People stalked and followed and spied on, and manipulated like puppets, by someone who is cunning and meticulous, a poisoner who is patient and precise and as cold as dry ice, and I can’t think of a more vulnerable population, a captive one like rats in a lab, especially if anyone working at the correctional facility is in collusion with whoever might be masterminding such sinister research. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t as you design a much bigger attack, biding your time, fine-tuning for months, for years.
Barrie Lou Rivers died suddenly while she was awaiting her execution. Rea Abernathy was found dead inside her cell, slumped over the toilet, and Shania Plames appeared to be a suicidal asphyxiation, supposedly hog-tying herself with her prison uniform pants. Then Kathleen Lawler, and Dawn Kincaid, and now Jaime Berger, all of the deaths disturbingly the same. Nothing is found on autopsy, the diagnosis one of exclusion. There was no reason, at least not in the earlier cases, to suspect homicidal poisonings that would elude routine toxicology screens.
It is almost two o’clock in the morning, and I don’t remember the last time I called General John Briggs at this hour. Whenever I’ve been as inconvenient as I’m about to be, I’ve had an ironclad reason. I’ve had proof. Lucy adds to my pile of printouts, and I take them with me. I go back to the bedroom and close the door as I imagine Briggs snapping up his cell phone wherever he’s sleeping or working. It could be the Air Force base in Dover, Delaware, the headquarters of the AFME and its port mortuary where our military casualties are flown in and given dignified transfers and sophisticated forensic examinations, including three-dimensional CT and explosive-ordnance scans. He could be in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Africa, maybe not the MIR space station, but we speculate about it, not really joking, because AFMEs could end up any place where deaths are the jurisdiction of the federal government. What Briggs doesn’t need is one more thing to worry him needlessly. He doesn’t need me and my intuition.
“John Briggs,” his deep voice answers in my wireless earpiece. “It’s Kay,” and I tell him why I’m calling.
“Based on what?” he says what I knew he would.
“Do you want the short answer or a more involved one?” I prop pillows behind me on the bed and continue scanning the information Lucy has been printing out.
“I’m about to get on a plane in Kabul, but I have a few minutes. Then you’re not going to get me for about twenty-five hours. Short answers are my favorite, but go ahead.”
I give him the case histories, starting with suspicious deaths at the GPFW that Colin has told me about, and from there I move on to what has happened in the past twenty-four hours. I point out the obvious concern that the one confirmed poisoning by botulinum toxin serotype A, Dawn Kincaid, suggests an enhanced delivery system, something we’ve not seen before.
“While it’s theoretically possible that death or severe illness due to botulinun toxin can occur in as few as two to six hours,” I explain, “usually it’s more like twelve or twenty-four. It can take longer than a week.”
“Because the cases we’re accustomed to seeing are foodborne,” Briggs says, as I go through the printouts Lucy generated, studying an enhanced surveillance image of the woman who delivered the take-out bag of sushi last night.
A sadist, a poisoner, I believe.
“We don’t see cases of exposure to the pure toxin,” Briggs says. “I can’t think of a single one.”
The woman’s head and neck are completely whited out, but Lucy has produced sharply defined and enlarged images of the rest of her, including the silvery bicycle she walked across the street and leaned against the lamppost. She is in dark pants, running shoes and socks, no belt, and a light-colored short-sleeved blouse tucked in. The only flesh exposed is her forearms and her hands, and a close-up of her left ring finger shows a baguette-cut square band that might be white gold or yellow or platinum, I can’t tell. All of the images are infrared and in shades of white and gray.
“Food contaminated by the Clostridium botulinum spores that produce the toxin,” Briggs is saying, “and it’s got to work its way through the digestive tract, usually becoming absorbed in the small intestine before it gets into the bloodstream and begins attacking neuromuscular proteins, basically attacking the brain and preventing the release of neurotransmitters.”
The woman in the surveillance footage also has on a watch: what Lucy shows through other image files is a dark-faced Marathon wristwatch with a high-impact fibershell and waterproof and dustproof case, made by contract with the U.S. and Canadian governments for issuance to military personnel.
