“Do what, exactly?” The first steel door slides open and slams shut behind us with a jarring clang. Then the next door opens and shuts. Officer Macon is ten feet ahead of us, communicating over his radio with central control.
“We can arrange transport to your facility,” she suggests.
“I think to keep things clean and simple, we’ll take care of that,” Colin answers. “One of our vans is on the way.”
The hallway the warden leads us along creates the illusion of a labyrinth, each corner, locked door, and connecting corridor reflected in the large convex mirrors mounted high on the walls, everything gray concrete and green steel. We emerge back into the sultry afternoon, with its oppressive heat, and women in gray silently drift about the prison yard like shades, moving in groups between buildings, pulling weeds by hand along walkways, congregated beneath a cluster of mimosa trees, three greyhounds squatting or lying in the grass, panting.
Inmates watch our passage with no expression on their faces, and I feel sure the news has reached every pod that Kathleen Lawler is dead. A well-known member of their community who allegedly was forced into protective custody because it was feared one or many of them might hurt her lasted in maximum security barely two weeks.
“They’re not kept out long,” Tara finally speaks to me, as Officer Macon opens the gate leading into Bravo Pod, and I realize she means the dogs. “In this weather, they stay in most of the day except for when they have to potty.”
I imagine what an ordeal it must be in a prison when one of the rescued greyhounds signals it’s time.
“Of course, they’re fairly well acclimated to heat, with their long snouts and lean builds. They have no undercoats, and you can imagine the heat at the racetrack. So they do fine here, but we’re careful,” she continues, as if I might have accused her of animal abuse.
Keys jangle from a long chain attached to Officer Macon’s belt as he unlocks the door to Bravo Pod and we step inside that dreary world of solid gray. I can almost feel a heightened alert as we pass by the second level’s mirrored glass tower, where guards invisibly watch and control the interior doors. Instead of turning left toward the visitation rooms where I was yesterday, we are led to the right, past the stainless-steel kitchen, which is deserted, then the laundry room with its rows of industrial maximum-load machines.
Through another heavy door we enter an open empty area with stools and tables bolted to the concrete floor, and one level up is a catwalk and behind it the maximum-security cells with green metal doors, each with a face peering out of the small pane of glass. Female inmates stare down at us with unwavering intensity, and the kicking begins as if on cue. They pound their feet against their metal doors, and the thudding rings in a shocking din, as if the very gates of hell are slamming.
“Holy shit,” Marino says.
Tara Grimm stands perfectly still, looking up, and her eyes move along the catwalk and fix on a cell directly above the door we just came in. The face looking out is pale and indistinguishable from my vantage point one floor down, but I can make out the long brown hair, the wide stare, the unsmiling mouth, as a hand enters the glass and she gives the warden the finger.
“Lola,” Tara says, holding Lola Daggette’s stare as the terrible racket continues to pound and bang. “The ever gentle, harmless, and innocent Lola,” she says, with an edge. “So now you’ve met. The wrongfully convicted Lola, who some think belongs back in society.”
We move on, passing a door with covered glass, then a cart of library books parked near an unfinished puzzle of Las Vegas, pieces sorted in small piles on a metal tabletop. Officer Macon unlocks another door with his jingling keys, and the instant we’re through it, the kicking stops, returning an absolute silence. Ahead are six doors on each side, sequestered from the rest of the pod, some with empty white plastic trash bags hanging from shiny steel locks, and the faces in the windows range from young to old, and the tense energy in them reminds me of an animal about to lunge, about to bound away like something wild that is terrified. They want out. They want to know what happened. I feel fear and anger. I can almost smell it.
Officer Macon leads us to a cell at the far end, the only one with an empty window and the door ajar, and Marino begins to hand out the protective clothing as we set crime scene cases and camera equipment on the floor. Inside Kathleen Lawler’s cell — a space smaller than a horse stall — GBI crime scene investigator Sammy Chang is perusing a notepad he’s apparently removed from books and other notepads arranged on two gray-painted metal shelves. His gloved fingers flip pages and he’s covered from head to toe in white Tyvek, what Marino calls overkill clothes,having come from an era when the most investigators bothered with was surgical gloves and a swipe of Vicks up their nose.
Chang’s dark eyes wander from Marino to me, and he looks at Colin as he says, “Got pictures of pretty much everything in here. Not sure what more we can realistically do because of access.”
What he implies is the guards and other prison personnel have access to Kathleen’s cell, and countless other inmates have been detained in it over time as well. Dusting for prints and other routine forensic procedures typically done in a suspicious-death case probably aren’t going to be helpful because the scene is contaminated. Deaths in custody are similar to domestic homicides, both complicated by prints and DNA meaning very little if the killer had regular access to the home or location where the death occurred.
Chang is careful what he communicates. He doesn’t want to suggest openly that if someone who works at the prison is responsible for Kathleen Lawler’s death, we’re probably not going to figure that out by processing her cell the way we would a typical crime scene. He’s not going to say in front of Officer Macon and Tara Grimm that his main purpose since he got here has been to secure Kathleen’s cell and make certain nobody — including the two of them — tampers with potential evidence. Of course, by the time he arrived, it really would have been too late to protect the integrity of anything. We don’t know for a fact how long Kathleen was dead in her cell before the GBI and Colin’s office were notified.
“Haven’t touched the body,” Chang tells Colin. “She was like this when I got here at thirteen hundred hours. According to the information I have, she’d been dead about an hour when I got here. But the times I’ve been given for events are a little murky.”
Kathleen Lawler is on top of the rumpled gray blanket and dingy sheet of a narrow steel bed attached to the wall like a shelf beneath a slit of a window covered with metal mesh. Half on her back and half on her side, her eyes are barely open, her mouth agape, and her legs are draped over the edge of the thin mattress. The pants of her white uniform are shoved up above her knees, and her white shirt is bunched up around her breasts, perhaps disarrayed by resuscitative efforts that failed. Or she might have been thrashing about before she died, rearranging her position in a frantic attempt to get comfortable, to relieve whatever symptoms she was suffering from.
“Was CPR attempted?” I ask Tara Grimm.
“Of course, every effort was made. But she was already gone. Whatever happened, it was very fast.”
As Marino, Colin, and I put on white coveralls, I notice an inmate staring through the glass window of the cell across from Kathleen’s. She has a matronly face, a sunken mouth, and a helmet of tightly curled gray hair, and as I look at her she looks back at me and begins to talk in a muffled loud voice through her locked steel door.