“Tell her I’ll call back in a few minutes,” Benton says to someone else.
I watch Colin walk out of the building. When he sees I’m on the phone, he gestures that he’ll wait for me in the Land Rover.
“See what you and your agent colleagues can find out about Roberta Price,” I say to Benton, who isn’t saying anything. “The pharmacist who filled Gloria Jordan’s prescriptions nine years ago. Who is she, and is she connected to Dawn Kincaid?”
“I remind you that if someone is a head pharmacist, their name is on every prescription bottle, even if they didn’t fill it.”
“Probably not if it’s a script called in by a prison doc or one who’s an executioner,” I reply. “If you’re the head pharmacist and didn’t fill the prescription for sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide, you might not want your name on it. You might not want your name even remotely associated with anything having to do with an execution.”
“I have no idea what you’re getting at.”
“Two years ago a pharmacist named Roberta Price, presumably the same person who filled Mrs. Jordan’s prescriptions, also filled the prescription for the sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide that would have been used in Barrie Lou Rivers’s lethal injection, had she not mysteriously died first. The drugs were delivered to the GPFW, and Tara Grimm signed for them. It’s hard to imagine she and Roberta Price aren’t acquainted.”
“A pharmacist at Monck’s Pharmacy. A small pharmacy owned by Herbert Monck.” Benton must have searched Roberta Price’s name as he was listening to me.
“Where Jaime shopped, but Roberta Price’s name isn’t on Jaime’s prescription bottles. And I wonder why,” I reply.
“Why? I’m sorry, I’m confused.” Benton sounds completely distracted.
“Just a hunch that maybe when Jaime went into Monck’s Pharmacy, Roberta Price kept her distance,” I add, and I recall the man in the lab coat who sold the Advil to me mentioning the name Robbi, someone who must have been inside the store a moment earlier and then suddenly wasn’t. “I don’t guess you can tell me what kind of car Roberta Price drives, and if it might be a black Mercedes wagon,” I say to Benton.
A long pause, and he says, “No car registered to her, at least not by the name Roberta Price. Could be in some other name. Did Gloria Jordan get her meds from this same pharmacy?”
“One close to her home. A Rexall back then that’s been replaced by a CVS.”
“So at some point after the murders, maybe Roberta Price changed jobs, ending up in a smaller pharmacy very close to the GPFW,” Benton says to me, as he tells someone else he’ll be right there. “There’s no probable cause to go after a pharmacist just because she filled prescriptions for Gloria Jordan, for the GPFW — and probably tens of thousands of other people in this area, Kay. I’m not saying we won’t look into it, because we will.”
“A pharmacy that must not have a problem aiding in executions at the GPFW, possibly the men’s prison, too. It’s unusual,” I point out. “Many pharmacists see themselves as drug-therapy managers responsible for promoting a patient’s best interests. Killing your patient usually isn’t included.”
“It tells us Roberta Price doesn’t have ethical issues about it or just feels she’s doing her job.”
“Or takes pleasure in it, especially if the anesthesia wears off or something else goes wrong. They had a case like that here in Georgia not so long ago. Took at least twice the usual time to kill the condemned inmate, and he suffered. I wonder who prescribed those lethal drugs.”
“We’ll find out,” Benton says, but he’s not going to do it this minute.
“And someone needs to contact the DNA lab Jaime was using,” I tell him, whether he thinks it’s a priority or not, as I walk in the direction of Colin’s grumbling Land Rover. “I suspect they’re not going to be up to speed with the new technologies being used by the military.”
I’m referring to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab, AFDIL, at Dover Air Force Base, where DNA technology has reached a new level of sophistication and sensitivity because of the challenges posed by our war dead. What happens when identical twins end up in theater and one of them is killed or, God forbid, both? Standard DNA testing can’t tell them apart, and while it’s true that their fingerprints wouldn’t be the same, there may be nothing left of their fingers to compare.
“IEDs and the devastating injuries, in some cases almost complete annihilation,” I add. “The challenges of identification when all that’s left is a mist of contaminated blood on a shred of fabric or a fragment of burned bone. I know AFDIL has the technology to analyze epigenetic phenomena, using methylation and histone acetylation for making DNA comparisons not possible with other types of analyses.”
“Why would we need to do something like that in these cases?”
“Because identical twins may start out in life with identical DNA, but older twins are going to have significant differences in their gene expression if you have the technology to look for these differences, and the more time twins spend apart, the greater these differences become. DNA determines who you are, and eventually who you are determines your DNA,” I explain, as I open the passenger’s door, hot air blasting out of the blower.
34
The man who answers the door is sweating, the veins standing out like ropes in his big tan biceps, as if he was in the middle of a workout when we showed up unannounced.
He is visibly displeased to find two strangers on his porch, one of them in range pants and a GBI polo shirt, the other in a khaki uniform, an old Land Rover parked in the shade of a live oak tree next to trellises of jasmine separating this property from the one next door.
“I’m sorry to disturb you.” Colin opens his wallet, displaying his medical examiner’s shield. “We’d really appreciate a few minutes of your time.”
“What’s this about?”
“Are you Gabe Mullery?”
“Is something wrong?”
“We’re not here on official business, and nothing’s wrong. This is a casual visit, and we’ll leave if you ask us to. But if you’d give me a minute to explain, we’d be most grateful,” Colin says. “You’re Gabe Mullery, the owner of the house?”
“That’s me.” He doesn’t offer to shake our hands. “It’s my house. My wife’s all right? Everything’s okay?”
“As far as I know. Sorry if we scared you.”
“Nothing scares me. What do you need?”
Quite handsome, with dark hair, gray eyes, and a powerful jaw, Gabe Mullery is in cutoff sweatpants and a white T-shirt emblazoned with U.S. NAVY NUKE: If you see me running, it’s already too late. He blocks the doorway with his muscular body, clearly not the sort to appreciate strangers dropping by without calling first, no matter the reason. But we didn’t want to give the man who lives in the former Jordan house the chance to say no. I need to see the garden and figure out what Gloria Jordan was doing in it the afternoon of January 5.
I don’t think it was pruning, and I want to know why she returned to her garden very early the next morning, possibly to the old root cellar, possibly because she was forced back there in the pitch dark about the time she and her family were murdered. I have an imagined scenario that is based on my interpretation of the evidence, and information Lucy e-mailed to me during the drive here only strengthens my conclusion that Mrs. Jordan wasn’t an innocent victim, and that’s putting it kindly.
I suspect that on the night of January 5 she may have spiked her husband’s drink with clonazepam, ensuring he would settle into a hard sleep. At around eleven, she went downstairs and disarmed the alarm, leaving the mansion and her family vulnerable to a break-in that she couldn’t have anticipated would end the way it did. What she probably had in mind was wrong, and most of all it was foolish, not so different from a lot of schemes devised by unhappy people who want out of their marriages and are seduced into believing they’re entitled to take what they think they deserve.