Red Mist

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I’m wondering when you finally met your daughter for the first time,” I reply.

  “She was born April eighteenth, 1979, and the first time I met her she’d just turned twenty-three.” Kathleen begins to recite the history as if she’s scripted it in advance, and there’s a chill around her now, less of an attempt to be friendly. “I remember it wasn’t long after Nine-Eleven. January of 2002, and she said the terrorist attack was partly why she wanted to find me. That and the death of those people in California who she ended up with after getting passed around like a hot potato. Life is short. Dawn said that a number of times when she was with me the first time we met, and that she’d been thinking about me for as long as she could remember, wondering who I was and what I looked like.

  “She said she realized she couldn’t have peace until she found her real mother,” Kathleen continues. “So she found me. Right here at GPFW, but not for the offense I’m currently serving time for. Drug-related charges back then. I was out for a while again and then back in again and feeling really low about it, about as much in despair as I’d ever been, because it was so damn hopeless and unfair. If you don’t have money for lawyers or aren’t notorious for doing something really horrible, nobody cares. You get warehoused, and here I was warehoused again and one day out of the blue, I’ll never forget my surprise, I get a request that a young lady named Dawn Kincaid wants to come all the way from California to visit me.”

  “Did you know that was the name of the daughter you gave up for adoption?” I’m no longer careful what I ask.

  “I had no idea. Of course, I assumed whoever adopts a baby would give it whatever name they decide on. I guess the first family who took Dawn were the Kincaids, whoever they were.”

  “Did you name her Dawn, or did they?”

  “Of course I didn’t name her. Like I said, never held her, never saw her. I was right here when I went into labor prematurely, right here at the GPFW in my cell and they rushed me over to Savannah Community Hospital. After it was over, I was right back in my cell like it never happened. It’s not like I got any sort of follow-up.”

  “It was your choice to give her up for adoption?”

  “What other choice was there?” she exclaims. “You give away your children because you’re locked up like an animal and that’s the way it goes. Think about the damn circumstances.”

  She glares at me, and I say nothing.

  “Talk about being conceived in sin and the sins of the parents being passed on,” she says sarcastically. “It’s a wonder anybody would want children born under circumstances like that. What the hell was I supposed to do, give them to Jack?”

  “Give themto Jack?”

  She looks bewildered for a moment and on the verge of tears, and she says, “He was twelve going on nothing. What the hell was he going to do with Dawn or me or anything? It wouldn’t have been legally allowed and it should have been. We would have been all right, him and me. Of course, I always wondered about the life out there that he and I created, but my assumption was who would want a mother like me? So you can imagine my reaction twenty-three years later when I get this communication from someone named Dawn Kincaid. I didn’t believe it at first, thought maybe it was a trick, that this person in graduate school was doing research, writing a paper. I thought, How will I know for a fact this person really is my baby?But all I had to do was lay eyes on her, she looked so much like Jack, at least the way I remembered him from the early years. It was eerie, as if he’d come back as a girl and appeared before me like a vision.”

  “You mentioned she’d somehow figured out who her real mother was. What about her father?” I ask. “When you met her that first time, did she already know about Jack?”

  No one has been able to find this piece of the puzzle, not even Benton and his colleagues at the FBI, at Homeland Security, and the local police departments involved in the cases. We know that for months prior to Jack’s murder, Dawn Kincaid was living in an old sea captain’s house he was renovating in Salem. We now know he’d been in contact with her for at least several years, but there’s been no forthcoming information to tell us how long ago the two of them were connected or why they connected or the extent of this connection.

  I have searched my memory, going back to my earliest days in Richmond when Jack was my forensic pathology fellow. I’ve yet to recall anything he might have said or indicated to me about an illegitimate daughter or the woman who bore her. I was aware he had been abused by a staff member at some type of special ranch when he was a boy, but that was the extent of the information I had. He and I didn’t talk about it, and I should have drawn him out. I should have tried harder at a time in his life when it might have helped, and even as this thought passes through my mind, a deeper part of me is convinced nothing would have helped. Jack didn’t want to be helped and didn’t think he needed it.

