Red Mist

by Patricia Cornwell

  “You are working for her de facto because you’re here at her bidding,” I add. “You’re certainly not working for me when you swap my car and cancel my hotel and scheme with her behind my back.”

  “I’m working for you but helping her, too. I haven’t walked off the job, Doc,” he says, with surprising gentleness for Marino. “I wouldn’t do something shitty like that to you.”

  I don’t reply that he has done plenty of shitty things to me over the twenty-plus years I’ve known him and worked with him, and I can’t help thinking about what Kathleen Lawler said. Every other minute it enters my mind. Jack Fielding wrote to her in the early nineties, wrote to her on lined notebook paper, like a schoolboy—an immature, sophomoric, mean-spirited schoolboy who resented me. He and Marino thought I needed to be warmed up, humanized, fucked but good, and for an instant the Marino standing before me is the Marino from back then.

  I envision him inside his dark blue unmarked Crown Vic, with all of its antennas and emergency lights and crumpled fast-food bags, its overflowing ashtray, the air shellacked with a stale stench of cigarettes that air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror couldn’t begin to crack. I remember the defiance in his eyes, the way he blatantly stared, making sure he reminded me that I might be the first female chief medical examiner of Virginia, but I was tits and ass to him. I remember going home at the end of each day in the Capital of the Confederacy, where I certainly didn’t belong.

  “Doc?”

  Richmond. Where I knew no one.

  “What is it?”

  I remember how alone I was.

  “Hey. Are you okay?”

  I focus on the Marino who has lived some twenty years since then, towering above me, as bald as a baseball and weathered by the sun.

  “And if Kathleen Lawler had declined to play whatever this game is?” I say to him. “What if she hadn’t given me the piece of paper with Jaime’s phone number on it? What then?”

  “I worried about that.” He walks over to a window and stares out at the night. “But Jaime knew for a fact Kathleen would give you the note,” he says, with his back to me, as he looks out and down, possibly looking for Jaime.

  “She knew it for a fact. I see,” I reply. “I’m not happy about this.”

  “I know you’re not, but there are reasons.” He wanders closer to me and stops. “Jaime couldn’t reach out to you directly at this stage of things. The safe thing was to have you make the first call and do it in a way that couldn’t be detected.”

  “Is this a legal strategy, or is she protecting herself for some reason?”

  “There can’t be a trail of Jaime initiating this meeting, of her reaching out to you at this point, plain and simple,” he says. “You’ll hook up with her tomorrow, officially, at the ME’s office in the course of doing business, but you were never here. Not here and not now.”

  “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. I’m supposed to pretend I’m not here now and that I didn’t see Jaime tonight.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m supposed to go along with whatever lie the two of you have concocted.”

  “It’s necessary and for your own good.”

  “I have no plans for hooking up with anyone and have no idea what business you’re referring to.” But I have a feeling I do know, as I think of the autopsy records of the slain Jordan family and any of the evidence from those cases stored at the local medical examiner’s office and crime labs. “I’m leaving in the morning,” I add, as my attention returns to the expansion files stacked on the floor by the desk. Each has a different-colored gusset and is labeled with initials or abbreviations that I don’t recognize.

  “I’ll be picking you up at eight a.m.” Marino is standing in the middle of the room as if he doesn’t know what do to with himself, and his large physical presence seems to shrink everything around him.

  “Maybe it would be helpful if you’d tell me what I’m meeting about.”

  “It’s hard to talk to you when you’re this pissed.” He stares down at me, and when I’m sitting and he’s not, I don’t like it.

  “Last I checked, you worked for me, not Jaime. Your loyalty is supposed to be to me, not to her or anyone else.” I sound angry, but what I am is hurt. “I wish you’d sit down.”

  “If I’d said I want to help out Jaime, that I want to do some things a little different from the way I’ve been doing them, you would have told me no.” Leather creaks loudly as he settles in the deep armchair.

