“You can’t tell no one! You can just fucking throw them out but can’t tell no one! I don’t want to go to jail! I swear I didn’t do nothing, I swear to God I didn’t!” the volunteer testified Lola said, and the more I read, the more I understand why no one at the time considered any suspect other than Lola Daggette.
18
Marino does little more than glance at what I slide over to him, handling the pages with a casualness and lack of curiosity that makes me suspect he’s studied them before.
“You’re familiar with this transcript?” I ask.
“Jaime’s got it in the records she’s been collecting. But she didn’t get it from him.” He means she didn’t get it from Colin Dengate.
“I wouldn’t have expected him to turn this over, because it wasn’t generated by him. She would have to get it from Chatham County Superior Court.”
“She figured he’d let you look at everything.”
“Apparently she figured right. But what I’m seeing so far doesn’t exactly help her case.”
“Nope,” he says. “Makes Lola Daggette look guilty as hell. No big surprise she got convicted. You can see how it happened.”
“I’m confused about the uniforms,” I add. “Jaime mentioned that Lola was in and out of Liberty House on job interviews, visiting her grandmother in a nursing home, that Lola could come and go rather much as she pleased as long as she had permission and was present and accounted for when they did a bed check at night, I assume. What did she wear when she went out?”
“The way I understand it, the uniforms looked like regular street clothes, like jeans and a denim shirt. That’s what the wards — and they called them wards — wore all the time.”
“You’re talking in past tense.” I take a sip of the water Colin gave me in his office, my black field clothes damp from sweat, the air-conditioning chilly.
“Lola Daggette wasn’t good for business, especially a place that depended on private donations,” Marino says. “Rich people in Savannah weren’t exactly eager to write checks to Liberty House anymore after Lola was convicted of murdering Clarence Jordan and his family. Especially since one of the things he was known for was helping out in shelters, clinics, helping people who had problems, people who had nothing and couldn’t afford going to the doctor.”
“Did he ever help out at Liberty House?” I get up to adjust the temperature in the room.
“Not that I know of.”
“Liberty House is gone, I assume. Let me know if you get too warm in here.” I sit back down, noting that Mandy O’Toole is ignoring us, or appears to be.
“A homeless shelter for women run by the Salvation Army. Nobody from the old days there anymore, and it doesn’t look the same, either,” Marino says. “You read this stuff, and what goes through your mind is Lola Daggette wasn’t smart enough to kill anyone and get away with it.”
“She didn’t get away with it. But we don’t know that she killed anyone.”
“The devil wore her clothing and then left it in her bathroom after the fact,” he says. “And she won’t tell anybody who the devil is except the name Payback?”
“Seems she started thinking about paybackwhen she was caught in the bathroom literally red-handed, washing the bloody clothing,” I reply, arranging more paperwork in front of me. “Someone was paying her back, someone from her drug days on the street. Seems she might have been thinking that she was set up, and maybe Paybackis how she began to refer to whoever is responsible.”
“You really think she had nothing to do with it and doesn’t know who did?”
“I don’t know what I think. Not exactly, not yet.”
“Well, I sure as hell know how it sounds,” Marino says. “Sounds the same now as it did at the time. Makes no friggin’ sense. Plus, you’ll see when you get to the DNA part that it’s everybody’s. Lola’s clothes have the blood of the entire Jordan family on them, so I’m telling Jaime from day one, I don’t know how you explain that away.”
“It gets explained away by Jaime the same way it was by Lola’s original defense team. Lola’s DNA wasn’t recovered from the Jordan house or from their bodies or whatever clothing they had on when they were killed,” I reply, as I come to a section in the transcript that includes photographs. “Her DNA was recovered from the clothing she was washing in the shower, and nowhere else. Only from the corduroys, sweater, and Windbreaker, but so was the DNA of the victims. To a jury, that’s quite incriminating, although scientifically it raises questions.” I don’t say what questions.
Not in front of Mandy O’Toole, who gives no sign she can hear us or is interested as she types on her BlackBerry with headphones on, purportedly listening to music.
“She’s naked in the shower, washing the clothing,” Marino says. “Seems like she’d leave her DNA on it just from that. She’s touching everything. And her DNA probably was on the clothing to begin with, since they were the street clothes she had on when she first arrived at Liberty House.”
“Correct. So no matter where the clothing came from, she’d certainly contaminated it with her own DNA by the time she was ordered out of the shower,” I agree. “That her DNA was recovered from her own clothing isn’t necessarily significant. Now, if another individual’s DNA was recovered in addition to Lola’s, that would have been a different story,” I add, as I think of Dawn Kincaid, whom I’m not going to mention. “If another individual had worn her clothing, and that person’s DNA was recovered from the pants, sweater, and Windbreaker left on the bathroom floor?” I’m careful what I say as I probe for information.
I won’t take the chance that Mandy O’Toole might overhear any allusions to new DNA results. According to Jaime, Colin Dengate doesn’t know. Scarcely anybody does, and I don’t understand how she can feel so sure of that, unless it’s what she wants to believe and her wish is her reality. In my opinion she should have filed a motion to vacate Lola’s sentence weeks ago. Then the truth would be known and there would be nothing to leak. It would have been safer for the case but not safer for Jaime. She couldn’t have hoodwinked me into coming to Savannah if I’d known about her new career and her big case down here.
She wasn’t off the mark last night when she doubted I would have volunteered to be her forensic expert if I’d had time to think about it, if she’d been up front with me instead of lying and manipulating and setting me up to be sitting where I am right this minute. The more I’ve mulled over everything that’s happened, the more certain I am that I would have said no. I would have referred her to someone else, but not because I would have worried about Colin’s response to my reviewing his findings and possibly second-guessing him. I would have been worried about how Lucy would react. I would have felt that anything I did with Jaime would be tainted by an unpleasant past and would be a bad idea for almost every reason imaginable.
“Well, if someone borrowed Lola’s clothes so this person could commit multiple murders, why wasn’t that person’s DNA recovered from the pants, sweater, the Windbreaker?” This is Marino’s way of confirming that neither Dawn Kincaid’s nor any other individual’s DNA was recovered from Lola’s clothing.
“Washing with hot soapy water could have eradicated another donor’s DNA if we’re talking sweat and skin cells. Maybe not blood, but it depends on how much, and if it was a small amount, perhaps from being scratched by a child, the blood might have been washed off in the shower,” I contemplate out loud. “Especially in early 2002, when the testing wasn’t nearly as sensitive as it is today. Did anybody look at Lola Daggette’s shoes?”