I couldn’t observe nothing! It’s not like she was standing up and looking out the window. I couldn’t see her, and that made it awful, just hearing her pleading and suffering and groaning. Making these bloodcurdling sounds like an animal suffering. A body could die in here, and who’s going to come! It’s not like we got a panic button we can push! They let her die in her cell,” she says to me. “They let her just die in there!” Her wide eyes stare at me.

  “We’ll have to move you to a secure unit if you don’t stop,” Tara warns her, and I can tell she doesn’t know quite what to do.

  She wasn’t expecting this display, and it occurs to me that the inmate named Ellenora is cagey like a lot of inmates. She behaved herself when she was questioned by prison officials the first time, because she wanted a chance to do exactly what she’s doing now, to make a scene when we arrived. Had she erupted earlier, I suspect she would already have been moved to a secure unit, no doubt a euphemism for solitary confinement or a cell where psychiatric patients are restrained.

  Colin’s booties make a sliding sound as he walks into Kathleen Lawler’s cell, and Marino opens crime scene cases on the polished concrete floor. He checks out the cameras as I lean against the wall, steadying myself to work shoe covers over my big black boots with their big tread. As I pull on examination gloves, I feel the inmate’s stare. I feel what’s in it, the high voltage of fear, of near hysteria, and Tara Grimm knocks on the window again as if to shut her up in advance. Ellenora’s frightened face in the tiny pane of glass flinches as the warden’s knuckles suddenly are there, rapping.

  “What makes you think she couldn’t breathe?” Tara Grimm asks loudly, for our benefit.

  “I’m sure she couldn’t, because she said so,” Ellenora replies from behind her barrier. “And she was aching and feeling puny. So tired she could hardly move, and she was gasping. She hollered, ‘I can’t breathe. I don’t know what’s happening to me.’ ”

  “Usually when someone can’t breathe they can’t talk. I’m wondering if you misunderstood. If you can’t breathe, you can’t holler, especially through steel doors. You have to have a lungful of air to holler,” Tara says to her so I will hear it.

  “She said she couldn’t talk! She was having trouble talking! Like her throat was swolled up!” Ellenora exclaims.

  “Well, now, if you tell someone you can’t talk, that’s a contradiction, isn’t it?”

  “It’s what she said! I swear to God Almighty!”

  “Saying I can’t talk would be like running for help because I can’t stand up.”

  “I swear to God Almighty and Jesus Christ it’s what she said!”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Tara Grimm tells her ward on the other side of the thick steel door. “And you need to calm down, Ellenora, and lower your voice. When I ask you questions, you need to answer what I ask and not yell and make a fuss.”

  “What I’m saying is the truth, and I can’t help if it’s upsetting!” Ellenora gets more excited. “She was begging for help! It was the most awful thing I ever did hear! ‘I can’t see. I can’t talk. I’m dying! Oh, fuck, oh, God! I can’t stand this!’ ”

  “That’s enough, Ellenora.”

  “What she said exactly. Gasping and begging, ‘Please help me!’It was terror, pure terror, her begging, ‘Oh, fuck, I don’t know what’s happening! Oh, please, someone help me!’ ”

  Tara knocks the glass again. “Enough of that language, Ellenora.”

  “It’s what she said, not me. It’s not me saying it. She said, ‘Fucking help me, please! I must’ve got hold of something!’ ”

  “I’m wondering if she might have had allergies, food allergies, insects,” the warden says to me. “Possibly to wasps, bees, allergies she never told anyone about. Might she have gotten stung by something when she was outside exercising? It’s just a thought. There’s certainly a lot of yellow jackets when it’s hot and muggy like this and everything’s in bloom.”

  “Anaphylactic reactions to insect stings or after an exposure to shellfish, peanuts, whatever the person is allergic to, usually are very swift,” I reply. “It doesn’t sound as if this death was swift. It took longer than minutes.”

  “She was feeling bad for at least an hour and a half!” Ellenora yells. “Why did they take so damn long?”

  “Did you hear her get sick?” I look at Ellenora through the thick pane of glass. “Did it sound like she might have vomited or had diarrhea?”

  “I don’t know if she got sick or not, but she said she had a sour stomach. I didn’t hear her get sick. I didn’t hear her toilet flush or nothing. She was yelling about being poisoned!”

  “So now she’s been poisoned,” Tara says, cutting her eyes at me as if to remind me to consider the source.