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to or how you could know what I might say.” I feel he’s accusing me of being difficult.

  “You don’t have the slightest idea what all is going on, because nobody’s in a position to outright tell you.” He leans forward, his big arms on his bare knees, which are the size of small hubcaps. “Some people want you destroyed.”

  “I think it’s been established that there are—” I start to say, but he won’t let me talk.

  “Nope.” He shakes his bald head, and stubble on his tan, heavy jaw looks like sand. “You may think you know, but you don’t. Maybe Dawn Kincaid can’t touch you while she’s locked up in the cuckoo’s nest, but there are other ways and other people. She has plans to bring you down.”

  “I can’t imagine how she would communicate illegal or violent intentions without the staff at Butler knowing, without the police knowing, without the FBI knowing,” I say logically, coolly, trying to get the emotion and heat out of my mood, trying not to feel wounded to my core about what Jack and Marino joked about twenty years ago, about how they really felt about me, how they ridiculed and isolated me.

  “That’s easy.” His eyes are locked on mine. “Her scum-bucket lawyers, for starters. They can communicate with her in private the same way Jaime has with Kathleen Lawler. If you’re worried about being monitored or recorded, you communicate in writing. You pass notes. You write it on a legal pad, and your client reads it and doesn’t say anything.”

  “I seriously doubt Dawn Kincaid’s lawyers have hired a hit man, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “I don’t know if they’d hire a hit man,” he considers. “But they want you destroyed and in prison. You’re in a lot of danger any way you slice it.”

  I can tell he completely believes what he just said, and I wonder how much of it came from Jaime. What has she contrived and why?

  “I suspect I was at graver risk driving that van of yours than being taken out by a hit man,” I retort. “What if I’d broken down out in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I would have known if you were broke down. I know exactly where you were all day, right down to the gun store one-point-four miles north of Dean Forest Road. I have a GPS tracking device on my van and can see where it is on a Google map.”

  “This is ridiculous. Who orchestrated all this, and what’s the real reason?” I ask. “Because I don’t believe it was your idea. Jaime’s down here talking to Lola Daggette? What could that possibly have to do with me? Or with you? What is it she really wants?”

  “About two months ago, Jaime called the CFC,” he says. “I happened to be in Bryce’s office and got on the phone with her, and she said she was following up on information relating to Lola Daggette, who happens to be in the same prison as Kathleen Lawler. All Jaime was interested in, supposedly, was if I happened to know anything about Lola Daggette, if there was any reason her name has come up during the Dawn Kincaid investigation—”

  “And you never passed this on to me,” I interrupt him.

  “She asked to talk to me, not you,” he said, as if Jaime Berger is the director of the CFC, or maybe Marino is. “It didn’t take me long to figure out that her calling wasn’t what it appeared to be. For one thing, caller ID didn’t come up as the DA’s office. It came up as unknown.She was calling from her apartment in the middle of the day, which I thought was unusual. Then she said, ‘Things are so deep I need to decompress before I come up for air.’ When I used to work for her, that was our c
ode, meaning she needed to talk to me in private and not over the phone. So I went straight to South Station and took the Acela to New York.”

  Marino’s not apologetic, he’s so sure of what he’s doing and saying. He has no qualms about what he’s withheld from me for two months because the skillful, shrewd Jaime Berger has moved him around like a plastic pawn. She knew exactly what she was doing when she called him and spoke in code.

  “It just amazes me,” he then says, “that you live in the same damn house as the FBI and you don’t know your phones are being tapped.”

  He settles deeper in the leather chair and crosses his thick legs, and I can see remnants of a past strength in them that had to be formidable. I remember photographs I’ve seen of him when he was a boxer. A heavyweight and a brute, nothing civilized about him. How many people are walking around with concussive head injuries because of him, how many people did he brain-damage, how many faces did he smash?

