“It might fit with that. I’m speculating.”
“The person you should be speculating with is him.”
He means General Briggs, the chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, my commander and an old friend from my earliest days when I began my career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Marino wants me to tell Briggs that Kathleen Lawler’s gastric contents appear to be undigested chicken and pasta and cheese that possibly were poisoned with botulinum toxin, and that scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive x-ray analysis of the odd-smelling residue recovered from her sink revealed magnesium, iron, and sodium. The answer to Colin Dengate’s question about whether the finding of these elements in the chalky residue means something to me is yes. Unfortunately, it does.
When water is added to food-grade iron, magnesium, and sodium or salt, the result is an exothermic reaction that rapidly produces heat. Temperatures can reach up to one hundred degrees centigrade, and it is this technology that is the basis for the flameless ration heaters used to cook or warm up food eaten by soldiers in the field. MREs, meals ready to eat, offer dozens of different menus, including chicken with pasta, and many of the tough tan plastic bags they’re packaged in offer additional rations, such as cheese spread. Each of these self-contained meals includes a water-activated flameless ration heater packaged in a sturdy polybag, an ingenious device that requires a soldier in the field to do nothing more than cut off the top, add water, and then place the bag under the MRE, propping both against “a rock or something,” according to the operating instructions.
I realize it’s possible there might be other explanations for why swabs of the residue in Kathleen’s sink show trace elements of iron, magnesium, and sodium, but it is the combination of evidence that offers a possible nightmarish answer that can’t easily be explained away. The unpleasant odor that reminded me of a shorted-out blow-dryer or overheated insulation strikes me as consistent with a chemical reaction producing heat, and Kathleen had burns on her left foot that prison officials claimed she could not have sustained while incarcerated in Bravo Pod. I believe she accidentally dripped a hot liquid on her bare skin, and it may very well have been the boiling water from a flameless ration heater.
The first-degree burns were recent, and I can’t dismiss from my thoughts her obsession with food and certain comments she made to me, and I wonder if a missing diary or more than one might have contained what Kathleen was doing and thinking and possibly eating since she’d been moved to Bravo Pod. Tara Grimm was taking care of her, was good to her, and Kathleen was more than happy to be a test kitchen.She had sweet buns and packages of noodles in her cell and knew how to turn Pop-Tarts into strawberry cake, fancying herself the Julia Child of the slammer. Maybe Tara Grimm was seeing to it that Kathleen got an occasional treat in exchange for cooperation or other favors, and early this morning the treat was a ready-to-eat feast that had been injected with poison.
“Plus, there’s the shit about the camera,” Marino continues to lecture me about what I should do. “Defeating infrared with infrared, a strip of tiny IR LEDs on her bike helmet, assuming Lucy’s right about that. Whatever this person did, the camera got defeated with something, and that’s a fact, completely whiting out her head the instant she got close enough for her face to be recognizable on the camera, and Lucy says the recording can’t be fixed or restored. Like the damn Chinese blinding our spy satellites with lasers. You should call him.”
“It will be sounding an alarm that could end up in the Oval Office,” I say what I’ve said before. “General Briggs will have to pass the information up the chain, straight to the Pentagon, the White House, if there’s even the slightest possibility that the bigger target is our troops — that what we’re dealing with is the preliminary if not plenary stages of a terrorist plot,” I’m explaining, as Benton appears.
“She isn’t going to say it outright.” He tells me about his conversation with Special Agent Douglas Burke, who is a woman. “But reading between the lines, the answer is yes. Fifteen-cent stamps matching the description we have were found in Dawn Kincaid’s cell. A pane of ten with three removed that are on a letter she didn’t get around to mailing. A letter to one of her lawyers.”
“The question is, where might she have gotten the stamps?” I ask.
“Dawn received mail yesterday afternoon from Kathleen Lawler,” Benton says. “Douglas wouldn’t confirm that the stamps were included, but the fact that she is letting me know about the letter suggests it.”
“Written on party stationery?” I ask.
“She didn’t say.”
“Mentioning something about a PNG and a bribe? In other words, derisive comments, probably about me?”
“Douglas didn’t go into that level of detail.”
“Fragments of indented writing I could make out while in Kathleen’s cell. What struck me as sarcastic, and understandably so, if she were under the impression that I sent her the stamps and stationery, what would appear to be cheap leftovers, something I didn’t want,” I say, as I recall Kathleen’s snide comment about people sending inmates their detritus, things leftover and expired that they no longer want. “That I might try to butter her up or bribe her with such a stingy gift,” I continue. “Only it wasn’t from me. The forged letter likely accompanying these items was mailed in Savannah on June twenty-sixth, meaning there was ample time for Kathleen to mail a pane of these same stamps to Dawn.”
“It seems she did, but Douglas wouldn’t go into detail, and she didn’t refer to you,” Benton replies. “Although I certainly was clear about obvious forged documents and a campaign on the part of an individual or individuals to set you up and that none of it is plausible.”
“An accident,” I decide. “Her incarcerated mother sends her incarcerated daughter stamps so they can be prison pen pals, having no idea the glue on the back has been tampered with. But Kathleen was too selfish to send the good ones.”
“What good ones?” Marino frowns.
“She had current stamps, forty-four-cent ones, in her cell, but she didn’t share those. Just the ones that were, quote, ‘shit’ other people didn’t want anymore. Ones she thought were from a PNG. From me.”
“That’s what stinginess will get you. She gives away her daughter and twenty-three years later gives her botulism,” Marino says as Benton empties the serving bowl of pasta into the trash and it lands in a solid mass.
“Sorry about that,” says my husband, who is rather worthless in the kitchen. “And washing the lettuce in hot water wasn’t the best idea, either.”
“You’d have to boil lettuce a good ten minutes to destroy botulinum toxin, which is very heat-resistant,” I inform him.
“So you ruined it for nothing,” Marino is happy to let Benton know. “If Dawn wasn’t an intended victim, that tells us something,” Benton says.
“The stamps didn’t poison Kathleen. It doesn’t appear she ever touched the stamps, and that tells us something, too,” Marino says, as we return to the dining-room table, where Lucy is working on her computer and has committed the only act that she considers a crime.
Paper. She doesn’t believe in printouts, but there is too much information to sort through, so much to look at and connect. Images, security-company billing information and logs, decision trees, datasets, and her searches continue. Out of consideration for the rest of us, she is doing her best to make it easy, sending files to the printer in the other room.
“It’s looking like she got killed by what she ate, right? Maybe chicken and pasta and cheese spread, and not the stamps.” Marino pulls out a chair and sits. “That’s really something. Maybe she’s lucky she didn’t live to learn that her daughter licked three of those stamps to put on the letter to her lawyer. How much botulism could you get on three stamps?”