“What if a pure, extremely potent toxin was exposed to mucous membrane?” I propose, as I continue to worry that the killer has some sort of military connection.
Someone with access to military personnel, perhaps her real target.
“Think about people who apply drugs to the mouth, vagina, rectum,” I add. “Cocaine, for example. We know what happens. Imagine a poison like botulinum toxin.”
“A really big problem,” Briggs says. “No cases I’ve ever heard of, no precedents, nothing to compare it to, in other words. But could only be bad.”
“The pure toxin in the mucous membrane of the mouth.”
“Much faster absorption, as opposed to ingestion of the actual microbe, the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and its spores, what is actually in contaminated food,” Briggs contemplates. “The bacteria have to grow and produce the toxin, all of this taking hours, possibly days, before paralysis starts in the face and spreads down.”
“Nothing worked its way through the digestive tract, John. It would seem these people had an exposure that actually induced gastroparesis,” I reply, and I can see what Lucy wants me to realize about the bicycle.
It appears lightweight, with very small wheels, and she has included an article she pulled off the Internet. A folding bike. Someone possibly with a military connection and a folding bike.
“Could also be induced by severe stress,” Briggs says. “Fight-or-flight syndrome, and your digestion quits. But that would be true only if the onset of symptoms was rapid. Again, no cases to compare it to. A direct hit to the bloodstream, and everything vital starts shutting down, my guess. Eyes, mouth, digestion, lungs.”
A seven-speed bike with an aluminum frame that has quick-release hinges, the entire bike folding into a 12x25x29-inch package, and in a series of zoomed-in and enhanced photographs from the security camera, Lucy shows the woman taking off a backpack, opening it, and pulling out the take-out bag from Savannah Sushi Fusion. The next page is an ad from a sports and outdoors online site where one can order what appears to be the same type of backpack for $29.99. Not an insulated bag for delivering food but a folding bike backpack for carrying or transporting the bike when one isn’t riding it.
“But the truth is, we don’t know what extremely potent doses of botulinum toxin manufactured in a lab might do,” Briggs continues, as I listen intently and go through paperwork on the bed, my thoughts moving rapidly in multiple directions that somehow point at the same thing.
But who or what and why?
“I’m just not aware of any deaths from that, any homicides, as I’ve said,” he adds. “Not one.”
A folding bike that’s nothing more than a ruse, a prop, an explanation for the helmet that interferes with security cameras, Lucy is implying. It would look suspicious to be wearing a bike helmet with safety lights on it if you didn’t have a bike, and it would look equally odd if you were wearing a lighted hat or headband. That’s why the woman was walking the bike across the street when she appeared at Jaime’s building at almost the same moment I did, it occurs to me. The woman with the baguette ring and military watch wasn’t riding the bike at all, and probably had a car parked somewhere.
“It’s about dosage,” Briggs continues. “Almost anything can be a poison if you get too much of it, including water. You can be poisoned by your wallpaper if there’s enough copper arsenide in it. That’s what happened to Clare Boothe Luce, paint chi
ps falling from her bedroom ceiling when she was the ambassador to Italy.”
“I’m just wondering if there’s been anything new in efforts to weaponize botulinum toxin,” I say to him. “Any technologies that a violent sociopathic person might have gotten hold of. A rogue military person, for example. Like the Army scientist who was working on an improved anthrax vaccine and carried out anthrax attacks that left at least five people dead.”
“You always have to pick on the Army,” says Briggs, who couldn’t be more Army. “Nice of him to do us the courtesy of killing himself before the FBI could arrest him.”
“Any other scientists who have been banned from labs where such research is going on?” I ask. “Especially anyone with military ties.”
“If it becomes necessary to look for that, we could,” Briggs says. “In my opinion, it’s necessary.”
“Obviously that’s your opinion, which is why you’re up all night and calling me in Afghanistan.”