  “They’re going through your e-mail,” he says, as I notice pale scars on his big knees and wonder how he got them. “They may be tracking you, tailing you.”

  I get up from the couch.

  “You know how it works.” His voice follows me into Jaime Berger’s well-appointed kitchen, which looks unused. “They obtain a court order to spy on you and then let you know after the fact.”

  9

  Idon’t offer him anything to drink. I offer him nothing as I open the refrigerator, scanning glass shelves. Wine, seltzer, Diet Coke. Greek yogurt. Wasabi and pickled ginger and low-salt soy sauce.

  Opening cabinets, I find little inside them, just the rudimentary dishes and cookware one might expect in a furnished rental. A salt-and-pepper set but no other spices, a fifth of Johnnie Walker Blue. I help myself to a bottle of water in the pantry, where there are more diet drinks, and an assortment of vitamins, analgesics, and digestive aids, and I recognize the desolate patterns of a life that’s stopped. I know what is in the cupboards, pantries, and refrigerators of people who are terrified of loss. Jaime hasn’t gotten over Lucy.

  “How the hell does he keep something like this from you?” Marino won’t shut up about Benton. “I wouldn’t have. I don’t give a shit about protocol. If I knew the feds were after you, I’d tell you, give you a friggin’ heads-up, which is exactly what I’m doing while he sits around and is the good Bureau boy, playing by the rules, not doing a damn thing while his own damn agency investigates his wife. Just like he didn’t do a damn thing the night it happened. Sitting in front of the fire having a drink while you wander outside in the damn dark by yourself.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “He knew Dawn Kincaid and maybe others were on the loose, and he lets you go outside alone at night.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “It’s a miracle you aren’t dead. I blame him, damn it. In a blink it could have all been over with because Benton couldn’t bother.”

  I walk back to the couch.

  “I won’t forgive him.” As if it is for Marino to forgive, and I wonder what Jaime has managed to stir up in him about Benton.

  How much has she encouraged the jealousy that is always there, ready to lunge or strike with the slightest provocation.

  “He didn’t want you to come down here, but he didn’t volunteer to come with you, now, did he?” Marino says loudly and hotly, and I think about the letters, about how insecure and selfish he can be.

  When I was first appointed the chief medical examiner of Virginia and Marino was Richmond’s star detective, he couldn’t have been more unhelpful and unkind. He did what he could to run me off the job until he realized he was better served by having me as an ally and a friend. Maybe that’s what really motivates him, after all. My authority and the way I’ve always taken care of him. Better to have me on his side. Better to have a good job, especially when good jobs are few and far between and he’s not getting any younger. If I fired him, he’d be lucky to get hired as a damn Pinkerton guard, I think furiously, and then instantly I feel beaten up inside and on the verge of tears.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted Benton to come to Savannah with me, and he certainly couldn’t have gone into the prison. That wouldn’t have been possible,” I reply, as I drink water from the bottle. “And even if what you’re saying is true and the FBI is investigating me for some ridiculous unfounded reason, Benton wouldn’t know.”

  I sit back down on the leather couch.

  “They wouldn’t tell him,” I reply logically, repeating myself as I think of Kathleen Lawler’s comments about my reputation and that unlike her, I have one to lose.

  I remember being alerted by what seemed an allusion, as if she were warning me and taking pleasure in the thought that some misfortune might be in store for me. I think about the letters, about what she says is in them, and I’m stunned by how hurt I feel. After twenty-something years, it shouldn’t matter, but it does.

  “How can he work in criminal intelligence for the friggin’ Bureau of Investigation and not know?” Marino says adamantly, and at times like this I know how much he dislikes Benton.

  Marino will never accept that Benton and I are married, that I possibly could be happy, that my seemingly aloof husband has dimension and appeal that Marino will never comprehend.

  “Let’s start with how you would know such a thing,” I reply.

  “Because the Feds have issued a preservation order to the CFC so nothing is deleted from our server,” he answers. “What that tells me is they’ve been in it for a while. They’re snooping through your e-mails, maybe through other things in there, too.”

