Red Mist (36 page)

“Maybe there’s a better way.”
He returns to his scene case and places rolls of evidence tape on the counter.
He puts on a
face mask and hands me one.
“Maybe we should get HazMat in here.”

“If that was necessary, I wouldn’t still be around to help you.”

I cover the counter with plastic bags and don’t bother with
the face mask.
My nose is my friend, even if I don’t like what I’m smelling.

“I touched all of this when I was helping clean up and didn’t have the benefit of wearing gloves or knowing there was any
reason for concern,” I continue.
“I’m sure Colin has contacts at the CDC, and if not, I do.
I suggest making a call and letting
them decide exactly how they want to handle transport, for example, which will be subject to regulatory control, since what
we’re talking about is the potential of pathogens or toxins present in body fluids and tissues collected at autopsy, and in
foods and food containers, et cetera.
But the first step for us is to package all this as rigorously as possible, triple-bag
it, document everything.
I don’t know if you or Colin have biohazard labels or infectious-substance labels or any other type
of leakproof packaging.
And we need to get all of this back to the lab and immediately refrigerate it.”

“We usually don’t deal with stuff like this, I’m happy to report.
I don’t have any special biohazard boxes or containers.”

“We’ll do the best we can.
Like this.”
From the refrigerator, I retrieve the container of seaweed salad leftover from last
night and make sure it’s sealed tightly shut.
“It goes in one bag, which I’ll wrap around and tape into a tight little package,
then that goes into a second bag, and I’ll do exactly the same thing, and finally a third bag, again the same thing,” I describe.
“Probably would pass the four-foot-drop test, but I believe we won’t press our luck.
I can take care of this or you can help
or you can stand here and watch.
Or, if you prefer, Colin can do it.”

“Who’s volunteering me for what?”
Colin says, as he walks down the hallway.

“You got any ideas about how to get this stuff to the labs?”
Chang asks him.
“She says it should be refrigerated.”

“And what you’re saying is you don’t want potentially poisonous garbage inside your candy-ass air-conditioned SUV.”

“I prefer not.”

“I’ll throw it in the back of mine,” Colin says.
“Open air and I just hose her off, decon her good, and Lord knows I’ve done
it before.
Just can’t use bleach on my fine upholstery.”

Chang carries his scene case to the desk near the stacks of expansion files with their different-colored gussets, and he begins
to process the two laptops.
He swabs keyboards and mouse pads, making sure he won’t wish he had done so long after the fact
if there is reason to believe someone might have tried to get into Jaime’s computers.

“I’m going to take these in,” he says, “but I want to look first.
Whatever isn’t password-protected.”
He moves a gloved finger
on the mouse pad.
“Bingo,” he says.
“If your delivery lady is real, we’re about to meet her.
This baby’s got a DVR card.
Looks
like it goes with that camera out front and the one outside the apartment door.”

I shake open more black plastic trash bags, and Colin and I individually package the containers that I placed in the trash
early this morning.

“And it’s got audio,” Chang lets us know.
“A pretty fancy camera she’s got outside, we’ll start with that and see who shows
up.
Long-range, pans and tilts three hundred and sixty degrees.
And thermal infrared, so it works in complete dark, fog, smoke,
haze.
What time did you say you got here last night?”

“Around nine.”
I dig chopsticks out of the trash.

“We probably should package her whisky glass,” Colin decides.
“And swab the bedside table, like you said.
Let’s make sure
we don’t forget.”

“The Scotch is in there”—I indicate which cabinet—“but I doubt that’s it, because the bottle was unopened when she first got
into it.
And here’s the wine bottle.”
I lift it out of the garbage and set it on top of a plastic bag, and the memory of drinking
pinot noir and talking on the couch tightens my stomach.
It almost takes my breath away.

“Nothing like day-old seafood,” Colin makes a face.

“Shrimp bisque.
Scallops.”

“Rather smell a floater.
Lord, that’s bad.”
He bags an empty container.

“Well, this is really strange,” Chang says from the desk where he’s seated.
“What the hell happened to her head?
Now, this
I’ve never seen before.
Well, shit.
That really sucks.”