  Ellenora’s face is agitated, her eyes wild. “She said, ‘I’ve been poisoned! Lola did it! Lola did it! It’s that shit I ate!’ ”

  “That’s quite enough. Now, stop it,” Tara says, as I walk inside Kathleen Lawler’s cell. “You watch that mouth of yours,” I hear Tara say behind my back. “We have people here.”

  21

  In the polished-stee
l mirror that Kathleen Lawler complained about when I was with her yesterday afternoon, Investigator Sammy Chang’s reflection walks behind me and stops in the doorway of the cell.

  “I’ll be right here, giving you some room,” he lets me know.

  The toilet and sink are combined into a stainless-steel unit with no movable parts except buttons for flushing and turning tap water on and off. I don’t see or smell anything that might indicate Kathleen Lawler was sick before she died, but I note a very faint electrical odor.

  “Do you smell something odd?” I ask Chang.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Something electrical but not exactly. An unpleasant peculiar odor.”

  “No. I don’t think I smelled anything at all while I was looking around. Wouldn’t be the TV.” He indicates the small television encased in transparent plastic on a shelf.

  “I don’t believe that could be it,” I reply, noticing water stains in the steel sink and a vague chalky residue.

  I lean closer, and the odor is stronger.

  “Acrid, like something shorting out, like a blow-dryer that overheats.” I do my best to describe it. “A battery smell. Sort of.”

  “A battery?” He frowns. “No batteries I saw. No blow-dryer.”

  He walks over to the sink and bends close. “Well, maybe,” he says. “Yeah, maybe something. I don’t have the best nose.”

  “I think it would be a good idea to swab whatever this is in the sink,” I tell him. “Your trace-evidence lab has SEM/EDX? We should take a look at the morphology at high magnification, see if it’s some sort of particulate that was in a solution and figure out what it is. Metals, some other material. If it’s a chemical, a drug, something that won’t be picked up by x-ray spectroscopy? Don’t know what other detectors the GBI’s scanning electron microscope might have, but if possible, I’d ask for EDX, FTIR to get the molecular fingerprint of whatever this is.”

  “We’ve been thinking of getting one of those handheld FTIRs, you know, like HazMat uses.”

  “A very good idea these days, when you’re faced with the possibility of explosives, weapons of mass destruction, nerve and blistering agents, white powders. It would also be a good idea to charm whoever is in charge of your trace lab and get this analysis done quickly, as in now. They could do it in a matter of hours if they move it to the head of the line. I don’t like the symptoms described.” I talk quietly and choose my words carefully, because I don’t know who’s listening.

  But I have no doubt someone is.

  “I can be pretty charming.” Chang is small and slender, with short black hair, deadpan, almost monotone, but his dark eyes are friendly.

  “Good,” I answer. “A little charm right now would be welcome.”

  “You think she might have been sick in here?”

  “That’s not what I’m smelling,” I reply. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t queasy, which is what her neighbor Ellenora described. A sour stomach.”

  The most obvious consideration on the differential diagnosis is going to be what’s already being suggested by those who aren’t qualified to do so and certainly aren’t objective. Kathleen Lawler was vulnerable to a sudden cardiac death precipitated by physical exertion in conditions that were risky for a woman her age who has never taken good care of herself. She was dressed in a synthetic-blend uniform with long pants and long sleeves, and I estimate it is close to a hundred degrees outside, the humidity at least sixty percent and climbing. Stress makes everything worse, and Kathleen certainly seemed stressed and upset about being moved into segregation, and I won’t be surprised if we discover she had heart disease from a lifetime of unhealthy eating and drug and alcohol abuse.

  “What about trash,” I say to Chang. “I noticed white trash bags on some of the doors, but I don’t see one in here. Empty or full.”

  “Good question.” He meets my eyes, and we exchange an understanding.

  If there was a trash bag or any trash in here earlier, it was gone by the time he arrived.

  “Do you mind if I look around?” I ask him. “I won’t touch anything without your permission.”

  “Except for anything you want me to collect, I’m done in here. So help yourself.” His gloved hands open the plastic packaging of sterile applicators as he moves past me to the sink.

  “I’ll tell you as I get to whatever it is,” I inform him anyway, because legally the scene is his. Only the body and any associated biological or trace evidence are Colin Dengate’s, and I’m nothing more than an invited guest, an outside expert who needs permission. Unless a case is the jurisdiction of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners — in other words, the Department of Defense — I have no statutory authority outside of Massachusetts. I will ask before I do the smallest thing.

