“… Yes, because I’d like to ask exactly what she did,” I overhear Colin saying to Tara Grimm beyond the cell’s open door. “You were told she walked around the cage for an hour, for the entire hour. Fine. I appreciate that, but like I said, I need to hear it from the officer who was present. Did she drink water? How much? How often did she rest? Did she complain of light-headedness, muscle weakness, headache, or nausea? Did she voice any complaints at all?”
“I asked all that and have passed it on to you word for word.” Tara Grimm’s quiet, melodious voice.
“I’m sorry, but not good enough. I need you to get the officer and bring her here or take us to her. I need to talk to her myself. I’d like to see the exercise cage. It would be good if we could do this now, so we can get the body to my office without further delay….”
I make out some words but not others indented on the stationery. It won’t be possible to determine exactly what Kathleen wrote in her letter on party paper until it can be examined in better conditions than a mesh-covered window and low-output recessed cell lighting that probably is manipulated by a key switch in the control room, preventing inmates from turning off their lights to ambush a guard coming in. I catch the shadow of what is written in a graceful hand that now is familiar:
I know … a joke, right? … so I thought I’d share … from PNG … Kind of fits with everything else … trying to bribe me and win me over … How are you feeling …?
PNG as in persona non grata? A person who isn’t welcome or, in legal terms, someone, usually a foreign diplomat, who is censured by no longer being allowed to enter a certain country. I wonder to whom Kathleen was referring as I hear the papery sound of Marino walking back into the cell, and he sets down a rugged waterproof Pelican case next to the bed.
“I’m sure there’s a hand lens somewhere,” I say, as he snaps open stiff clasps. “A ten-X with LEDs, if possible. The lighting’s not so great in here.”
He finds an illuminated magnifier, which I turn on with a switch and begin to slowly move over the tops of Kathleen Lawler’s pale hands. The smooth pinkish palms, her fingers and their pads, the wrinkles of her skin, the minutiae of her prints and faint bluish veins are ten times their normal size in the lighted lens. Her unpainted nails are slightly furrowed and clean, a few whitish fibers under them that could be from her uniform or the bedsheets, and a hint of something orange under the nail of her right thumb.
“If you could locate the fine forceps and a GSR kit for me. If Colin doesn’t have one, I’m sure Investigator Chang will,” I say to Marino, as I hold up the right hand by the second knuckle of the thumb, the body cooling but still limber, as in life.
Marino shuffles equipment around inside the case and says, “Got it.”
Like a surgical assistant, he lays the tweezers in my nitrile-covered palm and then gives me a small metal stub with a circular carbon tape adhesive disk on top for lifting gunshot residue off the palmar and back surfaces of hands. I instruct him to hold the illuminated lens over the thumbnail as I use the tweezers to coax out the whitish fibers and minute flecks of a crumbled orange pasty substance, capturing them with the sticky stub, which I seal inside a small plastic evidence bag that I label and initial.
Crouching by the bed, I begin to look at the exposed flesh of the lower legs and the bare feet, holding the magnifier over an area on the top of the left foot where there is a cluster of bright red marks.
“Maybe she got bit by something,” Marino says.
“I think she might have dripped something hot on herself,” I reply. “First-degree burns that you might expect if you drip a hot liquid on your foot.”
“I don’t see how she could heat up anything in here.” He leans close to the body, looking at the area of skin I’m talking about. “Could water from the sink do that?”
“You can run it and see. But I doubt it.”
“It’s okay to run it?”
“I swabbed the sink,” Chang tells him from the open door. “You can run water if you want to see how hot it gets. Maybe she had something in here. Something electrical?” he suggests. “Possible she was electrocuted?”
“Right now a lot of things are possible,” I reply.
“A blow-dryer, a curling iron, if someone brought one in for her to use,” Change suggests. “Would be against regulations, that’s for sure. But it could account for the electrical smell.”
“Where would she have plugged anything in?” I ask, seeing no electrical outlets, only an enclosed wall mount where the TV is connected.
“Something battery-operated could have exploded.” Marino turns water on in the sink. “If enough heat builds up with anything that’s got a battery, it can explode. But if that happened, she’d have more than just those little spots on her foot. And you’re sure they aren’t insect bites?” He holds his hand under running water, waiting to see how hot it will get. “Because that might make more sense, since she was outside and then started feeling bad. I’ve had that happen. A damn yellow jacket gets into my shoe or sock and keeps stinging until it dies. Once I was going about sixty on my Harley and rode through an entire swarm of honeybees. Getting stung inside your helmet isn’t a lot of fun.”
“Some edema, some minor swelling. These look like burns, very recent ones, confined to the outer layer of skin, first-degree or possibly superficial second-degree. It would have been painful,” I describe.
“No way that did it.” Marino turns off the water. “Not hot at all. No better than lukewarm.”
“Maybe you could ask if she might have burned her foot somehow.”
He steps past Chang, disappearing outside the cell. “The Doc wants to know if she might have burned herself,” I hear him say.
“If who did?” Colin’s voice.
“If Kathleen Lawler did. Like if someone maybe gave her a cup of really hot coffee or tea and she dripped it on her foot.”
“Why?” Colin asks.
“Impossible,” Tara Grimm says. “Inmates in segregation have no access to microwave ovens. There are no microwave ovens in Bravo Pod, except in the kitchen, and she certainly had no access to the kitchen. It’s impossible she could have gotten hold of something hot enough for her to get burned.”
“Why are you asking?” Colin appears in the doorway, no longer in white Tyvek, and he’s sweating and doesn’t look happy.
“She has burns on her left foot,” I reply. “Looks like something splashed or dripped on her.”
“We’ll take a closer look when we get her to the office.” He walks out of sight again.
“Did she have her shoes and socks on when she was found?” I ask whoever is listening.
Tara Grimm appears in the doorway of the cell.
“Of course not,” she says to me. “We wouldn’t have removed her shoes and socks. She must have taken them off when she came in from exercise. We didn’t do anything to her.”
“Seems like putting on a sock, a shoe, over burns wouldn’t have felt very good,” I observe. “Was she limping during her hour of exercise? Did she mention any discomfort?”
“She complained about the heat and that she was tired.”
“I’m wondering if she burned herself after she was returned to her cell. Did she take a shower when she came in from the exercise area?”
“I’ll say it again. No, it’s not possible,” Tara says flatly, slowly, and with undisguised hostility. “There was nothing to burn herself with.”
“Any chance she might have had something electrical in her cell at some point this morning?”
“Absolutely not. There are no accessible outlets in any of the cells in Bravo Pod. She couldn’t have burned herself. You can ask fifty times, and I’ll keep saying the same thing.”