“What shoes are you talking about?”
“She must have had shoes. Were they issued by Liberty House?”
“I don’t think the wards were issued shoes. Only jeans and denim shirts. But I really don’t know,” Marino answers me, as he continues looking at Mandy O’Toole, who isn’t looking at him. “Nobody’s ever said anything about shoes that I’m aware of.”
“Someone should have looked for blood on her shoes. I see nothing here to indicate Lola was cleaning a pair of shoes in the shower. Or undergarments, for that matter. If clothing is saturated, the blood soaks through onto panties, undershirts, bras, socks. But she was washing only the pants, sweater, and jacket.”
“You and shoes,” Marino says.
“Because they’re really important.”
Shoes are happy to tell me where a person’s feet were at the time of a terminal event. At a homicide scene. On the brake pedal or accelerator. On a dusty windowsill or balcony before the person jumped or was pushed or fell. On the body of a victim who was stomped and kicked, or in one case I had, in wet cement when a murderer fled the scene through a construction site. Shoes, boots, sandals, all types of footwear have tread patterns and unique flaws that leave their mark, and they deposit evidence and carry it away.
“Whoever killed the Jordans would have had blood on his or her shoes,” I say. “Even if it was trace amounts, something would have been there.”
“Like I said, I haven’t heard anything about shoes.”
“Unless Colin has them in the lab, stored with the other evidence, it’s too late now,” I reply, as I look through photographs included in Lola Daggette’s bid for clemency last fall.
The first few pages are portraits and candid shots intended to humanize the victims and inflame the governor of Georgia, Zebulon Manfred, who ultimately denied clemency to Lola Daggette. He is quoted in a photocopied newspaper article included in the transcript as stating that efforts to spare her life are based on evidence already heard and rejected by a jury of her peers and the appeals courts. “We can ruminate about this heartless act of human depravity until the cows come home,” he said in a public statement, “and it all comes back to the same horror acted out by Lola Daggette, who was in a mood to massacre an entire family on the early Sunday morning of January sixth, 2002. And she did. With no motive whatsoever except that she felt like it.”
I can only imagine the governor’s outrage when he looked at a studio portrait of the Jordan family during the last Christmas season of their lives, just weeks before their brutal deaths. Clarence Jordan, with his shy smile and kind gray eyes, was dressed festively in a dark green suit and tartan plaid vest, his wife, Gloria, sitting next to him, a plain-looking young woman with dark brown hair parted down the middle, demure in green velvet and ruffles. Their five-year-old twins are seated on either side of their parents, towheads with rosy cheeks and big blue eyes, Josh dressed exactly like his father, Brenda like her mother. There are more photos, and I flip through them, getting the point all too well as they draw whoever is looking at them deeper into the nightmare that begins on page seventeen of the transcript.
A child’s bloody bare arm dangles off a blood-soaked bed. The wallpaper is Winnie-the-Pooh and the sheets have a western pattern of lassos, cowboy hats, and cacti, all of it spattered with elongated drops of cast-off blood, and drips and large dark stains, and what appear to me to be wipe marks. Dawn Kincaid enters my mind without my inviting her, and I see her inside that dark bedroom, pausing during her frenzied attack, using the sheets and bedspread to clean off her hands and the weapon. I feel her lust and rage and hear her breathing hard and fast as her heart hammers and she stabs and slashes, and I wonder why she would slaughter two children, two five-year-olds.
Twins, a boy and a girl who looked almost exactly alike at that young age, pretty blue-eyed blonds. Had she met them before? Had she watched them in the past, perhaps while gathering intelligence about their house and the family’s habits? How did she know about Josh and Brenda and whose room they were in, or did she? What is the psychology of her going after them in what I interpret as an enraged attack? Who was she really killing when she went after them while they were asleep in their own beds?
It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t needed or expeditious or motivated by a certain goal, such as stealing. Maybe the parents, but not young children who couldn’t defend themselves and possibly couldn’t identify anyone. There could have been no sensible reason, only a highly personalized driving force, and I feel Dawn Kincaid’s hatefulness, her victims’ blood the language of a fury that she reveled in. I believe she didn’t go after them randomly or impulsively any more than her coming after me was a whim. It was thought out. She intended to leave the entire Jordan family dead. Including the children. Why?
Taking from them what she never had,it enters my mind. Robbing them of their safe home and parents who held them and took care of them and didn’t give them away, and I try not to fill the scene in my mind with images of her, of the woman who would come after me nine years later. Blood on the bedroom floor becomes blood inside my garage, and I feel the warm mist on my face. I smell its iron smell. I taste its iron-salty taste, and I will Dawn Kincaid to leave me. I force her out of my thoughts and banish her from my psyche as I follow the bloody trail into the hallway.
Partial footwear prints, drips, smears, and streaks along the fir wood floor. Small handprints and swipes made by bloody clothing and bloody hair low on the white plaster wall at the level of the banister, and then a pinpoint constellation, as if the person was struck, and larger drops in an arterial pattern that spattered and ran down the white wall, a fatal injury that could not be survived longer than several minutes. The carotid was severed or partially severed, probably from behind, the killer in pursuit, and then the arterial spatters are gone, as if evaporated. More drips and a confusion of patterns on the stairs leading to a large puddle beginning to coagulate under a small body curled in a fetal position in the entryway, near the front door. Tousled blond hair and pink SpongeBob pajamas.
The kitchen has a black-and-white tile floor that looks like a checkerboard with bloody partial footwear prints, and in the white sink is a residue of blood and two bloody dish towels wadded up. On the counter is a fine china plate, and on it a half-eaten sandwich, bloody smudges and smears everywhere, and nearby a block of yellow cheese and a packet of boiled ham that is opened. A close-up of a knife handle reveals what looks like more smudges of blood, and I’m aware of Marino getting out of his chair. I’m aware of a rapid high-pitched pulsing.
White bread, jars of mustard and mayonnaise left out, and two empty bottles of Sam Adams, and next the guest bath, blood drips and footwear prints all over gray marble. Formal peach linen hand towels, bloody and bunched up by the sink, a bottle of lavender-scented hand soap turned on its side, bloody fingerprints visible on it. A bar of soap sits in a puddle of bloody water in a dish shaped like a shell, and then the toilet that wasn’t flushed, and I shuffle through documents, looking for reports from the fingerprints examination. Lab reports, where are they? Did Colin include them?
I find them. Fingerprint analysis reports issued by the GBI. The bloody prints on the bottle of hand soap and a kitchen knife were from the same individual but were never identified. There was no hit in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, but there should have been when Dawn Kincaid’s fingerprints were taken after her arrest nine years later, this past February. The unidentified prints from the bottle of hand soap and the knife handle in the Jordan case should still be in the IAFIS database, so why wasn’t there a hit when Dawn’s prints were entered? Two different DNA labs have linked her to the murders, but the prints aren’t hers?