  “She knew about him because I told her,” Kathleen is saying. “I was honest with her. I told her everything I could about who her real parents were and showed her pictures I had of him from a long time ago and some more recent ones he’d sent. He and I kept in touch over the years. In the early days, we wrote letters.”

  I remember going through Jack’s personal effects after his death. I don’t recall seeing or hearing about any letters from Kathleen Lawler.

  “Later it was e-mail for a while, which is probably the hardest deprivation for me now,” she says angrily. “E-mail’s free and it’s instant and I don’t need people sending me stationery and stamps. Detritus and hand-me-downs, shit people don’t want, and we’re supposed to be grateful.”

  Benton and his FBI colleagues have read e-mails from more than a decade ago that have been described to me as flirty and juvenile and heavily seasoned with vulgarity. It isn’t as hard for me to comprehend as one might imagine. I suspect Kathleen was Jack’s first love. He probably was infatuated with her at the time of her arrest for sexual battery, and over the years, it was the stunted and damaged part of their psyches that related to each other through letters or e-mail that eventually stopped. Nothing else has been recovered that might indicate Jack communicated with Kathleen since about the time I left Virginia and he did, too. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in touch with his biological daughter, Dawn Kincaid, and in fact, he had to have been. It’s just a matter of when. Maybe five years ago, if she took that picture of him.

  “Mail’s so damn slow,” Kathleen continues complaining. “I mail something and someone in the free world mails something back, and I sit in my cell, waiting for days or longer. E-mail’s instant, but Internet access isn’t allowed in Bravo Pod,” she reminds me resentfully. “And I can’t have my dogs. I can’t do training or have a greyhound in my cell. I was in the middle of training Trail Blazer and now I can’t have him.” She gets choked up. “I’m so used to the company of having one of those precious dogs with me and I go from that to this, to something not much better than solitary confinement. I can’t work on Inklings.Can’t do a goddamn thing I used to.”

  “The magazine the prison publishes,” I recall.

  “I’m the editor,” she says. “I was,” she adds bitterly.

  5

  I nklings,as in Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, the name of their group,” Kathleen explains. “They’d meet at a pub in Oxford and talk about art and ideas, not that I get to talk about art and ideas very often, like most of these women give a shit. All they care about is flaunting themselves, getting their names out, getting attention and recognition. Anything to break the boredom and give a little hope that maybe you can still make something of yourself.”

  “Is Inklingsthe only publication here?” I ask.

  “The only show in town.” Her pride is obvious, but it’s not about any literary achievement she might enjoy. It’s about power. “There isn’t much to look forward to. Special treats to eat, and I’m a regular test kitchen for treats, not that any of it is something I’d touch in the free world. And the publication of Inklings.I lived and breathed for that maga
zine .Warden Grimm is generous as long as you play by the rules. She’s been really good to me, but I don’t want to be in PC and don’t need to be. She needs to move me back to the other side,” she says, as if Tara Grimm is listening.

  Kathleen has real power at the GPFW. Or she did. She got to decide who was recognized and who was rejected, who became famous among the inmates and who remained in obscurity. I wonder if this might have something to do with why certain inmates are after her, assuming what I’ve been told is true. I wonder what the real reason is for her being moved as I think of what Tara Grimm said about the family murdered in Savannah on January 6, 2002, and Jaime Berger’s recent visits to Bravo Pod.

  “I was an English major in college, wanted to be a professional poet but instead went into social work, got my masters in that,” Kathleen tells me. “ Inklingswas my idea, and Warden Grimm let me do it.”

  January 2002 was when Dawn Kincaid came to Savannah and met Kathleen for the first time, or so Kathleen claims. Possibly Dawn was here in Savannah when the doctor and his family were murdered. Hacked and stabbed to death, a category of violence Benton describes as personal, hands-on, often accompanied by a sexual component. The perpetrator is aroused and stimulated by the physical act of penetrating a victim’s body with a blade or, in the recent case of the boy in Salem, penetrating the skull with iron nails.