We take off our soiled gloves and walk over to see what he’s complaining about.

“Let me back up to when she’s first picked up by the camera.”
Chang’s finger moves on the mouse pad.

The images are high-resolution and remarkably clear in shades of white and gray.
The entrance of the brick building, the iron
railing of the front step, the walkway and the trees.
The sound of a car going by and a flash of headlights, then she’s there,
a distant figure on the street.
Chang pauses the recording.

“Okay.
She’s off to the left, right out here in front.”
He indicates
the street below us in front of the building.
“You can barely make her out with the bicycle.”
He points at the upper-left
area of the computer screen.

“There you are, pressing the intercom button, and here she comes in the distance.
But she’s not on the bike.
She’s walking
it across the street,” Colin observes.
“That’s a little unusual.”

“And no safety lights on,” I comment, as I look at what’s on the screen.
“As if she doesn’t want anyone to see her.”

“I’m going to guess that’s the point,” Colin agrees.

“It gets better.”
Chang touches the mouse pad, and the recording resumes.
“Or worse, actually.”

The figure moves again in the distance on the dark street, and I can see the vague shape of her, but I can’t make out her
face.
A shadow in shades of gray moving the shape of a bicycle closer, and I catch a movement of her right hand lifting up
and suddenly a hot spot.
A shocking white glare.
What looks like a ball of white fire has obliterated her head.

“Her helmet,” I suggest.
“She switched on the safety lights on her helmet.”

“Why would you turn on helmet safety lights if you’re not riding?”
Colin says.
“Why would you wait until you’ve reached your
destination?”

“You wouldn’t,” Chang answers.
“She was doing something else.”

I
t is almost nine p.m.
when Marino and I arrive at the hotel, the back of his van packed with bags of groceries and other necessities
of life, including cases of water, a set of pots and pans and cooking utensils, a toaster oven, and a portable butane stove.

After he picked me up in front of Jaime’s building as Chang and Colin were clearing the scene, I had him take me on a series
of errands.
First we visited a Walmart for whatever items I deemed essential to set up camp, as I put it.
Then it was a Fresh
Market for basic food supplies, and after that a liquor store.
Finally we stopped at the specialty market on Drayton Street
that Jaime recommended last night for its selection of nonalcoholic beer, and I was reminded of
what some might view as the coincidence of proximity on the one hand and the senselessness of it on the other.

While I understand the concept of fundamental randomness, the favored theory of physicists that the universe exists because
of a Big Bang roll of the dice, and therefore we can expect a mindless messiness to rule our everyday lives, I don’t accept
it.
I honestly don’t believe it.
Nature has its symmetries and laws, even if they are beyond the limits of our understanding,
and there are no accidents, not really, only labels and definitions that we resort to for lack of any other way to make sense
of certain events, especially god-awful ones.

Chippewa Market is only a few blocks from Jaime’s apartment and the Jordans’ former home, and around the corner from the former
halfway house on Liberty Street where Lola Daggette was a resident when she was arrested for murder.
But Savannah Sushi Fusion
is some fifteen miles northwest of where Jaime lived, and in fact is closer to the Georgia Prison for Women than to Savannah’s
three-and-a-half-square-mile historic district.

“The locations are telling us something.
There’s a reason for them, and a message there,” I’m saying to Marino, as we climb
out of the van into the steamy night air, and water pours from gutters and drips from trees, and puddles in the city’s sea-level
streets are the size of small ponds.
“Jaime put herself right in the middle of some sort of matrix, in the backyard of evil,
and the sushi place is the odd man out, way off to the northwest, as if you’re heading to the airport or the prison, which
might be how she discovered it.
But why didn’t she use a place closer to where she lived if she was going to have take-out
delivered several times a week?”

“It’s advertised as having the best sushi in Savannah,” Marino
says.
“That’s what she told me one time when I was with her and she had it brought in.
I said how do you eat that shit, and
she said it was supposed to be the best in town, but it wasn’t as good as what she got in New York.
Not that any of it’s good.
Fish bait is fish bait, and tapeworms are tapeworms.”