“No new technologies that the military might know about?” I again ask. “Anything classified, you don’t have to tell me what. Just that we should be considering such a possibility.”
“No, thank God. Nothing I’m aware of. A gram of pure crystalline toxin could kill a million people if it was inhaled, and to weaponize it, you’d need a way to produce a large aerosol. Fortunately, there’s still no effective method.”
“What about a small aerosol distributed to a lot of people?” I ask. “In other words, an approach that is different, more painstaking. Or a distribution of small packages of poison that are mass-produced like MREs.”
“I’m curious about why you’re mentioning MREs specifically.”
I tell him about Kathleen Lawler, about the burns on her foot and the trace evidence in her sink, and that her gastric contents were similar to an MRE menu of chicken and pasta with a ration of cheese spread.
“How the hell would an inmate get hold of an MRE?” he asks. “Exactly,” I reply. “Almost any food could have been poisoned, so why an MRE? Unless someone is experimenting with them to use on a bigger target.”
“That would be pretty damn awful, and it would have to be a systematic approach, a highly organized one. Someone working in the factory where rations are being produced and packaged, otherwise you’re talking about a lot of vials of the toxin and hypodermic needles and hijacked delivery trucks.”
“You wouldn’t need a systematic approach if the point is terror,” I reply.
“Well, I guess that’s true,” he reconsiders. “Have a hundred or three hundred or a thousand casualties at once in theater or on military bases or in operational areas, and the impact would be destabilizing. It would be disastrous to morale, would empower the enemy and further cripple the U.S. economy.”
“So not anything we’re doing or working on,” I make sure. “Not research our government might be involved in to damage morale and cripple the economy of the enemy. To terrorize.”
“It’s just not practical,” he replies. “Russia’s given up trying to weaponize botulinum toxin, as has the U.S., for which I’m grateful. A terrible idea, and I hope no one ever cracks the technology, but that’s just me. A point source aerosol release, and ten percent of the people downwind of it up to a third of a mile away are going to be incapacitated or dead. God forbid it drifts to a school or a shopping mall. One thing we need to figure out is why some people are dead while others aren’t or weren’t intentional targets.”
“We don’t think Dawn Kincaid was intentional.”
“But you think her mother was, and also the prosecutor.”
“Yes.”
“And based on what you’re telling me, you think that whoever is responsible really wanted the prosecutor …”
“Jaime Berger and Kathleen Lawler. Yes, I believe whoever is responsible really wanted them dead.”
“Then they’re not necessarily what you’re considering research, like the deaths of inmates, if what you suspect is true. A science project. I don’t mean to trivialize the death of anyone who might have been killed with botulinum toxin. A hell of a way to die, for fuck’s sake.”
“I feel as if something changed,” I reply. “I feel as if whoever is doing this is meticulous and has a plan, and then something came up she wasn’t expecting. Possibly because of Jaime. Somebody doesn’t like what she was doing.”
“You believe this person is female.”
“A woman delivered the sushi last night.”
“Well, if that’s confirmed.”
“I suspect it’s going to be, and then what?” I say to him.
“Three cases of homicidal poisoning by botulinum toxin that include a tampered-with MRE? All hell’s going to break loose, Kay,” he says. “And you need to stay out of the way. A million miles from it.”
32
The sun is high in another washed-out sky, the heat wave tenaciously holding its grip on the Lowcountry, and what Colin Dengate claims simply isn’t true. Not everyone gets used to riding around with no air-conditioning in weather like this, although Benton was thoughtful enough to bring me clothes, summer khakis, so I’m not baking in all black.
It’s July 2, Saturday, almost ten a.m., and Colin’s staff isn’t working except for whoever’s on call, and he had to swap a few favors to set up what I need, he said. Then he had to pick me up at the hotel, because I don’t have a way to get around on my own. Marino is off with a shopping list for medical supplies that I want to have on hand, and he just dropped off Lucy at the local Harley-Davidson dealership. She intends for her transportation to be a motorcycle while she’s here, and I wasn’t going to leave Benton without the rental car, although his plan at the moment is to stay at the hotel. When I left him he was making phone calls, and FBI agents are on their way to Savannah from the Atlanta field office so he can brief them thoroughly as we wait for the news from the CDC to have its impact.