  “We have our editorial meetings in the library to review submissions and go over the layout with the design team.” Kathleen is talking about her magazine .“While I have the final say about what gets published, Warden Grimm approves everything, then each person whose original piece is selected gets her picture on the cover. It’s a really big deal and can cause hard feelings.”

  “What’s happening to your magazine now?” I ask, as I wonder if Lola Daggette might have known Dawn Kincaid and is aware that Kathleen is Dawn’s mother.

  “Of course they’re not letting me do it,” Kathleen says resentfully. “Someone else obviously is. I was working in the library, like I said, but I can’t do that, either. That’s how I funded my commissary account. Twenty-four dollars a month, and buying a treat now and then, paper, stamps, and it doesn’t take long. Who’s going to send me money from the outside when what I’ve got runs out? Who do I have to help? How am I supposed to buy a damn bottle of shampoo so I can wash my hair?”

  I don’t answer. She’ll get nothing from me.

  “The rules are the same for everyone in Bravo Pod, whether you’re PC or a mass murderer. I guess that’s the price you pay for being kept safe,” she says, and I’m struck by how harsh she looks, as if something hideous inside her is working its way out. “Except I’m not safe. I’ve been stuck right here with danger right over my damn head.”

  “What danger is over your head?” I ask.

  “I don’t know why they’d do that to me. They need to move me back.”

  “What danger is over your head?” I ask again.

  “It’s Lola who’s behind all this,” she says, and the circle is complete.

  Jaime Berger has been coming to the GPFW to talk to Lola Daggette, who’s connected to Kathleen Lawler, who’s connected to me. I don’t let on that I know who Lola Daggette is as I continue to entertain the possibility that she is somehow connected to Dawn. I don’t know how or why, but all of us are in the circle.

  “She wanted to get me moved over here so I’d be near her,” Kathleen says angrily. “We don’t have a separate pod for death row. Lola’s the only one on it right now. The last woman was Barrie Lou Rivers, the one who killed all those people in Atlanta by mixing arsenic in their tuna-fish sandwiches.”

  The Deli Devil. I’m familiar with the case, but I don’t show it.

  “Same people every day getting the same tuna special and she smiled at them, just as nice as she could be, as they got sicker and sicker,” Kathleen goes on. “Right before she was supposed to die by lethal injection, she choked to death on a tuna sandwich in her cell. What I call one of life’s black ironies.”

  “Death row is upstairs?”

  “Just a maximum-security cell like any other, no different from the cell I’m in now.” Kathleen is getting louder and more upset. “Lola’s upstairs and I’m down here, one floor below her. So she’s not yelling at me directly or passing kites directly. But her words get around.”

  “What words have you been hearing?”

  “Threats. I know she’s making them.”

  I don’t point out the obvious, that Lola Daggette is locked up twenty-three hours a day just as Kathleen is, and it’s not possible for the two of them to have physical contact. I don’t see how Lola can hurt anyone.

  “She knew if she got people riled up and placed me in danger, they sure as hell would move me to the same damn pod she’s in. Which is exactly what they did,” she says in a scathing tone. “Lola wants me nearby,” Kathleen adds, and I don’t believe Lola Daggette somehow willed Kathleen to Bravo Pod.

  Tara Grimm did.

  “Have you had similar problems with other inmates in the past?” I ask. “Problems that necessitated moving you?”

  “You mean moving me to Bravo Pod?” Kathleen raises her voice. “Hell, no. I’ve never been in segregation before because why would I be? They need to let me out. I need to go back to my life.”

  Officer Macon walks past the windows of the visitation room. I’m aware of him looking in at us, and I avoid looking back as I think of the poem Kathleen sent and the prison’s literary magazine that she edited until several weeks ago. I wonder how often she published herself and passed over others. I glance at my watch. Our hour is almost up.