  “Why don’t I know about a court order issued to my office?” I think of the highly sensitive information on the CFC server, some of it classified as secret or even top secret by the Department of Defense.

  “Shit,” Marino says. “How can you be so calm about it? Did you hear what I just told you? The FBI is investigating you. You’re a target.”

  “I most certainly would know if I’m a target. I’d be on the verge of indictment for a federal crime, and they’d interview me. They’d put me in front of a grand jury. They would have been in touch with Leonard Brazzo by now. Why has no one told me about a court order?” I repeat.

  “Because you’re not supposed to know about it. I’m not supposed to know about it, either.”

  “Is Lucy aware of this?”

  “She’s the IT person, so she’s the one who got the notice. It’s up to her to make sure no electronic communications are deleted.”

  Obviously Lucy told Marino. But she didn’t tell me.

  “We don’t delete anything anyway, and a preservation order doesn’t mean anything’s been looked at.” Scare tactics, I think. Marino’s not a lawyer, and Jaime has goaded him into overdrive for some reason that serves her purposes.

  “You act like it’s nothing.” His face is incredulous.

  “In the first place, my case is being tried in federal court,” I reply. “Of course the Feds, the FBI, might be interested in any electronic records, especially Jack’s records, since we know he got in deep with a number of illegal activities and dangerous people while I was at Dover, not the least of which was his involvement with his daughter, Dawn Kincaid. The FBI already has been looking at his communications, at anything they can find, and they haven’t finished yet. So I would expect a preservation order. But it’s not needed, and what might I delete anyway? An itinerary for a trip to Georgia? I’m surprised Lucy has managed to keep this to herself.”

  “All of us could be charged with obstruction of justice,” he says.

  “And I’m sure Jaime’s put that worry in your head, too. Has she also talked with Lucy about it?”

  “She doesn’t talk to Lucy or even about her.” He confirms my belief that Jaime and Lucy aren’t in touch. “I told Lucy and Bryce they’d be the ones who sent you to jail if they didn’t watch themselves and started telling you things you’re not supposed to know.”

  “I appreciate your encouraging the
m to keep me out of jail.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “It certainly isn’t. I don’t like the implication that if I were given information, I’d do something illegal in response, such as deleting records. I’m always under scrutiny, Marino. Every damn day of my life. What has Jaime said to you that’s gotten you so agitated and paranoid?”

  “They’re interrogating people about you. Back in April, two FBI agents came to her apartment.”

  I feel betrayed, not by the FBI or Benton or even Jaime but by Marino. The letters. I never knew he used to deride me, belittle me to the man I mentored, to my protégé, Jack. I was just getting started, and Marino was poisoning my staff behind my back.

  “They wanted to question her about your character because she knows you personally and has a history with you, going back to our Richmond days,” Marino is saying, but what I’m hearing is what Kathleen Lawler said about the letters. “They wanted to corner her before she disappeared into the private sector,” he adds. “And maybe there was a grudge, too. Politics. Her problems with NYPD …”

  “Yes, my character.” It boils out of me before I can stop it. “Because I’m such an awful person to work for. So difficult. Someone who can relate to people only if they’re dead.”

  “What …?”

  “Maybe I’m about to get indicted for being difficult. An awful human being who makes people miserable and ruins them. Maybe I should go to jail for that.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” He stares at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “The letters Jack used to write to Kathleen Lawler,” I reply. “I guess no one’s wanted to show them to me. Because of what you and Jack said about me back in our Richmond days. Comments he made and ones you made that he repeated in letters he wrote to Kathleen.”

  “I don’t know anything about any letters.” Marino is sitting forward in his chair, a blank expression on his face. “No way there were any letters in his house that were to or from Kathleen Lawler. I got no idea what she might have from him, assuming it’s true he wrote to her. But I doubt it.”