“How does one make a delivery on a bicycle from there?
Some of it would be highway.
Not to mention the distance in this weather.”

“Hey, I need a couple of carts,” Marino yells for a bellman.
“No way I’m letting anybody haul this shit upstairs,” he lets
me know.
“If you’re going to all this trouble to make sure everything’s safe, then we don’t let anything out of sight.
Zero
possibility of our stuff being tampered with.
I’m not going to say you’re kooky as hell.
But I’m sure it looks kooky to anybody
watching.
Like the Brady Bunch is on summer vacation and can’t afford to go out for a burger or order a pizza.”

I trust nothing.
Not a cup of coffee, not a bottle of water, unless I buy it.
Until we have a better understanding of what
is going on, we’re staying right here in Savannah, and no food or drink will be delivered to us by restaurants or room service,
and we’re not touching prepackaged food or eating out.
I’ve also given fair warning that there will be no housekeeping.
Nobody
outside our circle is to come into our rooms, period, unless it is a police officer or an agent we trust, and someone needs
to be in residence at all times to make sure no one enters and touches anything, because we just don’t know who or what we’re
up against.
We will make our own beds, empty our own trash, and clean up after ourselves as best we can and eat what I prepare
as if we are in quarantine.

Marino rolls two luggage carts to the back of the van, and we
start unloading cookware, appliances, and water and nonalcoholic beer and bottles of wine, and coffee, and fresh vegetables
and fruit, and meats and cheese and pasta, and spices and canned goods and condiments.
As if we are the Boxcar Children settling
in.

“I don’t see how it’s coincidental.”
I continue to talk about the geography.
“I want us to get an aerial view, maybe Lucy
can get a satellite map up on the television screen and we can take a really close look, because it means something.”
We roll
our overloaded carts through the lobby, past the front desk and the crowded bar, and people stare at the couple in investigative
uniforms who appear to be moving in or setting up an outpost, and I suppose we are.

“But Jaime wasn’t around when it happened,” Marino says, as we push onward to the glass elevator.
“She wasn’t staying in that
apartment in the middle of the matrix or the evil backyard or whatever.
She wasn’t here in 2002 when the Jordans were murdered.”
He taps the elevator button several times.
“So whatever the locations might have meant back then, they wouldn’t mean the same
thing now.
It’s apples and oranges.
It’s you being spooky.
I don’t know about the sushi place and the bicycle, though.”

“It’s not apples and oranges.”

“Except if you were going to poison her food, it wouldn’t be all that hard if she was a regular customer of some place and
had stuff delivered all the time,” he says.
“That’s the only connection I’m seeing.
A place she used all the time.
Didn’t
matter where it was.”

“And how would you know Jaime used that place all the time and had her charge card on file unless she was in sight?
Within
range?
Unless both of you were common to the same environment somehow?”

“How the hell do you think so much?
I don’t have any thoughts left in my damn head, and I’m dying to smoke, I admit it.
See?
No evasiveness.
I didn’t buy any cigarettes during our shop-a-thon.
But I’m letting you know I need one really bad, and I
might go through two six-packs of Buckler, whatever it takes.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” I again say to him, as the elevator doors slide open and we roll our provisions inside,
plastic bags swaying from the frames of the carts.

“Plus, I’m hungry as hell.
Like one of those times when nothing I’m going to do will make me feel good,” he says, and he is
getting grouchier by the minute, about to come out of his skin.

“I’m going to whip up a very simple spaghetti and salad of mixed greens.”

“Maybe I want a damn cheeseburger with bacon and fries from room service.”
He irritably taps the button for our floor, then
taps it again, then taps the button for the doors to shut.

“It won’t take me long.
You drink all the Buckler you want and take a hot shower.
You’ll feel better.”

“A damn cigarette is what I want,” he says, as the glass elevator takes off like a lazy helicopter, rising slowly above floors
with their vine-draped balconies.
“You need to quit telling me I’m going to feel better.
This is why people go to meetings.
Because they feel like fucking shit and want to kill everyone who says they’re going to feel better.”