  “Well, it’s nice of you to bring me this picture of Jack.” Kathleen holds the photograph at arm’s length and narrows her eyes. “I hope your trial goes all right.”

  The way she says it catches my attention, but I don’t react.

  “Trials aren’t a picnic. Course, I usually just plead guilty in exchange for the lightest sentence I can get. Save the taxpayers money. Have had a few suspended sentences because I was honest enough to just say yup, I did it, sorry about that. If you don’t have a reputation to protect, just plead guilty. Better than getting a jury of your peers,” she snarls, “who want to make an example out of you.”

  She isn’t thinking about Dawn Kincaid, who will never plead guilty to anything. A sensation begins in the pit of my stomach.

  “Now, you do have a reputation, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. You have a reputation as big as the great outdoors, don’t you? So it’s not all that simple for you, is it?” She smiles coldly, and her eyes are flat. “I sure am glad we finally met so I could see what all the fuss was about.”

  “I don’t know what fuss you’re referring to.”

  “I got sick as hell of hearing about you. I guess you haven’t read the letters.”

  I don’t answer her about the letters she and Jack supposedly wrote to each other. Letters I’ve never seen.

  “I can tell you haven’t read them.” Kathleen is nodding and grinning, and I can see the gaping spaces where she’s missing teeth. “You really don’t know, do you? It makes sense you didn’t. I have to wonder if you would have had any contact with me if you knew. Well, maybe you would but maybe you wouldn’t be so smug. Maybe you wouldn’t think you’re so high and mighty.”

  I sit quietly. Perfectly composed. Nothing shows. Not curiosity. Not the anger I feel.

  “Before e-mail, we wrote real letters on paper,” she says. “He always wrote to me on lined notebook paper like he was still a schoolboy. This would have been in the early nineties, and Jack was working for you in Richmond and miserable as hell all the time. He used to write that what you needed was to be fucked but good. That you were a frustrated crazy bitch and if someone just went ahead and fucked you good maybe it would improve your disposition. Apparently he and that homicide detective you worked with all the time back then used to joke about it in the morgue and at crime scenes. They’d joke you’d been in the cooler too long and with too many dead bodies a
nd somebody needed to warm you up. Someone needed to show you what it was like to be with a man whose dick could still get stiff.”

  Pete Marino was a homicide detective in Richmond when I was chief, and I realize why I’ve not seen any such letters. The FBI would have them. Benton’s the criminal intelligence analyst, the forensic psychologist assisting the Boston field office, and I know for a fact he’s read the e-mails that Kathleen and Jack exchanged. Benton has given me an overview of what is in them, and I have no doubt he would have read any letters written on paper, too. He wouldn’t want me to see what Kathleen Lawler has just described. He wouldn’t want me to know about cruel comments Marino made, about him mocking me behind my back. Benton would shield me from anything that hurtful, arguing that there is nothing to be gained from it. I am steady and calm. I won’t react. I won’t give Kathleen Lawler the satisfaction.

  “So here we are at last. Finally, I’m looking at you,” she says. “The big chief. The big boss. The legendary Dr. Scarpetta.”

  “I suppose you’re somewhat of a legend to me, too,” I say with no affect.

  “He loved me more than he ever loved you.”

  “I have no reason to doubt he did.”

  “I was the love of his life.”

  “I have no reason to doubt you were.”

  “He resented the fucking hell out of you,” she says, and the calmer I am the nastier she is. “He used to say you have no idea how hard you are on people and maybe if you ever looked in the mirror you’d understand why you don’t have any friends. He used to call you Dr. Rightand he was Dr. Wrong.And the cops were Detective Wrongor Officer Wrong.Everybody wrong except you. Wrong, Jack. You have to do it this way. Wrong, Jack!” she continues, unable to disguise her delight. “Always telling him what to do and how to do it right. Like the entire fucking world is a crime scene or a court case,he used to complain to me.”