“You believe this person is female.”
“A woman delivered the sushi last night.”
“Well, if that’s confirmed.”
“I suspect it’s going to be, and then what?” I say to him.
“Three cases of homicidal poisoning by botulinum toxin that include a tampered-with MRE? All hell’s going to break loose, Kay,” he says. “And you need to stay out of the way. A million miles from it.”
32
The sun is high in another washed-out sky, the heat wave tenaciously holding its grip on the Lowcountry, and what Colin Dengate claims simply isn’t true. Not everyone gets used to riding around with no air-conditioning in weather like this, although Benton was thoughtful enough to bring me clothes, summer khakis, so I’m not baking in all black.
It’s July 2, Saturday, almost ten a.m., and Colin’s staff isn’t working except for whoever’s on call, and he had to swap a few favors to set up what I need, he said. Then he had to pick me up at the hotel, because I don’t have a way to get around on my own. Marino is off with a shopping list for medical supplies that I want to have on hand, and he just dropped off Lucy at the local Harley-Davidson dealership. She intends for her transportation to be a motorcycle while she’s here, and I wasn’t going to leave Benton without the rental car, although his plan at the moment is to stay at the hotel. When I left him he was making phone calls, and FBI agents are on their way to Savannah from the Atlanta field office so he can brief them thoroughly as we wait for the news from the CDC to have its impact.
Botulinum toxin serotype A has been confirmed in Kathleen Lawler’s and Jaime Berger’s gastric contents. The toxin has been confirmed in the empty container of seaweed salad and also the leftovers in the refrigerator from the bag of take-out sushi that a serial poisoner delivered to Jaime’s apartment building Thursday night. I haven’t given the latest information to Briggs, who is in transit on a military airlifter out of the Middle East, but I don’t need him to repeat what’s expected of me, which is to do nothing. I don’t want to hear him tell me that again, and I’m grateful I can’t, because I don’t intend to comply, at least not quite.
The investigation is locked down and off-limits in anticipation of what we expect to be a rapid and decisive diverting of jurisdiction to Homeland Security, the FBI, whatever the federal government decides, and I know when I’m supposed to stay out of the way, to use what I call the ten-foot-pole rule. Don’t go anywhere near these poisoning cases, and were Briggs or anyone else to ask me, I would say that technically I’m not. The nine-year-old murders of a Savannah family and the mentally impaired woman who was convicted of them are of no interest to the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the White House, or scarcely anyone else this moment.
Those cases are still closed, and Lola Daggette is still scheduled to die because Jaime never filed the petition to vacate her capital-murder convictions. The new DNA results are languishing in a private lab, awaiting some other criminal defense attorney to step in and finish what Jaime started. Until then, the Jordan murder cases are cold and old and irrelevant, when attention is on a serial poisoner, who might be a terrorist planning mass murder. As I’ve sorted through all that has happened, I continue to ask why. But the whyof a terrorist plan to cause incapacitation and casualties among innocent civilians or military personnel isn’t my question. Unfortunately, there’s a long line of disturbed people in the world who would covet the chance to cause such destruction. What has my attention is something else.
If earlier deaths at the GPFW were vengeful murders that also served as research for a poisoner planning a widespread attack, then how do Kathleen Lawler and Jaime Berger fit with the modus operandi and ultimate goal? Jaime’s reopening the Jordan case shouldn’t matter to a poisoner planning terror, unless Jaime was tampering with something that alarmed this person enough to take the risk of getting Jaime out of the way. By murdering her and Kathleen, and inadvertently poisoning Dawn Kincaid, the killer has only drawn attention to herself when before there was none. A cluster of homicidal poisonings with botulinum toxin that might include tampering with military rations, and the entire U.S. government is going to come down on the killer’s head. Ultimately, she won’t get away with it, and to take that chance after quiet years of painstaking premeditation can’t be attributed to a loss of self-control or an escalated urge to torture and murder. Something unexpected happened.
Pathologists — and certainly this is my natural inclination — focus more on cause than effect. I’m less interested in the gore of blood and tissue spattered everywhere than I am in the angle of an entrance wound that might suggest it wasn’t the victim who pulled the trigger, and I don’t care about the drama of symptoms beyond the suffering they cause. My method is to track down the disease, to reflect away distractions, and to dissect to the bone, if need be, or, in the Jordan case, return to the crime scene as best I can. I intend to look at the photographs and all the evidence as if they’ve never been examined, and I might visit the Jordans’ former home if I determine there’s anything left to see that matters.
“The same records you were looking at yesterday,” Colin is saying, as we walk along the deserted corridor, mobiles of bats and bones slowly twirling from the ceiling inside his empty lab building. “The knife recovered from the kitchen. Clothes, some other items that I collected at the scene and sent in with the bodies then. All of it submitted as evidence at trial, unless the prosecutor considered it irrelevant. My path tech Mandy will be in the room with you. Nice of her to come in, since we can’t afford overtime. Anyway, same drill as before. And I’ll be in my office, because I know damn well you’d rather take a look and not listen to opinions, meaning mine. You get to interpret the evidence the same way I did, and I won’t be breathing down your neck.”
Mandy O’Toole, in scrubs and examination gloves, is arranging a pair of children’s pajamas on white butcher paper that covers the conference room table, the case records I started looking at yesterday out of the way, stacked on a chair.
“It’s the kids’ stuff that’s really, really hard for me,” she says, and I recognize most of what I’m seeing from photographs I began to review yesterday.
Neatly spread out on the white paper are two sets of children’s pajamas, one SpongeBob, the other a football design with helmets of the Georgia Bulldogs. A pair of men’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt must have been what Clarence Jordan was sleeping in when he was stabbed to death in bed, and a blue floral and lace nightgown obviously was his wife’s. All of the garments are stained dark brown with old blood, and riddled with small slits and punctures from at least one sharp instrument, and there are multiple small holes where fabric was removed for DNA analysis.
I pull gloves out of a box on the table and put them on, then pick up evidence labeled and marked by the court: a knife, and I leave it inside its bag, examining it through the plastic. The blade is approximately six inches in length, the wooden handle smudged with old blood. White, filmy partial fingerprints and an intact one are permanently fixed in superglue on the nonporous smooth surfaces of the steel and lacquered wood, and while the knife may have been used by the killer to make a sandwich in the kitchen, I don’t believe it killed anyone.
The kitchen knife is a clip point, or “granny,” used for such tasks as removing the eyes from potatoes or peeling vegetables and fruits, and as suggested by the name, the blade has been clipped off from the middle of the spine all the way to the point, leaving a dull edge for resting your thumb. Any knife with a false curved edge will be less effective in piercing, and therefore not a good choice in stabbings. Furthermore, the blade at its widest point is almost two inches, which is inconsistent with what I saw on body diagrams in the autopsy reports. I walk to the other end of the table and look through the thick files on the chair, sifting through documents until I find what I remember looking at yesterday morning, a description of the wounds.