“If you need to find an AA meeting, I’m sure we can.”

“No way in fucking hell.”

“It’s not going to help if you go back to things that hurt you,” I say to him.

“Don’t lecture me.
I can’t take it right now.”

“I don’t mean to lecture you.
Please don’t smoke.”

“If I have to go to the bar to bum one, I’m going to.
You don’t want me to be evasive, right?
So I’m telling you.
I want a
damn cigarette.”

“Then I’ll go with you.
Or Benton will.”

“Hell, no.
I’ve had enough of him for one day.”

“You have every right to be devastated and disappointed,” I reply quietly.

“It’s not got a damn thing to do with disappointment,” he retorts.

“Of course it does.”

“Bullshit.
Don’t tell me what it has to do with.”

We can barely see each other around all the bags and boxes as we argue about what he doesn’t feel, and I know that at the
root of his anger is his pain, and he’s crushed.
He had feelings for Jaime that I’m aware of at some level, but I’ll likely
never know the extent of them and whether he might have been attracted to her or was in love with her, and I know for a fact
he had attached his future to hers.
He was going to help her out, and he hoped to do so in this part of the world, where he
likes the lifestyle and the weather.
Now all of that is changed forever.

“Look,” Marino says, as the elevator stops on the top floor.
“Sometimes nothing makes anybody feel better.
I can’t stand what
was done to her, okay?
It makes me crazy that we were right there eating with her in her own damn living room and had no idea.
Jesus.
She’s eating poison right before our eyes and is going to die and we got no clue, and I leave and then you do.
Goddamn
it.
And she was all
by herself going through hell like that.
Why the hell didn’t she call nine-one-one?”
He asks the same question Sammy Chang
did, the question most people would ask.

We are rolling our carts along the balcony that wraps around the hotel’s atrium, heading to a series of rooms that make up
our camp, a suite for Benton and me, with a connecting room on either side: one for Lucy, one for Marino.

“She was drinking,” I reply.
“And that certainly didn’t help her judgment.
But the more relevant factor is human nature, and
it’s typical for people to put off doing something as drastic as calling for an ambulance.
Strange thing is, people will call
the police quicker than they will ask for a rescue squad or the fire department, because we tend to feel ashamed and embarrassed
when we hurt ourselves or accidentally set our house on fire.
We’re much more comfortable siccing the police on someone.”

“Yeah, like the time I had the chimney fire, you remember that?
My old house on Southside?
I refused to call.
Climbed up on
the roof with the hose, which was stupid as hell.”

“People delay, they put it off,” I say, as we roll our carts along, and hanging vines growing from the balconies on every
floor remind me of Tara Grimm and all the devil’s ivy in her office that she lets grow out of control to teach people a life
lesson.

Be careful what you let take root, because one day that’s all there is.
Something took root in her, and all that’s left is
evil.

“They keep hoping they’ll feel better or can fix the problem themselves and then reach the point of no return,” I tell Marino.
“Like the lady with the bucket.
Remember her?
She dies of CO poisoning while acting like a bucket brigade, house burns up
and
firefighters find her charred body next to her bucket.
It’s worse for those who work in the professions we do.
You, Jaime,
Benton, Lucy, me, all of us would be reluctant to call police or paramedics.
We know too much.
We make terrible patients and
usually don’t follow our own rules.”

“I don’t know.
If I couldn’t breathe, I think I’d call,” Marino says.
“Or you might take Benadryl or Sudafed or root around
for an inhaler or an EpiPen, and when nothing worked, you probably wouldn’t be in a condition to call anyone.”

Benton must have heard us making our way along the open-air balcony, and the door to our suite opens before we get there.
He steps outside, holding the door open wide, and his hair is damp and he’s changed his clothes, showered and fresh, but his
eyes are clouded by what has happened and what worries him, and I imagine Lucy worries him most of all.
I haven’t talked to
her since I saw her last when I was on the elevator in Jaime’s building, on my way to discover an answer I would give anything
to change.

“How are things?”
It’s my way of asking him about my niece.
“We’re okay.
You look exhausted.”