  Built into the wall opposite the toilet are the two gray metal shelves arranged with books and notepads, and an assortment of clear plastic containers that are supposed to prevent the concealment of contraband. I open each and recognize the scents of cocoa butter, Noxzema, balsam shampoo, mint mouthwash, and peppermint toothpaste. In a plastic soap dish is a thick white cake of Ivory soap, in a plastic tube a toothbrush, and in another plastic bottle what looks like hair gel. I note a small plastic comb, a hairbrush without a handle, and large-size foam rollers, perhaps from a time when Kathleen Lawler’s hair was longer.

  There are novels, poetry, and inspirational books, and transparent plastic baskets full of mail, notepads, and writing tablets. I see no evidence of a shakedown, nothing to suggest a squad has rifled through Kathleen’s belongings, but I wouldn’t expect obvious signs of disturbance. If her property was gone through before Chang got here, the purpose wasn’t to search for marijuana or a shank or anything else prohibited by the prison. The purpose would have been something else that at the moment I can’t fathom. What might a prison official have been looking for? I don’t know, but there isn’t a legitimate reason for someone to have removed her trash bag before the GBI got here, and my bad feeling is getting worse.

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to look.” I indicate the contents of the baskets, informing Chang of my every move.

  “Sure.” He swabs the steel sink. “Yeah, there’s sort of an odor, you’re right. And whatever it is, it’s gray. A milky gray.” He tucks the applicators into a plastic collection tube and labels the blue screw cap with a Sharpie.

  Each notepad is ruled and has a glued top and a cardboard back, probably purchased from the commissary, where spiral notebooks would not be sold because wire could be fashioned into a weapon. The pages contain poetry and prose interspersed with doodles and sketches, but most are filled with journal entries that are dated. It appears Kathleen was a faithful and expansive diarist, and I’m immediately struck by the absence of anything current. As I flip through each notepad, I determine that she was consistent about making detailed daily entries dating from some three years ago, when she was returned to the GPFW for DUI manslaughter. But there is nothing after this past June 3, when she filled the notepad’s last page front and back in her distinctive hand:

  June 3 Friday

  Rain thrashes a world I’ve lost and last night when the wind hit the steel mesh on my window just right it sounded like a bending saw. Discordant then screaming like steel cables straining. Like some monstrous beast made of metal. Like a warning. I lay here listening to loud metal groans and reverberations and I thought, “Something is coming.”

  In the chow hall at supper a couple of hours ago I could feel it. I can’t describe what it was. Not tangible like a stare or a comment, just something I sensed. But definitely I could tell. Something brewing.

  All of them eating mystery-meat hash and not looking at me, as if I wasn’t there, like there’s a secret they keep. I didn’t speak to them. I didn’t see them. I know when not to acknowledge anyone, and they know when I know it. Everybody knows everything in here.

  I keep thinking it’s about food and attention. People will kill over food, even bad food, and
they’ll kill over credit, even undeserved and stupid credit. I published those recipes in Inklingsand didn’t give credit because it sure as hell wasn’t earned or remotely merited, and it wasn’t my choice anyway. I don’t have the final say and I did worry I’d get the blame. A little bit of blame goes a long way in here. I don’t know what else to figure. My magazine just came out and suddenly there’s a shift.

  One microwave in the unit shared by sixty of us, and we all do the same damn things in Mama’s Test Kitchen, as the other inmates refer to me and my culinary creativity. Or they used to. Maybe they won’t anymore, even if the treats are my idea. Treats always have been all about me and my inventiveness. Who else would think of it when there’s not a damn thing to work with besides crap and more crap?

  Crap we get from the commissary. Crap we get in the chow hall. Beef and cheese sticks, tortillas and butter pats I taught them to turn into potstickers. Pop-Tarts, vanilla-cream cookies and strawberry Kool-Aid to make strawberry cake. Yes, everybody does it when it’s treat time because I was doing it first.

  I don’t care who submitted what. The recipes are mine! Who taught who the art of scraping vanilla cream out of cookies and whipping it up with Kool-Aid to make pink icing? Who showed them the art of dissolving Pop-Tarts and crumbled cookies in water (reconstituting and reinventing, as I repeatedly explain) and cooking it in the microwave until the center bounces back at a touch?

  The Julia Childs of the slammer, that’s who. It was me. NOT YOU! I’ve done it all along because I’ve lived here longer than most of you are goddamn old, and my recipes are so legendary they’ve become like a quote or a cliché or a proverb with an origin long forgotten and therefore up for grabs in your small, ignorant minds. “A good man is hard to find ” wasn’t Flannery O’Connor’s idea, it was the title of a song. And “a house divided against itself cannot stand ” wasn’t Lincoln, it was Jesus. Nobody remembers where anything came from and they help themselves. They steal.