“You seem to have a lot of details,” I remark instead. “I’m sure the two of you have kept in touch.”
“No way in hell. I’m not about to keep in touch,” Kathleen says, shaking her head. “There’s nothing good that would come of it with all the trouble she’s in. What I don’t need is any more trouble. What I know I found out from the news. We have supervised access to the Internet in the computer lab, and a selection of periodicals and newspapers in the library. I was working in the library before they moved me here.”
“That sounds like a good place for you.”
“Warden Grimm doesn’t think you rehabilitate people by depriving them of information so they live in a news vacuum,” she says, as if the warden might be listening. “If we don’t know what’s going on in the world, how can we ever live in it again? Of course, this isn’t rehab.” She indicates Bravo Pod. “This is a warehouse, a graveyard, a place to rot.” She doesn’t seem to care who might be listening now. “What is it you want to know from me? You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something. Doesn’t matter who asked first, supposedly. That was lawyers, anyway.” Kathleen stares at me like a snake about to strike. “I don’t believe you’re simply being nice.”
“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.