Botulinum toxin serotype A has been confirmed in Kathleen Lawler’s and Jaime Berger’s gastric contents. The toxin has been confirmed in the empty container of seaweed salad and also the leftovers in the refrigerator from the bag of take-out sushi that a serial poisoner delivered to Jaime’s apartment building Thursday night. I haven’t given the latest information to Briggs, who is in transit on a military airlifter out of the Middle East, but I don’t need him to repeat what’s expected of me, which is to do nothing. I don’t want to hear him tell me that again, and I’m grateful I can’t, because I don’t intend to comply, at least not quite.
The investigation is locked down and off-limits in anticipation of what we expect to be a rapid and decisive diverting of jurisdiction to Homeland Security, the FBI, whatever the federal government decides, and I know when I’m supposed to stay out of the way, to use what I call the ten-foot-pole rule. Don’t go anywhere near these poisoning cases, and were Briggs or anyone else to ask me, I would say that technically I’m not. The nine-year-old murders of a Savannah family and the mentally impaired woman who was convicted of them are of no interest to the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the White House, or scarcely anyone else this moment.
Those cases are still closed, and Lola Daggette is still scheduled to die because Jaime never filed the petition to vacate her capital-murder convictions. The new DNA results are languishing in a private lab, awaiting some other criminal defense attorney to step in and finish what Jaime started. Until then, the Jordan murder cases are cold and old and irrelevant, when attention is on a serial poisoner, who might be a terrorist planning mass murder. As I’ve sorted through all that has happened, I continue to ask why. But the whyof a terrorist plan to cause incapacitation and casualties among innocent civilians or military personnel isn’t my question. Unfortunately, there’s a long line of disturbed people in the world who would covet the chance to cause such destruction. What has my attention is something else.
If earlier deaths at the GPFW were vengeful murders that also served as research for a poisoner planning a widespread attack, then how do Kathleen Lawler
and Jaime Berger fit with the modus operandi and ultimate goal? Jaime’s reopening the Jordan case shouldn’t matter to a poisoner planning terror, unless Jaime was tampering with something that alarmed this person enough to take the risk of getting Jaime out of the way. By murdering her and Kathleen, and inadvertently poisoning Dawn Kincaid, the killer has only drawn attention to herself when before there was none. A cluster of homicidal poisonings with botulinum toxin that might include tampering with military rations, and the entire U.S. government is going to come down on the killer’s head. Ultimately, she won’t get away with it, and to take that chance after quiet years of painstaking premeditation can’t be attributed to a loss of self-control or an escalated urge to torture and murder. Something unexpected happened.
Pathologists — and certainly this is my natural inclination — focus more on cause than effect. I’m less interested in the gore of blood and tissue spattered everywhere than I am in the angle of an entrance wound that might suggest it wasn’t the victim who pulled the trigger, and I don’t care about the drama of symptoms beyond the suffering they cause. My method is to track down the disease, to reflect away distractions, and to dissect to the bone, if need be, or, in the Jordan case, return to the crime scene as best I can. I intend to look at the photographs and all the evidence as if they’ve never been examined, and I might visit the Jordans’ former home if I determine there’s anything left to see that matters.
“The same records you were looking at yesterday,” Colin is saying, as we walk along the deserted corridor, mobiles of bats and bones slowly twirling from the ceiling inside his empty lab building. “The knife recovered from the kitchen. Clothes, some other items that I collected at the scene and sent in with the bodies then. All of it submitted as evidence at trial, unless the prosecutor considered it irrelevant. My path tech Mandy will be in the room with you. Nice of her to come in, since we can’t afford overtime. Anyway, same drill as before. And I’ll be in my office, because I know damn well you’d rather take a look and not listen to opinions, meaning mine. You get to interpret the evidence the same way I did, and I won’t be breathing down your neck.”
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